Full moon. Cold night. Dark shadow. Warm gun. The Beast of Glenkildove has stalked Ireland for centuries. Now, you must hunt it.

Hunter: The Reckoning — The Beast of Glenkildove is an interactive novel by William Brown, set in the World of Darkness. It’s entirely text-based, without graphics or sound effects, and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.

Choice of Games Editor Mary Duffy sat down to talk with William about this upcoming game. You can play the first three chapters of Hunter: The Reckoning — The Beast of Glenkildove today; the rest of the game will release on January 16th! Be sure to wishlist it on Steam—it really helps.

Hunter: The Reckoning was actually your first World of Darkness game as a player, and it was a given that you’d pitch us a Hunter game when we asked you. Tell me what drew you/draws you to that world.

Yes, Hunter: The Reckoning was my first experience of the World of Darkness. What I liked best about it was its emphasis on ordinary people – admittedly, ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances, ordinary people with extraordinary drives and obsessions, but still ordinary people.

The other World of Darkness games sometimes had a bit of tendency to treat ordinary people as basically uninteresting. If you weren’t a supernatural of some description, you didn’t really matter. You were an extra, there to be fed on or be collateral damage or just to be completely ignored. The idea of the Reckoning turned that on its head: suddenly, your vampire’s take-away Happy Meal, your mage’s meaningless set-dressing, had a shotgun, an armful of Molotov cocktails, and a bunch of equally angry friends.

Along with that came the idea that Hunters, because they were after all just human, were fragile and flawed. They’re loners, relying on home-made gear and second-hand weapons, keeping themselves awake on all-night stake-outs with black coffee and cigarettes (assuming, probably correctly, that they’ll die violently long before lung cancer gets to takes its shot). They’re also people with mortgages and marriages and jobs and kids, all of which they’re endangering by pursuing the Hunt.

I like the idea that Hunters aren’t part of big, world-spanning organizations and that they don’t have infinite resources to draw on. A Hunter is going up against enemies that are far, far more powerful than them, enemies that can draw on untold supernatural and mundane resources. They have to plan and research and train and prepare obsessively, they have to use every scrap of ingenuity they have to give themselves any chance of survival. And as things get darker, they have to decide just how far they’re prepared to go to achieve their aims.

You’ve written some fantastic, unique stories for COG: The Mysteries of Baroque and Cliffhanger, one a bit of a 19th century Gothic literature homage, the other bringing 1930s retro-futurism/pulp adventure to interactive fiction. Despite the supernatural underpinnings of Hunter: The Reckoning, Beast of Glenkildove is in some sense the most slice-of-life or true to life game you’ve written for us. Tell me about what it’s like writing characters in the present day with present day (a well as werewolf-based) problems.

I tried to ground Beast as much as possible in reality, particularly in the early chapters. I think that WoD supernatural horror works best when it has a strong foundation in something real. So I drew a lot on real life – most of the main characters are at least partly based on people I grew up with or knew in college. I tried to find their voice when I was writing their dialogue – sounding it out in my head, trying to decide if it was something that I could hear them saying.

I also drew on the stories that I heard growing up in Wicklow: folklore, crimes, disappearances, strange and colourful characters. I go back there every summer: while I was writing Beast, I’d eavesdrop and people-watch in the local pubs, pump my family for stories and gossip, and just wander through the woods trying to get at what makes this part of the world unique.

What will WOD fans find surprising about your approach to the world of Hunter in Beast of Glenkildove?

I hope that one of the things that will come across is a renewed sense of how rich and strange the World of Darkness is. Vampires, werewolves and other scary things can lose their sense of menace and mystery when they’re thoroughly explored and catalogued. One of the things that I was trying to do in Beast is to reset that. You’re playing a character who’s an outsider to the supernatural world: they don’t know any of the things that WoD players would take for granted, like tribes and clans, and so they can’t classify things in those terms. Everything out there in the darkness is, at least at the start, just one terrifying, undifferentiated mass of Horrible Things – with only hints as to the factions and alliances and intrigues and secret wars which define the other game lines.

Some of these take the form of stories and weird tales that the PC will hear throughout the game; brief microfictions that hint at the bigger World of Darkness beyond the scope of Beast. I like the idea that in a world as riddled with supernatural corruption as the World of Darkness, these kinds of stories are everywhere, Masquerade or no; it’s just that Hunters are the only people who lack the self-preservation instincts to simply resolutely ignore them.

Finally, I’ve included a number of Easter Eggs referring to other Choice of Games World of Darkness titles; Jim Dattilo and Jeffrey Dean were very gracious about letting me use characters from Out for Blood and Parliament of Knives respectively and Kyle Marquis and I were working on Beast and The Book of Hungry Names at the same time, so we agreed on a few shared setting elements and even arranged a crossover of sorts.

One of my favorite Pavement lyrics is “Beware, the head of state says that she believes in leprechauns/ Irish folktales scare the $%*! out of me.” And they do! What is it about Irish storytelling and myths that make it such a fertile ground for your imagination?

I think one of the key things to understand about Irish folklore is its playfulness and its ambiguity. A typical Irish person’s attitude to a story is not to consider whether it’s true but whether it’s entertaining. So the older generation in particular will tell stories about Fionn mac Cumhaill, the Other Crowd, the Good People, the púca and ghosts in the same way they might tell stories about historical Irish figures of the past like Michael Dwyer or Charles Stewart Parnell or Éamon de Valera. If they’re telling a story about a child being stolen by the sidhe, they don’t insist on being believed the way that an alien abductee insists on being believed. They know what they think is true but as long as the story holds their audience’s attention, they’re satisfied.

I think there’s a political dimension to this attitude. The rational, evidence-based approach was, after all, an English import. Surveyors coming with chains, measuring staves, and compasses, measuring and mapping land that had previously been described and controlled through folk tradition and memory, was usually a prelude to that land changing hands, from Irish to British owners. Under these circumstances, the Irish propensity to mythology, superstition, and exaggeration (noted with considerable irritation in British sources) was a form of self-defence, a way of making sure that there were some things kept beyond the imperial reach.

Ireland was nicknamed “Wolfland” by the English and Scottish settlers who came there from the 16th century onwards. For them, there was a connection between the native Irish and the wolves, living out in the darkness beyond the Pale (the zone of British control around Dublin). For the British, part of the process of “civilising” Ireland meant cutting down woods, draining bogs, and killing wolves; Cromwell put a bounty on wolf heads.

In The Beast of Glenkildove, the werewolves represent a kind of violent eruption of this forgotten, primeval Ireland into the urban civilisation that displaced it. I think we’re all a little bit simultaneously fascinated and terrified by the idea of the wild. We worry that our technology is alienating us from the natural cycle of the seasons but at the same time we’re horrified by the violence and ruthlessness of the reality of nature. I think that’s where folk horror lives.

Was there an NPC you enjoyed writing most?

I love all of my children equally.

In all seriousness, I’d find it hard to choose. I tried to make every character, even relatively minor ones, as memorable and engaging as possible. They were all lots of fun to write: Sister Judith, Tottenham, Ray and Dekko, the Mulcahy, Arthur Snow… maybe among my favourite scenes, though, were the ones where the core cast just kind of bounced off one another and argued or teased each other or joked around. Those scenes kind of wrote themselves; it really was like hanging out in the pub with friends.

Has your feeling for the game world changed as you’ve been immersed in writing a Hunter story?

I’ve certainly learned quite a lot about topics like how to make homemade explosives. My Google search history over the past year or so would make worrying reading for law enforcement.

I’ve tried to imagine the World of Darkness from the perspective of those who are mostly kind of on the penumbra of the supernatural world: people who’ve seen some shit and have (sometimes wildly misguided) ideas or theories about what’s really going on, but who are very much not insiders.

If you were the PC in Glenkildove, what would your character sheet/customization look like?

Predictably, I’d be an Inquisitive creed Hunter with an Academics specialisation and the Folklore Library edge. Assuming a werewolf didn’t eat my face, I’d try to hook up with the Arcanum.