Roleplaying Games
Caught in the World of Darkness Vortex
I’ve been spending more and more time on my Dawn of Arcanum campaign. In addition to writing adventures and enemies, plotting the meta-plot and reading about the history, I’ve started relearning my World of Darkness lore.
Halls of the Arcanum is part of the Mage: The Ascension line of the World of Darkness. I have a long history with WoD, having started with the first edition Vampire: The Masquerade some three decades away. Those days we played a lot of games in WoD, trying also Werewolf: The Apocalypse and Mage: The Ascenscion. The rules were rough and more baroque than in later editions, and most of WoD canon was yet to be established. Mage was the one I bought myself, but I didn’t run many games on it. People were mostly interested in Vampire, and with its second edition it became easier to play and the canon expanded. We probably spent the whole 90s playing it.
As years went by, I got more distanced with WoD and new editions of rules were not as interesting. I did try some of the side-games like Project Twilight, Mummy and even Street Fighter: The Storytelling Game. I still think Street Fighter and World of Darkness: Combat, which is derived from it, are the best combat rules for WoD.
One of the reasons why I floated farther from WoD was the size and insanity of the meta-plot as the Millennium approached. I really didn’t want to use most of those elements on my games.
Once Chronicles of Darkness came around, I wasn’t keen on it. I didn’t like the new world or care for the new rules. The only good thing about it was having a single rulebook for the basic system instead of repeating it for each line. I did play it, but only because, for a time, it was the only game for vampires and werewolves around. I’ve yet to test the 5th edition Vampire: The Masquerade, but I’d like to do that.
With Dawn of Arcanum I’ve dusted off my old WoD books and have re-read a lot of them. Because of the interests of the characters I’ve had to get new books on spirits and mediumship. These topics hadn’t been that important on previous campaigns. Also, I finally got M20, the 20th anniversary edition of Mage. Reading it has been really useful, as it condenses a lot of the accumulated lore that had been spread out in multiple books before. It also comes with options (“lenses” in GURPS parlance) for handling the millennial events (using them, ignoring them or taking just some of them).
The biggest change are the rules; 20 years of playtesting and progress shows there. I was especially alarmed by the note that the 1st edition magic rules are completely broken. That means I’ll have to learn the new ones and start to apply them in the campaign. It’ll probably take a while for me to shed the routines and instincts that rely on the old rules. I liked how the abilities were reorganized, and many secondary abilities were merged to avoid cluttering the character sheet.
Coming back to WoD I see a lot has changed, but now I know that I don’t have to learn all of the lore. I can still take and leave parts of it as needed. And in a reality as flexible as in Mage, if I change something or find out that lore disagrees with what I’ve established in the game, that is no problem. Still, it looks like I’ll have to buy some more books to take advantage of new rules and lore that apply to my campaign.
P.S. As the campaign was supposed to be just a short introduction to the world of Mage, there’s the main campaign waiting in the future. And before that, a few one-shots taking dives into different aspects of the world and rules like reality, combat and hunters. Looks like I’ll be spending the next year in World of Darkness too.
