Tag Archives: World of Darkness

Ur-Shulgi

I was recently reminded of this snippet of material that was cut from the revised edition of Clanbook: Assamite for lack of space. While not canonical World of Darkness setting material, it has a special spot in the cold, shriveled place where my heart should be.

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Date: Sun, 20 Dec 1998 01:11:34 +0200
From: Anonymous anonymous@black-veil.il
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Subject: [BROKEN STONE] 308A

I had the right authentication and your PGP keys. Here is where I establish my bona fides as a daughter of Haqim, not as a piece of technology. My name is Sarah Schneier and I hold the Seat of Copper and Lightning in the Council of Scrolls, and yes, this is important enough to require me to expose myself.
Alpha passed the order down for me to get the word out to all cells. You have to know what’s on the Throne.

On 08 November, we opened the Vault of the Pillars. The records there confirmed our suspicions as to the identity and nature of the new Eldest.

You already know about the Baali Wars, and about the Second City, and the parables of how the Ancestor made the warriors to serve as the world’s first police, and how the sorcerers were made as demon hunters because the Ancestor did not trust Saulot.

The problem, at least before the sorcerers came along, was that the Baali and all their cultist followers were too disorganized for the warriors and the first sorcerers to strike at. It was like trying to fight a swarm of wasps. So the Ancestor gave them something to unify them. He found someone who was born with a soul already destined for corruption — a ten-year-old shepherd — and Embraced that child. Then Haqim took his childe to the pit that Saulot said had spawned the Baali and he threw that shepherd into it. And the blood of the Ancestor and the power of that soul turned that child into the leader that the Baali needed.

When the Baali assaulted the Second City en masse, the Ancestor was off on one of his mysterious disappearances. He made it back just in time to stop his childe and tear the demon out of the body that it rode, and when the battle was over he claimed that he had found the child dying on the battlefield and the Embrace was the only way to save that innocent victim. Then he watched the child to make sure that it was safe to have around.

I guess he did not watch long enough. Some sort of spiritual seed stayed in the child, and that soul was never truly clean anyway, no matter what the Ancestor did. And it woke up last year, and now it is the Eldest. It is not Baali, and it is not possessed, and we do not think it is not working with or for anything infernal, but it is a case where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and it is not one of Haqim’s Children any more, not really. It is something more, and it is something less.

Every scroll and tablet we found in the Vault of the Pillars, every test we can perform without arousing its suspicion, everything we have points to ur-Shulgi as that child. It is close enough to 100% certainty that Alpha ord

Power out, generators are up. It knows already, and it’s moving. File attachments have all data that is in our hands as of tonight, and the mirror sites will contain it for download as long as they stay up. You have all that we have. Use it.

Go with God, and may He be mer^S^Csend^Cquit

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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Bachman Turner Overgoth

“What is your character concept?”

“Invulnerable black-clad moody lone wolf in a black trench coat wielding twin titanium monokatanas and smartlinked Desert Eagles firing incendiary moonsilver depleted uranium cold iron explosive tracer bullets while a bloodthirsty yet mournful heavy metal soundtrack wails distantly over the incessant rain that falls like the tears of a thousand fallen angels crying over the heart’s mournful lament for a lost paradise.”

“Um… no.”

Favoritism

Last week’s post on go-to game systems got me thinking about the settings I love and why I love them.

My lifetime achievement award for an intricately-detailed, internally-consistent, hugely-expansive setting has rested with Blue Planet ever since I first encountered it in the early 2000s. It’s worldbuilding at its finest, a sci-fi frontier setting that supports a broad spectrum of campaign styles. Its fatal flaw, if there is one, is that it has no default campaign. Without a clear vision of “we’re playing to do these things,” it seems very easy for a campaign to drown in options. But hot damn, the options.

Shadowrun (at least through the end of the 3e run) is every bit as detailed as Blue Planet, and benefits from an immensely-greater number of supplements. The FASA authors and developers crafted a fantastic world that could range from noir to gonzo while remaining internally-consistent. Moreover, the setting writing is a joy to read. I’ll still go back to 1e sourcebooks just to watch the in-setting conversations reveal another slice of the world’s secrets.

For big ideas and sweeping four-color generalizations, I adore the original 7th Sea. My elevator pitch for it has always been “the coolest parts of early Renaissance Europe filtered through the lens of Disney’s The Three Musketeers.” Every nation its its own unique setting that supports a different style of play. Theah as a whole is somehow stitched together in a way that feels cohesive rather than the half-assed patchwork that could easily result from a less-skilled attempt at putting together a kitchen sink setting.

The setting in which I’d most want to be a player character is Trinity. It’s not quite utopian sci-fi – the setting has plenty of dark places and rough edges, and there are ample reminders that when we went out into the stars, the monsters we brought with us were just as bad as the ones we found. But the overall tone is hopeful. It’s a setting in which humanity is striving toward a common goal but not united, in which the world is better but has been through some really bad times within living memory, and in which PCs can fundamentally make a difference on scales from human to interstellar. (Plus, I was an intern at the Wolf while the initial development cycle was under way, so it’ll always have a place in my heart for its proximity even though I had zero involvement with it.)

The setting in which I’ve spent the most time immersed is a toss-up, but I’d have to say that Twilight: 2000 wins by a nose over the (Old) World of Darkness. I’ve spent at least an order of magnitude more time playing the WoD line. Most of my closest, longest-lasting friendships came out of those gaming groups. It’s the foundation of my body of freelance work. But T2k is the dark future of the ’80s that I found the most compelling when I was a young gamer, and I keep coming back to it over and over again. It offers me a broken world whose fires are still smoldering, where memory of the world-that-was is still alive, and in which there is a faint hope of stabilizing the downward slide and starting the generations-long recovery process. Taken to the extreme, it’s the gaming counterpart to the calling that is my second career, and the same urge to bring order from chaos is what draws me to both of them.