Night’s Black Agents combines two of my big pop culture passions: spies and vampires. It pits them against each other as the players are cast as haunted (perhaps literally) operatives who stumble upon a bloodsucking conspiracy that they have to bring into the light. A recent Humble Bundle gave me an opportunity to reread the game and its expansions. The bundle also included one of the great campaign setups of the modern era: The Dracula Dossier. It’s been nearly a decade since this beast of a book came out. Does the old boy still have what it takes to thrill and chill? Let’s play to find out.
The Dracula Dossier, from designers Kenneth Hite and Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan, starts with a fascinating premise What if Dracula, the 1897 epistolary novel by Bram Stoker that heavily influenced what we think of when we think of vampires, belonged in the non-fiction section instead? Instead of an account of heroic vampire hunters slaying an immortal monster, it’s based on an account of a team of spies trying to recruit a monster for Her Majesty’s interests. In this case, it’s how the players get drawn into the vampire conspiracy, as they have acquired a copy of the book that’s been annotated with information on the real people, places and things that are part of the story. It’s a cold case that might let the spies thwart a centuries long play for power if the team plays it smart.
The main campaign centers on two books. The first, Dracula Redacted, is the copy of Dracula that ends up in the player’s hands. It soon becomes clear that this has passed through a few hands that have circled sections, crossed stuff out and argued with each other in the margins. Fans of Night’s Black Agents' sister game Trail of Cthulhu will see some similarities to The Armitage Files which featured a similar premise of decoding a central document to drive play. Doing this with Dracula, however, adds a real world verisimilitude that’s very hard to beat. An enterprising Director could take the time to go and find a vintage copy of Dracula and mark it up like the one here if they really wanted to present an artifact to the players that walks the line between the game world and the real world
The Dracula Dossier Director’s Handbook is where the campaign lives. It discusses not just what each entry in the main novel means, but offers multiple options for the entry. The options allow the Director the ability to customize this version of the game to best fit their players and tell a specific story with it. It also discusses ways to disseminate the information either by feeding players pages at a time and suggestions on how to incorporate real world locations into the game. I’m a fan of running Dracula Dossier in the same style as one of its main inspirations: the massive Call of Cthulhu campaign Masks of Nyarlathotep. I really enjoy just getting the whole book on the table, letting the players flip through it, get hooked by something in the text and then we’re off to some exotic, shadowy location.
The immersiveness of the experience is a great strength, but it can also interfere with the campaign if you have players that don’t want to do homework. It can be hard enough to keep everyone remembering the rules, their characters and what happened last session. Asking players to read a novel could be a barrier to enjoyment. Players don’t have to have read it to play the game, but the more they know about the story, the more they’ll be able to appreciate the twists and turns of the story. The real world aspects also mean that tables where phones and tablets are strictly controlled during a session will likely need to discuss changes. Part of the fun in decoding the “true” novel is pulling out your phone, Googling something mentioned in a note and seeing it is a real thing.
Ken Hite has always been a master at spinning together real world history with gamable ideas and Dracula Dossier features him working at the strength of his power. Much like D&D remixes mythology, the game spins what “everyone” knows about Dracula into something new and exciting. There aren’t really any spoilers for the campaign because there are so many options that could come together in many different ways. Night’s Black Agents offers plenty of tools to bend the vampire antagonists into everything from ancient aliens to cursed angels. Dracula Dossier applies that same flexibility to one of the most popular pop culture mythologies of the modern world.
Bottom line: The Dracula Dossier remains a modern day classic for fans who want to fight vampires in the shadows with their cool spy techniques in a campaign that blends vampire conspiracy with real world intrigue.
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