V20 Dark Ages: Value-Added Content (Oh yeah, and Cappadocians)

Vampire: The Masquerade

As we develop V20 Dark Ages, I get a lot of this question. “Can we see the stuff you guys talk about between drafts, the notes you cut, and all that?” Usually, we don’t include these notes because they’re silly, they become redundant, or they make us look like slightly less than consummate professionals.

My philosophy is, what the fuck ever.

I like this kind of stuff. I think it gives a deeper insight into the development of the game. And as game players, we’re all kind of game designers. At our table, we design the specifics, we tweak, we twist, we mess with our games. This kind of insight can help guide that, and I think that’s peachy keen. I think it also helps to remind readers that we’re people, too. While we can be super serious at times, that’d drive us batty if we kept it up constantly. One of my favorite examples comes from World of Darkness: Armory Reloaded. If you look closely, you can see a few of Chuck Wendig’s development notes that snuck into the main text.

So I’m going to share some of our development notes, shared between two of our writers in the Cappadocian esoterica.I find these notes particularly great, because yes, they’re a little silly, but they’re also showing the degree of attention our writers are paying to giving this the right tone, feel, and linguistic gravity. I’ve compiled it with the first draft of the Cappadocian clan, for a bit of context.

I also kept her art notes, which kind of tickle me, but show the kinds of stuff I tend to get on the first pass from my writers. These will get expounded upon and polished before we send it over to Mike in art direction. Speaking of Mike and art, did you see his post featuring the fucking amazing Demon: The Descent art from Cathy Wilkins? I hope we can get her on V20 Dark Ages.

(The esoterica is going to be an additional “setting” chapter that’s full of all sorts of clan-driven weirdness, like minor Paths, Noddist lore, new interpretations of old lore, alternate mythology, and other neat stuff you can’t wait to see.)

Cappadocian Clan Content

Anyway, you probably came for the Cappadocian content. Here it is! Now, normal caveats apply. It’s a first draft. It’s not even been through my normal development process. So keep that in mind. While we love suggestions and thoughts, anything requiring massive rewrites is pretty unlikely to happen because of scheduling. If you want to link to this, live link to the Google Doc, because we may fuss with it.

And Where We’re At

As a basic status update, I’m redlining a lot of documents right now. I’m also getting in a few drafts here and there that relied on other drafts for completion. Some of the writers are working on their second passes. I have a sneaking suspicion this book will require a third text pass, just because so much of the text is reliant on other parts to fall into place properly. The job of a developer is mostly about continuity and congruence. That’s particularly challenging on core content.