Someone asked me to start a Nightlife thread so I did.

Mark Rein-Hagen's Vampire has had numerous clones and competitors over the years, a few of them being better than it and even still around. Nightlife, on the other hand, predated Vampire and seems to have inspired it but never achieved the same success. The basic premise of Nightlife is more or less the same as Vampire, with humane versus inhuman factions, a humanity meter, and even calling themselves "kin" (not kindred). Except that the kin were divided into a number of races with a large amount of diversity and wildly different strengths and weaknesses (at least compared to Vampire). While not all of them feed on human life force as a matter of course, almost all of them can feed on humans to recover.

Nightlife is no longer legally available for purchase, but I am sure that you can pirate the books. Bradley K. McDevitt (one of the original writers who is angry the rights holders are not publishing anymore) wrote an unofficial 4th edition supplement titled "Street Velocity," which I believe is currently only available on the Nightlife yahoo group or scribd. The changes seem to be fairly minor, but much needed, such as renaming the "Inuit" (the First Nations people) character type to "Manitou" (a word for spirit). I personally would recreate the setting in the Feed rules since the humanity system therein is vastly more elegant than any other.

Feel free to share your experiences with Nightlife or to discuss the rules and setting in the abstract.

I have the original a friend gave me.

That and Nightbane are two of the best takes on the concept. I believe Nightlife and Nightbane may have been more inspired by Clive Barkers 1988 Nightbreed novel and 1990 movie.

Cabal/Nightbreed 1988/1990
Nightlife: 1990
Vampire: 1991
Nightbane: 1995

I saw Nightlife in a game store back in the day. It interested me, but I got the impression that my gaming group wasn't interested in horror gaming so I ended up not buying it. Now that I find that it was a precursor to Vampire and pioneered a lot of the ideas from Vampire, I kind of wish I had picked it up to read even if I never got to play it.

I ran a (brief) campaign of 1e Nightlife inspired by the film Nightbreed back in the day.  I'd picked up Nightlife at GenCon the year it was released, and read it the whole way home on the plane.

The game was fun, but lost in the fog of 30+ years of memory. I'm pretty sure the only reason my game died out was because of my rampant GMADD at the time. Pretty sure I moved on to Chill 2e right after, and then back to AD&D 1e shortly after that.

I had the original book back in the day, but never played it.

I think what hurt Nightlife was the presentation and the art.  The layout was like something from the late 70s, by FGU. The cover art was just awful. Some of the interior art was okay, but it had more of a punk style. The whole thing looked cheap and trashy and not in a good way.

Vampire on the other hand, looked classy, even in the the original spiral bound book. The artwork was great and clearly targeted goths.

I really liked the concept of the game, when I saw it. I never got the chance to run it, and shortly thereafter it vanished as it was swamped by Vampire.

What made Nightlife cool to run at the table? Especially vs. other urban fantasy / horror?

Quote from: Spinachcat;1050566What made Nightlife cool to run at the table? Especially vs. other urban fantasy / horror?

I never played it in its heyday. There are reviews at thegamingden, rpg.net and somethingawful.

In my opinion it is very similar to Vampire, except that the character choices are more diverse and the presentation is way less pretentious. It advertises itself as splatterpunk, so there is that. The factions are more or less the same as Vampire's Camarilla and Sabbat, with one side preaching secret coexistence with humans and the other embracing their monstrous nature. There is other paranormal stuff reminiscent of the miscellaneous weirdness in other World of Darkness games to round out the setting.

The rules are generally clunky. The rules for task resolution, skills and so forth are your standard d100 system a la BRP without any of the decades of refinement. The rules for superpowers ("edges") are structured similar to those of typical superhero games; none of the hierarchical ladder powers you see in Vampire. The superpowers are similarly unrefined. Like its spiritual descendants Everlasting and WitchCraft, all characters use the same rules for powers rather than having unique mechanics for different character types.

The humanity mechanic is easily the clunkiest mechanic here, even when compared to any of the convoluted "morality" meters in World of Darkness or "torment" meters in Everlasting. You spend humanity to use superpowers and your amount will wildly fluctuate over the course of play. A notable oddity of the humanity mechanic is that it makes kin who embrace their inner monster more powerful than those who embrace their humanity, but this is not reflected in the fluff.

Probably the single most interesting aspect is the sheer variety of character choices or "kin races". There are seven standard races, and forty others allowed at the GM's discretion. These include demons, fairies, elemental beings, vampires, werewolves, zombies, ghosts, Frankenstein's monster and so forth. Of its spiritual descendants, only Everlasting and Monsterhearts have reached the same level of character type diversity (and Monsterhearts cheats by including fan-made character types).

The NightLife monster menagerie was amazing and wonderful, it was what got me running it. No other game I've seen compares, and NightLife is the only game I've regretted giving away.

S'mon, tell us about your actual play experiences and why you gave the book away!

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1050588Probably the single most interesting aspect is the sheer variety of character choices or "kin races". There are seven standard races, and forty others allowed at the GM's discretion.

The game assumes the PC party is a melange of monsters?

Is there any reasoning why the vamp, the werewolf and the zombie would be teaming up?

Quote from: Spinachcat;1050670S'mon, tell us about your actual play experiences and why you gave the book away!

I ran a solo game by post (snail mail) in the early '90s with an old friend from school, he played Miles Hauser a New York skinhead turned werewolf recruited by Target Alpha... it turned out the BBEG they were fighting was Dracula.
I used rules based off 1e AD&D, in modern terms it'd be an OSR type system. One thing I noticed was that ghosts like IA VOL were way overpowered & basically unkillable.

We played dozens of games over the years. I picjed it up in1992. It was my go to game for years. We played in a variety  of period games as well. American civil war, victorian,  vietnam. He'll we played ourselves hunting kin in our hometown. A risky proposal since humans are shiiiiit compare to kin.
Here is my gaudy 15 year old site of rules options.
http://nightlife22.tripod.com/index.html

We allowed most of the kin as optional player races. Zombies were murder machines because we would pump up their armor edge and they had so few weaknesses.

Quote from: baran_i_kanu;1050678It was my go to game for years.

What made it your go-to game?

What kept bringing your players back? System? Setting? How you houseruled it?

Quote from: Spinachcat;1050671The game assumes the PC party is a melange of monsters?

Is there any reasoning why the vamp, the werewolf and the zombie would be teaming up?

They lack the weird cultural distinctions that prevented World of Darkness from being a monster mash. In fact, all of them are part of the same underground monster culture (an obvious precursor to Vampire's Camarilla and Sabbat). Most of the kin are essentially vampires of a sort since they all have the power to drain life force from humans to heal themselves, and some of them need to drain in order to survive. The explicitly named "vampyres" (yes, a number of the names had weird fantasy spelling) are specifically the Dracula-style of vampire. Other varieties exist, and pretty much the only thing that sets them apart as "vampires" is that they all drink blood whereas other kin might consume emotions, youth, flesh and so forth. Probably the closest modern comparison would be to the Canadian TV show Lost Girl, which feels exactly like a Nightlife campaign would.

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[strike]Speaking of vampyres, a really funny thing I noticed is that they must sleep on a bed of soil from "the consecrated ground of the cemetery in which they were originally buried," which interacts weirdly with their infection edge. Victims accidentally infected by draining, who will waste away if the initial drain did not kill them, will only rise as vampires if they are buried in a cemetery (whether that ever happens is GM fiat, as is the means of preventing it). The section on deliberate infection, however, explains the Ricean blood exchange method and makes no mention that the offspring much be buried to complete the transformation. I would assume so since otherwise they would not have the grave soil they need to sleep, but this seems odd to leave out when the accidental infection section reiterates it.[/strike] EDIT: The Street Velocity errata fixes this, so please ignore this whole paragraph.

Another thing about the vampyres is that they may have kids: a vampire may copulate with a human and the vampire may beget or become pregnant with a normal human child. When it comes up in vampire fiction most authors make a big deal about whether this is possible and how it works, but Nightlife completely glosses it over. In fact, lots of vampire fiction depicts the vampire protagonist angsting about losing their original human family... but this difference means that a vampyre character can angst about losing their children over and over to the relentless march of time but unable to stop themselves from doing it again due to loneliness. That kind of melodramatic black comedy backstory fits perfectly with the splatterpunk genre of the game.