“Lore of the Clans” Open Development Coming Soon!

Open Development, Vampire: The Masquerade

TL;DR VERSION: VAMPIRE CLANBOOK OPEN DEV COMING SOON! WATCH THE BLOGS! DON’T BE A DICK!

Much more long-winded and rambling version:

Wow, has it been a year already? Last time I was here, I was posting on whitewolfblogs.com, talking about blood magic and all sorts of crazy things. How time flies.

Sorry, got nostalgic for a moment. Let me try again.

Hey, all. Eddy here, your friendly neighborhood Vampire: The Masquerade developer. Now that Rites of the Blood is in everyone’s hands and they’re absorbing the blood-soaked goodness (and the latent mind control instructions I had embedded in the PDF — remember, the codeword is “Integration Jesus”), it’s time to shift focus and work on Lore of the Clans, previously The Clanbook, previously Blood Diaries of the Clans.

Over the next couple of weeks, I’m going to be redlining drafts of each Clan chapter and posting them online for folks to review. (“Redlining,” for those that don’t know our lingo, means I’ll be editing the first draft primarily with a focus on content, so the freelancer in question can revise accordingly.) As in previous years, I’ll be putting them up as Google Docs that anyone can comment on. I invite everyone to dive in and read up on them, and comment as you feel you need to! Just please keep it civil. I’d appreciate if everyone could direct their civil, insightful comments to the Google docs or the blog posts. I know folks like to discuss things on Facebook or the forums or G+ or wherever they’re comfortable, but it’s hard for me to see everything. If you have a cool discussion and drop a link to it as a comment on the blog, that works just as well to make sure I see it.

I should warn folks that there will be new material here and there in these drafts. I did ask the writers to stay pretty close to the existing material, but I also encouraged them to dig in and play with things to give new ideas and twists to the Clans. Sometimes, it’ll be too far. Other times, it’ll be too conservative. I ask that you keep an open mind with the new material and not reject it out of hand just because it’s new.

Another thing is that, odds are, your favorite thing isn’t going to be there. Even if we doubled the size of the book, it would be hard to get everything in, so I have to make hard decisions with each Clan. If you absolutely think something needs to go in, go ahead and bring it up, but I’m always going to start from the position of “no, there’s no room” and work from there. (Then again, I didn’t think we could fit infernalism into Rites of the Blood, and open development was a factor in getting a whole chapter of it added, so you never know!)

All that being said, I haven’t cracked open any of the manuscripts yet. I’ve got two in my inbox right now, and I expect a few more in the next day or so. The rest should trickle in as we’re all digging into the first set, so this should (theoretically) flow nicely over the next few weeks. It’s possible this could all go off the rails, leaving our bodies as twisted and charred corpses under the watery moonlight. But I’m excited to see what’s coming up, and I hope you are too!