The WotC Buffy the Vampire Slayer RPG that wasn't

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

How Wizards of the Coast almost published a Buffy the Vampire Slayer RPG

And the story of who actually did.

www.rascal.news

Well, Last Unicorn did. And the first proposal for it was written by Kenneth Hite, who knows a little something about supernatural RPGs! But then WotC bought them ...

The new management revamped the whole office: installing top-end computers, $500 Aeron chairs, and a wired T1 internet connection so communication from Wizards HQ in Seattle and Last Unicorn’s office in LA could be as fast and smooth as possible. This should’ve been the beginning of a new boom for the team. But it wasn’t to be.

Things unraveled fast. At Gen Con 2000, a company called Decipher, known for their How To Host A Murder series of games and multiple licensed collectible card games, announced that they had won the Star Trek license. Last Unicorn’s license was expiring at the end of the year, but according to Designers & Dragons, “Wizards hadn’t bothered to negotiate with Paramount about an extension; they just assumed that they’d get it”. They soon lost the Dune license as well; when renegotiations began, the Herbert estate expected Wizards to pay a higher fee as they were a bigger company. And as for Buffy, Wizards simply weren’t interested. This was the time when the OGL was first being drafted and Wizards saw a boom in d20 games on the horizon. So even though a contract with Fox for Buffy was ready to be signed, Christian Moore told Rascal that pen was never put to paper.

Moore was surprised that Wizards wasn’t interested but he wasn’t going to let all those meetings and negotiations (and lawyer fees) go to waste. So Moore and Seyler took the deal to a company called Score Entertainment which mainly did baseball cards and the like, but had recently found success with the Dragonball Z CCG. So Score made the Buffy CCG (designed by Moore and Seyler) and the RPG license went to a company called Eden Studios, the brainchild of George Vasilakos who was the art director of Last Unicorn and who now runs the Zombie Planet comic and game store in Albany, NY.

The story is based on a GoFundMe campaign for former Last Unicorn designer Ross A. Isaacs.

And I would love to see Ken Hite's Buffy RPG proposal one day, since we've got both the Eden Studios game and, realistically, Monster of the Week to compare it to in the RPG space.

 

[JConstantine]

Coincidentally, I was going through my Buffy/Angel RPG stuff this past month, anticipating potential interest due to the (now scrapped) reboot.
Given Kenneth Hite worked on the current edition of Vampire: The Masquerade (V5), which is my preferred edition by far, I, too, would be interested in seeing his take on a Buffy RPG.