# Night's Black Agents tags: #game/rpg/nights-black-agents ![[Night's Black Agents (cover).jpg|600]] **Night's Black Agents** is what happens when Ken Hite takes the **[[Gumshoe|GUMSHOE]]** engine, points it at every spy movie ever made, and then adds vampires. The result, published by Pelgrane in 2012, is a vampire-spy thriller in which the player characters are black ops and intelligence operatives who have burned their covers, discovered a vampire conspiracy running the world from the shadows, and decided to do something about it. It's *Bourne* by way of *Dracula* — high-octane action, shadowy espionage, and the deep psychological toll of living a double life among things that defy death. The tagline on the tin is a vampire spy thriller, and it delivers both halves of that sentence with enthusiasm. ## Setting The agents have found that the world's governments, banks, and criminal networks are all threaded through a vast, hidden vampire conspiracy. The player characters are former spies and operatives who went off the reservation — they've spent their **Cover** (their carefully maintained false identities) and now operate against the undead on the run. The vampires themselves are left deliberately **modular**: the Director builds the conspiracy rather than reading it off a page, layering it into a structure of cells, lieutenants, and a central master vamp that the agents must eventually root out and destroy. The campaign goal is simple to state and brutal to achieve: survive attacks, discover the conspiracy's structure, weaken it, and finally destroy the vampires at its heart. There's even an option to *not* have vampires at all — variants reinterpret what the "vampires" actually are, keeping the spy thriller even when you've had enough of the blood. ## Mechanics Night's Black Agents runs the core **GUMSHOE** engine (investigative abilities find clues without a roll; general abilities resolve uncertain action with 1d6 vs a difficulty), but it's the most mechanically tuned of the early line. Its signature is a pair of special **General abilities**: - **Cover** and **Network** — you get **Cover 10** and **Network 15** free. **Cover** is your false identities and your operational anonymity, spendable when you need to be someone you aren't (and *loss* of Cover is what happens when your cover starts to blow). **Network** is your web of contacts, assets, and favors — a pool you draw on to get things done on the run. - **Health** and **Stability** are the survivability meters: Health is lost in fights, Stability is the psychological armor, and both can sink toward the −12 line where agents die or break. **Sources of Stability** are the fragile human attachments that keep an agent sane, giving the Director obvious (and cruel) leverage. - The game also offers a set of **modes** for tone — a grittier "dust" mode, for instance, hardcaps Health and chokes the pool to make everything feel desperate. It's the GUMSHOE chassis built for chase scenes, firefights, and paranoia, and it's often what convinces people the engine can sing. ## Editions & Supplements - **2012** — the *Night's Black Agents* core book, by Kenneth Hite (on Robin D. Laws's GUMSHOE), a hefty 236-page hardcover. *In the library.* - **The Zalozhniy Quartet** — a Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan campaign. - **The Dracula Dossier** — the celebrated open-ended sandbox, framed as the actual MI6 file on Dracula; the *Director's Handbook* is in the library. - **Excess Baggage** — a supplement of ops, contacts, and material. *In the library.* ## References - [Night's Black Agents — Pelgrane Press](https://pelgranepress.com/product-category/gumshoe/nights-black-agents/) - [Night's Black Agents — Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night%27s_Black_Agents_(role-playing_game)) - [GUMSHOE System — Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gumshoe_System)