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Since 1995 is White Wolf's "Year of the Hunter," we thought it appropriate to devote some magazine space to the subject. The theme of characters being hunted by villains has been a mainstay of storytelling for hundreds of years, and it's only natural that we stage it in our roleplaying games. However, the trick is to make the hunt suspenseful, dangerous and fair. This article offers some ideas.

It happens to every character. Sooner or later you piss someone off and he seeks revenge, you leave a witness alive and she goes to the police with a positive ID, or you pull a job and you're caught on camera. In short, someone learns who you are and wants to find you. All that remains is to roleplay the manhunt. The question is how to stage it.

This article presents ideas for players and Storytellers on fleeing from hunters and tracking prey. It's about staging a fair hunt so that clever characters successfully cover their tracks and bumbling ones learn the hard way how to avoid getting caught. This article is also about staging hunts to build excitement and integrating hunts into other stories.

The Hows and Whys of the Hunt

After deciding to have a powerful person or organization track down the characters, the Storyteller must answer three questions: How does the characters' enemy locate its quarry? Once that enemy locates the characters, how quickly can it or its agents reach them? And what's the hunter's form of response?

Locating Characters

In a contemporary setting, every move that characters make broadcasts their location. The trick is for the hunter to be "tuned in" to the broadcast. Universal computerization and communication, such as the net or matrix of most cyberpunk worlds, make it feasible for someone with sufficient resources to locate characters whenever they interact with the world. Characters' dealings with the world can also be used to track them in settings of lower technology; only the means of acquiring information changes.

If characters know that someone is looking for them, they can use various means to conceal their activities. One of the most effective but demanding is changing their identities. Skills such as forgery, disguise and streetwise come into play as the characters try to avoid being recognized and fabricate the information necessary to create new identities. Depending on the characters' underworld connections, the process may be simple or may require quick wits and intense string pulling, all of which can be roleplayed.

Regardless of the means of the identity change, the Storyteller should pay attention to the exact elements of the characters' new selves. If a character fails to disguise herself on any level, someone may notice the discrepancy. Once someone draws a connection between a new identity and the character's old one, the hunt begins.

When staging a story about a manhunt, brainstorm the ways that hunters might locate characters and how characters might reveal themselves. Also keep in mind the likelihood of a method succeeding. What are the odds of government agents successfully locating a subject who's hiding out in a city's sewers?

Decide how closely that characters' pursuers can watch bars, retail stores and financial transactions - places where characters may appear and sources of information that may record their passing. An espionage cell or criminal ring probably keeps a keen watch over areas that it controls, but may have limited capabilities to track characters beyond its realm of influence. Organizations on the scale of the FBI may have contacts in every possible location. However, government agents typically have to obey privacy laws, and any organization on this scale is usually so overworked that it may overlook subtle clues or clues regarding minor cases.

Common Ways of Tracking Characters

Friends in Low Places

Contacts are the most realistic and common means of locating fugitives. Anyone who wants to know what's going on in the world takes care to cultivate a wide network of contacts and informants. These people are not secret agents and do not undertake espionage missions. They are simply an extension of the webs of social connections that people build for personal reasons. Such contacts go about their lives, and if they happen to learn anything noteworthy, they send word to their "friend." Thus, whenever fugitives show their faces there's a chance that someone may recognize them. Consider the possibility that motel clerks, bar regulars, car rental salespeople, airline ticket agents, black marketeers and door-to-door salesmen work for the enemy.

As a rule of thumb, decide on the chances (in die-rolling terms) that characters might draw unwelcome attention in common settings. An established espionage and surveillance organization such as the Soviet KGB or the Information Collection Service of Werewolf's Pentex probably has an extensive web of contacts. Anytime characters deal with a contact there should be a substantial chance, perhaps as high as 10%, that word reaches the organization. When you consider the number of "minor people" that we deal with on a daily basis, the chances of detection by a contact become substantial.

Plastic surgery or effective disguises may confuse casual observers. However, you should make secret rolls against a character's appropriate deception skills to see how effective a disguise is; nothing attracts the attention of informants more than an obvious disguise.

Cameras Are Everywhere

Even without the omnipresent telescreens of Orwell's 1984, we have security cameras in banks, convenience stores, school buses and apartment complexes. They can record characters' actions and indicate where characters have been.

If a hunter has the means to review tapes from a variety of locales, he may spot and locate characters from a remote location. Computer image-processing software offers a reasonable way to process data from security cameras. This leaves only the problem of collecting videos. In a strictly realistic, contemporary setting, there are no connections between the security cameras of different businesses. A hunter may require a tip from an informant before a single security video can reasonably be viewed. However, in a cyberpunk-era world, a hunter might access a vast number of security systems through the all-embracing computer net. Powerful organizations may have such capabilities in a pseudo-modern setting that features extreme paranoia, such as Werewolf or GURPS Illuminati.

Money Can Be Traced

In our society, money is routinely traced, often within a day or two of when it is spent. When cash goes to a store, that store deposits it in a bank, and the bank returns it to a federal reserve installation where clerks note the bills' serial numbers. Thus, anyone spending "hot" money, such as the loot from a bank robbery, risks attracting attention. In a fully computerized world, police could probably trace cash back to the precise store where someone spent it. Whereas this might take a week in the modern world, a transaction might be pinpointed within a day in a futuristic world.

Money can be made safe from tracing by laundering it through an institution such as a casino. The bills are then distributed to a large number of people at the same time, who spend it in different places.

Psychological Profiling

The movie Silence of the Lambs and TV's The X Files popularize the idea of using psychological profiling to track fugitives. Police can use psych profiles to locate ordinary criminals too. The key to this technique lies in identifying the target's trademark behavior and looking for signs of it. If hunters in your game use this technique, the Storyteller must be ready to explain what activities distinguish the characters, how the enemy knows about those activities and where the characters betray themselves by exhibiting them.

Characters often make psychological tracking methods easy to use. Players imbue into their characters an assortment of traits that reflect both their characters' psychologies and their own game fantasies. Does a firepower-addicted character insist on using a major military weapon? Such ordinance is not common even in the most dangerous and corrupt of cities. Whenever anyone reports hearing such a weapon, its shell casings are found or the gun is seen in action, police and other hunters are given a good idea of the character's location. Games such as GURPS, which encourage characters to accept formalized psychological and physical disadvantages, give you additional material for psychological profiling. If a character has a specific enemy, for example, the hunter may guess that attacks on that party are the character's work.

In the News

The modern world's press agencies operate a surveillance-for-profit service. If characters on the run are newsworthy, reporters can track them on the true hunter's behalf. All that hunter has to do is respond to sightings of the characters. If a hunter has access to the press or is socially influential, information on the characters can be falsified to make them attractive to the press (and sometimes worldwide police agencies). This kind of trap is along the "wanted for a crime they didn't commit" line.

However, the press can reveal characters' locales in less direct ways. If fugitives find themselves in the area of a newsworthy event, their faces may flash across TV screens worldwide. Foolish or gullible characters may even allow reporters to interview them on the air. (Storytellers who seriously want to make this happen must adopt a subtle strategy of appealing to the characters' sense of fun or pride. Most characters have a knee-jerk reaction against aggressive reporters.) If characters appear in the news, their enemies are likely to pinpoint them, at least for the time being.

No One Is an Island

If a hunter can't find the characters themselves, he may move against their friends and interests. This may mean kidnapping characters' relatives and associates in hope of luring the prey out of hiding, or it may simply mean watching people and places that are important to the characters.

Electronic Tracing

If characters use telephones, computers, radio headsets or other electronic gadgets, those devices can be used to trace them. The Storyteller simply decides on what percentage of the transmission's network that the hunter can afford to monitor. To intercept a phone call or computer message, the hunter probably needs to know the subjects that characters are likely to communicate with. However, in a game of global conspiracies, such as those in GURPS Illuminati, hunters may monitor entire communication networks. If characters don't hit the road to escape from their hunter (i.e., they remain in the same city as their hunter), any local radio, radar or similar broadcast that the characters make can be traced - the hunter doesn't have to monitor the world's broadcasting systems. The vast number of broadcasters in city locations makes locating an individual signal a difficult proposition, but not an impossible one. Remember, too, that hunters can locate not only radio transmitters but radio receivers by their electronic emissions, a fact that German submarine commanders exploited as early as World War I.

Strings Attached

Perhaps the easiest but most obvious way to find someone is to take advantage of all the important things in that character's life. This includes not only friends and relatives, but the material things that tie the character down. Does the target have a job? An apartment? A religion? A drug addiction? A credit card account? A police record? A security clearance? Research into easily available records on these matters can suggest the character's nature and resources. Unless the character is willing to give up all of these things, she perpetually leaves clues as to her intentions.

Who Do You Send and When Do They Get There?

Once the hunter locates the characters, you must determine how long it takes for the hunter or its agents to reach the target. Determine where the hunter's nearest base is and how its agents communicate with the hunter. Also consider legal restraints on the hunter's activities. Is the hunter a police force with officers who can force other vehicles out of the way with sirens and flashing lights? Do agents dare to shoot people in public? If so, can they use heavy weapons?

In all likelihood, the characters have an opportunity to react before the hunter springs its trap. Hunters with the ability to keep a watch on characters may spend time observing them before pouncing, trying to learn where they sleep, who their contacts are and how they operate. However, when such surveillance is not practical or when time is crucial, hunters may rush to the characters' locale and conduct a sweep of the area. The nature of the sweep depends not only on the hunter's power and ruthlessness but on its manpower. To keep the targets from slipping away, the hunter must block a number of potential boltholes. Furthermore, when searchers spread out for a sweep, targets who decide to fight their way out may overwhelm a few lone agents. You must therefore pay careful attention to the total number of hunters in an area, their locations and the size of each search team.

Police can cordon off a region and stop traffic. Unofficial organizations must rely on keeping their hunters inconspicuous, thereby preventing characters from running until it's too late. (You may want to make some secret intelligence/perception rolls for characters to see if they notice signs of a search.)

The ideal way to stage a sweep is to map the entire area in advance, including "popular" escape routes such as building air ducts and city sewers. Determine where searchers are, and let the characters try to find a safe route out. If the characters' hiding place is not known to you in advance of a game session and no maps can be drawn, establish the hunters' tactics. If fleeing characters attempt a maneuver that you have already thought of, regardless of locale, they encounter the hunters. The less you plan in advance, the more careful you have to be in justifying the hunter's anticipation of character moves. If characters behave unpredictably, they may escape.

Is This Search Necessary?

Designing a manhunt adventure is a matter of answering relevant questions. You can decide what answers match the "realism" of the setting on a moment-by-moment basis, or you can decide what best fits the campaign as a whole. Obviously a search effort suffers from several weaknesses - instances where a brief delay in response or the absence of suitable informants allows characters to escape. If characters have been laying low in a seedy hotel and an agent has been outside, waiting for them to appear for two days straight, what are the chances of him being awake when the characters make their move? Is it realistic that characters are automatically spotted in this particular circumstance? On a campaign scale, if an adventure leads characters to the Arctic Circle, what are the chances of a New York crime syndicate finding them there? If events in your manhunt adventure would reasonably result in the characters' discovery, let it happen.

The Hunt as a Subplot

A manhunt doesn't have to be the only thing going on in your game. When you want to emphasize another important plot element, the manhunt can fade to an atmospheric element that doesn't consume much play time. Simply stage occasional brushes with hunters to keep the characters on their toes. The hunt can become a full-fledged adventure again when another story is told or when either party makes a concentrated effort to resolve the conflict.

A hunt can also be inspiration for a campaign. Although this concept has been made cliche by TV studios - think: The A-Team, The Incredible Hulk, Dead at 21 and Renegade - it still has promise in roleplaying. The characters start the campaign by pissing someone off and hitting the road to escape retribution. During their travels they encounter all kinds of innocent people who have run into trouble themselves. Once characters have dealt with the local bad guys and have rescued the innocents, they move on, but only after narrowly escaping their own pursuers, whom the now-safe innocents send on a temporary wild goose chase.

Hunt Ideals

No matter what plot lines unfold, characters who are being hunted never forget that they're on the lamb. Though they may help other people or achieve different goals, they are constantly careful to cover their tracks. If they face the threat of reprisal against friends, cut all connections with their past lives and evade armed hunters, they earn the right to get away scot-free.