Solo Stakes

You wake. You are in a hospital bed. There is an IV in your arm and you are pretty sure you have been shot from the injury in your side. From the voices and the view from the window, you think you are in Hungary. You have no idea how you got here… Do you have amnesia? You can recall the sharp taste of blood, running through some woods, something swooping down at you and shrieking… Did you bite your tongue? Were you chased? And if so, by what, a bird? This is the set-up for ‘Never say Dead’, the first of three scenarios, which together form the basis of a mini-campaign for Night’s Black Agents: Solo Ops. Published by Pelgrane Press, this a campaign framework for Night’s Black Agents: the Vampire Spy Thriller RPG, the roleplaying game in which the Player Characters are ex-secret agents who have learned that their former employers are controlled by vampires and decide to take down the vampiric conspiracy before the vampires take them. Night’s Black Agents offers a range of tools which the Game Master, or Director, can design the vampire conspiracy and the vampire threat, from psychic alien leeches to the traditional children of Transylvania, and set the tone and style of the espionage, from the high octane of the James Bond franchise to the dry and mundane grittiness of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. What Night’s Black Agents: Solo Ops does is combine Night’s Black Agents with the GUMSHOE One-2-One System first seen in Cthulhu Confidential. This enables the Director to run and the player to experience the intensity and intrigue of an action-horror film.

Night’s Black Agents: Solo Ops is more than just the set-up for a trilogy of scenarios. It provides the rules for the GUMSHOE One-2-One System—adjusted to fit the setting of Night’s Black Agents—and the means for the Director to create her own. Just like Night’s Black Agents and the GUMSHOE System, an Agent in Night’s Black Agents: Solo Ops and the GUMSHOE One-2-One System has two types of Abilities—Investigative Abilities and General Abilities. Investigative Abilities, such as Cryptography and Negotiation, are used to gain information. If the Investigator has the Investigative Ability, he receives the information or the clue. General Abilities, like Driving and Sense Trouble, are more traditional in that their use requires dice to be rolled and a test passed to determine success or failure. Night’s Black Agents: Solo Ops then deviates from this in order to account for the fact that there is only the one Investigator rather than many as in Night’s Black Agents. With multiple players, all of the Investigative Abilities would be accounted across the Investigators. Not so in Night’s Black Agents: Solo Ops. So, when an Agent lacks an Investigative Ability, he can instead turn to an NPC or source for help as a Contact. A Contact can be written into a scenario, but an Agent can convert an NPC into a Contact or a player can create one during play. In Night’s Black Agents, Investigative Abilities have pools of points which can be spent to gain extra clues about a situation, but in Night’s Black Agents, the Agent has Pushes, which the player can spend to gain the extra information or a benefit. This applies to any Investigative Ability and could be used to gain the Agent extra information using the Interrogation Investigative Ability, gain greater insight into a suspect using the Detect Bullshit Investigative Ability, and so on. An Agent begins a scenario with three Pushes and can earn more through play.

In Night’s Black Agents, General Abilities also have pools of points, which are then expended to modify dice rolls for tests. In Night’s Black Agents: Solo Ops, General Abilities have two six-sided dice, which are also rolled on Tests. Tests are rolled when there is the possibility of failure in a situation, such as getting past a doorman to break into a suspect’s office or fleeing from the inhuman monster found in said suspect’s office, and are divided into two types. In either case, the player rolls the dice one at a time and totals their values. This is important because some Tests can be overcome with the roll of the one die rather than two dice. The Challenge is the more complex and more interesting of the two.

A Challenge gives three results—‘Advance’, ‘Hold’, and ‘Setback’. The ‘Advance’ is the equivalent of ‘Yes, and…’ and indicates a successful attempt with an extra benefit. This benefit is called an Edge and can prove useful later in the investigation. In addition, if the Challenge was overcome with the roll of a single die, then the Investigator is rewarded with an additional Push. The ‘Setback’ is the equivalent of ‘No, and…’ and indicates a failed attempt with an added Problem that will hamper the investigation. The ‘Hold’ lies somewhere in between with the Investigator no better or worse off, and also without an Edge or a Problem. It is also possible for the Investigator to suffer an Extra Problem in order to gain an additional die to roll in the hope of gaining an ‘Advance’. A player can gain extra dice for a Challenge by accepting an Extra Problem or having his Agent perform a Stunt, which uses dice from another General Ability. This requires a little explanation of how it works and it depletes the use of that General Ability until the Agent effectively rests. Effectively, what a Challenge does is codify a set of narrative outcomes that can help or hinder an Agent, whilst still pushing the narrative of the scenario forward.

In comparison, a Quick Test requires a simple roll to gain an ‘Advance’ result. The structure of Night’s Black Agents: Solo Ops and its scenarios presents Challenges in clear test boxes, and both Edges and Problems as essentially cards that are given to the player to add to his Agent. Fights, chases, infiltrating a base, and so on, are all handled as Challenges. Night’s Black Agents: Solo Ops is action-orientated, so there is the possibility of an Agent getting killed. The consequences differ greatly between Night’s Black Agents and Night’s Black Agents: Solo Ops. In Night’s Black Agents, the death of an Agent can easily be replaced whereas in Night’s Black Agents: Solo Ops, the death means the end of the investigation and the scenario, so whilst fights are dangerous, they are not lethal—and that applies to the NPCs or vampires as much as the Agent. The Agent can suffer debilitating injury or loss, but can recover through the ‘Take Time to Recover’ action. Similarly, the antagonist, whether mundane or monstrous, is not killed, but suffers a loss that will benefit the Agent in some way, represented by an Edge. However, this only applies in the early scenes of a scenario, and as a scenario progresses, fights and confrontations become increasingly deadly.

An Agent also has Mastery Edges which are attached to specific General Abilities. These reflect both the Agent’s intensive training and experience, but also how capable the Agent is in terms of the cinematic genre of Night’s Black Agents: Solo Ops. They typically provide a one-time effect which ignores the rules in a particular situation or grant a bonus to the dice rolls on a Challenge. For example, ‘The Nick of Time’ is a Preparedness Edge that enables an Agent to have done something retroactively that helps him in his current situation, such as planting a bomb, bribing a custom official, reconnoitring an avenue of escape, and so forth, whereas ‘Intuition’ for the Sense Trouble General Ability grants an extra die on a Challenge. An Agent begins play with three Edges and discards them after use.

As in action films, there are consequences to an Agent’s activities. These are tracked by three cumulative factors. Heat is gained for public fights or explosions, people getting hurt, and committing criminal acts, and as it rises, it can trigger Problems that affect an Agent’s progress or actual Challenges. Injury represents physical impairment, whilst Shadow determines how aware the supernatural threat is of the Agent. It is gained by encountering supernatural entities, attracting their attention, thwarting their conspiracies, and recalling previous encounters with vampires. The latter is important for the Agent for the three scenarios in Night’s Black Agents: Solo Ops, since she begins play suffering from amnesia. Shadow will also Problems to an Agent’s progress, but can be lost by killing vampires or fleeing to another city, or suppressed by using garlic or crossing running water. Both Heat and Shadow can also trigger another effect, and that is Blowback. This can be a repercussion, retaliation, or unintended consequences of an Agent’s actions and is typically framed as a Blowback scene that the Director inserts into the narrative.

In Night’s Black Agents, an Agent has the Stability General Ability, which is used to measure an Agent’s ability to withstand the supernatural abilities of the vampires he will face, as well as those of the other monsters that he might encounter—demons, ghosts, and ghouls, as well as Renfields. In Night’s Black Agents: Solo Ops, the Agent instead has the Cool General Ability. This is used to overcome stressful situations and resist the compulsions that a vampire might place upon an Agent. Mechanically, it will use Challenges in most situations and poor results will trigger problems for the Agent. Many of the powers and effects that a vampire can have on an Agent are modelled through Problems.

For the player, Night’s Black Agents: Solo Ops presents a good explanation of how an Agent is presented, how the rules work, and on how to play. This includes details on tradecraft and notably, the ‘Bucharest Rules’. These are akin to the ‘Moscow Rules’ that guided Cold War operations in Eastern European and they are similar, but given a suitably vampiric twist for Night’s Black Agents: Solo Ops. They emphasise that although the situation is dangerous and that the Agent can die, he can win, that he needs to be proactive, he should follow the money and use HUMINT, build networks of contacts and allies, and always know where the exit is. This is supported by several factors. First, that the play is more about interpreting the clues found rather than the finding of them (and that if unsure of where to go next, looking for more clues is always a good choice), and second, that the Player Character, the Agent, is the hero of the story. This is contrasted by the fact that Night’s Black Agents: Solo Ops literally pulls the safety net out from under the player. No longer can he rely upon his fellow players and their Agents for advice or help. Barring contacts and allies within the game, the player and his Agent is on his own. That is a scary situation for the player—in addition to his Agent facing vampires—and the player is being asked to be proactive from the start of a scenario to the end. In other words, he is always in the spotlight.

For the Director, Night’s Black Agents: Solo Ops explains how the rules work and gives advice on how to run the game. This applies not just to the three scenarios in Night’s Black Agents: Solo Ops, but also in general as the advice includes a guide to creating and designing vampires, conspiracies, scenes, Challenges, Problems, and more for her own scenarios. This includes a full range of sample Challenges. Night’s Black Agents: Solo Ops still employs the ‘Conspyramid’, the pyramid structure used to map out the vampire conspiracy, with the vampire leaders of the conspiracy sitting atop both the structure and the organisation and the base containing the outer edges of the conspiracy. However, here it is much narrower, reflecting the tighter focus upon the single Agent and his investigation in Night’s Black Agents: Solo Ops. The advice throughout the section for the Director is fulsome.

Half of Night’s Black Agents: Solo Ops is dedicated to its three scenarios. The protagonist for these is Leyla Khan, an ex-MI6 officer who has been a thrall of the vampires of the vampires for several years at the start of the first scenario. Not only will she have to confront her former masters, but she will also have to deal with the consequences of her own half-remembered past and its own monstrous activities. The antagonists are vampires, Linea Dracula, descended from Vlad Tepes and surprisingly ‘vanilla’ in terms of their design and abilities. This, though, works for an action-horror like that of the three scenarios in Night’s Black Agents: Solo Ops because it does not complicate the story or the antagonists. Plus, there is plenty of scope for the Director to modify them if she so chooses. That said, the Director could easily ignore the vampire aspect of Night’s Black Agents: Solo Ops and create scenarios focusing on more traditional espionage stories and they could be as tense and as exciting, though not necessarily as horrifying.

The mini campaign opens in classic The Bourne Identity style in ‘Never Say Dead’. Leyla Khan is in hospital with no memory of how she got there and very quickly she receives a message that someone is coming for her. ‘Never Say Dead’ is about escape, discovering the first hints of the vampiric conspiracy that Leyla has been enthralled in for the past few years and a conspiracy within the vampiric conspiracy, and perhaps arm herself to take the conspiracies down. Having escaped Hungary in ‘Never Say Dead’, Leyla Khan begins to do what she is trained to do and that is follow the money. In ‘No Grave For Traitors’ this leads her to Spain where she gets caught up in a drug war and from there follows a courier to London and an auction for a number of odd antiquities, and ultimately to their strange origins in Transylvania. Although there is plenty of action, there is more of an emphasis on investigation in this second scenario. The third scenario, ‘The Deniable Woman’, Leyla is given a mission by her former employer, MI6, to look for a missing agent in Moscow who has his own preoccupations. The investigation leads in another direction away from the central conspiracy, though it is tangentially connected. All three scenarios are very good, being tense, fraught affairs with a mix of exciting action scenes and tight interactions. Some of the scenarios are truly memorable and consequently, definitely not worth spoiling. All three are part of the same conspiracy involving Leyla Khan, but together, they do not form a beginning, a middle, and an end. They are definitely a beginning, perhaps with a middle, but leaving the end for the Director to create.

All three scenarios in Night’s Black Agents: Solo Ops are well organised. They include a backstory and an overview of the objectives that Leyla will be aiming to attain—even though she may not be aware of them at the beginning of a scenario, entry vectors for Leyla, a flowchart of the scenes, its cast, and then the various scenes with their associated Challenges and Problems and Edges to be gained through play. Each scenario’s range of Problems and Edges is given after the end of the scenario. Each scenario ends with a discussion of its aftermath and possible Blowback scenes and consequences. ‘No Grave For Traitors’ and ‘The Deniable Woman’ also add starting problems which the player can choose from as a consequence of her ongoing story and confrontation with her past.

One aspect of Night’s Black Agents: Solo Ops—and also of Cthulhu Confidential—is that the GUMSHOE One-2-One System and having a single player and a single Game Master, is that it can be played online just as easily as it can face-to-face. Playing online means losing a certain degree of interaction between the players and the Game Master, both because of the technology and the loss of visual cues that act as a buffer, but Night’s Black Agents: Solo Ops and GUMSHOE One-2-One System ameliorates that because its focus is always on the one player and the one Game Master and their focus is on each other.

As good as it is very much all about Leyla Khan and it does leave her story hanging, unfinished. There are rules for a player to create his own Agent, but that really, is the focus of missions created by the Director rather than those in the book. It is possible for the three missions to be played using a player-created Agent, but this will require some adjustment upon the part of the Director. The three scenarios in Night’s Black Agents: Solo Ops are really the start of a campaign, rather than a complete one. Essentially, it is up to the Director to create the next parts of the campaign. She is given all of the tools and advice to do that, but at the same time, it is disappointing not to be able to pick up where ‘The Deniable Woman’ left off and quickly find out what happens next. There is another scenario for Leyla Khan, ‘The Best of Intentions’, but that is all so far. There can be no doubt that a sequel to Night’s Black Agents: Solo Ops, bringing her story to a close would be more than welcome.

Physically, Night’s Black Agents: Solo Ops is very well presented and written, and the artwork is decent. The book itself is a pleasure to read.

In comparison to the earlier Cthulhu Confidential, Night’s Black Agents: Solo Ops is a much tighter, more focused affair. This is due to it being focused on the one protagonist and the one antagonist, essentially, the single Agent and vampires. This also has the consequence of making Leyla Khan’s story more personal for the player and more involving. The result is that Night’s Black Agents: Solo Ops provides a great playing experience, tense and exciting, telling the player to, “Buckle up, you’re in the spotlight now and your fate truly is in your hands” all in readiness to make his Agent the star of their own action-horror film.

An Orphic Odyssey

The Persephone Extraction is another campaign for one of the best RPGs—certainly the finest espionage and finest espionage/horror RPG—of 2012, Night’s Black Agents: the Vampire Spy Thriller RPG. Written by Ken Hite and published by Pelgrane Press, the roleplaying game casts the player characters as ex-secret agents who have learned that their former employers are controlled by vampires and decide to take down the vampiric conspiracy before the vampires take them. As much a toolkit as an RPG, it gives everything that the Director needs to design and create his game, allowing him to design the vampire conspiracy and the vampire threat, from psychic alien leeches to the traditional children of Transylvania, and set the tone and style of espionage, from the high octane of the James Bond franchise to the dry and mundane grittiness of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Essentially, Night’s Black Agents is your ‘Schweizer Offiziersmesser’ of vampires and espionage.

As with both Night’s Black Agents itself and The Zalozhniy Quartet, the roleplaying game’s first campaign, The Persephone Extraction is a toolkit. It presents another five, high octane scenarios in the vein of The Bourne Identity and its sequels—extending all the way up to the Bond series of films—that can be run more or less in any order. Actually, much like The Zalozhniy Quartet, it is really the middle scenarios which can be run in any order with the beginning scenario run first and the ending scenario run last. Unlike The Zalozhniy Quartet, there is no discussion of the type of vampires that can be used in The Persephone Extraction—supernatural, damned, alien, or mutant in nature—as they are definitely of a supernatural and damned nature. Similarly, it does not give any guidance as to what psychological (and action) Mode—Burn, Dust, Mirror, or (High) Stakes Mode—to run The Persephone Extraction in. The tone of the scenarios though would suggest somewhere between Mirror Mode, the genre’s “wilderness of mirrors” world of shifting allegiances and hidden agendas as exemplified by the best of John Le Carré’s fiction, and the (High) Stakes Mode patriotism of the novels of both Tom Clancy and Ian Fleming. From staging the defence of a secret base in Siberia to an aerial drop onto an extremely isolated Greek monastery, The Persephone Extraction certainly involves a lot of high action, but is leavened by interesting moral choices deep into the campaign and plenty of infiltration—both physical and digital—missions, including deep into legend…

Of course, The Persephone Extraction involves a plot about an ancient vampiric conspiracy, one it combines with a modern conspiracy of bioterrorism, but at its heart is a rich vein of Greek mythology, specifically that of Orphic Traditions. These draw from the legends of Orpheus descending into the Underworld where the Souls of the dead lie. And if you are not thinking about the vampiric possibilities of untold numbers of Souls wanting to return to the world of the living, even if that means coming back as one of the blood sucking undead, then perhaps you are running low on sanguinary sustenance yourself? Yet The Persephone Extraction involves not one conspiracy, but multiple conspiracies in a weirdly contemporary parallel to British politics, and in order to unravel it, the agents will find themselves in Paris first and Greece last, but before they get there, they will have travelled to Barcelona, Moscow and points further east, and Istanbul, though not necessarily in that order…

The campaign opens with Emma Marlow’s ‘The Persephone Extraction’ which takes place in Paris. The Agents are drawn to the city when they learn that someone is using their identities and covers, but to what end? It quickly becomes apparent that they are being set up and clues point to a biological research laboratory in the city and one particular researcher. Who is using the Agents and what do they want from the biological research laboratory and the researcher? This sets up the campaign as the Agents are put on the researcher’s trail after an assassination attempt on her life and she goes on the run. The trail will lead into the laboratory where research into Cold War viruses is conducted as well as deep underground—an aspect that will occur again and again throughout the campaign—and into Paris’ famous catacombs. The involvement of the Agents in what looks like some kind of bioterrorism plot also brings down a great deal of Heat upon them and this will hound throughout the campaign. This means that the Agents will need to make some effort to reduce this Heat as they continue their investigative efforts from country to country, lest the authorities catch up with them.

If ‘The Persephone Extraction’ takes the Agents into the underworld, financial clues point to Barcelona and ‘The Pale Agenda’ by Bill White. This is the shortest of the five scenarios in The Persephone Extraction, involving the world of high finance and more hints that there appears to be more than one conspiracy involved in the plot revolving around the research at the laboratory in Paris. This is the first chance for the Agents to really harm one conspiracy or another, but importantly, learn where the Cold War era viruses came from. This is from Soviet Era Russia and in Will Plant’s ‘Sleeping Giants’, the Agents track the source first to Moscow and then up into the Arctic Circle in an underground facility near a closed city. The latter is a holdover from the Soviet Era, but of course, it is a new era and the workers are no longer working at the mercy of the KGB, but instead live and work in a company town and their employer cares about profit rather than ideology. ‘Sleeping Giants’ has some nicely creepy moments, but then, this is a vampiric campaign, and it also has some fun James Bond moments as it turns up the heat by having the Agents direct the defences of the facility against attack. The advice on handling the defence against the assault is nicely done. By now it should be obvious that the vampires are desperate to obtain this virus.

Heather Albano’s ‘Clean-Heeled Achilles’ is where the campaign gets weird. A combination of missing people and possible archaeological malfeasance sends the Agents to Istanbul, where a monastery stands on the coast guarded by private security behind barbed wire. For Agents and players alike, this is where the mythological aspects of the campaign are at their most prominent as the Agents really descend into the Underworld. Getting in is not easy, but getting out is going to be a real challenge as the Agents confront countless restless souls. This is the weirdest, possibly creepiest sequence in the campaign—and quite possibly in Night’s Black Agents—as the Agents find themselves replicating myth in what is essentially an Ancient Greek Orphic heroquest. As part of this the Agents re-enact the heroic figures of Orphic myth and the Director is given advice on assigning these unknowing roles depending upon each Agent’s backstory, Drives, Solaces, and so on. This exacerbates the unworldly nature of the descent and the return, but it would have been good to see these roles foreshadowed much earlier in the campaign.

Lastly, ‘The People of Ash’ by Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan brings the campaign to a close in Greece as the conspiracy’s rich and elite gather to bring its plans to fruition. The finale of the James Bond movie, For Your Eyes Only, comes to mind as the Agents conduct an assault on the vampire’s ancient eyrie. The campaign should ideally end with a bang and ultimately, the Agents may succeed in defeating the greater conspiracy, but not the whole conspiracy. Defeating the greater evil will be enough to save the world, but ultimately it may still leave an evil in place. A ‘lesser’ evil, but an evil nonetheless…

As with previous campaigns for Night’s Black Agents, the middle three scenarios are designed to be played in any order, there being clues from one scenario to another, but the smoother path will be in the order as they appear in the book. Similarly all five scenarios are written such that they can be run as standalone adventures, but really this would be to ignore the greater conspiracy and the greater story that would come with them being played in order. This would be particularly obvious in ‘Clean-Heeled Achilles’ because its emulation of myth would lack the context of the previous episodes, and similarly, playing it early in the campaign may mean that the context has not yet developed enough to quite give it the impact it should.

All five scenarios are well organised, with clear explanations of the spine of each episode, the connections between the scenarios, the various NPCs, and quick and dirty briefings on each of the cities where the scenarios are set. Similarly, the set-up for the campaign is decently done with explanations of the campaign’s plots, conspiracies, conspyramid—the diagram of the conspiracy’s overall organisation, and also a Vampyramid. The latter employs mechanics from the supplement Double Tap to track the blowback and fallout of the Agents’ actions as they investigate the conspiracy. This models the conspiracy’s reactions to the Agents and as much as it makes them organic rather than static, it does add one more thing for the Director to keep track of throughout the game. Lastly, there are the vampires of the conspiracy itself, a seeming series of contradictions—arthritic and old, but breathtakingly fast; pale and spindly, but inhumanly strong; and fearful of death, but have long forgotten being alive. Similarly, they are at their weakest when insubstantial, but all but invulnerable and at their strongest when solid, but then at their most vulnerable.

Lastly, The Persephone Extraction comes with six pre-generated Agents, one of which will require some further details that the others have already figured in. They include a range of nationalities and covers, and can be easily personalised by the players. Physically, The Persephone Extraction feels somewhat rushed. The editing is not as tight as it could be and there is text missing in places. The artwork is not always of the highest quality either and in comparison to other Pelgrane Press titles, it does not feel quite as assured.

Ultimately, The Persephone Extraction is not quite the toolkit that The Zalozhniy Quartet is, for it very much feels more like a traditional, linear campaign. This should not be held against it, because The Persephone Extraction is a solid affair which draws from an unexpected source which the authors have developed into an exciting and genuinely surprising campaign.

A Disorderly Foursome

The Zalozhniy Quartet is the first set of scenarios for one of the best RPGs—certainly the finest espionage and finest espionage/horror RPG—of 2012, Night’s Black Agents: the Vampire Spy Thriller RPG. Written by Ken Hite and published by Pelgrane Press, the roleplaying game casts the player characters as ex-secret agents who have learned that their former employers are controlled by vampires and decide to take down the vampiric conspiracy before the vampires take them. As much a toolkit as an RPG, it gives everything that the Director needs to design and create his game, allowing him to design the vampire conspiracy and the vampire threat, from psychic alien leeches to the traditional children of Transylvania, and set the tone and style of the espionage, from the high octane of the James Bond franchise to the dry and mundane grittiness of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Essentially, Night’s Black Agents is your ‘Schweizer Offiziersmesser’ of vampires and espionage.

The Zalozhniy Quartet is, much like Night’s Black Agents itself, a toolkit. At its heart are four, high octane scenarios in the vein of The Bourne Identity and its sequels—extending all the way up to the Bond series of films—that can be run in any order and can be adjusted to whatever type of campaign or vampire that the Director is already running. So that is either Burn, Dust, Mirror, or (High) Stakes Mode, with vampires at the heart of the conspiracy either being supernatural, damned, alien, or mutant in nature. That said, the almost alchemical nature of some The Zalozhniy Quartet’s MacGuffins means that some types vampire are better suited than others, in particular, the supernatural or damned types. This enables the four scenarios to be added to the Director’s own campaign with relative ease. Although the tone and drive are all high action and a nod to modern espionage films, the underlying plot is dryer, more measured and restrained, inspired more by the works of authors John Le Carre and Eric Ambler, and this is apparent in some of the scenarios more than others. This combination also reflects the way in which the campaign was written—Gareth Ryder Hanrahan developing and writing from a story design worthy of a Suppressed Transmission by Night’s Black Agents’ author, Kenneth Hite.

The Zalozhniy Quartet starts in quick fashion with an explanation of the conspiracy, its aims, its origins, its participants, and its vampires. The conspiracy is an attempt to take control of one the global levers of economic and thus political power; its origins lie in the post-colonial division of the Middle East and the meddling of an infamous traitor; its participants are the Lisky Bratva, a major Russian mafiya brotherhood; and whatever their exact nature—supernatural, damned, alien, or mutant, as decided by the Director—the vampires have an odd time signature. The latter are the Zalozhniye of the title which actually refers to the number of scenarios in the book, rather than the number of vampires. Rest assured, there are more than just Zalozhniye in The Zalozhniy Quartet. All of this is set up with history, stats for the various NPCs, separate diagrams showing the connections between the NPCs and the arms of the organisation, and so on. 

In addition, The Zalozhniy Quartet includes a sextet of pre-generated player characters. As with other pre-generated player characters in scenarios for the Gumshoe System, these will require some adjustment upon the part of the players—assigning further points, establishing connections and levels of Trust between each other, and so on. Each also comes with a short background, although this is separate from the character sheets. Maps are provided for each of the five main cities that the player characters will visit over the course of the campaign, but not for any of the individual locations that they will visit.

The Zalozhniy Quartet opens in Bourne-style with ‘The Zalozhniy Sanction’. The player characters are employed by independent contractor, Donald Caroll*, to infiltrate a warehouse in Odessa believed to be one more stop on a gun-smuggling operation shifting stolen weapons out of Baghdad and into Europe. This will be their first encounter with both the Lisky Bratva and the Zalozhniye and it will go horribly wrong for both them and their employer. With the Lisky Bratva and the Zalozhniye in hot pursuit, the player characters are forced to go on the run. Their employer will be able to impart the location of his safehouse in Vienna—fortunately considered neutral ground by the espionage world—before he is caught, but getting out of Odessa and across Eastern Europe is challenge in itself even before taking into account the mafiya and the vampires on their tail.

* Man from U.N.C.L.E. fans may just want to change his name to Leo.

There are easy routes out of Odessa, but they are likely to be watched, so the player characters will probably take the scenic route and that means going via some of Eastern Europe’s weirder non-tourist spots. Primarily an extended escape and chase sequence interrupted by border crossings—recognised and unrecognised—‘The Zalozhniy Sanction’ also provides opportunities for the player characters to investigate and disrupt some Lisky Bratva operations along the way before they reach Vienna. These are almost mini-scenarios in themselves, one consisting of a fun attempt to disrupt a sporting event, another uncovering a foul Zalozhniye research site.

Once the player characters reach Vienna, there is a radical shift in tone and adventure type with ‘Out of the House of Ashes’. It is a classic Cold War scenario a la John le Carre, an extraction mission in which the player characters need to get Arkady Shevlenko, a retired KGB general, out of the city before he can give them the information he wants. He also represents the first link into the conspiracy’s origins, and so the Listky Bratva want him as do the CIA, though for different reasons. All the while, the FSB wants to stop them all… This played out against the backdrop of international diplomacy and a economic conference. Where ‘The Zalozhniy Sanction’ is all action, ‘Out of the House of Ashes’ is mostly intrigue and betrayal and counter-betrayal, with the possibility of the player characters needing to make multiple attempts to get Arkady Shevlenko out of the city safely.

The Zalozhniy Quartet again switches to another city, another tone, and another mission type for the third scenario, ‘The Boxmen’. The city is Zurich, the tone a little slicker a la Mission Impossible or Ocean’s 11, and the mission is a classic heist. Of course, it has the capacity to go wrong in the mode of Reservoir Dogs. By now the player characters will have learned that the Lisky Bratva is planning to buy a bank in the city, the same bank that they want to get into themselves to locate one of The Zalozhniy Quartet’s various MacGuffins. So this is very much a matter of casing the joint, gathering intelligence on the bank’s current owners—a family whose members cannot all agree on on the sale, and so on. This is complicated by a rival gang of thieves, the notoriously robust response of the authorities to any threat to its banking industry, and of course, the Lisky Bratva absolutely wanting the sale to go through… This is a much more restrained scenario than either ‘The Zalozhniy Sanction’ or ‘Out of the House of Ashes’, even in its action scenes, but again expect another shift in tone and style for the last part of the campaign.

‘Treason in the Blood’ brings The Zalozhniy Quartet to climax by piling on the action and upping the number of supernatural threats the player characters will face, much in the style of a James Bond movie. Taking them from Baghdad to Beirut to Riyadh, with possible diversion to Cyprus, it includes encounters with the fallout from conspiracy plot’s originators, fearsome monsters—some worse than the Zalozhniye, and of course, the inevitable, one last betrayal…

The Zalozhniy Quartet is thoroughly detailed throughout, such that it is a little overwhelming in places, especially with the number of NPCs that the Director needs to keep track of in some of the scenarios. Any one of the four will take multiple sessions to play through, but the advice and options given are never less than helpful. Whilst the most obvious order in which to play the four scenarios is in the order given—‘The Zalozhniy Sanction’, ‘Out of the House of Ashes’, ‘The Boxmen’, and ‘Treason in the Blood’—they are designed to be played in any order and to that end, links from the other three scenarios are listed at the beginning of each scenario to help the Director run one scenario after another as seamlessly as possible. They also serve as a useful recap.

Although clever, the structure of The Zalozhniy Quartet gives rise to two issues. The first is that, obviously, it does not form a ‘Conspyramid’, the interconnected pyramid structure which the player characters will work their way around and up as they investigate the entwining of vampires, governments, and organisations in order to uncover the bloodsucking conspiracy. This is intended as the classic structure for a Night’s Black Agents campaign, so it is somewhat disappointing not to see it supported in what is really the first set of scenarios released for the horror-espionage roleplaying game. Now that said, the Director can use The Zalozhniy Quartet as is—that is, as a campaign consisting of four, reasonably lengthy and interconnected scenarios, but she can instead take them and slot them into the ‘Conspyramid’ she has created as her own campaign. Then she can forge links of varying strength between these four scenarios and the other nodes in her ‘Conspyramid’. With strong links, The Zalozhniy Quartet becomes an integral part of the Director’s ‘Conspyramid’, but with weaker links, The Zalozhniy Quartet becomes a conspiracy within a ‘Conspyramid’.

The other issue is with the campaign’s climax—or rather with four of them. Each of the four scenarios in The Zalozhniy Quartet has its own climax—or capstone as they are called here—as expected, but depending upon the order in which they are played, the last capstone in the final scenario is upgraded to the campaign’s climax. The problem is that they feel like the finales to scenarios rather than a campaign, and really only the climax to the final scenario, ‘Treason in the Blood’, fully matches the intended scope.

Physically, The Zalozhniy Quartet is well written, fantastically presented and organised, and comes with very helpful staging advice aplenty. It is lightly illustrated, but the black and white artwork is decent. Although there are decent maps of the cities involved in the campaign, what the campaign lacks are maps of individual locations. For the most part, the Director can find or create maps of her own when running The Zalozhniy Quartet, as the descriptions of said locations are sufficiently detailed, but there are locations, such as the bank in ‘The Boxmen’ and the archival storage facilities in ‘Treason in the Blood’ which could have benefited from being supported by their own maps. 

So The Zalozhniy Quartet is not the massive ‘Conspyramid’ campaign that Night’s Black Agents deserves, but that does not mean that it does not present a superbly well realised conspiracy and threat to the future of the world and the means for the player characters to thwart the plot, if not take the conspiracy down. The shifts in tone and adventure type from one scenario to the next are a refreshing change of pace, present opportunities for different player characters to shine, and pleasing encompass a range of espionage styles. Overall, whether as a standalone or a plug-in to the Director’s own campaign, The Zalozhniy Quartet is epic in scope, a gloriously grand affair which showcases how to write and run a horror-espionage campaign.