Funny / Hunter: The Vigil

• In the Cheiron Group's Hunters section, there's a quote about a character's backstory being an Iraq vet being hired as a "cleaner", or cover-up specialist, and describes their main choice in life being to have nightmares about Iraq or about their current job. It's followed by this:
  You were a cleaner, too. An actual cleaner. With a mop. A clerical error led to you (instead of someone with a name with one letter different) getting transferred to Field Projects, and you had the surgery before you figured out what was happening and they realized their mistake. Too late now. You have parts of monsters inside you, a gun you don’t know how to use and a handbook that’s worse than useless. You’re in trouble.
• The Endowment list has some nice Black Comedy stories about some of the Epic Fails Hunters had to go through when their Endowment suffered a malfunction:
  • Task Force: VALKYRIE implants its agents with RFID chips sending signals which their advanced weapons need to function, as a way to ensure only their agents can use these weapons. They once tried to confront a coven of Mages in Canada, only for one of them to cast a spell that disrupted electronic communication. This caused the weapons to lose the signals and immediately shut down, leaving the poor agents defenseless to be decimated by the coven.
  • They also have a device known as the Gungnir Multi-Function Targeting System, which uses various sensors (body temperature scans for vampires, Kirlian aura sensor for mages...) to locate supernatural targets and prevent them from shooting at humans. During the Gulf war, agents who were fighting vampires in the desert were decimated because the sun baked the lair's wall to a temperature close to 98.6, causing the system to identify the vampires as human onlookers and refuse to fire.
    • The book mentions a "field upgrade" some agents use that removes the "anti-human brakes" function while keeping the various firing enhancements. It also points out that, by doing this, you're tampering with government property, so having the brass find out you did this is a court martial at best.
  • One of the Cheiron Group's implants, the Personal Defense Swarm, provides its user with the ability to summon a swarm of weird bug-like creatures who will immediately attack anything that triggers his anger or hostility. A Hunter with such an implant once found out his partner was having an affair with his wife, resulting in his swarm attacking and killing said partner in the middle of a battle.
  • Another of their implants featured in Slasher, known as Cortical Adaptation, actually is a weird brain tumor recovered in the skull of a Slasher, which the Cheiron Group's scientists apparently thought was a good idea to put in the head of their agents. Said tumor comes with a chip meant to ensure the hunter will keep control over the resulting murderous impulse. The entry comment there are reports this inhibitor chip dissolves after three years of swimming in cerebral fluid, but these reports are unconfirmed - because few hunters last that long with the implant in place.
  • Spirit Slayers gives us the "Berserker Splice", another thaumatechnological implant the Cheiron Group developped trying to replicate a Werewolf's Unstoppable Rage. After they performed their first implant on a "willing Cheiron Field Agent" ("hey, no one made him sign the waiver"), the patient indeed woke up in rage and proceeded to kill everything in sight upon waking up, slaughtering 11 Cheiron Group agents with his bare hands and teeth before he was subdued. Despite this, the scientists in charge enthousiastically continued, and they eventually managed to perfect the implant with "comparatively minor loss for the company" (as in, "only" 50 people were killed).
• Night Stalkers gives us a rather funny little bit where a group from Null Mysteriis tries to approach a vampire they have been following for a while by literally sending someone to tell him they know he is a vampire, give him their address and ask if he would agree to an examination. Even the vampire's reaction can essentially be summed up as "Who are these people and what the hell is wrong with them?"
  • It also gives us a little entry where a Lucifuge narrates how, upon hearing about someone who had the Devil's blood, a bunch of vampires from Belial's Brood actually came to her essentially squeeing like fanboys and begging her to join one of their rituals and let them taste a little of her blood. The Lucifuge being what they are, she reacted as well as you'd expect.
• Each of the Compacts and Conspiracies has various benefits granted by their Status dots, described on their respective pages. Usually these advantages are mechanical, such as free dots in specific merits... and then you have this for part of the 5 dots benefit of Task Force VALKYRIE's Status:
  "Also, you know who shot JFK, and who was really in that car with Diana and Dodi."
• Slasher gives this advice to storytellers regarding Slashers' habit of being Not Quite Dead, warning against abusing it too much:
  "If the players keep killing the monster and he keeps lurching to life after every deadly blow, players will not only grow wise to it, they'll get bored. (And boredom is a sin against Morality 1 for every storyteller.)"
• Tooth and Nail gives us information regarding hunters' opinions and relationships regarding Beasts. Here's what the Cheiron Group has to say about them:
  "The Beasts of legends serve an essential role in Cheiron Group operations: they print money."
  • The Ashwood Abbey entry is equally amusing for how self-aware the member is about his Compact's reputation:
  Let me start off by saying something provocative, to perpetuate the myth that "the Ashwood Abbey are the real monsters." Let's see. Where do we start? Oh. Did you know that both fear and arousal are dictated by the same chemicals in the brain? Chemically-speaking, being afraid and being turned on are almost identical. So, what's hotter than hunting nightmares made flesh? (Beat) Now that we've got that silly shit out of the way...
• Task Force: VALKYRIE's stereotype of the Malleus Maleficarum, and vice versa:
  TFV on the Malleus Maleficarum: We would prefer that the Church does not know of our existence.
  Malleus Maleficarum on TFV: They don't think we know about them.
• While possibly unintentional, the secret for the Project: TWILIGHT branch of Task Force: VALKYRIE starts with this line:
  The vampires that secretly govern VALKYRIE are largely interested in the goings-on of TWILIGHT
• Cheiron's Bad Boss streak continues gloriously in 2E, with the higher-ups finally replacing the notoriously useless field manual after its advice led to a Noodle Incident due to bad intelligence, and issuing one that lacks the crappy intel... by removing any advice whatsoever. And now it's also encrypted, so now the FPD has to translate a long book of nothing to even know what their job is!