Another part of WW's downfall in the 90s was them suing their own community (which, you could tell Paradox wanted V5 to start on a good note to include that blunder in their World of Darkness Documentary). Which, yeah... I get that they wanted to keep the edginess of WoD going into V5, but divisive modern events and including "...that guy" type characters wasn't a smart move. Otherwise, another decline for WW was that CofD (or nWoD at the time) was very different from their previous gamelines, thus many fans of WoD didn't gravitate towards the new gamelines. Which, hey, no disrespect to those that like CofD, but it's definitely a bold business decision as the company has to retain their previous customer base or hope the gamelines are successful enough to bring in more customers. But anywho, great video. Gets to the point and summarizes most of the events that transpired. Great job
Really good points. CofD has some really good positives but its not for everyone. Imo the Time of Judgement was necessary but I think they could’ve used it better to just reset the WoD without necessarily ending it. Sort of like what they did with 5th.
4:36 - That's not entirely accurate; As he writes in the Afterword of Wraith's 1st edition core book, Mark Rein-Hagen (MRH) says that he was running a playtest for Inferno with some friends when a pizza guy's car rolled down a hill (while he was out making a delivery - apparently the handbrake had failed) and it crashed into a transformer near the front of the house where the playtest was being run. MRH had to pull the guy back out of the car (who was unsuccessfully trying to reverse it out of the transformer) when MRH saw flames coming out from the crumpled vehicle - both were clear when the car was suddenly engulfed in flames. Because nobody wanted to go back to the playtest after the shock and excitement caused by the crash (and also because the crash cause a power blackout for that part of the neighbourhood), MRH decided to abandon the playtest, and he shelved all the notes for Inferno and forgot all about the game until someone suggested that MRH re-purpose them for Wraith (so they were never loss in a fire, they were just gathering dust until MRH was convinced to re-use them). MRH then explained that once he started re-using some of the concepts and writing from Inferno in Wraith, all sorts of bad and weird events started happening to almost everyone involved in it's production - so much so that apparently one co-worker suggested that if MRH died while making the game, they'll add his ashes to the ink of the first print run... this may have been written by MRH for dramatic effect, but it is said to be the origin of the so-called "Wraith Curse" that has plagued the delevopment of both the 1st and 2nd Editions, and the 20th Anniversary edition too.
You missed told some info, you say that promethean was a high quality slat book but then neglected to mention that PtC was a part of the new world of darkness and how Cofd wasn’t always cofd. Other wise good video
Zoomer here. I got into ttrpgs in 2019, and I was introduced to VtM 5th edition in 2021 and I fell in love with it immediately because supernatural creatures are my shit. Eventually, I learned about all the rich metaplots and lore of the legacy editions and how most, if not almost all, of it, was gutted in V5. It made sad and me fall out of love for V5 in favor of the Revised-V20 editions of the game. Oh, how I wish I could've been around to experience the heyday, but I was only a child and didn't even know what TTRPGs were yet!
Great vid - like you, I’m hoping the game meets with ever greater success under Jason Carl, who comes across as a great lead for the company. Still loved Requiem the best though. All the different flavours of vamps were right up my alley.
Requiem is pretty dope. I love the metaplot a bit too much to abandon VtM but like a lot of the stuff they lifted. Carl is a pretty solid steward of the brand and hope he can navigate White Wolf out of future blunders
Surprised nobody ever mentions White Wolf's imprint Sword & Sorcery Studios, which they used to publish their own D20 books, including the 6th edition of Gamma World, the 3e update of Ravenloft, their own house-setting of Scarred Lands, and d20 licensed RPGs for Everquest, Warcraft and World of Warcraft.
Just a side note, Paradox's games were grand strategy, not 4X.🤓 Besides the slip, its kind of sad. I had prayed that someone who cared (like PDX then) would buy White Wolf and embark on Bloodlines 2 as it was meant to be. Little did I know that Paradox had already started to go downhill from their beloved days, its by then they got their strategy of just shitting out endless usually low quality DLC at shit price points (it wasn't always like that). We even got Bloodlines 2 eventually announced. And seeing the epic clusterfuck that has been VTMB2 development, as well as the dogshit that are the 5E editions of the gamelines, maybe I shouldn't wish for anything - I clearly monkey pawed all this 😥
I mean,it’s fair that WoD isn’t trying to be as edgy as it was back then but a lot of people don’t exactly like that they are removing a lot of, what was, WoD’s identity. Yeah it was dark,edgy and absurd but it’s what made it be WoD in the first place. I don’t mind the 5th editions cuz it gives even more variety and perspectives on what you could do with WoD. But I can understand people not liking them,especially with what’s going with 5th edition Werewolf.
@@lavalamp505 It’s not that I dislike it per say, more so that from what I have heard about it,like with the other 5th editions so far,changes that a lot of people don’t exactly like or agree with. Especially relating to getting rid of certain tribes of werewolves,like the Get of Fenris. Like I said earlier,I don’t mind the 5th editions at all. But I do need to check out some reviews or videos talking about 5th edition Werewolf, to fully get people’s problems with it. I am just saying that, I do get why people don’t like them, from what I have heard and read about the 5th editions.
I don't get it- people get offended by evil deeds like child abuse, various deviations and LGBT hate IN THE GAME about World of Darkness, but in the real life they seem to be ok with it. I guess that means some people are not mature enough to play such games. In computer games like GTA or Fallout you can play an evil person and people know it's just a game- you don't like it, don't play it. Social justice warriors are ruining many fantasy worlds and the greatest offence for them is being misgendered or not being represented in a game. Funny how everybody see neonazis but fail to see neocommunists. There is a reason for anchoring some motives in our reality- it's supposed to lend credibility to this created world.
Nazis everywhere, under the bed even, leaned into even though half the text is constantly explaining how it's okay to kill these people. Anyone who thinks that there's Nazi glorification in White Wolf books, I genuinely wonder if they actually read the material in question. WW games especially as they got older were always written by pretty hard lefts, who don't even hesitate to equate the most mild mannered small c-conservative with being or being in league with neonazis. There's so many neonazis in WoD compared to real life because authors or whatever want a guilt free killing experience, or background to a character. I'm sorry, but if you think WW is secretly run by Nazi sympathetic people, there is actually something wrong with you. There's no other ways about it. Only a psued-intellectual lunatic would take WHITE WOLF books and say they're pro-Nazi. The 5Es are even more extreme in their anti-Nazi messaging that it's become the stuff of fucking parody, like the DONT LET FASCISTS PLAY at your table or hilarious goof shit like Rudi.
6:44 that sentence ended up sounding like the car accident was part of the success. Considering the quality of the show the company might have felt that way.
Believe it or not the show was actually renewed before his accident. I’ve watched it myself and while the beginning is rough it gets a bit better towards the end.
@@lavalamp505 Yeah I feel like it was rough from a big fan standpoint, but I also feel like if it had gone on longer the stuff that seemed to be missing like Malkavians, or Tremere or the Sabbat... Would have been introduced into the show... I can easily imagine the Tremere showing up as a new faction that had been mostly Isolationist up until they demanded a seat on the Primogen Council? And the Malkavians had been prevented from city politics because the other vampires thought they were too chaotic... Stuff like that easily could have happened... Heck if they had gone on long enough they could have introduced the other supernaturals. And then spinoffs lol...
According to the author of the book, 15:23 was done in order to bring attention to what's going on in Chechnya. Unfortunately we live in an outrage culture where you crucify people for internet good boy points.
Sad to see that White Wolf downfall was sticking to being themselves, now the games are just boring and sanitized products with the most mass market appeal possible, done by people who think they know what WoD is but were never there to understand what made it special.
Admittedly a bit of a blind spot in this video. Exalted feels so disconnected from White Wolf while simultaneously being one of their true fully successful lines. I want to do a video fully dedicated to that spin-off and a lot of Achillis work with the company.
I played D&D for years and moved to the original VTM, Mage, Changeling, and Werewolf and basically stopped playing TTRPG after that...there were a lot of neo-nazi undertones in the original series from what I remember with the Werewolf books specifically. There was a whole clan of Norse/Neo-Pagan/Neo-nazi wolves in Werewolf the apocalypse that felt very extreme even then. I feel like there was some weird shit brewing under the surface in the original series. Too bad, because there was a lot there that could have gone a different direction and the bones of that universe was very intriguing.
Oh, the Gets of Fenris, probably the most hated tribe in WtA (competing maybe with Shadow Lords), exactly for that. Fortunately, they are non-playable in the 5th edition. Now they are one of the main villains of the game.
I've loved the piece, very informative. Still, it creates unanswered questions. I didn't understand why in the late 90s White Wolf's sales suddenly dropped, and why only Vampire and Hunter remained standing. There had to be a reason. Could it be that Werewolf, Wraith, Mage and the like were disappointing? Also, how on earth a company with so much cash coming in - especially taking into account the Underworld settlement - ends up unable to keep the lights on? I don't buy it. And as for the controversy, how on earth creating a fictional setting where a power-mad, monstrous vampire in Chesnya persecutes gay people, makes the publisher anti-gay? That's downright stupid. I doubt it was regular gay people who got offended, it was probably some dumbass, miserable activists who spend their waking moments looking for something to be upset about.
The offshoot games were disappointing and the enormous amount of books white wolf put out made it hard for fans to keep up. Pair that with other games coming out, DnD becoming quite good again and sales just dropped over time. I don’t think the margins on ttrpgs were all that big, I doubt they were ever carrying all that much cash. The chechnya thing was gigantic. It was one of the biggest blowups I’ve ever seen in the space. You had mainstream media reporting on it and translators threatened with jail time in Russia.
I was huge into the WW games as a (much) younger man. Here are some thoughts: Vampire: the most popular setting. Perhaps because everyone pretty much knows what a vampire is, and there is a ton of pop-culture lore supporting it. Werewolf: Earth-First but with fur. An unexpectedly spiritualist game, with the primary personal horror generally being the mass-murder of people you love... by your own hand. The characters were over-the-top capable in combat with pretty much anything that isn't either a dark mirror of themselves or ludicriously overpowered. Best way I found to run it was to de-emphasize combat; to the point being a fight became an auto-win, but often had negative repercussions. Example: pack takes on a squad of Marines in the jungle. Good job, you win; but now the rest of the battalion is on high alert, making your infiltration much more difficult. Mage: you can do literally anything. Very, very few people I know could deal with the freedom, and constraints, productively. Almost everyone fell back on pre-made spells and effects. There was no practical way to run a conventional story, the best you could hope for is to create several "story beats" and hope to work some of them into the shared madness of the game. Wraith: awesomely depressing. The game starts with you dead, and everything goes downhill from there. It even features torches made from human souls, with the flames slowly and agonizingly burning the victims' life force away. Oh, and player characters could theoretically start the game with the power to do that. Changeling: this is where I hit the wall. I have friends who utterly loved this system, but it left me cold. I guess I'm too much of a grump. Never could get an answer to the simple question of does a troll in his human seeming have to crouch to pass through a normal doorway...
![[TH] VALORANT Champions Seoul - Playoffs Day 5 - FNC vs SEN](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/ockeLeCB0wI/mqdefault.jpg)
What is everyone's favorite White Wolf game? For me, I think it has to be Werewolf. Let me know below!
I prefer vampire the requem but if we had to go by the old setting, then i guess it would be hunter or VtM
@@mahmutichigo Nice, I really like CofD lines as well. What they did with Changeling was incredible.
I'm a big fan of Geist janky as it is since I find the concept just so fascinating.
Mage, both lines.
@@JohnQ5 Geist is one I've never gotten to play in person. Would love to give it a go one day. It does seem fascinating.
So that is why modern VTM book has a whole section about players political ideology, with even "see a therapis" recomendatons! Good video, thank you
Another part of WW's downfall in the 90s was them suing their own community (which, you could tell Paradox wanted V5 to start on a good note to include that blunder in their World of Darkness Documentary). Which, yeah... I get that they wanted to keep the edginess of WoD going into V5, but divisive modern events and including "...that guy" type characters wasn't a smart move.
Otherwise, another decline for WW was that CofD (or nWoD at the time) was very different from their previous gamelines, thus many fans of WoD didn't gravitate towards the new gamelines. Which, hey, no disrespect to those that like CofD, but it's definitely a bold business decision as the company has to retain their previous customer base or hope the gamelines are successful enough to bring in more customers.
But anywho, great video. Gets to the point and summarizes most of the events that transpired. Great job
Really good points. CofD has some really good positives but its not for everyone. Imo the Time of Judgement was necessary but I think they could’ve used it better to just reset the WoD without necessarily ending it. Sort of like what they did with 5th.
@@lavalamp505 Which is a shame as it seemed that's what the plan was with Beckett's Jyhad Diary for V5, but Paradox/WW thought otherwise.
@@ChaosReacon137 Yep. I honestly would've loved to see the license be fully purchased by OPP instead of Paradox but we are where we are.
4:36 - That's not entirely accurate; As he writes in the Afterword of Wraith's 1st edition core book, Mark Rein-Hagen (MRH) says that he was running a playtest for Inferno with some friends when a pizza guy's car rolled down a hill (while he was out making a delivery - apparently the handbrake had failed) and it crashed into a transformer near the front of the house where the playtest was being run. MRH had to pull the guy back out of the car (who was unsuccessfully trying to reverse it out of the transformer) when MRH saw flames coming out from the crumpled vehicle - both were clear when the car was suddenly engulfed in flames.
Because nobody wanted to go back to the playtest after the shock and excitement caused by the crash (and also because the crash cause a power blackout for that part of the neighbourhood), MRH decided to abandon the playtest, and he shelved all the notes for Inferno and forgot all about the game until someone suggested that MRH re-purpose them for Wraith (so they were never loss in a fire, they were just gathering dust until MRH was convinced to re-use them).
MRH then explained that once he started re-using some of the concepts and writing from Inferno in Wraith, all sorts of bad and weird events started happening to almost everyone involved in it's production - so much so that apparently one co-worker suggested that if MRH died while making the game, they'll add his ashes to the ink of the first print run... this may have been written by MRH for dramatic effect, but it is said to be the origin of the so-called "Wraith Curse" that has plagued the delevopment of both the 1st and 2nd Editions, and the 20th Anniversary edition too.
You missed told some info, you say that promethean was a high quality slat book but then neglected to mention that PtC was a part of the new world of darkness and how Cofd wasn’t always cofd.
Other wise good video
My apologies. Admittedly I know the least about Promethean of all the lines. Thanks for clarifying!
I wish Exalted would have gotten a mention, but otherwise a fascinating watch.
Paradox is the worst thing that could happen
After CCCP
Zoomer here. I got into ttrpgs in 2019, and I was introduced to VtM 5th edition in 2021 and I fell in love with it immediately because supernatural creatures are my shit. Eventually, I learned about all the rich metaplots and lore of the legacy editions and how most, if not almost all, of it, was gutted in V5. It made sad and me fall out of love for V5 in favor of the Revised-V20 editions of the game. Oh, how I wish I could've been around to experience the heyday, but I was only a child and didn't even know what TTRPGs were yet!
Wait, did you say a White Wolf writer ate a live snake on a stage?! WTF?!
Yep... It was at one of the Grand Masquerades.
Great vid - like you, I’m hoping the game meets with ever greater success under Jason Carl, who comes across as a great lead for the company. Still loved Requiem the best though. All the different flavours of vamps were right up my alley.
Requiem is pretty dope. I love the metaplot a bit too much to abandon VtM but like a lot of the stuff they lifted. Carl is a pretty solid steward of the brand and hope he can navigate White Wolf out of future blunders
Well, werewolf 5 crashed and burned so i’m not sure where we go from now
Surprised nobody ever mentions White Wolf's imprint Sword & Sorcery Studios, which they used to publish their own D20 books, including the 6th edition of Gamma World, the 3e update of Ravenloft, their own house-setting of Scarred Lands, and d20 licensed RPGs for Everquest, Warcraft and World of Warcraft.
Just a side note, Paradox's games were grand strategy, not 4X.🤓
Besides the slip, its kind of sad. I had prayed that someone who cared (like PDX then) would buy White Wolf and embark on Bloodlines 2 as it was meant to be. Little did I know that Paradox had already started to go downhill from their beloved days, its by then they got their strategy of just shitting out endless usually low quality DLC at shit price points (it wasn't always like that). We even got Bloodlines 2 eventually announced. And seeing the epic clusterfuck that has been VTMB2 development, as well as the dogshit that are the 5E editions of the gamelines, maybe I shouldn't wish for anything - I clearly monkey pawed all this 😥
Fantastic overview of the history! Sidenote; what's the music you used in the background for this one? Digging the chilled out groove
Could be wrong but I believe it’s ambient music from Mirror’s Edge.
@@lavalamp505 Not as far as I could find, the search continues!
@@RodieTheNightblade It's MIST from Parasite Eve 2, it's an arranged version of the police station theme from Parasite Eve 1. Cheers.
Rudi
Nothing about Requiem? Did I miss it? More about the MMO?
I mean,it’s fair that WoD isn’t trying to be as edgy as it was back then but a lot of people don’t exactly like that they are removing a lot of, what was, WoD’s identity. Yeah it was dark,edgy and absurd but it’s what made it be WoD in the first place. I don’t mind the 5th editions cuz it gives even more variety and perspectives on what you could do with WoD. But I can understand people not liking them,especially with what’s going with 5th edition Werewolf.
5th edition werewolf is stellar imo. Its easily the best 5th release they’ve had. Curious what you dislike about it?
@@lavalamp505 It’s not that I dislike it per say, more so that from what I have heard about it,like with the other 5th editions so far,changes that a lot of people don’t exactly like or agree with. Especially relating to getting rid of certain tribes of werewolves,like the Get of Fenris. Like I said earlier,I don’t mind the 5th editions at all. But I do need to check out some reviews or videos talking about 5th edition Werewolf, to fully get people’s problems with it. I am just saying that, I do get why people don’t like them, from what I have heard and read about the 5th editions.
I don't get it- people get offended by evil deeds like child abuse, various deviations and LGBT hate IN THE GAME about World of Darkness, but in the real life they seem to be ok with it. I guess that means some people are not mature enough to play such games. In computer games like GTA or Fallout you can play an evil person and people know it's just a game- you don't like it, don't play it. Social justice warriors are ruining many fantasy worlds and the greatest offence for them is being misgendered or not being represented in a game. Funny how everybody see neonazis but fail to see neocommunists. There is a reason for anchoring some motives in our reality- it's supposed to lend credibility to this created world.
Nazis everywhere, under the bed even, leaned into even though half the text is constantly explaining how it's okay to kill these people. Anyone who thinks that there's Nazi glorification in White Wolf books, I genuinely wonder if they actually read the material in question. WW games especially as they got older were always written by pretty hard lefts, who don't even hesitate to equate the most mild mannered small c-conservative with being or being in league with neonazis. There's so many neonazis in WoD compared to real life because authors or whatever want a guilt free killing experience, or background to a character.
I'm sorry, but if you think WW is secretly run by Nazi sympathetic people, there is actually something wrong with you. There's no other ways about it. Only a psued-intellectual lunatic would take WHITE WOLF books and say they're pro-Nazi. The 5Es are even more extreme in their anti-Nazi messaging that it's become the stuff of fucking parody, like the DONT LET FASCISTS PLAY at your table or hilarious goof shit like Rudi.
Yea, it was a time a place kinda thing. You could never publish something that edgy in current year.
I always wanted to play VTM or Werewolf. Can't find a group. I'm sure even if I did it wouldn't be the kind of people I'd want to spend time with lol
Theres plenty of solid groups out there. Check out roll20 for open games
This was massively interesting and a bit sad. It does explain why the game went from being actually progressive to being woke progressive.
6:44 that sentence ended up sounding like the car accident was part of the success. Considering the quality of the show the company might have felt that way.
Believe it or not the show was actually renewed before his accident. I’ve watched it myself and while the beginning is rough it gets a bit better towards the end.
@@lavalamp505 Yeah I feel like it was rough from a big fan standpoint, but I also feel like if it had gone on longer the stuff that seemed to be missing like Malkavians, or Tremere or the Sabbat... Would have been introduced into the show...
I can easily imagine the Tremere showing up as a new faction that had been mostly Isolationist up until they demanded a seat on the Primogen Council? And the Malkavians had been prevented from city politics because the other vampires thought they were too chaotic... Stuff like that easily could have happened...
Heck if they had gone on long enough they could have introduced the other supernaturals. And then spinoffs lol...
What an excellent day to be a Floater
According to the author of the book, 15:23 was done in order to bring attention to what's going on in Chechnya. Unfortunately we live in an outrage culture where you crucify people for internet good boy points.
Sad to see that White Wolf downfall was sticking to being themselves, now the games are just boring and sanitized products with the most mass market appeal possible, done by people who think they know what WoD is but were never there to understand what made it special.
Nothing edgy allowed in this modern world it seems.
Exalted?
Admittedly a bit of a blind spot in this video. Exalted feels so disconnected from White Wolf while simultaneously being one of their true fully successful lines. I want to do a video fully dedicated to that spin-off and a lot of Achillis work with the company.
I played D&D for years and moved to the original VTM, Mage, Changeling, and Werewolf and basically stopped playing TTRPG after that...there were a lot of neo-nazi undertones in the original series from what I remember with the Werewolf books specifically. There was a whole clan of Norse/Neo-Pagan/Neo-nazi wolves in Werewolf the apocalypse that felt very extreme even then.
I feel like there was some weird shit brewing under the surface in the original series. Too bad, because there was a lot there that could have gone a different direction and the bones of that universe was very intriguing.
The game has always been pretty edgy. They have tried to move away from that a good bit with 5th edition.
Oh, the Gets of Fenris, probably the most hated tribe in WtA (competing maybe with Shadow Lords), exactly for that.
Fortunately, they are non-playable in the 5th edition. Now they are one of the main villains of the game.
@@trotskyeraumpicareta4178 The Get don't seem to be quite villains in the 5e book. More of anti-heros, they give major Punisher vibes now lol
@@trotskyeraumpicareta4178That’s funny considering that a lot of people REALLY hated the fact they weren’t playable.
I've loved the piece, very informative. Still, it creates unanswered questions. I didn't understand why in the late 90s White Wolf's sales suddenly dropped, and why only Vampire and Hunter remained standing. There had to be a reason. Could it be that Werewolf, Wraith, Mage and the like were disappointing? Also, how on earth a company with so much cash coming in - especially taking into account the Underworld settlement - ends up unable to keep the lights on? I don't buy it. And as for the controversy, how on earth creating a fictional setting where a power-mad, monstrous vampire in Chesnya persecutes gay people, makes the publisher anti-gay? That's downright stupid. I doubt it was regular gay people who got offended, it was probably some dumbass, miserable activists who spend their waking moments looking for something to be upset about.
The offshoot games were disappointing and the enormous amount of books white wolf put out made it hard for fans to keep up. Pair that with other games coming out, DnD becoming quite good again and sales just dropped over time. I don’t think the margins on ttrpgs were all that big, I doubt they were ever carrying all that much cash.
The chechnya thing was gigantic. It was one of the biggest blowups I’ve ever seen in the space. You had mainstream media reporting on it and translators threatened with jail time in Russia.
I was huge into the WW games as a (much) younger man. Here are some thoughts:
Vampire: the most popular setting. Perhaps because everyone pretty much knows what a vampire is, and there is a ton of pop-culture lore supporting it.
Werewolf: Earth-First but with fur. An unexpectedly spiritualist game, with the primary personal horror generally being the mass-murder of people you love... by your own hand. The characters were over-the-top capable in combat with pretty much anything that isn't either a dark mirror of themselves or ludicriously overpowered. Best way I found to run it was to de-emphasize combat; to the point being a fight became an auto-win, but often had negative repercussions. Example: pack takes on a squad of Marines in the jungle. Good job, you win; but now the rest of the battalion is on high alert, making your infiltration much more difficult.
Mage: you can do literally anything. Very, very few people I know could deal with the freedom, and constraints, productively. Almost everyone fell back on pre-made spells and effects. There was no practical way to run a conventional story, the best you could hope for is to create several "story beats" and hope to work some of them into the shared madness of the game.
Wraith: awesomely depressing. The game starts with you dead, and everything goes downhill from there. It even features torches made from human souls, with the flames slowly and agonizingly burning the victims' life force away. Oh, and player characters could theoretically start the game with the power to do that.
Changeling: this is where I hit the wall. I have friends who utterly loved this system, but it left me cold. I guess I'm too much of a grump. Never could get an answer to the simple question of does a troll in his human seeming have to crouch to pass through a normal doorway...
Proud retrogamer here. I remember reading the original book when it came out and thinking, hey this sounds great! Then I saw who was playing it.
girls and people who actually got laid?