This may feel like a strange pairing for two V&V modules this week, but bear with me, because I think it makes sense.
More solid covers - Jim Holloway is always fun, and his interior art in Honor is just a delight
Patrick Zircher is to me the 2nd most influential V&V artist.
I have a great personal fondness for both of these modules because I was able to run them with my college game group to the exact right effect. Why? because they are inherently Modular. Which is a big thing that the prior ones were not. The other 5 modules all postulated world changing events, mass casualty scenarios, etc. and two of them were sequels. Including these could radically change your game world if the heroes failed, so of course there's a strong strong impetus to make sure the heroes don't fail. (Which is mostly baked into supers as a genre, but even more so here). In HONOR, the stakes are an inter-generational power struggle for control of a Japanese electronics company that just some part of occurs in the PCs city to hook them. In Terror By Night a reformed vampire is testing the heroes capabilities while conventionally wooing a human woman. The stakes are just so much lower.
The former feels like a guest author has taken over the comic for 2 issues. The latter feels like an annual. In both cases it's a disruption from the PCs normal plotlines to deal with this one off thing, and then resume normal programming. In which case, super-helpful for a GM who wants to take a break, or if one player wants to run the game for a couple sessions without breaking anything. Both of these are easy, training wheels modules.
In my personal use, I ran HONOR over a couple of sessions with two players in college. They rolled up random heroes with an aim for "these should be Avengers level" and got some pretty archetypical heroes - a Flight Invulnerability Strength Speed Himbo with a Sneaky Royalty Cat Lady - and just jumped right in.
The plot is pretty linear: the heroes see a news report about a corporate merger, stumble across an attempted ambush of one of the people involved, a request from that person for protection, a pretty slick kidnapping that shouldn't make the heroes feel stupid but can be stopped by clever play, and then a weird and unnecessarily complex turnabout ending. The stakes are super small; and will likely turn out the same if the PCs do nothing. It's useful for NSR play only in that the PCs can just safely ignore the whole thing. Plus the villains are generally cool, interesting enough for this sort of one shot fight... unless the heroes some day end up in Japan.
Since Terror by Night is designed to test the heroes, and my college V&V game was the classic "players as PCs" it was easy for me to slot it in as their midterm exam. But even without that additional hook, the module it just a classic set of tropes where the Players will go "Oh! We're doing the circus thing!" and hopefully run with it. It doesn't so much fit the dark and gritty tone of of New Salem, but that might be seen as a nice break or a an excuse to ramp up the threat level in the various tests and have the villain vampire be as bad as villain vampires can be. There are a handful of "what you can do next" ideas at the end of the module if the players enjoyed it and want to see more; I like the open ended nature of it and made use of it in my campaign.
I personally adore the leaning into the tropes, and just as Holloway's art in HONOR catches the slightly silly vibe of the whole ninja thing. Zircher's internal art here is just fantastic with panels of the sample heroes in the test chambers of the vampire's funhouse. Just great stuff! Again, it's completely trivial and modular, but as a module that's a good thing IHO.
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