The creators of Vampire: The Masquerade 5th Edition, the latest version of the classic gothic horror RPG franchise, have two new games in the works - an updated version of the shapeshifters-and-spirits game Werewolf: The Apocalypse, plus a new edition of an old World of Darkness property called Hunter: The Reckoning. The original Hunter: The Reckoning and its spiritual successor Hunter: The Vigil are both about mortal human beings trying to fight back against the monsters preying on their communities. However, Hunter: The Reckoning and Hunter: The Vigil both have huge differences in rules and setting detail - differences that may prompt the developers of Hunter: the Reckoning 5th Edition to wildly re-work their game's core premise.

The old World of Darkness RPG franchise, set in a "Gothic Punk" modern world of monsters, magic, and shadowy conspiracies, started in 1991 with the release of Vampire: The Masquerade 1st Edition and reached a climax of sorts with the publication of Hunter: The Reckoning in 1999. The Chronicles of Darkness RPG franchise, currently published by Onyx Path, re-imagines many of the core World of Darkness RPGs by updating their settings and re-working their rules to make "Crossover" stories more viable. The game Vampire: the Requiem, for instance, is a reboot of Vampire: The Masquerade, while Hunter: The Vigil, first published in 2008, is a re-imagining of the original Hunter: The Reckoning.

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Nearly all of the tabletop RPGs in both the World of Darkness and Chronicles of Darkness settings tell the stories of vampires, werewolves, mages, changeling, demons, mummies, ghosts and other supernatural creatures who reside a darker version of the modern world. Hunter: The Reckoning and and Hunter: The Vigil, in contrast, are effectively about squishy, mortal people declaring war on the other game-lines of their franchises, using investigation, negotiation, social activism, and violence to fight, however vainly, for a world where human beings are more than just prey or pawns for monsters.

The upcoming 5th edition of Hunter: The Reckoning, announced during an interview on the official World of Darkness YouTube channel, appears to take a lot of cues from the Second Inquisition antagonists in Vampire: The Masquerade V5, an multi-national alliance of spy agencies, special forces units, and old-school Catholic vampire hunters who pursue vampires with incendiary bullets, mass surveillance, drones strikes, and the old-school tools of wooden stake and zealous faith. Reading between the lines, the new Hunter: the Reckoning might also distance itself from the core concepts of the original Hunter: The Reckoning while also incorporating ideas introduced in the newer Hunter: The Vigil.

Hunter: The Vigil Is About Ordinary Humans Banding Together

In the dark world of the Chronicles of Darkness franchise, nearly ever human being has had at least one brush with the supernatural; briefly glimpsing a monster in their true form, hearing rattling noises from the local haunted house, etc. Most of the time, these people try to keep their heads down, forget what they've seen, and get back to their "normal" lives. The hunters from the Hunter: The Vigil RPG, in contrast, are nothing less than humans who refused to look away and chose to shine a light on the supernatural mysteries of their world.

Unlike Vampires and Mages, beings who start out as human then became something more, the player characters of a Hunter: The Vigil campaign are baseline humans, essentially mundane aside from a fanatical mindset and personal "Code" of conviction that keeps their sanity from plummeting after repeated encounters with the supernatural. In a Hunter: The Vigil game, "cells" and "compacts" of Hunters use ordinary skills, tools, and "Tactics" (an in-game ability representing teamwork) to confront supernatural phenomena in accordance with their core goal - protecting working-class communities, analyzing monsters and magic using science, proving the existence of the paranormal to the world using modern media, etc.

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Older, established conspiracies of hunters can grant their members a supernatural edge - miracle-invoking prayers, fortifying alchemical elixirs, ancient magical relics, advanced prototype weaponry, monster parts grafted onto the human body through surgery - but these "Endowments" are still external to Hunter: The Vigil player characters, rather than an innate source of superhuman ability.

Hunter: The Reckoning Empowers Humans To Defy The Apocalyptic Supernatural

Hunter the Reckoning Cover

In the grim world of the old-school World of Darkness franchise, conspiracies of supernatural beings have their hands (or talons) wrapped around the throat of society. Vampires using hypnosis and their addictive blood to control the authorities and maintain their "Masquerade," Mages manipulating the culture and beliefs of the masses to alter the nature of reality, Spirits of decay tempting corporations to pollute and destroy the earth, and so on. The player characters of a Hunter: The Reckoning campaign each start out as everyday human beings, blissfully unaware of the occult forces influencing their lives and communities... that is, until a mysterious force relates strange words of prophecy, rips away the human guises of the monsters standing before them, and challenges the newly minted hunters to act.

The gameplay and themes of classic Hunter: The Reckoning have a decidedly apocalyptic feel to them, which is appropriate given the game's 1999 publication date and the "imminent apocalypse" meta-plots other World of Darkness RPGs had at the time. During their "imbuing," each Hunter: The Reckoning player character receives strange visions and supernatural "Edges" from a mysterious group of entities called the "Messengers," an origin story similar to how prophets in the Bible receive sacred knowledge, power, and missions from God in times of calamity. Scattered across the world, burdened with the ability to see the monsters who've infiltrated their communities, organized into Creeds based on their hunting philosophies (such as protecting the innocent, redeeming monsters, and understanding them) a PC in Hunter: The Reckoning is doomed to wage a lonely, thankless war against the supernatural and the apocalypse, treated as criminal or insane by the humans who can't see what they see.

One big difference between the protagonists of Hunter: The Vigil and classic Hunter: The Reckoning is that the monster hunters of the latter game, paradoxically, are a kind of "monster" themselves - humans transformed by contact with the same force or entity, wielding innate supernatural abilities against other supernatural beings. At the same time, classic Hunter: The Reckoning PCs exist outside the hierarchies of large monster-hunting agencies like the Second Inquisition from Vampire: the Masquerade 5th Edition; with their anti-monster powers and visions, an "Imbued" Hunter and their allies, regardless of their background, can makes themselves a thorn in the side of both monsters and the institutions they've co-opted. This anti-authoritarian, rebellious take on monster hunting is the most unique quality of campaigns run using the classic Hunter: The Reckoning system and, perhaps the biggest reason for game designers to retain the "Imbued" as a Hunter faction in the soon-to-be released 5th edition.

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