Possibly the largest, most comprehensive play-aid ever produced, this book consists of the complete text of Bram Stoker's Dracula along with masses of notes, documents and comments that can be used as clues, hints and inspiration for a massive Nights Black Agents game. The premise is simple to state: What if Stoker hadn't been writing fiction at all but an after-action report on an attempt to recruit a vampire by the British Secret Service? Naturally, they'd not want word of such a thing getting out, so the novel with which we all are familiar has been heavily censored (in spy-speak, 'redacted') to conceal what was really going on.

However, anyone who knows the British civil service will know that they never chuck anything out (although whether or not they'll admit that they have it is another matter), so the full unredacted text has been festering away somewhere, accumulating more notes as years pass particularly during subsequent attempts to utilise that most famous of vampires in the national interest particularly in 1940 and during the Cold War. And now... this bundle has fallen into the party's hands. What will they do with it?

What you, as GM, need to decide is how it gets to them and why, and what is really going on. The companion volume The Dracula Dossier: Director's Handbook provides guidance aplenty, but this is an extremely open-ended concept - a campaign that is ready for you and indeed your players to put their own spin on the whole thing.

Marginal notes and scribbled comments that would drive a librarian to distraction, in several different hands that are, mercifully, pretty legible. The whole thing hangs together coherently, in an eminently believable manner. Stylistically, the expanded text matches Bram Stoker's own style well, it is only by comparison (or knowing the novel well) that you can discern what has been added. As a 'dossier' you might wish for added material - photos, sketches, maps - over and above the annotated text (you could always devise your own additions of course), but as the ultimate player hand-out this is hard to beat!

Return to Dracula Unredacted page.

Reviewed: 8 December 2015