Pelgrane Press’s The Dracula Dossier for Night’s Black Agents – successfully Kickstarted a little over year ago – has started shipping to backers.

The Dracula Dossier follows in the fully improvisational path of the award-winning Armitage Files campaign. Players follow up leads in the margins of Dracula Unredacted, a rare edition of Bram Stoker’s masterpiece that reveals the terrifying truth behind the fiction. They’ll chase down the real characters from Stoker’s novel, their descendants in the present, and the British agents caught in the backblast.

I’ve started reading through the campaign guidebook, the Director’s Handbook, and leaving Dracula Unredacted for holiday reading. This book is daunting; there is just so much content.

Ruth Tillman, in her review, writes:

When reading this I went through a bizarre cycle of eager, intrigued, appreciative, and overwhelmed. The first and last few sections were critical for me in sorting out these feelings and figuring out what I could do with the info.…

In my opinion, the best way to read the book is to start with “Opening the Dossier” through “Opposition Forces” and skip 180 pages or so to “Scenario Spines.” This section and the “Capstones” and “Campaign Frames” that follow are the key to avoiding getting a mental stomach ache in the feast of plot hooks and ideas in the middle. While you could simply skip forward from “Opening the Dossier,” the sections exploring the possibilities in the 1894 originals and their descendants and getting into Edom, Dracula, and other factors in play are exactly enough background material to put you in the right headspace as you read spines, capstones, and campaign frames.

I wrote about Night’s Black Agents previously.