Image courtesy Morguefile
The World of Darkness
In the early 1990s, White Wolf Publishing created a new genre of roleplaying with their game Vampire: The Masquerade. Rather than playing human heroes battling supernatural foes, Vampire: The Masquerade flipped sides, with players taking the role of undead vampires. This was not an regloss of Monsters! Monsters!: instead of playing simple monsters who preyed on humans, Vampire was primarily about the internal conflicts of monsters who fit into their own societies with their own problems, and who struggled to restrain their base impulses. This game of emotional drama proved wildly successful, and White Wolf produced a slew of similar games.
The games shared a common game engine (The Storytelling System) and a common setting, the World of Darkness, although different views of it. Since the games shared the same system, we describe the common mechanics for all of them together.
We believe Vampire: the Masquerade was the touchstone game against which all of the other World of Darkness games should be compared. To that end, we suggest that you peruse that game first before exploring what we have to say about the others.
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The setting and core mechanics for all of the 2nd Edition World of Darkness games. |
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Vampire: The Masquerade (2nd Edition) (1992) The basic game of the World of Darkness, and the most popular. |
Werewolf: The Apocalypse (2nd Edition) (1994) The end of the world is here. Can the werewolf warriors of Gaia reverse the corrupting tide of the Wyrm?
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Mage: The Ascension (2nd Edition) (1995) A battle for the ultimate stakes: what will the nature of reality itself be? |
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Changeling: The Dreaming (2nd Edition) (1995) A lighter game about lighter races. The end of the world means a much duller existence. |
Wraith: The Oblivion (2nd Edition) (1996) A deeply flawed game of psychological exploration. |
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Mummy (2nd Edition) (1997) A clever little tie-together for Vampire: the Masquerade and Wraith: the Oblivion |
Last revised June 22, 2012.