Night's Black Agents is Bourne meets True Blood. You a group of renegade soldiers, ex-spies, freelance analysts, and general spooks who have stumble upon a terrible specter haunting 21st century Europe: Vampires! Using your skills and networks, you have to send these bloodsuckers back to the grave for good.

There's a lot to like about this game. The GMing advice and conspyramid (conspiracy+pyramid) foe structure, with escalating levels of henchmen and shell organizations, is tuned for spies vs bloodsuckers, but brilliant and portable. The chapter on vampires summarizes tons of folklore, you decide what is true in your game. And the rules support multiple play styles, from high octane Stakes to the shadowy betrayal of Mirror to the psychological annihilation of Burn and the powerlessness of Dust.

This is my first time reading through the GUMSHOE system, and I am both impressed and a little confused. Roleplaying game systems are about managing the flow of information and the consequences of uncertainty. In GUMSHOE, clues are almost automatically revealed. No rolling perception to spot the shell casing, intimidate to coerce an uncommunicative witness, knowledge to retrieve an obscure fact. Characters have a pool of points, and they spend these for clues. A similar point spend mechanic is at play in the action sequences, with a d6+k vs N system. As long as players spend at least one point, they're guaranteed success on easy tests, and higher spends mean that exceptional characters can definitely make a critical check, at the cost of having nothing in reserve for the future.

I haven't played it yet, but it seems workable. I'm not a fan of attritional mechanics, and GUMSHOE is nothing but attrition, but it works. 8 years on from publication, it feels less sophisticated than the fiction-first fail forward-approach of games running on a pbtA or BitD-style fail forward engine. In a world of espionage, which is based around double-edged truths, secrets, revelations, and a fatal web of blowback, the GUMSHOE approach of 'yeah, it works' doesn't seem to model the source fiction. And finally, the layout is painfully old-school, triple columns and arbitrary section breaks that make using this book as a reference confusing. I'm still not sure how many points an agent starts with in a pool, which I guess is the same as the rating, but for such a key point of the system, I shouldn't have to guess. The combat sections are similarly confusing.

I'm sure that Ken Hite could run an amazing campaign of Night's Black Agents, but his decades of Suppressed Transmissions columns are the source for paranormal weirdness. Even after this book, I'm less sure I could do the same.