Greetings gamers! As you may have gleaned from previous articles, I am a die-hard horror fan. As a consequence, Halloween is my favorite holiday; the celebration of which I extend to the entire month of October. In the spirit of the season, I am going to share some of my thoughts on the classic World of Darkness and the contemporary Chronicles of Darkness games. Given my preference for horror fiction, I have spent an inordinate amount of time playing games within these settings. Both gamelines have much to recommend them. However, as I have mentioned previously, I find the Chronicles of Darkness to be superior to the classic World of Darkness setting. In a series of two articles, I would like to compare the two and elaborate on why I believe this to be the case. I think that it’s an important discussion, because while most TTRPG gamers are at least passingly familiar with classic World of Darkness games such as Vampire: The Masquerade, far fewer seem to be familiar with the Chronicles of Darkness setting. This is a shame, because the Chronicles of Darkness games are some of the best horror TTRPGs on the market. For the sake of simplicity, I will refer to the classic World of Darkness by the abbreviation “WoD” and the “rebooted” or “new” World of Darkness, (later branded as “Chronicles of Darkness” with the advent of the second editions of the core rulebook and previously published games), by the abbreviation “CoD.”

The Classic World of Darkness

To begin with, I want to preface this discussion of WoD vs CoD by saying that my criticisms of the WoD should in no way be taken to suggest that I dislike these games. In fact, I have spent more time playing WoD games than all of the other TTRPGs I have played combined. This is no accident. To say that I love these games would be an understatement; I grew up with these games, and in many ways the countless hours I have spent playing them shaped how I see TTRPGs in general. Whatever criticisms I may have, I will always have a fondness for the WoD setting. While some hardliner WoD gamers may see it as heresy, it is my honest opinion that in its current iteration, the CoD gameline shores up the best aspects of the WoD while avoiding its worst deficiencies, in terms of both game design and setting. Allow me to explain…

To those unfamiliar, the WoD is a shared TTRPG setting wherein a number of different horror games take place. The setting itself attempts to embody a “goth-punk” aesthetic. “Goth” in that it focuses on gothic horror themes set in a world where hidden monsters prey upon humanity and world-spanning supernatural conspiracies are responsible for the immiserated state of the world. “Punk” in that the attitudes of the inhabitants of the setting are far more cynical and belligerent than our own world. Each game in the WoD allows the players to take the role of ‘traditional’ supernatural beings (referred to as ‘splats’ by fans), competing with each other to further their own agendas amidst the ignorant masses of humanity that surround them. There are (arguably) five main gamelines within the WoD setting: Vampire: The Masquerade, Werewolf: The Apocalypse, Mage: The Ascension, Wraith: The Oblivion, and Changeling: The Dreaming. In addition, there are a plethora of minor game titles that supplement the main gamelines. Each of the games is ostensibly set in the WoD and frequently reference each other in the canon of global supernatural conspiracies that serve as the setting’s metanarrative.

While all of these games share a common setting, they sit uneasily together (at best). This is true both in terms of a lack of narrative consistency and game mechanics necessary for workable crossover campaigns. By narrative inconsistency, I mean that some games within the WoD are conceptually at odds with other games in the WoD, such that they are in some sense mutually exclusive. This most often takes the form of incompatible cosmologies within the setting. For example, the underlying cosmology of Vampire: The Masquerade is based squarely within a Judeo-Christian worldview. Vampires in VtM believe themselves to be descended from Caine, the first murderer from the biblical book of Genesis. It could be the case that the vampires have mythologized their own forgotten origins within the context of the dominant Judeo-Christian cultural narrative but this is unlikely for two reasons. First, there are vampires in VtM that are old enough to know the true origins of their kind; at the very least, there are extant vampires old enough to have been sired by vampires who were themselves sired by Caine. Second, one of the final WoD games, Demon: The Fallen, allows players to play as biblical fallen angels recently liberated from eons-long durance. These demons also claim to remember Caine and the first murder, and have confirmed that vampirism is indeed a divine curse that was levied upon Caine for his sins. While all of this is pretty cool as far as it goes, it lies in direct opposition to the explicitly stated cosmologies of other WoD games. Both Werewolf: The Apocalypse and Mage: The Ascension espouse a belief in a cosmological triad of fundamental metaphysical principles: Dynamism, Stasis, and Entropy. While mages tend to see these three as impersonal cosmic forces, werewolves see these principles embodied in the personage of three ‘gods’: the Wyld, the Weaver, and the Wyrm. While both groups conceive of these principles in different terms, both agree that the triad comprises the very foundation of reality and that all things ultimately arise from the interactions of the three. As to whether mages and werewolves are right about their metaphysical claims, few other beings would be better positioned to know, as both mages and werewolves are able to directly perceive the underlying metaphysical realities of the WoD. This leaves us with two radically different sets of metaphysical claims, both of which cannot be true simultaneously (at least not without squinting your eyes real hard and ignoring some important implications). Despite this, both cosmologies are presented as true within the WoD setting and both have strong evidence to support their validity.

This presents a problem for the WoD setting in my view, particularly as it pertains to crossover campaigns. Maybe I’m being particular, but inconsistencies such as this make it difficult to achieve the suspension of disbelief necessary for immersion; especially if I’m running a game where vampires and mages are comparing notes about the nature of the world in which they exist. Of course, the inconsistencies aren’t relegated to cosmology. Some of the claims made in the context of one game simply don’t make sense in the wider context of the shared WoD setting. For example, in Mage: The Ascension, the main antagonist of the game is a group of mages called the Technocracy. The Technocracy is hellbent on eradicating any semblance of the supernatural from the WoD. The Technocracy is at war with the game’s main protagonists, the mystic Tradition mages. We are told that the Technocracy is winning this war in no uncertain terms, yet if this were true, then what accounts for the sheer number of supernatural beings (and their influence on human society) in the WoD? More to the point, it would seem that if the Technocracy were indeed winning, the WoD would cease to be a world of darkness (or at least a world of supernatural darkness).

One reason for these inconsistencies is down to game design. While the WoD had always been intended to be a shared setting, each game in the setting was developed essentially in isolation from the other games in the setting (with a couple of exceptions). Each game focused on its own particular themes and was written to explore these themes with only a passing reference to the other games. In addition to the narrative inconsistencies that resulted from this bottom-up approach to game design, the game mechanics necessary for crossover campaigns were largely absent as a consequence. Not only were the power levels between splats wildly unequal in some cases (e.g., I wouldn’t try running a crossover game involving mages or wraiths), but there is very little guidance provided as to how to resolve contests between the splats when using their unique powers against each other. This places a heavy burden on storytellers to do an inordinate amount of house ruling when running crossover campaigns in the WoD. In a way this is understandable, as the Storyteller System was a new system of game mechanics that was largely a work in progress. The ruleset was continuously refined with the release of new games in the setting and between new editions of these games (though the broken dramatic failure rules were never adequately addressed despite this ongoing refinement). And to be fair, many attempts were made to solve these problems with rule clarifications and additional game mechanics as the setting matured. Unfortunately, these attempted solutions were never quite sufficient to mitigate these problems entirely.

While the inconsistencies between the gamelines do present a problem for an shared setting such as the WoD, they are largely inconsequential if you don’t intend to run a crossover campaign or use another splat as an antagonist in your game. While this is by far the easiest solution, it does limit your options and runs counter to the spirit of the setting. Allow me to explain. The setting as a whole and each of the games within it are predicated on the premise that the end of the world is near. The WoD was written during the 1990s, near the turn of the millennium and subsequently reflected cultural anxieties regarding the end of the 20^th century and an increasingly interconnected and rapidly changing world. From its inception, the narrative of the WoD was driven by a metaplot that progressed each gameline toward an inevitable apocalyptic scenario. This metaplot was global in scope, involving every splat in the setting, and was advanced through world-changing crossover events. Often the narrative changes that resulted from these crossover events were reflected in the changes to the setting that were made explicit with the publishing of new editions of the individual games. Ultimately, this narrative arc culminated in the Time of Judgment, a series of game books that effectively concluded the metaplot of the WoD and signaled the end of the setting. Herein lies perhaps the biggest criticism of the WoD setting; the metaplot that tied the various splats together in the setting became, over the course of the WoD’s publication history, increasingly bloated, intrusive, and absurd. Eventually, the numerous layers of supernatural conspiracy that comprise the metaplot became so dense that one wondered if there were any normal people left in the WoD, or whether mundane humans had any real agency at all. Now, at the time I was a pretty big fan of the WoD metaplot. I have always been a sucker for shared settings and subtle nods within the narrative to other works within the setting. It wasn’t until I saw CoD’s absence of explicit metaplot that I realized just how cumbersome the WoD’s narrative had become. More importantly, I saw how emphasis on metanarrative canon tended to detract from the mystery of the setting and obstruct the ability of storytellers to make the setting their own.

Despite these criticisms, I am still a fan of the WoD, and I am far from alone. Classic WoD games such as Vampire: The Masquerade and Werewolf: The Apocalypse still have a following within the TTRPG community. However, if you were to ask me today, I can honestly say that I will probably never play a WoD game again. Why? Because CoD exists. The CoD was, from its inception, designed to address the criticisms outlined above. And while I wasn’t sold on the setting in its earliest incarnation, I have come to see it as the superior product, the reasons for which I will discuss in depth in Part 2. So stay tuned, and until next time, happy gaming!