Basically, both systems listen to vinyls the former because it's too hip and edgy for your advanced technologies, and the latter because it's yelling for kids to get off its lawn and doesn't see the point in the last ten years of technological improvement.Īnd this is Nightbane. In a strange way, the systems are bad for very different reasons - Vampire is too modernly-pretentious to give a fuck about such things as rules being sane or consistent, while Nightbane insists that game design was perfectly solved back in the mid-eighties and could never improve. The fact that the rules are a drooling turgid mess of wtf is, of course, a given, but in all honesty, when comparing rules quality against Vampire, it's not a high fucking bar. Now, I'm not sure to what degree this affected Nightbane as opposed to, say, Rifts, but it definitely still shows. A major one of these is Kevin Siembieda ego (and cum) stains all over the pages. Now, given that this is a Palladium publication from the mid-nineties (or heck, as such), we can expect a certain amount of idiotsyncracies here. Yep, apparently even this guy is a-OK to play in this setting. Compatible with all Rifts material, of course. However, Nightbane is also distinctively different from Vampire, in that instead of having Elven levels of pretentiousness about its bad rules and worse worldbuilding and wanting you to play Vampire: Get Fucked If You Don't Suck Storyteller Penis and Fishmalk, it grafts a mid-eighties D&D clone engine with a thousand realizarm additions to a game about playing dark supernaturals fighting against a world-controlling conspiracy in an ubran fantasy setting. It has a very similar concept (secret supernaturals fighting scarier secret supernaturals a dark alt-modern world playing a monster etc.) is executed using a system with a similar level of awfulness (if for different reasons) has a lot of shit that makes no sense on a first, second or tenth reading and has some pretty sick art (provided by Brom). Let's not kid ourselves: Nightbane was an attempt by Palladium Games to cash in on the supernatural craze that Vampire sent into high gear several years prior to that.

From what I can gather, Nightbane is C.J.'s first full-blown standalone work, and as first attempts go, it is (supposedly) pretty good. Given what he had to work with, I guess this statement needs to be made with considerable reservation, but despite this, he seems to have some awareness of mechanics, can actually write worth a damn, and doesn't eat all the paste. Carella, who at this point, has been writing game supplements for about five years, and apparently was quite good at it. Into this hot mess (oh dear), we introduce C. Every preceding sentence but one was an attempt at a bad sex joke.

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