With each passing Storytellers Vault Roundup, it seems, we have more news to announce regarding favorite lines being opened up for development. In the wake of recent Werewolf: The Apocalypse and Mind’s Eye Theatre announcements, we now have Mage: The Ascension soon to join the ranks as well.
As announced on July 17th by White Wolf and DriveThruRPG:
As with Vampire and Werewolf before it, White Wolf will assist content creators in making the best [Mage] possible products by offering a considerable variety of graphical layout tools including pre-made design templates, and art-packs to choose from. Additionally, in an effort to speed up the availability process for game lines to become available for content creation, all the Mage specific historical settings (Dark Ages & Sorcerers Crusade) and Minds Eye Theatre will be made available during the first month of release.
Although no set date has been announced yet, the press release mentions August as the launch month.
Speaking of the newly-unlocked Werewolf line, we’re starting to see some new content appear on the Vault already.
One example is Rachel Judd’s Forgotten Corners of the Earth: A Listing of Lost Cairns. As the Introduction puts it, “By and large, the Garou are good at what they do: protecting the caerns, the sacred spaces where Gaia’s power most closely touches the mundane world. . .. But sometimes, the Garou lose.”
Forgotten Corners describes seven lost caerns, victims of the Wyrm or simply entropy. Each caern—in locations as various as a medieval English church, a certain popular Southern California amusement park, an island in the Danube, and high atop a mountain peak in the Andes—makes for an excellent location for a story or even a whole chronicle, as each comes loaded with plot hooks and motivations for characters interested in helping to reclaim the caern.
Our other two items this month return us to the bloodsucking world of Vampire: The Masquerade. Both titles are credited to “Secrets of the Masquerade” and both feature advice to players and Storytellers alike on how to improve the quality of one’s chronicles both in and out of game.
The Secrets of the Masquerade Guide to Siring is the shorter of the two, constituting only 12 pages, of which only six have actual content. However, there’s a lot packed into those half-dozen pages, with an excellent essay on the importance of Preludes as a means to building the sire-childe relationship and involving the sire in the childe’s unlife (narratively speaking), followed by a dozen short idea seeds of why a sire would choose to embrace.
Secrets of the Masquerade Guide to Playable Characters is almost the conceptual opposite to the Guide to Siring; whereas Siring is brief and to the point, Playable Characters goes into great detail over the course of nearly 80 pages “meant to help beginners and advanced players alike to think about their player-characters as playable and engaging characters regardless of age, history or setting, with the goal of avoiding harmful caricatures.”
After a brief introductory chapter discussing how to be a proactive player who improves the game experience for everyone at the table, Playable Characters covers character creation from conceptualizing the vampire’s mortal life, how their Clan affiliation affects their personality and role in the coterie, how Disciplines interact with a character, insanity and Humanity, and, lastly, an extensive section on how to best portray diversity of race, gender, and sexual orientation inside the repressively conformist world of vampires.
This article was contributed by David Larkins (sirlarkins) as part of ENWorld's User-Generated Content (UGC) program. We are always on the lookout for freelance columnists! If you have a pitch, please contact us! Please note that David is a participant in the Storytellers Vault, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to StorytellersVault.com.
As announced on July 17th by White Wolf and DriveThruRPG:
As with Vampire and Werewolf before it, White Wolf will assist content creators in making the best [Mage] possible products by offering a considerable variety of graphical layout tools including pre-made design templates, and art-packs to choose from. Additionally, in an effort to speed up the availability process for game lines to become available for content creation, all the Mage specific historical settings (Dark Ages & Sorcerers Crusade) and Minds Eye Theatre will be made available during the first month of release.
Although no set date has been announced yet, the press release mentions August as the launch month.
Speaking of the newly-unlocked Werewolf line, we’re starting to see some new content appear on the Vault already.
One example is Rachel Judd’s Forgotten Corners of the Earth: A Listing of Lost Cairns. As the Introduction puts it, “By and large, the Garou are good at what they do: protecting the caerns, the sacred spaces where Gaia’s power most closely touches the mundane world. . .. But sometimes, the Garou lose.”
Forgotten Corners describes seven lost caerns, victims of the Wyrm or simply entropy. Each caern—in locations as various as a medieval English church, a certain popular Southern California amusement park, an island in the Danube, and high atop a mountain peak in the Andes—makes for an excellent location for a story or even a whole chronicle, as each comes loaded with plot hooks and motivations for characters interested in helping to reclaim the caern.
Our other two items this month return us to the bloodsucking world of Vampire: The Masquerade. Both titles are credited to “Secrets of the Masquerade” and both feature advice to players and Storytellers alike on how to improve the quality of one’s chronicles both in and out of game.
The Secrets of the Masquerade Guide to Siring is the shorter of the two, constituting only 12 pages, of which only six have actual content. However, there’s a lot packed into those half-dozen pages, with an excellent essay on the importance of Preludes as a means to building the sire-childe relationship and involving the sire in the childe’s unlife (narratively speaking), followed by a dozen short idea seeds of why a sire would choose to embrace.
Secrets of the Masquerade Guide to Playable Characters is almost the conceptual opposite to the Guide to Siring; whereas Siring is brief and to the point, Playable Characters goes into great detail over the course of nearly 80 pages “meant to help beginners and advanced players alike to think about their player-characters as playable and engaging characters regardless of age, history or setting, with the goal of avoiding harmful caricatures.”
After a brief introductory chapter discussing how to be a proactive player who improves the game experience for everyone at the table, Playable Characters covers character creation from conceptualizing the vampire’s mortal life, how their Clan affiliation affects their personality and role in the coterie, how Disciplines interact with a character, insanity and Humanity, and, lastly, an extensive section on how to best portray diversity of race, gender, and sexual orientation inside the repressively conformist world of vampires.
This article was contributed by David Larkins (sirlarkins) as part of ENWorld's User-Generated Content (UGC) program. We are always on the lookout for freelance columnists! If you have a pitch, please contact us! Please note that David is a participant in the Storytellers Vault, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to StorytellersVault.com.
