Review: The Hunt Begins for the Supernatural RPG

I got the ‘The Hunt Begins’ a wee bit early so I had the chance to run this short adventure for some friends and we had a good time with it.  ‘The Hunt Begins’ is the first published adventure for the Supernatural roleplaying game by Margret Weis Productions. Jamie Chambers did the writing.

I’d seen the core book, my sister in law got a copy as a gift and was really impressed by the full color lay out and the in character feel that carried through even the out of character information. While this PDF isn’t full color, I still get that in character in theme feel throughout. As a White Wolf fan and freelancer, I’m a big advocate of a gaming book that helps you feel the setting just by flipping through it, and I think you get a feel of that in the adventure as well. If you didn’t know the show, I think you’d still vibe on the setting pretty well running this as a way to get started playing.

This adventure, like the game, uses the Cortex system, which I was well familiar with from playing Serenity before. I felt like the adventure had a great refresher/ quickstart description of how the system works and I basically explained it to my new players in about ten minutes. From what they said, their pre gen sheets also did a pretty good job of giving them an idea of what the character could do. The descriptions of what their sheets meant seemed to be helpful.

I played the game with four players. Two didn’t know anything about the show, two watched just about every episode. I’d seen a few, but didn’t feel like I needed to be an expert in order to run the story, which was nice. My two experts ended up playing Sam and Dean, the characters from the show, and it amused us all to listen to them bicker like the brothers. They both said the sheets were pretty good descriptions of the brothers, and while I was a little surprised to see the main characters from the show in an adventure I’d use at cons, they reported they had a blast playing them and that’d be a selling point if they were just trying out the game. The other two characters were pretty well fleshed out.

I think my only real problem with the adventure, and I’m just trying to be honest here, was the female PC. She’s bookish and intellectual, which is great for setting, but her whole sheet build borders on insulting, and as the player of said character pointed out, she’s basically a background character. She’s bookish and useless in a fight, tends to get overly curious and wander off by herself and isn’t much help outside of researching. She smacks of an interesting if clichéd NPC, but for an active player there to shoot monsters and make wisecracks, she’ll get lost in the crowd. She doesn’t feel like a PC. A hapless victim female PC in a group of dudes who get things done leaves one player on his or her thumbs most of the time.

Without giving away to much, (or going on too long,) the adventure is a straight forward ‘chase/uncover the monster.’ I think the writer did a pretty good job of anticipating what there characters might do on the investigation. I will say, if your going to run this, read it all the way through first just incase the characters make some logic leaps and skip anticipated steps as my characters did. The pacing is decent too. Starting with a lot of social investigation and moving on to a short fight immediately gives the players a good feel of most of the system and what their sheets can do in short order. This is not an adventure you want to run cold, which makes sense since it’s at the core, a mystery. The PDF includes some hyperlinks to information to the real Beast of Bray street which I thought was a great touch. If I were to run this again for friends, I think I’d email my players ahead of time with an email from their source with the links included as a way to invite them to the game.

All in all, we had a good time, shouted at one another a lot in character, and saw a lot of the characters come out as the mystery unfolded. (That’s particularly neat with pregens.) I’d be happy to run it again and with some good prep time and maybe a replacement of the one PC just for the sake of my personal tastes, but I’d use this if I wanted to introduce players to the game. It’s a great introduction.

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