World of Darkness

Those who’ve followed my writings for a while know I’m an avid tabletop gamer. I even made my own role-playing system for Combat Frame XSeed.

Unlike many in the #PulpRev and adjacent literary movements, I didn’t cut my teeth on old-school D&D. My induction into the hobby came in high school, which coincided with the 90s pen-and-paper gaming boom. In those days, everybody with an idea, a graphing calculator, and cash to pay the printer could publish his own role-playing game. TSR remained on top, but they faced a wave of competition from a variety of idiosyncratic games.

One infamous system I was introduced to early but didn’t gain a full appreciation of till now is the World of Darkness shared universe of games from White Wolf publishing. Long-time readers will recall a post from a few years back that started a running theme on this blog. It’s relevant today because in it I mentioned Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines, probably White Wolf’s most successful foray into video gaming.

While Bloodlines’ plot had serious structural flaws, the game writers’ failings don’t reflect on the TTRPG subject matter. In fact, storytelling is the centerpiece of the World of Darkness’ rules system. It’s difficult to think of a major competing game that’s as diametrically opposite D&D’s numbers-crunching, combat-focused experience. WoD brings unapologetic storygaming to the table. And in the right Storyteller’s hands, that feature works to the games’ credit.

Let’s focus on WoD’s flagship game, Vampire: The Masquerade. What sets Vampire worlds apart from every other major game I can think of is that it doesn’t shy away from religion–and more amazingly in this age of apostasy, that religion is unambiguously biblical and Abrahamic.

Vampire’s lead designer Mark Rein-Hagen has publicly stated that he wanted to make a game about religion. His upbringing as the son of a Lutheran pastor shows in the surprising competence of the final product.

Unlike D&D, which traded on its classic rules set and largely left the official back story to licensed tie-in books, the World of Darkness’ main selling point is its rich, layered, and intentionally paradoxical lore. All of the shared setting’s games boast deep and extensive world building, but in the deep lore department, Vampire takes the crown.

Imagine you take a wrong turn down a dark alley one night and stumble upon an entire parallel society. Its denizens practice Byzantine customs and traditions mostly alien to you, but much of their behavior resembles what most people would call vampirism. You learn that this underground culture has operated in the shadows of human civilization since forever. They even direct human affairs to a shocking extent while taking utmost pains to keep their true nature secret.

But most startling and intriguing of all, each of your queries about the vampires’ origins meets with a different answer, depending on who you ask. The rowdier nonconformists of the bunch proclaim they are the children of Caine, who slew his brother Abel, and whose threefold curse they carry to this very night. The more rational, SMRT vampires scoff at these Bronze Age fairytales–but cast nervous backward glances at the grim prophecies of Caine’s grandchildren rising from their millennia-long sleep to reclaim every last drop of blood.

No two Kindred–as the undead call themselves–even agree on their cursed genealogy. Ravnos, founder of the nomad clan that bears his name, was sired by Enoch the Wise. Unless it was Irad the Strong, or lovely Zillah. Or the enigmatic Crone. Or perhaps even Caine himself.

No one knows for sure. It’s up to you, the Storyteller, to decide.

Now factor in the tangled, almost contradictory origin myths of werewolves, mages, fey, and wraiths and you’ve got yourself a sumptuous mythos buffet. Sampling every dish, let alone cobbling together combination dishes, could take a lifetime.

Working out how Vampire interacts with Mage offers just one mind-boggling example. Since Tremere, one of the 13 Kindred clan founders, was a human Mage who contracted vampirism from a botched attempt at immortality, the two types of preternatural beings canonically coexist. That circumstance has fascinating implications regarding the nature of vampires themselves. Did Caine’s curse immediately transform him into a blood-drinking undead who burns to ash in the sun? Even the vampire bible the Book of Nod says otherwise. He was cursed and exiled following his murder of Abel, but he seemed to lead a proto-vampiric existence for a time.

That raises the question in players’ minds: When and how did Caine become a classic vampire as commonly understood today? Mage offers the possible clue that, much like his bastard grandchilde Tremere, Caine further cursed himself in a failed bid to escape the consequences of his Fall. Trying to Awaken himself to true magical power may instead have shattered his soul and made him undead.

Playing around with the WoD’s lore makes for hours of spooky fun. But every game needs rules, and despite its freeform reputation, Vampire and its related settings do indeed have game mechanics.

What new players will notice right away about WoD’s Storyteller System is that it’s much less rigid and much more nebulously defined than mechanics-first games like D&D. To start, every WoD game follows a variation on the following template:

• Pick a scary monster race.
• Decide which subtype of said scary monster race you want to be.
• The two preceding choices largely determine the kinds of scary monster powers you’ll have.
• Instead of levels, the degree of scary monster power you can wield is determined by a more evocative factor: generations from Caine/renown in the pack/level of enlightenment/unfinished business among the living/progress in figuring out your dharma/etc.
• Advancement in the above power scales has no relation to XP gained. It must be earned through role-playing, which in some cases involves doing truly horrific deeds.
• In light of the fact that WoD characters tend to be monsters that routinely do horrific deeds, the system has a robust virtue mechanic to track your slide from rational human to base beast. If your Beast/Shadow/P’o wins, your character becomes an NPC.
• And, oh yeah, you get to pick skills, advantages, and quirks to round your character out.

The main mechanic of all WoD games is simple. Each of your character’s stats has a number of dots next to it, like a standardized test. Each filled-in dot gives you one ten-sided die. When attempting an action that has a chance of failure, the Storyteller will ask you to combine your dots in two or more stats–usually a base attribute and a skill–and roll a number of d10s equal to that number. Each die that rolls equal to or above the success number (usually a 6 for most normal actions) counts as a success. The more successes you get, the better you do.

If that mechanic sounds rather vague, it is. WoD emphasizes storytelling and role-playing over hard and fast numbers. Many of the monster power descriptions admit of wide latitude for interpretation. Take the Malkavians’ signature discipline Dementation, which lets the vampire dredge up secret fears and pathologies from the victim’s psyche that manifest as fleeting glimpses, hushed whispers, and skewed thoughts at random times. The Malk using the discipline isn’t even privy to the content of the victim’s hallucinations. In D&D, such a spell would produce chaos. In VtM, it also produces chaos, which makes it some of the best linear magic in the game.

Then there’s True Magick, whereby a Mage can go, “I want all the air in that room to turn to wood,” and it just does.

If a less mannered and restrictive style of play appeals to you, consider picking up the old World of Darkness books. The classic editions of every setting can be found secondhand in game stores and online, so you can easily avoid paying people who hate you. And unfortunately, WoD’s current IP holders definitely hate you.

Meanwhile, for eerie, TTRPG-inspired fun, read my hit horror-adventure novel Nethereal.