History TabletopGame / HunterTheReckoning

* FightsLikeANormal: While the Imbued have a degree of Supernatural power, they mostly have to rely on mundane methods, such as guns and exploiting Supernatural weaknesses, to fight monsters

* NotUsingTheZWord: Hunters generally avoid using the actual names of the other gamelines, replacing them with either clinical or insulting terms ("rots" and "corpses" for the undead generally, "bloodsuckers" and "parasites" for vampires, "shapechangers" for werewolves, "warlocks" and "witches" for mages, etc.) Mostly this is a cultural thing, but when posting on hunter-net.org it's an opsec issue -- even though hunter-net itself is magically warded to be invisible to outsiders, [=Witness1=] still cautions Hunters to use [[UnusualEuphemism coded language]] when describing supernatural beings online for safety's sake. As a result you'll see the actual word "vampire" asterisked out as "v*mp*r*s" on occasion.

* HaveYouSeenMyGod: Religious Hunters are, of course, absolutely certain that God is on their side and is the source of all their powers, but the Big Man himself is conspicuously absent from this setting -- to the extent the Messengers communicate anything about themselves at all they communicate that they are merely, well, Messengers, and provide no information about who exactly it is they're carrying messages from. (God's absence is explored in much greater depth in the sister game to ''Hunter'', ''TabletopGame/DemonTheFallen''.)

** ''Hunter: Holy War'' tells us that Muslim Hunters in the Middle East take their terminology from Literature/TheQuran, naming their primary supernatural enemies after the four pagan nations struck down by Allah with the coming of Islam, the Adites ([[TabletopGame/VampireTheMasquerade Vampires]]), the Amalikites ([[TabletopGame/WraithTheOblivion Wraiths]]), the Midianites ([[TabletopGame/WerewolfTheApocalypse Werewolves and other shapeshifters]]), and the Thalmudites ([[TabletopGame/WraithTheOblivion Risen]] and [[TabletopGame/KindredOfTheEast Kuei-jin]]). Note that in the case of the Adites this is AccidentallyCorrectWriting in-universe, possibly under influence of the Messengers -- the Adites building the great city of Ad and turning to the worship of the three idols therein eerily parallels the story of the First City of Enoch built by the Antediluvians, where the True Black Hand (the secret cabal that manipulated vampire society from behind the scenes) worshipped the mysterious beings known as the Aralu (which is what led to the Sixth Great Maelstrom and the Imbuing).

* GlamourFailure: The Imbued's 'second sight' enables them to see through the various supernaturals' {{Masquerade}}s, which is generally how said supernaturals notice the imbued at all.

* FightsLikeNormal: While the Imbued have a degree of Supernatural power, they mostly have to rely on mundane methods, such as guns and exploiting Supernatural weaknesses, to fight monsters

* GadgeteerGenius: Hunters of the Entrepreneurial Creed are essentially this, along with any Hunters that possess the "Improvised Gear" edge.

* BadassNormal: Most hunters in the fifth edition. They still have something called "edges," but instead of being magical powers they now consist of mostly mundane advantages like being a skilled hacker or having ready access to guns.

Being relatively new to the shadows of the World of Darkness, these new 'hunters' don't have much of a shared community or vocabulary; the closest thing they have is Hunter-net, a website where they can get together and share what they know. This being the Internet, it can often be more trouble than it's worth.

Following the original game's cancellation, along with the rest of the Old World of Darkness, in 2004, it was announced in 2021 that a new edition of ''Reckoning'' was slated for release as part of the resurrected World of Darkness begun by TabletopGame/VampireTheMasqueradeFifthEdition.

!!'''BEHOLD THE TROPES''':

** This gets taken UpToEleven in ''Hunter: First Contact'', pitting the Imbued against other HunterOfMonsters factions from the 1995 "Year of the Hunter" supplements published in other games: It is an ''absolute certainty'' that other "hunters" like members of the [[ChurchMilitant Society of Leopold]], the FBI's [[ParanormalInvestigation Special Affairs Division]] (or the actually-in-the-know GovernmentConspiracy that is White Wolf's version of the [[NoSuchAgency NSA]]), the scholars of the Arcanum, etc. will think of the Imbued as just another kind of "supernatural entity", and that the Society of Leopold will most likely dismiss the Imbued's claims of being blessed by angels as blasphemy and chalk them up to demonic possession.

* SpiritualSuccessor: White Wolf repeatedly argued ''Hunter: the Reckoning'' was ''not'' meant as a direct successor to ''Hunters Hunted'', ''Project Twilight'' or any other "humans vs. the supernatural" book in the gameline, but it was pretty clearly seen as such by most people anyway. Notably, even though the Imbued are repeatedly stated to ''not'' be the same kind of thing as Inquisitors from the Order of Leopold and many of them are outright hostile to Christianity and traditional religious faith, White Wolf nonetheless published the ''Dark Ages: Inquisitor'' book showing medieval Inquisitors to have analogous powers and organization to the Imbued (thanks to True Faith being far more prevalent then).

* ImmuneToMindControl: See NoSell -- this is one of the most powerful and essential features of Second Sight. However, Hunter aren't ''constantly'' immune to mind control, only when they have their Second Sight active, and without it are as vulnerable as any other human. The ability to "react with Conviction" (to sense they're about to be mind controlled and activate Second Sight defensively) is a variant rule and one that requires a successful Willpower roll to pull off.

%%* ShockAndAwe: The Blast edge, available to Defenders.
%%* SociopathicHero: A Wayward is at best a literal example.

%%* StoneWall: Most Defense edges, unsurprisingly.%%Are examples how?

** Hunters have to do improvise a lot of their equipment, since, unlike the other gamelines, they have no social institutions whatsoever to lean on for support and are just random civilians who went crazy one day and were told by the voices in their heads to kill monsters. White Wolf brought some notoriety on themselves by having the Wayward creedbook include discussion of how to improvise a fertilizer car bomb, among other things.

* RippedFromTheHeadlines: One of the UnintentionalPeriodPiece aspects of this setting is ''Hunter: Apocrypha'' naming as one of the five portents of the end-times the then-hot news story of the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_F._Kennedy_Jr. death of JFK Jr.]], something that very few people were likely to remember as one of the most "apocalyptic" things that happened at the TurnOfTheMillennium (at least until Trump's presidency, when conspiracy theories about his having survived started bubbling up).

** There is one major exception to the above rule -- the "true Demons" from ''TabletopGame/DemonTheFallen'', the sister gameline of ''Hunter: the Reckoning'', can possess Extremist Hunters (who have attained Level 5 in their primary Virtue, i.e. Hunters who've successfully reached the limits of their potential), and by so doing become extremely powerful. (In terms of the Demon gameline, the Imbued have the highest Faith rating a human host can have and therefore immediately give the Demon character a huge mana pool to draw from.) It's hinted that this is because the Messengers and the Demons are similar, and the Messengers' ''intended'' outcome for a Hunter -- a "Divine Extremist" -- is just allowing yourself to be possessed by unfallen angels the way becoming a Corrupt Extremist is allowing yourself to be possessed by a fallen one.

* NotUsingTheZWord: Hunters generally avoid using the actual names of the other gamelines, replacing them with either clinical or insulting terms ("rots" and "corpses" for the undead generally, "bloodsuckers" and "parasites" for vampires, "shapechangers" for werewolves, "warlocks" and "witches" for mages, etc.) Mostly this is a cultural thing, but when posting on hunter-net.org it's an infosec issue -- even though hunter-net itself is magically warded to be invisible to outsiders, [=Witness1=] still cautions Hunters to use [[UnusualEuphemism coded language]] when describing supernatural beings online for safety's sake. As a result you'll see the actual word "vampire" asterisked out as "v*mp*r*s" on occasion.

However they react -- talking, shouting, attacking, defending - they find themselves gifted with supernatural abilities, just enough to extricate themselves from the situation.

* StoneWall: Most Defense edges, unsurprisingly.

* SuperpowerLottery: One very relevant complaint about Hunter is that compared to the open-endedness of Mage Spheres or even of Vampire Disciplines, Hunter Edges are absurdly limited and situational -- you only get to do very specific things (like make a cloud of smoke or throw a weapon really hard) that are only useful in very specific circumstances. The Edges for each Creed are only vaguely thematically related to each other and seem like an arbitrary grab-bag, and the rule for advancement only give you a ''very'' limited ability to pick-and-choose to customize your character (when you earn a level-3 Edge you ''must'' pick one from the very limited options for level-3 Edges in that particular Creed, and can never sub it out for having two level-2 Edges instead or an Edge from a different Creed).
** This is to some degree addressed in-universe -- the Messengers who gave the Imbued their powers seem to be keeping them on a ''very'' tight leash, with hints that they're ''terrified'' of what might happen should they [[GrewBeyondTheirProgramming evolve beyond their limitations]]. If the Hunters really are the second coming of the [[TabletopGame/{{Exalted}} Solar Exalted]] and/or the ''[[TabletopGame/KindredOfTheEast wan xian]]'', this fear seems entirely appropriate.

[[caption-width-right:300:Defeat the [[TabletopGame/OldWorldOfDarkness other game lines]] [[KillEmAll and die trying]].]]

* KillEmAll: In the canon story hunters are assumed to have brief careers, since they're fighting forces they usually don't understand using powers they also don't understand. As such, entire groups eat it fairly regularly.

Shortly before the turn of the millennium, people across the world start to receive strange messages - voices in their heads, words on pages rewriting themselves, graffiti that wasn't there a moment ago.

However they react - talking, shouting, attacking, defending - they find themselves gifted with supernatural abilities, just enough to extricate themselves from the situation.

Terminology: [[PlayerCharacters PCs]] are known as ''hunters'' or ''imbued'', and are divided into nine ''creeds'' - Avengers (kill the monsters), Defenders (protect people from the monsters), Judges (make decisions about the monsters), Innocents (don't assume the monsters are monstrous), Martyrs (sacrifice themselves to stop the monsters), Redeemers (save the monsters from themselves), Visionaries (ask the big questions about the monsters), Hermits (seclude themselves and provide information about the monsters) and Waywards (kill the monsters, and anybody who gets in their way, and anybody who gets caught in the crossfire...). Their powers are ''Edges'', and the moment when they first see through the Masquerade is their ''imbuing''. The entities who send the messages, and perform the imbuing, are known as the ''Messengers''... although the true identity of these benefactors remains unknown, with guesses spanning from angelic messengers to God Himself to the collective will of Mankind. People who fail to act at the imbuing yet somehow survive are ''bystanders''.

Unusually for a White Wolf product, the terminology is rarely used in-game; the imbued don't have a fixed shared vocabulary for their experiences, and come up with their own words for what's going on (though some become common parlance through Hunter-net).

* BlackAndGrayMorality: Defenders of the other White Wolf gamelines would call it GrayAndGrayMorality, but the fact of the matter is there are plenty of straight-up monsters to be found among every species of supernatural entity and even the most indiscriminate monster hunter will probably end up mostly killing sumbitches who needed killing. The real issue is how difficult it is to keep up the fight against monsters -- who invariably force you into inflicting and accepting collateral damage to other humans despite your best efforts -- [[HeWhoFightsMonsters without becoming one yourself]].

* NiceJobBreakingItHero: Not all monsters are evil, but more zealous hunters might opt to whack them anyway, which can lead to this.

* MiddleEasternTerrorists: After hinting at the idea for a while, ''Hunter: Holy War'' went ahead and told us that there is in fact a huge network of Middle Eastern Imbued -- far more organized and effective than the Western Hunters we've been following so far -- who are primarily devout Muslims and who are, indeed, treated by the governments of their home countries as a terrorist organization. The narrator of ''Holy War'' fiercely disclaims any connection with actual mundane terrorist organizations like Al-Qaeda, of course, but the book remains somewhat uncomfortable and controversial.
** It even extended to openly stating that Hunters become more numerous and more powerful the closer their Imbuing was to the holy cities of Jerusalem and Mecca, that Middle Eastern Hunters have no need for hunter-net because they can telepathically commune with each other while meditating on the scriptures, that Middle Eastern Hunters get access to the Martyr Edges for free, etc.

* {{Muggles}}: Player characters always start this way. The contrast between Muggle life and the horrifying truth is one of the central themes of the game.

** Hunters have to do a lot of this, since unlike the other gamelines they have no social institutions whatsoever to lean on for support and are just random civilians who went crazy one day and were told by the voices in their heads to kill monsters. White Wolf brought some notoriety on themselves by having the Wayward creedbook include discussion of how to improvise a fertilizer car bomb, among other things.

* MacGyvering: Hunters have to do a lot of this, since unlike the other gamelines they have no social institutions whatsoever to lean on for support and are just random civilians who went crazy one day and were told by the voices in their heads to kill monsters. White Wolf brought some notoriety on themselves by having the Wayward creedbook include discussion of how to improvise a fertilizer car bomb, among other things.
** There's also the Terrible Swift Sword (named for the line from "The Battle Hymn of the Republic"), a special application of the Cleave Edge discovered accidentally by a member of the Avenger Creed who was also an [[FanOfThePast amateur swordsmith]] and RenaissanceFair enthusiast. Any melee weapon, however crude or clumsy -- so long as it's made by hand by the Avenger themselves -- can be imbued with a little bit of their power, allowing it to be a permanent channel for the aggravated damage done by Cleave.