A World of Darkness Game for Revised 3.5 Edition Rules
Well, yes. But I was think of something a little more...
There we go.
Technically, Monte Cook's World of Darkness came out in 2007, which makes it dubiously acceptable as an OSSR in 2015. But it's an unholy mashup of World of Darkness and WotC's Open Gaming License. And both of those things come from the Clinton Administration. And if you're reading this in the future, I mean the first Clinton administration. So we'll say one way or the other that it counts.
Let's get this out of the way: Monte Cook's World of Darkness is something no one asked for and which was nothing more than a blatant cash grab. Monte Cook did not care about this product in any way, important sections are farmed out to fucking Sean K. Reynolds of all people, and it was just a pile of text filled in until it was full and then shat out the door for money. There are three writers (Monte Cook, SKR, and Luke Johnson), the Creative Director is Rich “The Onyx Path” Thomas, and it's edited by Scribendi.com. Yes, for reals. It's edited by a website,This book is 280,000 words of shovelware text filling up 380 pages and retailing for fifty bucks. I would be pretty surprised if more than about 20,000 words got written that didn't make it into the final product. Three people got their marching orders and pretty much just arrglebarrgled text into boxes until it was full. That's a hundred thousand words each for distinguished hacks who have access to word processors, primary writing on this was probably done in a month and a half. And then editing was done by an actual website, so this entire fucking thing was probably turned around in less than a season. Inspiration to presentation for this whole fucking thing: three months. Tops.
The only portion of this book that has an actual list of contributors you couldn't write on your tongue is the interior art. There are thirteen credited interior artists. There is, admittedly, a lot of art in this book. It all looks kind of like the sort of generic World of Darkness art that nWoD books had in them. I honestly can't tell if these were reprints from other White Wolf books or material first printed in this book. Either way it represents Rich Thomas doing the thing he is still doing – keeping a bunch of fanboys around who crank out urban gothic art on their spare time and then paying them chicken feed to fill his books with it.
What this boils down to is two things. The first is that by reading and reviewing this book, AncientHistory and I will be putting more thought into this book than anyone in the history of the world has ever done, including the people who made it. And the second is that the position that Onyx Path is in to do good for the gaming world is incredible, and the fact that “they” (by which I mean “Richard Thomas”) have not and will not be doing any is really sad. Richard Thomas is sitting upon an engine that generates all the art and typesetting and funding streams you'd need to make a game book. Any game book. Any premise. Any ruleset. If he wanted to put together good games, all he'd need to do is get some writing and development. But he never did that, and he's never going to do that because he is a cancer in this industry.
Richard Thomas.
It's arguably worse than that. In GURPS: Vampire: The Masquerade I discussed how that book represented the good of both systems - GURPS for having semi-passable mechanics and at least a bare minimum effort to make the setting consistent, attractive, and playable, and V:tM having a bare-bones concept with enough legs and attractive artwork to draw in the kids that think vampires are cool.
Whatever else your opinions on the games are, you have to admit that D&D 3.5 was a highly visible and influential game system, and the new World of Darkness was a highly stylized and prominent game setting. The fact that d20 lacks an actual setting by design and that nWoD's system is mostly the flaming turd in the paper bag on the doorstep of life, this mashup at least had potential. This could have been the Coloning of a new generation, where even though both setting and system were flawed, they combined to make something more palatable than either. Or at least more capable of passing for a playable RPG than nWoD on its own.
This was not to be.
More importantly, I don't know why. This didn't happen sooner, and in a better format. I know Monte Cook & co. don't give a tenth of a sizable shit for the World of Darkness, but by this point White Wolf had a fairly sizable stable of d20 books through their Sword & Sorcery imprint, Cook's own Malhavoc Press, licensed titles like Ravenloft d20, Everquest, Scarred Lands...my point is they had d20 procedural content generation down pat. They had nWoD shovelware generation down pat. There is really no excuse why they went together like the world's most disgusting cocktail.
This book has 10 chapters, 2 Appendices, an Introduction, and three fiction pieces. That's sorta kinda like having 16 chapters but also really importantly not at all like that in a lot of ways. A page full of text in this book (of which there are of course many) has just shy of a thousand words on it (page 146, for example, has 998 words). This means that the old adage of a picture being worth a thousand words is very nearly exactly true for this book. But it also underlines how much of this book is filler space. There are 280,000 words in this fucking book and 380 pages. That means when you add up all the scribbles, overlarge headings, pictures and just plain hanging white space, that's close to a hundred pages. Big pages, in a hardbound coffee table book that cost fifty dollars.
Anyway, we're going to try to blaze through as many chapters in a single post as we can. Because dag nabbit we have no intention of doing this up in 16 or more posts.
We really don't.
The decision not to have a general setting for D&D 3.+ - yes, I know it has some basic hangers-on from Greyhawk, but let's be honest here - is tied in to both the history of the game and the hard marketing: D&D is primarily a system you use to run your own games at home. And those games are not all going to look alike. Which is fine. As much as we may bitch, that's the main difference between D&D and World of Warcraft: rules and setting are applied (and sometimes created) at the table; it's a collaborative storytelling effort where your characters are largely limited by your imagination rather than the set limits of a computer, and where the setting can be anything you can describe, not limited to a script and how hot your graphic card is.
Game on.
Which is part of the reason why, from a design perspective, the modular nature of d20 makes sense. It is easy to generate rules content for D&D because it is easily broken down into chunks: classes, skills, feats, spells, equipment, monsters, magic items. The format is already there, there are examples a-plenty. The only hard part is working them into your game... it's the interface, largely, where D20 falls down, more than any internal flaws regarding skill checks or dubious magic systems (okay, linear warriors/quadratic wizards is a thing, but that's part of the interface too). Like GURPS, d20 struggles with trying to boil basically incompatible ideas down to the same mechanics and format them so they talk to each other - and that means that any one individual piece of bad design in the game is going to potentially impact every aspect of the design. It's not just "there are no Snorkles in Eberron!", it's "How the fuck do the Snorkle bubble-powers interact with the Soap-Golems of Zigaro?"
On the other hand, WotC made a shitload of money on the idea that they could sell both rule books and setting books without having to dick with the problem as to whether or not the two ever actually worked together.
I would be a total hypocrite with chocolate sprinkles if I said that a bottom up redesign of World of Darkness with a tighter core system was a bad idea. I mean fuck, I wrote After Sundown. World of Darkness is sclerotic, but appealing. The fluff is full of bad ideas clinging on like barnacles to the hull of a ship of fools. Every edition of the rules has been notably bad, even by the extremely generous standards of role playing games of the 90s. And yet... World of Darkness is basically Teen Wolf, Underworld, and Vampire Diaries. It's thematically awesome. The thirty second pitch is pure gold. The one hour pilot is totally awesome. It's just the details that need to be rethought.
World of Darkness needs a reboot. And it deserves a reboot. The problem here is that the “Creative Director” for this project is the same jerk who is in charge of the IP now. And basically that means that the guy running the reboot of the brand is the same person who was already hurling the brand off a cliff with his offensively failtastic creative direction.
That, and while I think most people would agree that 3rd edition D&D is a much tighter system than any version of Storyteller/Storytelling, it's not a good fit for modern games. The D20 system is actually pretty good at what it does, but what it does simply does not include stories in which you expect major characters to be killed if they are shot by the police. No one has ever figured out a way to do guns in D&D that wasn't shit, because the whole narrative of guns is a square peg to D&D's iron age heroism.
This game sucks because the mechanics don't port well to the genre.
So when this book came out, pretty much everyone saw it for the blatant cashgrab that it was. Some people probably couldn't articulate why it was so obviously a ridiculous charade, but their instincts still told them what it was. I've never heard of anyone actually playing this fucking thing, and no expansion material was ever written. Even Monte Cook never did anything with this thing.
Thank you Dark Gods for small favors; I really don't want to see fucking Pathfinder World of Darkness where you bitch about how your Brujah Monk/Fighter is feeling small in the pants because of the Tremere.
Following the standard internet meme, from henceforth I shall be referring to this book as "McWoD."
Intro Fiction:
More Complicated Now
We're doing into fiction? Sure, it has a name, why the hell not?
Short and pretentious fiction pieces are easy to write. They use up wordcount and don't have to be rectified with shit. Back when I was making Shadowrun materials, I would submit like 3 or 4 different flash fiction chapter openers per chapter I was working on and then just ask the devs to choose which one they thought worked the best. Because you can shit these out super fast. And if you're being paid by the word, that's music to your ears. So it's no surprise that RPG writers and lazy devs have been reluctant to get rid of these things.
White Wolf had a particularly annoying method of doing these pieces of intro fiction, and mostly of the shitty hit parade are in full form. You have the story open up before the title page or table of contents and. You have white on black text, weird fonts, and creative use of curved text justifications. In short, it really looks like the typesetter was just playing with all the Adobe InDesign protocols that they are not normally allowed to use because they make things “hard to read.” To the extant that this story has saving graces, it is that it is short – just five pages and with all the bullshit filler doodles, you could squeeze it down to three.
I, on the other hand, really enjoyed intro fiction as a creative exercise to get the most content into 500 words. Not that anyone much seemed to fucking notice, but that's the thing: I took freelancing and the fluff very seriously.
This intro fiction for McWoD is particularly annoying, because it's written like an InQuest advertisement aimed at the mentally retarded subset of Jihad players that always felt the need to be dark and edgy, but never quite got beyond not being able to buy that Godsmack album at Walmart because they were afraid to go to checkout with something that had a parental warning label on it.
It's also amazingly generic. Stunningly so. There isn't a single piece of data in this whole piece that can tie it to anything related to the product identity of World of Darkness, whatsoever. It's basically four pages of back cover copy.
The intro fiction More Complicated Now does not appear to be about the World of Darkness. The POV character appears to be a vampire, but he appears to be a Buffyverse vampire, where there is a sharp divide of self between the monster and the person, and they can talk to each other. And souls getting trips to Hell are part of the deal. The “vampires” appear to be like the body possessing demon ghosts from Unknown Armies. Which is a reasonable thing for vampires to be in a story, but it doesn't seem remotely connected to The World of Darkness. Right away, this book doesn't seem like a love letter to the World of Darkness by a game designer and fan, so much as some mercenary write-for-pay by someone who couldn't be fucked to read any of the source material at all. This isn't so much Ultimate Spider Man as Ultimatum. Ugh.
The main character is unlikeable. Not “tragic” or an “anti-hero” or something, he's just a friendless asshole who murders people with a body he possessed or something. The end is that the body regains partial control and they are a hybrid entity, but the reader is given absolutely nothing and no reason to empathize with either portion of the Firestorm Matrix vampire. I can kinda see why you might think these flavors of vampire were a good idea, but they sure as fuck aren't protagonist material.
Roll credits page (where we are one comma away from Monte Cook being a trademark of White Wolf, which I personally would have found hilarious and appropriate) and the Table of Contents, which appears to have been generated automatically from the headers. Like ya do these days.
Second Chapter Zero
Introduction
The introduction is 3 pages long, and begins with a personal story by Monte Cook about how he really liked Vampires and was completely cut off from Goth culture.
OK, he's talking about 1991. Anne Rice's Interview With The Vampire came out in 1976 and The Cure's Pornography came out in 1982. When Vampire: The Masquerade came out, it wasn't an early adopter of the Goth subculture, it was a blatant cashing in on a decade and a half old subculture having matured and acquired spending money of its own. But while Monte Cook is just dead factually wrong about how all this shook out, I do believe that this is how he experienced it. He grew up in Watertown, South Dakota and in 1991 he was 23 years old and had been working as a game writer for 3 years. I totally believe him that he had no idea that Goth subculture was a thing that existed before he found it at a gaming convention.Monte Cook wrote:While this was before the vampire and goth subcultures really existed, among some of my friends, I was known as the “vampire guy.”
What's weird is the whole epistemic closure of it all. Vampire: The Masquerade comes with a fucking reading list. I get that Monte Cook in 1991 was like a homosexual virgin finding out that there are other gays for the first time when visiting the big city, but I don't understand why Monte Cook in 2007 felt that he was qualified to rewrite a signature book of Goth subculture without having done the most cursory of research to find out if the subculture he is marketing to had even existed before he encountered it as a young man. The raw hubris of this is absolutely breathtaking.
Monte Cook: Sith Lord
Monte Cook doesn't understand Gothic punk. Which is not an uncommon thing. People that originally make games do so because they're attracted to the source material - Shadowrun was straight mashup of Tolkien and Gibson, with influenced from Borderlands and Mercedes Lackey - and for lots of people, an RPG might be their first real exposure to concepts like Gothic punk, cyberpunk, Lovecraftian horror, urban fantasy (okay, that one's hard to buy these days), or the like. There's a reason the Crusades Campaign Sourcebook has a bibliography: it's a starting point, not an endpoint. Second- or third-generation developers, who aren't familiar with the "roots" of the game or the genre...tend to miss that. They're pasticheurs, basically: they pick out the big, obvious elements that are easy to mimic, dial it up to 11, and say "Hey, look, it's got tentacles! Must be Lovecraftian, right? I'm brilliant!"But, I reasoned, some people aren’t going to want to confine their gaming to a ruined world, so I made it only a “partial apocalypse.” Now while that term seems a bit oxymoronic, it applies to this setting quite nicely. It’s usually easier to juxtapose horror against a more realistic and understandable world, so I knew that at least part of the world should seem normal. Though with heavy emphasis on “seem.”
Probably this one.
Apparently, Monte Cook was given carte blanche to write whatever the fuck he wanted as a stand-alone World of Darkness thingy by Rich Thomas and Stewart Wieck. This rings pretty true, as those guys were watching the company circle the drain and throwing out any ideas no matter how retarded to try to make a quick buck and/or funnel company funds to themselves and/or their friends. I have no idea how much Richard Thomas paid himself to be “creative director” for a stand-alone game line that he apparently let Monte Cook do whatever he wanted with, but I suspect it amounted to “whatever was left in the company treasury.” This book came out within months of White Wolf going officially bankrupt and the IP getting sold to an Icelandic video game company.
Monte Cook talks about how his first ideas were to do World of Darkness in space, or World of Darkness post apocalypse, which actually sound kind of interesting. Instead he made this book, which is supposed to be like post apocalyptic fiction, but scaled way the hell back. Monte admits that “partial apocalypse” is basically oxymoronic, and no further justifications are given.
Following this intro is a series of "Brief Intros" and "Basic Concepts" which are basically the "Boring skip-over boilerplate" sections of RPG books. It's literally the worse parts of book design of D&D and WoD, since it doesn't actually explain anything, and does so in a terrible way that makes the page choppy as hell. This is basically just filler, but they've trained players to expect it. At this point, if a game doesn't treat the reader like an idiot or n00b that's never picked up a die before, it's remarkable.
The “Wat is Roleplaying?” section of any game is a window into what the authors were thinking, into what assumptions they were making and what they thought needed (or did not need) to be said. Monte assures us that if you've played 3rd edition D&D and played a World of Darkness game, that you do not need to read this section at all. That's kind of weird actually, considering how incredibly different those games are from one another in how they expect the relationship between the players and the MC to be. For example, in D&D Mr. Cavern is called the “Dungeon Master,” while in Masquerade Mr. Cavern is called the “Storyteller.” There's a lot of theory of games and theory of storytelling that goes into those choices, and Monte Cook doesn't think it's at all important. Very notably, he refrains from using both terms, and calls Mr. Cavern the “Game Master” like he was still writing for Iron Crown in 1991.
That's not entirely inaccurate, but it flippantly disregards the entire “Storyteller” mythology that the Storyteller Games (such as Masquerade) sold themselves with. And remember, this hurling of the auteur theories of RPGs that White Wolf was so fond of into the trash comes one paragraph after telling White Wolf fans to skip a bit because they are already familiar with this material.Monte Cook wrote:A typical roleplaying game (RPG) session involves you and your buddies sitting around a table, eating pizza, drinking soda, rolling funny-sided dice and making up stories.
Considering the super seriousness of the Vampire community, putting “lol, we're just eating pizza and telling stories” into the book equivalent of spoiler text is simply an odd decision.
When it does pitch for the World of Darkness, it oddly refers to only nWoD books. This is odd because those were extremely unpopular, and even odder considering that Monte Cook obviously hasn't read any of them. It would be like saying “You might remember Spider Man from the One More Day storyline...” And when I say it's obvious that Monte Cook hasn't read the new material, I mean it's super obvious that he hasn't read the new material. He refers to Vampire: the Requiem as running on the “Storyteller System,” which is actually the engine that Masquerade ran on. NWoD ran on the “Storytelling System” which debuted and replaced the Storyteller System in 2003.
I have a feeling that the "post-apocalypse" idea lasted a long time Cook's writing thesis.Brief Intro to the World of Darkness wrote:The World of Darkness is a setting. It is a modern-day setting keyed for horror games — though of course horror isn’t the only emotion you can elicit when you play games set in the World of Darkness. The World of Darkness is much like the world we see outside our window, but unseen predators lurk in the shadows — predators that prey on the unsuspecting mass of humanity. These creatures range from those which our culture has already described in legends and stories (such as vampires) to those for which we have no name.
The World of Darkness is the most popular setting published by White Wolf, and you might be familiar with the World of Darkness from some of the other games set in it: Vampire: The Requiem, Werewolf: The Forsaken, Mage: The Awakening or perhaps Promethean: The Created or Changeling. The World
of Darkness presented in this book is similar to but not identical to that other World of Darkness.
Any sort of game you want can take place in this World of Darkness, from normal humans confronting ever-more-horrific truths to games where players play vampires and werewolves engaged in a stealthy, shadow war of politics, intrigue and assassination to supernatural creatures waging open battle across the ruins of America’s cities.
Anyway, this isn't exactly wrong but for players of WoD games it might feel off - and the reason is, that all of the different White Wolf WoD games aren't really supposed to be connected. That was in the Old World of Darkness. New World of Darkness actively worked against a uniform setting of any kind, and didn't want crossovers. So it's not just that every single individual game in WoD had different assumptions as to what kind of game you could play, they were also individually incompatible with each other. But that's not enough to stop Monte Cook!
Ironically, the most disturbing aspect of this is the part where Monte tells us to round all fractions down, except "certain rolls, such as damage and hit points, have a minimum of 1." Really? For fuck's sake, Monte.
Third Chapter Zero
More Opening Fic: Faces
Before we get to chapter one, we are regaled with yet another un-numbered chapterlet. This time, it's another piece of micro fiction. It uses less formatting than the first one, and it comes in at three pages. But to underline what I said about the padding of the first story with formatting bullshit, the two stories differ in wordcount by less than two hundred words. The five page story at the beginning is seriously only 10% longer than the three page story preceding chapter 1.
The story is about some monster hunters who fight a werewolf and then one of them gets into a trap laid by some vampires and a big red and scaly D&D-style demon. This POV character is also rather repellant and spends much of the story either posturing or torturing people. The fiction authors appear to believe that to make characters World of Darknessish, they should be unlikeable. Which is not really how you're supposed to write stuff like that. If you're going to make POV characters do bad things, you need to introduce them in a way where the audience is made to sympathize with them first.
This is one of the floating boxes, containing an excerpt from the text - again, exactly as if this was magazine fiction. I don't know why. I suspect it's because it has the word "Fucker." in the middle of it, which is a word that Monte would not often get to use in d20 products.Baxter wiped his mouth with his fingers. Fucker. That was dangerous. Now he knows I'm here. Ah well. He's just one guy. I'm too close for him to get away now.
Next up: we finally get to Chapter 1!
At random points, I'm going to drop in panels from Preacher. I've been doing a reread recently, and Cassidy is a breath of fresh air.