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."
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."
