My relationship with the World of Darkness games (I'm talking oWoD here; I've not really bothered with any of the post-Rein-Hagen stuff) is a little conflicted. It's all so incredibly teenage, with everybody angst-ridden, rebellious, and surly-lipped. The naive right-on politics are writ-large throughout. The "gothic-punk" aesthetic does nothing for me. Of all mythological beings, vampires are the least interesting and compelling. So I am in large part disdainful of the whole endeavour.
And yet I own Vampire: The Masquerade, Changeling: The Dreaming, Werewolf: The Apocalypse and Wraith: The Oblivion, and many of their source books. I suspect that this is partially because when I was about 14 you couldn't walk into a game store without tripping over a mound of copies of Vampire: The Masquerade, so I ended up buying them almost by osmosis, but that's not the whole story - I love Changeling; it really captured my imagination even though nobody I knew wanted to play it (sniff), and despite its flaws we played the shit out of Werewolf during those years: playing angry people who are likely to turn into gigantic man-wolves and tear everybody around them to pieces at any moment is an incredibly fun concept.
The thing is, once you remove the annoying teenage-ness and the tiresome obsession with "story telling" from the Old World of Darkness, what you are left with is a group of very interesting and detailed quasi-settings for urban fantasy games that is tailor-made for the kind of city-based sandbox game I like to run. I say interesting, because at their core, the main Old World of Darkness settings are thematically very strong. Changeling brings the mystery, beauty and strange sinisterness of the fairy tale to the modern age, combining it with a sense of loss, of autumn approaching, of magic leaving the world. Werewolf is all about misanthropy, at its core - the misanthropy that many of us feel when we look around us and see the natural world in retreat and untouched areas of wilderness being flooded by tourists, rubbish and pollution. (I think the perfect tag-line for a Werewolf game would be the quote from Richard Dawkins, speaking about the disappearance of the Tasmanian Wolf: "Maybe they were a pest to humans, but humans were much bigger pests to them; now there are no Tasmanian Wolves left and a considerable surplus of humans.") Wraith is about death and what comes next now that we live in a world of agnosticism and the old sureties of heaven and hell are gone. Mage is about the pursuit of knowledge and power at the price of all else, about the triumph of a kind of uber-rationalism which seems curiously apt in the modern age.
Even Vampire, a game I never really liked, seems positively counter-cultural nowadays in the aftermath of the Twilight series. Stephanie Meyers has done to V:tM what V:tM did to the Hammer Horror vampires of yore, such that its cod rebelliousness has almost become genuine - if you are still playing V:tM nowadays then you are, in a weird way, being far edgier than you would have been in 1991. Something about that appeals to my contrarian instincts in a profound way.
Fuck it, I'll cut to the chase: I want to run Changeling, goddamit!
From what I remember of it, I wouldn't mind playing Changeling...
ReplyDeleteWill bring a copy tomorrow night.
DeleteGreat. Maybe that or CoC is a good starting point for our own G+...?
DeleteTotally with you, man. I ran Werewolf and Changeling games back in the 90s and really adored the settings for the reasons you mentioned. A con or two ago, I got to play a new game of werewolf. It was still enough like the old game that I enjoyed it. I'd play again!
ReplyDeleteI just looked up the new Werewolf on wikipedia. Looks pretty good - the last thing I need right now is another game, though...
DeleteI was always drawn to the setting of the oWOD games but not so much the thespians who seemed to be playing them... who would loudly yammer on about their games in the coffeehouse I frequented.
ReplyDeleteA while back I inherited a BIG stack of oWOD/nWOD books and... well, a lot of the archetypes still look pretty silly to me. But the nWOD books of Changeling and Promethean are compelling and make me want to play.
The nWOD Changeling does look interesting - I like the way it makes the fae a malevolent, capricious and dangerous enigma. Again, it's thematically very strong. My concern is that it could end up being too much about angst and emo-ness, suitable for exactly those sort of thespians you mention.
DeleteIt does appear that way from reading but in practice I found it's so much better at giving you immediate problems to deal with though, that it's far easier to downplay the angst stuff than it was in the oWoD. It really works fine as just straight survival horror with a surreal fairy tale edge.
DeleteSame thing applies to nMage - the setting as presented in the books is darker, blander and looks to have more tedious politicking but in practice it's does everything Ascension did except now there are ancient temples to plunder and antediluvian evils to vanquish.
And Vampire and Werewolf are the opposite: the new versions cut out a lot of the dumb stuff, but they also hollow out the antagonists to the point where it becomes easier to slip into loneliest wolfman nonsense just cos there's little in the way of immediate threat or opportunity. But the monster books are better, I reckon.
Changeling was the only WoD game I ever bought. Never ran it.
ReplyDeleteI haven't either. When I was about 15 I spent an inordinate amount of time creating characters and NPCs for it, who never once saw the light of day.
DeleteYou know, I've had OWoD on the brain lately as well. I've been sketching out sort of a redesign that focuses more on urban fantasy and less on the whole goth-punk thing.
ReplyDeleteThe only opinion on which we differ is Wraith. After reading it numerous times I don't find it to be about 'Death and what comes next' at all. Nor is it about being a Ghost, which is what my friends and I were all hoping for when we saw the adds for it.
ReplyDeleteWraith is a dark fantasy world in which your existance feels meaningless. Add meaningless to a world setting I don't care about and you have the most chaotic, least interesting of all the WoD products. My group and I were terribly disappointed in that game.
Changeling: The Dreaming FTW!
Yes, I wanted it to be a game about being a ghost as well. There's definitely an opening in the market for that.
DeleteMy primary disappointment with both versions of WoD has always been that the different games don't actually cross over well. Playing a game where one PC is a vampire, one is a werewolf, one is Fae, and one is a wraith just doesn't work. Each game has certain aspects of tone and theme baked into it. When you cross the streams, those aspects cancel one another out, and you end up with a "supernatural superheroes" game.
ReplyDeleteI've also always felt out of sync with the developers. I start with strongly buying in to the grand concept. But then, at each level of detail, I want to go left and the setting goes right (or vice versa). By the time I get to character creation, none of the options are actually appealing to me.
I had that same sort of mixed-monsters game in mind back when I first read about the games... and was similarly disappointed that it didn't seem to be encouraged/supported. Nowadays I'm not sure I think that is problem... I find it hard to imagine any game with PCs playing all those creatures and not ending up feeling like a superhero game. GURPS Cabal gives it a good try though.
DeleteI've always wanted to play Werewolf or Changeling. We've tried on several occasions, but it never stuck past character creation. I really like the nWoD version of Wraith, Geist: the Sin-Eaters. The mechanics are very tight and well thought out in way that other WoD games aren't.
ReplyDeleteWhen I was a lad, Changeling was the litmus test. If someone could 'get' it, they usually had good taste in music, books, etc. and were pretty cool in general. Needless to say I never had enough people for a full-size game.
ReplyDelete