I completely did forget about it. It was always one of those games I wanted to get around to playing but back when I was very into PC gaming, it was in a state that required a ton of patching just to function and I never felt like committing to it. I think they released a remaster that I should probably get around to playing.
I know it's very well regarded though. And if I know anything about it, I know about Fat Larry (with an F.A.T. because he knows he's got a weight problem, he just doesn't give a fuck).
Yeah, in video game circles I guess it's seen as one of those "highest of highbrow" RPGs...which probably says more about the general brow level of that medium than anything. :P It does have some great attention to detail, though. Also the kind of crazy ambitious mid-budget game you sadly don't see too often these days.
I hadn't even considered a supernatural conspiracy game for a prospective RPG campaign at my clubhouse, but you've just about convinced me to do my long toyed-with idea of combining old World of Darkness with Delta Green and Conspiracy X.
For my money, original Mage was the pinnacle of this sort of mid-to-late-90s esoteric, conspiracy driven and early cyberpunk aesthetic. NuMage did some good things, though (I am indebted to the Magical Traditions book for the introduction to the stories of Manly Wade Wellman, for example). Chronicles of Darkness: Chicago is one of the very best RPG sandbox books I've ever read, and almost certainly the best of such put in a modern setting.
Delta Green is also a fascinating RPG. It's one of those concepts that's basically bespoke to my interests; shady conspiracies, corrupt governmental intelligence agencies, with Lovecraftian horrors? I could get down on that all day.
If it's anything like the books, a game based on The Laundry Files would be killer. Not the best written books on the planet but good reads none the less.
Once again, we seem to be operating on the same wavelength. I've been reading old World of Darkness rulebooks to feed an unexpected craving for 90's nostalgia.
One thing I keep saying to myself over and over is, why would anyone do this? Like, making a werewolf game, I get that - but why jam hacker werewolves in there? It's not like they were running out of ideas elsewhere in the book.
I'm not saying it's bad. I'm saying it's incomprehensible in retrospect - which is part of the appeal, I guess.
Personally, I like some of the more out-there ideas like hacker werewolves, but I would agree that revisiting Werewolf in particular left me a bit overwhelmed. I don't think they were running out of ideas so much as they had too damn many. They really did pack in a ton of shit that could have been pared down. Like, I love the idea of there being other were-critters running around, and they all have their own unique niche roles they fulfill within the global network of shapeshifters, but taken with the scads of lore, lore, and more lore throughout the run, there's simply too much crap for it all to mesh well. No campaign would ever be able to hit on all of it in any meaningful way. At least, no campaign that didn't run for ten years, or so. Ultimately, a lot of the oWoD seems like they got really, really enthusiastic about the world-building and went, "What about this? Oh, what about this? We should add this, too!" That kind of creative enthusiasm is respectable but one must know when to trim the fat. All of the oWoD gamelines suffer that kind of ADHD energy to some degree or another.
Absolutely. Did they need 13 clans and five aspects and septs and three lineages AND three missing tribes? Did they need fetishes AND totems AND rituals AND special abilities?
I admire the sheer manic creative energy. That, and the flavor of the looming apocalypse, is at the core of this 90's nostalgia that's sprang up on me all of a sudden.
But thinking about playing it as a game gives me a headache.
Thanks for this. Good article, and I hope you follow up on the cliffhanger soon. VtM/White Wolf is one of those things I've always been mildly intrigued by but never got around to looking into, so I appreciate this quick retrospective. I always imagined it as the more serious, less empowering, story-focused alternative to D&D, so I'm surprised to learn it was so cheesy in many ways. It's fun that there were actual practicing neopagans involved, though. Your descriptions of Changeling and Demon sound more like what I envisioned these games being like. Either way, I think it's neat that they're not as much of a power fantasy as D&D: like you said, humans aren't at the top of the foodchain, and the player tends to be at the bottom rungs of a very ancient and formidable vampire hierarchy as well (I think?). Oh, and you forgot the most terrible WW game concept of them all, the one I'm sure we were all thinking of in the back of our minds. Pony: the Stampede. Now there's a crossover and a half. ;)
A few other random tidbits about this article, if you'll indulge me: first, you're very right about the "D&D effect". I'm sure there's a proper name for it, but I can't think of it right now. There's so many places where the leader in that niche sucks out all the air and makes it hard for people to change due to sheer inertia. Steam, Magic the Gathering, Warhammer, World of Warcraft, etc etc. I think tabletop RPGs might be in a better position than the rest here, since an individual group can just change whenever they feel like it, while people who play these other games have to build up their multiplayer skills from scratch and deal with a much lower player base. Still, I get the frustration for sure.
Speaking of Vance, I also just love the idea that he was playing Urza's Saga the same time I was messing around with those cards, even if he knew what he was doing and I was a 12 year old with questionable English and even more questionable grasp of Magic strategy and deckbuilding, haha. There's something surreal about people with these experiences and reference frames actually getting into real positions of power now, people from my own generation.
The good news is I have the follow-up already prepared and ready to go; this is a duology I've had on the backburner when I needed something to fill time between articles, so I figured since I've been busy with traveling for some "investigative journalism", now was the best time to publish them.
As for the game's themselves, cheesy though they may be, they do take themselves completely seriously. They are less empowering than your average D&D campaign (especially with 2024 rules), as you do usually start out as the bottom bitch of whatever supernatural strata your playing. But, at the very least in oWoD, the end-goal is to stop one of a variety of supernatural apocalypses, so your characters do end up becoming pretty OP. Takes a while to get there, though. Also, while Pony: The Stampede was (thankfully) never a thing... at least so far as I'm aware, I'm fairly certain there was a homebrew MLP TTRPG made using White Wolf's basic game system that's shared between all their games (i.e. WoD and White Wolf's other big series, Exalted, both function more or less the same in terms of mechanics, but one's urban fantasy and the other is high fantasy... and also not good). I feel like I remember that being a thing. I hope I'm wrong.
If there is no actual term for the "D&D Effect", I'm going to adopt it, anyways. I think the bigger issue of this newly-coined term isn't just that it makes expanding in the niche or scene difficult, but it also taints everything adjacent to it. Recently, I've been doing some reading on the state of fantasy literature, and it's incredible how bog-standard D&D has so irreparably colored how so many people see high fantasy. It's pretty much set the standard and in turn the expectations of the audience in a way where authors are afraid to deviate too far from the predetermined tropes. I think it's a lot like what you see in the tech space - one platform does one thing, and because it works, every other platforms begins to adjust to match them and do the same thing, albeit worse. Best example is dating apps; I read an interview with the founder of eHarmony and he said something along the lines of, "eHarmony worked because it wasn't a hook-up app and it was intended for adults who were serious about meeting a long-term partner. Then Tindr came along, and everyone wanted to ape their success, so all dating sites and services became lesser knock-offs of Tindr." Obviously, the catastrophic results are still playing out in all their odious glory. I think this is the best example of why the old adage of "capitalism fosters diversity/creativity/innovation" is not entirely true; often times, it seems to funnel everyone into following the same narrow path as the market leader, to everyone's detriment.
Lastly, on Vance... well, let's just say it's hilarious to me that we absolutely have a vice-president who dropped racial slurs in an Xbox Live lobby at some point in his life. And he won't be the last. It'll be interesting when more Millennials take public office because you just know they're all going to be praying their old social media accounts don't come back to haunt them.
"it's incredible how bog-standard D&D has so irreparably colored how so many people see high fantasy."
Absolutely. I know I've griped about this before, but it makes me both exasperated and sad to see that the one genre that really needs fresh ideas and a sense of wonder has turned into the most formulaic one. Basically due to the one-two punch of Tolkien and Gygax, as you said.
"eHarmony worked because it wasn't a hook-up app and it was intended for adults who were serious about meeting a long-term partner. Then Tindr came along, and everyone wanted to ape their success, so all dating sites and services became lesser knock-offs of Tindr."
See also: the Ultima Online vs Everquest vision of MMOs, and WoW making the whole genre stuck in the EQ vision for a decade and a half. (I'm tempted to do a write-up on that at some point, even if I suspect everything to do with WoW has been covered to death)
As for Millennials in public office, that's one thing I'll give the current Prime Minister here in Norway. While the PM himself is an old, rich Boomer, he did actually appoint a bunch of Millennials in important posts. Including a Justice Minister born after 1990. The Finance Minister (ie. second most important post) was also a Gen X for most of the term. Somehow it didn't lead to any scandals with embarrassing old social media, but we did get one who was caught plagiarizing her Master's thesis.
I played Orpheus from World of Darkness in the early aughts - definitely one of my favorites. But I've missed the last 20 years of tabletop rpgs, so I'm on the edge of my seat waiting for what happens next in this series.
The concept of Orpheus was pretty cool, I will admit. As for what comes next... I doubt you'll like it. But we wouldn't be talking about it if anyone DID like it.
Wasn't "Vampire the Masquerade" briefly the cause of a mini Satanic Panic when some weirdos started playing the game for real and ended up killing someone?
I had to look it up because that sounded familiar but I couldn't be certain, but yes; in 1998, some lunatic named Rod Ferrell beat a couple in Florida to death because he was LARPing as a vampire cult leader, and he was inspired directly by VtM. Reminds me of this one article I read written by a guy who's legal name is "Sephiroth" because his parents named him after the Final Fantasy character, where he said something along the lines of, "Some people can play video games and be perfectly normal about it. Unfortunately, some people, like my parents, can't."
Mermaids concept conflicts with nWoD Mage lore so couldn't happen (the mages are reincarnated Atlantean souls, and Atlantis itself was erased from the timeline by the Exarchs, among other shenanigans).
Mad superscience is the Technocracy from oWoD Mage. Which was perfect, but replaced by the above and general gnostic overhauls.
I didn't really like the God-Machine thing. Obviously the writer(s) wanted to work in some inspiration taken from The Matrix. And it's not that I don't dig the concept. But it wasn't a great fit, and was a huge departure from what was left of the themes carried over from oWoD to nWoD.
IIRC the original goal of nWoD was to reconcile WoD with itself and with Exalted, so the White Wolf games would all inhabit a shared self-consistent universe. They got about halfway there and then aborted, but the echoes are still there: Mage's Atlantis is obviously The Blessed Isle, the God Machine is Autochthon with his serial numbers filed off. Demons are sort of an inverted version of the primordial/autochthon narrative from Exalted. Werewolves are just nerfed Lunars, full stop - they didn't even change much.
One thing that never reappeared in nWoD as far as I know was Wraith, which was a huge hit toward the end of the oWoD cycle and deeply tied to oWoD's lore, and also might have tied into the Exalted Abyssals and Underworld stuff (or likely the latter was inspired by the former).
May be wrong about that. I quit bothering with WW long before World became Chronicles. Never even saw Beast. So next article will be new to me.
Don't forget about Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines for PC. That was a surprisingly good RPG.
I completely did forget about it. It was always one of those games I wanted to get around to playing but back when I was very into PC gaming, it was in a state that required a ton of patching just to function and I never felt like committing to it. I think they released a remaster that I should probably get around to playing.
I know it's very well regarded though. And if I know anything about it, I know about Fat Larry (with an F.A.T. because he knows he's got a weight problem, he just doesn't give a fuck).
If I remember correctly he changes it to “because there is more of me to love” or something like that if you are playing as a girl.
Yeah, in video game circles I guess it's seen as one of those "highest of highbrow" RPGs...which probably says more about the general brow level of that medium than anything. :P It does have some great attention to detail, though. Also the kind of crazy ambitious mid-budget game you sadly don't see too often these days.
I hadn't even considered a supernatural conspiracy game for a prospective RPG campaign at my clubhouse, but you've just about convinced me to do my long toyed-with idea of combining old World of Darkness with Delta Green and Conspiracy X.
For my money, original Mage was the pinnacle of this sort of mid-to-late-90s esoteric, conspiracy driven and early cyberpunk aesthetic. NuMage did some good things, though (I am indebted to the Magical Traditions book for the introduction to the stories of Manly Wade Wellman, for example). Chronicles of Darkness: Chicago is one of the very best RPG sandbox books I've ever read, and almost certainly the best of such put in a modern setting.
Delta Green is also a fascinating RPG. It's one of those concepts that's basically bespoke to my interests; shady conspiracies, corrupt governmental intelligence agencies, with Lovecraftian horrors? I could get down on that all day.
Delta Green is really underrated. I never did get around to playing The Laundry Files, but the setting seems like it should work well.
The old Delta Green was top-notch. New Delta Green sucks.
If it's anything like the books, a game based on The Laundry Files would be killer. Not the best written books on the planet but good reads none the less.
Once again, we seem to be operating on the same wavelength. I've been reading old World of Darkness rulebooks to feed an unexpected craving for 90's nostalgia.
One thing I keep saying to myself over and over is, why would anyone do this? Like, making a werewolf game, I get that - but why jam hacker werewolves in there? It's not like they were running out of ideas elsewhere in the book.
I'm not saying it's bad. I'm saying it's incomprehensible in retrospect - which is part of the appeal, I guess.
Personally, I like some of the more out-there ideas like hacker werewolves, but I would agree that revisiting Werewolf in particular left me a bit overwhelmed. I don't think they were running out of ideas so much as they had too damn many. They really did pack in a ton of shit that could have been pared down. Like, I love the idea of there being other were-critters running around, and they all have their own unique niche roles they fulfill within the global network of shapeshifters, but taken with the scads of lore, lore, and more lore throughout the run, there's simply too much crap for it all to mesh well. No campaign would ever be able to hit on all of it in any meaningful way. At least, no campaign that didn't run for ten years, or so. Ultimately, a lot of the oWoD seems like they got really, really enthusiastic about the world-building and went, "What about this? Oh, what about this? We should add this, too!" That kind of creative enthusiasm is respectable but one must know when to trim the fat. All of the oWoD gamelines suffer that kind of ADHD energy to some degree or another.
Absolutely. Did they need 13 clans and five aspects and septs and three lineages AND three missing tribes? Did they need fetishes AND totems AND rituals AND special abilities?
I admire the sheer manic creative energy. That, and the flavor of the looming apocalypse, is at the core of this 90's nostalgia that's sprang up on me all of a sudden.
But thinking about playing it as a game gives me a headache.
I can't wait until I get to Mage.
It makes my day when you drop a new article! What a pleasure to read!
Thank you Laura, I'm glad you enjoyed! I appreciate the support.
Thanks for this. Good article, and I hope you follow up on the cliffhanger soon. VtM/White Wolf is one of those things I've always been mildly intrigued by but never got around to looking into, so I appreciate this quick retrospective. I always imagined it as the more serious, less empowering, story-focused alternative to D&D, so I'm surprised to learn it was so cheesy in many ways. It's fun that there were actual practicing neopagans involved, though. Your descriptions of Changeling and Demon sound more like what I envisioned these games being like. Either way, I think it's neat that they're not as much of a power fantasy as D&D: like you said, humans aren't at the top of the foodchain, and the player tends to be at the bottom rungs of a very ancient and formidable vampire hierarchy as well (I think?). Oh, and you forgot the most terrible WW game concept of them all, the one I'm sure we were all thinking of in the back of our minds. Pony: the Stampede. Now there's a crossover and a half. ;)
A few other random tidbits about this article, if you'll indulge me: first, you're very right about the "D&D effect". I'm sure there's a proper name for it, but I can't think of it right now. There's so many places where the leader in that niche sucks out all the air and makes it hard for people to change due to sheer inertia. Steam, Magic the Gathering, Warhammer, World of Warcraft, etc etc. I think tabletop RPGs might be in a better position than the rest here, since an individual group can just change whenever they feel like it, while people who play these other games have to build up their multiplayer skills from scratch and deal with a much lower player base. Still, I get the frustration for sure.
Speaking of Vance, I also just love the idea that he was playing Urza's Saga the same time I was messing around with those cards, even if he knew what he was doing and I was a 12 year old with questionable English and even more questionable grasp of Magic strategy and deckbuilding, haha. There's something surreal about people with these experiences and reference frames actually getting into real positions of power now, people from my own generation.
Anyway, looking forward to the next part!
The good news is I have the follow-up already prepared and ready to go; this is a duology I've had on the backburner when I needed something to fill time between articles, so I figured since I've been busy with traveling for some "investigative journalism", now was the best time to publish them.
As for the game's themselves, cheesy though they may be, they do take themselves completely seriously. They are less empowering than your average D&D campaign (especially with 2024 rules), as you do usually start out as the bottom bitch of whatever supernatural strata your playing. But, at the very least in oWoD, the end-goal is to stop one of a variety of supernatural apocalypses, so your characters do end up becoming pretty OP. Takes a while to get there, though. Also, while Pony: The Stampede was (thankfully) never a thing... at least so far as I'm aware, I'm fairly certain there was a homebrew MLP TTRPG made using White Wolf's basic game system that's shared between all their games (i.e. WoD and White Wolf's other big series, Exalted, both function more or less the same in terms of mechanics, but one's urban fantasy and the other is high fantasy... and also not good). I feel like I remember that being a thing. I hope I'm wrong.
If there is no actual term for the "D&D Effect", I'm going to adopt it, anyways. I think the bigger issue of this newly-coined term isn't just that it makes expanding in the niche or scene difficult, but it also taints everything adjacent to it. Recently, I've been doing some reading on the state of fantasy literature, and it's incredible how bog-standard D&D has so irreparably colored how so many people see high fantasy. It's pretty much set the standard and in turn the expectations of the audience in a way where authors are afraid to deviate too far from the predetermined tropes. I think it's a lot like what you see in the tech space - one platform does one thing, and because it works, every other platforms begins to adjust to match them and do the same thing, albeit worse. Best example is dating apps; I read an interview with the founder of eHarmony and he said something along the lines of, "eHarmony worked because it wasn't a hook-up app and it was intended for adults who were serious about meeting a long-term partner. Then Tindr came along, and everyone wanted to ape their success, so all dating sites and services became lesser knock-offs of Tindr." Obviously, the catastrophic results are still playing out in all their odious glory. I think this is the best example of why the old adage of "capitalism fosters diversity/creativity/innovation" is not entirely true; often times, it seems to funnel everyone into following the same narrow path as the market leader, to everyone's detriment.
Lastly, on Vance... well, let's just say it's hilarious to me that we absolutely have a vice-president who dropped racial slurs in an Xbox Live lobby at some point in his life. And he won't be the last. It'll be interesting when more Millennials take public office because you just know they're all going to be praying their old social media accounts don't come back to haunt them.
"it's incredible how bog-standard D&D has so irreparably colored how so many people see high fantasy."
Absolutely. I know I've griped about this before, but it makes me both exasperated and sad to see that the one genre that really needs fresh ideas and a sense of wonder has turned into the most formulaic one. Basically due to the one-two punch of Tolkien and Gygax, as you said.
"eHarmony worked because it wasn't a hook-up app and it was intended for adults who were serious about meeting a long-term partner. Then Tindr came along, and everyone wanted to ape their success, so all dating sites and services became lesser knock-offs of Tindr."
See also: the Ultima Online vs Everquest vision of MMOs, and WoW making the whole genre stuck in the EQ vision for a decade and a half. (I'm tempted to do a write-up on that at some point, even if I suspect everything to do with WoW has been covered to death)
As for Millennials in public office, that's one thing I'll give the current Prime Minister here in Norway. While the PM himself is an old, rich Boomer, he did actually appoint a bunch of Millennials in important posts. Including a Justice Minister born after 1990. The Finance Minister (ie. second most important post) was also a Gen X for most of the term. Somehow it didn't lead to any scandals with embarrassing old social media, but we did get one who was caught plagiarizing her Master's thesis.
I played Orpheus from World of Darkness in the early aughts - definitely one of my favorites. But I've missed the last 20 years of tabletop rpgs, so I'm on the edge of my seat waiting for what happens next in this series.
The concept of Orpheus was pretty cool, I will admit. As for what comes next... I doubt you'll like it. But we wouldn't be talking about it if anyone DID like it.
Wasn't "Vampire the Masquerade" briefly the cause of a mini Satanic Panic when some weirdos started playing the game for real and ended up killing someone?
I had to look it up because that sounded familiar but I couldn't be certain, but yes; in 1998, some lunatic named Rod Ferrell beat a couple in Florida to death because he was LARPing as a vampire cult leader, and he was inspired directly by VtM. Reminds me of this one article I read written by a guy who's legal name is "Sephiroth" because his parents named him after the Final Fantasy character, where he said something along the lines of, "Some people can play video games and be perfectly normal about it. Unfortunately, some people, like my parents, can't."
Putting on my nerd glasses here for a minute:
Mermaids concept conflicts with nWoD Mage lore so couldn't happen (the mages are reincarnated Atlantean souls, and Atlantis itself was erased from the timeline by the Exarchs, among other shenanigans).
Mad superscience is the Technocracy from oWoD Mage. Which was perfect, but replaced by the above and general gnostic overhauls.
I didn't really like the God-Machine thing. Obviously the writer(s) wanted to work in some inspiration taken from The Matrix. And it's not that I don't dig the concept. But it wasn't a great fit, and was a huge departure from what was left of the themes carried over from oWoD to nWoD.
IIRC the original goal of nWoD was to reconcile WoD with itself and with Exalted, so the White Wolf games would all inhabit a shared self-consistent universe. They got about halfway there and then aborted, but the echoes are still there: Mage's Atlantis is obviously The Blessed Isle, the God Machine is Autochthon with his serial numbers filed off. Demons are sort of an inverted version of the primordial/autochthon narrative from Exalted. Werewolves are just nerfed Lunars, full stop - they didn't even change much.
One thing that never reappeared in nWoD as far as I know was Wraith, which was a huge hit toward the end of the oWoD cycle and deeply tied to oWoD's lore, and also might have tied into the Exalted Abyssals and Underworld stuff (or likely the latter was inspired by the former).
May be wrong about that. I quit bothering with WW long before World became Chronicles. Never even saw Beast. So next article will be new to me.