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Night's Black Agents RPG

The Dracula Dossier: Director's Handbook

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For years, it has been a legend. Somewhere in the dusty archives of MI6 is the complete version of Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula — the unredacted version. The full story revealed clear pointers to the sources and methods the Service used in Operation EDOM, an 1893 mission that sent a bold agent deep into the Balkans to awaken and then terminate a very dangerous asset indeed.

But the termination didn’t take. In 1940, desperate to stop Hitler’s march through Europe, the Service reactivated EDOM, and reanimated their Transylvanian asset. Once more, they found they had bitten off more than they could chew, and in the chaos of wartime Romania they put him to sleep. Or so they thought.

In 1977, MI6 discovered that they weren’t the only players in this game. Their asset had left his own sleepers behind in Moscow and Romania — and in London — and inside MI6. The Service had to reopen EDOM, awaken Dracula again, to find his agents in their own ranks — or so they said. Perhaps that reawakening was the sleeper’s doing, too. Perhaps the Count never slept, not as the Service thought.

In 2011, looking for a terror great enough to fight terror, MI6 once more reached for EDOM. Once more, Dracula reached back. That’s how you found the EDOM case file: the Dracula Dossier.

The edition of Dracula you found is more than complete — it’s annotated. MI6 analysts and EDOM field men kept notes in the margins of their priceless copies of Stoker’s work, notes from 1940, from 1977, and from 2011. Notes collated into one master case file, a file that vanished in 2011. The file you found. This is the dossier you must decipher to find the secrets of EDOM, to reveal who betrayed the 1893 operation, to discover who in MI6 still serves Count Dracula today.

And then, you must follow those clues to end the story once and for all, to close EDOM forever. You must find, hunt, and kill Dracula, the king of the vampires.

The Dracula Dossier follows in the fully improvisational path of the award-winning Armitage Files campaign. Players follow up leads in the margins of Dracula Unredacted, chasing down the real characters from Stoker’s novel, their descendants in the present, and the British agents caught in the backblast.

Combine these leads and notes with pre-prepared elements such as conspiracy nodes, eerie locations, and vampiric beasts. The dossier contains over 40 supporting characters in vampiric, heroic, or in-between versions. Different versions of the real Mina Harker, Abraham van Helsing, and the other stars of Stoker’s novel — and their modern-day successors, descendants, and survivors — can drive the story in any direction the players look.

Players choose which leads to track, which scarlet trail to follow. The Director, using the clear step-by-step techniques in this book, improvises a suitably blood-soaked thriller in response to their choices. Clear advice to players and Directors on improvisation, with extensive examples and guidelines, helps you set the scene. Together, you will read and write your own unique version of the Dracula Dossier … if you survive.

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The Dracula Dossier is constituted by the Director's Hadbook and Dracula Unredacted.

368 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2015

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About the author

Kenneth Hite

128 books115 followers
Kenneth Hite (born September 15, 1965) is a writer and role-playing game designer. Author of Trail of Cthulhu and Night's Black Agents role-playing games, Hite has been announced as the lead designer of the upcoming 5th edition of Vampire: the Masquerade.

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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
Profile Image for Kelvin Green.
Author 16 books9 followers
October 23, 2024
This review is copied (and edited) from my blog:

Well then. Twenty-two sessions and almost a year later, my Dracula Dossier campaign is finished. Twenty-two sessions! I think that may be the longest campaign I've ever run; Rogue Trader ran for fifteen sessions, as did The Enemy Within II: Enemy Withiner, and while it did take about a year to play through Horror on the Orient Express back in 1998ish I'm almost certain that we didn't get twenty-two sessions out of it.

You can read individual session summaries here, but now that the game is done and I don't have to worry about spoiling anything for the players, I thought it would be good to have a look at some of the behind the scenes stuff.

Spoilers follow!

Modern Life Is (Mostly) Rubbish

One advantage of running a game set in the present day is that it's easy to research; most people know how the modern world works and it's easy to find out what you don't know; you can Google it!

The problem is that player-characters in a modern setting can Google things too, and that can suck the drama out of the game.

It seems churlish to ban the modern era as a setting for investigative games, but if you're going to be running DD in the present day be prepared for tech-savvy players. Look up how computer hacking works, and the sort of information and services that are available through computer networks. Can the player-characters mess around with the traffic lights in London? Can they access blueprints of the Palace of Parliament in Bucharest? Can they hack MI6's bank account?

These are tricky questions because it's difficult to know on the spot what the answers are. You can make something up about Generic Fantasy World #87 but if you start making things up about a world that's just like ours except it's got Dracula in it, you may get caught out.

One way to avoid the issue is to set the campaign in the dark pre-internet days, and there is some material in the book on setting the game in the 1970's, the 1940's, or the 1890's; in hindsight, I think I would have enjoyed a Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy style game set during the Wilson/Heath era.

All that said, there was something quite fun about the players asking "can we do X?" and then everyone using our smartphones to find out.

Who Built the Pyramids?

This campaign was a pain in the neck -- ho ho -- to develop. The Director's Handbook is bursting with content -- it has hundreds of pages of characters, locations, objects, and organisations, not all of which will be used in even the most sprawling campaign -- but is somewhat lacking in practical advice of what to do with all the piles of stuff.

There's a brief example at the start of the book of a conspyramid -- the default NBA campaign structure -- with some of the DD specific elements slotted in, and there is a little bit of discussion on who Dracula is, but that's about it for gamemaster advice. Given how much content there is, I think there needs to be more and better guidance.

Each of the entries in the book gives suggested connections to the others, so it's possible to brute force your way through and then go back and populate your conspyramid, but it's not an efficient process. What I did in the end was use a random generation method -- a deck of cards was released as part of the campaign's Kickstarter -- to get the basic structure, then I filled the gaps with the bits that seemed most interesting from skimming the book. After that I went back and tinkered with the plan so that the connections made sense and there were no dead ends, and I was ready to go.

Except I wasn't because I had no idea how to start the campaign. There is zero advice on how to kick things off, beyond a short starting scenario lurking in the back of the book or a separate adventure released for Free RPG Day. Again, I made something up, borrowing from both.

What does Dracula want? No idea. We are given a number of candidates for who Dracula was in life, but almost no discussion at all of his possible goals, needs, and wants. We know what EDOM wants, or at least what it claims to want, but there's zilch -- not even a list of suggestions -- of what the main antagonist's motivations are. The best we get is some vague references to him hating Turks, and as I was sitting here in March 2016 trying to put a campaign together, that didn't seem anywhere near good enough.

As it turned out my players didn't seem interested in Dracula's goals, so perhaps it doesn't matter.

Excuse Me, Have You Seen Mr Dracula?

The Dracula Dossier looks like an investigative campaign but it plays almost like a hexcrawl, or maybe a pointcrawl. There are clues and connections everywhere and all lead in the end to Dracula, but some are more direct than others; this is what that conspyramid structure is supposed to illustrate.

In theory there are no dead ends in this kind of structure; if a line of investigation stalls and the players can't go any further "up" the conspyramid, they can always go sideways or down to find another route, and perhaps can return later to the original thread to pick it up again once they know more.

I didn't make this concept clear to my players and I think the campaign suffered a bit as a result. There were a couple of occasions where they felt like they'd exhausted a line of enquiry and I think they got frustrated; I felt like they were overlooking other paths when in truth they'd just forgotten, because there were so many threads to monitor.

In the last half of the campaign I started issuing index cards with notes on them, so the players could see what they'd discovered so far and where the gaps were, and I think that helped, but I think it would perhaps have been sensible to discuss the campaign structure with them before we began.

Super Nature

Where the book gives the option of a campaign element being mundane or something more eldritch, I almost always went with the latter. My version of Dracula's "wolf gypsies" were actual werewolves because why not? Bram Stoker's The Jewel of the Seven Stars is also a redacted mission report, so there's a mummy running around too -- the players didn't meet her -- because why not? Jack the Ripper's disembodied spirit is floating around London because why not?

At some point in preparing the campaign it went from The Bourne Identity to Hellboy and I thought that was good and appropriate, but I acknowledge that's not going to be for everyone; I know some of my players raised an eyebrow when things started getting a bit silly, but I think I got away with it and, after all, the Director's Handbook itself allowed the possibility.

On the other hand, the Director's Handbook didn't suggest that an immortal Rasputin was the head of Russia's secret vampire programme. That was all my fault. Nor did it suggest that Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is also a mission report and that Jekyll's potion is an early experimental use of Seward Serum. That's my fault too; yes, the dates don't quite match up but it's close enough.

They are lucky that I didn't make Dracula an avatar of Nyarlathotep.

Fangs for the Memories

I think I got a lot wrong in running DD. I was unused to the format of the campaign, I struggled without robust GM advice, and I made things more difficult by chucking out the intended rules system and using my own. All that said, I think it was a success; everyone had fun along the way and I think the players felt that they achieved something significant when they pinned Dracula down and defeated him.

The Dracula Dossier is not a great campaign out of the box -- I think it relies a little too much on quantity of content over utility, and on the central gimmick of Dracula being the biggest player handout ever -- but with a bit of work it can be a good one, and once it gets going it sort of runs itself. It kept me and my group entertained for half a year, and that's not bad at all.
Profile Image for Brian Rogers.
836 reviews8 followers
September 17, 2015
as far as gaming supplements go I'm hard pressed to find one better than this (maybe the Great Pendragon campaign). There may be others as good, but in boldness of inspiration, breadth of possibility, depth of research and strength of execution Dracula Dossier is all but flawless. (some of the additions to Dracula Unredacted read with a very slight false note, but that's honestly of little matter)

As with many things I so very much wish I had a group for whom this story would work, but alas at the moment I do not. But it would be a damn lot of fun!
4 reviews
September 16, 2022
Easily the best RPG Adventure I have ever read. Not so much of a story but a tool box to make your very own modern sequel to Dracula. What it does in practice is teach a Game Master how to run a improvisational sandbox game. Where you walk into the plot knowing very little about what exactly is going on, and then use the choices of the players, and the plot beats of the game to build a story. It’s also the only campaign I’ve run twice, for a few of the same players. There is enough content that you can have a completely different experience more than once!
Profile Image for Peter De Kinder.
216 reviews2 followers
November 24, 2017
An interesting concept for a RPG book. However, I felt it left the information a bit too freeform to just start running a campaign. I had hoped the skeleton of the scenarios would have already been fleshed out, sort of like the Enemy Within campaign of Warhammer RPG. Too much work for me before being able to start running it.

That being said, the wealth of information does give you all the tools needed to be able to write a proper campaign of your own. So that is definitely worth the while.
Profile Image for Benjamin.
1,440 reviews25 followers
Read
May 3, 2021
Another Bundle of Holding package, and if it seems like I posted this very soon after posting the previous one, that's because (a) with toddler I don't have the mental energy for more serious work on my to-do list and (b) at some point, I stopped reading this and just did a real quick scan.

And not for the usual reason, which is that I think I get the general idea and am not impressed with a book, but for the opposite: I get the general idea and am so impressed I almost want to talk a friend into running this.

This is a set of books for Night's Black Agents, the vampire spy thriller rpg where the PCs play intelligence agents who realize they have to uncover and stop vampires. The premise behind this collection is that the book Dracula is a heavily redacted report of a real incursion of Britain by a vampire -- or rather, part of the story. The whole story involves certain elements of the British secret service (called Project Edom) attempting to coopt Dracula into their various wars and how spectacularly wrong it all goes.

This bundle consists of
* The Night's Black Agents core rulebook
* The Dracula Dossier Director's Handbook and the accompanying Dracula Deck (for randomizing)
* Dracula Unredacted, the complete text of Bram Stoker's novel Dracula (which is to say, three layers of annotations, not all of which agree on what happened in the past and what's happening in the annotator's present)
* The Edom Files, a series of adventures in the past that outline the history of Project Edom
* The Hawkins Papers, a collection of handouts
* The Thrill of Dracula, Kenneth Hite's nonfiction reviews (mostly) of Dracula films, and how to steal ideas for your game

Usually, when I boil down a Bundle into a review on one book, that's because that's the book that made the biggest impression on me, and the Director's Handbook is the book that made me sit up and pay attention. Because it's not just a fun premise that Dracula is real (especially for book nerds) (though also, as with other Gumshoe system books, there's some question about who Dracula is and what sort of evil he is), but this book presents less a campaign and more of a sandbox for improvisational play.

Who do the players talk to? Well, here's 64 characters, each of whom may be an innocent (caught up in the Great Bloody Game), an asset of Edom, or a minion of Dracula. Where do the players go? Here's a chapter of possible locations. Here's a couple sample nodes of the conspiracy that they may interact with, from gangs to banks to churches. (To the entire political apparatus of Romania.) In a sense, this book provides something halfway between a written adventure and a campaign setting, something like a very focused setting: here's the whole world and all the people in it, insofar as they can help or hinder you in your fight against Dracula.

I have no idea how it plays, but I would be very interested in finding out.
Profile Image for Andy.
90 reviews4 followers
September 12, 2023
This is a big slick sourcebook chock full of vampires, espionage, conspiracy, and even a little bit of literary review.

You get a deep well of locations and NPCs for use in any Night's Black Agents game, most of them usable with little or not tweaking in other Gumshoe games. Feel the pressing need to mix the Dracula tale and Cthulhu mythos? This book has you covered.

It's Ken Hite and Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan giving you 300+ pages of espionage and vampires and all that good stuff. If you're not on board with this, I don't know what to tell you.

Gaming value: More than you deserve.
Profile Image for Tor.com Publishing.
110 reviews520 followers
Read
February 8, 2016
What an interesting book. An alternate history where Dracula is on the loose is nothing new, especially to fans of Anno Dracula, but it's done in a clever way. I like books in this style: no canon, no answers, no truth, just suggestions for the DM. Look for the games take on "magic" items for my favorite bit. --MK
Profile Image for Michael Mc Donnell.
33 reviews3 followers
March 12, 2017
This is the mega campaign that Nights Black Agents (the best game about modern day spies, modern day vampires and modern day spies and vampires out there) deserved
Profile Image for Trung.
62 reviews
July 1, 2016
An absolute triumph of a gaming supplement useful for any kind of modern Era tabletop RPG!
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