Time for a Chinese based review look at the World of Darkness book line! I looked at a bunch of World of Darkness books. I wrote a massive review of all of them together that was really too big to post as a single blog post. Instead, I’ve split them up into sections. This is the first section that tackles the greater World of Darkness concept before getting into the individual books. After I’ve posted each of the individual parts I’ll post the whole in case people like reading it better that way.
What is World of Darkness?
World of Darkness is a series of TTRPGs that have been released since 1991. It started off with Vampire: The Masquerade, a book for playing as an evil vampire in the modern age. The universe rapidly expanded with books for Werewolf: The Apocalypse, Mage: The Ascension, Wraith: The Oblivion, Changeling: The Dreaming, Demon: The Fallen, and Hunter: The Reckoning. There’s also some smaller properties about playing as a Mummy and some other stuff.
The basics of the World of Darkness setting is that Earth is infested with monsters. They’re everywhere in the shadows but people are blind to it. The monsters prey on humanity. But that’s not all. Every part of the world is worse. All the people, governments, and organizations are more hostile and corrupt than the real world. It’s a World of Darkness after all. The monsters are close to triggering some apocalypse event as well that will bring an end to the current global society and bring on something worse.
Additionally, in World of Darkness belief shapes reality. But only beliefs shared by many people or a single person’s strongly held belief. So vampires exist, partially because we tell stories about them, bringing them into existence. Same for werewolves, wizards, ghosts, faeries, etc. Some abilities in the game tap into this power of belief, allowing your character to warp reality as they believe it should be.
The World of Darkness is kind of a mess for publishing. The first four editions are all essentially compatible, so I just kind of went with whatever was available. I looked through:
- Vampire: The Masquerade, Revised Edition (1998)
- Kindred of the East (1998)
- Dark Ages: Vampire (2002)
- Blood & Silk (2000)
- Hunter: The Reckoning (1999)
- The Hunters Hunted (1992)
- Demon Hunter X (1998)
Maybe all those books aren’t intended to work together, but they certainly seem like they do.
Each of the World of Darkness books is a giant pile of lore. At least half of each book is stories about vampires or werewolves. The lore is presented in various ways. First-person retellings of encounters with monsters. Blog entries and ancient scripts. All sorts of stuff. There is A LOT, but there’s also a nice wiki that consolidates it all into something that’s easier to consume.
https://whitewolf.fandom.com/wiki/Main_Page
I’ll go through each book in turn. I read all of these books before I wrote this, hoping I’d be able to get a grip on how to use them all together. I’ll described how to do that after I’ve reviewed all the books.
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