Ken Cliffe

I just found a used copy of World of Darkness to go along with my digital copy so it must be the Fates telling me to write a review.

As a White Wolf fan since 1994 I was skeptical when a new revision was announced following the original World of Darkness. The thirteen-year crash finally occurred and each of their original lines fell to their fates, first with Wraith that poor ghostly step-headed redchild portending the death of Vampire, Werewolf, Mage and the like. I didn’t buy into the new World of Darkness until DriveThruRPG offered it as their monthly free download, and only then because I was curious about what they were going to do with Changeling. It turns out my fears were unfounded and I would be joyous about how all the revisions would turn out.

I heard scuttlebutt about making a book like the World of Darkness core rulebook back in 1997; it is really a no-brainer. It was nice that you didn’t have to buy a Player’s and Storyteller’s handbook if you wanted to play Vampire only just one self-contained book but if you got into the other lines and lord help you if you wanted to run a crossover things go ridiculous fast. There were an entire chapters on the basic rules set that was repeated in each book, often with inconsistencies. This was particularly glaring with the Merits and Flaws which varied widely from book to book. It is so much better to have all the rules in just one book for several reasons. The first is consistency in the rules set as stated above which have also been streamlined and simplified to cut down on game time. Secondly now there is so much more space in the Vampire: the Requiem core book to for vampires. It can be ALL ABOUT VAMPIRES all the time. Thirdly, it made playing mortals cool and viable. I think there was one official mortals character sheet way back in the first edition of Vampire but they were given very little consideration as the years went on. Now all your characters start off as mortals and either stay that way in a viable, fully-supported game line of their own or have a supernatural template built around that foundation. Everyone has morality and everyone behaves according to the same rules set. Very exciting. White Wolf has continued to deliver on this in their “blue book” mortals line, giving us books just about portraying the police, or the military, or travel stories so we don’t have to poke around this Vampire book for this bit of information and that Mage supplement to get that tidbit that should apply to the whole.

But what got me was the fiction. With old World of Darkness books you could play a little game with the flavor fiction where you tried to guess what creature the story was about as soon as possible. Oh, that’s a Silver Fang werewolf. Oh, that must be a Settie vampire. It was pretty clear cut because even though Darkness got a lot of name dropping the world was pretty fully illuminated because everyone thought it was cool to find out what supernatural creature inhabit what niche in the world. I read the fiction in this new book and was clueless, totally blown away. A priest knows his days are numbered as he has found secrets about an otherworldly patron of a small New England town that came over with the first settlers. This ghoul is refined in manners but only blesses the town with good fortune with a tithe of death. I was guessing it had to be a vampire of some sort since it lived hundreds of years… but wait! Sounds an awful lot like an old world fairy tale as well. This thing only “feeds” every fifty years and claims thirteen lives, numbers like that were more reminiscent of a dark Fae than Kindred. Another story presents the last lecture of a cryptozoologist teaching anthropology at a state college before his abrupt disappearance. He talks about traveling to a island in British Columbia and spending time with a hominid creature. Oh, I thought, it must be some sort of werewolf… but the pieces didn’t fit. It went this way for every piece of fiction except the chapter heading splash pages. The monsters were Monsters, unnervingly unclassifiable and mysterious.

That is the great gift of the new World of Darkness book, it brings back mystery and by stripping out the meta plot it makes the game of personal horror personal again. It has some bumps and flaws particularly in its shortcomings of actually executing the horror end of that title but those can be hacked and White Wolf has recently put out some excellent tools to hack the system. I was so thankful, though. So refreshed to be bewildered and confused and scared by a White Wolf book again. There is more power to creatively tell the story as you wish. Boundlessness unhindered by a built-in Millennialism.… (more)