Always one to keep up to date on the latest gaming trends, I have been finding myself drawn to the classic World of Darkness lately. I know, I'm only just over 20 years too late to jump on this bandwagon, but I have gotten the Vampire: The Masquerade and Werewolf: The Apocalypse twentieth anniversary editions and I've been looking through supplements both old and new, to decide what to put together. My interest was sparked about a year ago, when a friend ran some Werewolf: The Apocalypse games online. I had fun, and I wanted more.
First, I picked up the POD edition of Werewolf: The Apocalypse Revised to use as a player in our games. You never really know how long a game is going to last, and I didn't want to put down the money for the "fuller" 20th anniversary edition and have the game end. Of course it did, but that taste made me want to run the game myself. Over the year since, I grabbed up the 20th anniversary editions of both Vampire: The Masquerade and Werewolf: The Apocalypse.
I'm not really sure why the games are grabbing my attention now, rather than when they first came out. Admittedly, when the first World of Darkness games came out originally, I was playing a lot of Call of Cthulhu, and while I have been a big fan of horror for most of my life, the particular style of horror that games that Vampire and Werewolf utilized wasn't something that I was a fan of at the time. For me, the 1990s were the era of Splatterpunk, of "extreme" horror, and more internal horror. My reading into horror at the time was the seminal and brilliant Abyss line of books put out by Delacorte Press. The Abyss line introduced me to authors like Poppy Brite and Kathe Koja. In fact Koja's novel Skin ended up inspiring a series of Call of Cthulhu games that I have always wanted to revisit. If you are a fan of horror fiction and see a book with the Abyss logo on the spine in a used book store, do yourself a service and pick it up (except for John Byrne's novel…yes, that John Byrne).
In the years since, while I still read a lot of horror fiction, my tastes have shifted towards Paranormal Romance/Urban Fantasy and authors like Kelley Armstrong, Patricia Briggs, Gail Carriger and Devon Monk. Reading their stories of werewolves, ghosts, witches and vampires with impeccable waistcoats shifted the sorts of "horror" games that I wanted to run, and this direction started to line up more with the World of Darkness. My personal brand of horror is somewhere between the extremes of my 90s interests and my current reading habits.
I think that I also didn't look quite closely enough at the World of Darkness material to see if it could match my interests. The gamer that I was in the 90s was much more interested in the rules as written, and the games as written, than the gamer that I currently am. If a game has some of the basics of setting and system that I am looking for, it is much easier for me to hack what I want rather than look for a new game. If 90s Gamers Me didn't find what he was looking for in Call of Cthulhu, he would have switched to something like Kult for his horror fix, leaving the "poor" World of Darkness out in the cold.
I mean, does Werewolf have everything that I want out of a game about werewolves? No, but I know that the bits that I don't agree with I can change. I still think that it was a misstep to make the werewolves hereditary, only because there are just as many werewolf stories about people "infected" by lycanthropy as there are werewolf families. One of my favorite urban fantasy TV shows Being Human (US) not only utilized both of these types of stories well, but also used them to create drama within their stories as well. I loved the storyline of the werewolf Josh having to deal with the Eurotrash werewolf kids, and their entitlement that came coming from a long familial line of wolves.
However, this is easy enough to change for my games. I have said in the past that I would like to see Werewolf: The Apocalypse move away from the idea of tribes and bloodlines, and move towards a more player-facing model that is built around the individual pack rather than groups of werewolves with common powers and origins. This, however, is a digression.
Why these games and why now? This is a question that I ask myself often, as a gamer, a designer and a publisher and critic. I think that looking at why we play games gives us insight into what makes games work, or not work. The system is a good one, and it does what it needs to do in a way that isn't overly complicated. Don't look at the giant 20th anniversary edition of Werewolf: The Apocalypse and get intimidated, that is just because they included material from a lot of supplements to the game to give you a book that is one-stop Werewolf shopping. This is good and bad, because it can give option overload, but regardless of the fact that there is a lot in the book it doesn't overcomplicate the system itself.
One of my pet peeves about games designed during the 90s is that they tried so hard for "realism" that they usually ended up with task resolution systems that lead to a ridiculous level of failure when characters tried to do things. More often than not, this would cause play to grind to a halt because players would have to keep trying to succeed at a task that was integral to the story continuing. Whether the game was trying for "realistic" characters, or more cinematic character types, this was a common design flaw. However, it was one that the World of Darkness games have seemed to sidestep.
Please note that this doesn't mean that I think that characters should automatically succeed at the things that they do. That takes all of the drama out of a game. The problem that I have had is that when you play competent or ultracompetent characters, their chances of success should be better than more mundane characters, and at some point the idea that there should always be a non-zero chance of failure makes a game less entertaining for me. Personally, I prefer the approach of more contemporary games that take failure as a chance to interject more drama into the ongoing story than the option of having everything stop. The mileage of others may vary.
However, the more important thing is that having played the game made me want to play the game more, and since I am primarily a GM, it made me want to run the game. As I read through the books, the first thing that I thought was that I wanted to play this game. That is the ultimate measure of a successful game and, honestly, it isn't something that happens as much as I would like for it to happen with games that I come across. A lot of games come across my desk, as a gamer and a critic, and I can say that a lot of them don't click with me to the degree that I want to play them. It always makes me a little sad when that happens, but then, at the same time, I only have so much time with which to run games, so I guess that it is a mixed blessing.
I am not a collector, and I have enough stuff to read without reading RPGs just for fun, so if I can't pick up a game to play it, it isn't going to ultimately appeal to me. The fact that, twenty years after their release, the games of the World of Darkness managed to engage me enough to make me want to play is a good thing. The only thing that is a real pain is that because these games first came out before the ubiquity of the internet, finding information that lets me determine which lines and supplements I want for the kinds of games I want to play is more difficult. I do have a lot of gamers who did play World of Darkness games in my social media to help out. What sorts of games do I want to play? I guess that I'm looking for something that has an early Vertigo Comics (a sort of Doom Patrol meets Sandman meets Shade The Changing Man aesthetic) but with werewolves. Probably not your typically World of Darkness game, but we'll see what happens when the wheels hit the ground for the actual game.
The other side benefit of an interest in the Vampire: The Masquerade and Werewolf: The Apocalypse games is that I am curious to see what White Wolf is going to do for a new edition of the game. I think that this is the first time that I've ever been interested in the new games will be like from White Wolf. Hopefully, though, I'll find out more about that when Gen Con comes around.
Regardless, I have a new game that I am passionate about, and I am excited about running something with it. We'll see what happens once we get to actually game, and what form this eventual game will take, but I don't think it will be a bad thing.
