Nightbane

Nightbane has always been an incredible game. This is Palladium's answer to the World of Darkness series, but instead of classic movie monsters providing the character types, it draws on characters and forms from our dreams and nightmares. What comes out is a twisted mishmash of strange characters pulled from fiction, horror, science fiction, body horror, pop culture, classic stories, aliens, demons, nightmares, dreams, fantasies, fantasy fiction, and any other source of hopes, dreams, or fears.

Vampires are still a huge theme in this world, though they play a different role, with the classic supernatural creatures serving as targets os the alien threat that secretly took over the world. The game's story is very X-Files in a way, with the world conquered by an alien force from another dimension, a massive Earth-wide blackout happening, and the world now existing in the supposed aftermath and resolution of this gigantic, disruptive, still-unexplained event.

Again, this is like "The Snap" in the Avengers movie timelines, where a global event causes unexplained chaos and destruction, leaving the world afterward unable to explain what happened but trying to move forward. Nobody knows the Earth's governments and corporations have been conquered, but the awakened do. Unlike The Snap, there is no going back here, and the world lives in a strange, "everything is normal" sort of faux-reality where everyone knows what just happened isn't normal, and we are biding our time until the truth comes out.

See also the Pandemic. We have been through a worldwide event like this recently, and the events of 2020-2024 are a direct parallel to those in Nightbane, where the world is turned upside down, and "the after" is a time when everyone tries to return to normal. However, nobody can, and the events are still unexplained. Only here, the world was taken over by extradimensional aliens, and the young are waking up as monsters.

Are we secretly living in a nightmare, and nobody can wake up?

Is that why we are seeing so much chaos and upheaval, with these factions going around screaming at us to "be normal" and "live our normal lives" when we all know things will never be the same again? How can we explain the strange actions of government officials, with one administration directly contradicting the previous on every matter, and each side fighting for a goal that people think is one thing but could be entirely another? Is one side or the other, or both, aliens? What is going on here? This never happened before all this started.

The collective of the Nightbane is a chaotic group of the awakened, sharing that theme with WoD-style games, but every individual is unique. The game comes with example factions among the Nightbane, each with its own theme, goals, and leadership. You are free to make your own local clans, groups, and gangs, too.

It is a more challenging game to run than a WoD Vampire-style game since the structure is more open, and the awakened can be literally anything and anyone, from monsters to a sci-fi trooper in a battlesuit. If you wanted a closer-aligned group of Nightbane, say, everyone is derived from classic monster horror movies, you could do that and theme your campaign and the players' awakened forms. Still, the default of the game is to let anything go and let anyone be anything.

There is definite lore in the sourcebooks, and this twists my mind to try and grab hold of it all. It is rooted in the classic themes of dreams and nightmares, so those creatures of the night who collectively haunt our consciousness are here, present, and play roles in this nightmarescape.

Yes, this is "the secret world." Still, with a hard Palladium-dimensional-plus-alien twist on the idea, it is shocking how contemporary this is, and how incredible and remarkable the entire notion and framework have become.

Nightbane is freaking awesome.

If you are still sleeping on Nightbane, you are missing out on a fantastic, mind-altering game. Stop playing corporate role-playing games, games designed by the dimensional aliens to drain our imaginations away and turn us into brainless drones, controlling our notions of fantasy and what is possible with our minds. If all fantasy exists on a 1-20 track with limited power levels, expectations of balance, tightly controlled lore and subclass options, and character sheets that absolutely must exist on the corporate (alien-controlled) cloud and AI systems - where is the room for our imaginations to play?

Can we create an imagination that must be strictly designed according to the rules on a character creation website and stored in the cloud? Or does the simple fact of doing that sacrifice our idea to the alien consciousness? When we see our dreams through the corporate lens, does that kill the dream?

Or does the global zeitgeist and consciousness, and "streaming shows" that support the fantasy systems of today, signal a larger, more sinister plot to drain the Earth of its dreams and imagination? Is the corporate version of "accepted fantasy" some attempt to limit it? By thinking we are expressing our identities through this framework of rules and limitations, are we killing those ideas of self-expression and marching them into corporate idea prisons in the AI cloud?

Who is giving the orders?

And ...why?