31 Character Challenge Part 15: NightLife

 

"If Vampire is The Cure, then Nightlife is The Ramones." - Grim Jim, YouTube.

That pretty much sums it up. Nightlife hit the shelves in 1990, a year before Vampire: The Masquerade. Written by Bradley K. McDevitt and Lee Cerny, NightLife was the first game I ever owned that allowed you to be the monsters.  In all the other games I'd played, if your character contracted lycanthropy, or was turned by a vampire, you lost your character. Heck, even in Star Wars if you fell to the Dark Side, you were now an NPC.  The Game Master takes over your character, create a new one.

But NightLife not only let you play the monster, it let you play a whole slew of them, and they had their own underground society existing parallel to "herd" society. That's what they called us, and they called themselves the Kin.

This game did not have the pretension of Vampire, and it rebelled in an aesthetic it calls "Splatterpunk."  The authors mention the film works of Clive Barker, James Herbert, and Guy Smith.  I'm not familiar with these last two, but I do certainly know Clive Barker's work. In essence, this is less Lestat and more Lost Boys. In fact, the plumbing spewing blood and "death by stereo" are both in my mind pretty damn splatterpunk.

NightLife uses only d10s, but unlike Vampire, it uses them in a fairly conventional way for 1990.  Percentage dice checks against scores, and multiple d10s for damage rolls, etc.  It has Abilities, which are Strength, Dexterity, Fitness, Intellect, Will, Perception, Attractiveness, and Luck.  Hit Points are referred to as Survival Points.  There's also Edges and Flaws, Skills, and Humanity.  It's important to discuss Humanity because it's central to the game.  Kin on the upper end of the Humanity scale look more human, can more easily pass for human, and also take less damage from things their type of Kin are vulnerable to.  Lower end Humanity Kin are on the other end of the spectrum.  The thing is, Humanity will fluctuate throughout the game or campaign due to the actions of the Kin, and the need for certain Edges to use Humanity as fuel.  Use your supernatural powers, become temporarily less human.  Buying new Edges, or improving them, brings down your maximum possible humanity.  Taking actions that spotlight your humanity restores it, and if you can bank ten more points of current humanity than your maximum, your maximum goes up.  It's a constant struggle, and that's a very cool roleplaying concept, but it's not played as soul-crushingly dire as it is in Vampire.

All Kin can Drain humans, they might do so to survive, or simply to heal/power themselves  - vampires, excuse me, Vampyres, drink blood.  Werewolves Drain by causing pain. Ghosts cause fear. And so forth.  Some forms of Drain, like those of a Vampyre or Daemon, can cause the human drained to become addicted to the experience.

So... lets' love the Nightlife, and have to boogie on down to

Character Creation

First thing to do here is decide which race of Kin we're going to be.  I'm going to roll a die randomly, because random is (usually) fun. Inuit. Interesting.

Next, roll up Abilities, and add the racial modifiers.  We roll 4d10 for each.  So 'ere we go:

• Strength: 32
• Dexterity: 27
• Fitness: 30+5=35
• Intellect: 23
• Will: 17
• Perception: 18+10=28
• Attractiveness: 32
• Luck: 17

 Survival Points are FIT+LUCK, so 52.  HTH Damage is STR/5, so that comes to 6. Humanity would start at 50, but gets a +10 due to the Inuit race.

Now we get to our edges. Inuits begin the game with Drain (life force), Infection, and Invisibility.

Flaws for an Inuit are Substance Vulnerability: Fire, Repulsion: Holy Relics, Compulsion: Flamboyant dress and behavior, Power Source: Inuits are tied to a particular area of nature, and Special: An Inuit's skin glows green when using an Edge.

So, what is an Inuit?  Vampyres, Werewolves, even Wights are pretty well known.  Inuits are nature spirits that haunted the continent of North America.  Today, we're a lot more sensitive about this sort of thing than we were in the late 80s and early 90s.  With the commotion about racist tropes in gaming we've been seeing of late, I can easily see the Inuit race being caught up in that sort of discussion.  My feel is that this race started out as spirits, not as Native Americans themselves, and so their traditions and lore would not necessarily be identical.  But then, Inuits in Nightlife are driven to create more of their kind on nights of the full moon, and they create new members of their kind by draining the life force of a human.  During pre-modern times, that would of course mean Native Americans.  In current day, that means... anyone?  So, how do Inuits pass on their culture, and is it Native American culture or something older? Did they influence Native American culture rather than the other way around, and what happens now that modern day New Yorkers are being drafted into their ranks?  

If played poorly, this class could be a good example of tone-deaf cultural stereotype.  If explored deeply, it could be a good look at the psychology of nature-bound spirits adapting to the culture shock of what modern mankind has done to the land.  Hey, that gives me an idea.  Were I playing this character, I think I'd make him like myself, in order to treat the subject material with some respect.  About five years ago, my aunt finally tracked down my grandfather's birth certificate.  We always knew Pappaw had Native American blood, but as he was adopted, it was hard to say what tribe.  Turns out, not only was he Natchitoches "Indian"- he was also African American.  I'll admit I found it a bit satisfying that some of my family was upset by this revelation- there is still some vestigial racism here and there. I found it fascinating.  But I didn't know the first thing about my ancestors on that side.  Since then, I've done a bit of research into the tribe to which my family belongs, hampered a bit by tribal politics that caused a rift within the other descendants just as the State of Louisiana formally recognized the tribe as continuing to exist in 2017. So this character could just be discovering their own link to Native ancestors, and their journey to adjusting to being Inuit could also be their journey to discovering their heritage.

So, that answers a question we needed to answer- how old is this character?  We're going to make the character young, to explain his need to learn about who he is and what he is.   That means our hero has 20 1d10 rolls to place into skills.  Each die has to be allocated to a skill, then rolled.  A single die's result can't be divided between skills. When you select a skill, you add the die to the Basic Ability linked with that skill.

After skills, we roll for Connections.  We roll an 8, four connections of which one is a potentially highly placed official.  We'll take a DA, a Bartender, a Businessman, and an Admin Assistant at the law firm for which he worked.  He begins play with $10,000 in assets.  And now we have a Kin character.

The Character

Kenny Cohen was on the fast track- law school, admitted to the bar, and hired to handle business cases by a prestigious firm in New York. His future looked bright, if he could just ignore the nagging of his own conscience on some of the cases with which he was assisting. Corporations causing environmental damage to what little unspoiled land remained in America, it paid the bills, but it bothered him at a core level.  After all, some of that land was tribal land, and didn't he have a great-grandparent somewhere who was some kind of Native American?

One night there was this guy, he was waiting near the firm.  As Kenny walked to the subway, the guy started after him.  As Kenny stepped up his pace, the guy disappeared.  He headed down the stairs at almost a jog- and ran directly into the man that was following him.  The man said nothing, but lifted Kenny up by the front of his shirt. Anger burned in his eyes, and suddenly Kenny was wracked with pain, he remembered screaming, and passed out.

Kenny woke up to a cop prodding him awake.  He looked around, and found himself in Central Park, still dressed in his suit- but his watch, wallet, and briefcase were all missing.  He blearily sat up, shook his head, and told the cop his story.  A short time later, he'd made a police report, and returned to his apartment.  The super let him in, and he called work to take a sick day.  Things were about to get weird.

 

After a shower, Kenny's dreams came quickly as he passed out on the bed.  He dreamed of the sins being committed by his firm's clients, sins against the Earth, which was somehow alive, an entity.  He saw his own place defending those clients, and felt remorse- and anger.  He saw Central Park, and felt a deep connection to it as a bastion of nature surrounded by the vulgar concrete and steel of the city.

Kenny started awake.  He felt... different.  The shadows of the apartment were sharper, the smells more intense, the sounds louder, and clearer.  He stood to dress, and soon the entire contents of his closet were strewn about the room as nothing he owned seemed to be vibrant or fitting in any way.  Every expensively tailored suit was dull, washed out... boring.  Why was he suddenly concerned with boring?

He was snapped out of his swirling thoughts by a knock on the door.  He looked through the peephole and saw a girl with feathered earrings.  She was about to tell him precisely what had happened to him, and what he was, and where he might go from here, but it would take him many more conversations before he actually believed her.

My Thoughts

I've always thought it was a shame that Nightlife didn't get more attention than it did.  The arrival of Vampire: The Masquerade sort of blew the game off the radar, and I don't quite think that's fair.  VTM and Nightlife are two different takes on a theme. As I said above, it's The Lost Boys versus Interview With The Vampire.  Same monster, very different tone/theme.  There was room on game shelves for both games.

I remember Nightlife being available on CD-ROM, but now I can't find the link to post.  Copies are still available through the usual used RPG channels.

I managed to get hardcopies of everything for the line, the GM Screen, the magic sourcebook, the music sourcebook, etc. Though I doubt I'll get much chance to ever run this- it's a guilty pleasure I love to re-read every so often.  There's something here I really like, and I can't put my finger on it.  The system is a bit clunky, and it feels like it could have been more polished- but maybe that's the point. Punk isn't polished.  Look at the original Cyberpunk boxed set.  It was obviously done with extremely early desktop publishing software.  But nobody says it's a bad game- quite the opposite, it's a classic.

Folks may pooh-pooh this game because it's not World of Darkness.  But damnit, I liked it.