World of Darkness (2017) - full transcript

- I am absolutely a

fanatic over this game.

I can eat it up, it's awesome.

- I love it.

I love getting to

be something else

and creating this character.

- It's a fun way to

express yourself.

- I've been talking pretty

much nonstop for the past

96 hours.

This is as important

as music and movies.

It's another way to

talk and communicate.

- It's a wonderful way of

connecting with a lot of

different people.

It really changes a lot for you.

It puts you into a different

world and it's just wow,

this is lovely.

- When you engage

something so deep,

so dark, so personal

in that intimate kind of a

way, you carry that with you

wherever you are.

- Here, you are an

outsider getting to play

the ultimate outsider.

All the sudden, you

have different people

that place different

values on what is gaming?

What is a role playing game?

- It was something that

opened people's eyes

to being able to express yourself

in a whole different way.

- This is one of the great

secrets of pop culture,

of the 21st century.

- The key moment

of my entire life

is when I first played

Dungeons and Dragons.

- Your dungeon master

has placed you

in a dreadfully

precarious position.

You're playing the most

phenomenal game ever created.

Your choices are limited.

Stand and fight or run.

Use your lightning bolt.

- I was just instantly

just addicted.

- Throughout the 70's and

80's, the most commercially

successful role playing games

were all fantasy games.

They were all sort of

variations on Lord of the Rings

for the most part.

You go on an adventure.

You kill a dragon.

You get some gold and

then you hit repeat.

Dungeons & Dragons

popularizing it.

- Dungeons & Dragons has

grown from an obscure hobby

for an obsessed

elite into a craze

shared by an obsessed

million or more.

- Role player, through

it, was something

that was really big in

contemporary culture.

Literally millions of people

were playing all the time.

It allowed something quite new,

which was a game that had

a very strong narrative.

People would be getting

into this so much.

- It's surprising how

much of your aggressions

you can take out just by

rolling dice trying to

kill some monster.

- Role playing games were an

opportunity to live the story,

ya know, be an actor,

tell the story,

but create drama.

- Yeah, I think the

role playing is,

we call it an art

form, role playing,

and it's just unique.

It's a unique experience.

- I found Dungeons & Dragons

at a very early age,

as a teenager, and we

had a group that played

and it wasn't something

we talked about.

To admit to being a

Dungeons & Dragons player

or role player, you

risked social ridicule.

- Role-playing games

were not understood.

It was new and especially

in the deep south.

You're a geek and a

nerd for doing it.

None of the cool kids

played role-playing games.

- I think that that is

where I found more of a

comfort level interacting

with people.

- I was the outsider.

I was teased, not invited

to birthday parties.

That was my life, ya know?

- Part of the role-playing game

hobby and prior to everybody

sitting down to play,

somebody's gotta come up with a

general story line of what

you're gonna play through.

- Well, we appreciate that.

- Alright.

- Thanks for calling me, okay?

- You can buy books

that give you stories

or you can write your own.

So, from a early point, we

were creating our own story.

- Stewart Wieck, White

Wolf's founder,

he and his brother started

a magazine that was

called White Wolf magazine.

The first couple issues looked

like their stapled together,

black and white paper,

white line art,

looked like something that

you'd see at a high school

freshman make out of his

garage because that's kinda

not too far from the truth.

- We pooled money ourselves

and we bought a box of

photocopy paper and I took

that into high school one day

and asked for permission

to use the photo copier

in the front office and

they said, "Sure, Stewart."

So, I printed my demonic

role-playing game magazine

on the rural Georgia high

school photo copier.

Initially, the sales on the

magazine were nothing.

I mean, we made like 100

copies of the first issue

of White Wolf.

We're not succeeding

because this looks like

a piece of garbage.

There was a decision

point to like, okay,

if this is really going to

be something we're going

to continue to do, we've

gotta be more serious

about it again.

That's the point at which

we borrowed some money

from our parents.

- That allowed us to do

the full color cover

and all this content.

But, the way we really got

traction with the magazine

was that we would go

every year to Gen Con.

Okay, we need, where's upstairs?

Does anybody have any idea?

- Gen Con is the oldest

tabletop role-playing

game convention in the world.

It's where if you make

a physical product

that rolls dice or uses

cards or has a board,

that's where you go to

celebrate your hobby.

Back then, magazines were

the only way you got

your information.

- So, we would drive up all

these copies of the magazine

and we would hand

out free copies,

just giving them out to

every gamer in line.

- Gen Con was a place

where you always saw

the next big game, the next

big breakout to happen.

- It would've been Gen

Con '87 that I first met

Mark Rein-Hagen of Lion

Rampant at the time

and Ars Magica was one

of those little games

from a little company

that I found and I was

blown away by it.

It was very artful, the

contents were spectacular.

- Ars Magica was

this phenomenal game

that won all these awards.

At the time, we

were not doing well

and I met Stewart and he

just seemed like the kind of

rock solid business guy.

- These are serious

fantasy game players

who are here to assume the

roles of imaginary characters

in imaginary places.

- The role-playing game industry

at that point was tiny.

So, for financial reasons,

Lion Rampant and White Wolf

magazine decided to merge.

Mark, at that point, decided

to move down to Atlanta

where the Wieck brothers were.

Thought was that we were

going to do everything

we were doing

already, but better.

- White Wolf moves from the

environments of a little

five points, which is

this very Bohemian,

artist friendly, counter

cultural cluster of

the weird and alternative

and misunderstood

that lives in the

middle of Atlanta.

So, it's a perfect fit.

- Everyone worked together

and they lived together.

Your bedroom was your office.

- Mark's bedroom was his office.

- The house was always a weird

kind of eclectic mess of

creative papers everywhere.

- We're all stuck in this house

together and it was nuts.

- So, here was this

little company with this

really nifty, semi

successful independent game

and it's time for the annual

pilgrimage to Gen Con.

- You had to go through Indiana.

You had to go through

Gary, Indiana.

I had never seen a place, it

just looked like time forgot.

It was the worst.

- Their wholesale urban

decay brought about

by the economic disaster that

was the 70's and the 80's

ruined a lot of people's lives.

That's what Mark saw in Gary.

He saw the complete and

utter disdain for humanity.

We did that.

It wasn't the automotive

companies that destroyed.

Rust Belt, America, it was us.

People.

We let it happen.

- I remember us saying,

"This place is bad."

"Who would live here?"

Mark was like,

"Probably vampires."

- Instantly, I knew, boom.

You are the vampire.

You were human.

You've been fucked.

Your life is over.

It's this nightmare world.

What are you gonna do now?

How are you gonna survive?

Everyone in the

car went, "What?"

Like back then, the

idea of being a vampire

was just impossible to imagine.

- In role-playing games,

vampires were monsters

to be killed.

Their lairs looted for treasure.

- Vampires were always something

in Dungeons and Dragons

that you fought.

- You know, now it seems

so normal and ordinary

and such a plausible idea.

But at the time, it was

a definite glitch.

Normally, at Gen Con, which

is the great one convention,

I was a party animal.

I would party the

whole time, right?

This convention, I

didn't party at all.

I just sat and wrote

and wrote and wrote.

And it just all flowed out.

- Being in that dark

side takes me away

from my ordinary life.

You gotta explore the

deprivation and violence

that you don't do in

your regular life.

You don't have to actually

expose yourself to those dangers

but you get to experience them.

You can just get a bit

of an understanding

why you feel the way you

feel or act the way you act

by taking on a different role.

I met a lot of people I've

been friends with for years

through RP-ing.

You get a thing that binds you

together, this experience.

- Fuckin' daylight!

- Vampire at the

Masquerade clearly draws

a lot of it's inspiration

from movies like.

The Lost Boys and New

Dark and The Hunger,

sort of vampire

myths of the 80's.

It also draws from some

of the entire spectrum of

popular vampire mythology.

- Vampires have been depicted

differently in different eras.

In the very earliest

stories about vampires,

folklore stories about vampires,

vampires are not seductive

and they are not appealing.

Vampires are ghouls.

The Lord Ruthven is

somebody who is handsome,

is personable, and yet,

ultimately, he is revealed to be

a top of the food

chain predator.

But Dracula really is ground

zero for our contemporary

conception of the vampire.

He is where it starts, the

idea of the seductive vampire,

the appealing vampire,

the vampire who's

lust for human blood does

not make him unwelcome

in human company.

Anne Rice's Interview

with a Vampire was a real

turning point for a

number of reasons,

but the single biggest

one I think was that it

pushed the sexuality

of vampire stories

even farther forward.

- That provided the

contemporary idea of

they were tragic, romantically

cursed creatures,

ones you could sympathize with

and arguably wanna be with.

- I decided I would

not read Anne Rice.

I would not be tainted.

Of course, what I didn't

realize was that all these

80 vampire movies

that I loved so much,

all stole their stuff

from Anne Rice.

- Sleep all day,

party all night.

It's fun to be a vampire.

- What vampire did was it

essentially took ownership

of every previous

vampire myth said,

if you're a fan of

any of these things,

come play in our world 'cause

our world is the whole world.

- After we got back

from that Gen Con,

Mark really started

working on his vampire.

- Stewart was very much the

sounding board for me.

His office is across

the hallway from me

as I constantly burst in and go,

"What do you think of this idea?

"Okay, we're gonna have clans

and these clans will be

"the way, they'll be

like character classes,

"but we're not gonna

do character classes."

"They'll be like social

groups but they won't"

"give you anything extra."

"They will, they will,

but they won't."

He would go, "That

sounds good, Mark."

- One of the most powerful

design ideas in Vampire

is the idea of Clans.

- Monster entertainment

always, I think, has appealed

to outsiders but, if you are

slightly different in some

manner in your real life,

it's so nice to belong,

ya know, to a clan or a pack

and to have a clear purpose.

- That idea that

you would inherit

a world view and

political position

and history with your choice

of character had never been

expressed so fully and

completely before.

- When I first started

in role-playing games,

the biggest artists in the

gaming industry at the time

were guys that did

the D&D stuff,

but they weren't very dynamic.

There was gaming art before

Tim and then there was Tim.

- It was a lot of fun.

So many things before that

were very high fantasy art

to varying degrees of quality.

Ya know, classic

swords and sorcery,

big guys in armor and

dragons and women in

chain mill bikinis.

Vampire was the first

time where I really sunk,

pardon the pun, I

sunk my teeth into it

and it was the right

subject matter

at the right time for me.

I immediately knew

what I wanted to do.

Instead of having this

character on this page that

feels like a comic book,

what if I wanna make them real?

I wanna make them possible.

- He basically brought

this real world grittiness

that you could, you

could really believe

'cause they were real people.

- I would just get friends over.

I would say,

"Okay, who's gonna be right

for this character?"

My friends were in these bands.

That's my pal, Sherry Wall.

She's one of my favorite

people on the planet.

There's a classic right there.

That's Tim Shinkle.

My best friend, Joel, who

modeled for everything for me

for a long time.

It's my pal, Scotty Wilson.

The absolute, quintessential,

gypsy white trash

vampire is Scott Wilson.

Wow.

So, instead of having

it be some count

that lives in, ya know,

Romania, 400 years ago,

I started with a

different culture.

- It immediately makes it like

wow, this is our vampires.

I can be one.

I can just go down to

the club and be one.

- I don't know whether or

not I realized how big.

Vampire was going to be until

these visuals came in.

I was like, this is

cool on another level.

- Tim Bradstreet's

artwork was one of the

best decisions we made.

- The full pages were it.

They were gothic pun.

They expressed the

moment of the time.

They expressed characters.

They were perfect.

Funny thing is, we had no

money left for a cover.

We were screwed.

- They had actually commissioned

a piece of artwork,

Vampire with a blood tear and

a helicopter crashed in the

background and a

motorcycle and stuff

and it was just, didn't

really feel right.

I came up with the idea of

wanting to do something

that was a little more

photographic and a little more,

let people just put their own

vision of what they thought

vampires could be onto that.

- So we got in his car.

We bought a bunch of roses

with the last dollars

in my pocket and we

went to a stone place

and we bought a piece

of green marble.

We snapped that photo

and I am absolutely

100% convinced that if

it had a stupid, cheesy

gamer, I'm a Vampire, that

wouldn't have worked.

- At that time, the world

was changing a lot.

The sort of old guard

Republicans in America

were coming up power.

The Berlin Wall had

just come down.

Music was making this

revolution, this sort of

hair metal poppy scene of

the 80's was fading away

to the Seattle punk scene.

- In the early 90's, there

was an undercurrent

of a need for change.

There was a need for a dark

voice and those people

with dark voices emerged.

- 1990 was the first time

that you heard about it.

It's first advertisement for

this game called Vampire

was just a big black paper

with just white Vampire

across it.

- When Vampire the

Masquerade came out,

I'd seen nothing like it.

This beautiful green cover

with a red rose across it,

just absolutely beautiful,

I had to pick it up.

- This is vampires

and goth and punk

and that, of course, makes

it vastly different

from any role-playing game

that has ever come before.

- Here, you are an

outsider getting to play

the ultimate outsider.

That was catalytic for us.

- It wasn't even really so

much playing the vampire

as becoming the vampire.

- It's not just reading a

novel about an anti-hero.

Those moral ambiguities and

moral challenges are yours now.

- I can hear her heart beating.

My mind screams with lust.

Now.

- Suddenly, people who had

never been interested

in role-playing games before

or geek culture before

were interested.

- I remember working in the

store after the Vampire

first edition had come out.

There was sort of a

steady stream of ya know,

these sort of goth kids

that were coming into

the game store which was weird

'cause they didn't

buy anything else.

They didn't socialize

with anyone.

They came in and they bought

their White Wolf products

and they left.

- They wanted to share

this thing with us,

this thing that we loved.

It was a new

sensation to be cool

or to at least think

you were cool.

- I grew up in a very

not progressive part

of the United States and I

didn't really have a lot

of friends, so all of

my spare time was spent

reading books or drawing or

doing all of these things

that were kind of by

myself and in my own head.

Then, when I finally

met one or two people

who actually played

these things,

it was like a whole other

experience because suddenly,

I was getting to hang

out and be with people

that were just as into these

strange little ideas as I was.

Looking at those books, looking

at every single little bit

of that stark black and

white, beautiful art

with all the detail,

all that ink work,

I was enthralled.

It was just so, my

imagination went everywhere

just getting to look

at all of that stuff.

It's not just here is a

mechanical system of numbers,

but rather, it's like, here

is a way you can really

collaboratively create some

universe with each other.

- Vampire had the artwork

and the clownsiest stem

of this idea that

you're the monster

but what really made

it revolutionary is

that it shifted focus

away from rolls and dice

towards storytelling.

- Vampire was written differently

than other role-playing

game products.

It was produced differently.

It looked different.

It read differently.

It was not just a collection

of numbers and statistics

and tables for how to

kill monsters or how to

have a car chase.

- When it came out,

it was a revolution.

This was during a time when

games like roll master

were great and they had

these hundreds and hundreds

of pages of tables that they'd

go through and look through.

We started realizing that what

we felt was most powerful

was the conversation.

It wasn't really, can I

jump between the buildings,

roll the dice and so, that became

more and more meaningless.

- Horror fiction is really

popular because it allows

us to engage with a lot

of big moral questions

and these issues about humanity

and often about belonging.

Role-playing is a very

good medium for exploring

some of those dynamics

specifically.

- It's not an external

force you're fighting

which you can kill with

a sword or a fireball.

It's the conflict within you

which makes it much more

psychological type of game.

- It doesn't look very exciting.

If you walk into a room

and people are playing

pen and paper, they're

just sitting around.

It's happening in this sort

of shared imaginative space

between all the players

and that means that

you can't see it

unless you're playing.

It's all happening

in their minds.

- There's Mark

Rein-Hagen's head.

Come show me.

Turn, look down.

Show me the whole business.

- At Gen Con, game

just explodes.

- Clone of Chaos.

- I went over to the White

Wolf booth and I was like,

"Dude, how's it going

for you guys?"

They were like, "It's nuts."

It was crazy.

White Wolf grew so fast.

I mean, they literally went

from being a garage company

to a million dollar

company overnight.

- People's appetite for the

game was just ferocious.

- Going from living

in a house together

with our warehouse in

the yard to ya know,

renting a warehouse building.

- Vampire was taking

the industry by storm

and we became known as

the company that would

throw the crazy parties.

- The late night, gothic

punk scene in Atlanta

was incredibly strong.

- We went out every night.

We were there in the clubs

where this is happening.

So, it's informing the game

and you could not separate

the game from club culture

and club fashion.

- It began to aggregate different

looks of counter culture

into one beautiful, blended,

gothic punk aesthetic,

which then, in turn,

certainly began to appear

everywhere else.

- Stuff that was really

niche, all of the sudden

became this sort of bigger

and broader subculture

visual aesthetic.

Thousands of people,

inarguably, by those classic

vampire depictions

of you can be this.

- We have vampires,

we need werewolves.

Right and so, we're gonna

put ourselves on the spot.

Here's the games

we're going to make

and I guess we'll make them.

- Now we gotta make them.

- We were really creating

a world of darkness

and the idea was that in

the world of darkness,

these vampires

existed side by side

with these werewolves

and these mages

and the lingering after

effects of ghosts.

There were other games

that kind of supposed

different supernatural

creatures would be in contact

with one another, but the

world of darkness idea

that these all shared a

world, that their societal

structures overlapped one

another or often intruded

on one another, that's

really I think,

what made the world of

darkness stand out.

The same time, these live

action rules for playing.

Vampire the Masquerade emerged.

- The first live action

role-playing game product

was called The Masquerade.

It was a big box set.

There'd never really been

a LARP product before.

Once you actually had

something on the shelf

for people to buy, next

to the table top game,

then it exploded.

Then it got big.

- LARP started out

as an acronym for

live action role playing.

It's a form of role playing

where you embody the character

and very often, you also

dress up as your character

and try to portray their

actions as fully as possible.

- LARP existed before this.

This is what made it huge

in the same way that

there was science fiction

before Star Wars

and then there was Star Wars.

All of the sudden, instead

of like five or six people

playing around a table,

you had 15, 30, 60,

hundreds playing in

parks, college campuses,

in night clubs.

It was more like an event.

- Up until Vampire, most

of the live action games

were people in a

field or in a forest

with padded foam swords

running and chasing

and hitting each other.

The Vampire live action game

was more of a social drama.

All of the sudden, you

had different people

that place different

values on what is gaming?

What is a role playing game?

- We are all being hunted

because we are one!

- It completely changed

the type of people

that would play an

event like that.

- Calm down!

- They were not

traditional gamers.

They were theater people.

They cared about the

narrative, the story,

the drama, they

wanted intensity.

- What people get

surprised by often

is how powerful role

playing as a form is.

- You made me this monster!

- Everybody's creating

the story every moment

through the game.

When you speak, you

are creating it.

When you are not speaking,

you are also creating it.

You're doing something

kind of difficult

and awesome together.

You created this world

and you made it real

for a little while.

- I felt the timing was perfect

for this role playing game.

So, I went to friends of

mine, said what do you guys

think about transforming

the world of Vampire

into a living, breathing

organization?

Our interest was

building a community.

- Camarilla Fan Club was

extraordinarily important.

White Wolf was one of the

very first role playing game

companies to have a

dedicated fan club

that would go out into the

world and show people

how cool their stuff was.

- That was something that was

really different with Vampire.

We didn't build large communities

around our D&D games,

but when it became

Vampire and then,

when it became live action,

then all the sudden,

we were bringing other

people from other cities in.

- We felt a really easy

point of entry for someone

to get involved in the

world of darkness

where friends would say,

"Hey, what about this"

"game in the back?"

"Come with us, take a look

and see what you think."

- Those people were passionate

about what they were doing

and so, they continued to

inspire other people to be

passionate and it was a big

part of how the brand grew.

- It grew so fast, we simply

could not keep up with it.

It was impossible to keep up

with how fast it was growing.

- Not only across cities,

but across continents.

- Camarilla Fan Club

organized LARPS regularly.

In Europe, it reached

millions of people.

- Vampire became

more than a game.

It became a culture, a

culture that opened doors to

different kinds of people

with different ideas,

but we were all joined

by this common interest.

- What I loved about

the Vampire culture

was it didn't matter

what gender you were.

It didn't matter

what color you were.

It didn't matter what ethnic

background or cultural

background you came from.

They were all a vampire.

- I remember reading many

Dungeons and Dragons books

and I'd see a black person.

World of Darkness was different.

- What I find really cool

about Vampire the Masquerade

is that it created that

foundation of equality.

- I had the community finally

that accepted me for what

I am and allowed me to be

what I wanna be.

- I have always

been outta place.

I never really fit in.

I was a gamer, Dungeons &

Dragons and stuff like that

and a friend of mine got me

into Vampire back in '93.

About two years after that,

we start getting to LARP,

which was recently

released at that time

and we became the first

Camarilla based Vampire group

in San Diego.

A lot of my close friends who

I'm still friends with now,

we started off in

a Vampire LARP.

I like dressing up

like a monster.

It gives me more of

this sort of feel,

ya know, not like many

people and I can be myself

'cause this is basically me.

I realized that my

friends were more family

than anybody else.

I'm much happier that way.

- Here it is, the

White Wolf bus.

Woo, now they wanna

film this road.

Oh, that's scary.

- Frankly, anywhere we went,

there was a very different

kind of fan that was around

the White Wolf booth

holding our games than

you saw anywhere else

in the convention hall.

- You know, when you're

at a RPG convention,

you're talking about Magic

and you're talking about

ya know, knights

hitting each other

and none of that is what the

World of Darkness was about.

- Going into a gaming

environment was a boy's club.

Vampire the Masquerade

wasn't a boy's club.

- I have people to this day

come up to me and say,

"Man, I remember that Gen

Con after you came out"

"with Vampire, suddenly, there

were women at Gen Con!"

- It became inviting to

girls because here were

suddenly games that were

about stories and characters

and relationships.

- They would come to the

convention and go to no one else's

booth except our booth.

- Having almost a 50% ratio

of women was unheard of

in the role playing scene.

- It was big business

at this point.

It was a serious

competitor to D&D.

They had a goofy

cartoon in the 80's.

All of the sudden, we've got

like prime time FOX show

that's just coming out

after the X-Files.

- I got a call, this

guy, and he said,

"I'm so and so from the

Creative Artist Agency."

"We're the agency that does

everything in Hollywood."

I invite Mark into

the office and say,

"Hey Mark, what do

you, this message,"

"what do you think we

should do with this?"

He just goes running screaming

through the office.

"CAA called, they

called, they called!"

- This is what the Prolog Clan

will do to all you Gangles!

- The thing about

it was that it was

an Aaron Spelling show.

Strike number one.

- You Gangles are

cruising for broo-ha.

You chose the wrong place.

- So, Mark moved out

there on the west coast

and they were putting together

the film deal with Spelling.

- Everywhere I could, I'd

try to manipulate it to be

a better show than

Spelling wanted to be.

- Alexandra!

- He got his sticky

old hands all over it

and just made it slop.

- Alexandra!

- It was still Vampire

the Masquerade,

ya know, Crescent

City, the whole game,

but I was really turned

off by the show.

I couldn't even watch

all the episodes.

- At that time, one of

the big controversies

that came up for White Wolf

was a guy named Rod Ferrell.

- You cut yourself,

let them drink it.

It runs through their

veins for a few moments.

Then, your blood

becomes tainted.

- He murdered people in a

sort of cult-like fashion.

- Prosecutors plan to

seek the death penalty

against Rod Ferrell.

- We were like,

"Oh, we're fucked."

- The fact is, it was a

whole vampire culture.

People who wanted to dress

like vampires, drink blood

and generally behave

like vampires.

Clearly, that caused a

lot of consternation.

- Had church leaders

speaking out against us,

political figures

speaking out against us.

- Was so absurd, the

accusations from the media

and from the state

was so ridiculous.

- Horror has always

been a problem for

religious groups

because clearly,

all of the horror creatures exist

outside of God's universe.

They're not God's creatures.

God didn't make werewolves.

God didn't make vampires

and it was clearly a thing

that people found

very disturbing.

- For the murder of

Richard Wendell, you are

hereby sentenced to death.

- We had nothing to do with him.

He didn't even, by all

accounts, play our games.

That point, there was a

number of internal struggles

between the development

team in Atlanta

that was making the

games and Mark.

- Mark had moved to California

to open White Wolf West

and he was frequently in

conflict with some of the more

traditional business-minded

people at the office

and there were also

people who felt like

that west coast office

was just bleeding money

and they weren't

generating anything.

- One memory I have is that

I had just gotten back from

Germany and this amazing trip

and I just ran three LARPs and

I come back to White Wolf

straight from the airport,

no one has any idea

how exhausted I am or

how little I slept

and I come in the warehouse

and the entire company,

they all give me this look.

Like, "You fuckin' asshole."

- The late 90's, the

entire table top industry

was going through a

fundamental shift.

The entire publishing trade

was being massively disrupted

by digital entertainment.

- The same problems the book

industry led to our main

competitor, TSR, who ran Dungeons

& Dragons going bankrupt

and it nearly bankrupted us.

We had layoffs, which

it was a hard time

and so, in the middle

of this atmosphere of

hardship for the company,

the west coast office

became a more difficult

thing to keep going.

- I just thought that

you wouldn't wanna

get rid of the creator.

But ya know, what

I didn't realize,

the entire company would wanna

get rid of the creator.

Made me feel like shit.

I mean, I hate that.

As much as I'm

always the outsider,

as much as I'm always the

guy who is not loved,

ya know, it destroyed me.

- In 1998, White Wolf

Publishing as a company

was struggling, which is ironic

because at the same time,

Vampire media and

entertainment was booming.

You had Buffy, you had

From Dusk Til Dawn.

And a lot of what you

saw in those shows

were influenced directly

by the World of Darkness.

- One of the great untold stories

about early 21st century

popular culture is really

how much World of Darkness

influenced the resurgence

of vampire culture.

- You better wake up.

The world you live in is

just a sugar coated type.

There is another

world beneath it.

- Blade came out in 1998.

That was basically

based on Vampire.

- Blade definitely was Vampire

the Masquerade on steroids.

- Blade.

- I thought the trailers

looked so fuckin' awesome,

ya know?

I was excited to see the movie.

- That's him!

Get him, fuck him up!

- It didn't occur to me until

I was watching the movie

and I'm like, "Oh, wow!"

That looks like a thing

that I did, ya know?

It was just where he stops

at the end of that scene

where he shh, then

there's Blade.

It was almost the

exact same pose.

A couple years later, I

talked to the writer

of the first movie.

He's sitting next

to me and he says,

"Ya know, on Blade one, dude,"

"we totally had your art books."

I'm like, "You're kidding!"

Really?

He goes, "Yeah, yeah,

we had your portfolio",

"your vampire portfolio."

"We had your art book."

I was like, "So, you

just borrowed my stuff"

"and you didn't

hire me for that."

He's like, "Oh."

I mean, Blade was a character

before Vampire, of course,

but when did Blade start

to look really badass

and take the safari jacket off

and the green goggles?

I rest my case.

A little while later,

I get a phone call

from Guillermo Del Toro.

I was like, "You're

Guillermo, aren't you?"

He's like, "Yeah."

He goes, "Listen, we're gonna

work together right now."

I was like, "Right now,

what do you mean?"

He goes, "I've got a

film, it's Blade 2."

I was like, "Oh, really?"

He goes, "I'm gonna make sure

you get paid this time."

Ha!

- I would say after

that, it, I think,

became very problematic

because after that, White

Wolf, in a very real sense,

in a very legal sense went

to war with the club.

- White Wolf, the sort of

rock and roll cultural mavens

of the last decade now became

the guys that had lawyers

and suits in a lawsuit

with their fans.

- When the lawsuit happened,

the community was shattered.

- Even though White

Wolf won that lawsuit,

they really lost the

court of public opinion.

That was the end of the

Camarilla as we knew it.

Some people were

very hurt by it.

- The response to that is

you started to see sales

just drop and sort of go away.

- I saw the sales had gone down.

I have friends who run

these game stores.

I said, "I'm not selling

Vampire as much any more."

- We were used to selling tens

of thousands of something

and now, we're

selling thousands.

- We knew that we made a game

that was popular in the 90s.

We also knew that role

playing games, overall,

were declining, but what we

didn't know at the time was,

was it us or was it them?

Was it a product problem or

was it a market problem?

- At this point, we

had hundreds of books

around Vampire the

Masquerade and we felt like

we had explored so many

of the topics that were

there to explore that we

were starting to move into

minutia that only applied

to a small group of people.

- There was so much vampire

stuff that we had created,

this world was so

rich, so developed,

like new players were

just too intimidated by

I have to know what.

We decided we needed to

restart and I think then,

we decided the best way to do

that was to sort of fulfill

this inherent promise

that we'd made

from the very beginning.

For a 1991 ya know,

the advertising is,

Gehenna is coming.

- Gehenna is coming soon.

- From 1991 on, we had said

in our books at some point,

the elder vampires will wake

up and they will be hungry

and it will fundamentally

change the very existence

and the nature of what it

means to be a vampire.

- The world will turn cold

and unclean things will

rise up from the earth

and storms will roll,

lightning will light fires,

boils will fester and their

bodies, twisting, will fall.

- It was the vampire apocalypse,

we called it, Gehenna.

- The you will know, it is time.

Gehenna will soon be upon you.

- People in the

industry were like,

"Whoa you guys, that's radical."

You're insane. - Insane.

- You're taking one of

those popular products

in the marketplace and you're

just gonna stop doing it?

- When I started playing

World of Darkness,

my mom had gotten very sick

and I ya know, had a lot

of feelings about that

that I didn't really

talk to people about.

So, getting to play a character

that maybe acted out

or do stuff was a really

great way of taking

all of that emotional stuff and

putting it into something.

The first time I went,

go into the room,

have a basic costume,

nothing really super cool

and I walk in and I

see all these people

and they're engaged

and doing stuff.

I chickened out.

I turn around and I

walk right back out.

I didn't say anything

for like 30 minutes.

Then, people started

talking to me and I was

responding in character,

then all of a sudden,

I was just doing it.

I felt exhilaration.

It was awesome, it

was very thrilling.

It was scary too.

It's intense and it requires

a lot of social skills actually.

I learned so much about

what I can do as a person,

being able to play all

these different roles

and I learned a lot

about other people too.

The World of Darkness

and the LARP community

is very close knit.

For me, what is cool

is involving people,

telling really great

stories and making it fun.

- The war itself had

become more perilous.

The weapons had evolved.

- With all the upheaval that

was going on at the time,

the last thing that

White Wolf needed was

yet another legal battle.

- Who are you people?

- You're in the middle

of a war that's been

raging for the better

part of 1,000 years,

a blood feud between

vampires and lichens.

Werewolves.

- When I saw

Underworld, I thought,

"They must have

contacted White Wolf"

"and done this movie in

association with them."

"I thought it was that close."

- They essentially make a

World of Darkness movie

just straight up.

- The chain has never

been broken, not once,

not in 14 centuries,

not since we elders first began

to leap frog through time.

- There's cases where we

felt movies or other works

had taken too much

of our material

and Underworld was a

good example of that.

- Ah yes,

the lichen.

- Underworld is a washed

down version of Masquerade.

The whole vampire

verse werewolf thing

came from the World of Darkness.

- We had a protracted

legal fight but,

we reached a satisfactory

settlement on it

and the settlement

allowed them to

continue making the movies.

- That was the only time

that we were acknowledged.

The rest of the time,

we were just copied.

- 2006 to 2008, you saw

that the Twilight novels,

the Sookie Stackhouse,

Charlaine Harris books,

those were very clearly

influenced by World of Darkness.

♪ When you came in,

the air went out ♪

- I think the greatest copy

of Vampire the Masquerade

was True Blood.

- Anybody that saw True

Blood first season

thought that same thing.

They knew about Vampire.

They went, "Is this the

new Vampire show?"

"Is this a new White Wolf show?"

- The first vampire was Cain.

Being a vampire is

the mark of Cain.

It's God's punishment

for bringing...

- The True Blood TV series,

they actually talk about Cain.

The first vampire, I

mean, that was sort of

a defining point of our myth.

- Your majesty, you've had

me abducted by werewolves.

- They had kings of

different cities.

We had princes.

They had sheriffs,

we had sheriffs.

- Listen, Bill was

in fact kidnapped

by human or vampire.

I am duty bound as

sheriff of the area

in which he resides to find him.

- It had gotten to a point where

there weren't even really

pretending not to copy

our stuff any more.

- In 2004, we relaunched

the World of Darkness

in what a lot of players call

the new World of Darkness.

It wasn't Vampire

the Masquerade.

It was Vampire the Requiem.

- There was a lot of excitement

looking forward to it,

to it coming.

- I was excited to see a

reinvention of this world

that I'd grown to love.

When I received the book, I

started paging through it

and did not speak to me at all.

- Requiem emphasized lust

story and more rules

and procedure.

- Vampire became

more gaming oriented

and rules monitoring than role

playing and storytelling.

- That was a big departure

for a lot of people.

Tim Bradstreet wasn't

doing the art.

The art was very

comic book style.

- If you look at

Requiem more closely

and if you look at the

nuts and bolt of it,

there is this huge change.

It can be played to win.

- When Vampire Requiem

had come out,

all of the people that I

was playing the LARP with

were like, "What?"

- To me, Requiem was

another role playing game

and I love role playing games,

but it didn't speak to me

like Masquerade did.

- We sold more books

with that launch

than we had ever sold

before on any other launch.

100,000 units, which for 2004

in the role playing

game industry,

might as well have

parted the Red Sea.

It was an incredible launch.

- While they sold a

lot of the core book,

what was very telling is

they didn't sell much

of it's companion books.

- White Wolf with a new game,

who wasn't going

to buy that book?

Everyone was going

to buy that book,

but after that first book,

I saw people were not as

interested and I thought,

"Oh my goodness, maybe White

Wolf just committed suicide."

- What do you do in a

situation like this?

You have fans who love the

traditional World of Darkness

but they're not buying

the game any more.

You tend to launch a

brand new version of it

and no one's buying it.

- Know any games we can play?

- One of the reasons that

we weren't resonating

with the youth of the role

playing game industry

is because the youth

weren't in this market.

They had found another market.

- Book publishing was dying.

It was clear everything

was moving electronic

and we were trying to

basically create a property

that would be exciting again.

- Bloodlines truly captured

the sense of story

from the role playing game

and the live action game.

It was a new way to play

something that we were already

enthusiastic about.

- Bloodlines is a game that

was put out by Activision

and we were all excited

about the potential.

So, we felt like we

needed to get into being

our own development studio.

- That's when CCP steps

into the picture.

- The idea of EVE was that

we would create a world

with rules and that the

players inside that world

would then create the game.

- Don't tell me what

you're looting.

I don't wanna know until after.

- The game is about people

interacting with other people.

- Shut up.

- EVE Online is a massive,

multiplayer online game

which you play by logging onto

an online server somewhere

and you start playing

it together with

a lot of other people.

- Felt like a perfect fit because

what they were doing was

completely based around

stories that were driven

by the community and

so, we felt like,

this is exactly

where we wanna be.

- I met Hilmar for

the first time

at EVE three in 2006

and at one point,

Helmar just says,

"Everybody keeps

talking to us about

"merging and working with

CCP, but it's like,"

"they want to add Coca

Cola with Coca Cola."

"You're like a cheeseburger!"

"We would go great together!"

- Here comes this odd

Icelandic company

that makes this

weird space game.

They sort of seem like the

great white hope, so to speak,

that they're gonna come

in and save everything

and make it awesome again,

make it bigger and

better than ever.

- You all know this guy.

- For me, it was huge

because ya know,

it'd always been a thought

of World of Darkness.

I was really into revitalizing

a lot of the things

that were now struggling

at White Wolf.

- We went through the entire

merger and acquisition

process in four months.

It was like drinking

from a fire hose

that was full of

Icelandic vodka.

- All of the hardcore fans

is like where is the stuff.

Here, have our money.

But nothing was

really happening,

so that was frustrating.

- This point, White Wolf's

community was a mess.

You got a lot of resentment.

There was these broken promises.

So, the idea was sort

of get em all together.

1300, 1400 fans of different fan

clubs all in the same room.

- So, we put something

together just for you guys.

This was made to capture

the mood and the feel

that we're gonna try to pursue

with the World of

Darkness in a month.

- You won't believe me.

In fact, I shouldn't tell you.

Some secrets are best

taken to the grave.

They're all around us.

They control everything.

They have always been here

waging their secret wars.

- The big question up to

that point was, ya know,

which version of the World of

Darkness are they gonna make?

- So, behind the scenes,

we've been working on it

for three years

and we still have

a very long way to go.

So, that brings me

to the announcement

that I know a lot of you

guys have been speculating

about for a long time, which is,

what version of what

White Wolf product

is this game gonna be based on?

The answer is...

- You thought you were

at a rock concert.

- That was the moment

when I realized,

"Holy shit, they're

bringing it back."

"It's coming back."

- When they said that, I

felt role playing games

matter again to me.

- This was the

ultimate validating

holy shit moment.

We're going back

to what's awesome

and we're gonna spend

millions of dollars

on the franchise you

grew up with, you loved.

- It was terrifying and

exciting and cathartic.

We are gonna be able

to walk into a living,

breathing digital world and

it was going to be glorious.

- It was huge.

The level of excitement,

all the old grievances

sort of swept away.

We announced we were gonna

do this 20th anniversary

printed book.

Tim Bradstreet was gonna

come back and do the art.

- Doing V20, for me, it

was revisiting, ya know,

an ex-lover in a way.

Here we are, we're gonna

go down this road again

and it had been a while.

Felt great.

- People had gotten the

book back in their hands

the way they did originally.

They got to share stories and

reconnect with old friends.

- Even thought traditional

role playing games

were far less popular than

they had been in the 90s,

people who were fans were

still playing these games.

LARPing was super popular

all around the world

during that whole period.

- There was a community

aspect to playing this game

that really transcended

just fun and escapism.

- What's special about

role playing is that

you have a very clear

purpose typically

and you, very often, have a

strong sense of belonging.

The characters are

very rarely isolated

and that can be quite

liberating, I think.

- Story telling is the

currency of human contact

and that is exactly at

the very heart of what

role playing is.

- Even if we don't necessarily

know we are called players,

you do belong to this collective

and it has this sort of

transformational potential

for everybody.

As you get so caught up in

the moment, that you forget

that you don't think you

have leadership skills

and you stand up and lead.

Then, after the event,

you're like, "Wait, what?"

"I was a leader?"

That's still something

that you did

and nobody can take

that away from you.

- Making video games

is really hard.

It's really hard

and making an MMO

is even harder on top of

that because of the sheer

volume of systems and

scope of those systems

and players who need to be put

in contact with one another.

- We knew this, but it was

also kind of mock through

within CCP, we know it is

going to be incredibly hard.

But impossible is nothing.

We eat the impossible

for breakfast.

We did EVE and we're

gonna do this.

- In the MMO, a lot of what

the creative director wanted

was players to be able to

express themselves visually

and the idea here was the

players would be able to wear

whatever they wanted.

So, visually, they could

create this look for them.

So, we had multiple fashion

designers working at CCP.

- CCP approached

me to bring me on

as a designer because they

wanted to honor the tradition

of World of Darkness

and it's aesthetic

but at the same time,

push it forward.

My aesthetic is very tribal

and has goth elements to it.

I gravitate towards a darkness.

I came on as the role of

Digital Fashion Editor

where I worked with a

team of illustrators

and we created

fashion collections

that represented

each of the clans.

I thought it was just

such an incredible world.

This was the first jacket

that has ever been created

digitally from an

actual fashion piece.

We took this jacket and

we put it into the.

World of Darkness environment

where the characters were

able to wear the jacket

within the game setting.

We were able to digitally

make everyone's fantasy

and something that you would

dream of wearing in real life.

- I like to be complimented.

I like to be told

how awesome I am

and ya know, I'm cool.

Yeah, it's always,

ever since I was a

really little kid,

it's always been about

putting on the costume.

When I start to put

on the costume,

I start to kind of just

distance myself from myself.

It's always fascinating

when I realize

I can see the moment

when it's clicked,

that I've transitioned from

Caroline to the character.

Sometimes it's a very

noticeable click almost,

like switching the

channel on a TV.

With Requiem, I like to play

the more apologetic monster.

I don't necessarily

enjoy what I do,

but a girl's gotta eat.

With Masquerade, there is

so much more opportunities

for me to decide

that I'm a monster

and I feel good about it.

Some days, I want to

explore a part of me

that I might shy away

from or that I don't

quite understand why

I'm like that and LARP

gives me a cheaper

alternative to therapy

to explore myself.

- Role playing has a

long history of being

your self therapy

from I think it was

in the 20s or 30s where

it first started

in the sense of be your mother

as she leaves your father.

It's right around the

standard through that.

That's role playing.

- There are therapeutic

methods that look a lot like

role playing and you

never know which thing,

which random moment in this LARP

or role playing game is going

to resonate with something

in your life, that suddenly,

something in your mind clicks

and you're like, "Hey, this

reminds me of that thing."

If you're not prepared for that,

then it can be a little scary.

- When you engage

something so deep,

so dark, so personal in that

intimate kind of a way,

you carry that with

you wherever you are.

- EVE was the economic engine

that drove the company.

CCP had raised capital to

develop two new projects,

DUST 514 in it's Shanghai office

and World of Darkness

in it's Atlanta office.

- The problem starts when EVE

starts to lose subscribers.

Now, we're seeing a

trajectory where

it's not really going up.

It's just going down.

So, we're like whoa.

We need to do

something about this.

So basically, all teams

in all continents

go to work on EVE.

- CCP was a good

company to work for,

but once you sell something

to someone else,

it's theirs.

White Wolf was now

part of that company

and White Wolf needs were

subservient to CCPs at that point.

- All of the resources

we needed to make the.

World of Darkness MMO

were actually being

taken away from us and our

project was suffering for it.

- The following news that we got

was that workers at

White Wolf is fired.

So we're like okay,

this is bad probably.

- You don't come back from that.

Yes, it took a few more

years for the project

to get shut down completely,

but that's the point where

the company, basically

the fans I think,

just didn't believe it.

- The decision comes

to shut it down.

Ya know, I'm part

of that decision.

There was only a second

who made that decision.

You could say I

killed it but, yeah.

- I felt a huge amount of

responsibility towards

the fans and I still do.

I mean, it made me feel

terrible to feel like

all these people had put

in so much effort and time

and belief and faith.

It made me feel terrible.

- They canceled the MMO,

it felt like, okay,

this is the end.

- In many ways, World of

Darkness helped some of us geeks

come to terms with

being who we were

and that hadn't happened before.

- Created a complete

cultural movement.

It was something that

opened people's eyes

to being able to express yourself

in a whole different way.

- You know that feeling

you've had when you've

walked out of certain movies

and you just feel different.

As an entity, it

exists in that way and

it's pretty special.

It's a very special thing.

- When you have somebody

come up to you and say,

"I read your book."

"It changed my life."

You're just humbled by that.

It's just like writing the

book's changed our lives too.

- We Rabnos are so few now.

We're so very few.

But we are strong

and we are clever

and when we band together,

we are a force to

be reckoned with.

Our hope is to rise again,

to reignite that passion

that we used to feel

and to drink in a

new generation.

- It's just time for there

to be a new expression

of the World of Darkness

in a way that will

capture the imagination

of millions,

millions of fans.

- There's a lot of

different groups of people

that you'd never get to meet

if you didn't play the game,

so it's a beautiful thing.

- As soon you join in,

the community's lovely.

You find this really

broadening network

that you can connect with.

- Role playing has

changed my life

in so many ways.

It brings a sense of

understanding between people.

That's why we're here, right?

- We just have it

in us, this quest

and this thirst for darkness.

I think World of Darkness

really brings out

other parts of who we are

and who our souls are.