Boy, everyone is hunting monsters these days. The blood of alien behemoths had barely dried on our hands before we were thrust into a damned Victorian metropolis where werewolves, vampires and stranger beings stalk the darkness. This time, we’re rounding up a crew of five souls to brave Dread Nights, a standalone Forbidden Psalm expansion.
In Dread Nights, you will make a crew of five people belonging to one of the peculiar monster-fighting factions of the city. Just like in Forbidden Psalm, you’ll assign them one of two stat arrays – and there is no dump stat, so all of the choices matter. Lastly, you’ll spend your budget on weapons, armor, and stakes. Then you’ll head out into the night!The tests in the game are resolved with D20 rolls – a result of 12 or more is a success(with exceptions). Other sizes of dice come into play mostly when scoring damage with weapons. It’s an easy system to grasp; it worked in Forbidden Psalm and it doesn’t suffer any from being cast into a world where firearms exist. Dread Nights provides a dozen unique scenarios and two repeatable ones. The players – in solo, coop, or versus modes – face of powerful monsters of the night. No matter the type of the foe, they’re all driven by a simple-yet-workable AI (or scenario rules) Some enemies are straightforward, like animated corpses and vampire familiars. Others are weirder than even vampires and werewolves. Some of these monsters can even infect your team members with their curses!So you’d think that Dread Nights, where the world is dark, chargen is fast, and a character will outright die if they get hit when downed would be very brutal about death and lycanthropy. But it isn’t! NPC monsters don’t attack downed characters, you can save one character per game for free, you may spend crew XP to bring back a guy with a new flaw, and you can even pay the Apothecary a whole lot of dosh to make a dude immortal. And the curse of vampirism/lycanthropy/ghoulism? They actually give the character benefits – the downside is that they may turn into an NPC during a mission (they get better later). And if you complete the mission to heal them, they get a different set of bonuses and immunity to any further illnesses. This is so good it hurts!On the other hand, your fortunes can be very swingy when it comes to your budget and advancement. Cassa managed to roll the “Thief” flaw for three of his characters. This means that he lost 15 gold immediately after every mission. On the other hand, I managed to score a ridiculous amount of XP after our second playtest via sheer monster-slaying luck. One absolutely amazing feature in Dread Nights campaign play is the Artefacts. They range from a diving suit to Chechov’s Gun – which must be fired during a mission or it will shoot the character afterward. And all of them are unique – once someone has the Sword of the Space Knight, nobody can find a second one. In conclusion, Dread Nights is a great twist on the Forbidden Psalm formula. The book is a treat for the eye, the fiction is captivating, and the gameplay is full of all sorts of neat decisions that are bound to delight a player. So play it – and if you do, write us if you manage to blow up a vampire by throwing a grenade down their throat!
