For my regular group I’ve been running Night’s Black Agents, a TTRPG in which players are cinematic hyper-competent agents who are fighting a terrible conspiracy which happens to be… vampires. Think Bourne, with vampires. Or Bond, with vampires. Or Mission Impossible, with etc.

Specifically, we’re playing the Dracula Dossier campaign, which supposes that Bram Stoker’s classic novel is actually an after-action report on an ill-fated attempt by British naval intelligence to recruit Dracula. In the game’s present-day setting, Dracula is still around and causing havoc that the agents must foil, once and for all. The book is incredible: 350 pages of Dracula supposition and imagination drenched in contemporary spy paranoia.

It’s a lot of fun and its system, Gumshoe, has been interesting to learn. Gumshoe’s USP is about investigation: whenever a player tries to find a clue with an owned ability, they succeed. No roll, no uncertainty: the info is theirs. This gives investigations real forward motion, never getting stuck behind a failed skill-check. Another great feature is Night’s Black Agents’ campaign design, which gives the players freedom to follow any lead that interests them, and gives GMs a suite of tools to maintain pressure from the vampire conspiracy and to ensure the players are constantly progressing towards the centre of that conspiracy.

One thing that hasn’t been working, however, is Night’s Black Agents’ somewhat crunchy old-style combat, in which players and enemies take turns to roll attacks against each other, chipping health away. There’s nothing wrong with it — it delivers some clever thriller genre nuances and it’s a lot simpler than, say, D&D — but as a group we typically play Blades in the Dark and other expressionistic Powered by the Apocalypse-derived indie TTRPGs, and we weren’t investing ourselves in it.

Then I came across QuickShock, which Gumshoe’s original designer, Robin Laws, developed for the most recent Gumshoe game, The Yellow King RPG. QuickShock completely upends fighting, health and other systems, replacing them with a single round of player-facing Gumshoe-style rolls and a huge set of cards that give players physical and mental injuries that affect play. The cards are very flavourful and rich, in their names (“Existence is a Meat-Grinder”, “It’s a Miracle You’re Alive”); in their effects on the character; and in how the character recovers from them — so much more so than losing health points and asking for a Medic check to restore them.

And amazingly, publisher Pelgrane added the The Yellow King RPG’s rules, including its cards, to Gumshoe’s SRD, which allows anyone to share and adapt them. So I did. Here’s my attempt for Night’s Black Agents.

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