Night Stalkers is one of a triad of supplements for White Wolf’s Hunter: the Vigil line of books. Like the other two books, Witch Finders and Spirit Slayers, Night Stalkers provides tons of information and inspiration for hunters who want to take the fight to the bloodsucking creatures of the night and walk away.
Like any good supplement for Hunter, Night Stalkers contains a host of new Tactics and Endowments specially tailored to vampire hunting. The new Tactics nicely reflect the dangers vampires present to hunter and civilian alike. Vampires, after all, are rarely a simple physical threat; rather, they sink their foul tendrils deep into whatever society they infect, making them more difficult to uproot with mere main force. Quite a few of the new Tactics and Endowments allow hunters to cut those tendrils, the better to ensure the vampires are vulnerable to a good ol’ fashioned stake.
In addition to the new crunchy bits, Night Stalkers also provides a great deal of information on historical vampire hunting activities, new compacts, a new conspiracy, and a slew of tasty information for Storytellers wishing to throw vampires at their players. The Cainite Heresy, the new conspiracy, is definitely my new favorite group of half-psychotic paranoid zealots. The Cainites use the vampires’ own blood magic against them, though where they learned to do so, not even the Cainites know. In fact, the Cainites are incredibly ignorant about their own organization, which provides plenty of fodder for good story hooks in any game that involves the conspiracy.
My big issue with the Cainites is their Endowment: the Rites of Denial. The Rites themselves are pretty awesome (some of them are downright terrifying, actually) but in order to power their rites, the Cainites need to collect blood from other Cainites in a special phial. Unfortunately, the mechanical description of this phial is vague at best, and the actual amount of blood the phial can hold is never mentioned explicitly (a critical oversight, in my mind). Additionally, the rules behind the phial practically require a Cell of hunters to be entirely composed of Cainites, a stylistic choice I don’t personally like, but it could certainly work for any group of gamers.
Finally, my favorite part about Night Stalkers is the information about different types of vampires it provides. One of my biggest pet peeves concerning Vampire: the Requiem is that the game pigeonholes every vampire in myth into their five Clans or subsidiary bloodlines. There’s a lot of vampire or vampiric myth out there, and Vampire ignores a lot of it. Night Stalkers does the exact opposite, and provides a ton of information about different vampires, from the traditional western vampire to the penanggalan (a floating head vampire that trails its innards behind it as it flies) of Malaysia. All this is great inspiration for a storyteller hoping to throw a curveball at players well versed in Vampire: the Requiem. In fact, like the other Hunter books, Night Stalkers is meant to provide everything a Storyteller needs to create vampires without needing to buy Vampire, something I greatly appreciate (even though I own both books…).
Night Stalkers is a great addition to Hunter, one of my favorite World of Darkness lines, and definitely (with a few hitches) lives up to my expectations for this genre of monster slaying. If you want to kill vampires, or want your players to kill (or be killed by…) vampires, Night Stalkers is a great purchase, and, honestly, an entertaining read in its own right.
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