News Digest: White Wolf Dissolved, MORE New D&D Releases Announced, RPG Now Closing (kinda), and mor

Hello everyone, Darryl here with this week’s gaming news! New Wizards of the Coast releases (and not just Mad Mage and Ravnica), RPG Now closing in 2019, White Wolf Publishing dissolved, and more!

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Paradox Interactive announced on Friday that they were dissolving White Wolf Publishing as an independent entity and taking over direct management of the World of Darkness line. This decision follows a string of controversial events surrounding the company, which was created by Paradox in 2016 (the original White Wolf Publishing was similarly dissolved in 2012 by then-owner, CCP Games). The most recent controversy involves their two new sourcebooks for Vampire: The Masquerade released by White Wolf, named Camarilla and Anarch. The latter contained sections which called those who committed suicide “weak” and a included posts from a “Mommy Vampire” social media group with controversial posts, including one that talked about feeding vampire blood to babies.

The Camarilla book, however, received most of the focus as an entire chapter was devoted to the Chechen Republic. This chapter, which all credited authors on the book have publicly denied writing, described real-world events going on in the country as a camouflage for the activities of vampires, who have openly taken over the country. This included stating that the real-world torture, imprisonment, and execution of gay men first reported in 2017 was part of this cover-up of vampire activities and providing in-game information for the real-world head of the Chechen Republic, Ramzan Kadyrov, was a low-generation vampire used as a pawn by the Kindred in charge. This sparked not only outrage from the LGBT community for the use of an ongoing real-world tragedy and human rights atrocity as fodder for a game, but also from the Chechen Republic and Russian government who stated the “developers tried to blacken Russia and Chechnya” in an official press release. Additionally, a fifty minute press conference was held by Jambulat Umarov, the Minister of National Policy for the Chechen Republic, and three members of Studio 101, the company localizing Vampire: The Masquerade 20^th Anniversary Edition (the previous edition of the game) for the Russian language and a statement from Dzhambulat Umarov, the Press Minister for the Chechen Republic, stating he is “studying the option of litigation the game developers” (the source is in Russian, automatically translated by Google Translate)

The newly-created company has been dogged by controversy since it was formed. As recently as this past July, Jason Carl held a Q&A live stream on Twitch responding to allegations of marketing the new edition to Neo-Nazis and the Alt-Right. Before that, the “Pre-Alpha Playtest” released in June of 2017 (later removed from the website) received criticism for controversial content including hunger rules that could force player-characters to commit acts of sexual assault in-game, use of the psychological term “triggered” both in its clinical meaning (“to cause an intense and usually negative emotional reaction”) under Malkavian and its pejorative meaning (“offended by something…and react to it with extrovert anger” from the playtest text) for Brujah, and including one of four pre-gen player characters as a young adult fiction writer whose feeding restriction was “children and very young teenagers”.

Following the backlash over the Chechenya chapter of Camarilla, Paradox Interactive Vice President Shams Jorjani announced that both Camarilla and Anarch would be withdrawn from sale on digital markets and edited before re-releasing them and fulfilling print pre-orders. Additionally, Paradox Interactive will no longer directly create material for the World of Darkness setting for tabletop roleplaying games and return to a “focus on brand management” to “…develop the guiding principles for its vision of the World of Darkness”. No statement has been made about the status of the Onyx Path Publishing crowdfunding effort for a Chicago By Night sourcebook for Vampire: The Masquerade 5^th Edition which started before this current controversy with no comments made on the Kickstarter page, nor whether this will affect the video game for Werewolf: The Apocalypse in development by Cyanide Studios (makers of the Call of Cthulhu video game recently released and licensed from the Chaosium tabletop roleplaying game).

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Well, that was heavy. Let’s talk about helping charity by playing games! Wizards of the Coast released the digital adventure Lost Laboratory of Kwalish on DM’s Guild with profits going to Extra Life. The adventure is for characters of fifth to tenth levels and is inspired by the classic module Expedition to Barrier Peaks, including a return to the actual locations. The adventure also features a tribute to fan Laurence Withey who passed away from a rare form of cancer earlier this month by immortalizing his character, the wizard Galder, in the adventure by turning him into an NPC with custom spells and magic items available to players. The adventure is available in PDF for $9.99 with proceeds going to Extra Life.

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Additionally, Wizards of the Coast updated their Dungeons & Dragons product page with a new entry, Tactical Maps Reincarnated. The collection includes twenty full-color tactical-sized poster maps ready for use on the table right away. The maps are reprinted from several modules from 3^rd, 3.5, and 4^th Edition adventures including Tomb of Horrors, Vor Rukoth, Demon Queen’s Enclave, Death’s Reach, The Book of Vile Darkness, Kingdom of the Ghouls, Dungeon Master’s Kit, Orcs of Stonefang Pass, Fields of Ruin, Gargantuan Blue Dragon and Colossal Red Dragon miniature sets (which included maps for the D&D Miniatures skirmish game), Vaults of the Underdark, Legend of Drizzt, and Red Hand of Doom. The map set is due February 19, 2019, with a retail price of $24.95.

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A new errata has been released for the core Dungeons & Dragons 5^th Edition rules covering all three core rulebooks. The majority of the changes for the Player’s Handbook, Dungeon Master’s Guide, and Monster Manual are minor changes, but there are a few important changes to class spell lists and all spellcasting classes have had their descriptions updated to specify which spells various feats and class abilities apply to (so if an ability only affects class spells, it will now say so). The DMG also made changes to the Rod of Lordly Might and Instrument of the Bards magic items, and the Monster Manual includes multiple math fixes for attacks, skills, and saving throws for several monsters. These changes are including in the just-released Dungeons & Dragons Core Rulebook Gift Set and the 10^th printing of the core rulebooks which should be on their way to stores now (the printing will be listed in the credits page of the book).

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One Bookshelf announced that the RPG Now site will be closing in February of 2019. All links will automatically redirect to Drive Thru RPG including bookmarks and links to individual products (so podcasters, bloggers, and video makers don’t need to rush to update links from old posts). Both RPG Now and Drive Thru RPG have been the same company just with different branding and storefronts since they merged in 2006. As of now, the other storefronts for One Bookshelf (Drive Thru Comics, Drive Thru Cards, Drive Thru Fiction, Wargame Vault, Storytellers Vault, and DM’s Guild) will still remain in place, though they generally function similarly where the only difference between them is the branding on the storefront site (you can test this yourself by clicking on a product from Drive Thru RPG and changing “drivethrurpg.com” in your address bar to any of the other sites and leaving of the URL alone). All purchases, accounts, published materials, affiliate accounts, balances for gift cards/sales/affiliate links, and everything else will be unaffected by this change.

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As the year starts to close out, eyes are on what’s due out in the future. And as you may have seen on multiple designer social media accounts, EN World’s annual Most Anticipated RPG of 2019 poll is currently live. The poll runs until Tuesday, December 4, and you can vote for as many titles as you like of the list scheduled for release in 2019. I may or may not have given away one of my votes in the image above.

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The RPG Game Dev Bundle from Humble Bundle is still going strong with all the assets you need to create your own 2D video game RPG using your favorite game engine. Or, if you’re like me, you can use the art for creating your own home game maps as well as take advantage of the thousands of licensed music and sound effects files for your podcast, live stream, or videos. And if you need inspiration, there’s the Dystopian Worlds Book Bundle with twenty-two novels from bestselling and award-winning authors including James Gunn, Dave Dunca, Steve Erickson, Eli K. P. William, and more. And if you don’t believe that you can be inspired to create a game from these books, the base level includes A Boy and His Dog by Harlan Ellison, which was the direct inspiration for the Fallout video game series.

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There’s a lot to talk about with Never Going Home, the World War I inspired occult horror game. The artwork is evocative, the setting is interesting…but I want to focus on the genius of the game mechanic and how it pushes the theme of the game to the forefront in a meaningful way. Each player has a deck of cards that power their spells and abilities and can also be spent to learn new skills, get additional dice for a check, and learn new dark powers…but each card also represents a memory of your former life. This is such an elegant design to really push the theme of how war changes you that I am simply blown away. The PDF is available for a $10 pledge, the softcover for $20, a deluxe edition with custom playing cards and dice for $45, and a limited hardcover deluxe edition (with dice and cards) for $65. This project is fully funded and runs until Monday, December 3.

Eternalverse maps are listed as “Dungeons & Dragons maps” but are useful for any fantasy roleplaying game. These mini-poster sized maps (about the same as two letter-sized pages side-by-side) are laminated so they’re marker-friendly and waterproof. The maps themselves are fairly generic, which makes them perfect for homebrew campaigns, and they come with reusable acetate labels that you can stick and rearrange on the maps to denote unique landmarks, items, and destinations. You can get the maps as PDFs for €5 (about US$6) or the waterproof maps for €25 (about US$28), but you can also get your own maps custom-made for €50 (about US$57). This Kickstarter from the first-time Spanish company (so be careful with shipping costs) is fully-funded and runs until Thursday, November 29.

That’s all from me for this week! Don’t forget to support our Patreon to bring you more gaming news content. If you have any news to submit, email us at news@enworldnews.com, and you can get more discussion of the week’s news on Morrus’ Unofficial Tabletop RPG Talk every week. You can follow me on Twitter @Abstruse where I’ve been lamenting the lack of easy-to-read textbooks on media studies, follow me on Twitch as I take a break from Dragon Age: Origins to play something a little different chummer, subscribe to Gamer’s Tavern on YouTube featuring videos on gaming history and gaming Let’s Plays, or you can listen to the archives of the Gamer’s Tavern podcast. Until next time, may all your hits be crits! Note: Links to Amazon, Humble Store, Humble Bundle, and/or DriveThru may contain affiliate links with the proceeds going to the author of this column.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Yes, you have and you continue to do so. The comments you are making are designed to try and attack the man, not the argument. When you claim somebody is not being honest in their arguments, that is precisely what you are doing - it's an ad hominem. Telling me to "Just stop and move on" - therein lies your objective.

I'll stop when I feel it's time to move on, unless a moderator wants to say otherwise. I suggest you either engage with the argument at hand, rather than try to turn it into an argument about me, if you want to actually want to resolve this in a civilised way.

I engaged your arguments. You ignored my points in favor of misrepresenting what I said and derailing with whatever this is.

Telling someone that their argumentation is dishonest is not a person attack.

There isn't anything more to say, unless you either present new arguments, or actually respond to my counter arguments.

 

[TrippyHippy]

I engaged your arguments. You ignored my points in favor of misrepresenting what I said and derailing with whatever this is.

Telling someone that their argumentation is dishonest is not a person attack.

There isn't anything more to say, unless you either present new arguments, or actually respond to my counter arguments.

You're now trying to argue that accusing somebody else of dishonesty in their arguments is not an ad hominem?!

Let me be clear, I haven't argued anything dishonest or used any rhetorical device in a dishonest way at all. If you believe that I have then you are wrong, and you are in no position to second guess my intentions beyond this, unless you have psychic powers. I know my intentions, and you don't. To make claims about my integrity or the integrity of my arguments is a direct insult to me, and a distraction from the actual debate at hand. It is an exemplary case of an ad hominem, for any philosophy students out there.

Beyond this, I don't think you've actually managed to make any arguments for the last few posts, but I'll refer you again to my previous post regarding the circumstances about when I'll choose to stop.

 

[Mouseferatu]

The very idea that people are more offended by the manner in which people write about persecution, than the actual persecution itself is extraordinary to me. These are the times we seem to live in.

You want an example of where your argument falls apart at best, or is dishonest at worst? It's this right here.

Nobody is "more offended" at what WW wrote than they are the actual persecution, and claiming that this is the case is absolutely disgusting.

It's precisely because we're horrified at what's happening that we maintain that it matters how it's presented. The people angry about how WW wrote about this are the same people who have been screaming about what Chechnya is doing for months, and in fact many of them are the exact same people who, if they lived in Chechnya, would be the ones herded into camps.

They're upset at White Wolf because of how all of this represents the situation as a whole. For you to claim that they're more upset about the chapter than they are about the actual crimes against humanity is grotesque.

 

[Desrimal]

Unfortunately, political correctness have taken over the world.

 

[TrippyHippy]

You want an example of where your argument falls apart at best, or is dishonest at worst? It's this right here.

Nobody is "more offended" at what WW wrote than they are the actual persecution, and claiming that this is the case is absolutely disgusting.

It's precisely because we're horrified at what's happening that we maintain that it matters how it's presented. The people angry about how WW wrote about this are the same people who have been screaming about what Chechnya is doing for months, and in fact many of them are the exact same people who, if they lived in Chechnya, would be the ones herded into camps.

They're upset at White Wolf because of how all of this represents the situation as a whole. For you to claim that they're more upset about the chapter than they are about the actual crimes against humanity is grotesque.

The context of what I said was in relation to what was said previously - that what the Chechnyan government thinks about this, and the nature of their complaints against White Wolf didn't matter. It does matter, which was the point being made. It's at the heart of the matter. I'll try to explain why.

Now I knew about the Chechnyan stuation from Amnesty International, as a member, although very few people I knew in my everyday work and socialising were aware of the situation. Indeed, a number of my gay friends have no idea about anything happening to LGBT people in Eastern Europe and Russia, and I know one that actually said she liked Putin as 'he gets bad press but he gets things done' (believe me, I have had this conversation). The wider awareness about what is happening in Chechnya is so limited that I could do a survey in many local populations, and I'd wager that more than half of them wouldn't even know of the existance of Chechnya. The lack of awareness in the gaming community reflects this also.

I feel, as somebody who does care about these issues, that there is a lack of discussion on the matter, and that referencing these things in any medium is a good way of raising awareness. This particular medium was a game depicting a fantasy reflection of our own world, where vampires supposedly exist in conspiracies that mirror human society and control it. Some people argue that a game like this shouldn't reference things like this at all, but I disagree. It's a valid a medium as any other.

Is it just an issue of the manner in which they present it? Should supernatural elements ever excuse real life atrocities? There is validity in this statement but it is a nuanced one. I feel the outrage over this particular nuance has been overstated - because the real point is that the issue has been raised at all, metaphorically or otherwise.

Using metaphors to raise awareness isn't a new thing - when UB40 sang about mass starvation in Africa in 1979s Food for Thought or Black Sabbath sang about the Vietnam War in War Pigs, they did so using metaphors. When George Orwell wrote Animal Farm as an allegory about the impact of the Russian Revolution he used animals as a metaphor. There really is no difference here, except vampires are used as a metaphor in this case. Now, you could say that they should have changed names or created some sort of fantasy version of Chechnya to make the metaphors less obvious, but again this is a nuance. Presenting the leadership of Chechnya in vampiric form is as much part of the satire as a Saturday Night Show comedian doing a comedy impersonation of a political figure would be. In folklorish terms, it's like presenting Lady Bathory as a vampire or, indeed, Vlad Tepes. These were cruel, tyrannical, murderous individuals - well represented by the metaphor of being vampires. Considering the regime Ramzan Akhmadovich Kadyrov has presided over, I don't see the metaphor as being unapt here either. I don't think this trivialises what is happening - I think it accentuates it, in a poetic way.

Now you could disagree with all this, and that's fine. But this is my point: this article has raised awareness to the extent that the Chechnyan leadership took notice - it made an impact on them, it angered them that the issue had been raised and they had been presented in a negative way. This is a good thing, because they are being forced to address the criticism in a public way. I'm not claiming here that people like yourself don't care about the situation over there, but rather that the anger against White Wolf could have been channelled more directly against the Chechnyan leadership within the momentum of having got their awareness. The fact that they felt compelled to respond in anger, should have been built on to widen the publicity. People ought to have championed Western freedom of expression to highlight this issue even louder.

But they didn't - the whole thing was meekly withdrawn, White Wolf was condemned and dissolved for a nuanced aspect of their presentation of the situation, and the Chechnyan leadership claimed a victory. The likelihood of any creative medium making statements like these is diminished under threat of misplaced opprobrium as much as anything else. It is the worst possible outcome of this situation - for the LGBT people in Chechnya - some of whom have actually said as much in correspondance to the White Wolf forums. We all care about the people in Chechnya, including the writers from White Wolf, but their situation has not been made any better by the demise of White Wolf and the censoring of the book. It's been made worse.

 

[ruemere]

Trippy-Hippy wrote...

Now you could disagree with all this, and that's fine. But this is my point: this article has raised awareness to the extent that the Chechnyan leadership took notice - it made an impact on them, it angered them that the issue had been raised and they had been presented in a negative way.

But they didn't - the whole thing was meekly withdrawn, White Wolf was condemned and dissolved for a nuanced aspect of their presentation of the situation, and the Chechnyan leadership claimed a victory. The likelihood of any creative medium making statements like these is diminished under threat of misplaced opprobrium as much as anything else. It is the worst possible outcome of this situation - for the LGBT people in Chechnya - some of whom have actually said as much in correspondance to the White Wolf forums. We all care about the people in Chechnya, including the writers from White Wolf, but their situation has not been made any better by the demise of White Wolf and the censoring of the book. It's been made worse.

So basically, "the ends justify the means" (quote #1), and "a broken clock is good enough because it shows correct time twice a day" (quote #2).

That's quite an immature approach, you know?

We don't know if the Chechnya piece goes completely away - who knows, maybe in hands of a better editor, a revised piece will not rub people a wrong way. Let's wait before we call Paradox on this one.

Also, why do you care that the other side claimed victory? It's just propaganda on their side - as a member of Amnesty International you should be pretty familiar with PR people claiming things that are just PR. It's like you care more what Chechnyan mouthpiece says than what genuinely affected people say... your priorities appear to be wrong.

FYI, the people you disagree with, like Mousferatu over here, and Justin Achilli (he wrote a piece about not using 9/11 or other recent tragedies for Vampire development) are former WhiteWolf developers. So, your disagreement reaches new heights - you're not only arguing against actions of current WWGS property owners, but also disagree with former WWGS devs.

So, at this point it may be a good idea for you to take a step back, and then consider whether your views are really correct.
Me, when I am being told that I am wrong, I am at least willing to review my position, especially if I am picking a debate with several authorities on the subject, or people who are closer to the heart of the matter than me.

Regards,
Ruemere

 

[Morrus]

Unfortunately, political correctness have taken over the world.

*glances around*

It very, very, very clearly has not.

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

In WoD you can create, for example, a character who is a cangrel vampire former IRA member but you can't say IRA was created by Irish cangrels to fight Hibernophobia, nor "Pentex caused the violent night riots in Paris by madmen intoxicated by its products" nor "Technocracy did false flag operations in Russia to start a new war against Chechnya". You can create a character like Joseph Seed, the main antagonist of "Far Cry 5" for your WoD campaign, but you can't add supernatural causes to the tragedy of Waco siege in the 1993 real world, maybe at most ghost characters died in tragedies from real life. We need a piece of good sense and sensibility and a right distance between reality and fiction.

I start to suspect the reason about this matter they wanted an alternative origin for islamic radicalism in Chechnya and other Muslims countries, the true message was: "Stop islamophobia, don't hate all Muslims, the jihadists are puppets controlled by others, it isn't fault by the Quran". But the road to the hell is paved with good intentions.

Other matter is many characters from WoD, not only vampires, are too close to social darwinism and Nietzsche's ideas about Übermensch or superior man who rejects weak slaves' Jew-Christian morality to follow his own ethic code. (For me this sounds like Joffrey Baratheon, character from Games of Thrones, with a crossbow and superpowers, or Lord Voldemort). Why Magneto, leader of homo-superiors, should respect flatscans' lives? If WW publihs fiction and sourcebooks to report fanaticism and intolerance but they forget to defend the respect of human dignity then they are losing the time, replacing a tyrant with a new one who may be worse than the previous one.

And if we want to use speculative fiction to try a softer way to talk about serious matters of real life, do remember to convince you can't offend because then your listener doesn't trust you to keep hearing. Spanish cinema when is used like political propaganda become a total box office failure, time after time, because public doesn't want to support the same message again, and North-americans themselves also are sick by Hollywood's ideological agenda. We are in the beginning of the cultural counter-revolution, the actual equivalent of anticommunist McCarthy's witch hunt and satanic panic.

 

[Umbran]

I start to suspect the reason about this matter they wanted an alternative origin for islamic radicalism in Chechnya and other Muslims countries, the true message was: "Stop islamophobia, don't hate all Muslims, the jihadists are puppets controlled by others, it isn't fault by the Quran". But the road to the hell is paved with good intentions.

Unfortunately, I suspect you are wrong here. I'm told that this is not the only problematic element that has come up in the production of the book - the others were largely removed in playtests. The writers and editors had overall... lack of good judgement.

 

[Lychee of the Exch.]

The context of what I said was in relation to what was said previously - that what the Chechnyan government thinks about this, and the nature of their complaints against White Wolf didn't matter. It does matter, which was the point being made. It's at the heart of the matter. I'll try to explain why.[...]
White Wolf was condemned and dissolved for a nuanced aspect of their presentation of the situation, and the Chechnyan leadership claimed a victory. The likelihood of any creative medium making statements like these is diminished under threat of misplaced opprobrium as much as anything else. It is the worst possible outcome of this situation - for the LGBT people in Chechnya - some of whom have actually said as much in correspondance to the White Wolf forums. We all care about the people in Chechnya, including the writers from White Wolf, but their situation has not been made any better by the demise of White Wolf and the censoring of the book. It's been made worse.

A weel reasoned and nuanced post.

Thank you for that.

I will add that, in my opinion, the controversy surrounding this issue is due for the most part to the ongoing power grab of the post-modernist faction currently scouring the USA, aided by some well-meaning but deluded bystanders.

Neo-Maccarthyism, indeed.