Topple the vampires from the streets below! Will you unite the homeless, the gangs, and the secret hunter societies to defy vampiric rule?

Hunter: The Reckoning — A Time of Monsters is an interactive novel by Paul Wang, set in the World of Darkness, where your choices control the story. It’s entirely text-based, 1,000,000 words and hundreds of choices, without graphics or sound effects, and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.

I sat down with Paul to talk about his upcoming game and experiences writing it. Hunter: The Reckoning — A Time of Monsters releases Thursday, November 13th. You can play the demo on Steam and wishlist the game in advance of release!

Our Choice of Games and Hosted Games fans all know you from your games with us, but our World of Darkness extended universe fans may not. Can you introduce yourself for those readers?

I’m Paul Wang, a first-generation Canadian living in Burnaby, which is one of the bigger municipalities of the Metro Vancouver area. I have an academic background in history – especially military history – but I started writing for Hosted Games and then Choice of Games when I was an undergrad, thirteen years ago. For the past decade or so, I’ve been working full time as a games writer.

I’m probably best known for my Dragoon Saga (Sabres of Infinity, Guns of Infinity, and Lords of Infinity) on the Hosted Games catalogue: a long-running blackpowder fantasy series set in my original setting of the Infinite Sea. I also write a high fantasy series (The Hero of Kendrickstone and The Cryptkeepers of Hallowford) set in another of my settings, the Fledgling Realms, for Choice of Games. A long, long time ago, I also wrote Mecha Ace – half military science fiction and half homage to ‘real robot’ anime like Mobile Suit Gundam. More recently, I worked as a writer on WW2 tactical RPG Burden of Command, which just released earlier this year.

Do you feel like A Time of Monsters represents a kind of progression in your work as an interactive storyteller?

As you can probably tell from my previous work, my writing has primarily focused on military and political fiction, with a side-helping of high adventure. This means I’m personally treading a lot of new ground by setting foot into urban fantasy and gothic punk. My first priorities have been mostly to get the tone and setting right. I’m writing a lot more conversationally and a lot more colloquially than I usually do, and that’s definitely been a change. The Dragoon Saga employs a sort of circumspect aristocratic register for its narrative voice, and even the Fledgling Realms is more rigid and formal. This time around, the narration is a lot looser – more stream of consciousness and more casual.

But at the same time, I’ve also tried to iterate on Hunter’s 5th Ed rules in a way which makes for an accessible gameplay experience in a way which I haven’t before. If there’s any consistent feedback I’ve gotten on my past games, it’s that they’re too hard and unforgiving, especially when it comes to skill checks. In a lot of cases, this isn’t so much a difficulty issue as it is an informational one: players take risks they think they can succeed at, only to get kicked in the face. This time around, I’m leaning heavily on the Storyteller System which previous Choice of Games’ World of Darkness titles have developed to give the player the tools to make decisions more effectively – should they choose to do so.

This doesn’t mean that I’m going to make things easy, of course. I interpret one of the core themes of Hunter as that of being the ultimate underdog – and you can’t sell an underdog story by making the player feel like they’re completely in control. I want the player to feel like they really are just ordinary base model H. Sap fighting an enemy which outclasses them in almost any way that matters. I want the desperation to be real, I want the fear to be real. That means I’ve spent a lot of time and effort trying to put the player in the position of weakness without making them feel helpless. I want the player to understand just how powerless they are at the beginning, so that if (not when, if) they’re able to turn the tables on their supernatural foes and make it to sunrise, they feel like they’ve earned that privilege.

Tying to maintain that balance between tone and accessibility has been one of the three big challenges of working on A Time of Monsters, and it’s one I desperately hope I’ve managed to nail.

Tell me a little about your background and experience with the World of Darkness and TTRPGs and/or LARPing.

My first experience with tabletop roleplaying games was when I got the Dungeons and Dragons 3.5 starter set at the age of twelve. In the twenty years since then, I’ve played 4th Ed, 5th Ed, Pathfinder, Savage Worlds, Dark Heresy, Shadowrun, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, Lancer, and Blades in the Dark.

But here’s the thing: aside from Vampire: The Masquerade—Bloodlines, I had never played anything – digital or tabletop – set in the World of Darkness. Not “Hunter: The Reckoning,” not “Werewolf: The Apocalypse,” not even “Vampire: The Masquerade.”

This meant that when I was approached to do “Hunter: The Reckoning,” I was starting almost completely fresh – but I was also starting fresh in a world inhabited by many, many people who care deeply about its characters, its history, and its lore.

So, like any newcomer looking not to step on anything dangerous, I looked for guides. When I began the writing process, I sought out playtesters who had the experience that I lacked. Some of them had been deeply involved in the old World of Darkness, some of them were running or playing campaigns in the current edition. One of them had been a “Vampire: The Masquerade” LARPer for almost as long as I’ve been alive. They’ve been the ones who’ve kept a close eye on my narrative as it’s progressed from plot outline to mechanical skeleton to fully-fledged game, and they’re the ones who’ve been keeping me honest through the whole process. If I’ve gotten any of it right, it’s only thanks to their efforts in educating me on a world which they know far more intimately than I do.

What will WOD fans find surprising about your approach to the world of Hunter in A Time of Monsters?

The one thing that stood out for me the most about Hunter was how it’s Gothic Punk in contrast to say, “Vampire: The Masquerade’s” Gothic Horror.

To me, “punk” is a genre which is inherently about power, specifically how those without it are caught up in the machinations of those who have it – and how those powerless, downtrodden bystanders choose to respond to being trampled on by those who may not even be willing to acknowledge their existence.

Most of the World of Darkness game line – and most of its adaptations – have, I think, focused primarily on the perspective of those with power over those who don’t. While a vampire can pretend that they’re a representative of the othered and the marginalised, that the hierarchy of their society shackles them, and the cost of their ‘curse’ robs them of their humanity, that line of argument rings rather hollow when you remember that vampires are still, for the most part, immortal nigh-indestructible superhumans with supernatural powers who inherently see normal mortal human beings as amusing pets at best and prey animals at worst. Their hierarchies constrain them, but they also empower them. Their powers come at a cost, but that hasn’t stopped them from amassing wealth, influence, and the ability to commit spontaneous violence on a scale no individual human can. They’re the equivalent of the privileged members of society who insist that they’re the real victims here, even as they stand richer and more powerful than the vast majority of their society, and even as their ‘victimhood’ consists solely of the fact that a small minority still exist ‘above’ them.

Which brings us to the Hunter.

The Hunter has no inherent supernatural abilities to fall back on. The Hunter has no hierarchy to call for help. The Hunter is a normal human with nothing but their own resources, going up against an enemy which they cannot survive a head-to-head one-on-one fight against: a normal person who’s seen just enough of this other world to know just how dangerous it is to themselves, their loved ones, and their communities.

Some Hunters have personal fortunes to rely on, training, resources, and connections – all factors that can help mitigate their relative weakness. Your Hunter will begin with none of those things. They are, in almost every sense of the word, starting with nothing, facing an enemy which not only outclasses them in every way, but which they have no chance of escaping from.

How they proceed from there is up to the player’s choices, and when inhabiting the life of someone at the bottom of any kind of society, every choice is a compromise. Do you trust those around you to help you, even if they’re barely keeping afloat themselves? Do you look further afield for more capable allies regardless of the cost they might exact? What lines do you cross to get the food and shelter you need to survive, or the weapons and equipment you need to take your fight to the enemy? What terrible people do you cozy up to for support? What awful systems do you perpetuate? Who do you risk helping? Who do you risk opening yourself up to? Who do you betray, if it means living to see another sunrise?

When someone’s back is against the wall and their stomach is empty and their entire future is an endless, hopeless war against a world which sees their existence as an inconvenience and an enemy which seems unstoppable, what kind of decisions do people make? What kind of decisions would you make? And are they ones which let you look in the mirror and say, with complete sincerity, that you are still a better person than the one your circumstances have tried to force you to be?

That, in essence, is my take on Hunter. I’m not sure if it’ll be surprising, especially given how many passionate veterans of the game line there are out there.

But that’s what I’ve got.

Was there a character you enjoyed writing most?

You know, come to think of it, I really enjoyed writing most of the major characters, but I think it was the player character I enjoyed writing the most.

Most of what I’ve written before has been, if not entirely archaic, then a lot more formal than what my conversational style is like. Writing an aristocrat in a Regency-analogue military setting, or even an adventurer in a high fantasy one doesn’t really let me cut loose quite as much as I would if I weren’t writing a certain type of person in a certain kind of place. That applies to the responses the player has access to as well. There are certain social boundaries which can’t be crossed, certain things which the genre conventions or the basic concept of the character doesn’t let you make them say.

But I’m not writing an aristocratic cavalry officer or a high fantasy adventurer or even a WW2-era company commander. This time, I’m writing someone who grew up in and inhabits the same society I do, which means they have a chance to be as irreverent and informal as I’d like to be sometimes – especially in the face of fear and hopelessness. I’ll stress that this is still a choice. They can choose to exhibit as much deference or defiance as they want – but the players who choose to play their Hunters as the kinds of people who don’t feel like they need to restrain themselves around their friends, or show false respect to their enemies, or simply want to occasionally let the intrusive thoughts win? They’ll have some real good material to work with.

If you were the PC in A Time of Monsters, what would your character sheet/customization look like?

To be honest? I have no idea.

I’ve taken a lot of liberties with the base system of “Hunter: The Reckoning.” This wasn’t out of some desire to ‘dumb down’ the mechanics so much as it was from the fact that I’ve always held to the belief that a game with meaningful character creation should have as few stats as it can possibly get away with – so that every point allocated and every character advancement choice made has significant weight.

For A Time of Monsters, this means I stripped down the stats system to its bare essentials – only the things a Hunter would need to survive and investigate and run and fight, no more, no less. Obviously, the base system was designed much the same way, but a system intended for a party-based tabletop game isn’t one that works well for a single-player Choicescript game which follows a single character. A well-balanced Hunter cell can fill all of the roles which the base system allows for, but in A Time of Monsters, you are not playing a well-balanced Hunter cell, unless you can find the allies to make one.

So all this is to kind of say ‘I don’t know’. I know what my strengths and weaknesses are, but I don’t have to go out at night looking for vampire lairs. I might know how strong I am in the gym or how smart I am in front of a desk – but in the dead of night with nothing but a flashlight and an ancient semi-automatic up against some thing which shouldn’t exist but is somehow still bearing down on me faster than any human could possibly move? I’d have no idea.

And I hope I never have the chance to find out.

Why did you choose to set A Time of Monsters in Vancouver?

Simply put? Because I live here.

I’ve lived in probably a dozen places in three countries over the course of my life, but this is the place I’d choose over everywhere else. I genuinely love it here, and I hope that love shows in the way I’ve portrayed not just the city of Vancouver itself, but the area around it, the people who live here, its often-conflicted history, and the culture of British Columbia’s Lower Mainland, as I see it.

Of course, loving a place means also acknowledging its faults, and Vancouver’s faults are ones which tend to create some rather deep hypocrisies: a global port home to multiple diasporas, yet built on land stolen from its original inhabitants; a place open to the world, but only if you can afford the sky-high cost of living; a metropolis which has the potential to be one of the greatest cities in the world but is being strangled by its refusal to grow in the ways that matter. It’s fabulous wealth next to excruciating poverty, high-tech infrastructure next to a spiralling housing shortage, world-class parks next to opioid addiction. It’s deeply complicated and deeply complex place, and part of the reason I chose to set A Time of Monsters here is that I want to show people how I see this city, about the problems it’s facing, and about why I love this place despite those problems.

The end result, I think, is a story which is unabashedly Canadian – and unabashedly Vancouverite. I don’t want my players mistaking the setting of A Time of Monsters for anywhere else in the world, and I’d like to think I’ve succeeded there. It’s almost certainly not a perfect representation, but it’s one which I feel is authentic to how I see the place where I live – and one which reflects my feelings towards it.