The basic premise of “Against the Darkness” is that good and evil as embodied in Angels and Devils are real; and that within the Church is a cadre of very specially blessed individuals who battle this evil aided by the grace of God. The rules are simple but elegant and capture the flavor of the genre fairly well.
Each character has four ability stats: Corpus (Body), Mentus (Mind), Spiritus (Spirit) and Fidelis (Faith/Belief/Hope). Characters are built using a combination of a point pool (or random rolls) and assigning resolution dice to these abilities. This interesting mechanic requires you to assign one of four sizes of dice, one to each stat. You get one d8, two d6, and one d4 to assign. This decision is critical to your character concept since whatever stat is assigned the d8 becomes the primary focus of the character and is the stat upon which your miraculous abilities are based.
Task resolution is a die roll vs. a target number based on the GM’s determination of the task difficulty. The roll uses whatever die type you assigned to the relevant ability score. This roll is modified by the ability score and any points you’ve assigned to skills relevant to the task at hand. Tasks are either straight target numbers; or opposed rolls in which you match your roll against your antagonist’s roll.
“Miracles” are the special talents and divine abilities granted by the Deity to the character- such things as Telepathy, Preternatural Endurance or Speed, a Healing touch, or unrivalled luck. Of course your enemies, the devils and demons, have special abilities as well- in their case called “Blasphemies”.
Combat is relatively simple. Opposed rolls with the loser taking one wound point against the relevant ability. Rather than having a diversity of wound results, different weapons or miracles provide bonuses to the opposed rolls. Physical attacks do damage to Corpus (ultimately leading to death), or Fidelis leading to insanity.
The rest of the rules spells out different types of campaigns; from the slightly humorous (in the vein of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, pun intended) to the Apocalyptic. Various genre archetypes are discussed, and adventure hooks along with sample characters are presented.
Want to unravel ancient coded mysteries within the Vatican’s archives? You can do it. Expose the plans of a demonic cult’s bid for world domination? You can do it. Explore the destiny of a man aided by Angelic heritage (or burdened with Demonic ancestry)? You can do that too. These rules are simple enough to handle them all without being too simplistic.
Clearly the success of this game lay in the hands of the Game Master. He/she will set the tone and drive the narrative flow of the game. When everyone playing is really on their game, they will have a lot of fun with Against the Darkness. There is almost limitless opportunity for secret societies, dark conspiracies, biblical curses, archaeological exploration or anything else the GM can imagine to throw against the players.
While the default assumption is that of a mystery shrouded order of heroes within the Christian church, you can easily port them into a secret government organization, or even a clandestine unit of mercenaries. The key point being that these are people who know the truth about the darkness, and still choose to stand against it. It doesn’t get much more Heroic than that now, does it?
