Paranormal Romance and Urban Fantasy blurred into one another and Laurell K. Hamilton started writing porn.
Sparkly Vampires, Southern Vampires, etc. More vampire slayers, hip witches and obscure lycanthrope types fucking like rabbits than you can shake a stick at.
Cool Wizards, like Jim Butcher's Dresden.
The Fantasy section of bookstores no longer look like most of the books were written by guys who grew up playing D&D.
White Wolf laid the groundwork for the 21st century rise of all this vampires & werewolves in love stuff! As well as the less raunchy, but still very urban adventures of Harry Dresden, et al.
They don't seem to be reaping the rewards. Why the hell not?
They saled that ship not once, but twice. I think, for them, the journey is over.
ReplyDeleteA lot of folks who cut their teeth on their games have moved on to do their own thing and you can see shadows of their game style in other games totally out of the genre.
I think that RPG gamers may be fed up with blousy vampires and angsty demi-human protagonists, even if they are still reading their fiction. Those that aren't are likely still playing with solid core groups or "living the life" in the new subcultures that pretty much let them get their freak on for real. I know that groups like the Camarilla are still chugging along too.
-Eli
A friend of mine still plays a rather large (30+) Larp Vampire game.
ReplyDeleteThe genre is so large these days, I'm thinking more along the lines of capturing a new audience. Or, at least leveraging their IP to take advantage, even if it's fiction lines, or whatnot. Still, as big as the whole Urban Fantasy thing has gotten, one would think there's at least a relatively decent potential to market RPG's to those fans.
White wolf didn't invent: Vampire romance, vampires having a secret society hiding among mankind, or vampire vs werewolf.
ReplyDeleteWe can thank them for lot's of goth-a-likes with vampire fangs.
they didn't invent it but Lucas didn't invent science fiction either but he sure didn't hurt it's popularity. Give credit where credit is due.
ReplyDeleteIt does seem odd that the company that built itself on the popularity of Anne Rice, Lost Boys, Salem's Lot, Nosferatu, etc., hasn't tried to make a play for the modern iteration of what they had capitalized on before. This is especially odd as it seems that some of this new crop is even based on White wolf's work to a degree.
-Eli
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ReplyDeleteExactly. It's not like I know what goes on at WW, but it just seems grossly incompetent. And an incredible waste of their IP.
ReplyDeleteParallels between White Wolf and another major rpg company that starts with a W, I'll leave unsaid, for now.
@JDJarvis - I thought they did invent Vamp. vs. Werew. Who's responsible for that one?
ReplyDelete@James, Vampire vs werewolf is an old film trope. It also turned up in comics again and again well before the birth of the Whitewolf.
ReplyDeleteAh, now that you mention it I remember those old Dracula vs. Wolfman movies, etc.
ReplyDeleteI do remember White Wolf trying to sue the makers of Underworld for some sort of infringement based on their edgy portrayal of vamp vs. werewolf.
ReplyDeleteYeah, I think it is undeniable that WW probably brought more ladies to the gaming tables than any other gaming product line to date.
ReplyDeleteWhite Wolf, especially some of the older products, often has a tone of dead freaking seriousness. I don't see much common space between the relatively fun and funny (even if it gets dark from time to time) world of the Dresden Files and the oh-so-philisophical attitude of old Mage.
ReplyDeleteI'm not knocking White Wolf; I'm just saying that the mood they often used to present their stuff doesn't seem to quite gel with the mood of a lot of urban fantasy type stuff. I think the new WoD stuff is quite a bit more compatible in terms of tone, but by the time they dropped the Joy Division quotes and stuff, it may have been too late.
On a related subject, I was in my LGS a year or so ago and saw an Urban Fantasy supplement for the HERO system, but I've heard nothing about it, nor have I seen any similar books out from other companies. Could it be that this is one of those genres that just reads better than it plays?
I always thought White Wolf was riding on the coat tails of Anne Rice. So I wouldn't consider them as laying the groundwork for the rise of urban fantasy, vampires, etc.
ReplyDeleteI think the intent was that they layed the ground work for or popularized the genre as a role-playing genre, not a literary genre.
ReplyDeleteWhite Wolf shot themselves in the foot with the new World of Darkness, really. It's restrained, based on mythic and pop-cultural tropes rather than stretches like, say, the four Independent clans, less burdened by its metaplot and offers more choice for conflicts between greater numbers of equally developed factions. The system's more responsibly developed with genuine care taken for how crossovers work.
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately, they took out all the... well, all the 'well cool' stuff like some of the weirder and wilder disciplines, and the essential binary opposition conflicts that tended to make most people's stories go - and while people groused about the amount of metaplot, puzzling it out and resisting it and adapting it and sometimes just complaining about it was geek-bait of the highest quality.
They've made a better game, and in doing so taken out a lot of things that gamers like.
I also agree with Ryan. White Wolf games don't present themselves as 'fun', which tends to limit their appeal a bit. Sure, there's fun to be had there, but it's the kind of dark and savage fun that comes from playing the game totally straight, or the absurdities that come from resisting it (fun originating from the story of the game rather than the story taking place in the game, if that distinction makes any sense).
My unscientific opinion is that the nature of the market and marketing have changed since the 1990s. Back when WW started you could make money off an Anne Rice-a-like game without calling it "Lestat;" nowadays you have to have the licensed IP to get noticed. WW would have had to pay out for the Twilight name and they probably couldn't afford it.
ReplyDeleteA few times I've posted about one of my 'pet' subjects - the differences between fantasy in general popular culture, and in D&D.
ReplyDeleteAt least once someone has stepped up to 'defend' D&D from my 'attack' on it. And a lot of people who didn't say anything are probably silently grateful that D&D doesn't follow popular culture:
"Do you want D&D to appeal more to young people?"
"Of course."
"Great - should Pegasus and Unicorn be two separate PC races, or should there be a single Pegasus-Unicorn race?"
So maybe it's the same with White Wolf: their world has become a separate thing to the popular culture that it originally pastiched, and the fans and creators like it that way.
By the way, I think your point was true before Twilight, when Buffy was popular.
PS Also, maybe it's like how people can be so dismissive of Swords of Shannara and the like when, to the general public, their beloved Robert E Howard isn't that different.
ReplyDeleteMaybe Anne Rice is a serious study of the human mind, and obviously completely different to Twilight, in the minds of White Wolf.
All True Blood really needs is mummy to show up and they have all of the WW material covered. Can anyone who has played a WW game and watched that show and not see many similarities (along with a few differences)?
ReplyDeletePersonally I love most of White Wolf's stuff. I enjoy nWoD far more than I ever did the old. The real problem if you ask me is their ownership by CCP by buying into what looks more and more like a vaporware World of Darkness MMORPG. In handing the reigns over to CCP, they quickly got their RPG products classified as "legacy" products when compared to MMORPGs.
ReplyDeleteThat being said, given how small the actual RPG sub-company is, and how much they're doing and have planned to do still, I think they're doing damn good with what they have.
I think you could level the same complaint to WotC re: new, younger gamers and Harry Potter.
ReplyDeleteA lot of recent vampire fiction is just about getting laid by another name. Oddly enough some of WW material (even recent stuff) is dated, as it expects more of gamers than them just showing up to get laid in game.
ReplyDeleteshrug I don’t keep up with WW, but it seemed like it has been past its peak for a while. Few companies can figure out how to sustain what makes them great. (Which is why I’m always telling people to emulate what the market leaders did rather than what they’re doing.)
ReplyDelete“Yeah, I think it is undeniable that WW probably brought more ladies to the gaming tables than any other gaming product line to date.”
Interesting. I don’t think any of the women I’ve gamed with started with WW. Most were gamers before WW, and the rest started in the past few years. But then, I’ve never played a WW game myself (though I owns Ars Magica), so I may be an outlier.
When an rpg gamer thinks of Vampires and Urban Fantasy the majority think of White Wolf. Due to their proliferation and style they were the go to company if you wanted to play in that genre. In my opinion no other game company has approached their level.
ReplyDeleteSo why are they not leveraging their gamer stock? My opinion is that since they were bought by CCP Games (the computer game company) they have had a serious downturn. This is made even worse now that CCP has essentially killed the Vampire computer MMO (or delayed it into irrelevance) and cut a significant number of staff from the rpg arm of WW.
> A lot of recent vampire fiction is just about getting laid
ReplyDeleteBam, nailed the only common interest of the general population. Is why most(all?) mass media revolves around sex.
RPG's are a set of niches. It is folly to chase after mass market appeal.
...Why don't you email the guys who were just laid off and ask?
ReplyDeleteOn a more practical level, what would 'reaping the rewards' actually look like?