Get the “World of Darkness” rulebook for free this week

The World of Darkness I just found out that the World of Darkness rulebook is available for free on RPGNow in celebration of “Read an E-Book Week”. This 224-paged PDF is the core rulebook for all “new” World of Darkness settings like Vampire – The Requiem or Geist – The Sin Eaters. But since the updated Storyteller is pretty versatile I am sure an experienced GM can easily run his own urban horror campaigns with this book. Here’s the blurb from the RPGNow product page:

Where the Shadows Grow Long
We live our days completely ignorant of the true terrors lurking around us. Only rarely do our experiences draw back the veil of shadows and reveal the horror in our midst. These glimpses into the supernatural can cause us to retreat into comforting lies – ‘There are no such things as monsters’ – or stir our morbid curiosity. Only a few, however, can overcome their fear and dare to look deeper.

Abandon Hope All Who Enter
The World of Darkness Rulebook introduces a version of our contemporary world where the supernatural is real. Players join to tell tales of mystery and horror, where theme, mood and plot are more important to a character’s experiences than his weapons or equipment. Inside are rules for character creation, task resolution, combat and any activity your character attempts as he delves into the shadows.

If you don’t own this book, you should definitely head over to RPGNow and download it now. It’s definitely worth it!

Michael Wolf is a German games designer and enthusiast best known for his English language role-playing games blog, Stargazer's World, and for creating the free rules-light medieval fantasy adventure game Warrior, Rogue & Mage. He has also worked as an English translator on the German-language Dungeonslayers role-playing game and was part of its editorial team. In addition to his work on Warrior, Rogue & Mage and Dungeonslayers, he has created several self-published games and also performed layout services and published other independent role-playing games such as A Wanderer's Romance, Badass, and the Wyrm System derivative Resolute, Adventurer & Genius, all released through his imprint Stargazer Games. Professionally, he works as a video technician and information technologies specialist. Stargazer's World was started by Michael in August 2008.

6 comments

comments user
Stargazer

I have made similar experiences a couple of years back, but the fact that some WoD players are pretty strange, doesn’t make WoD a bad game.

If you don’t like dice pool systems, you probably won’t agree, but in my opinion the new Storyteller is some of the better systems out there.

comments user
Canageek

I don't disagree with you much Stargazer, but I have to respectfully disagree with you here: The only reason to download WoD is the fact that it is free. If it wasn't free I'd advise you that there are a thousand better games you could spend the same money on.

Disclaimer: I am biased vs WoD games as my introduction was with in a high school game with multiple goths. It had every bad point a game can have: Blatent favouritism, bias against one player who can't get away with anything the other players can (Me), GMPC, power spiral, and the Storyteller was the only one with the books, and she played most of the rules wrong (something I learned latter). None of the fact changes the fact that the rules are terrible dice pool based drek however.
.-= Canageek´s last blog ..A History of Below =-.

comments user
Canageek

Ok, I've not played nWoD, but I found oWoD very open to interpretation, which combined with poor wording leads to a lot of uncertainty about what powers did. Posts I've seen about others tend to agree, has this been fixed?

I dislike any system that obsfucates your chances for success: I should be able to look at any chance and go 'I have a 2/3rd chance of success' or a 50% chance of success. In d20 you can do that as long as the DM is good about keeping DCs scaled right (ie this 'hard to climb' wall is about as hard to climb as the last one) and the math is pretty simple. Same with 4e.

With a dicepool the math gets really complicated, really fast as you are multiplying %s against each other, and I can't do 0.36 * 0.36 * 0.36 in my head.

Now I've heard it is better in nWoD as only the number of die change and not what you need on *each* die but still.
.-= Canageek´s last blog ..A History of Below =-.

comments user
Sunglar

Thanks for the heads up! Downloaded… While I as never the biggest fan of oWoD, I had fun with it. Of course I met weird people playing it, like I did playing Rifts and other games. I own theis book and the new Vampire in dead tree format. While I never played nWoD Vampire I thought this book would be ideal to run a game of supernatural investigation.

comments user
Stargazer

That was exactly what I thought! 🙂

comments user
Dr Rotwang!

…what? Free game…? Uh…okay. *click click click*