I’ve Got The World Of Darkness On My Mind

Even though I am still running Star Trek using Where No Man Has Gone Before at the moment, I am already making plans for what to run after that. A while back I decided that running short campaigns is probably best for me. I still have quite a few Star Trek stories in me, but after that I want something completely different.

A couple of days ago, I had a chat about “Mage: 20th Anniversary” on IRC. Back in the day it was my favorite World of Darkness game, but alas I only played it once or twice. What I really like about Mage is its excellent Magick system. It’s not spell-based like in most games, but in Mage your creativity is basically the only limit of what you can do. Of course there’s also the problem that you can’t throw fireballs around or fly without reality kicking your ass. In the World of Darkness reality can be bent by mages, but if you are not subtle enough, you get into trouble. Sounds like fun, doesn’t it?

Of course there are also Vampire and Werewolf, the two other WoD games I have fond memories of. While Mage is my favorite, these two games have also a lot of appeal. The politicking of the undead in Vampire and the tribal culture of the shapechangers in Werewolf have a certain charm as well. Even though I had my share of issues with certain types of WoD players, I still love the setting and the somewhat quirky rules.

Even though the New World of Darkness has a lot going for it, I prefer the old WoD, the one which I started playing with back in the late 1990s. When I leaf through on of the 20th Anniversary books I immediately feel at home. I understand the special lingo, I recognize the names of clans, traditions, people, et cetera. This never happens when I read one of the nWoD books. For some reason it’s hard for me to grok the setting. That’s why I decided to run a game set into the old World of Darkness in the future.

As far as I know the majority of my players haven’t played any WoD games before and are at least open to the idea. Over the next weeks I will try to introduce the games and the setting to them, so that we can come to a decision what game they are most interested in. A mixed campaign including Vampire, Werewolf, and Mage characters is pretty much impossible, so we have to decide on what they want to play first. After that I can take some time to prepare a campaign. With Star Trek it’s very easy for me to come up with new “episodes” between sessions, but for the WoD I need some more preparation.

I really hope that my players will be as excited as I am. The WoD can be an awesome place to play in if you have players who are interested in more than just killing people and taking their stuff. Although there’s nothing wrong with getting one’s fangs dirty from time to time.