Ye Olde Staging Point

(Before I begin, a quick aside: It's getting difficult to post anything game-related that can match up to Ed's recent string of excellent gaming posts. Great stuff, Ed.)

While I was at Gencon, I stopped by the White Wolf booth to see what their much-hyped "big announcement" was going to be. For those not familiar with White Wolf, they're a major roleplaying game company that publishes a lot of "monster" RPGs with names like Vampire: the Masquerade and Werewolf: the Apocalypse. They had a pretty big impact on the world of RPGs when they debuted with Vampire way back in the 90s. For reasons I won't go into now, I'm not a big fan of their games in general (although I did pick up a hefty batch of Mage and Werewolf sourcebooks recently when my local gaming store went out of business), but they do happen to print one of my favorite RPGs: Hunter. In Hunter, instead of playing a monster, you play an everyday human "gifted" with the ability to see the evil creatures around you and tasked with the job of dealing with them. It's a worthy game, in my opinion.

So what is White Wolf's big announcement? They're blowing up all of their gamelines. Well, most of them--all of the games set in their World of Darkness universe, which includes all of the aforementioned games and a slew of others.

Included as a major plot/setting hook in each of their games since Vampire has been the idea that the end of the world is just around the corner, that your characters are living in the final days of the earth, and that the entire universe is teetering on the brink of destruction. It's big, it's epic, and I suppose it's gotten a bit stale now that we're a few years past Y2K. So over the next few months, they'll be ending the game lines by having Armageddon finally arrive, presumably destroying everything in a series of climactic in-game events.

My first thought upon hearing the news was disappointment that the Hunter line would be ending, but it was impossible to deny the coolness of the basic idea. They're blowing up not just one game, but a whole group of games--some of which are exceedingly popular, sales-wise. I was impressed that they're actually taking on a project with such a huge potential to enrage loyal fanboys.

Mostly, I'm just jealous--because writing a sourcebook detailing the end of the world for a roleplaying game sounds like an incredibly fun job.

Even beyond that, I'm feeling quite inspired right now to run a World of Darkness campaign--Hunter or otherwise. How cool is it to be on hand to play in the closing scenes of the gameworld? Not many games set you up to actually participate in the End. It sounds pretty fun to me.

It's somewhat cheesy, but in a let's-have-fun-with-this sort of way. The countdown to the End, in the form of a daily news ticker at their website, has begun, and reading the news items, I see they're already killed off one major character from the Hunter setting (the August 5 entry--the former Marine/activist), and possibly a second (if I'm correctly guessing the identity of the man in the August 4 story). So far, so good--here's hoping Hunter goes out with a bang.

So yeah. I thought it was cool, anyway, and I'm suddenly a lot more interested in White Wolf's stuff than I was before they made their announcement.