New Freedonia

When I attended White Wolf’s “End of the World” party at GenCon last
year, I was struck by how much of a bummer the entire affair seemed to
be. I got to meet a couple of cool guys that ran a Otaku website, but
beyond that, it was just an endless sea of even-more-depressed vampire
wannabe’s.

We all heard Justin’s speech about an “all new system with an all new
setting”, and the grumblings started about Vampire and the WOD in
general going d20. After a significant amount of time to let the pale
masses bitch and moan, the boys at WW said that Vampire would not be
going d20, and not to get your panties in a wad.

So we got spoon-fed little pieces of the new WoD, and it quickly
became apparent that there was very little “new” about it.

The “all new” setting came to pass as a very “John Byrne Superman”
reboot of the WoD, and the “new” system is simply Storyteller 3.5.

Now, these aren’t “bad” things necessarily. I think a lot of it was
done so that previous chronicles could continue past the whole Time
of the Shitcanning with minimal fuss, and indeed, there are some
pretty cool little tweaks here and there (looks like a lot of
house-rules made it into the system if you ask me).

But the whole thing still leaves a bit of a sour taste in my mouth.

I applaud the effort to remove large, bloody chunks of metaplot for
the games. IMO, it was one of the most abused portions of any WW
title. I tended to like the fiction, and even followed it across the
supplements and some of the novels. Arguments about “cannon” and
who-knew-who were getting a little hard to take after a bit. Don’t
even get me started on convention games.

Yeah…my WoD did not have nearly as much of the angst as it “should”
have. My players were hopeful, tried to make a difference and failed
to treat each day as their last.

Sue me.

I always appreciated Justin’s vision of the WoD as I saw it, and I
always dug his attitude of “it’s your game, do what thou will”, but
then we come to the ToJ.

The whole thing just reeked of a mess. Played out amongst several
different books we had several different versions of the End Times.
There were a few gem-like moments in the rubble, but each one had a
huge sense of disappointment. SO while the massive reset was upon us,
we were fed huge portions of metaplot that felt like a bunch of
editors couldn’t decide which way to go.

SO now the “new” WoD….

If you look on my bookshelves, you’ll see dozens upon dozens of White
Wolf books. As a GM, it was almost the only thing I ran for better
than 10 years, as a gamer pretty much the only thing I played. While
I don’t find any of the books invalid, it does force me to look at
them and say, “why?”

I liked reading them, I like owning them, and now, they will all (by
and large) be re-released.

Will I be buying them all again? I doubt it. I think that perhaps
the core books will suffice for sake of seeing the finished product.
I’ll probably try it out with my friends, and see if I can get into
it.

That is, until someone decides to hit the reset button again.