Ever since I have gotten back into Dark Conspiracy, I have felt conflicted about various things about the setting. One is the general dynamic of the game itself. It’s the “near future” where the whole economy has collapsed, corporations rule the day and governments are struggling to even exist. I get that. There is a tide of darkness in all that where creatures that were thought legend are arising, new nightmares we have never seen drop out of dimensional gateways and aliens are controlling things from various points behind the scenes. I get that too.
My thoughts delve in a little deeper. What are minion hunters? Are they people that happen to know about the monsters and just throw explosives at them until they go away or are they skilled hunters with knowledge of folklore and arcane arts able to fight one on one with the creatures of the coming darkness? Is Empathy their only valid weapon or is there more? The feeling I have always gotten is there were only two solutions – some Empathic power or blowing it up. Part of the reason I got out of DC was because every adventure I ran seem to end with the group blowing something up. Although fun, it can get repetitive.
What fascinated me about DC was how close in relation some creatures were to real folklore while there were others that were not at all. So you can have a good mix of old and new with a little the slightly misunderstood folklore. What is missing for me is details on existing creatures. Maybe I did not read the details enough but my impressions were that the creature descriptions were relatively vague on vulnerabilities and weaknesses. Yes, some creatures had weaknesses listed bu you had to hunt and find them, while others were non-existent because the category was too broad or only vaguely mentioned.
Dark Conspiracy came out about the same time as the TV show X-files was on and a lot of fans of that show used that to influence their games. Today, shows like Fringe and Supernatural influence me more. I want to steep adventures deeper into folklore and give the players more weapons against their enemies than just dynamite and grenades.
What I want is the minions to have clearly defined weaknesses and those weaknesses somehow hinted at in folklore. Just like the monsters are variations of folklore, the folklore surrounding fighting them might be skewed.
I have been diving into old Challenge magazines and some of the adventures just are not satisfying. The creatures are just straight forward and boring and the plots lines don’t make sense sometimes. How does one avoid just ending these adventures into one big explosion? I want a little more investigative work, more depth in the story. I also want it to make more sense and jive with the setting better.
Perhaps I did no grasp the setting well enough the first time. Maybe I needed to do a little more reading. I do not know. But I am finding myself re-writing a lot when I read the old adventures and changing my perspective on what a Minion Hunter really is.