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Hunter
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You wake up as normal. It's a Thursday, and you're thanking the calendar for telling you that the week is almost over. You get in your car and drive the long commute into the city to your office. Nothing gets done all day; you're stuck in meeting after meeting. Finally, the day is over, and you pack up and leave. Down in the parking lot, as you walk towards your car, you get the feeling that something is different, not right. Something is out of the ordinary. You look around, but everything is as it has been. The harsh glare of the streetlights, the soaring glass monstrosity that is your office, the faintest hints of stars, hidden above the tops of the skyscrapers. Cars rush by on the street outside as you wait for an opening to pull into traffic. You make a run for it, and narrowly avoid being hit by a Cadillac that whizzes around the corner. You slam your horn, he gestures obscenely out the window. You're driving home through the maze of highways, when you notice smoke coming from under your hood. The car abruptly ceases to handle well, and you veer off onto the side, just in time for a BANG to come from the engine, and your hood to go flying up, thick smoke curling out. I just had it inspected a week ago, you think. As you reach for your cell phone, you hear a noise. A sound of fear, a shrill cry for help, comes cutting through the woods next to the road. It cuts through your head, tearing away callousness, cynicism, and "somebody else's problem" thoughts. You know that you, and possibly only you, can help this person. You might not have all the skills, but you have the opportunity, and the need. More than anything, that's what it is. A burning need to help. A need to do something. You drop your cell phone as you run down the embankment. You stumble on a root, but regain your balance. You tear through the trees, as the sound lingers on, echoing through the woods. It is a wordless scream of fear. It is an irresistible summons. You leap over a fallen tree, and stand there in the clearing, seeing the two young boys clambering higher into the tree, as the thing claws at the tree, gradually gaining purchase and getting higher with each breath. But... It does not breathe. That one statement explodes into your head, reworking your image of the world in one instant. No longer can walking corpses be a mere myth. You're looking at one. You scream, picking up a nearby branch, and charge at it. It turns its head ponderously, and the stick connects with its temple. There is a flash of light, the stick burns with your belief, and the thing falls to the ground, head gone, rotting as you watch. It's as if it were stop motion film. The body decays into nothingness in a matter of moments, and you're left wondering if you hallucinated the whole thing. Then the whimpers of the two boys bring you back to reality. You help them down, comfort them, ask them what they where doing out in these woods at night, where they come from, what that things that was frightening them was. You don't hear their answers. A voice is still pounding in your head, saying that you're not crazy, and that there are more of these things out there. That you must do something about it. Your consciousness is trying to calmly rationalize it all away, but you know. You know that what you saw was true. And that you can do something about it. Welcome to the life of a Hunter. Hunter: the Reckoning is a game about normal people in abnormal situations. The Hunters don't just wake up one day, buy a gun, and start looking for zombies. They are confronted with a situation wherein they and only they can do something about a creature of the night that is staring them in the face. It's shocking. But they get over it, at some level. That is, they get over it just enough to not go into denial and ignore these things again. But whether they ever come fully to grips with their world is for you to play out. After all that, then they might buy a gun and start looking for zombies. But they're just as likely to spend days in observation until they finally confront the creature, and have an interview with it, getting to ask it where it came from and how it got this way. The possibilities are near endless. I have very few resources for Hunter, having only played it briefly. But here they are:
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