I have a few search keywords that I check on my local cragistlist and other marketplaces. A few weeks ago, a new post appeared. Someone near me was liquidating their vintage gaming stuff. Score!
I spent $175 for a bunch of old modules from various games in the early 80s, as well as a TSR board game from the 1970s. I am always excited to discover old gaming stuff I have never seen before, so I was super pumped with the find.
I now have plenty of reading material for the summer, and I wanted to start by sharing one of the most interesting things I found – Stalking the Night Fantastic by Richard Tucholka and Chris Beiting, and published by Tri Tac out of Madison Heights Michigan from 1983.
What is Stalking the Night Fantastic
Stalking the Night Fantastic seems to be an urban horror fantasy style role playing game, similar to what you’d see from the show Supernatural, or the X-Files. Players will create a character who is a “free-agent” of Bureau 13, with the authority to search for, pursue, and deal with dangerous and evil supernatural entities around the country.
The mechanics of the game rely on 17 different character statistics (from strength and dexterity all the way to accuracy and magic), and an incredibly long list of detailed skills. The core resolution mechanic is to roll a d100 and apply any statistic, skill, and difficulty modifiers. A roll under the final target number is then determined a success.
Over time, characters will discover and dispatch evil, gain experience, and level up both in abilities and Bureau 13 rank (from “Victim” to “Rookie” to “Sleuth” all the way up to “Inspector”).
Three Highlights
The game seems crunchy and very numbers based – similar to a lot of the games from the same era. I haven’t read the whole book yet (that’s on my to-do list, and I’ll likely do a video about it), but there are three amazing things that stand out to me so far.
Bureau 13 History
One of my favorite staples of the “supernatural underworld” genre, is the magical and fantastical explanations of real world events that bridge the fictional world with the one we live in. Stalking the Night Fantastic has a great timeline of Bureau 13 near the front of the book.
It’s a bit further down the list, but Stalking the Night Fantastic does something pretty smart with their timeline. In the late 1970s, Bureau 13 experiences a mass casualty event, as a rival (and unknown) organization kills the majority of Bureau 13 agents. The result is a massive hiring spree in the 1980s – and this leads to why the characters are being recruited to a top secret organization.
Humor
Stalking the Night Fantastic creates what I think is a pretty rich and “serious” gaming world – but the book is still peppered with humor.
To help facilitate the understanding of rules, the authors of the book have sections describing “Harrison and Friends” – a gaming group focused around a character, Harrison, and the often silly situations he gets himself in. Much of the humor in the book is presented through these snippets.
Some of the humor I found has that off-color 1980s tone, but a lot of it was just, well, goofy and funny. I love these types of things in rules books, as they remind you that hey – we are all here to have fun.
Discovering Monster Banes
The thing that excites me most about this book are the monster banes. Each monster in this book comes with a (in true 80s fashion, complicated) list of banes. Each monster has several banes, and there are a few different versions of each monster.
I think this would lead to some incredible investigation and deduction style gameplay. Imagine playing a member of Bureau 13, and seeing signs of a vampire in a small town in Wisconsin. The local Bureau 13 safehouse describes some of the weaknesses (banes) of vampires, but also describes that there are several different kinds of vampires, and they all have different weaknesses.
It’s now the player’s job to figure out which type of vampire they are up against, and which type of bane will be most effective against it.
Then, as time goes on, the players have a growing list of banes that work against monsters they’ve previously faced. If they see vampires in the future they’ll now have a playbook on how to deal with it, giving the players a sense of progression and competency.
I think that this type of gameplay is very fun. It’s a type of prescribed deduction, and differs from something like Monster of the Week which often creates improvised deduction (though the end result is sometimes the same). If the players know up-front how the mechanics of the game work, I think prescribed deduction can lead to more enriching gameplay with a certain type of player.
Connect
It’s been fun to read through Stalking the Night Fantastic so far, and I hope you enjoyed reading. If you want to keep up to date with vintage games and similar articles, you can join the newsletter here!
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