As an illustration of just how different the 1990s were from our current hell world, roleplaying games were steady, if not big, business. TSR was still plugging along, hitting new creative heights in their 2nd edition AD&D settings like Planescape and Dark Sun. Chaosium, hoary creators of Runequest and Call of Cthulhu, were experiencing a renaissance with new editions of their classic games. You could get jobs (with benefits!) making the groggiest of grognard games, modeling armor slopes and muzzle velocities in paper and cardboard form for companies like Avalon Hill.

The landscape was littered with publishing houses churning games out, good and bad, but all yoked to a sense of endless belief that somewhere in the hobby stores and conventions you could find the future if you turned the right key.

One of the most successful studios, and certainly the coolest, was down south, in Atlanta. White Wolf Publishing was setting the gaming world on fire with their World of Darkness line. You know their influence, even if you don't know the games themselves; Vampire: The Masquerade was the biggest, but not the only one, with the same general conceit—monsters are real, but hidden, and you are one of them—spread from vampires to werewolves to wizards and more.

A significant part of what makes the current generation of roleplaying games feel so vibrant—its burgeoning, albeit imperfect, space for women, minorities, LGBTQ, the spaces for the political and non-traditional—was presaged by White Wolf.

The company went from small studio to behemoth very quickly after Vampire came out in 1991 on the back of the design team eschewing the trappings of most roleplaying games which preceded them. They incorporated lyrics from goth and punk songs into their texts and heightened the growing sense that the 90s were just the calm before a storm so incomprehensible we could only translate it via whispered symbols of nightmares. It was the same impulse which buoyed The X-Files to its heights; we don't understand what's coming so let's pretend it's already here. White Wolf was forward thinking and desperately cool during the decade which gave us The Crow and Blade.

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That's why Street Fighter: The Storytelling Game is such an oddity—at the height of its powers, White Wolf did a 180 from its tragically cool horrorpunk metaverse and made a game based on the legendary fighting game. Street Fighter upended expectations of what roleplaying game combat looked like in White Wolf's unifying Storytelling system, and in tabletop RPGs at large. It was weird and unexpected.