Re: Nightlife och Chock
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Här har du en recension från webbsidan "Culture Overdose"...
"NightLife (3rd Edition) – Stellar Games
There is a secret world out there, hidden from mortal eyes--a world where monsters and other creatures from humanity’s nightmares stalk the shadows and feed off mortals. Predatory creatures with their own secret subculture struggle to survive and stay hidden in a world not too dissimilar to our own.
The World of Darkness? Guess again. This is NightLife, the original game of modern urban horror where players take on the roles of vampires, werewolves, and things that go bump in the night.
Published by Stellar Games in 1990--a few years before White Wolf unleashed Vampire: the Masquerade on the gaming public--NightLife went through three editions before Stellar faded into gaming-company-Limbo.
In NightLife the players take on the roles of monsters in modern-day/near-future Manhattan. Players can choose from such classic creatures as Vampyres, Ghosts, and Werewolves, or more exotic species such as Wyghts (undead necropaths that feed off their victims’ youth) or Animates (golems and such). These creatures (known collectively as “The Kin”) owe more to Universal Horror than to Anne Rice. Unlike most modern interpretations of classic monsters, these creatures still have all the classic powers and weaknesses. Vampyres can turn into bats, mist, or wolves and hate garlic and crucifixes. Werewolves spread their lycanthropic disease thru their cursed bite.
The game’s atmosphere itself contains more splatterpunk nihilism and ultraviolence than gothic angst and self-loathing. If Vampire: the Masquerade is Depeche Mode and The Cure, then NightLife is Rob Zombie and the Misfits. Fans of Nancy Collins’ “Sonja Blue” stories will also recognize the similarities between her world of Pretender and the world of the Kin.
The Kin are divided into different factions--some pro-human, some anti-human, others neutral. Factions such as the Commune, Caduceus, or the Knights of the Living Dead, work towards peaceful, but secret co-existence with humanity. While factions such as Red Moonrise, the Complex, or the Morning Star Corporation struggle to bend humanity towards their will and establish a Kin-dominated world.
The third edition book, published in 1992, is a soft-cover volume of 256 pages divided into chapters with a fairly complete index (an absolute must for any game).
The introductory chapter gives your standard “what is role-playing” essay as well as a brief history on the horror genre and the rise of splatterpunk. The second chapter describes character-creation. The players randomly determine eight abilities (Strength, Intellect, Luck, etc) and then calculate Survival Points. One of the most important statistics is the Humanity score. This score fluctuates as a character uses her supernatural powers and otherwise acts in a humane or inhumane manner.
The next several chapters of the book describe the common races of the Kin (Vampyres, Daemons, etc.) as well as the supernatural powers used by the Kin known as “Edges.” A character is limited to what powers they can possess according to what race they belong to. Edges include such familiar powers as Claws and Invisibility, as well as more interesting abilities such as Weather Control and Necropathy.
There is also a fairy extensive list of skills, combat-related and otherwise, for the characters to choose from. The easy-to-learn skill system is percentile based. If a character has a score of 65 in Juggling, for instance, they need to roll 65 or less on a percentile die to succeed.
The combat system is turn-based and easy to master. Characters act in order of initiative (based on their Dexterity score and whatever skill they are using). Like most other rolls in the game, players resolve attacks by rolling percentile dice and comparing them to the combat skill in use. A successful attack reduces a target’s Survival Points (SP). Humans who reach zero SP die, while Kin who drop to zero “sleep stiff” until the next night, when they will rise again. Each race of the Kin has it’s own way of permanently killing it (stake through the heart for Vampyres, a silver bullet for a Werewolf). My favorite part of the combat section is a small section of optional rules called “Putting the Splatter into Splatterpunk”. Here the authors give rules for determining the size of exit-wounds and how long and deep knife slashes are. It’s good cinematic fun.
The last 160 pages of the book are all campaign information. The authors go into great detail describing the world of the Kin, focusing on Manhattan and the Kin-dominated section of the Lower-East Side known as the Deadlight District. The authors include descriptions of all the major factions of the Kin, as well as full write-ups for the major NPCs. The “Optional Races” section includes dozens of the less-populous races of the Kin such as Ghouls, Ogres, and--my favorite--Datahaunts (incorporeal spirits of the electronic network). The “Enemies of the Kin” section describes a variety of antagonists including the extra-dimensional Demons, several human gangs, the government-sponsored Kin-hunting organization known as Target Alpha, and many of horrible creatures that live in the forbidden tunnels beneath Manhattan Island. The book concludes with a few fairly complete appendices of powers and charts, as well as the index.
NightLife’s artwork is fairly hit-or-miss. To be frank, the airbrush artwork on the front cover is crap. The interior black-and-white is, for the most part, rather good in a horror/comic-book sort of way.
NightLife has often been rumored to be the secret inspiration for White-Wolf’s World of Darkness. The similarities are impossible to deny, but the games are very different. NightLife, while far from being humorous or comical, doesn’t take itself as seriously White Wolf does. The Kin are monsters, but they accept that without the self-torturing soul-searching that is so prevalent in many other modern-horror games.
NightLife is one of those games that, while most people don’t know about, the majority of people who are familiar with it quite enjoy. While the game is out of print, many game stores I’ve seen still have a copy or two of it floating around on the shelves again. Stellar also published several supplements for NightLife. These include Magic, which introduced sorcerers and witches into the game, and In The Musical Vein, a wonderful sourcebook on the Caduceus faction that included a very well-written adventure, and America Afterdark which detailed several other cities across the U.S. (Cleveland, Chicago, etc.) and also contained a fun map-spanning adventure. The supplements also included the not-so-good NightMoves (which contains lots of good information about Greenwich Village, but is hindered by a poor adventure with too many “dungeon crawl” elements) and the ill-conceived KinRise, which details an alternate setting where the Kin rule in a Mad-Max-like post-apocalypse setting."
Tja, behöver det återupplivas för att spelas? I skräckspel tror jag det kan vara en fördel om spelarna inte vet för mycket och om SL själv uppfinner nya monster, äventyr m.m. så blir det lite mer stämning av okänt över det hela. Det är svårare att leva sig in i rollpersonernas skräck om man "vet allt". Varför inte ge spelarna varsin människo-RP skriven på Vampireformulär och låta dem tro att de när som helst ska förvandlas till vampyrer och sedan istället överraska med lite chockmonster och egna varelser medan alla vampyrer är som uppslukade av jorden?
Tja, men för det behöver jag inte ST-systemet. : )
Näh, om jag skulle låta mina spelare spela svaga dödliga i en fientlig värld skulle jag nog använda GURPS, eller möjligtvis gamla Basic Roleplaying. : )
Men i vilket fall som helst skulle jag vilja se en återupplivning av Chock därför att jag inte har tillgång till någon av huvudböckerna. Det enda som finns kvar i min närhet är ett söndrigt exemplar av ett gammalt Chock-äventyr som utspelar sig på ett tåg...och det var så länge sen jag spelade Chock (tänk 80-talet) att jag inte minns hur fanken det funkade. : )
"Ursäkta, har någon sett en fem meter hög hund springa förbi?"
En RP i en av mina krönikor.
