Night’s Black Agents: Double Tap is a ‘gear book’ from 2013, a collection of new equipment, background and game material for GM and players, written by Ken Hite and several others. It’s an expansion for Night’s Black Agents, an RPG of modern tactical espionage and vampires, also written by Ken Hite and published by Pelgrane Press in 2011. It’s a really interesting book whether you play NBA or not, and we think you’ll enjoy our far-ranging discussion of it and the issues it raises.
Click here to see NBA: Double Tap on DriveThruRPG
Click here to see the Night’s Black Agents RPG on DriveThruRPG
This episode was made possible by Juicy Garland, a performer on All Our Faults Monsterhearts 2 podcast.
We gave the main Night’s Black Agents RPG rulebook the Ludonarrative Dissidents treatment in the early days of the podcast, back in the heady not-quite-worked out-what-we’re-doing days of season 1 episode 4. When any of the team or these notes refers to ‘NBA’ they are talking about Night’s Black Agents, not basketball, at least in this episode.
Show Notes
These are the shownotes for NBA: Double Tap, where we delve a bit further into things that we don’t have time to explore in detail in the podcast itself, with links where relevant. In many cases clicking on the links helps to support the podcast.
The Palladium Book of Weapons and Armour by Mathew Balent, possibly the first RPG ‘gearbook’, was released by Palladium in 1981 and was one of the company’s very first books. It is still available, in an updated form.
Chromebook was the four-volume gearbook series for the original Cyberpunk RPG (and also, as Google keeps insisting, a series of small Android-based laptops from HP). Oozing style and WD-40 in equal measure, they remain a milestone in the graphical presentation of RPGs, and a fascinating insight into what 1991 thought 2020 technology would be like. (Hint: it would have been difficult to be wronger.)
The Book of Ebon Bindings (1978) is a demonology supplement for Empire of the Petal Throne, allegedly written by Tsémel Qurén hiKétkolel of the Clan of the Great Stone, High Ritual Priest of Lord Ksárul, the Doomed Prince of the Blue Room, concerning the nature, summoning and binding of the demons of the Tsolyáni empire. It’s the first RPG supplement we’re aware of that’s presented as an in-world document, an artefact of the culture it’s describing. It is a brilliantly written piece of game background and culture-building by one of the early masters of the craft. Tsolyáni demons are not Christian demons, though they could be mistaken for each other by an excitable non-gamer in the early 1980s, and the rituals described in the book sometimes involve human sacrifice and worse. As far as I know it was never actually cited in any of the literature of the Satanic Panic, for which we can all be grateful. The book seems to be out of print and somewhat collectible these days.
One can’t mention Empire of the Petal Throne today without referencing the fact that after his death in 2012, it was discovered that the game’s author Professor MAR Barker had been on the editorial advisory committee of an academic journal that advocated holocaust denial, and in 1991 had published a neo-Nazi novel under a pseudonym. An odd move for a man who had converted to Islam and changed his given name from ‘Phil’ to ‘Muhammad Abd-al-Rahman’ in 1951. The world of Tékumel remains awe-inspiring, but is forever tainted.
The World of Darkness was the name for the setting of White Wolf’s core RPGs published in the early-mid 90s, including Vampire: the Masquerade (which we will be covering in season 3 episode 7), Werewolf: the Apocalypse, Mage: the Ascension, Wraith: the Oblivion, and Changeling: the Dreaming. As I’ve said in earlier shownotes, most of you will know that but a few of you won’t, and we are not going to make any assumptions about our listenership’s demographics, not least because most of this happened 30+ years ago. We were there, but we realise some of you weren’t even cellular yet.
‘Circles and arrows on the back of each one’ is a misquoted reference to Arlo Guthrie’s Alice’s Restaurant, where you can get anything you want. If you don’t know it then do listen to the whole thing; if you do know it then you’re probably listening to it already because it’s one of those tracks that never gets old. Arlo Guthrie is Woody Guthrie’s son. This red VW microbus kills fascists.
‘TCIP’: we believe Greg meant TCP/IP, please don’t write in.
Getting a USB to fit first time: this is 25-year-old technology and I’m sure everyone knows this already and you do not need to be told but: the side of the plug with the two empty square holes goes upwards. It really is as simple as that. Or mark the ‘up’ side with a Sharpie.
Tribes of Tokyo was the Night’s Black Agents campaign that Ross ran in 2013. The whole thing is online for your listening pleasure.
Ronin is the seminal post-Bond pre-Jason Bourne techspionage movie from 1998, starring Robert de Niro, Jean Reno, Sean Bean and Natascha McElhone, directed by John Frankenheimer from a script by David Mamet and John David Zeik. It won’t change your life but does its job well and the car chases in Nice and Paris are particularly good.
Mission Impossible is two separate franchises: the nine-season TV series (1968-73 and 1988-90) and the increasingly implausible series of Tom Cruise movies, now up to seven over eighteen years. There has never been an official RPG of either, which is a shame.
You know who Tom Clancy is, of course, but to bring this back to the world of RPGs, former White Wolf developer Rich Dansky later moved to Red Storm Entertainment, Tom Clancy’s videogame company, where he became ‘Chief Clancy Writer’ for many years. Rich is one of the good guys, and now a guru of writing for interactive media, as well as creating some rather good novels. He’s also an NPC in the Unknown Armies adventure ‘And I Feel Fine’ by Geoffrey C. Grabowski, in which Jenna Moran also appears.
If you only know John Woo from his somewhat lacklustre output for American movies (though Face/Off remains delightfully bonkers), you owe it to yourself to check out his genre-defining ‘heroic bloodshed’ Hong Kong output from the 1980s, particularly A Better Tomorrow, A Better Tomorrow II, Bullet In The Head, The Killer and the astonishing Hard Boiled. As you watch Hard Boiled, remember that the three-minute single-shot hospital shootout was done entirely in-camera, in the era before CGI.
“It’s it’s, Mommy. It’s flavor.” No, AI transcription software, we said ‘Umami‘, the fifth flavour (savoury, or richness). Just as there are more than five senses, there are far more than five flavours, of course (hotness, coolness, starch, putrefaction, &c.), some of them not tasteable by humans.
‘The Great Game’ is historically the rivalry between the British and Russian empires in the nineteenth century, mostly expressed through conflict in the middle east. The term has been picked up and misused ever since, though usually still in the context of international political and espionage machinations.
Achievements in games date back to 1982, when the instruction booklets in Activision games told players that if they could set a certain high score, take a photo of the screen and send it to the company, they would receive a physical iron-on patch as a reward. Purely in-game achievements date from 1990 and E-Motion. In RPGs the first implementation I’m aware of is Robin Laws’ Pantheon (2000) which we’ve mentioned before, one of Hogshead’s New Style games, in which players receive victory points by being the first to do or fulfil certain genre-appropriate actions within the narrative. Achievements are an under-appreciated mechanic, much abused by gamification merchants.
Gordon Ramsay is a British chef with multiple Michelin stars to his name, best known these days for the TV programmes in which he swears at chefs who are not as good as he is. My brother-in-law reports that off camera he is still an asshole.
Yojimbo is Akira Kurosawa’s much-copied movie of a village occupied by two warring gangs, and the stranger who comes to town and turns them against each other. (“Signor Leone,” Kurosawa wrote to the director of A Fistful of Dollars, “I have just had the chance to see your film. It is a very fine film, but it is my film.”) If you haven’t seen it you really should, if only so that you too can steal its plot.
Toon is a 1984 RPG from Steve Jackson Games, a wonderfully silly game based on the slapstick antics of animated characters of a Warner Bros ilk. It was written by Greg ‘Paranoia/Star Wars RPG‘ Costikyan and Warren ‘Deus Ex‘ Spector, both of whom went on to be heavyweights in the world of videogame design and game design theory, which gives you some idea of its pedigree. On the other hand it’s from Steve Jackson Games so it’s not exactly lightweight or untraditional in terms of its mechanics. Nevertheless, a delight and a classic.
Feng Shui is Robin Laws’ RPG based heavily on the vibe of Hong Kong action movies, including the oeuvre of John Woo (see above), though ostensibly it was the RPG of the Shadowfist collectible card game, published originally by Daedalus and now available from Atlas Games. Heavily recommended.
The Wallis/Howitt/Dean Paranoia reboot – I seem to describe this in every set of shownotes.
The origin of ‘grabbing the brass ring’.
Kieron Gillen’s advice for RPG players – you should read this, it’s very good and not long.
Greg’s advice on how to run an RPG and how to play an RPG are downloadable here. It’s a zip file so your computer’s security may be worried, but everything’s fine, honestly.
That XKCD comic about geology and knowledge.
In case you were wondering whether there are any extinct volcanoes near Venice, it depends on your definition of ‘near’. The closest ones are part of the Campanian volcanic arc, but that mostly runs south of Rome, and the nearest of those to Venice is the Colli Albani which hasn’t erupted for over 35000 years. Distance to Venice: 550 kms. You can drive it in five hours, or considerably faster if you’re Natascha McElhone.
A Penanggalan is a disembodied floating head and intestines, that can transform into a motorcycle. The Wikipedia entry doesn’t include the motorcycle bit, which is why you need a copy of Double Tap.
Of course, there’s also this.
Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 1e is the 1980s forebear of the game we covered in Season 2 episode 02, and was once published by James’s company Hogshead Publishing. Mechanically it’s notable for making Fate Points a big thing, and also a pretty nifty career system, and the presence of a small but vicious dog.
Deities & Demigods was a legendary book for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, written by Jeff Grubb and released in 1980. In the podcast we allude to the fact that the first printing is highly collectible because it includes the gods of the Cthulhu and Elric mythoses. TSR did obtain permission for this, but both properties had separately been licensed to Chaosium, which threatened legal action.
Fangoria was and is an American magazine of horror cinema, launched in 1979. In the age before the internet, or at least before images and video could be quickly uploaded and downloaded, it was the bible of horror fans around the world and the source of information on movies that you might otherwise never have heard of. It also had a knack of making them look much more interesting than they often were. It took me almost thirty years to view Hell Comes To Frogtown and my friends, it was not worth the wait, although the makeup effects are still very cool.
Dragula is a song by Rob Zombie about one of the two cars from the TV show The Munsters, specifically the one built around a coffin, not the one Mr Zombie is seen driving in the video. The car in the show was literally built around an actual coffin, which is probably cooler than anything in the song.
Robert Eggars has directed a version of Nosferatu and here is the trailer.
Greg’s reference to the 1988 version of The Blob is a callback to our discussion of Blob-related matters in season 3 episode 2.
The Netflix Daredevil series was part of the early lappings of the Marvel Content Tsunami, appearing on the streaming service in 2015-2018 and running three seasons. Reviewers at the time liked it quite a bit, and everyone agreed that Vincent D’Onofrio as the Kingpin was excellent.
The cowboy in Dracula, Quincey Morris, is the most forgotten character in almost any great classic work of literature, to the extent that if you tell people that a full-on cowboy has a fairly major role in Dracula they won’t believe you. But he’s there.
Flashbacks and the preparedness ability: Gumshoe, Robin D. Laws’s investigative RPG that forms the mechanical basis of much of Pelgrane Press’s RPG output is probably the most notable example before Blades in the Dark, though it wasn’t the first: the great 3:16 Carnage Among The Stars had one, as did Hot War, InSpectres and Leverage, to name a few.
Dominion is Donald X. Vaccarino’s hugely successful card game of deck-building a tiny kingdom, generally acknowledged as the first deck-building game but not the first game to use deck-building as a system. Vaccarino’s genius was to take something that Magic and other CCGs had kept separate from the actual on-table gameplay, and move it to the heart of the gameplay. Sometimes that’s all it takes to create an industry-changing hit.
As always the episode hosts were Ross Payton, Greg Stolze and James Wallis, audio editing by Ross, show notes by James. If anything in this episode has spurred your interest then come and discuss it on our Discord.
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