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HERE BE SPOILERS.
The Story
The plot is straightforward: the PCs, who are probably paranormal investigators of some kind, arrive in a fictional Texas town to help a woman whose family is suffering under the weight of hostile haunting. The PCs quickly learn that the problems are probably connected with the house next door, where a Nazi fugitive lived and died, and go to confront the hostile force there. They discover that the Nazi left behind a secret legacy, and must deal with both living and dead opposition on their way to settling it all and bringing peace to victimized ghosts and living neighbors.
When I read the adventure for the first time, I thought, "Hey, this mystery is awfully easy to solve." Then I realized that it isn't a mystery in that sense. There's basically no chance at all that the PCs will fail to learn where they should go or (some of) what they're up against. The challenge is in learning the details, which comes through thorough investigation, and in dealing with the unexpected aspects of the opposition.
The backstory is well-constructed, with obvious parallels to real-world affairs. The dead Nazi was an occultist and concentration camp doctor, who managed to bind a lot of ghosts to himself in his pursuit of immortality. When he settled in Texas (after a period as a fugitive hither and yon), he built up a new cabal among local authorities and respected figures to continue his work. Now he's gone, the bound ghosts are at loose ends, and his erstwhile disciples have their own plans for it all.
The haunting is equally well-constructed, with a timetable for escalating phenomena plus free-floating incidents. Each part of the Nazi's house and the house next door comes mapped and described with mundane and paranormal details, and the whole panoply of haunting events are here: mysterious voices, ectoplasmic manifestations, friendly and unfriendly communications, a seance run amok, and so on.
What really makes it work, though, is the characters. The unfortunate family are all really engaging, with an emphasis on the fatigue and strain of being constantly afraid and defensive. (There's also a clear answer to the question "Why not go somewhere else?" The ghosts followed them.) There's the widowed mother and her two children, and I found them immensely sympathetic and engaging characters. My players found them so, too, I think, with a lot of our play being more or less free-form interaction with the family. I found plenty of support in the adventure for winging it with dialogue and action well beyond the necessities of the plot. These are folks worth helping, and that's crucial.
The Adventure
12 to Midnight provide two versions of the adventure in the same archive, one with color illustrations and bells and whistles in the layout, one with much less art and simpler layout intended for printing. Both come thoroughly bookmarked. (My heroes!)
The props are great. There are photos of the family and various supernatural phenomena at work, and nearly all of them are excellent. I don't know who played the tired mother, scared and worn girl, or detached boy, but they really brought the parts to life. The ghostly manifestation in the bathroom mirror, the mysteriously fogged photos in the Nazi's house, and a lot else looked great. The revenant guardian didn't work so well, I'm afraid; sorry, but it just wasn't impressive. But that makes it the exception. Photo illustration seldom works in gaming, but here it was very much the right thing. The floor plans were also great: the houses felt entirely plausible, and marked out absolutely everything I needed to know in play. Finally, the newspaper article and miscellaneous handouts were great.
I must give special thanks here for a unique set of play aids: a downloadable set of 5-10 second MP3 files, each containing one of the ghostly voices characters might encounter in the course of play. They are creepy. Very well done, and awesomely atmospheric and mood-building. I've never encountered anything like it in play, and am completely delighted with them. The photos' conformity with real-world parapsychological claims moves my production rating from average to good, and the MP3s move it from good to excellent.
The adventure isn't perfect. It's a little weak in insertion points, for one thing. Since campaigns making use of this kind of paranormal investigation are relatively rare, I'd have liked to see some more discussion of how PCs might get together for such work, how that kind of business works in real life, and so on. I could dig up enough to suit the purpose when I ran it, but then I've been soaking in this stuff just like the 12 to Midnight guys. Also, I'd have liked to see the realization I described above - about it not really being a mystery in the sense of finding out what's responsible - spelled out explicitly. Maybe I came at it with a skewed perspective, but I spent some time in mental dead ends before insight dawned.
I'm not sure the timing for the final confrontations works as presented. It seems like the characters could end up locked in the Nazi's basement fighting an undead guardian for a really long time, as measured in d20 combat rounds, until the ex-disciples showed up. I moved the triggering ward further out into the house at large so as to get them on their way more quickly. But this is a relatively straightforward twist. Somewhat more serious, at least for my group, is the fact that, um, when we worked on "paranormal investigator" characters, we spent precious little time on combat ability at all. I was actually running this in Hunter: The Reckoning with imbued PCs, so they had supernatural resources of their own, but typical un-fight-y un-powered characters could be in real trouble. If you run this adventure, encourage your players to think of backgrounds that can provide some combat experience and also a few weapons, or they're awfully likely to end up dead on the floor themselves.
There's also what I consider one highly unsatisfying element in the climax, with the Nazi's soul getting away in mummy form in a way the PCs cannot stop or interfere with at all. There's mention of later adventures planned for the guy to show up in, but I'd have felt I ripped off my players using this bit as is. I therefore changed it so that he's decisively banished from the living world and his victims released. This took me whole seconds of effort, and was not a big deal. I'd suggest that if 12 to Midnight want to leave similarly unresolved elements in future adventures, they provide some discussion of ways to use the escaped antagonists in the future, in fairly concrete terms. In my experience, players will take some lack of closure if there's the prospect of eventually settling it later, but in any event, for a one-shot, anything in the way of "he gets away" should be optional. I'd like to see the alternative, "he's nailed but good", made primary.
On the other hand, the aftermath discussion is excellent, covering various layers of civic response to unpleasant revelations. Classic motifs of the genre turn up here, and the PCs are likely to leave town unappreciated by anyone but the family next door, just as it should be.
A Few Words on Nazis
This warrants a heading of its own. In too much pop culture, Nazis are useless buffoons. I don't think that the Nazis stand alone among the great evils of the 20th century - in terms of raw numbers and percentage of population killed, there are Communist and independent tyrannies that share that dubious honor. But even so, the Holocaust was a remarkable and distinctive crime against humanity, and the regime that perpetrated it was not cute, cuddly, or silly. It was smart, well-organized, and thoroughly evil.
I therefore have a tough time enjoying entertainment that sets up the Nazis as easy targets, quick to take down, stupid, and otherwise acting as basic straight men. I admit to approaching Last Rites of the Black Guard with a bit of caution because of this. What I found fully satisfied my concerns. There's no glossing over the individual or collective wrongs done. The dead Nazi is not in any sense a comic figure, and his American collaborators are clearly evil as well. Their victims are diverse and distinct, their responses to suffering and their ability to cope with it all equally diverse. The ways evil rebounds to make future generations of victims as misery is passed on rather than healed.
This is a responsible use of real tragedy for fictional purposes.
Tweaking
As I mentioned a couple paragraphs back, I ran this for friends interested in playing Hunter. It worked great. With second sight, the PCs spent more time dealing with ghosts that otherwise they'd have had to hunt out and perhaps miss contact with, and a couple secrets became easy reveals. But the atmosphere came through intact, and my players were very satisfied with it. So was I.
Adapting Last Rites of the Black Guard for other modern-day games would also be pretty easy, I think. The town of Rosetta could easily move to places other than Texas, and the nature of the challenges presented is such that any game about character who are basically normal people, even if they have some extraordinary abilities, would work for it. The NPCs all come with enough description that I had no problem understanding the intent of the stats, nor any hardship converting them over.
Summary
Excellent work. I'm now very keen to run Bloodlines, the second adventure from the same crew. (I might use it to give Savage Worlds a try.) I'll be looking for future releases, and expect to find more enjoyment. I don't want it to sound like any of my criticisms add up to reasons you should spurn or avoid this adventure: despite what I regard as weaknesses, it is hands-down one of the neatest, most distinctive modern-day horror adventures I've encountered in a long time, and I am very glad I bought and ran it.
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