OSSR: World of Darkness: Mirrors

[Anon_issue]

Bleeding Edge

This is the section on making a cyberpunk version of The World of Darkness. Timely, too, as Cyberpunk 2077 was released today.



I asked for this! People have been asking for some version of this for 30 years!

Pretty much since the very beginning there has been demand for a cyberpunk take on The World of Darkness. I’m not even sure how many times people have tried to make it work (depends on what you count as serious material of course), but this book represents at least one more attempt. The basic themes of Vampire the Masquerade – crime and pollution, transhumanism, loneliness and alienation, personal corruption and moral decay, enormous dark gothic cities that mix the present with the past, long black trench coats – make it a perfect fit for cyberpunk. Plus, in Vampire the characters explicitly live forever and you are constantly encouraged to think on very long time-scales in order to engage with the vampire politics. So if you ignore all the stuff about the looming apocalypse (which isn’t even a thing in nwod) it’s pretty reasonable for the characters to ask what the world of 50 years from now will look like.

Like, the entire party goes into torpor for 100 years, they wake up and the world has changed… how exactly? Are there off-world colonies? Entire cities built on nanotechnology? Insectoid robots? Cyborgs? The books never had any good answers on how you should handle it. The vast majority of the time they would just completely ignore the possibility. Both versions of the World of Darkness were drowning in setting material for playing historical games, but you had to subsist on crumbs if you wanted to do anything set even a decade into the future. We got a version of Werewolf: The Apocalypse set in the wild west before we got decent cyberpunk support. Absurd.

The real question is: does this section deliver anything useful for your own homebrew Cyberpunk/WOD crossover? The unfortunate answer is: “almost certainly no.”

We get two sample settings: “Tomorrow Country” and “Metalground.” Both are explained very badly as the information for each is spread out throughout the entire section for no reason. I think Tomorrow Country is supposed to be more low-key and realistic and Metalground is supposed to be more outlandish with open supernatural stuff, but I wouldn’t be willing to bet money on it. We also get some new merits that I think are recycled from Hunter: The Vigil to set up a kind of pseudo-class based system where you get bonuses to certain skills and a new morality system (“alienation”) that is supposed to represent morality for cyberpunk antiheros.

Then there’s the rules for transhuman augmentations (here called “plugins”). Augmentations are treated as merits, and the rules are shit. By default, an augmentation just gives bonus dice equal to the size of the merit to any two rolls of the players choosing. If the augmentation does something that is impossible for a normal human (like turning invisible) you are supposed to borrow the rules from any published nwod power. So for example turning invisible is the third dot of Obfuscate, so the merit cost is 3 dots and a hypothetical implant than turns you invisible works exactly like that power in terms of rules and modifiers.



A reasonable person might point out that turning invisible whenever you want is massively more useful than just getting +3 to Dexterity + Stealth, so it’s a dead giveaway that the system didn’t have much thought put into it, and really the whole thing is incredibly threadbare in the sense of “make something up, assign a point cost”. We don’t get any monetary costs, there’s no hard-limit on how many augmentations you can have, no discussion of how different supernaturals handle implants, etc. What really kills it for me though is that there’s this elaborate system where you have to roll willpower to use your implants and if you fail bad things happen to you. It is really REALLY easy to imagine scenarios where this makes no sense (like dermal armor) and the whole thing is a waste of space that slows the game down and fucks-over players that happen to roll badly. It’s complete bullshit, and I think whoever wrote the section must have hated the entire idea of players getting augmentations and wrote the rules to try and screw them over somehow.

Then we get to hacking. In the vast majority of cyberpunk games someone who can do nothing but hacking is still considered a valuable member of the team. In the nwod system, hacking is entirely handled by a single skill (Computer) and you can completely max that out at character creation. Back in 2004 the world didn’t even have smart phones, and with every real world year that passes the Computer skill gets more and more powerful. So how do they reconcile the nwod skill system with the vastly increased importance of computers and hacking in cyberpunk fiction compared to a modern-day setting?

Basically they don’t. We get one fucking paragraph where they recommend that you reskin the social and mental combat systems to represent hacking, which is such an absurd, shit, braindead idea that doesn’t even acknowledge the problem. We also get advice to treat corporate AI’s as spirits for most purposes, which is … a fairly good idea, but after completely fucking up the need for new hacking rules I’m not going to give them any credit. It’s a bit like if you went to Pizza Hut and you ordered a pizza and they gave you an empty box with no pizza, but they “made it up to you” by giving you extra napkins. You don’t get points for extras after you fucked up the main shit everyone was asking for.

So yes, the mythical cyberpunk World of Darkness that actually works is once again nowhere to be seen. My advice: just crack open GURPS or FATE, because by the time you wrangle the nwod system into usability the group will have lost interest. How the fuck they could have fallen down so badly on the two basic things people wanted for almost every cyberpunk setting (augmentations and decent hacking rules) is anyone’s guess. Seriously, those two sections are what most people were interested in and they got all of 2 pages out of 23. The rest is filled out with ruminations about old cyberpunk novels and some not-terribly-cyberpunk-specific mechanics that no one cared about.

What a waste.

Infinite Macabre

The section on doing space horror. Think something along the lines of the Alien movies or Event Horizon or maybe Firefly.



Hopefully it will at least turn out better than Jason X. But who knows.

We get some discussion on the genre of space opera as well as some rules for owning and using space ships, complete with the players being able to buy their own spaceships with merits. The space ship rules have a very “kludge-y” feel (The rules are for space ship chases are basically the rules for vehicle chases but re-skinned, there are linear costs for non-linear benefits, the fluff doesn’t always match up with the mechanics, etc.) but they are decently workable if no one tries to minimax the system or if you are willing to change some of the values: C+


We also get some pretty good fluff for how interstellar travel works: There are giant scary-looking stargates of unknown origin (“Stygian Gates”) that lead into hyperspace, but in order for a ship to remain in hyperspace, the hyperspace dimension (depicted as an evil dark dimension like the Warp from Warhammer) has to “feed” off of the willpower of the crew. Long-range FTL is therefore limited by the collective sanity of the crew, because if the journey goes on too long the crew goes insane and reality starts to break down. Fun mechanics and more flavorful than the standard “hyperdrive” excuse: A-

We then get a lot of discussion about how all the different nwod splats adapt to outer space. Most of the mini-section is a waste of time. The whole thing is basically the phrase “The World of darkness…… BUT IN SPACE!” repeated 100 times. Like we get descriptions of every single nwod group/faction but with a bunch of random space words (Nebula, Wormhole, Asteroid, etc.) sprinkled in. Like it’s Werewolf: The Forsaken……. but they’re on a space station! Mind blown! Except not really. We do get a few new mechanics for how different characters might adjust to outer space, some of which are actually interesting, but it is still too padded. We don’t even get basic rules for doing things in zero-gravity, which is an incredibly glaring oversight.

We also see the return of our old friend “entire paragraph full of questions” in several places:

A vampire’s vulnerability to sunlight is a supernatural one, not a biological one. So it’s up to you to determine the nature of a vampire’s aversion to sun or starlight. Is the vampire harmed only by the light of those stars orbited by habitable planets (tying it to the vibrancy of human life and how the sun sustains those naturally living and burns those who are unnaturally undead)? Is the vampire vulnerable to all starlight? Or, again, is it only the light of our own sun that burns the vampire? If a vampire is Embraced on a different planet—or moon, or stardock—is he burned by the sun in that system only?

You know. One or none or some combination of the above options. Whatever.



We finish off with those rules I promised about making aliens. Specifically, a system for making alien PCs. How it works is that there are a bunch of merits in four sections: mental, physical, social, and cultural. You make your character as if they were a normal human and then you load up on alien merits using a (stupid) tier system. You can take a handful of optional alien flaws (“imperfections”) if you want more points, but by default aliens will end up more powerful than normal humans. So for example you can combine the traits Human-Seeming (•), Natural Armor(••), Lyrical Voice (•••), and Hive Mind (•••••) to create your own alien species.

It’s a great starting point, if a bit wobbly. The only really obviously overpowered merit is Non-Linear Thought Patterns (•••), which gives permanent 8-again to five different mental skills AND reduces the untrained penalty for those skills from -3 to -1, making it an absolute must-have for any mental focused character. But other than some balance issues the concept is solid with three example alien species given. And I’ll admit, I’ve always loved free-form point balancing schemes like these that let you make your own stuff. It’s all the accounting fun of chargen mixed with the primal artistic freedom of making shit up.


…Which is why it’s such a disappointment that there isn’t even close to enough content for it to really be playable. With only a handful of merits for each category, the designers all but admit in a sidebar that you’re going to have to make up your own content if you really want to use the system, and I completely agree. Which is a shame because the rules for aliens could very easily be extended to cover things like sewer mutants or completely unique fairy-tale monsters. If this system had gotten the entire 30 pages I would have been much happier. I would have been happier still if White Wolf hadn’t totally crashed and burned years ago, but you can’t have everything.

Otherwise yeah, the space section is better and more useful than the cyberpunk section, if you can believe that.

[Anon_issue]

Appendix

The appendix is the last chapter of this book. We get ten essays each individually written by the ten different White Wolf writers who worked on this book (including Matthew MacFarland, but fuck that guy). Most of the essays dispense with the usual White Wolf shovelware prose and just get to the point. It is really refreshing. For once, the writers wrote something because they are earnestly trying to communicate their ideas rather than because they have to meet a quota.

It’s a good way to end the book, and it acts as a tiny glimpse of the better version of nwod that could have existed. A lot of nwod books had little flashes of insight and creativity and obvious passion for telling character-driven stories when you got away from the bad mechanics and madlibs design, and you see a lot of that in these essays.

For the sake of convenience, I’m only going to go over the essays I found to be interesting/amusing. The other ones aren’t necessarily bad, but they tend to be filled with standard GMing advice you can get anywhere, so I just have nothing interesting to say about them.


It Is Your Destiny Not To Suck By Ben Baugh

My favorite essay of the section, entirely devoted to a house-ruled XP system called “magic character beans.” How it works is that the players get all the XP for the campaign completely up-front, and they never get a single point of XP after that. Or if they do get more XP everyone gets the same amount at the same to represent the power-level of the campaign increasing (i.e. the players have gone from normal people trying to survive to professional investigators/monster hunters).

You spend as many of the points as you want in character creation to make your character as powerful as you want, and unspent points (“beans”) represent a metagame currency you can spend to get die roll bonuses. So if you have ten beans left over you have +10 worth of bonus die you can spend wherever you like. The unspent pool refreshes “whenever the Storyteller makes the story about your character”, and you can spend your beans at any point in the campaign to buy character stuff. Also included are some really great suggested rules, like being able to sell character traits during downtime to get beans back (potentially at loss), or being able to spend beans to miraculously survive death or do other narrative declarations.

It’s a great system, if a bit rough around the edges (the exact numbers seem a bit wonky, nwod flaws give out XP during play and these aren’t mentioned at all, metagame mechanics tend to reduce immersive horror etc.). The one part that really offends me though, is how the Storyteller is supposed to focus the story on whichever character has the most unspent points. In any game, making one of the players “the main character” is almost always a terrible idea that upsets group dynamics, even if that character is no more powerful in any objective sense. The refresh mechanic is also terrible. What the fuck counts as “being the focus of the story”? Getting a refresh can potentially represent an enormous advantage, and the refresh rules are so vague that arguments are practically inevitable if you try to run this thing as written.

All in all, though, this system is a little hidden gem, and I very much approve.


Stupid Storyteller Tricks By John Newman

Advice on how to run a game when you haven’t done nearly enough preparation:

• Encourage players to improvise, as this will buy you more time to come up with stuff.

• Don’t be afraid to use Google. Google is your friend.

• Have at least a basic plot. This only needs a few pre-planned locations, a few NPCS, and some vague overriding motivation to get players to do things. Don’t worry too much about plot holes. It’s likely no one will notice and if they do notice just imply that things are not as they seem or that the PCs have been tricked somehow. For quality you should aim more for “cheap horror movie” than “Shakespeare.”

• Don’t stat out every character. Just lie and use cheap approximations if you are forced to roll. If the character is supposed to be “good” at something just roll five dice. The only thing you need to track in any detail is Health for combat.

• Steal ideas shamelessly from popular culture, including entire characters. i.e. the cop they meet at the house is basically Stabler from Law and Order, just with a different name.

All very straightforward and useful, and bonus points for being honest about Google.

Authenticity: A Fire in the Heart of the Game By Malcolm Sheppard

A rambling essay about “authentic experience” and how important it is come to the gaming table in a spirit of good faith. The entire essay is very-well written in a single, flowing stream of consciousness with a focus on abstract, high-level ideas like the shared imaginative world or the collective expectation of the players. I enjoyed reading it, and there’s more intelligence and regard for the reader in these 1200 words than in entire White Wolf books.

It also only occurred to me later that everything he writes in this essay about the nature of roleplaying is system agnostic and has nothing to do with White Wolf games, so points to him for that.


Last Words: The Hat Trick By Chuck Wendig

This one is a disconnected grab-bag of ideas. Wendig points out that dramatic failures virtually never happen in Nwod (very true!). His solution is to suggest two different Owod botch mechanics, both of which are bad and have well-known problems. He then suggests a new, third botch mechanic where just a flat 10% of all failures are dramatic failures. The third option is pretty boring and will definitely slow the game down (you have to roll to determine dramatic failure every time you fail at any task), but it is something.

He then addresses what he calls “me-too” (#metoo?) syndrome in tabletop gaming. “Me-too” syndrome, as he defines it, is where one player fails at a task and another player will attempt the task right afterwards in a way that feels “munchkin-y.” I have never seen anything like what he describes in real life, so all of his proposed solutions are basically meaningless to me. It’s stuff like this that makes you realize just how incredibly different two gaming tables can be, and how dependent a game is on the personalities of everyone involved.

Finally, he introduces the eponymous hat-trick: put some pieces of paper in a hat where each piece of paper contains something unique (extra merits, dark secrets, free skill dots, plot hooks, etc.) and have each player take one to give a little randomness to character creation and spice up the game. Sounds cute, but I think it would get tiresome if you did it for every campaign.


Afterword

We end with an Afterword from Richard Thomas where he informs us that that Mirrors will be the last book published using traditional methods. I was originally going to quote his little spiel in full, but it is so blatantly insincere and filled with corporate double-speak that I decided against it. Here’s a little chunk anyway in case you were wondering what you were missing:

All in all, the success and fantastic creativity of this version of the World of Darkness proved that the setting itself was rich enough, complex enough and mysterious enough to evolve into new forms and still engage the imaginations of players and storytellers around the world.

[Anon_issue]

Final Thoughts


I am 90% certain that this game will be crap. Remember, you heard it from me first!


I first started getting interested in tabletop roleplaying around 2008 or 2009 when nwod was starting to really collapse, and nwod was the first system I learned front to back. I was taken in by the whole “mature storytelling” angle, but there was more to it than that. Games like DnD seemed very crass with their numbers and their leveling up and their endless treadmill of new content. Nwod promised a subtler experience, where maybe not much actually happened and there weren’t even that many mechanical options, but that was okay because you were roleplaying and there was actual tension and uncertainty. When everything is cranked up to 10, nothing ever stands out, and I appreciated nwod because it was trying to do the “gritty horror” thing and you were encouraged to draw on your knowledge of the real world to solve problems and get emotionally invested in the proceedings.

So for reasons of personal nostalgia I’ll probably always have some fondness for The World of Darkness, even though I’m well aware that 90% of the published content is crap. The reason I mention all this though, and half the reason I did the OSSR, is that as far as I am concerned this was It. This book was the final and permanent end to White Wolf and The World of Darkness in any form. Everything that came after this point was someone’s fanfiction, and really shitty fanfiction at that.

(Though to be fair, I did think that God-Machine/Demon: The Descent looked okay and were even interesting in places. But that’s what, maybe 3 or 4 good releases over a decade? That’s pathetic.)

Nwod was an unambiguous failure. Every White Wolf adaptation has come from the Old World of Darkness, which has been out of print for years. The most recent V5/chronicles of darkness stuff is even worse than nwod ever was and actively drives people away because it is so badly designed and thematically repugnant. Fuck, it’s enough to make you yearn for the days when storyteller RPGs where just kind of bland and tediously predictable instead of outright offensive and toxic.

The thing about roleplaying games though, is that the content never “goes away.” Popularity comes and goes, but pretty much any game of any note will last forever in a digital format (thanks internet pirates!) and unlike videogames you don’t have to worry about running an emulator or having your save files corrupted by weird unfixable bugs. From the comfort of my own home I can read the very first version of Dungeons and Dragons written by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson for free. That game is useless to me because pretty much everything that came afterward has done fantasy roleplaying better, but it’s there if I want it for some reason.

It’s the same with White Wolf. Even with the disgraceful downfall of the brand Mirrors was pretty much the best possible ending to the World of Darkness (1991 – 2011) we could have gotten by 2010. If you are ever going to run any kind of White Wolf game it is enormously unlikely you’ll use the rules as written. Instead you are going to pick and choose what to focus on from 20 years of publishing history, and you’re going to make your own mechanics and setting and story, either explicitly or just implicitly because many of the books were not very well written in the first place.

When you find yourself at that point, having a big book of mechanical options and setting ideas becomes invaluable. Long after the original writers have fucked-off, you can still pick through the rubble and make something that works, something that improves upon the original and gives you that perfect roleplaying experience you always wanted. In that context, Mirrors (or at least the general ideas forwarded by the book) could be seen as one last saving grace from a company that collectively fell off a cliff. The games might be fucked, but so long as the information still exists, there’s always the possibility of fixing them in some way. And in this world that’s the best kind of hope we can get.


Happy New Year!

[Whipstitch]

3. They never tell you that the setting is meant to be modular. By 2004 the World of Darkness had a huge fan base that was invested in more than a decade of continuity. People loved Vampire: The Masquerade. They still do. And nwod just refused to acknowledge the existence of anything owod related for years. Masquerade was the most successful thing White Wolf ever made, and the designers were trying to get away from it as quickly as possible. They plopped down the nwod lines as generically and uniformly as they could, and they expected everyone to just accept them without question. It was an incredibly authoritarian and tone-deaf approach to game design. All the passion and imagination died, and the advantages of any reboot were squandered. Just saying clearly from the beginning “hey, you can still keep running your owod stuff or just change things if you want to” could have made all the difference.

I'm actually of the opinion that "TTRPGs are modular" is both inherently true and something developers are best served by largely ignoring, at least when it comes to metaplot. The fact that many players can and will do much of the work for you isn't a great reason to fail to provide your own in-house alternatives. You only get one first impression and even the themes and ideas that individual tables throw out still end up going a long way towards establishing a brand and shared reference point for gamers from different tables to talk about when they discuss a given game line--for example, the minutia guys like Ancient History geeked out over did make me a bigger shadowrun fan even if I virtually never used that stuff at the table. So I'd argue that oWoD's cardinal sin is both that they threw out the old AND they didn't really do enough to have a sprawling replacement front and center when they rebooted.

[Anon_issue]

I'm actually of the opinion that "TTRPGs are modular" is both inherently true and something developers are best served by largely ignoring, at least when it comes to metaplot. The fact that many players can and will do much of the work for you isn't a great reason to fail to provide your own in-house alternatives. You only get one first impression and even the themes and ideas that individual tables throw out still end up going a long way towards establishing a brand and shared reference point for gamers from different tables to talk about when they discuss a given game line--for example, the minutia guys like Ancient History geeked out over did make me a bigger shadowrun fan even if I virtually never used that stuff at the table. So I'd argue that oWoD's cardinal sin is both that they threw out the old AND they didn't really do enough to have a sprawling replacement front and center when they rebooted.

I'm not actually sure we disagree. TTRPGs that are purely mechanical are definitely in the minority, and it's worth distinguishing between mechanical modularity and fluff/setting modularity.

Whether or not the reboot needed a metaplot, it definitely needed something. The dev's deliberately made a very homogenous madlibs type setting where there was no clear direction and the stakes were actually very low.

[themadimp]

It Is Your Destiny Not To Suck By Ben Baugh

My favorite essay of the section, entirely devoted to a house-ruled XP system called “magic character beans.” How it works is that the players get all the XP for the campaign completely up-front, and they never get a single point of XP after that. Or if they do get more XP everyone gets the same amount at the same to represent the power-level of the campaign increasing (i.e. the players have gone from normal people trying to survive to professional investigators/monster hunters).

You spend as many of the points as you want in character creation to make your character as powerful as you want, and unspent points (“beans”) represent a metagame currency you can spend to get die roll bonuses. So if you have ten beans left over you have +10 worth of bonus die you can spend wherever you like. The unspent pool refreshes “whenever the Storyteller makes the story about your character”, and you can spend your beans at any point in the campaign to buy character stuff. Also included are some really great suggested rules, like being able to sell character traits during downtime to get beans back (potentially at loss), or being able to spend beans to miraculously survive death or do other narrative declarations.

It’s a great system, if a bit rough around the edges (the exact numbers seem a bit wonky, nwod flaws give out XP during play and these aren’t mentioned at all, metagame mechanics tend to reduce immersive horror etc.). The one part that really offends me though, is how the Storyteller is supposed to focus the story on whichever character has the most unspent points. In any game, making one of the players “the main character” is almost always a terrible idea that upsets group dynamics, even if that character is no more powerful in any objective sense. The refresh mechanic is also terrible. What the fuck counts as “being the focus of the story”? Getting a refresh can potentially represent an enormous advantage, and the refresh rules are so vague that arguments are practically inevitable if you try to run this thing as written.

All in all, though, this system is a little hidden gem, and I very much approve.

This sounds a lot like the old Karma system of older Shadowrun editions (1E, 2E). It was a shitty idea then - trading real permanent character power for momentary power. If you know how long the game's going to last, you go all in on blowing it for one-time bonuses, because it's not going to fucking matter how many "beans" you have after the campaign is over. Rehashing a concept that's over 30 years old by this point isn't new and innovative, and there's all kinds of examples floating around out there of why this is a bad concept.