Hunter: The Reckoning 5th Edition
Tabletop Roleplaying Games
Hunter: The Reckoning 5th Edition
English
Horror
Rules-medium
Hunter: The Reckoning is a horror tabletop roleplaying game about ordinary people who discover the supernatural and take up arms against it, set in the World of Darkness. The original was published by White Wolf in November 1999 as the sixth main game of the World of Darkness line. The 5th Edition (H5), published by Renegade Game Studios in 2022, is built on the Vampire: The Masquerade 5th edition ruleset, with Justin Achilli as series creative lead and Tomas Arfert as art director. The core rulebook is a full-colour hardcover that was an ENNIE Award nominee for Best Rules in 2023. A companion Hunter: The Reckoning Dice Set and a Character Journal were announced alongside it.
The system directly evolved from Hunter: The Reckoning (1999), and it shares its ruleset with Werewolf: The Apocalypse 5th Edition, another entry in the World of Darkness.
Description
Players take on hunters, humans with jobs, families and debts who have stumbled on the monsters around them. The Storyteller, the game's name for its Game Master (GM), runs a chronicle in which the group tracks down vampires, werewolves, ghosts and other threats while trying to keep their ordinary lives together. In the original, hunters were granted power by mysterious Heralds or Messengers, and they coordinated through an anonymous online forum called Hunter-Net. In H5, hunters are not imbued, and the game focuses on the human side of the work.
The game asks a table to hold a particular tone. The Renegade page calls it "a storytelling game of desperate measures", and its themes include righteous fury, paranoia, hope and the cost of keeping a normal life. It suits groups who like dark urban fiction and fragile characters, more than groups that want a power fantasy.