Why not bring your hunt to the dark fantasy world of Etharis, in the upcoming edition of Grim Hollow? But be careful, Hunter. Grim Hollow makes monsters of us all. ghostfiregaming.com/WSRD_GHRF_2024_10_004
That has to be the cleverest, most thoughtful take on "those who fight monsters yadda yadda" I've ever heard: the awareness of monsters turning you into an isolated weirdo who has to hide their true nature from the world; which is the main thing that monsters are in the World of Darkness.
I think that's why Imbuement could work - you're gradually becoming more and more supernatural yourself. At some point, you're literally just another supernatural waging a secret war in shadows of society, no different from a mage or werewolf.
@@ShinoSarna While that angle is interesting, it is very annoying that it was the default for all Hunters and that everyone just accepts the guidance of some unknown supernatural entities. I think it would make more sense to become a monster in a psychological way, become inhuman to fight inhuman things out of necessity, not because your supernatrual sugar daddy said you can play with fireballs now. There are still magic, artifacts and superweapons in the game. It is totally believable that some Hunter goes insane enough to turn himself into something monstrous to hunt better. Those who want that kind of drama can get it. But those who just want to be humans in over their head can do that too now and they are the default, which feels way more earned.
My friends and I played these game BECAUSE we had played the Hunter TTRPG. In fact, for me personally Hunter was my favorite WW setting. I always liked how stacked against you the world felt. Hunters could get quite powerful, sure, but compared to werewolves and vampires? I liked the modern day supernatural resistance movement feeling the setting always gave me.
Fun fact, imbuement is a relic of when the entire setting was meant to be a followup to Exalted. The imbued were the final flickering embers of the Solar exalted. This was quickly canned but still, neat little trivia.
IIRC, the last two remaining angels were implied to have chopped up the solar exaltations into a thousand lesser pieces so that they couldn't scar the world as before. At least under that planned but dropped connection.
@@z2ei the original plan for Exalted was to have it as the prehistory of the oWoD. Despite being dropped almost as soon as unplayable Lunars, it still had to have some setup and planning elsewhere. And that didn't get dropped technically as it happened first and was the setup.
Not just technically, the character sheets were completely cross compatible between the tabletop games. If you've played V:TM:Bloodlines, the character sheet in that is very similar to what you'd see in Hunter (or Vampire.) (Though, there were some differences, Hunters and Vampires had different virtue scores, and Hunters used Conviction to fuel their abilities, while the Humanity score was exclusive to Vampire.)
@@yoursonisold8743 Yup. The only real hickup in the rules was that the Imbued didn't take (or deal) aggravated damage (their unsoakable damage was technically a distinct type.) Which was something the game never made explicit. (Though, one of the splats pointed out that this was an intentional quirk of the system.)
It’s kinda surprising we don’t because it’s the perfect gateway into WoD you’re a normal person who knows nothing about the supernatural suddenly being thrust into a world you don’t understand.
My complain about hunter 5e is that it shouldnt have been the second splat to be released, they should have released it at least after werewolf and in my opinion after mage
I LOVED the H:TR ttrpg so dang much. It was the first time I joined an on-line community! And the PBP (play-by-post) in the forums was great. My Hunter was a Defender, an elderly Holocaust survivor who taught at a university in NYC...
I always felt like Hunter was more of an action game. Tho it's obviously horror in a sense that you're a guy with some telekinesis and a gun possibly going up against a Mage who can explode you through your webcam. Tho unloading a shotgun works on almost everyone. It's incredibly based to shoot through probability warping field of some weird mech wizard with just a shotgun you prayed at for a week
The first game and Supernatural were big inspirations for me to run Hunter as a ttrpg, though I was always a bigger fan of Onyx Path’s Hunter: The Vigil. That feeling of just being a person having to learn the world of darkness in order to fight back against was more prescient when you aren’t just Shazammed with magic powers.
Minor correction, the game does scale depending on how many players. Enemy damage and boss health is altered. I recall it being drastically harder when I played with three as opposed to solo or even two players. The 2nd game was only 2 player and the scaling was much more drastic when adding another player. Playing on normal with 2 players made the enemies in the latter half of the game worse than playing on hard with only yourself.
Great video! My tabletop WoD group played the heck out of H:tR: Wayward back in the day. We even had a song about Judge: "Father Esteban / Has many guns / Many guns has / Father Esteban"
I would've liked Hunter 5th edition a lot more if they made it canon some of the things you're hunting were the former imbued who've gone mad after some events of the metaplot instead of just hand waving them away saying they never once existed at all. This is a cool video though thanks for making it
As someone who uses Reddit, all I can say is no, you would never find Hunters there. That platform is way to straight laced. Tumblr, on the other hand, you could probably find people claiming to be Hunters there in the real world right now
I mean, a private subreddit that spoke in code would probably be how they used it, if they used it at all. The reason Hunter net worked before because it was protected by the messengers from all kinds of Supernatural shenanigans. It killed a mage that wouldn't listen when they were told to go away.
So I was one of those kids who had no idea this was tied to a TTRPG franchise. Me and my friends rented it because we had played and really enjoyed ANOTHER RPG we had no idea was based on a TTRPG. That being Baldur's gate: Dark Alliance. It was BALLS hard and we didn't get very far, but it stuck with me due to presentation. Unrelated, I assure you, I have run more Hunter:The Vigil games then any other WoD line combined. I really like the idea of just being people fighting back.
Really liked Hunter: the Vigil in the NWoD- the morality system was something special as the Hunters gradually replaced their humanity with monstrous compromises to ward off ever encroaching insanity Great video!
I like imbument, and I think that it should at least be an option, even if not the main one. Plus I like exalted and the old tie to it with it was always nice.
*Fun Fact:* There are still BBSs that run, even to this day. So the idea that somewhere out there, there is a super obscure BBS system still running on the phone network is not that far fetched.
My parents were big hitters in The Camarilla during this period of time. Every saturday we would attend physical larp games at different people's homes in the late 90's and early 2000s. I was exposed to all that weird industrial punky goth aesthetic of the time during childhood and it framed my life moving forward pretty strongly, despite outwardly not indicating that at all. I remember these games fondly. That kind of thing helped inform my interest in music, aesthetic, and my interest in the horror and specifically vampire genre. The hunter games were really a contemporary love letter to that entire subculture, which was, at the time, pretty fucking large.
I loved play this game as a kid with my brothers. It was the introduction to The World of Darkness to twelve year old me, I honestly didn’t know it was part of a larger universe until getting into Vampire The Masquerade in high school
I've got strong feelings about the removal of the Imbued from 2023's Hunter. On one hand, yeah, it makes complete sense. In 2024, the idea of playing schizophrenics responsible for mass casualty events hits a bit differently from how it did 25 years ago. (And, yeah, the Revised era Hunter books are very explicit about drawing comparisons between the Imbued and schizophrenia in particular. And, not just in the, "hearing voices," sense, but actually a lot of the symptoms.) It's frustrating because the Imbued were one of the more unique elements of the setting. You don't see characters like this very often in urban fantasy. Whereas unpowered monster hunters are something of the norm. Even if World of Darkness. So, seeing that getting set aside sucks, but at the same time, this was an era when the idea of a mentally unhinged person opening fire on civilians was an almost fanciful horror, rather than something that's become so mundane it won't make national news. A minor nitpick, Project: Twilight was part of a mini-series of multiple books. V:TM got The Inquisition, which covered "The Society of Leopold," the same one that shows up in Bloodlines. Wraith got The Quick and the Dead, which covered rare humans who were born with intact cauls, and their society. Changeling got The Autumn People, which covered faeries who'd been completely consumed by banality to the point that they were an active threat to other faeries by, literally, being too boring to endure. Halls of the Arcanum was about scholars and mystics who investigated the arcane, and magical weirdness, often running afoul of mages in the process (remember, these guys would count as sleepers, but ones that were exceptionally adept at catching Awakened mages engaging in shenanigans.) Finally, (and this might not have been part of the line), Kindred of the East got Demon Hunter X, about a squad of cyborg who hunt monsters in Japan, but are actually a front for the Technocracy. (And, if they did leave Japan, a lot of their cybernetic enhancements would go from being coincidental to vulgar, so most of the more augmented members couldn't leave.) It also had the Shi, who were superhuman martial artists who, similarly, hunted monsters. So, a bit less grounded, but it was part of that whole release era.
I definitely remember playing this when my buddy rented it back in the day. But it never really grabbed us in the way the Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance games did.
I know it clashes with the theming but I like the imbuement. I think the punk themes are still there but it's like the imbuement is a reward for making the difficult but right choice to rise up and fight the power.
I remember playing the first game on original Xbox but never knew about the sequel games. Had no idea it was based on a TTRPG either. Also the first game was stupidly freaking hard.
We always had unimbued hunters, the reckoning is about imbued hunters... they're two different things. Not having the choice is a loss. Also, strictly speaking, different versions of the truth exist as to what/who the messengers are. In Demon: the Fallen there's an explanation, and the one in HtR Storytellers Companion which I assume is the one most people are familiar with because it's actually a supplement for the game itself...
Love your videos and it's so nice to see you branching out. As an old (but no longer active) tabletop guy it's so nice to catch up with games I've never or barely played and settings I know little about. Keep it up! I am subscribed and will continue watching and clicking like on them. Because they're great.
Can’t wait to watch. Hunter: The Reckoning has always been my absolute favorite tabletop game. Can’t believe it didn’t take off more! You had to homebrew a few rules in/out but past that it’s just a phenomenal time for having this real high stakes, character driven game. No other TTRPG makes lows feel so low and highs feel so high.
Had this game on GameCube growing up, and man, looking back on the game, it was a wild fever dream. Especially the graveyard level, when once you get to the church, you fight an giant evil teddy bear that vomits on you.
I remember playing Hunter with a big group that was playing Vampire and Werewolf as well. My character was an alcoholic anarchist who was systematically destroying the infrastructure of the Masquerade in the city. He didnt even believe in Vampires or magic or anything, he just wanted to watch the system burn and his buddy (who was actually an Anarch vampire) helped him find targets. He eventually died at the hands of another Hunter when they tracked down his friend. But for those 4 months, oh man, the Vampires of Las Vegas were absolutely miserable.
One funny thing about HUnter at the table was that the GM always had to make up new "rules" for monsters because the players (almost always Vampire/Werewolf/Mage veterans) were intimately familiar with the strengths, weaknesses, and societies of the "canon" monsters. This meant that monster abilities and aesthetics varied wildly from play group to play group, as each GM had to make up their own versions of the baddies to keep the players guessing.
The OG pen & paper Hunter was most definitely inspired by Buffy, which makes sense, it's when the show was coming out and super popular. ...it was also an Exalted teaser, but we try to forget about that part
Hell yeah, I've been looking forward to Hunter! I haven't had the opportunity to play any WoD tabletops, but Hunter is the closest I've gotten. A friend was going to run a game of Reckoning, then after people had created their characters, he got a copy of Vigil and decided he wanted to run that instead. I was down, but several players understandably didn't want to learn a new system all over again, so the game fizzled. As for the Imbuements question, at least on paper I like Vigil's approach a bit better. The idea of your unique edge coming from the subculture you interact with--your network and support structure--is a lot more unique imo than another game about superpowers.
I have to say that my impression of that time from talking to older gamers is that WoD, wasn't "second" to D&D. Up until 3.5 WoD was "THE" RPG setting. It surpassed AD&D 2E quite easily making it seem archaic. It was an RPG born from that mid 80s- early 90s era and FOR people of that era.
In particular, I remember the publicity stunt that White Wolf pulled for the release of Hunter: the Reckoning in print. In an attempt at proto-ARG content, they posted on their website that the company had been SOLD. I was friends with a few freelance writers who worked for WW at the time, and this announcement totally blindsided them, throwing them into a minor panic, wondering what such a change of ownership meant for unpublished projects that they had in the pipeline that they had yet to be paid for. As it turned out the "company" that "bought" White Wolf turned out to be the in-game front company for the Hunter-Net Forums, and in reality, everything was business as usual. I get why only permanent employees were in on the marketing scheme, but I still see it as a dick move keeping the freelance writers out of the loop. And it's not the only time they pulled a proto-ARG stunt like this. 3 years later for the release of Demon: the Fallen, they made a whole website for a fictitious Baptist Church in Florida that was supposedly denouncing the release of the game. It was pretty convincing, considering that they had dealt with real church disapproval in the past, but as someone who lived through the 80s RPG Satanic Panics it came across as kind of tasteless to me.
This was top notch. I never played the Hunter Tabletop game but I played the hell out of Hunter the Reckoning Redeemer. I did not know there was more then one. Might grab the book as well. I played a little Vampire back in the day but it was not my favorite. I love collecting retro ttrpgs though. Thanks for this!
My parents got this game and played it with me a lot when it came out, I was 4-5 and couldn't even read yet but fell in love with it and naturally my taste in everything was massively influenced by it. Lost my mind when I was a teenager learning about WoD and saw the Hunter: The Reckoning ttrpg
I get the feeling imbuement was a way to handwave away the fact that to some level humans aren't supposed to be able to tell a supernatural thing happened?
Vampires had tons of mind control abilities, most of which Hunters are immune to. Otherwise, Hunters wouldn't stand a chance. Werewolves would inflict The Delirium on mortals. This rendered them briefly insane, and incapable of remembering, exactly, what they saw. Hunters are, again, mostly immune to it, though they still keep the associated nightmares. This, too, is because supernaturals in WoD were too hecking powerful. The list goes on and on. As individual games, WoD was occasionally brilliant. As a shared universe? It's a dumpster fire.
Thank you for this, this was one of my favorites. I still remember when I bought my first Xbox and saw a used copy for $5 at Gamestop, thought it looked cool and it was cheap so why not? Then I wound up soloing the game four times over (once for each main character) To this day it's still a fondly remembered game for me, and yes we are getting old Will, I miss blood puffs too.
It's... interesting. Since the mid 2010s, when conspiracy theories moved from the fringes to become mainstream politics, the H:tR concept really hits differently. We have armed people storming pizzerias to stop conspiracies of supernatural evil powers farming chemicals from children in the basement IRL now, and it's hard to see that kind of behaviour as "punk" or even anti-authority at this point. Warhammer 40k has the issue where people say "oh, the Imperium is justified, actually, the demons and witches are real so they have to run their society like that", but, obviously, while those things are genuine issues in 40k, the way the Imperium handles them is nightmare bananas. H:tR seems like it just does the first part - "the vampires and werewolves are real, so it's good that you do terrible things to them" with po-faced sincerity - without the satire that people keep missing or deny exists in 40k. Bringing H:tR back in 2024 feels like a Choice, and I'm curious what their thought process was behind the update and how they've framed it for this era.
This was the game that got me to buy an OG X-Box. I was a huge WoD dork and had bought all the core rulebooks. I enjoyed the video game, though I recognized it was just using the title to do urban-fantasy Gauntlet. It's wafer-thin, but it uses the vibe well enough to do its own thing. As far as imbuement goes, I think it makes sense if you're looking to build a gameline. The rules to make a normal human were long established and it's not like you need a rule book to explain what being an ordinary human is about. They did do a previous non-Reckoning hunter book, "Hunters Hunted" that discussed the various tools and factions of ordinary human hunters (that also offered rare psychic abilities called numina as a storyteller-approved option long before HtR). While you probably could have expanded that book into a full core rulebook unto itself, I'm not sure you could have turned it into a full game line series, and that was what White Wolf was all about at the time. As it is, I kinda like the idea of exploring the idea of getting imbued and trying to make sense of your own abilities while fighting other creatures much more powerful than you. But I do think it is a one-trick pony and once you've explored the hypocrisy, there's not a lot else there besides just "Kill the monster." The Hunter Creeds all got their own books, but since it's more of a general personality trait rather than a faction, they always felt a bit thin. The imbued Hunters were all relatively new, not organized other than a forum that *some* of them were a part of. So while I can see what they were going for, the execution kind of did it a disservice if the intent really was to build this into a line much like Vampire, Mage, Werewolf, etc. But I've also not read anything they've done since shortly after they ended original WOD 1.0 in the early 2000s, so I'll fully concede it is possible they did find a great angle to build a non-powered-up Hunter into a full game series with multiple books.
If Imbuing has a million supporters, I am one of them If Imbuing has a hundred supporters, I am one of them If Imbuing has one supporter, It is me And If Imbuing has a no fans left, I am dead Real talk, I think the Imbuing serves several purposes: 1) It metaphorizes the moment of radicalization. Eventually there is a tipping point, and you cannot see the world the same ever again. 2) It metaphorizes the slippery slope between watchdog and conspiracy theorist, and the slope between the resistance fighter and terrorist. The danger you're facing and the scope of the evil around you tempts you to delve deeper and deeper into the power offered, which drives you crazy. 3) The Heralds and the mystery surrounding them is dope, and if you don't like the canon answers, you can absolutely throw them out and make up your own. 4) The fact that the Imbuing is amoral recreates the ugly reality that resisting the government is a big tent, and even getting cooperation among more like minded folks in the struggle can be extremely contentious. People today like to say punk was always leftist, queer, and wholesome, but there was a reason early punks often needed to violently resist neo-nazis co-opting their spaces. You can think the institutions that run are world are corrupt and still be an insanely evil jackass as well. 5) There's nothing wrong with power fantasy in a vacuum. Power fantasy in fact has always been, for better or for worse, part of the appeal of WoD. Vampire is infamous for veering that way, and it's pretty much an explicit feature of Werewolf and Mage. Frankly, I think it's probably good for people to have a space where they can take a flaming sword and swing it at the face of the horrors of modernity, given in real life, just talking about the horrors too loud in a public space has the police show up, unload a clip of rubber bullets in your face point blank, and then charge you with trespassing. Loved the video. This was fun. Please do the other games!
The Hunter trilogy by Mercedes Lackey is very much in this line. Corruption exists at high levels. Humanity has to pull together against monsters in order to survive.
Hell yeah, I was hoping you would cover the Orange Books! While I might not play H:tR, it and Supernatural have inspired my Call of Cthulhu game world. As a world with layers as far as the supernatural and eldritch is concerned, my players can be normal humans like traditional games of CoC (or ones like Hunter the Vigil) to more supernaturally empowered characters like The Imbued
I would love for you to review the Chronicles of Darkness games; they were full of beautiful ideas, although they never reached the same heights as OWoD in sales or popularity
26:09 🤬 that quest but i did get a ton better at the game because of it. It was one of those "get good or go home stages." A skill check kinda stage 🤔 and good God that was awesome. Looked at that bloody bear
Sans Wayward (Which I feel sad to never play) The XBOX games were my CHILDHOOD along with many others (sad it's the ONLY XBOX game I can't get on my switch! Dark Alliance 2 at least was nice to get back) and this game DID get me into the Hunter series (and the rest of the World of Darkness alongside Vampire Bloodlines)
I wouldn't say I never realized that the Hunter game I played on the xbox as a young kid was a WoD property, but when I did realize it when I was a teenager, I thought it was pretty cool and made a lot of sense that it was.
Hunter rolls Nat. 20 - "I cast vicious mockery on the Wraith player" P.S.: Also kinda weird that all 3 games did not get some kind of Remastered treatment and bundled-up as a trilogy pack deal...
Wish all 3 main games were remastered and improved to modern consoles and PC, and some got extra features, like an optional remix rebalance mode, and more outfits, more playable characters, and more a rpg style for the first game.
I have a new coworker hes my age, invited him over and introduced him to my xbox original and showed him this game. He had a blast. He started asking more about the game and why there isnt more like it cause it is fun as fuck
@@WilliamSRDyou said it at the beginning and it is so true. Played uunter the reckoning when i was 8-10 years old loved the game. At 19 i heard about world of darkness and found it interesting. Then my eyes jumped out my head when i saw my childhood game was a title attached to the series. What a revelation
Currently running a Hunter: the Vigil game set in New Orleans! Always been more of a fan of HtV more, with the PCs starting out as unpowered humans up against the same odds, making their victories all the more worthy of celebration
It took me a second, but some of the artwork shown is by Guy Davis! He's an amazing cartoonist and concept artist. Check him out if you haven't heard of him.
I was thinking about this game just the other day, and I never knew it was from the World of Darkness. Of course, I never got very far playing solo. The bit about the forums could be more 2024 accurate if they were reached by a Tor browser.
Why not bring your hunt to the dark fantasy world of Etharis, in the upcoming edition of Grim Hollow?
But be careful, Hunter. Grim Hollow makes monsters of us all.
ghostfiregaming.com/WSRD_GHRF_2024_10_004
I'm actually more surprised onyx path and their curseborne team didn't contact you for a sponsor on this one
I don't know if your ever going to cover the WOD Text RPGs. Their pretty good (except for sins of the sire).
That has to be the cleverest, most thoughtful take on "those who fight monsters yadda yadda" I've ever heard: the awareness of monsters turning you into an isolated weirdo who has to hide their true nature from the world; which is the main thing that monsters are in the World of Darkness.
I think that's why Imbuement could work - you're gradually becoming more and more supernatural yourself. At some point, you're literally just another supernatural waging a secret war in shadows of society, no different from a mage or werewolf.
@@ShinoSarna While that angle is interesting, it is very annoying that it was the default for all Hunters and that everyone just accepts the guidance of some unknown supernatural entities. I think it would make more sense to become a monster in a psychological way, become inhuman to fight inhuman things out of necessity, not because your supernatrual sugar daddy said you can play with fireballs now.
There are still magic, artifacts and superweapons in the game. It is totally believable that some Hunter goes insane enough to turn himself into something monstrous to hunt better. Those who want that kind of drama can get it. But those who just want to be humans in over their head can do that too now and they are the default, which feels way more earned.
I never thought of it like that, but I guess this is why hunters should work in packs. Gotta have _some_ kind of social net, right?
My friends and I played these game BECAUSE we had played the Hunter TTRPG. In fact, for me personally Hunter was my favorite WW setting. I always liked how stacked against you the world felt. Hunters could get quite powerful, sure, but compared to werewolves and vampires? I liked the modern day supernatural resistance movement feeling the setting always gave me.
Hell yeah, time to get hyped for another setting / system I'm never playing.
Vampire Girls with Uzis sounds like the title of one of those old horror flicks that was just a step or two below being softcore porn...
I'm pretty sure i've seen this porn before.
Have you seen Hunter: The Parenting? The guys responsible for TTS (40k parody) are doing one for the World of Darkness and it's utterly sublime!
too much reddit- MCU tier humor for me
@@j.2512
Did you enjoy the TTS series?
@j.2512 what?
@@MichaelJohnson-fr8yr "If Emperor had Text-To-Speech", warhammer 40k parody.
@@j.2512 "Things people like are reddit-mcu tier humor" is one of the dumbest takes ive heard in a while.
Fun fact, imbuement is a relic of when the entire setting was meant to be a followup to Exalted. The imbued were the final flickering embers of the Solar exalted. This was quickly canned but still, neat little trivia.
Thankfully we now have Exalted vs The World of Darkness for those of us who want to stomp on vampire and werewolf skulls.
IIRC, the last two remaining angels were implied to have chopped up the solar exaltations into a thousand lesser pieces so that they couldn't scar the world as before. At least under that planned but dropped connection.
@@ArispeMattwell that's cool as shit
Didn't Hunter predate Exalted by a couple of years?
@@z2ei the original plan for Exalted was to have it as the prehistory of the oWoD. Despite being dropped almost as soon as unplayable Lunars, it still had to have some setup and planning elsewhere. And that didn't get dropped technically as it happened first and was the setup.
Whatttttt Hunter: the reckoning is technically related to Vampire: the masquerade?! Thats cool shit.
Not just technically, the character sheets were completely cross compatible between the tabletop games. If you've played V:TM:Bloodlines, the character sheet in that is very similar to what you'd see in Hunter (or Vampire.) (Though, there were some differences, Hunters and Vampires had different virtue scores, and Hunters used Conviction to fuel their abilities, while the Humanity score was exclusive to Vampire.)
@@StarkeRealm Could you cross them over then? Play a Hunter in a VTM campaign?
@@yoursonisold8743 Yup. The only real hickup in the rules was that the Imbued didn't take (or deal) aggravated damage (their unsoakable damage was technically a distinct type.) Which was something the game never made explicit. (Though, one of the splats pointed out that this was an intentional quirk of the system.)
@@StarkeRealm That seems like it could be interesting to use as a balancing trick, making sure one enemy can't hurt a weaker player, or something.
Technically?
It's Actually
We need a proper Hunter the Reckoning RPG video game.
It’s kinda surprising we don’t because it’s the perfect gateway into WoD you’re a normal person who knows nothing about the supernatural suddenly being thrust into a world you don’t understand.
We never could get past the werewolf. Didn't realize how close we were to the end.
The vomiting teddy bear boss still sticks with my memory all these years later.
That one make vampire upstairs in the fireplace room 😮 Jesus he was hard
Imagine the hunters that met up on 4chan.
A more likely way in more modern incarnations. MSN Messenger, Skype, 4chan, discord.
@@Agentkrow Nah, Hunters should be more old school / savy, and go straight to usernet.
@@VRO_000 True. I mean because of tabletop RPG community shenanigans I still use IRC.
@@VRO_000Maybe they'd be competent enough to use the darkweb
My complain about hunter 5e is that it shouldnt have been the second splat to be released, they should have released it at least after werewolf and in my opinion after mage
I generally agree! Though I think PDX has been rolling things out in order of player #'s rather than metaplot order.
I'm not going to argue, but I am going to play Hunter.
Even though Vampire and Hunter are by far the most popular of the WoD settings?
THE FIRST TTRPG I ever played.
HtR, my beloved, Martyr, my beloved.
I miss playing it every day.
My dude, this is one of the best damn description of Hunter the reckoning,I have ever seen, and I have been reading the source material from day one.
I LOVED the H:TR ttrpg so dang much. It was the first time I joined an on-line community! And the PBP (play-by-post) in the forums was great.
My Hunter was a Defender, an elderly Holocaust survivor who taught at a university in NYC...
What a flashback... I used to LOVE "pbp" forums so much in the early 2000's man!
I always felt like Hunter was more of an action game.
Tho it's obviously horror in a sense that you're a guy with some telekinesis and a gun possibly going up against a Mage who can explode you through your webcam.
Tho unloading a shotgun works on almost everyone.
It's incredibly based to shoot through probability warping field of some weird mech wizard with just a shotgun you prayed at for a week
The hard counter to everything in WoD is 5 dudes with shotguns showing up unexpectedly.
Also cats in OWoD.
Holy crap is this Hunter? I still own the discs for these games. So much fun with friends!
I'm shocked they never made more. I was waiting for one to come out on PS3 😢
The first game and Supernatural were big inspirations for me to run Hunter as a ttrpg, though I was always a bigger fan of Onyx Path’s Hunter: The Vigil. That feeling of just being a person having to learn the world of darkness in order to fight back against was more prescient when you aren’t just Shazammed with magic powers.
Absolutely! I love the vibe of just being outclassed and having to deal with that. Same reason I'm a Dark Heresy fan haha
Vigil is the Hunters Hunted Revised we wanted and deserved. And I say this as a fan of Reckoning.
@underthepale H5, the new Hunter the Reckoning is basically Vigil but in the OG world of darkness.
@@vxicepickxv If H5 is still a game where you kill things because the voices in your head tell you to, then it sure as shooting isn't Vigil.
@@underthepale impued aren't in h5
Minor correction, the game does scale depending on how many players. Enemy damage and boss health is altered. I recall it being drastically harder when I played with three as opposed to solo or even two players. The 2nd game was only 2 player and the scaling was much more drastic when adding another player. Playing on normal with 2 players made the enemies in the latter half of the game worse than playing on hard with only yourself.
I remember how frustrating this was as a 12 year old playing with my dad. How suddenly the game became twice as hard when the two of us tried to play.
Great video! My tabletop WoD group played the heck out of H:tR: Wayward back in the day. We even had a song about Judge: "Father Esteban / Has many guns / Many guns has / Father Esteban"
I would've liked Hunter 5th edition a lot more if they made it canon some of the things you're hunting were the former imbued who've gone mad after some events of the metaplot instead of just hand waving them away saying they never once existed at all. This is a cool video though thanks for making it
As someone who uses Reddit, all I can say is no, you would never find Hunters there. That platform is way to straight laced. Tumblr, on the other hand, you could probably find people claiming to be Hunters there in the real world right now
I mean, a private subreddit that spoke in code would probably be how they used it, if they used it at all.
The reason Hunter net worked before because it was protected by the messengers from all kinds of Supernatural shenanigans. It killed a mage that wouldn't listen when they were told to go away.
As someone who uses Tumblr, believe me, you will not find Hunters on there. Everyone on that site wants to fuck the monsters.
Honestly, I expected them to just say Hunters gather on the dark web or something, because that just sounds appropiate.
@@yoursonisold8743
Nah, they are regular people. Message boards and forums are where they would be.
I'm not sure straight laced is the word I'd use for reddit.
I'd say 95% of all those in encounter there ARE monsters
So I was one of those kids who had no idea this was tied to a TTRPG franchise. Me and my friends rented it because we had played and really enjoyed ANOTHER RPG we had no idea was based on a TTRPG. That being Baldur's gate: Dark Alliance. It was BALLS hard and we didn't get very far, but it stuck with me due to presentation. Unrelated, I assure you, I have run more Hunter:The Vigil games then any other WoD line combined. I really like the idea of just being people fighting back.
Really liked Hunter: the Vigil in the NWoD- the morality system was something special as the Hunters gradually replaced their humanity with monstrous compromises to ward off ever encroaching insanity
Great video!
I like imbument, and I think that it should at least be an option, even if not the main one. Plus I like exalted and the old tie to it with it was always nice.
*Fun Fact:* There are still BBSs that run, even to this day. So the idea that somewhere out there, there is a super obscure BBS system still running on the phone network is not that far fetched.
My parents were big hitters in The Camarilla during this period of time. Every saturday we would attend physical larp games at different people's homes in the late 90's and early 2000s. I was exposed to all that weird industrial punky goth aesthetic of the time during childhood and it framed my life moving forward pretty strongly, despite outwardly not indicating that at all. I remember these games fondly. That kind of thing helped inform my interest in music, aesthetic, and my interest in the horror and specifically vampire genre. The hunter games were really a contemporary love letter to that entire subculture, which was, at the time, pretty fucking large.
The TTRPG that inspired Supernatural, and the other titles inspiring so much stuff.
I loved play this game as a kid with my brothers. It was the introduction to The World of Darkness to twelve year old me, I honestly didn’t know it was part of a larger universe until getting into Vampire The Masquerade in high school
You always put out great videos. Taking the extra 30 seconds to goof on reddit made it even better.
I've got strong feelings about the removal of the Imbued from 2023's Hunter.
On one hand, yeah, it makes complete sense. In 2024, the idea of playing schizophrenics responsible for mass casualty events hits a bit differently from how it did 25 years ago. (And, yeah, the Revised era Hunter books are very explicit about drawing comparisons between the Imbued and schizophrenia in particular. And, not just in the, "hearing voices," sense, but actually a lot of the symptoms.)
It's frustrating because the Imbued were one of the more unique elements of the setting. You don't see characters like this very often in urban fantasy. Whereas unpowered monster hunters are something of the norm. Even if World of Darkness. So, seeing that getting set aside sucks, but at the same time, this was an era when the idea of a mentally unhinged person opening fire on civilians was an almost fanciful horror, rather than something that's become so mundane it won't make national news.
A minor nitpick, Project: Twilight was part of a mini-series of multiple books. V:TM got The Inquisition, which covered "The Society of Leopold," the same one that shows up in Bloodlines. Wraith got The Quick and the Dead, which covered rare humans who were born with intact cauls, and their society. Changeling got The Autumn People, which covered faeries who'd been completely consumed by banality to the point that they were an active threat to other faeries by, literally, being too boring to endure. Halls of the Arcanum was about scholars and mystics who investigated the arcane, and magical weirdness, often running afoul of mages in the process (remember, these guys would count as sleepers, but ones that were exceptionally adept at catching Awakened mages engaging in shenanigans.) Finally, (and this might not have been part of the line), Kindred of the East got Demon Hunter X, about a squad of cyborg who hunt monsters in Japan, but are actually a front for the Technocracy. (And, if they did leave Japan, a lot of their cybernetic enhancements would go from being coincidental to vulgar, so most of the more augmented members couldn't leave.) It also had the Shi, who were superhuman martial artists who, similarly, hunted monsters. So, a bit less grounded, but it was part of that whole release era.
I definitely remember playing this when my buddy rented it back in the day. But it never really grabbed us in the way the Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance games did.
I know it clashes with the theming but I like the imbuement. I think the punk themes are still there but it's like the imbuement is a reward for making the difficult but right choice to rise up and fight the power.
Hunter was by and far my favorite WOD setting. I still have the complete RPG book set for Hunter: The Reckoning. We didn't use imbuement in my games.
I remember playing the first game on original Xbox but never knew about the sequel games. Had no idea it was based on a TTRPG either. Also the first game was stupidly freaking hard.
Oh yeah, this game was a huge part of my childhood. My friends and I loved this game so much lol
You're the only ttrpg channel where I learn about the niche.
We always had unimbued hunters, the reckoning is about imbued hunters... they're two different things.
Not having the choice is a loss.
Also, strictly speaking, different versions of the truth exist as to what/who the messengers are.
In Demon: the Fallen there's an explanation, and the one in HtR Storytellers Companion which I assume is the one most people are familiar with because it's actually a supplement for the game itself...
Just finished watching your space hulk video and now you uploaded a new vid on a very nostalgic game for me. What a day!
Adored these games growing up, fantastic vid
Love your videos and it's so nice to see you branching out. As an old (but no longer active) tabletop guy it's so nice to catch up with games I've never or barely played and settings I know little about. Keep it up! I am subscribed and will continue watching and clicking like on them. Because they're great.
Can’t wait to watch. Hunter: The Reckoning has always been my absolute favorite tabletop game. Can’t believe it didn’t take off more! You had to homebrew a few rules in/out but past that it’s just a phenomenal time for having this real high stakes, character driven game. No other TTRPG makes lows feel so low and highs feel so high.
Had this game on GameCube growing up, and man, looking back on the game, it was a wild fever dream. Especially the graveyard level, when once you get to the church, you fight an giant evil teddy bear that vomits on you.
Hunter: The Vigil needs more love.
I remember playing Hunter with a big group that was playing Vampire and Werewolf as well. My character was an alcoholic anarchist who was systematically destroying the infrastructure of the Masquerade in the city. He didnt even believe in Vampires or magic or anything, he just wanted to watch the system burn and his buddy (who was actually an Anarch vampire) helped him find targets. He eventually died at the hands of another Hunter when they tracked down his friend.
But for those 4 months, oh man, the Vampires of Las Vegas were absolutely miserable.
13:35 Hunter is a game about angry, heavily armed Muppets? I never knew I needed that.
Hunter's premise: "there are real monster out there, take this double barrel shotgun, bottle of holy water, a molotov and deal with them"
Played these games with my best friends so much. Great memories. Only the first game is backwards compatible on Xbox though right?
one of my favorite game/games growing up.
too bad we'll never get a remake, or sequel, it will live on in my memory!
One funny thing about HUnter at the table was that the GM always had to make up new "rules" for monsters because the players (almost always Vampire/Werewolf/Mage veterans) were intimately familiar with the strengths, weaknesses, and societies of the "canon" monsters. This meant that monster abilities and aesthetics varied wildly from play group to play group, as each GM had to make up their own versions of the baddies to keep the players guessing.
The OG pen & paper Hunter was most definitely inspired by Buffy, which makes sense, it's when the show was coming out and super popular.
...it was also an Exalted teaser, but we try to forget about that part
Hell yeah, I've been looking forward to Hunter! I haven't had the opportunity to play any WoD tabletops, but Hunter is the closest I've gotten. A friend was going to run a game of Reckoning, then after people had created their characters, he got a copy of Vigil and decided he wanted to run that instead. I was down, but several players understandably didn't want to learn a new system all over again, so the game fizzled.
As for the Imbuements question, at least on paper I like Vigil's approach a bit better. The idea of your unique edge coming from the subculture you interact with--your network and support structure--is a lot more unique imo than another game about superpowers.
i wasn't into wod till i watched the amazing series hunter the parenting and i've been lore divining ever since.
I have to say that my impression of that time from talking to older gamers is that WoD, wasn't "second" to D&D. Up until 3.5 WoD was "THE" RPG setting. It surpassed AD&D 2E quite easily making it seem archaic. It was an RPG born from that mid 80s- early 90s era and FOR people of that era.
I love classic WoD but sorry not sorry, Chronicles is where I keep going back to--especially for Hunter and Changeling.
The new Hunter is a lot more like Vigil. I do agree on Changeling being better with Chronicles of Darkness.
I love Hunter! I'm currently digging "Hunter: the Parenting", definitely recommend. 😜
In particular, I remember the publicity stunt that White Wolf pulled for the release of Hunter: the Reckoning in print. In an attempt at proto-ARG content, they posted on their website that the company had been SOLD. I was friends with a few freelance writers who worked for WW at the time, and this announcement totally blindsided them, throwing them into a minor panic, wondering what such a change of ownership meant for unpublished projects that they had in the pipeline that they had yet to be paid for.
As it turned out the "company" that "bought" White Wolf turned out to be the in-game front company for the Hunter-Net Forums, and in reality, everything was business as usual. I get why only permanent employees were in on the marketing scheme, but I still see it as a dick move keeping the freelance writers out of the loop.
And it's not the only time they pulled a proto-ARG stunt like this. 3 years later for the release of Demon: the Fallen, they made a whole website for a fictitious Baptist Church in Florida that was supposedly denouncing the release of the game. It was pretty convincing, considering that they had dealt with real church disapproval in the past, but as someone who lived through the 80s RPG Satanic Panics it came across as kind of tasteless to me.
That's... soft of you.
This was top notch. I never played the Hunter Tabletop game but I played the hell out of Hunter the Reckoning Redeemer. I did not know there was more then one. Might grab the book as well. I played a little Vampire back in the day but it was not my favorite. I love collecting retro ttrpgs though. Thanks for this!
talk about games that actually need a remake. loved these games as a kid.
My parents got this game and played it with me a lot when it came out, I was 4-5 and couldn't even read yet but fell in love with it and naturally my taste in everything was massively influenced by it. Lost my mind when I was a teenager learning about WoD and saw the Hunter: The Reckoning ttrpg
I get the feeling imbuement was a way to handwave away the fact that to some level humans aren't supposed to be able to tell a supernatural thing happened?
Vampires had tons of mind control abilities, most of which Hunters are immune to. Otherwise, Hunters wouldn't stand a chance.
Werewolves would inflict The Delirium on mortals. This rendered them briefly insane, and incapable of remembering, exactly, what they saw. Hunters are, again, mostly immune to it, though they still keep the associated nightmares. This, too, is because supernaturals in WoD were too hecking powerful.
The list goes on and on. As individual games, WoD was occasionally brilliant.
As a shared universe? It's a dumpster fire.
@@underthepale yeah that's what I thought. This mechanic feels like needing to reconcile that aspect of the setting without contradicting it.
Damn, great monologue about the setting.
I played the absolute hell out of these games when they came out and didn't know about The World of Darkness until that last Vampire game came out.
1:45 wills best set so far 😅
Thank you for this, this was one of my favorites.
I still remember when I bought my first Xbox and saw a used copy for $5 at Gamestop, thought it looked cool and it was cheap so why not?
Then I wound up soloing the game four times over (once for each main character)
To this day it's still a fondly remembered game for me, and yes we are getting old Will, I miss blood puffs too.
For soloing with Martyr, you are my hero
@@NostalgiaChan Patience is indeed a virtue 😆
New vid? It's on like the Second Inquisition!
Last time I was this early , Grout was alive
It's... interesting. Since the mid 2010s, when conspiracy theories moved from the fringes to become mainstream politics, the H:tR concept really hits differently. We have armed people storming pizzerias to stop conspiracies of supernatural evil powers farming chemicals from children in the basement IRL now, and it's hard to see that kind of behaviour as "punk" or even anti-authority at this point.
Warhammer 40k has the issue where people say "oh, the Imperium is justified, actually, the demons and witches are real so they have to run their society like that", but, obviously, while those things are genuine issues in 40k, the way the Imperium handles them is nightmare bananas. H:tR seems like it just does the first part - "the vampires and werewolves are real, so it's good that you do terrible things to them" with po-faced sincerity - without the satire that people keep missing or deny exists in 40k.
Bringing H:tR back in 2024 feels like a Choice, and I'm curious what their thought process was behind the update and how they've framed it for this era.
This was the game that got me to buy an OG X-Box. I was a huge WoD dork and had bought all the core rulebooks. I enjoyed the video game, though I recognized it was just using the title to do urban-fantasy Gauntlet. It's wafer-thin, but it uses the vibe well enough to do its own thing.
As far as imbuement goes, I think it makes sense if you're looking to build a gameline. The rules to make a normal human were long established and it's not like you need a rule book to explain what being an ordinary human is about. They did do a previous non-Reckoning hunter book, "Hunters Hunted" that discussed the various tools and factions of ordinary human hunters (that also offered rare psychic abilities called numina as a storyteller-approved option long before HtR). While you probably could have expanded that book into a full core rulebook unto itself, I'm not sure you could have turned it into a full game line series, and that was what White Wolf was all about at the time. As it is, I kinda like the idea of exploring the idea of getting imbued and trying to make sense of your own abilities while fighting other creatures much more powerful than you. But I do think it is a one-trick pony and once you've explored the hypocrisy, there's not a lot else there besides just "Kill the monster." The Hunter Creeds all got their own books, but since it's more of a general personality trait rather than a faction, they always felt a bit thin. The imbued Hunters were all relatively new, not organized other than a forum that *some* of them were a part of. So while I can see what they were going for, the execution kind of did it a disservice if the intent really was to build this into a line much like Vampire, Mage, Werewolf, etc. But I've also not read anything they've done since shortly after they ended original WOD 1.0 in the early 2000s, so I'll fully concede it is possible they did find a great angle to build a non-powered-up Hunter into a full game series with multiple books.
If Imbuing has a million supporters, I am one of them
If Imbuing has a hundred supporters, I am one of them
If Imbuing has one supporter, It is me
And If Imbuing has a no fans left, I am dead
Real talk, I think the Imbuing serves several purposes:
1) It metaphorizes the moment of radicalization. Eventually there is a tipping point, and you cannot see the world the same ever again.
2) It metaphorizes the slippery slope between watchdog and conspiracy theorist, and the slope between the resistance fighter and terrorist. The danger you're facing and the scope of the evil around you tempts you to delve deeper and deeper into the power offered, which drives you crazy.
3) The Heralds and the mystery surrounding them is dope, and if you don't like the canon answers, you can absolutely throw them out and make up your own.
4) The fact that the Imbuing is amoral recreates the ugly reality that resisting the government is a big tent, and even getting cooperation among more like minded folks in the struggle can be extremely contentious. People today like to say punk was always leftist, queer, and wholesome, but there was a reason early punks often needed to violently resist neo-nazis co-opting their spaces. You can think the institutions that run are world are corrupt and still be an insanely evil jackass as well.
5) There's nothing wrong with power fantasy in a vacuum. Power fantasy in fact has always been, for better or for worse, part of the appeal of WoD. Vampire is infamous for veering that way, and it's pretty much an explicit feature of Werewolf and Mage. Frankly, I think it's probably good for people to have a space where they can take a flaming sword and swing it at the face of the horrors of modernity, given in real life, just talking about the horrors too loud in a public space has the police show up, unload a clip of rubber bullets in your face point blank, and then charge you with trespassing.
Loved the video. This was fun. Please do the other games!
The question we should be asking is not "Why does this werewolf have nipple piercings?", but "Why don't all werewolves have nipple piercings?"
goddamn i love the (sometimes kinda janky) art in the World of Darkness ttrpg books.
The Hunter trilogy by Mercedes Lackey is very much in this line. Corruption exists at high levels. Humanity has to pull together against monsters in order to survive.
I am here for this!
Hell yeah, I was hoping you would cover the Orange Books! While I might not play H:tR, it and Supernatural have inspired my Call of Cthulhu game world. As a world with layers as far as the supernatural and eldritch is concerned, my players can be normal humans like traditional games of CoC (or ones like Hunter the Vigil) to more supernaturally empowered characters like The Imbued
I would love for you to review the Chronicles of Darkness games; they were full of beautiful ideas, although they never reached the same heights as OWoD in sales or popularity
I rented the ps2 game as a kid and had absolutely no idea there was a table top game. Hell I didn't learn what a ttrpg was until years later
26:09 🤬 that quest but i did get a ton better at the game because of it. It was one of those "get good or go home stages." A skill check kinda stage 🤔 and good God that was awesome. Looked at that bloody bear
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Sans Wayward (Which I feel sad to never play) The XBOX games were my CHILDHOOD along with many others (sad it's the ONLY XBOX game I can't get on my switch! Dark Alliance 2 at least was nice to get back) and this game DID get me into the Hunter series (and the rest of the World of Darkness alongside Vampire Bloodlines)
I wouldn't say I never realized that the Hunter game I played on the xbox as a young kid was a WoD property, but when I did realize it when I was a teenager, I thought it was pretty cool and made a lot of sense that it was.
Jesus that lore section hit home
When you talked about Imbuement i thought "Man that's really nice, I like that aspect, I wonder why I haven't heard about it!"
Now I know, I guess ;-;
Hunter rolls Nat. 20 - "I cast vicious mockery on the Wraith player" P.S.: Also kinda weird that all 3 games did not get some kind of Remastered treatment and bundled-up as a trilogy pack deal...
16:29 That's Mike Mignola's Art!
Wish all 3 main games were remastered and improved to modern consoles and PC,
and some got extra features, like an optional remix rebalance mode,
and more outfits, more playable characters, and more a rpg style for the first game.
Am simple man
Me carry heavy thing
Me cook meat
Me see "goth punk horror"
It has a nice ring
So i subscribe
Grab that like button
And YEET
I have a new coworker hes my age, invited him over and introduced him to my xbox original and showed him this game. He had a blast.
He started asking more about the game and why there isnt more like it cause it is fun as fuck
A lost art!
@@WilliamSRDyou said it at the beginning and it is so true. Played uunter the reckoning when i was 8-10 years old loved the game. At 19 i heard about world of darkness and found it interesting. Then my eyes jumped out my head when i saw my childhood game was a title attached to the series. What a revelation
4:00 that's freaking right.
I like the bisexual lighting that you've got going there.
I was shocked there was an upgrade system. That part was a let down. I liked part 2 way more.
Currently running a Hunter: the Vigil game set in New Orleans! Always been more of a fan of HtV more, with the PCs starting out as unpowered humans up against the same odds, making their victories all the more worthy of celebration
It took me a second, but some of the artwork shown is by Guy Davis! He's an amazing cartoonist and concept artist. Check him out if you haven't heard of him.
These guys actively were hunting me in Vampire Masquerade Bloodlines
I was just thinking about BilliamSRD
I was thinking about this game just the other day, and I never knew it was from the World of Darkness. Of course, I never got very far playing solo. The bit about the forums could be more 2024 accurate if they were reached by a Tor browser.
Yay
I played these games and they were so fun.
Console exclusive explains why I never heard of this, but hunter is great
I _vaguely_ remember seeing ads for this game in magazines.