I used to play Vampire: The Masquerade a few years back and liked how for all the books, everything seemed to be teetering on the end of the world. At a party recently, I was informed that White Wolf apparently ended the world, and was reminded of that on the boards here recently. So, who out there’s played/read about these final nights, and how did they go about doing it? Did Cain rise and cull the vampires? Did the Wyrm devour all the werewolves? What roles did Wraith, Changeling, Mage, and Demon have on all this? I hear WW is coming out with new games…does this imply that there is there life after the Apocolypse, or are they starting anew?
First of all, with 3rd edition Vampire, there was some tiny note that it was not actually in the WoD, with werewolf and mage and all that, and thsoe were sort of adjuncts you could put in but weren’t officially a neccessary part of the game. Which is really quite correct, since all the game books were moe or less written with the idea that the universe revolved aorund whatever the players were.
Second, i skimmed through their “Gehenna” book and found it to be a piece of crap. Essentially, its an “ending campaign” with no real point, and I wouldn’t pay 5 bucks for it. And Gehenna will last only until someone at White WOlf feels the need for 4th edition Vampire, no longer. There weren’ty really any details, just a bunch of ideas for ending the game.
But frankly, who cares? They’ve been doing this “the world is ending” schtick for 20 years now. Its the slowest apocolypse I’ve read.
And it really doesn’t help that they’re still making WoD stuff.
4th edition Vampire (and the rest of the WoD 2.0) starts up in August. New Mage and Werewolf follow shortly thereafter. It’s a new game, new mechanics, new setting, but still about vampires, and should hit on similiar themes. All we know for sure is that some names (Gangrel, Ventrue, Nosferatu) will be recycled in some fashion. The old WoD stuff goes out of print come April 30.
The ends of the differnet lines had little to do with one another. Each big game got their own book, with a fourth book collecting Demon, Hunter, Changeling, KoE, and Mummy’s endings. Each book offered several alternative endings that the ST could mix and match as he chose.
For example, in Vampire:[spoiler]There was one sceanario where God chooses a handful of worthy vampires to save, returning them to humanity, and kills the rest.
Another where Lilith pust the smack down on Caine and anyone who sides with him.
One where the Antediluvians and signature characters fight it out.
And finally one where the Antediluvians utterly destroy the world.[/spoiler]
No one sceanario is correct or canon.
Personally, I like the move. The metaplot was getting a bit crowded anyway, and look forawrd to the new WoD.
I just ignored their metaplot, which I always found quite tepid.
Personally although I’m not interested in the end of the world books I respect WW for actually ending their story, even though I hate the WoD metaplot.
Anyway about Wraith, my favorite WoD game, it ended before all the others. Ends of Empires details the events that drastically reshape the lands of the dead and set up for a number of other things to happen in the WoD. Charon returns, there is a huge battle in Stygia, Enoch is destroyed and the fighting sets off a nuclear device in the Labyrnth. Why was there a nuke down there? A Void Engineer was going to nuke the Malfeans but his device went off early due to the use of relic nukes on Enoch. The device wasn’t deep enough to destroy the Neverborn (assuming of course it could - I doubt it given that in Week of Nightmares an Ante. took more than that to go down) but did waste most of the Onceborn and managed to wake up the Neverborn.
Of course all this crap going down in the Underworld isn’t healthy for it and consequently the 6th Maelstrom starts and never steps. The lands of the dead are in total chaos and many wraiths are thrown across the Shroud, some into the bodies of the living and dead.
The newest, and last, WoD game is Orpheus. It takes place in a microcosm of the main WoD, which arguably all the games do, and it is about individuals who can go out of body and interact with the dead who are hanging around the world. The experience of linking Wraith and Orpheus is very cool and the game has 6 books - a core and 5 supplements. Bit by bit a plot is developed and the connection between Wraith and Orpheus is shown.
April 30th (IIRC) all WoD items, except Orpheus I think, go out of print. WW is continuing the Dark Ages line and Exalted and is going to be starting up the Wod 2.0 which probably has a better name officially. There is a core book for WoD 2.0 and then “fat splat” supplements for different critters. Vampire: The Requim, Werewolf: The Forsaken and Mage: The Awakening are the three confirmed so far. No word yet as to what the games are like or what mechanics have changed.
After playing a bunch of Werewolf and Mage, and reading some comparison threads around here, I have decided that the WW mechanics are seriously screwed. If they can come up with something that still looks as simple on paper as the current one, but that actually gives reasonable results, they would have a much more solid system.
That would be “immediately”, then. I know a WoD gamer who says they’re rebooting (essentially) right away, ditching only a couple of the less popular variants.
This is all from a pamphlet at the GAMA trade show in Los Angeles.
As a table top player of WoD stuff, I always hated the Meta-Plot stuff.
Yeah, my 10th gen Ventrue is going to do so much against a 3rd generation anything… Especially when I can’t do anything to even a 7th generation anything.
But playing LARPs (live action roleplaying) and Storytelling them, I find the Meta-Plots , so much more interesting to throw in to confuse or disorient players from their normal fare of PvP or PvWolfs/Mages/Hunters/Sabbat/Camarilla/Rival City/etc.
I hope the WoD 2.0 revives the interest on WoD stuff. As it is, our LARP and the others in the Atlanta area are losing players and money.
The endings are really probably not as cool as I have imagined them to be. I read the Amazon reviews of the material… Icky. I want serious Revelations type wierd fun goofy end of world fun stuff… I want to read the Antediluvians waking up and their perspectives. I want a resolution to Gehenna. Not so according to most reviews.
Oh well.
I wonder how much the WoD 2.0 might affect our LARP rules?
Dang it, we just went to 3.0 rules…
I despised the metaplot but loved all the games. I really doubt I can get into any new books with brand new backgrounds/stories. I mean… out of all the source books… do they really have any real-world mythology left to borrow from/rip-off?
I played all my WoD exclusively online on MUSHes so the majority were always cross-sphere games. Hardly any games used all the 3rd addition changes… especially the 3rd Mage which essentially locked Spirit users with high arete out of the umbra and numerous craptacular changes in Vampire… except for the improved combat system. I also hated the hard-on the writers seemed to have for all-things-Sabbat at the detriment of my beloved Camarilla.
I hope one of the Mage endings was where The Things That Should Not Be tear through the gauntlet and obliviate reality with a blast of sanity rending paradox.
sniff I miss my Nephandi widderslainte.
True dat.
I admit I am vaguely curious about the Werewolf endings: there seems like only one possibility (as much as those moronic overgrown fleabags understand it: we lose. Evil things rise up and eat us all, sort of like Call of Cthuhlu, only Cthuhlu is less charismatic).
Actually, after a while, I started to find the werewolves quite humorous. They took themselves so seriously, when quite frankly, they were cosmic putzes. I mean, how many millenia did it take them to realize that indiscriminately slaughtering everyone else was a bad thing? There were what, five wars of rage? According to their own words, these fools caused the apocalypse in their own version of WoD. The other shapeshifters aren’t muchy better - just weaker.