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General Abilities: Athletics 10, Infiltration 12, hand to hand 8, Shooting 15, Sense Trouble 4, Medic 1,
preparedness 1, Surveillance 3, Special weapon Training (Primary Weapon-6 points)
New Infiltration Cherry: Sniper’s Hide
If your Infiltration is 12 or more, and you have received sniper training (either military or by a paramilitary agency),
you gain the Sniper’s Hide ability. The intense training you have received in camouflage, combined with the ability
to remain stationary for long periods, and to endure privation, come together to allow the sniper to become nearly
invisible. Given the right materials, and time, a sniper can create a sniper hide that cannot be discovered short of
accidentally stepping in it. This hide is good until the situation goes loud, then the sniper will need to displace orbe discovered. Setting up a sniper’s hide requires fore planning (which can be done with preparedness if the
character’s rating is high enough)
Finishing out
the character
Once you have
selected a
background, it is
time to flesh out
your character by
spending your
remaining
investigative and
general skill
points.
Remember to add
points to your
character’s health
score, most
operators are
extremely robust
individuals who
can take some
punishment in
the field.
Other than these
changes to
character creation, finish the characters just as you would any other NBA character. Remember your free points in
Time to lock and load. Combat in Night’s Black Agents is fast, evocative, and fun. But,
differences in conventions between spy thrillers and military thrillers call for a few optionalrules. These rules add a little more “Crunch” to the NBA Thriller Combat system.
Ammunition Capacity and Reloading
In a normal NBA game, ammunition is not tracked unless it is dramatically necessary. While it
is not fun to micromanage ammunition, a major factor in combat is scarcity of supply. The
system for tracking Ammunition in NBO is a dramatic system, not a strict simulation.
One reason where many systems fall down is in the way they treat each shooting roll in
combat. Even the most skilled operator will rarely fire only one shot at a time in combat,
instead they will fire two or three carefully aimed rounds at a time. They will rarely fire assaultrifles automatically, unless they are laying down suppressing fire.
Ammunition Capacity
Ammunition is heavy. Anyone who has humped several hundred rounds, along with all their
other gear can attest to this. This puts a practical limit on the amount of ammunition that can
be carried into combat. Most operators carry twenty magazines for their primary weapon, and
ten for their secondary weapon (Pistol). Machine gunners carry ammunition in two hundred
round bags, and carry around one thousand rounds into battle for smaller caliber machine
guns, six hundred for larger caliber weapons.
Rather than trying to break down ammo capacity by individual weapons, which would create a
rather long list, magazine loads are broken down by weapon categories. These assumptions
are based on operators firing three or four rounds each time they make a shooting roll on
list, since they are always fired in single shots.
Sniper will always have enough rounds for
standard, or light sniper rifles. Anti Material rifles
(.50 Caliber) Fire from 10 round magazines.
Automatic Fire
Modern Automatic weapons can burn through
ammunition at an extraordinary rate. Each time
your fire a shot on automatic, it uses 2 “shots”.
(This does not include the light machine gun,
since it is already computed for automatic fire).
NSR’s and Precise fire
Sometimes you have to put more steel on target
rapidly, and precisely. This is often referred to as
an NSR, or Non Standard Response. NSR’s arerapid, aimed fire not spraying and praying. An
NSR uses two shots, but grants a +1 to the
shooting roll to represent the greater number of
rounds going downrange. If you NSR with a magazine, you cannot later claim precision fire
until you have made a magazine change.
Other times, you want to conserve ammunition and fire with more
precision. If you are running low on ammunition, you can declare
you are making precise shots. When you run out of ammo in a
magazine, you make a shooting roll. Each point of success gets anextra “shot” out of that magazine. Shooting points can be spent on
this roll as normal if saving ammo really counts.
Reloading
It is easy to reload on the range, or back in the team room.
Reloading in combat, under pressure takes effort. Luckily,
operators spend a great deal of time training and practicing mag
changes until it becomes muscle memory. Reloading does not require a skill roll, per say. But
there is always a chance for failure. When changing a magazine during combat, you make aroll. On a roll of 1, the
character fumbles the
reload. Players can
spend points from their
shooting pool to ensure
success. If a character
uses an entire action to
reload, no roll is required.
Operational Note:If under fire in close -proximity to the enemy,will normally transition totheir secondary weaponto keep up a volume offire. When there is abreak in the fire, theOperator will have hisbuddy cover him whilehe reloads.
Holographic sights allow for rapidacquisition of targets in close quarterscombat. They reduce the time requiredto line up iron sights, and allow
the firer to easily keep one eye open forsituational awareness. The Holographicsight woks best at out to Near Range,providing a -1 modifier to the target’s hitthreshold when aiming for a called shot.(Pg. 72 NBA)
Infrared Laser
It is hard to aim a weapon using nightobservation devices (NODs). Without
depth perception, and unable to focus onweapon sights, marksmanship becomesdifficult to say the least. The solution wassimple, mount a laser that can only beobserved with NODs. The IR Laser canbe used by characters with NODs withoutpenalty. It functions exactly as a normallaser sight, but can only be seen bycharacters equipped with NightObservation devices, so it does not givethe operator’s position away.
Cutting through red tape
The Director may want to have the characters still working for their native government. If using
Hawthorne (see Below), the characters will have to wade through red tape to get things done.
The following rules are taken from the Night’s Black Agent’s rulebook, Page 195 and work
perfectly for the job.
Bureaucracy (General)
Finally, Bureaucracy now becomes a General ability. It can be used investigatively as normal,but it also creates your pool for tests to get your own agency (or a theoretically allied agency) todo something for you: retask a satellite, block and opponent’s dangerous mission or fundingprobe, authorize the rescue of a captured asset, lower your Heat by 1, release a classified file toyou (or bury one away from someone else), send in SEAL Team Six, or anything else. In othertests, you may try to thwart or prevent your agency from doing something it has decided on:trade a prisoner, investigate your network, bug an embassy.
A standard task that you have clearance for is Difficulty 3; something you have to pull strings toget is Difficulty 5; something you have no business asking for is Difficulty 7. Raise Difficulties by 1for other agencies of your own government, and by 2 for agencies of other governments. It wiloften be more convenient to build Network contacts in other governments than to actually gothrough channels.The Director may build NPC bureaucrats who oppose you often enough to get their own pools
and set the parameters for your operations based on the results of full contests of Bureaucracy.Bureaucracy is an ideal ability for continuing challenges (see p. 50); you make one test peroperation, with a bonus or penalty depending on your performance (and lack of Heat) on themission.Bureaucracy only refreshes at the end of an operation; it cannot be refreshed in a haven (see p92).If the agents have attracted Heat during an operation, they cannot spend build points earned asexperience from that operation on Bureaucracy.In burn mode, success by a margin of 1 or less in a Bureaucracy contest means the Director wiltask your team to do something unpleasant in return.In dust mode, all Bureaucracy Difficulties increase by 1.
In mirror mode, the agency starts with 2 Trust points from each agent. To reverse the results of afailed Bureaucracy test, an agent can give the agency 1 more Trust point during an op. When, erif the agency betrays the player characters, its (NPC) operatives spend the agency’s Trust pool toharm the PCs (see p. 41).
Friends Upstairs
If your Bureaucracy rating is 8 or more, you are protected from on high by powerful patrons. Operhaps you’ve been around long enough to know where some particularly savory bodies areburied. In any case, the Difficulty rating for any attack on you (or your funding, authority, etc.) in acontest of Bureaucracy is 1 point higher than normal. This is the bureaucratic equivalent of Hardto Hit (see p. 27).
Note that NPC bureaucrats with Bureaucracy ratings of 8+ will also have this cherry.
HAWTHORNE
Hidden deep within the United States Budget, between “Project to investigate the behavior ofnorthern sea otters”, and “Sea Turtle Mating Studies”, is a line item called “Hawthorne”. Theentry contains no explanation. It has no department head listed, nor any contact information. Itsexistence has never come to light within the hallowed halls of congress. It is an agency thadoesn’t exist.Hawthorne is the name of a project that began immediately following the American Civil War. Ihas been run under countless cover names, which changes every couple of years, but thebudgetary name has been constant. The current operational name is, ASH, but members of thissecret organization refer to themselves as simply, The Office.Each newly elected President of the United States is visited during his first month in office by arepresentative of The Office. He is shown the directives that created the organization and giventhe key to a chest which contains the records of the Office (this key and chest are now symbolicas the records are now stored off site in a secret, secure location). No President has been readyfor this briefing, and many don’t take the news well.Hawthorne is devoted to the destruction of vampires, and has been for nearly 150 years. TheUnited State’s Militaries best and brightest are recruited into this ultra secret, high speed unitThey are the best of the best, recruited from the nation, and allied nation’s, tier 1 speciaoperators. And they must not fail.