Hunting Humans: NWoD is coming!!

Our new game is about to start here at the Wargate, and we'll be death-trippin' with a new Games Master for a bit. Josh is here to tell us a bit about his reflections in the new World of Darkness, with perspective born from the old.

Hunting Humans by Josh Swearingen

Well, it's August. Fall is right around the corner, and we've spent the hot, sweltering summer deep within the cool, dark caves of Khazid Grimaz. Now, it's time to crawl back out into the world...the World of Darkness.

I first encountered the World of Darkness in the early '90's (with everyone else who was alive at the time). I had played other RPG's before, mostly GURPS. We had a highly creative Gamemaster back then who had practically invented a brand new trope every other week.

Soon, however...I fell in with a group of bad kids. Bad kids who played Vampire. I instantly fell in love with the gothic-punk world. It was perfect for my brooding, angry sensibilities. However, eventually the group I gamed with burned out, grew up, grew apart, and quit playing. I sold my books, and hadn't thought about the game for years.

About two years ago, a friend was spring cleaning and found his "fairly" complete World of Darkness collection. He knew the best place to sell a set of gaming books was the Wargate. I snatched them up, and was instantly brought back. The layout and the artwork in those books was always great. I found out that the World of Darkness had been ended with a series of books labelled The Time of Judgement.

As I looked these books over, I realized - out of perverse desire - that I had to destroy my old playground, the object of so much wonderful game time. I would end the world. I decided I wouldn't run the White Wolf metaplot verbatim. I would pick and choose elements that I and my group would enjoy. For more details on this campaign, read Dave Bone's great article Magick in Montreal. As the game began to reach it's climax, I took another look at the old World of Darkness, and a few things began to occur to me.

1. The game is a bit dated. If you look at Mage: The Ascension, you'll notice the technology creep if fairly apparent. Dante (the cover mage) doing magick on a huge desktop computer is only one example of this.
2. My characters had a lot of out-of-game knowledge. Though they were fairly good at not abusing it, there were more than a few out-of-game discussions about what powers high level antagonists would possess and other metagame information.
3. They ended the damn game. There would be no more books. Of course, White Wolf would point out that you could keep playing indefinitely. The game designers simply wanted to work of something different. Perhaps I needed to find another modern horror game...Call of Cthulhu, maybe? Some mish-mashed D20 garbage? My short trip through game land soon took me to a new World...of Darkness.

Over the last few months, I've collected a great core set - and there are so many improvements.

1. It's a new game, the mechanics for all the main games are all redesigned, streamlined and unified. The default race is human - something that was all but ignored in the old World of Darkness.
2. Mystery is back! Metaplot is lighter, everything is much more subject to Storyteller interpretation. The supplements are more general. Asylum, for example, is about how mental hospitals and other institutions operate and how that can relate in the game. Similarly, Tales from the 13th Precinct is all about law enforcement and police procedure. To my knowledge, this is a fairly unique supplement - a gaming book spelling out basic police procedures is just so great.
3. Anyone who has looked at the new books can tell you - they are beautiful. The art direction is more unified, consistently using one artist in each book. The layouts are slick, the fiction is almost always top-notch. In fact the new books are so great, card carrying non-emo guy Dave Bone can pick up a few.

So in a couple of weeks, dust off your D10's, put on some dark clothing, pick up a pack of clove cigarettes (LoL).

Because the elder things of the night aren't gone. They've just been sleeping.

Soon, they awake...