I just found out over the weekend that White Wolf is dusting off it's Old World of Darkness, slapping a fresh coat of paint on it and giving the optimistically titled, "Classic World of Darkness", a fresh look just in time for the system's 20th anniversary.I'm pretty happy about that, all things considered. Vampire and Wraith interested me more as settings than games, but Mage and Werewolf were fantastic games, and overall the Old... er, Classic World of Darkness was a great example of product and line development, as well as a cautionary tale about reaches and grasps. The system's greatest strength was it's depth of background and the interconnectedness of the whole thing, with the backstories of the various factions weaving in and out of the others'.
Unfortunately, they couldn't keep their stories straight. One book would contradict another, which would then be invalidated by a third. Which is fine, when you're dealing with deep conspiracies and the like, but the end of it all really got to me. After years of mapping out every single detail of the World of Darkness, White Wolf put out it's Time of Judgement series, which amounted to them abdicating responsibility for their creation and saying, "how this story ends, the story we've been telling for the last several years at no small cost to you the consumer, yes the ending is up to you, because really, this is YOUR story."
Maybe it was my fault, for having unrealistic expectations for it all - I was suckered by their frankly masterful mixture of mechanics and narrative, and started treating it more like a work of fiction than a game. I wasn't reading Blood Treachery to find out the stats on the Vampiric Mages, I wanted to know what happened in the war between the Tremere and the Order of Hermes!
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