What's the deal with the new World of Darkness games?

[Little_Nemo]

I used to be into the World of Darkness games - Vampire the Masquerade and all the various spin-offs. I had a pretty complete collection at one point. But I dropped out back around when the historical games came out. I know there was a Year of the Hunter series and a big grand finale that was supposed to wrap everything up. I assumed the company had decided to move on to other things.

But I now see there are new games coming out with Vampires and Werewolves and Ghosts and such (haven’t seen a Fairy game yet though - apparently they learned something). Is this what it appears to be? A basic reboot of the entire series that is restarting everything from the beginning? Do they acknowledge the existence of the old games? Are there any significant differences from the old games or is everything basically the same with new names?

[Push_You_Down]

It’s a reboot. I looked through the new main book for Vampire. There are new clans and some old clans are not included. Some of the new clans seem like merged general ideas of the old clans to remove redundancies. If memory serves they also renamed a lot of things (powers. that sort of thing)

[Kamino_Neko]

The old universe was destroyed, and a new one born.

I haven’t looked at it recently, but IIRC, they went for a more unified system, as well as a less unrelentingly dark world.

[cckerberos]

The old games ended with the Time of Judgment series of supplements. I’m not all that familiar with the new games, but they’re supposed to be complete reboots and significantly different from the old games. I vaguely recall reading something by WW that said they wanted to give player groups more of a sense of control over their characters.

Here’s what the Wikipedia article on V:tR says:

In many ways, Vampire: The Requiem is very much like its predecessor, The Masquerade, but there are a number of important changes.

Firstly, the concept of “vampire generation” has been eliminated. A vampire’s power is unrelated to to that of the vampire who spawned him; instead, he starts off at the lowest level and steadily grows more powerful with age (though he can rise faster by absorbing the power of other vampires).

Secondly, the clan one is “born” into is less important than the political faction (“Covenant”) one chooses to belong to.

Thirdly, the creation myth involving Caine and the Antedeluvians has been removed; vampires are unsure of their origin. Though vampires still conspire against each other, they are no longer puppets of ancient all-fathers, nor do they have a doomsday prophecy looming over them.