Nightbane
It's 1995. Bill Clinton is getting it in the White House. TSR is beginning their slide into being purchased by Wizards of the Coast, but are determined to go out with a bang (and a million settings). We're in late second edition Vampire: The Masquerade-times for White Wolf, which has been helping TTRPG nerds and goth women have sexy-times for four years now. And of course, Rifts (or RIFTS as it was probably referred to back then) is already flaccid, meaning that Kev Siembieda needs to get some new action going.
Every preceding sentence but one was an attempt at a bad sex joke. I try too hard.
Let's not kid ourselves: Nightbane was an attempt by Palladium Games to cash in on the supernatural craze that Vampire sent into high gear several years prior to that. It has a very similar concept (secret supernaturals fighting scarier secret supernaturals; a dark alt-modern world; playing a monster etc.); is executed using a system with a similar level of awfulness (if for different reasons); has a lot of shit that makes no sense on a first, second or tenth reading; and has some pretty sick art (provided by Brom). However, Nightbane is also distinctively different from Vampire, in that instead of having Elven levels of pretentiousness about its bad rules and worse worldbuilding and wanting you to play Vampire: Get Fucked If You Don't Suck Storyteller Penis and Fishmalk, it grafts a mid-eighties D&D clone engine with a thousand realizarm additions to a game about playing dark supernaturals fighting against a world-controlling conspiracy in an ubran fantasy setting. Compatible with all Rifts material, of course.
Yep, apparently even this guy is a-OK to play in this setting. The fuck.
This is Vampire in my weak analogy.
And this is Nightbane. Except this old lady is cooler than the system here, or anywhere else.
Bane of Night - An Overview
So, first-off, we have a Satanic-Panic-style warning for this game. I suspect this warning (along with the entire fucking Palladium engine) is boilerplate written once in the mid-eighties and never really revised much (apart from crude fit hacks), and the fact that it probably read as laughably ironic and dated back when this book came out, much less now, is thus not surprising in the least. Additionally, the list of trademarks and copyrights at the bottom of page 2 could sink a law firm - however, once again, this is just Kevin being the litigious super-asshole that he is. After a long (and notably chapter-free) set of contents pages, we come to our first Very Important Section.
Now, here, I want to give Nightbane some credit - for two things. Firstly, it decided not to have some boring tl;dr introductory, 'mood-setting' Forging The Narrative<sup>TM</sup> bullshit. Instead, we immediately launch into a very concise explanation of what this game is about, who you can expect to be playing, and why you should give a damn. This is something that a lot of games (both then and now) could have done with more of - after just reading a few paragraphs, I already have a basic idea of what I can expect to find here, and I didn't have to read any italics or Da Vinci Forward Regular (or kill any braincells) to get there. Basically, there are monsters, you are one of them, and your task is to fight against other, worse monsters, that secretly control the government and the media and want you dead. Apparently, the average person doesn't know any of this, and you're supposed to do all this fighting in secret. Basically, a similar set of circumstances to Vampire and its ilk. However, you don't get made into a monster - instead, this is something you're born with. The monsters you can play are called Nightbane, and the stuff you're up against are the Nightlords and their assorted friends and pets.
Now, I did say credit was due for two things. By this point in time, the 'Vampions' playstyle (and meme) was already well-established, and White Wolf's reaction to it well-known and as pretentious as ever. While I never played Vampire back then (because I was like, eight or so), from the stories I heard, this was actually a workable and fun way to play the game, which was apparently deemed badwrongfun by the howler monkeys at White Wolf. However, Nightbane hits that nail right the fuck on its head from the get-go:
"The game tries to combine heroic and horror role-playing. ... Ultimately, [Nightbane] face terrifying foes in the guise of the Nightlords, vampires, demonic entities and, in many cases, their own inner demons, fears and desires. ... Against all odds, they must expose and destroy the evil threatening the world, or die trying."
So basically, C.J. Carella and Kev are not only OK with Vampions as a playstyle, they actually make it the primary way to play the game! Given the crunchiness and combat-orientation of the Palladium engine, this is perhaps unsurprising, but this is both remarkably sensible and remarkably far-sighted and aware (if only by accident). Also, it would be horribly remiss of me not to mention that, despite sending a clear message, that paragraph arghle-bargles a bit already, as it claims that Nightbane have to face terrifying enemies pretending to be Nightlords, vampires and demonic entities, rather than, you know, the entities themselves. Apparently, according to C.J. and Kev, the Nightbane should go beat up Halloween trick-or-treaters or something.
A foe worthy of the greatest Nightbane.
Additionally, there's apparently an alternate Shadow Realm out there, which is just like our world, but Evil.
Basically, that world is darker, scarier, nastier and more hopeless than our own, and it's ruled by a bunch of dark, scary and evil things called the Nightlords. They are also called 'the Ba'al' - which is annoying as fuck, because 'Ba'al' is a singular form; the plural form would be 'B'alim'. While somewhat pedantic of me, I found that super-grating. Apparently, they hate humanity and Nightbane both, and want to do Evil things to them. There's also other scaries there, but there's treasure too - basically, it's a giant Dungeon World (and not of the kind a certain former poster was a fan of). These scaries are Nightlord minions - we have Doppelgangers, Hounds and Hunters (basically killing machines in armour), the Ashmedai (Lovecraftian horrors, on a first reading), and Nemtar (basically like the Mi-Go from After Sundown). Apparently,they also have some truly mad humans working for them as well - so we have cultist-type things going here too. As it turns out, the Dark Day was the Nightlords invading the Earth, and they basically won. Now, as a Nightbane, you're supposed to fight against them because otherwise, they will murder you and everything you care about.
As far as in-character writing goes, it's not terrible - it certainly gives me a good feel for what's going on in a high-level way, and the fact that it's brief and came after an out-of-character high-level explanation makes it much easier to follow. I suspect this part was C.J. Carella's work - Kev would never read so coherently and with so few ego stains on the page. However, one thing that's conspicuously absent is any explanation of 'what is a tabletop RPG' and 'how do I played it'. It's basically assumed that you already know how this all works, and we can launch straight into describing what kind of world we're going into and what you're expected to do in it. That's ... probably the right move, considering who's publishing this book, but it's a little jarring in what's meant to be a standalone product.
Millenium of Shadows
This section (or chapter, or whatever the fuck) is meant to give us a more detailed look at the setting. To do this, it heads immediately back into authoritative out-of-character voice, and begins to tell us what happened around the time of the Dark Day. This is where shit begins to get stupid, and this is what motivated me to put fingers to keys in the first place.
One of the biggest issues with this entire section is that it basically paints a huge, worldwide event in incredibly American terms. Apparently, 600,000 people died on that day worldwide, which is a pretty big figure, but we basically get almost no mention of anywhere but the US in describing how it all went down. Fuck, the example we're given is from New Berlin, Connecticut, where apparently one-third of the population spontaneously committed suicide. Now, there is no New Berlin in Connecticut, but all the New Berlins anywhere fucking near there have at most two thousand citizens today. We're literally making a huge deal out of less than 600 people spontaneously killing themselves when the worldwide death toll was seriously a thousand times that, and skipping everything else. This laughable US-centrism continues basically throughout this section-chapter-thing, and by the looks of it, this entire book. Now, I know that the USA is the default setting for Nightbane, and I'm pretty sure that, given where Kev is from, he's not the most worldly of people. However, this event has huge global impact, and skating over it so casually is fucking lazy. While at the time, neither Kev (if he knew how to use a computer) nor C.J. had access to Wikipedia or even Google, it's completely unacceptable to not even think to mention anywhere but the Yew-Ess-of-fucking-Aye when describing an event that would rank as the fourth-worst natural disaster in human history.
This is basically how this book thinks, about everything.
This picture, and this writing in Nightbane , is the reason why people don't get you, America.
We then segue into a section called 'Forbidden Truths', which is meant to be out-of-character knowledge about 'what's really going on'. No, seriously, one of the sub-sections is even titled 'What's Going On?', and basically describes that the Nightlords have taken over everything, and hushed up all supernatural stuff by doing Nazi things to journalists. We get another description of the Shadow Realm, and that the Nightlords run fucking everything, from the government to the news media. A notable thing is that we start getting some bits of intro fiction on some sub-sections, but not others. One of them (the Seekers) refers to something we haven't heard of yet, confusingly, something which the utter wtf of the organization of this book will repeat often in text to come.
In there, we have a section on the Nightbane themselves, again. We learn that all Nightbane are orphans or adopted, no exceptions. This is ... really heavy-handed for no good reason. Nobody knows how the fuck Nightbane came to be, so this restriction and its justification seem like so much weak tea. I don't understand why every character that you play in this game needs to be someone without birth parents in any way, shape or form, and while some variation on this theme is possible, it's a restriction for no sensible reason.
But then, we get to the real bit where my brain fucking explodes. The magic words are here:
"[The] Dark Day changed all this. Before that time, there were only a few hundred manifested Nightbane worldwide. ... Thus, [after the Dark Day], the number of Nightbane has increased a hundredfold. ... [Only] half of all Nightbane in the world manifested ... [and the] late bloomers would "awaken" over the next year or so."
What the fuck. What. The. Fuck. This fails basic statistical analysis. Let's look at this - basically, according to these numbers, there's seriously a few tens of thousands of Nightbane worldwide. Even by the (optimistic, because of deaths and purges and stuff) population figures for the world of 2003, it means that the rate of Nightbane occurence is seriously one in two hundred thousand. The entire fucking city of New York has like forty Nightbane in it. Fuck, the entire continental USA has 1450 or so Nightbane total. Now, I know what you're thinking - are we heading into Vice President of the Anime Club territory?
You assume correctly.
Now, about those seven fucking Factions I mentioned - the next section runs them down. Even though many of these factions are deeply stupid (for both statistical and non-statistical reasons), there's a bit of sensible advice at the start of this section, which basically says that having everyone belong to the same Faction is good, as it helps focus the party and give them a reason to work together, as well as some common goals. If that wasn't statistically super-unlikely in all but the largest cities in the world, I'd agree. It also says that players choosing antagonistic Factions should be permitted only if they're mature enough not to shit all over the game with them - which makes for remarkably sane advice given what the fuck I just read. Each Faction also has a White-Wolf-esque 'how they get along with other Factions' in its description, but it's written using the out-of-character voice and is a lot less pretentious.
So, without further ado, the Factions:
The Resistance
These are the 'fight the Nightlords and free our country world' Faction. They are necessary and important, but of course, demographics royally fuck them. Even if we assume that all Factions have equal membership, the number of Resisters in the entire USA is seriously like 200. That puts them at about the membership levels of the Real IRA. Now, these fuckers haven't really done anything newsworthy in a damn while unless you happen to be in Northern Ireland, watching Northern Irish news. It's also worth noting that Northern Ireland is not a paranoid police state like the US supposedly is in this world, and it's also about 100 times smaller. Superpowered or none, that's a batshit small force to take on a supernaturally-supported US fucking government. Basically, I have no clue how the fuck this faction even exists or accomplishes anything - they lack the numbers to be anything more than a minor nuisance, if not a complete joke.
The Nocturnes
This is a 'fight the Nightlords and free our country world' Faction. If this seems familiar, it's because it is - the only thing that sets these fuckers apart from The Resistance is that they've apparently been around much longer, and have a bunch of other supernaturals (including vampires, which have only just now been mentioned as a thing), and even some Doppelgangers. Now, given that pre-2000, the number of Nightbane worldwide was seriously a few hundred, this Faction worldwide would have had something like forty Nightbane in it. Since we have no clue how many vampires exist, and how many of the other kinds of supernatural thing we have in the world, we can only conclude that the organization was bullshit-small like The Resistance back then, or that the Nightbane were a very tiny minority.
If you're not familiar with Rifts and vampire intelligences, you're not gonna make heads or tails of this Faction, because these concepts just get chucked at you like it's no big deal. Essentially though, this Faction and The Resistance are not meaningfully distinct - the difference between them is that The Resistance is 'we fight the Nightlords and are statistically useless', while The Nocturnes are 'we and our super-friends fight the Nightlords and we're not statistically useless as a result, apparently'. You could fold the former into
the latter losing nothing.
The Underground Railroad
This is supposedly a 'we teach newbie Nightbane how to be the very best, like no-one ever was' Faction. Now, apparently they've been around for a while, and only adopted their current monicker in the 19th century. I think it bears repeating that prior to the year 2000, they seriously had about forty members worldwide. The chance of any given member of this Faction finding another Nightbane are statistically close to zero, so I have no idea who was teaching whom and what for most of their history. Fuck, I don't even know how this organization stayed coherent being that thinly-spread. Given that they're no-bullshit described as being 'the oldest Nightbane organization known to exist' is laughable on the face of it; prior to 2000, I don't even see how they could be called an 'organization'. The fact that they have such an obviously American-centric name for what is meant to be a worldwide organization is both sad and unsurprising at this stage.
Now, thanks to the current circumstances, to protect newer Nightbane, these fuckers have to ... you fucking guessed it, 'fight the Nightlords and free our country younglings'. If you've heard this before ... it's because you have. Twice. Seriously, the official story is that The Resistance split from these fucks. So we're talking about a schism in the anime club here. With an echo in the room. Fuck, two echoes.
This is what we're getting here.
You could seriously roll together these first three organizations and end up with something both statistically sensible and coherent. I have no clue why they were separated like this or why this is supposed to make any fucking sense. Because it doesn't.
The Warlords
Prepare for an avalanche of bullshit.
Like this, but in literary form.
This is probably the most illogical, US-ethnocentric and stupid of all the Factions. Essentially, a bunch of Nightbane from the mean streets of the USA, in the space of a few years, got the Bloods, the Gangster Disciples and the Latin Kings, as well as 'other nationwide gangs' to stop murderfucking each other and work together. If I drank, my fucking bottle would be empty by now as my brain tries to frantically unpack the sheer, mind-numbing wtfery of that statement.
Let's start with the obvious issue. Just those three gangs alone have a combined membership that is greater than all the Nightbane in the fucking world. And this is not including a number of other major gangs - like La Eme, the Surenos, the Aryan Brotherhood, the Hell's Angels, the Crips, and basically everything you fucking see by watching reruns of Gangland.
In their pursuit of the first two, the authors of this book committed the third. On my brain.
But wait, it's even worse. Nowhere is anything mentioned about ... well, the rest of the fucking world, or even other, more traditional organized crime groups. Do the Warlords have any Bousouzoku in their ranks? What do La Cosa Nostra think of this super-gang (literally and figuratively)? The Vory V Zakone? The Yakuza? Law enforcement? Fucking fuck this is lazy. The kind of crime organization they are describing is statistically, logically and operationally an incredible stretch, and they basically make no effort to justify or explain how it affects the world. It's like they basically chucked down some random gang names, decided that they all wanna work for a bunch of Nightbane now, and left it there like a half-eaten sandwich. A half-eaten shit sandwich.
I'm not done yet. The description put in place of this Faction is strongly reminiscent of the Sabbat, complete with hurr-durr-evil stuff and total improbability given most people not believing supernaturals exist. The only way such a small group of supernaturals could control such a large group of gangbangers is through fear - which means that they have to know supernaturals exist. That... kinda means that the major gang population of (at least) the US would have to know that supernaturals exist, which fucks your Masquerade front, back and sideways. And the Nightlords ignore it. The mind fucking rebels. Thus, they are also just as improbable and nonsensical as the Sabbat in Vampire, minus the religious overtones and the Totally Real We Mean It This Time Black Hand bullshit. It also seems to be all about 'defending your turf' NWoD style, which is basically putting dogshit icing on that human shit cake we've been baking for the last few paragraphs. This is a perfect storm of worldbuilding fail, and the more I examine it, the more stupid it looks.
Fuck this Faction.
The Seekers
These are basically magical researchers and occultists, except their powers actually work. This is a remarkably refreshing bit of sanity after all the bullshit before. However, much as with The Nocturnes, The Resistance and The Underground Railroad... the basic purpose of the Seekers is 'fight the Nightlords and free our country I don't give a fuck anymore', and, once again, much as with The Nocturnes, the Nightbane in it are probably a small minority. While the sheer existential threat-ness of the Nightlords certainly makes this goal sensible, and I believe that the Faction still has enough traction (and statistical sensibility) to stand apart, it feels lazy to basically make them yet another force fighting against the Nightlords as their chief mission.
The Lightbringers
This Faction description leads with a story piece. No, I dunno why either.
In this Faction description, we get introduced to another supernatural kind out of nowhere. These are the Guardians (or the Lightbringers), who are basically angels. However, the Guardians have no idea if a god or gods exist - they discovered their powers from a 'light at the end of the tunnel' near-death experience. This organization is a mixture of humans, Nightbane and Guardians (so is statistically sound-ish) and is basically based around where Palladium Studios happen to be. Guess what Faction Kev's character came from...
The Lightbringers (the faction, not the supernatural kind) also have the goal of 'fight the Nightlords and fuck it not this shit again'. The difference is that they have literal angels on their side, but these angels don't really know where they come from. I don't feel as violently offended by them having the same goal as damn near every other Faction for the same reason I feel the same way about the Seekers.
The Spook Squad
This one also has a story piece leading it. Maybe ever Faction was meant to have one, and then some got cut or forgotten at the last minute? Wouldn't surprise me.
Remember how all the alphabet soup agencies got wiped out? This is where their members who know about the Nightlords ended up. Guess what their goals are? Yeah, you guessed it, 'fight the Nightlords and take back our country extra-judicial surveillance powers'. Because obviously at this point. So we have an organization filled with former spies, Feds and whatnot, with some sorcerous and supernatural backup.
I genuinely have no clue why any Nightbane would want to join this Faction. It openly states that many within it believe that Nightbane should all be killed as a danger to themselves and others, and even those that don't feel that way are quick to blame Nightbane for anything and everything that goes wrong. Being a Nightbane as part of this organization is a bit like being the only African-American cop in the newly-desegregated police department in the Deep South in the late 60s - you're basically asking for trouble constantly from the people who are meant to be watching your back. Given that you have enough problems as it is, I don't really understand why you would want to belong to such an organization, except out of desperation. Here's the rub, though - there cannot be such desperation, as Nightbane as super-duper rare. If your goal is to beat on the Nightlords, there's literally five other Factions you can go join where you won't be treated as a second-class citizen (at best) or as lynch-fodder (at worst).
The Others
No, not that.
In this section-subsection-whatever-the-fuck, we get introduced to all the other supernatural shit that's kicking about in the world. Given that we've already talked about these in the Faction writeups, I don't understand why this was placed here, except by the whim of Kev (or his wax layout machine and a lack of sleep). Basically, Vampires are a thing (and are just like the Rifts ones) and mages are a thing. The Guardians are given a fuller explanation, and it basically tries to paint them as palette-swaps of Nightbane. All-up, this entire section should basically have been put before the Factions, so that when we encountered all this shit, we'd know what the fuck it was on about, and wouldn't need redundant explanations. Not that this would have helped most of the Faction writeups, but still.
We finish off with a lexicon. Because of course they had to - this is the World of Darkness as Done By Kev Siembieda, after all! This lexicon introduces a bunch of concepts we've never seen before (as can be expected), and has a bunch of arcane terms mixed with 'cool'-sounding 'street'-slang. Luckily, it's fairly short, unlike its WoD cousins. We also get a tiny timeline squeezed in - apparently, we're in about 2004 for the game world's 'now'.
Now that this has hit about 6k words, I'm gonna leave it there. Next time, I'll go over how to play this game (because that section-thing is coming up next), character creation and a bunch of weirdly-misplaced rules things.