The Dracula Dossier: Dracula Unredacted

Night's Black Agents RPG

by Kenneth Hite

[This Edition is a Kickstarted Limited Edition, with a dustjacket that replicates the paperback edition's cover. Inside it is a facsimile version of the cover of the 1st Edition of Stoker's Dracula]

For over a century, we have known only part of the story of Dracula — the part Bram Stoker was allowed to tell. Now, the whole tale can be revealed. In 1893, the secret services of three nations played a dangerous game to contact and control the perfect asset — the ultimate weapon — Count Dracula.

This new edition of "Dracula" adds new letters and recordings, diary entries long thought lost, and documents suppressed by Her Majesty’s Government … until now. From the first tentative contact between British intelligence and the un-dead, to the werewolf of Walpurgisnacht, to the cataclysmic disappearance of Dracula in volcanic fire, read the story you’ve known for years … for the first time.

Dracula Unredacted does for the Dracula Dossier what Henry Armitage’s letters did for Armitage Files or The Book of the Smoke for Bookhounds of London: it supplies the players with a series of props and clues to enrich "The Dracula Dossier" game.

This version of the book will be a "yellow cover" replica of the original edition of "Dracula", and will be included in the "Dracula Dossier" campaign.

Genres: Role Playing Games, Horror, Gaming, Games, Vampires

480 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2015

About the author

Kenneth Hite (born September 15, 1965) is a writer and role-playing game designer. Author of Trail of Cthulhu and Night's Black Agents role-playing games, Hite has been announced as the lead designer of the upcoming 5th edition of Vampire: the Masquerade.

Reviews

[K.T. Katzmann · Rating 4 out of 5]

A reedited, enlarged Dracula based on Stoker's notes. So do we have a Blade Runner's Directors Cut or a Star Wars Special Edition?

Dracula Unredacted has an interesting pedigree. Yes, it's a complete reading experience, but it was designed as a massive prop for the Night's Black Agents role-playing game of super-spies versus vampires. You're supposed to hand it to your players and let their examination of it guide your game.

But what the hell is it?

Dracula Unredacted posits that Bram Stoker's Dracula (which I recently reviewed here) is not fiction. It's the actual report of British Intelligence's attempt to recruit a vampire, just heavily edited from its original form.

Two things are different about this "original" manuscript:

1) It's 20% longer. Kenneth Hite and Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan have meticulously looked through Stoker's notes to add in elements that didn't make the final cut. Do you remember reporter Kate Reed from Anno-Dracula? She was one of Stoker's almost-rans, and she's only one of several characters to come back. Not many meet happy ends.

Also, how crazy is it that the Icelandic translation of Dracula, supervised by Stoker, added things to tie Dracula to satanic cults and Jack the Ripper?

2) There are annotations. Three generations of British Intelligence have their marks in the margins, colored coded to tell them apart. Named after Van Helsing actors, agent "Von Sloan" records the 1940s attempt to use Dracula against the Nazis, "Cushing" writes paranoid fears about the undead infiltration of the UK vampire recruiting agency in the 1970s, and "Hopkins" writes from a modern day perspective.

This lets Hite and Hanrahan add in stuff outside the novel, references to WWII operations, modern black ops, and the crazy connections between Dracula and earthquakes.

How does it read? Great! I loved Stoker's text as much as I did before, and I liked the additions. It's hilarious to watch Quincey Morris end up in the story of Dracula's Guest and proceed to Texan the hell out of it.

Whenever it wasn't clear whether if I was reading the original text or the additions (a credit to the creators that this is a problem), I just typed "Dracula" and four words of a sentence in quotations marks into Google to see. The book's public domain, after all.

Warning: If you use this to study for a college course you will be in as much trouble as my friend who tried to watch Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula instead of reading the novel.

If you want to know how that turned out, well, by the second sex scene we had this exchange:
Him: This isn't in the book and I'm screwed, aren't I?
Me: Yup. Totally!


Dracula Unredacted is a brilliant riff on the original. Because it was made for a specific gaming campaign, it can never be the definite version of the original for reference. It's an entertaining and fresh take on Dracula for those who have read it before, though, and well worth a look.

There's just one character I REALLY wish they added in . . .

[Diane · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book has a clever idea. It argues that the novel "Dracula" was actually only telling part of the story, and that the British government was trying to recruit Dracula as a secret agent. This author takes the original text and adds some material and marginal notes to support his thesis. He has marginal notes from across time, beginning with World War II, then going on to the Cold War, and the various wars in the Middle East of the early 21st century. It is a good idea, but it isn't executed all that well. The author doesn't really add enough material to make a coherent story, and doesn't really bring together the original material with emerging international issues. So, it is mostly just a rehash of the original book, with a little bit of new material added in. Also, the marginal notes were in a strange font, and were very hard to read.

[Richard · Rating 4 out of 5]

Easily the most elaborate TRPG prop ever devised. A version of Stoker's novel, expanded by parts removed from the original, and "annotated" with the observations of people from three different eras, acts as the key to a story of supernatural horror and Hollywood-style espionage.

For Bibliophiles and others who love pouring through stuff for clues, this is a gift from heaven. The standard TRPG player may find it all a bit much.

[Maria Diz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Me lo he pasado muy bien leyéndolo e investigando cada dos por tres todas las referencias que salían. Pero.
Me parece una edición algo descuidada. Uno de los tipos de letra es tan pequeño que apenas se entiende; hay veces que las letras "manuscritas" coinciden con el texto original, algo que nunca hacemos cuando escribimos en un libro; y hay errores tipográficos. Estos detalles estropeaban un poco la experiencia.
Por lo demás, me parece un esfuerzo muy notable y bien documentado.

[Aaron · Rating 5 out of 5]

An interesting take on the classic Dracula story in and of itself, tweaking things, adding new material, and putting existing parts of the story into a new light. Given that Dracula Unredacted is as much a Dracula Dossier supplement as it is an independent revision of the original novel, some of the material (especially the annotations) don't make a lot of sense unless you're familiar with the context of Night's Black Agents or The Dracula Dossier in specific. However, I think it was an interesting read and one that could have benefited from making it even more distinct, with more footnotes and annotations to better emphasize the concept that this version is the "true" retelling of events and that Stoker's original was greatly changed and truncated.

[Kealan O'ver · Rating 5 out of 5]

I first read Dracula when I was 12 years old and thought it was terribly boring. Now as an adult I have to read it for a role playing game and I loved it.
Its been so long since i read it that I've no idea where the original version begins and the new additions end which says a lot for how well its done. I also don't really understand the point of the notes or the additions yet but its 5 star for the novel itself.

[Joe · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best gaming books ever, and probably the most ambitious. It's Bram Stoker's "Dracula," but expanded with material from notes and earlier drafts. Then it gets interesting--annotations from different fictional secret agents who know some of the truth about the count's activities since the plot of the novel. Outstanding stuff.