Ken Hite Is Lead Designer of VAMPIRE 5th EDITION!

A few days behind the news curve on this one - apologies! Veteran game designer Kenneth Hite, author of Trail of Cthulhu and Night's Black Agents, has been revealed as the lead designer on Vampire: The Masquerade 5th Edition. Hite announced it via social media, following a live announcement at a World of Darkness event in Berlin -- "Now it can be revealed: I am the Lead Designer for VAMPIRE: THE MASQUERADE 5th Edition. Some pretty big Doc Martens to fill." There's not a lot more info available yet, but I'll report it as I hear it.

He made a few other comments on social media:

Lore: "It's still in the World of Darkness but it's very much about the 21st century. Our goal is to make it a (dark and horrific) great on-ramp."

More on lore changes: "Mostly timeline advancement but everything you ever read in V:tM was already explicitly from an unreliable narrator."

Mechanics: "Still uses d10s but not Storyteller. So far."

Other World of Darkness games: "I'm only doing VAMPIRE. Other games are other games by other designers."

On Pelgrane Press: "I won't have a lot of time for Pelgrane work in the near future."

On vampires: Hite once said "If it were up to me, nobody would ever get to play the good vampire again in any medium. It is, sadly, not up to me." When somebody rather aggressively asked about this in the context of this news, he replied that "Vampires are monsters, but in V:tM the possibility of moral redemption is not entirely remote."

 

[jimmifett]

This is great news! I've met Ken a couple times, great guy!

 

[Desh-Rae-Halra]

This is exciting. I loved his work in Nights Black Agents.

 

[Von Ether]

The Tim Powers of RPGs working on Vampire? Now you have my attention.

 

[Mercule]

These are the bits that most caught my attention:

Mechanics: "Still uses d10s but not Storyteller. So far."

Other World of Darkness games: "I'm only doing VAMPIRE. Other games are other games by other designers."

I wonder if the first one means that it's going to be a tweak along the lines of Storyteller --> Storytelling System. Or, does it mean something more significant. I hope the former, as I think the Storytell* system was a very, very good fit for the game. Also, I just kinda like dice pools.

The second bit is unremarkable, in itself. All the original WoD games had different leads. I'm assuming that's what's going on, here. Placed back-to-back with the line about "not Storyteller", the context made me question whether they're considering using somewhat different mechanics for the different games. That would be disastrous, IMO. Just to be clear, I don't think this is a real possibility, just commenting on a twitch I got from the way the two comments lined up.

 

[Doctor Futurity]

Very exciting. I am not a WoD fan but I'll probably pick this up because it's frakkin Ken Hite! Love it.

 

[Transcendental Dream]

Game changer!!

 

[Queer Venger]

There are now 3 different versions of vampire being played: Vampire the Requiem/Chronicles of Darkness/storytelling system, Vampire the Masquerade 20th Anniversary/storyteller system, and now this. I wonder which one will be the definitive edition?

Seems a bit of a hodgepodge to me.

 

[ChapolimX]

The Tim Powers of RPGs working on Vampire? Now you have my attention.

I'm not familiar with Ken Hite or Tim Powers work besides what I could find in Wikipedia. This makes me curious about your comment meaning.

 

[ChapolimX]

There are now 3 different versions of vampire being played: Vampire the Requiem/Chronicles of Darkness/storytelling system, Vampire the Masquerade 20th Anniversary/storyteller system, and now this. I wonder which one will be the definitive edition?

Seems a bit of a hodgepodge to me.

This has being a line of comment that I see here from time to time that I don't grasp.

IMO, if you want to stretch things a bit, you can say that there will be two versions of the same game. This assumes you considers Vampire: the Masquerade and Vampire: the Requiem essentially the same game, as DnD and Pathfinder. I don't agree with this, but I'm not willing to make a case.

Beyond that? It's the same old story of most rpgs. They iterate through editions. Some games change little, some games change a lot. Some players stick to their favorite editions some players want the newest. Not a big deal.