A month of Thanks!

Monday Meeting

As we come to the last few days of the fantastic Deluxe V20 Dark Ages Kickstarter, not only does our Salubri pictured above give thanks, but so do I. First of all, for that same fantastic Deluxe V20 DA Kickstarter, which has vaulted through funding and right into enabling us to create both a V20 DA Tome of Secrets book to further explore parts of the V20 Dark Ages we couldn’t in the main book, but also to assemble a V20 DA clan-based Fiction Anthology and a Quickstart. We experimented with staying very focused on our Stretch Goal rewards for this one and I think these are going to be very fun and useful books that will add to anyone’s appreciation of the setting. We still have some surprises stored up for the last 48 hours! If for some currrrazy reason you still missed this Kickstarter, here’s the link: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/200664283/deluxe-v20-dark-ages

I’m thankful our good buddy Eager Eddy Webb and his wife Michelle had fun on their LARP Cruise last week and got back to us safe, sound, and with some Mesoamerican ruins explored. These two are such game designers that when things were slow they bought two packs of playing cards – and redesigned how to play War. Game designers gotta design games. While Eddy was gone, he got a couple of messages that he and I talked about today which basically indicated that folks still think he is a CCP employee. Negatory on that. Eddy is a full-time freelance writer and designer in the gaming industry: tabletop RPGs, Live Action, fiction, computer games. He does it all. As part of his freelancing, he also has been hired by CCP to review and interface with the companies that have licenses for the White Wolf properties CCP owns. He is not inside CCP any more than I am, he just has more reasons to communicate with them as part of his contract gig with them. Sorry if our relationship was in any way unclear.

I’m thankful that our Onyx Path crew talked me out of my original title for this week’s blog: “Enough Negativity, Let’s Have a Yes-vember!”

Each week this month I’m going to give some thoughts on a different kind of thanks, and this week it’s thanks for the past. This is kind of a safe sort of thanks, as it’s about things that already happened. Fuzzy nostalgia sort of stuff. In my case, lots of white fuzzy wolf fur.

The great thing about our hobby is that those moments don’t need to have occurred in real life, those moments we can be thankful for might have occurred during a tabletop or live-action session. The lessons and the feelings are just as significant in terms of their impact. So here’s a few from me that are specifically gaming and White Wolf related:

– The first couple of Gen Cons I attended with the guys working on White Wolf Magazine. We started out selling the magazine all day from the WW booth, and gaming all night in our hotel rooms. Each year we partied more and gamed less until that fateful Paranoia game where not one of us could move the story forward but we sure could empty and line up the beer bottles around the entire hotel room walls. Yet because of gaming before then, I am thankful I got to know those guys before the crazy success of Vampire, that I got to sit in on a Warhammer Fantasy game where Ken Cliffe did his hilarious and spot-on Black Adder impersonation, and played Jorune with the Lekers who created it. Both Stew and Steve Wieck were college students, and were so smart and so honest that those handful of conventions set the stage for how I would always think of them.

– Dragon-Con, a couple of years before Vampire hit. My first LARP was an Ars Magica one, played at the con with the combined WW and Lion Rampant crew who were in Georgia. As a House Flambeau representative to a council seeking to judge if Mark Rein Hagen’s character was a traitor, I stomped around accusing just about everybody to foster doubt about his guilt. One player and I wound up nose to nose screaming at each other; he was so mad spittle flew. Afterwards, I went over to him to say thanks, and he told me to fuck off. I am thankful that I learned that night how much people invest emotionally in roleplaying.

– All the playtesting sessions, short or multi-week, for all our games that I joined in on from Vampire: the Masquerade right through to the early WoD MMO. I am thankful that I learned that players make games their own, sometimes very much in a direction the creators never intended. And that is one of the truly magical parts of our hobby.

– Playing Diplomacy with a WW crew in the office in the later 90’s that included Steve Wieck and Rich Dansky and realizing I was lying and cheating my way to winning, and hating how that felt. I’m thankful that for some reason that resonated so strongly with me that it altered how I deal with people and run Onyx Path. I’d rather have small successes and treat people decently, than trade them in for a big win.

– A couple of years ago, we had reached the end “episode” of Eddy Webb’s V20 semi-noir chronicle played over Skype/Roll20. I was playing a Malkavian junkie weasel sort of character, very twitchy and not aggressive. But desperately connected to two other characters as almost parental substitutes, one of whom was a very tough Brujah. In the final fight, the Brujah Maxx was going at it with another vampire (revealed to be Sabbat coming into our city) and it looked like Maxx was going to be taken down. I had every intention of playing the character as I had so far and remaining hidden behind some boxes in this warehouse meeting space we were in. The Sabbat vampire grabbed Maxx and was about to hold her head in one of those flaming trash cans and before I could process why I said it, I told Eddy I was leaping on the Sabbat baddy’s back and driving his upper body into the fire. I’m muttering something like “You’re bad and you burn” over and over again into my headset, and while Eddy rolls damage and soak and all that, the rest of the players are silent. Maxx strong arms my Malk off the burning body and pulls him away. Still nothing from the rest of the players. Then, into the silence, Mike Tinney whispers “Damn that was scary”, and everybody starts talking at once about how my character’s action was so unexpected but so right that it weirded them out. Sometimes we don’t know why we do things in a story, but I’m thankful role-playing has moments like that that work so well when you act on inspiration. Apply that to real life as you will.

I’ve got a million of these, so I’d better stop before this blog gets bigger than the next Song of Ice and Fire novel (or Mage 20). Anybody else have moments in gaming they can look back on with some thanks? I’d love to hear them!

And while we are going down memory row, here are some current projects to give thanks for (I certainly do):

DEVELOPMENT STATUS FROM ROLLICKING ROSE (Projects in bold have changed listings)

First Draft (The first phase of a project that is about the work being done by writers, not dev prep)

Beast: the Primordial core book (Beast: The Primordial)

W20 Pentex Employee Indoctrination Handbook (Werewolf: the Apocalypse 20th Anniversary Edition)

M20 How do you DO that? (Mage: the Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition)

M20 Book of Secrets (Mage: the Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition)

Cursed Necropolis: Rio (Mummy: the Curse)

Secrets of the Covenants (Vampire: The Requiem 2nd Edition) – In Open Development

Wraith: the Oblivion 20th Anniversary Edition

V20 Black Hand: Guide to the Tal’Mahe’Ra (Vampire: the Masquerade 20th Anniversary Edition) – In Open Development

W20 Novel by Mike Lee (Werewolf: the Apocalypse 20th Anniversary Edition)

Exalted 3rd Novel by Matt Forbeck (Exalted 3rd Edition)

W20 Changing Ways (Werewolf: the Apocalypse 20th Anniversary Edition)

Redlines

Mummy Fiction Anthology (Mummy: the Curse)

Exalted 3rd Fiction Anthology (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Arms of the Chosen (Exalted 3rd Edition)

W20 Shattered Dreams (Werewolf: the Apocalypse 20th Anniversary Edition)

Mage: the Awakening 2nd Edition, featuring the Fallen World Chronicle (Mage: the Awakening) – In Open Development

Second Draft

Promethean: the Created 2nd Edition, featuring the Firestorm Chronicle (Promethean: the Created) – Playtesting

Development

V20 Red List (Vampire: the Masquerade 20th Anniversary Edition)

V20 Ghouls (Vampire: the Masquerade 20th Anniversary Edition)

World of Darkness Dark Eras- Vampire chapter (WoD Dark Eras)

Sothis Ascends (Mummy: the Curse)

V20 Lore of the Clans (Vampire: the Masquerade 20th Anniversary Edition)

Fallen World Chronicle Fiction Anthology (Mage: the Awakening)

Editing

Mage: the Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition core book (Mage: the Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition)

Werewolf: the Forsaken 2nd Edition, featuring the Idigam Chronicle (Werewolf: the Forsaken)

Exalted 3rd Edition core book- From Holden: “During the course of editing we realized we forgot to ever mention the way the soul-eaten victims of the Fair Folk become compliant drones often sold back to the Guild as slave labor, so we added a paragraph covering that. Weekly updates become repetitive during this stage: The book is finishing in editing. Art continues to come in thick and fast, being reviewed and revised”. (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Firestorm Chronicle Fiction Anthology (Promethean: the Created 2nd Edition)

Development (post-editing)

World of Darkness Dark Eras core book (WoD Dark Eras)

Idigam Chronicle Fiction Anthology (Werewolf: the Forsaken)

ART DIRECTION FROM MIRTHFUL MIKE