Mail Room: Nightbane

What a strange game. What a strange setting.

The best way I can describe this is...

Sort of like Vampire: The Masquerade, where the players are members of an outcast caste of Nightbane. The world is a dark, twisted place taken over by evil forces called the Nightlords. Myself, I would not have used "night" as the first word for both the good guys and the bad guys, kinda like calling the two factions in Star Wars the Empire-Rebels and the Empire-Imperials. I will call the bad guys "The Lords of Darkness" in my game and let the players have the cool "night" word in their good-guy faction.

Okay, better.

There are a few other factions in here as well, but let's just stick to the big two.

So anyways, the Lords of Darkness secretly control the world's governments, military, and police and hunt down the Nightbane. And they are all after you. So there is a bit of The Matrix in here as well, a few years before the Matrix was a thing.

Deja-vu.

What Shapeshifters?

But unlike Vampire: The Masquerade or The Matrix, you play a character who can shapeshift into a form (and only one) only limited by your imagination. You are not limited to being a vampire, mage, hacker, or werewolf.

Want to be a giant talking soda machine? Great! A dragon man? Perfect! A gargoyle? Wonderful! A man with a typewriter for his head? Let's go! A cartoon character out of Roger Rabbit or Cool World? Yep, we can do that too. A demon-guy? Yep! Someone with large ears, hands, and eyes? Why not? A talking wood-cabinet television? Sure! A pixelated video-game guy who plays the Mario sound when he dies? Sure!

Some of mine are silly, but they would work. This was one of the hardest parts for me to wrap my head around. Your morphed form is really anything semi-human, semi-something else. The stranger the better, but I would let players go silly if they still acted cool and "dark-emo."

And your special form has all sorts of cool powers to "fight the powers that be."

The form you take depends on your dreams and nightmares. This is sort of again like Vampire, but really, you get to be anything in your second form, and human in your normal form. And there are vampires in here as an enemy faction, and I suppose you would put werewolves, demons, and mages as enemy factions too. So anything White Wolf-ish is a minor bad guy faction vying for control compared to the Lords of Darkness. So there is a war going on here between evil factions.

And there are a few neutral and good guy factions as well, and very few of them get along.

The game defaults you to rolling on random tables to create your morphed form, but I would let my players pick the one they want. Whatever you can dream up, we will find something similar and make it work. This is the most Palladium way of creating a character, you want a cool character that captures your imagination and inspires you to play?

You got it. Live big.

Strong Sub-Factions Needed

Me? I know this goes against the "players can be anything" vibe of the character creation process, but I feel it would be huge fun to create sub-factions for the Nightbane around what form they take. And I would have a cartoon character faction led by a man named "Bugz" who snorts dehydrated carrot powder off of strippers. And he would be surrounded by, and be looking for, other Nightbane who want to be cartoon characters.

This is our group. Our kind.

"The us."

And this cartoon character faction would be competing with other Nightbane factions, such as the Land Sharks, the Lost Toys, the Mannequins, the Claymation Squad, the 8-Bit Power Squad, the Dead Rock Stars, the Mall Santas, and others. Some of those factions are just silly, but some are cool, like a normal guy who works at a gas station who turns into Dark Elvis at night.

Anytime you see a grumpy review that says, "I would use the setting but not the rules!"

Yeah, that is a clear sign that this is a great Palladium game.

No Rules, No Problem

And I respectfully disagree, the rules are part of the old-school experience. We don't need everything laid out for us and indexed. We made the rest up ourselves. The game was partially ours. Bad rules, confusion, missing rules, and disorganization invited us to make up the missing parts ourselves.

And if we are making up rules, we are protected from rules lawyers.

And we are free to make rulings on power gamers.

Some people hate it when a game gives the group this much power. Because they can't point to a book and say you have to allow something. If we are making the missing half up, we get the final say on what the other part is too. It is when Bob Ross lays a giant dark ugly tree trunk over a landscape and says "bravery test" - and everything comes out just fine.

Happy little trees.

Your game will be just fine too if you make half of it up.

And you will probably be having more fun than endlessly digging through a book for a rule.

Very Fun Concept

Palladium knocks it out of the park when they create games like this. You get the "be anything" of Rifts minus the MDC and power armor. You get a setting unlike anything else. You get to be something cool based on your imagination. This is like a Superhero game meets a Vampire game, but you get to custom-create your morphed form.

And it can be anything.

A very cool game and setting, and once you wrap your head around the concept and create your inspiration for the central conflict, it sounds amazing.