Darkness spreads across the land, bringing with it a horde of ferocious demons ready to breach our gates. An epic fantasy RPG awaits - the path will be grueling, but you must persevere and descend into hell itself to destroy this evil before it ravages our world. Subscribe for more PC game videos! CCP's World of Darkness MMO was cancelled last year, but now that Paradox have purchased White Wolf from them, maybe a Wor. Vampire: The Masquerade Chapters. Flyos Games is developing a story driven role-playing board game for 1 to 4 players. Prepare to play a breathtaking World of Darkness adventure! Since then, the World of Darkness has evolved into a vast universe of personal horror and White Wolf have had its many different brands appearing in over 850 books, TV-series, video games and events around the world. World of Darkness, or World of Darkness Online, was a Massively-Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game (MMORPG, or simply MMO) which was under development by CCP Games. World of Darkness MMO Game Data for World of Darkness. You can view population, subscribers, daily players, trends, about the game, and more on MMO Populations. World of Darkness is the name given to three related but distinct fictional universes created as settings for supernatural horror themed role-playing games.

• World Of Darkness Game Books
• World Of Darkness Game 2018

It had its own rules systems and supernatural types and offered a lot of variety. The game was released in three editions that updated the rules and storylines a little each time. After it was brought to a close, it was called the 'old World of Darkness' and eventually the 'classic World of Darkness.'

For the video game industry, Monday 14 April 2014 was just another day of layoffs and wasted creative energy.

The massively multiplayer online game World of Darkness had spent nine years in development but was being cancelled, and its production studio CCP Atlanta slashed to a sliver of its former size. Fifty-six people lost their jobs.

Insiders could barely muster a collective shrug. A few wondered if anything could be done about the increasingly sorry state of the business, about developers like Irrational and 38 Studios closing and constant downsizing, but not many questioned how it had all happened this time. This was a project with a promising pedigree – based around one of the most popular table-top gaming franchises since Dungeons and Dragons.

How did it fall apart after almost a decade of work?

The origins of World of Darkness

World Of Darkness Game Books

The story begins 25 years earlier at the peak of the tabletop roleplaying games industry. Back in the 1990s, a company named White Wolf loomed over this arcane landscape with a hugely successful series of games about vampires, werewolves, and wizards lurking behind our mundane reality.

Years before Twilight and its sulky undead hordes, World of Darkness mixed punk-rock rebellion and gothic style into the vampire mythos, grabbing the 90s zeitgeist by the throat and selling millions of books in the process. There was even a short-lived Aaron Spelling television show.

But the good times didn’t last for tabletop gaming. Over-confident expansion, rising printing costs and the growth of video games brought the sector to its knees. And White Wolf wasn’t immune.

That’s when Icelandic studio CCP Games swooped in. Founded in Reykjavík in 1997, the company launched its ambitious sandbox spaceship game, Eve Online, six years later. Boasting a complex player-made economy and dramatic space battles, it was like nothing else out there – a living, breathing sci-fi universe. By 2006 it had attracted 100,000 subscribers. Flushed with success and confidence, the company was looking to expand.

White Wolf was a natural fit. There was plenty of desirable intellectual property locked up in its range of board games and trading cards, especially World of Darkness. And CCP was effectively White Wolf for the MMO era: hipper than the competition, punching above its financial weight, and flirting with wider mass market attention.

Disorganised management

In November 2006, the two companies merged, with White Wolf becoming a wholly owned subsidiary of CCP. Immediately, work began on a massively multiplayer online game based around World of Darkness, featuring all of the unpredictability and openness of Eve Online.

CCP, to its immense credit, offered to keep on most, if not all, existing White Wolf staff. It was, according to those involved, a smooth transition; artists stayed on as artists, accountants as accountants. The existing staff who needed to transition to new roles were quick to learn fresh skills in areas like coding. However, plans for a swift ramp up to full production on the World of Darkness MMO faded as the pre-production and training phase dragged on.

There was another problem. Several members of the WoD development team told the Guardian that this early bump in the road was exacerbated by extreme disorganisation on the part of CCP’s Icelandic management. Very shortly after initial development began, the company started blurring the lines between the World of Darkness and Eve projects.

Repeatedly, staff were shifted over from the former to work on expansion projects for the latter. At times, our sources say, the entire WoD staff was put onto Eve, particularly during the development of 2009 add-on Apocrypha.

“On many different occasions throughout the years I was there, CCP would often ‘poach’ WoD staff for expansion projects,” recalls Nick Blood, a former developer and game master at CCP.

“There were plenty of developers who would get redirected to create Eve content for three to six month cycles… During these times, World of Darkness development was significantly slowed down. I remember the upper management often exasperatedly trying to figure out what to do with the remaining staff for a six-month period while their artists and programmers were busy elsewhere.”

'There was very little of the core game in it'

This constant yo-yo effect contributed to a development cycle in which planned features were partially completed and then dumped numerous times over. There seemed to be no clear vision on how the various parts would create a cohesive end product.

Sources report that, over the nine-year period, the game effectively reached alpha – the stage at which all the major features have been implemented - three times, only for each version to be scrapped.

“I tested it myself, on two different occasions out of those three,” says Blood. “With the first playtest, I was amazed at how little of the core game was there – at this point the game had been in development for over half a decade. I mean, there was just nothing, literally nothing, for someone like me, a complete outsider to the WoD IP, to appreciate.

'Other testers who were familiar with it thought it was great that they could finally see their avatars ‘diablerise’ – or consume – other player’s corpses, for health, or something. I just kind of shook my head and wondered how this would ever draw in anything other than die-hard fans.

“On the second play test, quite some time later, I was struck by how much had changed – and yet remained unfinished. The flagship achievement was a new movement system, made after scrapping the old one, which was similar to the Assassin’s Creed gameplay – with mantling walls, etc. But it was very basic in comparison. CCP was quite self-congratulatory on achieving this much, and the internal propaganda was that this kind of movement system would revolutionise MMO gaming.”

'Coders had to throw work away again and again'

For the coders there was a constant state of flux. “Almost every system in the game was designed, built and tested at least once, most of them multiple times,” says one gameplay programmer. “Some of the systems were reportedly pretty cool; they had never been seen in MMOs before. The problem was that, without a cogent vision, none of it gelled. There was no clear path towards ‘done’.

'So the team just ended up building stuff and throwing it away, over and over again. It's something I saw on Eve and Dust as well - the teams would build a feature, then be told by management to make ‘small changes’ which necessitated a full, back-to-square-one rewrite.”

One manager couldn't answer questions on gameplay or focus. I remember him standing over the shoulder of a programmer putting his finger to his lips and saying 'No - make it more.. psssshhhh’

This constant build and rebuild approach meant massive issues in the development process. Features that were good enough to retain in one build had to be redesigned from scratch for the next because so many other interconnected parts had changed. Even when there was enough to play, internal testing revealed a confused and unfocused experience.

Most of the sources spoken to for this piece identified the same problematic CCP manager, who had little vision for what the finished game would look like.

“Not once could he answer any question about moment-to-moment gameplay or areas of focus,” says one source. “Instead, he preferred to deliver buzzword-laden rambles… It was not uncommon for him to communicate in onomatopoeia.

'I once saw him looking over the shoulder of a programmer at some bit of User Interface the poor guy had hacked together. He straightened up, put fingers to lips and said, ‘No, this isn't it at all. Make it more.. psssshhhh’ He hissed on his fucking fingertips, like the air coming out of a bicycle tire, and then just walked away.”

A blame culture

Former staff claim that the management team charged with creative oversight on WoD did not accept responsibility for the increasingly chaotic game development. “When things started turning sour in 2010, it was categorically not the fault of management, executive or creative,' said another source. 'The line employees were blamed.

'One email sent on the eve of the company's 2010 team-building trip stated that all teams had to work through the weekend - and that this necessary overtime was the fault of the teams, that it was their failure to plan and scope their project accordingly. Never mind that management insisted on changing requirements and designs on a weekly basis, without pushing the schedule out to accommodate the changes.”

Design meetings were decidedly robust affairs. Lead designers piled into what was known as “The Sweaty Room” and yelled at one another. “It was very alpha-male, whoever shouted longest and hardest would dominate the meetings,” recalls one developer. “This didn't seem to spill out into the rest of the project until later.”

Budgeting problems

The budget for the game was also affected by the lack of oversight. While no one interviewed for this article was in a position to quote exact numbers, all were under the impression that CCP dealt with one unified research and development fund, rather than allocating money by project. Former staff claim this explains why teams shifted regularly between WoD and Eve.

CCP lusted for relevance, the expectation that it should do more than its peers. It constantly attempted to recreate the buzz that followed a favourable article in the New York Times

This unusual state of affairs meant that any development on WoD was extremely reliant on the success of CCP’s other projects. When it was just WoD and Eve, WoD development could be theoretically funded indefinitely without much worry. This remained true even as Eve’s subscription rates appeared to plateau, becoming more reliant on players with multiple accounts. The sensible thing would have been to concentrate on Eve, while settling on a single vision for WoD in an attempt to get the latter out the door.

That wasn’t how things turned out. Spurred by Eve’s status as a unique brand in the MMO space, CCP developed an odd internal corporate culture which insisted on what CCP refers to as a 'War on the Impossible', an idea that the company should do more and expect more than its peers in the industry. This mission became tangled up with what Nick Blood calls CCP’s “lusts for relevance” - its constant attempts to recreate the buzz that followed a favourable article in the New York Times. There was a growing sense of hubris.

Dust to dust

But the company’s ambitions grew. In August 2009, CCP announced Dust 514, a multiplayer shooter for the Playstation 3 which was set in the Eve universe. Players would even be able to affect the main Eve Online universe via their planetary battles in the console spin-off. It was a hugely innovative endeavour and once again, staff were pulled off World of Darkness to help deliver on the promises.

When Dust was finally released, however, reviews generally praised the concept, but savaged the well below par execution. It flopped.

The beginning of the end for WoD predictably didn’t have anything to do with that project at all. In June of 2011, CCP launched Incarna, one of Eve’s regular expansions. Chandni movie download hd. Incarna was primarily focused on allowing players to interact with the world as their character avatars, rather than just their ships, for the first time.

Without the time or resources to properly do so, many things were left half-delivered, to be iterated upon later – which never happened. CCP has an extensive track record of promising to return to features and never doing so

One of the key new additions was the “Captains Quarters”, which allowed your avatar to leave their craft and wander around a limited section of the game’s space stations. The system was underpinned by CCP’s Carbon framework, a technology designed to allow the sharing of code between games; this would facilitate the transfer of WoD’s character movement technology to the Eve project.

But development of Incarna was not going smoothly. “As little as a few weeks out from launch, the lead designers were still trying to add features to the Captain’s Quarters,” says Blood. “But without the time or resources to properly do so, many things were left half-delivered, to be iterated upon later – which never happened. CCP has an extensive track record of promising to return to features and never doing so. There was little discipline to the process.”

Worst of all, according to Blood, the entire point of the expansion (walking around space stations) was let down by the Reykjavic office’s art team; it took them nearly the entire development time to create one faction’s Captains Quarters. Yet again, the WoD team was asked to cross over in order to bail out an Eve expansion.

Our sources say it took them a fraction of the time to create the one room station interiors for the other three factions. Blood recalls the friction between the teams on this point. “While it certainly vindicated the WoD artists in terms of work ethic, I remember it was a sore point between the offices that the much vaunted Icelandic crew had been so demonstrably shown up.”

Microtransactions and 'monocle-gate'

The development difficulties were only part of the Incarna problem. According to sources, CCP management had decided to introduce microtransactions, unbeknownst to most of the rank and file, charging real money for cosmetic items with which to customise character avatars. This is a familiar feature in online games, but usually a new outfit for a player character will cost $15-20. CCP decided to charge much more. The most notorious example was a monocle costing $70. The price tag infuriated fans kick-starting a major pricing controversy that would go on to become known as Monocle-gate.

The CEO had members of the fiction writing team put the apology together - he was either so out of touch, so arrogant, that he couldn’t find the words himself

The management response was elusive. In June 2011, senior producer Arnar Gylfason delivered an ambiguous statement, comparing the pixelated monocles to $1000 jeans and questioning whether people should buy clothes in real life at all. Eve subscriptions declined sharply and precipitously, and there were actual in-game riots in protest.

Eventually CEO Hilmar Veigar Pétursson issued an apology to the players. But even this short appeasement wasn’t what it seemed; according to Blood, Petursson didn’t actually write it.

“He had members of our storyline team – a group responsible for writing in-game content and fiction – put it together,” he says. “He was either so out of touch, so arrogant, or perhaps both, that he couldn’t find the words to say himself. They bailed him out big time.”

Darkness descends

Even after Monoclegate blew over and CCP backed away from the cash shop, the bugs in Incarna remained. The main feature, the Captain’s Quarters, just didn’t work very well. It was buggy and a major system drag, killing performance on older computers. Eventually, CCP added an option to disable the feature entirely.

The damage was done. The subscription numbers would eventually rebound, but player trust in CCP was strained. As WoD dragged on with its constant reboots, as Eve Online began to decline in the wake of Incarna, as Dust sucked the oxygen out of the development process, even the high end employee benefits, the main selling point for American CCP employees, began to disappear.

'In Atlanta, the first benefit – the cantina – has been dramatically cut with no compensatory salary increase,” says Blood. “Meals used to be a fantastic benefit, and even included dinners at one point, but the ‘culture of frugality’ as they put it, has resulted in cut after cut and the current quality is simply not worth the lowered salary. The medical benefits have similarly been cut. Previously CCP had a very good coverage plan, but they swapped that out in 2011, and again in 2012, for plans with less coverage options. Again, there was no commensurate increase in salaries to make this loss up.”

Late 2011 spelled the real end of WoD as a viable project. CCP had to shed costs and 20 percent of its overall workforce was laid off, with the bulk of the cuts coming from Atlanta. WoD was slated to continue, according to the press release, but “with a significantly reduced team.”

Shockingly, given the turmoil, a flythrough video for WoD was released at Fanfest 2012, CCP’s annual fan convention. At barely over one minute long, it showed an impressive grasp of the World of Darkness universe – but it also displayed no moving NPCs or collision, the hallmarks of a developed product. Reviews were predictably mixed. Plenty of fans expected things to begin to look up from there; the video was proof that something was being worked on. Lots of others, particularly those with experience in the industry, sensed smoke and mirrors.

This was the last the general public were ever to see of WoD. Behind the scenes, morale was shot. A source who was in the Reykjavik office at the time recalls, “The 2011 layoffs incited a lot of anger. A lot. I heard it was worse in the ATL office, and most of the folks I know down there have never forgiven CCP's management.” CCP announced a fourth project, a game for the Oculus Rift tentatively titled Valkyrie. This stretched resources even further. Even staff with secure positions began to leave for other studios or to get out of the industry altogether.

And so it went. Fifteen more employees were let go from the Atlanta office in late 2013. Then finally in mid-April 2014, the World of Darkness MMO was canceled, with 56 redundancies – among them numerous staff who had been with White Wolf for 20 years.

The Guardian approached CCP for comment on the details this feature and were directed to the company's statement on the closure of World of Darkness. We then contacted the company's US PR department again, detailing the specific allegations, and received no response.

As a bizarre postscript to the saga, the Georgia state legislature announced a fresh round of tax cuts for the video game industry within hours of the official announcement of WoD’s cancellation. It was, perversely, a fitting conclusion: a tax incentive meant to reward and spur job growth in an industry notorious for shock layoffs, while what was clearly the state’s video game studio crown jewel was announcing a new bout of job cuts.

The industry that closed its eyes

Perhaps the real scandal is that there’s nothing truly unusual about what happened here. Earlier this year, Disney announced 700 job cuts, many from its casual games division; Sony Santa Monica made redundancies, Irrational Games shut down. Partly it’s the economy, of course, but a lot of it is just down to the games industry not functioning as well as it should, on outdated production methods and sky high budgets.

In the US, for example, video game company layoffs are twice the national average. “GameJobWatch tracked 73 layoffs in the first ten months of 2013, totalling more than 3400 jobs lost, not including studios among those 73 that they didn't have a head count for. That's almost two studios with layoffs each week,' said Darius Kazemi, a former developer and once a board member for the IGDA.

“A layoff-heavy strategy means that people burn out of the business quickly. Last I heard the average time spent in games is seven years. You get tired of being treated that way and you realise that you can probably work somewhere else doing more boring work and get a lot more money and stability. Or you try your hand at going independent, where the odds are low but at least you control your own destiny.

'When experienced people leave the industry entirely, we lose institutional memory. Our games stagnate. I think AAA is in extended death throes. I think it's going to look like the comics industry in a few years: a couple of huge corporations that dominate the mainstream attention, and then an enormous number of very small indies. Actually, it looks like that today.”

Speaking to Rock Paper Shotgun during the annual Eve Fanfest in May, CCP CEO Hilmar Veigar Pétursson, showed some acknowledgement of the company’s mistakes over the past few years. “I would say we’re re-focusing on simpler strategies and smaller teams,” he said. “I think that helped make us successful: EVE was made like that. And maybe we scaled up our teams and our ambitions too rapidly.”

But for the staff we spoke to it’s too late. Only one remains in the industry, working as a designer at a small studio. The others left or were made redundant.

“I wasn't laid off,” points out Blood at the end of our interview. “I left voluntarily, out of disappointment at what the industry is increasingly becoming.”

He has no intention of returning.

•EVE Online fanfest: the party at the top of the world

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/TabletopGame/OldWorldofDarkness

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• Vampire: The Masquerade

The World of Darkness is a Gothic PunkTabletop RPG published by White Wolf. The universe is a dark reflection of our own, where humanity is not the master of the world or its fate. Throughout all of human history, supernatural forces have manipulated mankind from the shadows.

The original or 'classic' World of Darkness and the Storyteller System began in 1991 with Vampire: The Masquerade. Over the next 13 years, it expanded to nine different 'gamelines' with assorted setting- and era-based spinoffs and hundreds of books, until it officially ended in 2004. Starting the same year, the new World of Darkness was created as a reboot with a new system and is ongoing under the name Chronicles of Darkness. The Old World of Darkness returned to active publishing in 2011 with the release of 20th anniversary editions of several of its gamelines, along with new supplements.

Each supernatural creature in the setting has a unique niche, theme, and back story. Crossovers between gamelines were initially meant to be optional. The resulting incompatible histories and cosmologies and lack of clear equivalents to various supernatural power sources, as well as differing relative strengths of the creatures created significant mechanical and lore conflicts when the second edition made such events more common.

World Of Darkness Game 2018

In later editions, the old WoD setting acquired an overarching back story and an ongoing metaplot, advanced via both the game books themselves and an assortment of tie-in novels and comics. The Time of Judgment books ^note were dedicated to The End of the World as We Know It, covering scenarios that were often, but not always, exclusive to a particular gameline. Orpheus was another gameline with its own end-of-the-world scenario, that also doubled as the end to Wraith.

At one point Exalted was set up as a prequel to The World of Darkness; this is especially obvious in Hunter: The Reckoning with the eponymous hunters being the equivalent of Solar Exalted returning yet again to a world that needs heroes. This eventually was changed and Exalted is now considered a separate game, although it still shares similarly named characters with Kindred of the East.

This role-playing game provides examples of:

• Always Chaotic Evil: Most of the games had some always evil faction (Baali for Vampire, Nephandi for Mage, Black Spiral Dancers for Werewolf, etc.) that was at least initially unavailable for player characters. Later, White Wolf came out with the 'Black Dog' brand to publish Splatbooks for these groups.
• And I Must Scream:
  • Clan Tzimisce vampires are particularly notorious for this, thanks to their body-sculpting powers that allow them to reshape victims into house furniture, while keeping them alive and aware of their condition.
  • Wraiths who have been soulforged into inanimate objects are said to be aware of their existence but unable to express it. As a result, most wraiths try really, really hard to forget almost everything they interact with that isn't a relic was once a soul like them.
• Animorphism: Fera (including Werewolves), vampire Clan Gangrel, Changelings of the Pooka Kith, and Orpheus ghosts with the Marrow Shade can all turn themselves into animals with varying levels of ease and flexibility of form.
• Apocalypse How: The Time of Judgement, a series of sourcebooks and a trilogy of novels that presented various end-of-the-world scenarios for the different gamelines, ranging from ancient vampires awakening to entire Werewolf tribes falling to the Wyrm
• Arcadia: The home of the fae in Changeling: The Dreaming.
• The Artifact: The references to Exalted are ignored now that the game is no longer a prequel to the World of Darkeness.
• Ascended Demon:
  • Golconda for vampires. Particularly in the early editions, it was a state that removed many of the more monstrous aspects of being a vampire, such as the danger of frenzy and the need for frequent consumption of blood, possibly even offering a chance to become human. Later editions downplayed this.
  • Demon has the possibility of reaching zero Torment, indicating that the character in question has overcome the hate they feel over being sent to hell and have regained their former selves.
• Astral Projection: A common power among the supernatural creatures that populate the world:
  • Vampires with the Auspex discipline can learn to astral project at high levels. Additionally, one path of Giovanni necromancy allows uses to project themselves (and occasionally other people) into the Shadowlands
  • Skimmers in Orpheus use astral projection to reach the world of the dead. Similar to the Auspex example, they are connected to their bodies by a thin silver cord.
  • Werewolf places a great deal of importance on the Umbra, a spirit realm that exists alongside our own and can be reached by 'stepping sideways'.
  • Mages with the Spirit Sphere can either do the traditional astral projecting or can 'step sideways' like the werewolves do.
• Authority Equals Asskicking: Movers and shakers of the setting tend to be on a completely different level of power than normal starting characters, as supernatural abilities tend to increase in power on an exponential scale and many of the higher-level ones take decades (or in the case of vampires, centuries) to master.
• Badass Normal: Non-Imbued hunters, at least those few of them who weren't using some form of magic or the True Faith.
• Beast Man:
  • Changelings of the Pooka Kith each have an affinity with a specific animal and take on features of that animal, with most falling somewhere between this trope and Little Bit Beastly
  • All the werewolf (and other changing breed) forms except for homid and lupus are beastmen, with different forms at different places on the Sliding Scaleof Anthropomorphism
  • The clan curse of Gangrel vampires causes them to take on animal traits every time they frenzy, leading to older Gangrel becoming beastmen
• Beethoven Was an Alien Spy: It got to the point where virtually every historical figure was some sort of supernatural creature. Of particular note was Rasputin, who was claimed by about five vampire clans, a Mage Tradition and a Werewolf tribe. They ultimately explained that Rasputin was all of the above and the ultimate Big Bad of Vampire: The Masquerade. Instead, he's eventually revealed to be a bodyriding Wraith. The revised editions clamped down hard on this sort of thing, making it very clear that most human things happened for human reasons with the supernaturals at most altering details.
• Being Good Sucks: Unless you're a Mummy, most supernatural creatures in the World of Darkness spend their lives fighting against dark parts of themselves- The Beast for vampires, Rage for werewolves, Torment for demons, etc. While resisting these is possible, the things player characters have to do regularly, such as fighting or using their powers tend to make that fight more difficult. A common source of conflict in the game is the tension between the power offered by doing wrong and the moral benefits of remaining on the straight and narrow.
• Beneath the Earth: Where you'll find Nosferatu warrens and the underground tunnels of Black Spiral Dancer hives. According to the other Changelings, Sluagh have this going on as well.
• Beware the Superman: Several factions, such as Mages and Garou, are dealing with the far-reaching effects of their ancestors lording over humans.
• Blessed with Suck: It is not fun to be a supernatural being in many gamelines of the old WoD (in particular, in Wraith and often in Vampire, in other lines becoming a supernatural is more of a mixed blessing).
  • Changelings are blessed with incredible talents via their Birthrights and can use Glamour to shape reality, but must constantly balance themselves- too much Glamour will drive them mad, while too much Banality will lead them to forget about their supernatural heritage entirely.
  • Hunters have their eyes opened to the supernatural forces at work in their world and are given powers to fight them with, but find themselves in constant danger from creatures more powerful than they are and alienated from friends and family who can't perceive what they can.
  • Vampires are difficult to kill with anything except sunlight, fire, or True Faith and have powers ranging from Super Strength to Emotion Bombs to Blood Magic, but at the cost of their humanity, leaving them driven by their inner Beast, forced to prey on humans to survive, and unable to experience sunlight or eat normal food.
• Blue and Orange Morality: The various alternate morality systems in Masquerade, referred to as Paths of Enlightenment in the modern day and Roads in the Dark Ages games. Depending on the Path followed, the greatest 'sin' a vampire can commit could be anything from admitting another's superiority to helping demons to not feeding when hungry.
• Body Horror:
  • A large part of the Tzimisces' hat in Vampire: the Masquerade is inflicting And I Must Scream-style changes on their victims.
  • For many Garou in Werewolf: The Apocalypse, the First Change qualifies. Garou who are unaware of their werewolf nature are horrified when they transform into an eight foot tall beast with fangs and claws. Lupus Garou are often alarmed when they suddenly transform into a human.
  • Body horror is a common experience among Wyrm servants in Werewolf as well. Fomori (living beings possessed by bane spirits) take on grotesque physical characteristics. Black Spiral Dancers frequently exhibit mutations due to Wyrm taint, inbreeding, and generations of exposure to balefire.
• The Caligula:
  • The actual Caligula was apparently a Setite plot, as revenge for the whole 'Subjugation of Egypt' thing.
  • Black Tooth, a Simba king who oversaw the attempted genocide of the Ajaba (were-hyenas) and used their skulls to decorate his palace before forcing a benevolent Wyld spirit into slumber in case its presence touched off the apocalypse.
• Church Militant:
  • The Inquisition, aka the Society of Leopold, an order of the Catholic Church (with later help from various governmental secret services) dedicated to finding and destroying evil caused by supernatural forces.
  • In Werewolf: The Apocalypse the Order of Our Merciful Mother (a camp of Black Fury nuns) worked to redirect the Inquisition's wrath at Wyrm servants.
• Clap Your Hands If You Believe:
  • A matter of life or death for Changelings in Changeling: the Dreaming, as the central premise rests on the fae being driven into human forms by the growing unwillingness to believe in the fantastic among humanity. This tendency, referred to as 'Banality,' can drive a changeling to an early grave, and must be overcome if they wish to work magic on a target.
  • In Mage: the Ascension, Paradox, the backlash created by the subconscious disbelief of non-mage humans, can be the strongest force against mages, making magic a risky blur of this trope and Cast from Hit Points.
  • In Vampire: the Masquerade, vampires are only affected by symbols of faith- be they crosses, stars of David, or credit cards- if the wielder has true faith to put behind them.
  • In Hunter: The Reckoning, Hunter's powers and second sight depend on their Conviction, a measure of their willingness to stand against monsters and believe in themselves and their mission.
• Cosmic Horror Story: Most game lines offer their own brand of this.
  • Mage stands out a bit by the players themselves frequently being the big bad threat to the stability of reality itself. Usually by accident. 'Reality has enough of your bullshit and erases you' was actually the setting's primary antagonist, and being a walking madness-inducing eldritch abomination was often one of your better qualities once paradigms started combining with Avatar.
  • Vampire has the Antediluvians, millennia-old, immensely powerful, utterly inhuman vampires who lie dormant somewhere. Their awakening means massive destruction and great loss of life for both humans and vampires, but only the Sabbat seem to treat this as a realistic possibility.
  • In Werewolf: The Apocalypse, the Weaver (the cosmic force of order and stasis) trapped the Wyrm (the cosmic force of destruction and renewal) in the fabric of reality, causing the Wyrm to go insane. Much of the corruption and evil in the world is a direct result of the Wyrm madly trying to free itself.
• The Cracker: Virtual Adept Mages have this attitude towards reality itself.
• Crapsack World: The oppressive helplessness of the setting is what appeals to many.
  • In Vampire, the player characters have been transformed into inhuman creatures who must constantly fight against their darker impulses or lose their minds. The various factions are constantly at war with each other and older vampires lord their power over younger ones (and humans), using them as pawns in their games and often treating them as disposable. And the end of the world is coming, but only the most violent, inhuman of the sects seems to acknowledge or care about this fact.
  • Changeling is an exception, where the object is to prevent the world from becoming a Crapsack World by retaining the power of imagination and possibility.
  • Mummy: The Resurrection was primarily written as a direct subversion of this trend. The main tagline for the game is 'Where there is Life, there is Hope,' the NPCs are folks who lived crappy lives in the crappy world and returned with the mandate to change the world for the better, and the entire setting treats the idea of changing the world as something more than the seeming impossible.
  • The Hengeyokai (and possibly also the Kuei-Jin) believe that the crappiness of the world is cyclical and that, so long as the coming 6th age (the ultimate in crappiness) is finite and temporary, the universe will eventually become a better place to live.
  • Werewolves have to contend with the fact that the three entities that shape reality are hopelessly out of balance, resulting in everything from destruction of the wilderness to twisted horrors that used to be normal creatures. The mistakes of their ancestors have left them hopelessly bound up in conflict between their tribes and the other shifters, all the while fighting the slow decline of their population. And if they can't manage to find a way to get everything back into balance, the world will end.
  • Wraith played Crapsack World straighter and harder than any of the other games. The world may bite, but it's still a paradise compared to the despair and horrors of the Shadowlands.
• Creative Sterility: When a new Vampire is Embraced, it puts them in a mental stasis, as well as physical, making it very difficult for them to do anything truly innovative or creative.
• Cross-Melting Aura: Baali vampires are vulnerable to symbols of faith, but a merit allows them to destroy such symbols that enter their proximity.
• Crossover Cosmology: Each game line in the Old WoD had a long, intricate Back Story, full of probably intentional internal inconsistencies and an independent cosmology. Needless to say, they did not play well together. This was a reason for several Ret Cons.
• Cursed with Awesome:
  • Vampires are doomed to live forever without the sun, at the mercy of the Beast and dependent on human blood.. but they're also very difficult to kill without fire or sunlight and have a wide range of superhuman powers.
  • Werewolves find themselves targeted by a Corrupt Corporation and fighting a losing battle with cosmic forces, but it might be worth it to gain Voluntary Shapeshifting into a giant man-wolf hybrid with supernaturally damaging claws and the ability to regenerate from most injuries.
  • Humanity in Vampire, which was supposed to punish characters for committing certain evils by making them lose touch with their mortal life. What actually ended up happening was players having a mechanical point at which their characters stop caring about committing mass murder.
  • Discussed often in Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines: A number of other vampires you meet are convinced that their condition really is a pretty sweet deal, what with having a good chance at an eternal or at least really long life of doing whatever the hell they want. A low Humanity character in particular can cheerfully talk about how they like their new power.
• Darker and Edgier:
  • Being this, by comparison with DnD and its clones, became one of the main marketing points for World of Darkness games when they first came out in the beginning of the 1990s, featuring heavier sexual themes, graphic violence, and more mature themes.
  • On a more meta level, the World of Darkness is a Darker and Edgier version of the real world- things are mostly the same, but the shadows are a bit longer, the bad a bit worse and the good not quite as good.
• The Dark Side: A major mechanical and thematic aspect of the setting is that committing evil acts makes it easier to do more (and more extreme) ones in the future.
  • Losing Humanity in Vampire means that it will take a more severe act of evil to force a humanity roll next time, essentially meaning that the more evil you do, the less you care about it.
  • Similarly, in Werewolf, the Wyrm taints its victims and actively encourages them to commit atrocities, thereby opening them up to greater control.
• Dark World:
  • The Shadowlands in Wraith, a decayed, deathlike version of the land of the living, inhabited only by ghosts.
  • The World of Darkness is a darker, more worn down version of our world, where supernatural creatures stalk the night.
• Deadly Decadent Court:
  • The Camarilla often functions this way, being composed of Vampires scheming, plotting, and backstabbing their way to power as they feed on the blood of mortals.
  • Owing to their status as The Fair Folk, Fae courts are also havens of deadly intrigue and twisted pleasures.
• Demonic Possession:
  • The player characters in Demon: The Fallen. The upside to being a Fallen in a mortal shell is that the shell can't be possessed by something else.
  • Spiritual corruption in Werewolf: The Apocalypse can leave openings in mortals souls, ripe for filling with malevolent Bane spirits that hijack their hosts minds and bodies.
• Depending on the Writer: Storytellers and writers generally painted the other types of supernaturals with different colors than their 'home' books when they showed up in other continuities, especially in the Old World. Hunter: the Reckoning is a particularly stark example of this, as many of their books encouraged STs to make sure that the players saw the hunted as monsters.
• Dhampyr: Revenants and dhampir. The former are families of ghouls serving their vampire masters, while the latter are natural children of thin-blooded vampires. Mechanically, they're nearly identical.
• Dysfunction Junction: AND HOW! Vampire: The Masquerade, Mage: The Ascension, and Hunter: The Reckoning all stand out as this, with game mechanics encouraging player characters to come from a variety of traumatic and unusual backgrounds and the nature of their supernatural identities warping their perspectives.
• Earth Is Young: If the cosmology of several of the lines is to be believed
• Empty Shell:
  • Soul loss turns a person into this over a period of time.
  • Long-term bane possession can also turn fomori into this.
• The End of the World as We Know It: Imminent throughout the Old World of Darkness.. and then in Time of Judgment, it happened. In at least five different apocalypses. All at once. Each race got 3-5 different apocalypses for a story teller to choose from, with the results ranging from bittersweet to incredibly depressing. Only one of the Mage endings was totally unambiguously happy.

  • There was a full-on semi-officially sanctioned ending for all the game lines used in the official New Bremen Digi Chat online text-based game run off of the White Wolf website, since it catered to all the game lines together and crossover (while discouraged) was frequent and inevitable. In the end, the Antediluvians rose up to devour their vampiric progeny, werewolves had their final battle with the Wyrm, Lucifer's Black Cathedral rose out of Los Angeles as a base from which to fight his Earthbound former captains, the changelings headed off to Arcadia, mages found their powers overflowing now that humanity's belief in the supernatural was restored and either killed each other or Ascended, the sun went out, untainted humans disappeared to some unknowable reward or destination, and the Metatron showed up to collect all the Fallen who were willing to come with him to take another crack at this whole 'Creation' thing before the world simply collapsed. It was, in fact, fairly epic.
  • Oh, and to expand a little bit: The final scenes for the game were for Werewolf and Demon and happened simultaneously. At the same time as the Metatron took the Fallen off to get involved in Creation, the Wyrm was released (by Player Character efforts, no less) from the Pattern Web and shattered the material universe, restoring itself and the Weaver to balance so that a whole new and better creation could happen. They way that it was run left room for both groups of beings to witness the destruction of the universe at the same time, and for each to understand the very same obliteration from within their own lens. As said above, it was epic and it ended on a very bittersweet and hopeful note. Plus the good guys got to go out in style.

• Enemy Within:
  • All vampires suffer from The Beast, the animalistic, id-like force with a hint of supernatural malice, that attempts to compel them into immediately satisfying their instinctive urges, such as craving for blood, fear of sunlight, or anger at a slightest provocation, no matter the circumstances.
  • The Shadow from Wraith: the Oblivion, and the P'o, its Kindred of the East equivalent, fits this trope even better; in both cases, it is intelligent and consciously attempts to turn you to The Dark Side.
• Everyone Is Bi: While not outright stated or heavily enforced, it was implied that most of the Fae were bisexual in Changeling: The Dreaming. Especially since a husband and wife could reincarnate as two men or two women, among other reasons.
• Evil Counterpart: The Sabbat, Black Spiral Dancers, Nephandi, Spectres, and Thallain all existed to be Evil Counterparts of the PC supernaturals.
• Evil Feels Good: Morality, in gamelines with a Karma Meter, is lost by not showing remorse for misdeeds. You also can still lose it anyway if the dice screw you.
• Evil Tastes Good: Vampires find themselves enjoying the taste of blood more than they had ever enjoyed any food or sex they had experienced before their Embrace.
• Eviler Than Thou: Default playable factions in both Worlds of Darkness tend to be morally dubious at best and outright evil at worst. Then there are guys like the Sabbat, the Technocracy and the Pure, who are firmly lodged in the 'outright evil' camp, despite their rhetoric. But even they pale before the crazy, dog-raping, demon-worshiping, apocalypse-mongerers that usually serve as each game's worst faction.
  • The Technocracy certainly started out as 'outright evil', but this was ameliorated steadily over time; when they actually became player characters with the Guide to the Technocracy book, the designers made it very clear that as world-straddlingly huge a conspiracy as the Technocracy must contain multiple factions, and that your players were intended to be firmly in one of the better-natured ones (Friends of Courage, Harbingers of Avalon or Project Invictus).
    • Indeed, what may be interesting is that, since Guide to the Technocracy, the Technocracy may be 'antagonists' but by no means are they the 'bad guys.' The difference between the Traditions and the Technocracy is that the Traditions tend to want a better world (though better for whom?) and the Technocrats tend to want a safer world (though safer for whom?). The Technocracy's often over-stifling control might even be downright necessary in a world where reality itself is based on consensus - a world where anything is possible and the laws of physics are constantly in flux is downright horrific. If you end up playing Technocratic PCs, they tend to be Reality Cops.
    • And it cannot be stressed enough that the Technocrats are NOT a hivemind! Whatever you think about the overarching goals and actions of the order, it's extremely silly to think each and every agent is 'outright evil' (White Wolf themselves even coined the term 'Soulless Technocratitis' for that kind of one-dimensional portrayal and mocked it repeatedly). The Technocracy is home to countless different ethoses^note and philosophies, and features people from every Character Alignment. The book gives many examples of good Technocrats and the like ..
  • Similarly, the Sabbat got this treatment in the Revised Guide to the Sabbat. The book presented the idea that the Sabbat isn't just a howling mad group of nutcases who want to murder humans 'cause it feels good, but rather they want to destroy the Camarilla due to feeling that it is a pawn of the Antediluvians. And because they think they're better than humanity. There are plenty of examples of Knight Templar Sabbat.
• Evilutionary Biologist: Pentex in Werewolf: the Apocalypse has the trappings of this trope, but is actually run by outright evil cultists. Developmental Neogenetics Amalgamated is a straight example. Progenitors and Etherites in Mage: the Ascension could be this.
• Extra-Strength Masquerade: Depending on the game, you're sometimes left wondering 'okay, how the hell can they cover that up?'
• Fantastic Fragility: Most supernaturals can get all the new powers they want, and more cheaply and quickly than working honestly would bring.. at the downside of getting loaded down with (usually permanent) potentially crippling weaknesses. Have we mentioned being a supernatural is Blessed with Suck?
• Fantasy Kitchen Sink: Each game line in the original was incredibly insular; vampires could go centuries never meeting a werewolf, though for a vampire, meeting a werewolf is good way to NOT go any more centuries.
• Final Death: Possibly the Trope Namer.
• Five Races
  • It could be argued that this applied to the old World of Darkness on a broader scale - Vampires, Were Beasts, Mages, Faeries, and Muggles since Jiang-Shi, Wraiths, Mummies, and Demons were relatively rare and less influential than the others.
    • A stronger case can be made for Wraiths as the fifth race, who were an incredibly common 'species', one of the five 'core' races introduced for the original gameline, and whose metaplot ending was used as the springboard for numerous later games, among them Hunter, Mummy, and Demon.
• From Bad to Worse: The entire point of the Time of Judgement line. Plus you can mix and match.
• Functional Magic: Usually used by Sorcerers or Mages, but almost all have their own supernatural powers. Some mortals even get True Faith.
• Game Face: A Werewolf's Crinos warform could considered this, and a Demon's Apocalyptic Form definitely is.
• Genius Bruiser:
  • Vampire: The Masquerade had Beckett the Gangrel Adventurer Archaeologist.
  • Garou can be very intelligent as well. The Garou Nation has produced poets, philosophers, historians, and scientists. Among the Black Spiral Dancers, W. Richard MacLish (a.k.a. Writlish) is a professor of anthropology and a walking repository of Wyrm history.
• Glamour: Many supernaturals can make themselves seem beautiful, trustworthy, desirable, and invincible to onlookers.
• Gollum Made Me Do It: Shadows and Spectres, in Wraith: the Oblivion.
• Gothic Punk: The old World of Darkness defined this trope.
• Growing Up Sucks: In Changeling: the Dreaming, changelings tended to lose their fae side as they grew up, succumbing to banality and becoming dull adults.
  • The worst thing about the game was that all of your abilities could be duplicated if you were playing insane psychics. This puts a different spin on the whole thing.
  • Arguably inverted in the new Changeling, in which the focus is no longer on keeping your innocence and naivete in a harsh and dark world but rather about finding the way back from the loss of innocence and the pains of life and learning how to put yourself back together and discover what comes next.
• Half-Human Hybrid: Every game has at least one sub-class of mortals who have some of the parent supernaturals' strengths, but none of their weaknesses. It's worth noting that most of the following examples are not exclusive of each other or even the main supernaturals (Mages can be ghouls, Changelings can be Kinfolk, etc., though too much crossing over is frowned upon):
  • Vampire: the Masquerade has Ghouls (mortals who gained a portion of supernatural power and longevity by feeding on vampire blood) and Dhampyrs (the offspring of Vampires conceived under very specific conditions, which vary depending on whether they're the Eastern or the Western variety).
  • Werewolf: the Apocalypse has Kinfolk, relatives of werecreatures who inherited a whisper of the spiritual nature but not the ability to shapeshift. They're immune to the Delerium/Lunacy effect that befalls most humans who see shifters in their war form. They sometimes have access to Gifts. At best they're treasured allies, family members, and lovers of the Garou; at worst they're treated as brood mares to make more werewolf babies.
    • On a side note, some Werewolves are the offspring of a Spirit and another Garou, and will have some spiritual boon from the ethereal parent's side and improved relations with other spirits of that type.
  • Mage: the Ascension has Sorcerers, humans who lack the 'spark' of mages, instead practicing linear paths of magic like tarot cards or weathercraft. They can't rewrite reality and their spells tend to require more preparation, but they're immune to Paradox backlash. Mages who scoff at their perceived weakness sometimes don't live to make that mistake twice.
    • Mage also had an entertaining inversion in the form of Sleepwalkers, mages that hadn't actually 'awakened' and disbelieved in magic even while using it. Actually a substantially more annoying, and potentially terrifying, foe for a mage to fight than another mage, because they usually specialized in counter-magic (making them walking null-zones with disbelief piled on top) and just existing was enough for a mage to challenge their paradigm ('magic's not real, I'm just really lucky'), which is a free pass to homicidal rage town.
  • Changeling: the Dreaming has Kinain, people of True Fey blood (diluted now, but the True Fey were horny bastards when they were still around) who have the ability to interact with fae existence to a degree without experiencing the risk of Banality.
  • Wraith: the Oblivion has Mediums, who are not hybrids but follow the theme: humans who can speak to the dead and often give them a hand on the other side.
  • Hunter: the Reckoning has Bystanders, humans who were given the ability to perceive the supernatural by the angelic Messengers but 'refused the Call', gaining none of the anti-supernatural powers of the various Hunter Creeds but also not having their lives steadily taken over by the life of the Hunt. A major theme of Reckoning was that you only get one chance at the Call and Bystanders can never 'awaken' into true Hunters, serving as NPCs and sidekicks — but that you could play a particularly tragic game by having a Bystander try to take on the supernaturals without any Hunter powers and doom himself to a tragic end (albeit the same end most Hunters head to eventually). Interesting note: the gameline recommended that while 'normal' Hunters come from typical, everyday backgrounds and have no special occult knowledge, combat training or other unusual resources, that it would be appropriate to have such a character introduced into the game as a Bystander for the sake of 'balance'. Think Buffy and Giles.
  • Demon: the Fallen has the Nephilim, offspring of Angels and humans, considered an aberration by both.
    • Demon also had Thralls - humans who had made pacts with Demons in return for (sometimes supernatural) gifts.
• Hermetic Magic
  • Technically, all magic is a result of pure enlightened will, but the Order of Hermes explicitly advocates this (obviously) along with some of the Sons of Ether who've implanted themselves with their gadgets or quaffed some mutagens to gain 'psychic powers' instead of more traditional paradigms.
• Historical Rap Sheet: Explicitly averted in one specific instance. Almost anything else is allowed to have been a Vampire/Werewolf/Mage plot, but the Holocaust is required to remain a purely human atrocity.
• Horror Hunger: Vampires need blood.
• Hypnotic Eyes: The vampire discipline of Dominate works entirely via eye contact until you're powerful enough to take the sixth rank, then you can use Dominate Disciplines via touch.
  • Eyes of the Serpent allow you to hold a mortal, or kindred to a limited degree, in place. Also overlaps with Supernatural Gold Eyes.
• I Know Your True Name: One of the power branches in Mummy: The Resurrection is called 'Nomenclature,' where knowing anything's True Name (which requires varying amounts of time invested in study to learn - it's easier to learn the Names of simple things like plants and animals than, say, the Name for humans, which is even less complex than an individual human's personal True Name, and so on) allows for varying effects, culminating in (at the highest level) total erasure from existence. Of course, that last one automatically costs the Mummy a permanent dot on the Karma Meter, no matter who you do it to.
  • Also shows up in Mage (where knowing someone's true name makes magic easier to use on them) and Changeling: the Lost (where swearing Pledges on your True Name has specific effects, and many Storytellers expand the concept considerably in keeping with its importance in fairy tales)
  • True Names play a very important part in Demon: The Fallen. Certain rituals, invocations and evocations require knowledge of the target's True Name to work properly (granted, you are able to try and use a target's Celestial Name — their 'common' angelic name — if the target is another fallen and you don't know their True Name, but it's far less reliable and generally much more difficult to do so); the fallen's Abyssal Lords can use their subjects' True Names to contact them even from inside the Pit; knowing a target's True Name makes many rolls you can make against them substantially easier; and a demon's True Name can be invoked to have them hear what you're saying (and possibly who you're saying it to and where you're doing it, given enough successes on their roll) from anywhere in the world, regardless of their distance to you — in fact, invoking a demon's True Name will very likely send shivers down their spine and make their extremities tingle, regardless of whether you want them to notice you speaking of them or not. And this is just to mention but a few of True Names applications in Demon. The sourcebooks are crawling with other fun and interesting uses for them ('fun and interesting' for the user, not the target, obviously).
    • In Demon, a True Name isn't even really a name per se. Rather, it is the metaphysical representation of something or someone: you don't have a True Name, you are your True Name. Before the Fall, when the angels still had access to the full breadth of their power, they could use True Names as the targets of any evocation or invocation, instead of having to be in the presence of the actual being or thing — this was, in fact, the preferred/official method of relaying God's orders across the cosmos, and even of transporting oneself across the cosmos, depending on which House the angel was from (e.g. if you knew Earth's True Name, you could teleport yourself from wherever you were in the whole Universe directly to Earth, by using the appropriate evocation with its True Name as the target).
• Immortality Immorality: Oh, where to begin:
  • Firstly, vampires. While it is possible to live by drinking the blood of animals and to only drain humans of minute amounts, Frenzy is a bitch and most vampires come out of it with a dead human or three on their hands. Killing humans while feeding is strongly frowned on by the Camarilla; for one it brings you closer to the beast and the last thing you want is a vampire frenzying in Elysium, for another, there are only so many corpses you can make vanish before the Masquerade is at risk.
• Immune to Bullets: Vampires tend to take less damage from gunfire than some other forms of attack. Werewolves can easily shrug off most non-aggravated damage, including gunfire, except when faced with silver bullets. This is part of the reason that werewolves and vampires do not get along: werewolves can rip a vampire to shreds without a lot of effort due to a combination of their aforementioned damage resistance, and the fact that they deal out Aggravated Damage with their claws.
• Ironic Hell: The Demon book 'Days of Fire' had three different visions of the end of the world. In the first one, every Clan, Tribe, and Tradition gets a unique end; Ventrue's refined tastes become so refined that they can't feed off anyone, the Black Furies are enslaved and submit to men, the Cult of Ectasy reach their perfection only to realise how futile it all was, etc.
• Karma Meter: More optimistic/more action-oriented gamelines of the old WoD, including Mage and Werewolf, avoided this.
• Katanas Are Just Better: In those gamelines of the old World of Darkness where mundane weapons did matter.
• Kill It with Fire: The most surefire way to kill something in the WoD is with fire: if it isn't extra vulnerable to fire, rest assured it's probably not invulnerable to it either.
  • Averted with the Devils in Demon: The Fallen, whose apocalyptic forms are completely immune to fire. Otherwise, Demon is actually the one old World of Darkness gameline that uses aggravated damage where fire isn't a source of said damage.
• Killed to Uphold the Masquerade: The short version is, every single supernatural group has very good cause to keep their existence hidden, and while some are quicker to resort to this solution than others (vampires are frequently very quick on the trigger), all of them are willing to kill a sloppy member of their group. Moreover, since the reveal of one type of supernatural is likely to get people questioning which other types are real, not to mention several of these groups are actively antagonistic (werewolves and vampires most notably), it's quite possible to get killed to uphold someone else's Masquerade.
• Knight Templar: In Hunter: The Reckoning, even normal Imbued that had Zeal as a primary virtue often leaned towards this. But they paled in comparison to Waywards, who were prepared to eradicate every last supernatural on the planet - and didn't care about humans who got in their way. In Werewolf: The Apocalypse becoming a Knight Templar is a major occupational hazard, considering that werewolves were created to defend all existence from Cosmic Horrors that are indeed every bit as cosmically horrible as werewolves believe, and also extremely good at corruption, seduction and infiltration.
  • The Garou have managed to Knight Templar themselves into killing three other races of shapechangers and one of the Garou Nation's own tribes. This sounds pretty bad on its own, but without those three races, they've seriously hurt their chances of defeating the Wyrm during the apocalypse. Whoops.
  • Not to mention the Inquisition and the actual Knights Templar, who are a small craft of Mages.
• Live-Action Adaptation: Kindred: The Embraced, a short-lived 1996 series on Fox, based on Vampire: The Masquerade.
• Liminal Being:
  • In Vampire: The Masquerade, Kindred straddle the line between living and dead (being undead), as well as between human and inner beast (as former humans who cling to their human traits as they struggle to keep their Beast at bay).
  • In Werewolf: The Apocalypse, the Garou and Fera are beings who straddle the line between human and animal, partaking of the natures of both.
  • Deceased persons in Wraith: The Oblivion straddle the line between living and dead. They are no longer alive, but not truly dead, since they can still interact with the world of the living and are not yet able to pass on.
  • In Changeling: The Dreaming, the eponymous Changelings are creatures of both the Autumn World (physical reality) and the Dreaming, existing simultaneously in both.
  • The fallen angels of Demon: The Fallen are supernatural entities who now inhabit human hosts, partaking of both human and angel impulses.
• Lord British Postulate: There are rules for fighting Cain: You lose.
• Mad Scientist: The Sons of Ether. Within the Tradition, Mad Scientist is an official designation.
• The Magic Goes Away: Almost every game line describes magic as not being as strong, or at least not as accessible, as it used to be.
  • Each successive generation of vampires is weaker than the last, and the default generation for player characters (the thirteenth) is the last one to be 'full' vampires, with their progeny being half-breeds.
  • Changelings and traditional mages both rely on human belief in the supernatural to practice magic (and in the changelings' case, to exist in the first place). With science and reason being the order of the day, both groups are reduced to a shadow of what they used to be. Not so with the Technocracy, a group of mages that use human belief in scientific advancement to make magitek.
  • Demons have the same problem as mages and changelings (in their case it's specifically faith they need), and also suffer from a) the world having been broken in the Fall so that the occult resonances that they use to rely on to amplify their magical workings no longer function, b) having been stripped of large parts of the power by God before being thrown into the Pit, and c) trying to make what's left work while occupying a human host whose brain was never made to comprehend celestial Lore. On the other hand, their return to Earth signify the return of the divine and cause an upswell in religious fervor and faith, for better or worse.
• Magic versus 'Science': The Traditions vs Technocracy.
• Magitek: Weavertech is described as this. Various other factions also make use of it, with the Technocracy specializing in it almost exclusively.
• Manipulative Bastard: In some gamelines, including Vampire and Demon, being this is almost a requirement for obtaining any power within your supernatural society.
• Masquerade: Vampire: The Masquerade is the trope namer. Each supernatural enforces their own, but vampires and mages are typically first to do clean up. Still, sometimes the ability of supernatural beings to maintain it stretches the suspension of disbelief, considering their penchant for superpowered violence.
  • They don't always maintain it - storytellers were suggested to use both kinds of hunters in response to Masquerade breaches, and even then, you have the capital H Hunters that are capable of nearly ignoring it.
• Massive Race Selection: Just look at the list of games; nearly every title is named after a separate playable race (although mages, sorcerers, and hunters could all just be called humans).
• May Contain Evil: Taken to insane lengths by the Pentex Corporation in Werewolf: The Apocalypse. Pentex's subsidiaries frequently sell products that corrupt the bodies and souls of consumers. Once in a while, they even sell products possessed by banes.
• The Men in Black: The Technocracy had them.
• Metaplot: Yeah.
• Mind Control: Almost everyone can potentially do this, but vampires and mages are particularly notorious for this.
  • One of the big edges of old WoD Hunters over normal people was total immunity to mind control as long as second sight was running. A sourcebook tells of a Hunter that was once Dominated while off-guard by some mid-rank vampires (who had heard about the Imbued and wanted one as a pet), then activated second sight (or had it activated by the Messengers) eight months later, used a candlestick and the Cleave edge to dust ten vamps, and got away alive.
    • Not to mention that old WoD Fallen (demons) are immune to mind control at all times, period. Suck it, Ventrues.
• The Missing Faction: Just about every game line has at least one.
• Monster Lord: Vampire elders below 7th gen.
• Monster Mash: Essentially the premise of the game. The core game lines introduce vampires, werewolves, witches, fae, and ghosts.
  • Supplementals also include mummies^note , hunters^note , gargoyles^note , mad scientists ^note , hunchbacks^note , gypsies^note , and demons^note . There are even references to 'Prometheans', who are effectively a race of Frankenstein's Monsters.
• Mr. Vice Guy: Potentially any and every player and character. The Toreador clan in Vampire, the Cult of Ecstasy Tradition in Mage and the Satyr Kith in Changeling are some of the more ready-made examples.
• Omnicidal Maniac:
  • In Vampire: The Masquerade, the Giovanni want to bring about the end of life as we know it For the Lulz. Setites are also working towards Gehenna, though most of them don't know it, but they are doing so in the name of their god.
  • In Werewolf: The Apocalypse, the Black Spiral Dancers and various Wyrm cults seek to either (1) free the Wyrm from the Weaver's web, which would destroy the fabric of reality in the process, or (2) empower the Triatic Wyrm to destroy Gaia and the cosmos.
• Our Vampires Are Different: Thirteen clans worth of 'Different'. However, the differences between political views and origins are much more pronounced in the new WoD. All vampires share the same common weaknesses, but each clan has a unique new weakness.
• Our Werewolves Are Different: Moreso in Werewolf: The Apocalypse than in Werewolf: The Forsaken.
• Personality Powers: In Hunter: The Reckoning a hunter's edges — the supernatural powers they use to fight evil — are determined by their beliefs and personality. In Mage: The Ascension the ways a true mage used his power also depended on his beliefs.
• Point Build System: You put Dots into your Attributes and Abilities and whatever other specific items from the gameline, and those determine the number of dice rolled to accomplish things.
• Positive Discrimination: White Wolf went far out of its way to avoid talking about ethnic minorities in the Mage sourcebook Destiny's Price, which deals with street culture. As a result, it came across as a generic reprint of the Splatbooks for the Brujah or Bone Gnawers. It'd be interesting to know if this came before or after the much-maligned Gypsies, which would explain their fear of stereotyping, though it could have been avoided if done right.
  • Destiny's Price was 1995; Gypsies was 1997, so not the reason.
• Power Born of Madness: The Marauder mages and the Malkavian vampire Clan.
• Power Perversion Potential: White Wolf was willing to acknowledge it sometimes. There even was at least one supernatural power specifically aimed for this. Just please don't dwell on Tzimisce body-altering powers for too long.
• Red Right Hand: All of vampire Clan Nosferatu, as well as Metis Werewolves. Tzimisce deliberately do this to themselves.
• Resurrective Immortality: The mummies are immortals who would resurrect every time they were killed. It is possible to destroy them outright, but not particularly easy (like putting them at ground zero of a nuclear explosion).
• Recycled In Space: Every game has one or two historical supplements [the Dark Ages and often one other]. Plus, The Year of the Lotus event gave Eastern counterparts for every gameline. Some, like the Kuei Jin, are a totally different type of creature but conceptually similar, while others, like the Hengeyokai, are the same creatures as before in a different setting.
• Renowned Selective Mentor: Placing four or five dots into the 'Mentor' Background will give one of these to your Player Character.
• Romanticized Abuse: Common in the relation between vampires and their ghouls, among other things. Also, in the book Possessed, you can build a character with superpowers based on one of the seven deadly sins. The 'lust' ones pretty much run on this trope.
• Science Is Bad: If it is not used by a fascist Ancient Conspiracy to control humanity, then it is a tool of an Eldritch Abomination that strives to eliminate free will and change.
  • In the old WoD, science is generally associated with the principle of Stasis, which serves as a sort of Well-Intentioned Extremist to Entropy - it's not actually evil, but if it gets its way it will remove change from the world and steal everyone's freedom. This idea gets a bit jarring at times, since science has historically been responsible for most of the changes to human society, and those changes have resulted in the average person having far more freedom and choice than ever before. Conversely, the default heroes in the games that have this theme (mainly Mage, Werewolf and Changeling) are assumed to represent the freedom-loving, change-embracing principle of Dynamism - despite being members of extremely hierarchal societies that haven't changed for the last several thousand years.
  • Stasis is less about 'No change, ever' and more about 'Carefully controlled, slow moving change is essential, and no more.' ..Or was, until the Weaver went around the bend.
    • Except Changelings, their society changed quite drastically on July 20 1969 and several times since.
  • That said, most gamelines where this comes up have at least one Splatdedicated to proving that this doesn't always hold true, with the Glass Walkers and Bone Gnawers, Nockers and especially the Sons of Ether and Virtual Adepts.
• Science Is Wrong: Mage: The Ascension (usually) posits that all Science is Wrong — except when enough people believe that it's not. The Technocracy convinced humanity that science is right during the Enlightenment, though, so mundane reality works on observable principle as long as people believe it does. The whole point of the game is that Awakening allows the True Mage(tm) to flip mundane reality and the collected observers the bird and do things through 'discredited' systems of magic/faith/pseudo-science. The mere presence of mundanes who believe in conventional science also tends to make True Magic go awry in non-repeatable and/or fatal ways, making it basically impossible to objectively observe magic.
• Self-Parody: 'Black Dog Game Factory' was an in-universe RPG studio (in contrast with White Wolf's 'Black Dog' brand of books). It had a number of parodies of their own works: Fiend: The Pacting, Human: The Protagonist, Lycanthrope: The Rapture, Pixie: The Delusion, Revenant: The Ravishing, Spectre: The Annihilation, Warlock: The Pretension, Zombie: The Putrescence.
  • Which begs the question, did those games have their own fictional game studio in-in-universe also? And just how Grim Dark would that 'World of Darker Darkness' setting be?
• Serial Killer:
  • The Wayward creed from Hunter: The Reckoning, just.. focused on supernaturals. Of course, if some mortals die when they blow up that apartment building with a vampire living in the basement, well, that's collateral damage for you.
  • In Werewolf: The Apocalypse, Black Spiral Dancers are often serial killers. Wyrm cults such as the Pretanic Order and Seventh Generation have racked up a significant body count through their human sacrifices.
• Serial-Killer Killer: In Werewolf: The Apocalypse, some factions and individuals hunt down serial killers and related scum. The Get of Fenris' Hand of Tyr camp hunts down those who harm the innocent, such as murderers and rapists. The Black Fury tribe ruthlessly kills domestic abusers, sexual predators, and serial killers who target women. The narrator of the first edition Nuwisha tribebook describes how he tormented a serial killer with the voices of his victims until the serial killer committed suicide. Two characters from Warriors of the Apocalypse — Volcheka Ibarruri and Gere Hunts-The-Hunters — maim and kill wolf hunters.
  • Hunter: The Reckoning can be seen as 'Serial Killer Killer: The Game', if the Hunters target the more vicious supernaturals in their area.
• Sliding Scale of Turn Realism: Action by Action.
• The Soulless: How a number of Fallen end up with a human body to possess.
• Sourcebook: And frequently several revisions of each as well.
• Special Snowflake Syndrome: Almost every game has several smaller splats mentioned in the various sourcebooks, for players who somehow can't create interesting characters otherwise. Vampire has Bloodlines, Mage has Crafts, Changeling has Thallain, etc.
• Splat: Essentially the Trope Namer, more or less.
• Stages of Monster Grief: Just about every splat has members who deny, love, hate, or go off the deep end after changing from mere human.
• State Sec: The Technocracy definitely has elements of this trope, what with the secret agents, cyborg and bio engineered soldiers and what-not.
• Super Loser: Many starting PCs.
• Unluckily Lucky: The dhampyr suffer from this. Since their birth (a child of a human and an eastern vampire) is so unlikely, it messes up their fate. As a result they gain supernatural luck, which they can learn to consciously manipulate, but at the same time they tend to attract trouble.
• Unstoppable Rage: Vampires or Werewolves in Frenzy.
  • Werewolf's crossover rules lampshade this by mentioning that mages do not quantifiably explode in Rage.
• Urban Fantasy: Authors prefer to define the genre for most World of Darkness games as Horror, but actually WoD fits this trope.
• The Usual Adversaries: Humans!
• Van Helsing Hate Crimes: Hunters generally don't know the difference between the good supernaturals and the bad. Can't really blame them.
• Wainscot Society: Multiple, intermittently interacting hidden factions — of vampires, werewolves, wizards, faeries, etc. — each have substantial, organized social systems of their own. Vampires have their Masquerade; other beings have less formal systems of secrecy.
• The Wall Around the World: The borders between the physical realm and the spirit worlds.
• Watch the World Die: The line had a battery of books about how the world Ascended To A Higher Planeof Existence/concluded / ceased to exist / got destroyed.
  • A scenario for Vampire: The Masquerade included a group of vampires hiding away from God's judgment to hold vigil and repent; even though the Player Characters might not leave the church they are stuck in, the fates of vampires the world over were written with detail.
  • A scenario for Mage: The Ascension included an illustration where a mountain tallNephandus with burning eyes is breathing atomic fire on cities. The PCs were welcome to survive long enough to see how the victorious Nephandi and their Malfean masters tore holes in Reality and raped it to death. Depressing as it is, the book for MtA included other scenarios where the player factions won and ended the world for a better, more comfortable age.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: Hunters and Werewolves in general are at risk of this, but in the old WoD, Waywards especially, being willing to kill hundreds of normals just to take out -one- supernatural.
• We ARE Struggling Together: Hoo boy.
• Wolf Man: The Garou.
• Wolverine Publicity: The Gangrel Beckett, who appeared in various Sourcebooks and novels, sometimes without adding anything to the story or even advancing his own quest to uncover details about Cain. Perhaps the worst was his appearance in a Hunter/Mummy crossover trilogy of novels where he never met any of the main characters and it seemed his only purpose was to artificially stretch out the story.
• World-Wrecking Wave: The Sixth Great Maelstrom, which not only was powerful enough to put an end to Wraith, but set into motion many of the events that ended the other games' story lines as well. It simultaneously managed to spawn three new gamelines.