Hunter: The Vigil

Hunter: The Vigil
RPG published by White Wolf / CCP
Rule System	Storytelling System
Authors	Justin Achilli, Aaron Dembski-Bowden et al
First Publication	2008
Essential Books	Hunter: The Vigil Rulebook Witch Finders Block by Bloody Block World of Darkness: Slasher Horror Recognition Guide Night Stalkers Spirit Slayers Compacts & Conspiracies Mortal Remains (2e)

Two words: Fuck monsters.

Fine, I'll give you a longer explanation, but I've got to be quick, the bastard MIBs are probably already tracking this. Hunter the Vigil is a World of Darkness game line, back when White Wolf was still a thing. See, some people didn't want to play as an undead rapist or a lunatic witch. But they didn't want to just sit around and act like they could just ignore the terror in the world as a plain ol' mortal. White Wolf already tried hunters once. Time to try it again.

See, these hunters don't all get powers. Hell, a lot of them don't even know what they're fighting. You want to be a hard working sonuvabitch that's got his buddies and baseball bats to beat down and drug dealer or monster around your kids' school? Do it. Want to be part of an organization of basement dwelling fuckups who use cameras to film demon summoning ceremonies to upload on Youtube? Done. A descendant of Hell itself? Do you want to throw fireballs or get the ability to summon demons?

I don't think I need to say it, but since you don't know anything about how the world really is, I'll tell you. Hunter doesn't get along too well with the characters of the other New World of Darkness game lines. You're supposed to be staking vampires that kill people, or cutting up fairies with iron daggers, why the fuck should there be any playing nice?

Morality? Here's your damn morality: Monsters don't count. Any "hunter" who says there should be exceptions might not be a real hunter. Nevermind those fucks who think they know the right way to handle monsters, and collateral damage is irrelevant as long as you can justify it.

Yeah, you don't understand because you haven't been doing it too long. Give it time. Pretty soon you'll realize that you can't trust anyone anymore.

...Of course, by that point it might be wise to remember what Nietzche said: "He who fights monsters should see to it that he himself does not become a monster". And sure enough, an alarming amount of Hunters tend to devolve into Slashers: lunatics whose obsession with killing for its own sake grants them limited supernatural abilities which make them the perfect serial killers.

Hunter: the Vigil is another New World of Darkness attempt at adapting part of the Old, in this case, Hunter: The Reckoning. However, it is in many ways a superior game, with less broken magical powers and ill-thought-out ideas, and more being a squishy human surrounded by terrible threats that will tear away at your sanity, soul, and flesh. If that sounds grimdark as shit, that's only because it is. It literally has a spin-off game, Slashers, devoted to playing as one of the above-mentioned Slashers so you too can play a murderous psycho who wouldn't be out of place in... well, a slasher movie.

Still, despite all that, Hunter is, or can be, an oddly hopeful game. Sure, you're probably going to die, but in a world like this one, it is a good and noble thing for ordinary people to stand up and refuse to be victimized. One candle blows out, but lights two more as it passes. The hunter dies, but the vigil goes on forever. World without end, amen.

All in all, perhaps the biggest difference between the two versions of Hunter, and why Vigil has attained a popularity that Reckoning has lacked, is that Vigil takes more of a pro-Humanity Fuck Yeah stance, whilst Reckoning, in accordance with the rest of the Old World of Darkness, is very much on the anti-HFY! stance. Vigil hunters, even at Cell tier, woke up to the true world around them and chose to fight the things that go bump in the night even though they know next to nothing about them. Reckoning hunters were forced awake by "mysterious powers of good" and can only hope to challenge the monsters because those same patrons gave them all kinds of anti-monster abilities.

Hunter: The Vigil is still in its first edition and had a limited run of books: the core book, an expansion for monster territory, a collection of short stories based in the Hunter setting, three books focusing on the World of Darkness' Big Three (Vampires, Werewolves and Mages) and one book to wrap it all up and reveal the truth on some groups. Four years after the first book it received the book Mortal Remains, which updated the game to fit into the Chronicles of Darkness. This was not a "true" second edition like Vampire, Werewolf, Mage and Promethean have been receiving, but instead it was a book that updated some things and expanded on the "lesser" lines of Promethean, Changeling, Geist, Mummy and Demon. Whether or not Hunter: The Vigil will receive a new book remains to be seen.

Hunter Organization

Hunters are organized into groups at three levels; Cell, Compact, and Conspiracy.

Cell

At least the Imperial Guard get some backup, amirite? A Cell has only one to a few people in them, maybe five or six if you're lucky. They have no support base, no guiding ideology, no way of telling if the tentacle monster is really going to rape, kill and eat them (Spoiler: It will, and not in that order). So what do they have to help? They're not being told what to do by people who have no idea what's going on either but act like they do.

Compact

When a bunch of cells met up and decide they have more in common than being killed by werewolves on a monthly basis, they sometimes form into a compact, a collection of cells that go from citywide to nationwide. The cells have some things in common, but there's no real bosses, so they make things up as they go along still, but now they have some help to call. Provided said help doesn't decide it's not worth it or that they have the right idea on what to do.

Ahl al-Jabal: A Middle Eastern compact founded in the Middle Ages after a leader of the Hashshashin (the Islamic sect that lent its name to the term "assassin") discovered that vampires had infiltrated much of the Muslim world. They're notable for having very strict rules about collateral damage, for reasons which should be very obvious when you take recent events in the world into account.

Ashwood Abbey: A bunch of bored, jaded rich assholes who want to hunt the most dangerous game of all in a world where that isn't "man". Sick fucks to the core, even when other books try to tell you they're in it "for the thrill". To them, hunting's a game, and they want to play without any rules. Also, they have money. Lots and lots of money. Which is why they think they can afford to hunt monsters with swords and arrows.

The Barett Commission: Politicians who have found out that vampires (and other monsters, but mostly vampires) like to meddle with politics, so they decided to band together in order to keep them out.

The Bear Lodge: Big Game Hunters who have decided that werewolves are the ultimate trophies to hunt. They can't actually keep any pelts or anything, but the hunt is still dangerous enough they keep at it.

Division Six: A secret government agency hunting down "reality deviants" before they can cause the total collapse of reality. Really, they're the unwitting dupes of the Seers of the Throne being used to hunt down the Awakened, but they don't know that.

The Hunt Club: Sick fucks who make the Ashwood Abbey look like saints by comparison, this is only a "hunter" compact in that it's pretty common for burnt-out hunters to end up in it. This is basically a social network for serial killers and Slashers who haven't completely lost their ability to relate to people, based on covering up each other's messes and scoring "points" by their kills. Based on the rules they follow they either hunt people that nobody will miss (homeless, prostitutes), those who have squandered their lives or held others back (aka, those who are only alive because it's illegal to kill them) and those who are quite capable of defending themselves or would draw significant investigation (the physically and/or politically powerful).

Habibti Ma: Founded by Eme Amun Hassan, an Egyptian woman who lost her husband and sons to a suicide cult. After suing every authority who watched it happen but didn't act she was left with a fortune and an empty feeling. Hassan began to organize a group dedicated to breaking up cults and returning cultists to their families: Habibti Ma. The authors have admitted they fucked up and should've called the group Habibti Ma'at, named after the Egyptian goddess of mercy that Hassan bases her group's ideals on. While they act out of mercy they're not above kidnapping, torture and psychological abuse to deprogram cultists. This means that they'd rather go after cultists of monsters (frequently cults of arisen, vampires and the Kinfolk of werewolves), but if push comes to shove they'll take on the monsters as well.

The Illuminated Brotherhood: Wigged out druggies whose experiments in psychedelics have clued them in to the existence of ghosts and spirits and who continue to poke at the supernatural despite their lack of any training in what to do when they get noticed.

The Keepers of the Source: A bunch of hippies and eco-nuts who have the sucky ability to sense those carrying Essence by feeling pain, so they think werewolves and mages are "parasites of the Earth Mother". Used to use typical peacenik tactics to try and convince the werewolves and mages to stop channeling Essence; when this kept getting them killed, they upgraded to terrorist acts instead.

The Long Night: The Westboro Baptist Church on one end, the Triple Rock Baptist Church on the other with tent-healers in the middle. The Long Night believe it's the end of the world and a lot of them do not feel very fucking fine. The belief that Jesus will arrive if all the monsters are dead is about the only thing most of them can agree on.

The Loyalists of Thule: Ex-Nazis and people they've essentially blackmailed into being hunters. The Loyalists were originally the Thule-Gesellschaft. Knowing they done goofed, they think they have to atone for what they've done by hunting down monsters. Note that they're running low on people who were actually Nazis and the younger members are asking why they need to be so hung up on WWII.

Maiden's Blood Sisterhood: A sorority of vampire-hunting college chicks. Like Buffy, only no superpowers.

Network 0: Making shows like Ghost Adventures and Finding Bigfoot look professional, Network 0 are all obsessed with finding footage and evidence of the monsters and dark parts of the world and either shoving said evidence of them in people's faces or hiding it and waiting to shove it in people's faces.

The Night Watch: Ghetto toughs, petty hoods, gangbangers and other street trash who've decided they aren't going to stand for being the go-to munchies for vampires anymore.

Null Mysteriis: When scientists find out the truth, they don't go full-mystical. They break out their gear and start researching. They analyze vampire blood, study things from other dimensions and look for theories to explain why witches can break reality.

The Promethean Brotherhood: Envious pricks who perform human sacrifices on mages, monsters, even Conspiracy-tier hunters to try and steal their magic for a time.

The Talbot Group: Well-meaning healers hoping to try and "cure" werewolves and spirit possessions. Founded by a couple whose son turned into a werewolf. They're slowly making progress and are considering how the werewolves they have pseudo-pacified handle spirits doing bad shit, which is the entire purpose of werewolves to begin with.

The Union: The compact of the common men and women who don't know or care about what the monsters are as long as they stay out of their neighborhood. Unlike most Hunters, they prefer to react to monster depredations rather than go out looking for trouble themselves.

Utopia Now: A bunch of Libertarians looking to make the world a better place for everyone. The catch? They want to do this using whatever they pilfered from dead institutional demons, demons who have taken over buildings instead of people (translation: the God-Machine's Infrastructure). Their founder is a Stigmatic, a human who has been exposed to a demon in its true form and was changed for the experience. He is now looking to rid the world of institutional demons and build a utopia where they do not exist.

Conspiracies

It would be god tier, it they weren't so god-awful about so much. Conspiracies aren't just the largest groups in Hunter. They're controlling governments, churches, and have access to endowments. What's an endowment? Do you want to shoot werewolves with plasma weapons? Kill a golem with God's holy power? Wolverine claws? Take your pick, just remember that the conspiracies don't give a shit about you unless you get results, and more than a few have their own dirty little secrets which the Hunters working for them aren't supposed to know about.

Aegis Kai Doru: Definitely not a front for an Arisen hunting down their old magical toys. Nope, not at all. In all seriousness, they've got a ton of fancy relics, and they really hate mages and werewolves.

Ascending Ones: What do you need man? Heroin from Afghanistan? Crack from Columbia? Weed from Mexico? Mysterious alchemical mixtures whose formulas were first perfected in ancient Egypt? Pay up, you'll be helping them wage war on evil. Just as long as you're okay with rampant drug addiction and street crime where they take control.

The Cainite Heresy: Crazy fuckers who use blood magic and are obsessed with killing all vampires RIGHT THE FUCK NOW. They are descended from an organization of rebellious ghouls in the Roman Empire that turned against their vampiric masters.

The Cheiron Group: They're better than Umbrella, if only because they haven't accidentally triggered a zombie apocalypse yet. They don't just get powers, they get powers from monster body parts. Vampire limbs, serial killer brain implants, hands "volunteered" from the Lucifuge. Just don't expect a decent retirement package and keep in mind that there's a good chance you might end up becoming the test subject for an implant that they haven't quite worked the kinks out of. Are actually lead by aliens who use the Cheiron Group for some mysterious reason.

The Faithful of Shulpae: Weird cultists who ritually cannibalize their "gods" (read: any monster that can live a long time) as an act of worship as some kind of messed up version of the Eucharist, in doing so to obtain some of their nifty powers. The fact that the "gods" they worship generally DON'T want to have their flesh devoured doesn't seem to bother them at all.

The Knights of Saint Adrian: Half biker gang, half paladin order, all bounty hunter, no real subtlety. They work for angels to capture or kill demons. Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing really depends on how big an asshole a particular demon's being. And how much you've read about the God-Machine. To facilitate this they are given tattoos with angelic magic coded in. For example one makes it so they can punch a demon so hard their stolen human face flies right off while another is basically an infinite-ammo cheat code for the Knight's firearm of choice.

The Knights of Saint George: Ostensibly a branch of the Church of England, in reality they hunt mages with their own magic-nullifying spells because they fear they'll wake up the Lovecraftian "Faceless Angels" if they aren't killed. Said angels may or may not be Mage-style Abyssal spirits.

Les Mysteres: They think they're helping the innocent, oppressed spirits fight against their tyrannical werewolf masters. Anyone who has ever played Werewolf: The Forsaken will realize that they're being manipulated and are too dumb to know that "freeing" the spirits will result in the destruction and/or enslavement of humanity. Somewhere, a Uratha is trying to stave off Death Rage after learning what this group is trying to do.

The Lucifuge: They've got Hell in their blood and they aren't happy about it. They view the destruction of supernatural beings as a way for them to redeem themselves in the eyes of God. At least they get kickass powers from it. Fun fact: their founder has been alive since the 800s. Fun fact 2: they always have exactly 666 members. Don't ask too many questions about what happened to the guy you replaced.

The Malleus Maleficarum: Vampires, Witches, and Demons; that's the order of importance for the Catholic Inquisition. Don't question it and you won't be taken down to the church basement. Agree to help and you can call on God and his saints to give you awesome abilities to slay monsters. Please ignore the fact that their leader is a ghoul still addicted to vampire blood who uses "holy" magic.

Task Force: VALKYRIE: MIBs, conspiracy creators, and America's last line of paranormal defense. Great story but the execution isn't quite as neat as it sounds. They're a bureaucratic clusterfuck that can barely keep track of which monsters they're supposed to be killing. But at least they get to carry around a laser cannon and ghost-killing bullets when they need to. Oh, and only some of the top brass know that most of their budget secretly comes from vampires using the organization to deal with their rivals.

Vanguard Serial Crimes Unit (VASCU): FBI agents with telepathic powers who use their abilities to hunt down supernatural serial killers, namely Slashers. The subject of much hilarious interdepartmental in-fighting and dick-measuring with VALKYRIE. VALKYRIE's got neater stuff and a better idea of what's going on. But VASCU isn't nearly as much of an organizational mess and its agents are often actually good at their jobs.

Slashers

Not really meant as player options because of their powers, goals and because having your players play actual serial killers instead of hunters would be very fucked up, Slashers are either hunters who have gone off the deep end or people who just happened to go batshit insane in the worst possible way. They all have some kind of Undertaking, a modus operandi based on famous real-life and fictional serial killers. Each of these can go even crazier, going from a Ripper (a Slasher who's still human, at least in the physical sense of the word) to a Scourge (a Slasher with powers that border on the supernatural). While Slashers can be very powerful they all have a Frailty, a psychological (and sometimes physical) weakness linked to their particular brand of insanity.

Generally speaking, Rippers are less powerful than Scourges, but Scourges are more-deeply crippled by their Frailties in addition to inheriting the Frailty of their Ripper counterparts.

Rippers

Avenger: Avengers are out for revenge. Having been deeply hurt by someone else they take (lethal) revenge on those who wronged them, then go on to hunt people like their first target to prevent others from being wronged like they were. But with every victim they kill, they grow increasingly indiscriminate to the point where the subjects of their revenge have only tangential connections to their initial victim. While the drive for revenge is not an uncommon origin for a Hunter, the difference is that Avengers often do not target supernatural beings specifically (not for long, anyway). They are very capable at handling several targets at the same time, but are driven to chase their targets no matter what, which can make them easily manipulated. Drawn from movies like I Know What You Did Last Summer, Death Wish, and Urban Legend.

Brute: More of a monster than a man, a Brute lives only for the hunt and the kill. Exceptionally dangerous at close range and nearly impossible to stop when they've found a victim, a Brute out for blood is a killing machine. Their bloodlust makes them less perceptive though, and with care one can avoid a Brute who has not spotted its prey yet. Drawn from movies like Ravenous and The People Under The Stairs.

Charmer: A rather friendly and affable sort at first glance, a Charmer will appear nice, help you out, win your trust and then strap you to a rack and work you over with a blowtorch as he mocks your decision to trust him. Often the product of abuse in their childhood, Charmers are obsessed with vulnerability and punishment, frequently abhorring sex as well. They will find a victim, win their trust until they let down their guard, then do whatever horrible thing it is they do. Those who trust them tend to make all kinds of excuses for them and dismiss any implied wrongdoings, all the way until they are the next victim. The particular worldview of a Charmer is also their greatest weakness: if someone resists their charm or sets them off in another way, a Charmer will lash out, often violently, revealing themselves in the process. Based on the likes of Death Proof and Wolf Creek.

Freak: Physically deformed and shunned by humanity, Freaks want revenge on the world for rejecting them. They get it by performing the most depraved sorts of acts on their victims. They often grow attachments to people (like their family or other Freaks) or places and know their environments to an almost supernatural degree. Freaks sometimes team up with a supernatural being as an Igor of some kind, but sooner or later they realize they are being used, which inevitably results in the death of either the Freak or the supernatural. Because of their worldviews and hideous appearances, Freaks are very bad at social interaction. Based on works like Red Dragon and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

Genius: Working with their superior intellect, a Genius can deduce what a victim is going to do, how they'll react to situations, their routines and so on. They can also learn about their target by talking to them, discovering oddities, psychological problems or secrets with nothing but a conversation. They love using traps to kill people, rigging things to kill and maim in inventive ways. Some will give their victims a way out when putting them in a trap, feeling that if a victim doesn't figure it out then the resulting horrible blood-typhoon isn't the Genius's fault. Because Geniuses tend to be creatures of order and routine, when an irregularity happens that isn't part of their plans, they tend to get irate and sloppy, even if it wasn't something they could have prevented. Based on urbane serial killers from Silence of the Lambs or Copycat.

Scourges

Legend: The evolved form of the Avenger, Legends are Scourges who have transcended mortality to become living slasher myths. They're the murderous boogeymen that people tell stories about, stories that are ultimately all-too-real. Each Legend is, as you'd expect, wrapped up in his or her own personal mythos, gaining strength when others "play their parts" right but also being compelled to obey certain bans or afflicted with banes based on their legends- nobody's sure if they're just that fixated on their own legend or if it somehow deprives them of free will. Based mostly on urban myth slashers like The Hook-Handed Killer, the Lover's Lane Maniac, or the Licking Lunatic, they also tap into the more "supernatural" slashers from films like the titular character of Candyman or Freddy Krueger from Nightmare on Elm Street.

Mask: The evolved form of the Brute, Masks are killing machines to an even greater extent than their Ripper counterparts. They are supernaturally durable to a level to make even the monstrous player splats sit up and go "Damn, that's a tough bastard!" However, this durability doesn't count for shit against booby traps (most likely because otherwise they'd be nigh-invincible), and they're literally incapable of doing anything that doesn't involve trying to hunt people down and kill them- they can't speak or even understand human language anymore, and extended contact with living things seems to actually cause them pain and a desire to respond with violence. In short, they simply want everything around them to die. Based on super-tough film slashers that never seem to stay dead; the most iconic example of a Mask is probably Jason Voorhees from the Friday the 13th films, or Michael Myers from Halloween.

Psycho: The evolved form of the Charmer, the Psycho has been consumed by their murder-lust, their obsession eating away at them until they can barely feign normality on a day-to-day basis. A Psycho still has enough charm that they can trick victims into lowering their guards at just the right moment, but suffers from intense obsessions; if they fail to manipulate someone, a Psycho is compelled to make that victim their next target. Patrick Bateman from American Psycho is called out as an inspiration for this kind of Slasher.

Mutant: The evolved form of the Freak, Mutants are even more hideously deformed to the point where they are no longer recognizable as having ever been human. Their mutations act as either natural armor or natural weapons as a result, and are even worse at social interaction than Freaks due to their horrific appearances. However, their mutations also make them painfully vulnerable to a certain kind of stimulation, making it impossible for them to bear and reduces them to a state of atavistic rage- a cave-dwelling monster that burns in agony at the touch of sun-light, a blind abomination that hunts through scent and recoils at strong odors, etc. Mostly owe their origins to "Hillbilly Horror" type Slasher flicks, such as The Hills Have Eyes or Wrong Turn.

Maniac: The evolved form of the Genius, Maniacs are even crazier, but also startlingly charismatic; they prefer a more "hands off" approach to killing, and mostly sate their murderous lusts through proxies, having the ability to not only gain great understanding of peoples' psychologies by studying them, but also driving them off the deep end to become the Maniac's loyal flunkies. Their flaw is that they're obviously insane to anyone who doesn't end up adopting their twisted mindsets, penalizing their Social skills with anyone who isn't as crazy as they are (and doesn't catch their brand of insanity from interacting with them) and making them very recognizable. Jigsaw from Saw and John Doe from Se7en are perhaps the best examples of Maniac type Slashers in modern films.

Books

Because of its status as a Limited Run game, Hunter: The Vigil has not received many books. The books that it has do a fine job at making for a tight setting that does its thing well. The books are:

• Hunter: The Vigil Rulebook is the core book presenting what the game is about, how it expands on the base World/Chronicles of Darkness book, what the Compacts and Conspiracies are about how to run a game of Hunter.
• The trio of books on the "Big Three" of World of Darkness. These books go into depth on how their particular brand of nasties are fought, how the core Compacts and Conspiracies see them as well as new toys for them, new Compacts and Conspiracies that specialize in a particular brand of enemy and how to fit the monster into your Hunter games:

• Night Stalkers is the Vampire book and adds The Barrett Commission, Maiden's Blood Sisterhood, The Night Watch and the Cainite Heresy.
• Spirit Slayers is the Werewolf (and spirit) book, adding The Bear Lodge, The Illuminated Brotherhood, The Talbot Group and Les Mysteres.
• Witch Finders is the Mage book and details the use of magic in a low-key version of Mage: The Awakening. It also adds Division Six, The Keepers of the Source, The Promethean Brotherhood and The Knights of Saint George.

• Block by Bloody Block is for urban monster hunting and has rules for Territories, parts of the city that you can drive monsters out of to reclaim them as your own, freeing a city this way. It also has rules for webs of alliances/enmities between various groups so that getting rid of one group might gain you allies somewhere and enemies somewhere else.
• World of Darkness: Slasher is technically a core book, but it's been made an honorary Hunter book. It details the Slashers, those Hunters who go off the deep end. It also includes the rules for those government agents who hunt Slashers, the Vanguard Serial Crimes Unit (VASCU).
• Horror Recognition Guide is a collection of fifteen short stories set in Philadelphia, detailing various Hunter Cells who get into contact with various monsters and how this ends. The book works as inspiration for Hunter games, with no stats included.
• Compacts & Conspiracies is the finale book, greatly expanding on the various core Compacts and Conspiracies. It gives them more rules, more background and lifts the curtain for a few to reveal that they're actually being duped.
• Mortal Remains was released four years after Compacts and Conspiracies to update Hunter: The Vigil for Chronicles of Darkness. It goes into detail on Prometheans, Changelings, Geists, Mummies and Demons, adds a whole slew of new Dread Powers for monsters, updates a lot of existing rules and adds four new Compacts and Conspiracies: Habibti Ma'at, The Faithful of Shulpae, Utopia Now and The Knights of Saint Adrian.