Contested Ground Studios, the folks who brought us a|state and Cold City, have a new RPG hitting the shelves in 2008.

In October of 1962, the Cold War went hot. But the war was not just a nuclear apocalypse. Other technologies that had been hidden from the public gaze, technologies developed in Germany during the World War Two and hidden away by Britain, France, the USA and the USSR. These technologies were twisted and esoteric, fusing science, madness and the occult together. They ripped holes in reality, created horrific monsters, drove men and women beyond sanity and laid waste to continents.

Hot War is a game about the aftermath of this horror, about survivors, factions, hidden agendas, trust and betrayal. All of this takes place in the city of London, England in the freezing winter of 1963, one year after the war. Life has been altered forever. The population is massively reduced, essential services are virtually non-existent, food and other products are subject to draconian rationing measures and both inside and outside the borders of the city, horrible things still happen.

Previous Hunter topics include Light in Shadows, Professions and Endowments. Each of them explored just a bit more of the setting of the upcoming game.

We’ve talked briefly about the daily lives of the Hunters, made a small mention of compacts and conspiracies once or twice already. There has been a lot of speculation about each of these words (and their possible meaning) on forums and blogs.

Just to recap some of that text:

Hunter society is small and secretive, even in large cities like London or New York, but it is also vibrant and constantly in flux. Individual hunters band together to form cells, pooling their skills and resources to take on solitary monsters that threaten their communities. Sometimes these hunters become aware of other cells in their area and they form broader ties that grow into larger compacts, creating a network that spans entire cities or regions. In rare cases, hunter compacts grow so large that their resources and influence span entire countries.

12 to Midnight publishes modern horror roleplaying games and accessories.

In this interview Ed Wetterman and Preston DuBose take us on a tour of Pinebox and then they explain a little bit about the design process that went into the new Steamworks d20 fantasy book.

We also get to hear about why 12 to Midnight likes the Savage Worlds system and get some details on the first ever Midnight Charity Project.

We’ve talked about Light in Shadows as the theme of Hunter: the Vigil and we’ve looked at one of the Professions featured in the upcoming game.

Yet the question remains…how do they hunt the monsters of the World of Darkness?

Anyone can grab a gun and start blasting away, but is that enough to destroy a vampire or werewolf? What good are bullets against a ghost?

Last week I talked a bit about the theme of Hunter: the Vigil. The theme of the game is Light in Shadows and I talked about how Hunters team up to fight against the things that lurk in the shadows of the world.

I also mentioned that most Hunters have “day jobs” since nobody really gets paid to stake or shoot supernatural creatures. This week we’re going to take a closer look at the “day job” element of Hunter: the Vigil.

In Hunter: the Vigil these “day jobs” are called Professions. They seem to be the everyday “real” careers that “normal” people have in the world. The trick for a Hunter is balancing the demands of the hunt with the realities of the job.

The theme for White Wolf’s new game, Hunter: the Vigil is “Light in Shadows” and this theme is well presented in the advance materials I’ve seen already…

family, or those driven together by maddening circumstances. They protect
their stretch of forest, their city block, their network of women’s shelters. They don’t know the depth of what’s out there, they only have the meager light of their own candles to light the way.

Candles give way to torches, to cells who band together in localized compacts. They pool resources. They provide moral support. They present a more unified front against the denizens
of darkness.

And torches give way to raging bonfires as those compacts grow outward globally and backward through time. Ancient groups and modern conspiracies supply their hunters with potent weapons, some of which are so strange that those who use them can only wonder how long they can truly maintain their own humanity.

This theme continues throughout the text. Individual Hunters acting as a point of light, driving back the shadows. Together that light shines brighter, those shadows retreat or are destroyed outright by the fire. Still, those shadows never go quietly and there are always more of them creeping their way into the world.

Paul S. Kemp lives in Michigan with his wife and preschool-aged twin sons. He is a corporate lawyer, which makes him lawful evil. He salves the pangs of conscience that arise from his career choice by imbibing ample amounts of Diet Dew and enshrouding himself in the sense-dulling smoke of Te Amo and Dunhill cigars.

He is the creator of the assassin-priest Erevis Cale and writes primarily in the Forgotten Realms setting from Wizards of the Coast (this makes him a shared world hack, true; but that’s MISTER Shared World Hack to you, bub)…

Talisman Studios – the home of Gamescapes, Shaintar and Suzerain.

In this interview Martin Klimes and Aaron Acevedo tell us how the studio came together, give us a peek into their gaming habits and share some of the design ideas that they’ve used to create the Talisman Studios products.

We are still working on a few of the details behind-the scenes on the new site. However, here are a bunch of new Reviews to dig into! Neil Gaiman’s “Two Plays for Voices” Audiobook Doctor Strange Animated Movie Changeling: the Lost RPG In the Serpent’s Coils Novel 30 Days of Night Movie Kitty and the […]