My love/hate relationship with World of Darkness and its offshoots is pretty well known. In my early 20s when I first got into gaming (large part thanks to some Airmen in AIT) 3rd edition had just been released and I was all in. Competing against that in my little microcism was White Wolf’s World of Darkness books, particularly Hunter and Vampire.
For some reason I could never wrap my head around these game. I found them obtrious, finky, and vague as hell in a lot of respects. Add to that the stereotype of the types of people who played WW games (you know goths, emos, theatre-kids) and I eventually stayed away outside of the Hunter games on the X-Box and Vampire for PC.
Around 2008 a new edition was released that seperated the books into a Core book and theme books (Mage, Vampire, Werewolf, etc). Meaning that all the games played with the same rules, names, etc with very little difference between them … I got into, and into hard. Not the theme books, I couldn’t give a crap about those, but the core book, the one where the players were normies in a hidden supernatural world. For me this was mana, it was I had hoped for (and didn’t get) in the X-Files and did eventually see in the first three seasons of Supernatural.
Only problem was, no one wanted to play it. The older WW players loved their systems and boycotted, non-WW players looked down on it the way I had the original stuff in 2002 … in the end my few World of Darkness books fell to the wayside, gathering dust …
… Until Onyx Path got the rights and tried to revitalize the series with a rename: Chronicles of Darkness. I picked up the core book (an expensive but cheeply produced rebranding of my NWoD book) and went online looking for games … again none where to be had.
Last year, Onyx Path joined the Community Content groups over at DrivethruRPG with the STORYTELLERS VAULT but CoD wasn’t there … as of a few weeks ago that has changed and Chronicles of Darkness games are now able to be released through the Storytellers Vault.
So get to it and let’s get some awesome adventures, games, creatures, etc going in this new world!
