Is it all about the Nightlords?

[Jefffar]

Personally, I throw in all the factions avauilable in a winner take all situation.

I mean really, once the outsiders are defeated, do you think the Resistance and Spook Squad and the Light Bringers and the Nocturne are really going to get a long?

[Beelzebozo]

Nightbane is different from some other contemporary horror/supernatural games in that it has a focus: the war against the Nightlords. That gives the setting a sort of coherence that makes it attractive. Monster/villain-of-the-week games tend to get old after a while; having a focus for the campaign gives the players a reason to keep playing.

That being said, I've run two Nightbane games that deviated from the standard Nightbane versus Ba'al format. One was a Spook Squad game, set shortly after Dark Day; it *did* involve the Nightlords, but all of the characters were human (one a martial artist agent from N&SS, another a regular Joe Government, the third a PAB psychic), which gave things a different dynamic.

The other was more different. It was set in Atlanta ca 2005, and involved a mixed bag of characters - again, all humans, except for one Cavinisham vampire (from my old Bloodlines netbook) - hunting a vampire clan (Dark Symphony) in the Underground. It didn't last long, but it didn't involve Nightlord minions at all.

I've run a couple of other episode-based modern-supernatural games using BESM - not really horror, considering the abilities characters had at their disposal. They were both one-shots.

The first, Touched, involved psychically-gifted individuals investigating a mystery of a pair of kidnapped women. I actually set up psychic abilities to work quite differently than the typical setup in games.

The second was Border Town, which I'll be resurrecting soon. Border Town is basically hot rod-driving, gun-toting, two-fisted adventurers versus the forces of darkness. Basically, Gunsmith Cats meets Bubba Ho-tep.

My feelings on the matter, as far as Nightbane goes, is to focus on either the war with the Ba'al or the vampire threat (or both, if you're into multicornered struggles). Occasional one-shots with other threats is good to break things up, but if you're looking for mostly one- or two-shot villains, you're really better off with something along the lines of BtS.

[Judas]

We have been playing NB for many years and it's all good going against the baal, are very first group was all NB and it was all Dark Nightlord plots.

however are game has advanced since then, the party includes Two bane, one Kinetic, One mage, one Demigod of Inti (His godling forefathers survived the invasion of the Nightlands SA2), one priest possed by a demon and a wamypre. As you can see a very diverse group, and though the main fight has been against the Nightlords and the main bad guys are the hounds, hunters NSB we do have other plots running.

for example the mage has a blood hunt put on him by the Master Vampire in L.A, the mage also has the Mystic Tongs after him after he slew one of there immortal brethren. The Demi-god has only just found out he is a decendant from a God after battling an ancient found in a mayan temple that called him "Godseed".

as you can see many different quests running through the main campaign, you seem to be doing a good job Nerdbane keep it up, sounds good so far!

[Mike Taylor]

I guess here's two of the major things I worry about, just to clarify a bit more:

1 - If you set up the three-way dance between Nightbane, Nightlords, and Vampires, do you ever worry that your player characters are going to become less pro-active, more willing to sit on the sidelines and let the Vampires and Nightlords duke it out? Or relatedly, do you worry that if there's Nightlords AND demons AND Vampires AND Mystic Tongs AND so on, then the player characters will feel insignificant, like nothing they do makes a big difference?

I treated the vampires as a major problem, but secondary to the battle against the Nightlords. The smart players, however, will figure out how to play off one foe against another (and so will the NPCs). What I recommend is ranking the foes according to importance to the campaign.

2 - If you focus on the war against the Nightlords, do you ever provide a payoff? Can the campaign keep going indefinitely if the Nightbane PCs always fight the minions of the Nightlords but never big bad Lord Moloch? Or if they DO fight Moloch - where do you go from there?

My campaign was structured in such a way that the players would never directly confront King Moloch. They would, however encounter major underlings.

[Beelzebozo]

It's my feeling that in a Nightbane campaign, it should be *very* rare that the player characters encounter a Nightlord in person, let alone some of the older Nightlords like the Viceroys (IIRC Nightlands uses that to refer to Magog and Lilith; I work from the assumption that it's a senior rank and there are other Viceroys such as Behemoth) or Moloch himself. The highest-ranking Ba'al commanders the players should encounter should be Night Princes and Avatars, with *possibly* the occasional minor Nightlord. Encountering and defeating a major Ba'al generally should/would effectively end the campaign (because where do you really go from there?).

In fact, at lower levels, it may even be possible for you to convince the players that Avatars *are* the Nightlords themselves. This would make for some interesting play when they finally realize that the "bosses" they've been fighting (and probably just defeated) are in fact just aspects of a larger evil, and aren't at the top of the food chain after all.

As far as "if" the player character defeat Moloch, there are still other big players in the Ba'al world. There's Lord Mocker, for one thing; from the rumors in the books and what Jason has said, Mocker has his own link to the Dark and is likely to be the next big contender. We don't know what Moloch's relations with him are like, but they're presumably frosty. It makes you wonder why he would tolerate Moloch calling himself "king" of the Ba'al. What if he's even more powerful, and is just allowing Moloch to *begin* the conquest of Earth, be defeated, and step in himself to finish the job?

There is an interesting thought about defeating Moloch and the Ba'al for good, however. Presumably, a campaign that involves finally defeating, destroying, and/or banishing the Nightlords would be very long, and involve gathering all of the factions into an alliance against the Ba'al and convincing them to put aside their differences.

Then, what if the Ba'al are defeated? What new threat lies around the corner? Do the vampire intelligences - or demon lords - see it as their chance to move in? Does the power behind the Guardians finally reveal itself (for good or ill)? Is it possible that some Cult of Night could try to resurrect the Ba'al, or perhaps even forge their own link to the Dark, beginning a new generation of Nightlords?

How would the factions react? Would the alliance hold, or would they end up at each other's throats? I'm especially thinking about the Lightbringers versus the Nocturnes, Warlords, or Seekers; Seekers versus Nocturnes, or even Warlords versus Resistance would be possible (although a post-Ba'al merger of the Resistance and Warlords wouldn't be out of the question).

Then there's the cosmological implications. It's implied in TTGD that realigning the Earth and Nightlands so the Nightlords could return threw some kind of mystic balance out of whack. Banishing the Ba'al to the Nightlands again isn't much of an option; they have escaped once, and can escape again. Severing their link to the Dark and destroying them is more likely to be the permanent solution. What if the Nightlords are destroyed, and then the powers that defeated them find out that the Ba'al were necessary to some cosmic balance (remember the unknown forces behind Dopplegangers and Nemesi)?

Dang, I rambled too long. Time for my medication.

[Jefffar]

In my multi faceted campaigns, the players have learned that jsut sitting back quickly leads to them being taken out. Why? if you don't take offensive action then you msut be weak. if you are weak, then we can wipe you out first at little cost so we won't have to watch our butts at the more critical time.

Instead, rather than direct overt action they do what they can to stir the plot. the feed intelegence (sometimes real and sometimes not) to the various factions, they conduct raids in a way to make it look like another faction did it.

In short they take an active role in sending the other factions after each other in a way that compliments their objectives.