Tag Archives: Character Creation Challenge 2025

Iuchi Masuyo

Game: Legend of the Five Rings (first edition – Alderac Entertainment Group, 1997)

My Experience: I’ve been hanging out in Rokugan since my junior year of college, when the hall director saw some of us playing Magic: The Gathering in the third floor lounge of Holmes Hall. He remarked that his buddy, John Zinser, was involved with a company that was bringing some new card game to market. I was hooked as soon as the first free samples showed up. A couple of years later, the RPG set in the same universe released, and the Louisville Gaming Mafia engaged with it pretty much immediately. I’ve run or played each of the four editions AEG put out and it remains one of my go-to systems and settings.

Iuchi Masuyo, Reluctant Yojimbo

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Viatiel

Game: Demon: The Fallen (White Wolf Publishing, 2002)

My Experience: Today closes out this event’s Week of World of Darkness with the last standalone WoD core game. I fell in love with Demon as soon as it released – weirdly for me, being staunchly agnostic/atheist for most of my life, but as a story toolkit, it’s an amazing and underrated piece of work. I spent about two years tinkering with a LARP adaptation of it and successfully played one of my more enjoyable LARP PCs as a testbed for some of that work.

Tom Hartman/Viatiel, Darkness on the Edge of Town

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Neville Grimes

Game: The Hunters Hunted (White Wolf, 1992)

My Experience: This is a different game only by the thinnest of technicalities, as the first mortal hunters sourcebook for the World of Darkness was marketed (and product numbered, at WW2205 as a Vampire: The Masquerade supplement. It’s also a core book only in the sense of establishing ground for mortals chronicles, as it’s written with the need for the VtM core. But I’m seizing those technicalities and thwacking them for all the candy that’ll come out. I couldn’t tell you when I first ran or played in a mortals game, but I know several were going at various points in the Louisville Gaming Mafia’s glory days, and mortals have been an evolving fixture of the WoD since this book released.

Neville Grimes – Eighteen Wheels, Both Barrels, and Exodus 22:18

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Silver Mhachkay

Game: Changeling: The Dreaming (first edition – White Wolf, 1995)

My Experience: Of the big five World of Darkness games, I’ve admittedly spent the least time with Changeling. It just never clicked with me. I built a few characters, sat at a table a time or two, but it was always too whimsical and Technicolor for me to be comfortable with it.

The irony does not escape me now.

Gökhan Karga/Silver Mhachkay, Goth Bard

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Margo Vaughn

Game: Wraith: The Oblivion (first edition – White Wolf, 1994)

My Experience: For all the time I’ve spent with it, Wraith is one of my less-played World of Darkness games, but no less beloved. The Louisville Gaming Mafia tried a few campaigns that never got legs. Shortly thereafter, I met the newly-reaped line developer, Rich Dansky, at Origins ’96. That encounter led directly to my internship with White Wolf during the autumn of that year, during which Rich gave me my first chance at freelancing with a tiny 1,000-word assignment for The Shadow Player’s Guide. I subsequently bookended my World of Darkness freelancing career with the Silent Legion in Book of Legions and, two decades later, revisiting them in Wraith‘s 20th Anniversary Edition along with most of the wraithly powers known as Arcanoi. Immediately thereafter, I got what was likely my last-ever WoD freelancing gig in Book of Oblivion – also, likely the last-ever official Wraith product. I’ve posted an authorized excerpt and a few cut pieces here under the Wraith: The Oblivion tag.

Margo Vaughn, Stormchaser at the End of the World

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Gordon Armstrong

Game: Mage: The Ascension (first edition – White Wolf, 1993)

My Experience: I’ve played in a few short campaigns and one-shots over the years, but I couldn’t get my head around MtA enough to run it. One of my first freelance contributions was a very minor bit of Tradition Book: Euthanatos.

Gordon Armstrong, Cryptid Preservationist

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Nadia Vasylyk

Game: Werewolf: The Apocalypse (first edition – White Wolf, 1991)

My Experience: Werewolf was on the market by the time I started playing Vampire. I grabbed it as soon as I became aware of it, in the fall of 1993 when I was a freshman at UK. I briefly tried to run it for the guys in my dorm, but I was the only gamer on my floor, so that kinda fell flat. I’ve been in a couple of short-lived campaigns over the years, but I never connected with it as well as I did with VtM. I did do a bit of freelancing for one book during Ethan Skemp’s tenure as line developer.

Nadia Vasylyk, Dangerous Antiquarian

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Curtis Baxter

Game: Vampire: The Masquerade (first edition – White Wolf, 1991)

My Experience: Oh, dear gods. I was introduced to VtM in late 1992 or early 1993. My first actual play experience was the LARP at RiverCon ’93 at the Holiday Inn Hurstborne. At the same con’s LARP the next year, I met most of the core of what would become the Louisville Gaming Mafia, and we’ve been in and out of each other’s lives ever since. I also was a contributing writer on a number of VtM projects back in the day.

Curtis Baxter, Anarch Vigilante

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Agent Svallin

Game: Spycraft (Alderac Entertainment Group, 2002)

My Experience: Spycraft’s first edition was one of the first d20/OGL games to really break the D&D mold. Tracker7 and I went to the Rusty Scabbard in Lexington for no particular reason. He picked up a copy and we went over to Backyard Burgers on Waller Ave to grab lunch. By the time we’d finished, I’d decided to buy a copy, too. I went on to run my Defense Research Agency campaign (source material previously posted under the Spycraft tag), then joined the design team for almost all of the first edition’s run, as well as Stargate SG-1‘s licensed releases. Tracker7 subsequently ran a cops game under the second edition rules, and I was heavily into the Living Spycraft organized play space whenever I could get out to Archon.

Isak Eriksen (code name Svallin), Watcher on the Baltic

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Gervais Fournier

Game: 7th Sea (Alderac Entertainment Group, 2000 [second printing])

My Experience: I’ve run this one for a couple of one-shots, played in a couple of convention games, and was a regular in Tracker7’s campaign back in the early 2000s. It remains one of my go-to settings for ahistorical Renaissance swashbuckling, intrigue, and general.

Gervais Fournier, Reluctant Porte Sorcerer

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