The World Of Darkness – From 90’s Kings To The End Of White Wolf – Prime
The World of Darkness carved a dark, edgy niche in the RPG empire, but the brooding 90s led to a storm of controversy at the tail end of the 2010’s…
In the World of Darkness, monsters lurk in every shadow. Vampires weave intrigues and schemes from their secret lairs scattered throughout the city, looking down on humanity like cattle meant to be cultivated to be fed on, with hidden fangs and thinly veiled metaphors for capitalism, sexed up under the guise of the undead. Mages sit up in their ivory towers, judging everyone and deciding who gets to know about magic. Ghosts of days past linger in the world, trying to hang on to their identity. Changelings from the Fae lands caper about, aware of the real horrors in the world, while Werewolves fight to save the planet and for your right to party–both of them giving people at Renaissance fairs far too easy an excuse to dress up.
Come to think of it, every edition of any White Wolf book has done this
This dark, urban fantasy came to define much of the 90s in the tabletop world. Vampire: the Masquerade was on the rise as D&D was on the decline, and right up until the end of the 90s, that was the case. But trouble was just around the corner for White Wolf. It’s a familiar story–one you might have seen in the long arc of TSR, the company found success and followed fast after it, releasing product after product without creating sustainability. It’s a cycle that most companies go through leading to a downturn. White Wolf was no exception. At the end of the 90s, starting in 98, the company announced a major restructuring of their business.
Though Splatbooks were by and large one of the biggest hits for the company, the many different product lines proved to be too much. As TSR found, having many buckets for your customers doesn’t mean catching more, it just means that you’re dividing your core audience. And so, they announced the cancellation of their Wraith line, as well as Changeling: the Dreaming, and the alternate timelines for Werewolf set in the wild west, and Mage set during the Renaissance.
Now, the thing to understand here is that these games were successful. They had found an audience, but they hadn’t found a big enough audience. They couldn’t support the big company that White Wolf had become, so for a time, White Wolf created a spinoff company, Arthaus, which would take over White Wolf’s more experimental ideas like Trinity and Aberrant. But before WW shuffled everything off to Arthaus, they brought about changes to the storyline. Because as we talked about last time, the White Wolf-verse was a lot like what we’ve seen in the MCU. Sure there are individual stories, but throughout the entire World of Darkness was an overarching metaplot that tied the different properties together.
To that end, they kicked off big crossover events and storyline shifts to bring about the release of new books like Kindred of the East and Mummy and later Demon: the Fallen. However, the audience fatigue for metaplot–as well as the interest of the writers in supporting it started to wane. The big sweeping plotlines that never resolved found themselves condensed into a new format: six releases that could tell a complete story with beginning, middle, and end. You saw this in the very last “classic” World of Darkness release, Orpheus, which was a reimagining of Wraith and gave new life to ghosts. Ironic, for sure. Orpheus only ever was intended to have six books to tell its story, and this model would prove to be important for White Wolf in the coming years.
But before we get to that, we ought to talk about just how big D&D is. When 3rd Edition came out, and the OGL was released, it changed the face of the RPG industry as we know it. Not even White Wolf could escape its influence. They launched their own d20 line, Sword & Sorcery, which they created in partnership with Necromancer Games. If you’re familiar with Ptolus, that whole line–as well as Monet Cook’s other brainchildren came out of this partnership. S&S was the perfect studio for weird, experimental d20 products.
And for four brief years, it was amazing. And then WotC released D&D 3.5 in late 2003, and by the beginning of 2004, the d20 market had all but crashed into nonexistence. Companies that couldn’t make the edition pivot found themselves going under. There was a whole market boom and bust all on the turn of a change in rules–which highlights the danger of systems dependent on an engine like that. White Wolf had briefly acquired the rights to Gamma World and Ravenloft, but returned them to WotC in 2005, gave up work on an EverQuest RPG, and then some.
Fortunately for White Wolf, they had other irons in the fire. And the rise of d20 did ultimately cost them a great deal, the interest of the WW audience in fantasy helped give rise to one of the best swords & sorcery fantasy games out there. Exalted. We could spend a whole article talking about how Exalted took the storyteller system and iterated it to the extreme, creating something entirely different–where WoD was a superhero game dressed up like a vampire, Exalted was a superhero game dressed up as “anime fantasy.” And with Exalted, White Wolf created something the ttrpg industry had never seen before, and has not seen since. Under the guidance of Geoffrey C. Grabowski, Exalted built out a fantasy empire with enough sustainability to keep almost forty books afloat by the end of it’s 2nd Edition.
For whatever reason, the lore the details, the expansions–it was its own self-sustaining not quite WoD. It caught the tabletop world’s eye in a way nobody was expecting. But even the success of Exalted and the reinvigorated World of Darkness was not enough to insulate White Wolf from disaster. As Exalted grew, the World of Darkness went through another two shifts in edition. And in 2006, CCP Games, the producers of Eve Online acquired White Wolf with the hopes that they would be able to create an MMO out of the World of Darkness.
They never did. By 2009, CCP had implemented new shifts in priorities, trying to revive a flagging World of Darkness with new editions. And ultimately, in 2011, White Wolf, seemingly at odds with itself given CCP’s directives, stopped publishing in the traditional sense. CCP didn’t have the success it wanted, Eve Online was successful, but compared to World of Warcraft, it was nothing. And by 2011, CCP shrank and White Wolf was left adrift with almost no resources.
A Hail Mary release of Vampire for the 20th Anniversary, which most folks call V20 probably saved them from being cut from CCP entirely. The anniversary edition of Vampire caught that old nostalgia like a moth catches a flame. And its initial success likely kept CCP happy enough to keep White Wolf going. Which led to creative director Rich Thomas offering to create a new corporation to keep White Wolf’s IP going–Onyx Path Publishing. OPP licensed World of Darkness and Exalted and so on from White Wolf–in reality CCP–and launched their own imprint. And their aim was to recapture the nostalgia of early White Wolf, which was enabled by a new tool in the tabletop landscape. One nobody had anticipated: Kickstarter.
When Kickstarter launched, Onyx Path was there at the outset. Its crowdfunding model allowed them to prove that the audience for these titles, old revisions to the World of Darkness that captured that old school flare, were out there, just not in the traditional sense. And over the first three years of their existence, they managed to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars and publish nine different titles with a comparative handful of backers. The most successful of OPP’s World of Darkness titles, Mage: the Ascension 20th anniversary edition, had less than four thousand backers, but it raised $672,899.
While the digital destiny for White Wolf and the MMO dreams of CCP wouldn’t pan out, they ultimately found plenty of success acting as the stewards of the World of Darkness. But. Even this brought its own trouble.
Towards the end of 2018, with a brand new edition of Vampire, a 5th Edition (because those are all the rage these days), in the works, with all the excitement that this massive nostalgia trip would bring, a storm of controversy brewed that would ultimately erupt in Chechnya, setting off an international incident and leading to the dissolution of White Wolf as we know it. But before that, the company came under fire from different corners of the internet for flirting with neo-nazi iconography and ideas in its release, including an archetype for one of the Brujah that was a typical skinhead:
Clan Brujah have always Embraced from the ranks of those sympathetic to counterculture and revolution. They seek out allies who question normative ideas, and recognizing the fire of the oppressed, they gravitate toward the underdog.
AdvertisementCommon perception place punks, gang-members, maladjusted immigrants rejected by the society that should protect them, and placard-carrying and Molotov wielding rioters among the Brujah. While the clan definitely includes substantial numbers of vocal and visible outsiders, their desire for rebellion reaches as deep as the fraudster ripping off his own company, the lawyer representing the poor pro bono, the neo-Nazi claiming to be “alt-right,” and the basement-dweller downloading thousands of movies illegally for redistribution on streaming sites. Fledglings Embraced to fight and protest are commonly known as rabble.
And as one critic put it:
“The game’s in-universe antagonists share many traits that nazis and fascists associate with their real-world enemies, meaning that readers who share that ideology will be able to easily see it as representing themselves.”
Again this was nothing new, Vampire had always played with a certain edginess. Neo-nazis were a part of the original Vampire as well. But the new edition drew on real-world tragedies and came under fire from the international community, culminating in Paradox Interactive (who now own CCP) reining in the creative team and assuming direct control over White Wolf.
At least until November of last year, when the dust around the World of Darkness settled and Renegade Games stepped up as the new tabletop publishing partner, taking the World of Darkness–well at the very least 5th Edition Vampire and that version of the World of Darkness out of the hands of White Wolf and Onyx Path and putting them in the hands of a new team with many familiar names.
It’s an unprecedented shift for sure. It would be like if all of a sudden Wizards of the Coast stopped publishing D&D and instead a company like Evil Hat took over the reins–but with the help of some of the old D&D team to revamp the product.
Even now the future is murky for the World of Darkness, but then, Vampires have always lived life on the edge.
