In 1991, White Wolf Game Studio released Vampire: The Masquerade which took the tabletop gaming world by storm. This game, about vampires hidden in a dark reflection of our modern world, eventually grew to be part of the World of Darkness. Now, World of Darkness has announced a return home by rebranding itself White Wolf once again.
This interview has been edited for clarity and combines quotes from multiple interview sessions.
“Around eight months ago, I think,” said Jason Carl, Brand Marketing Manager at White Wolf, “when Marco [Behrmann] came on board as the new VP, the Vice President of Darkness as we like to say, we started to take a look around at the business. It’s been going since the start of V5 [Vampire: The Masquerade Fifth Edition] We have over 45 licensees now. World of Darkness as a licensing organization is very successful. Lots of licensees are doing great work creating all kinds of different products; video games, tabletop roleplaying games, board games, card games, T-shirts, pins, more besides and some things you haven’t even seen yet. That’s great, but how do we grow the business? What do our customers want from us? What do our business partners want from us? What do our fans want to see from us? It quickly became apparent that we wanted and needed to become publishers again. We wanted to get back into the first party publishing business not just tabletop role playing games, but video games as well and other kinds of products. And we’ve been very successful at creating World of Darkness as a licensing organization. We needed to to avoid market confusion, to avoid confusion with our fans and customers. We wanted to make sure that everybody realized that this is a big change. Bringing publishing into the mix again is significant. And we wanted a name that would reflect the new business unit and the entirety of what it does now. [White Wolf] is the name that makes sense for this kind of business unit doing all these different things together. And it’s the name that many of our business partners, many of our fans, many people in our community already know us by or at least, you know, have a positive association with. Let’s go ahead and bring White Wolf out of Torpor.”
World of Darkness is a setting much like our own, except supernatural monsters are real. Vampires engage in bloody political battles in the shadows of the cities while werewolves stalk the countryside fighting a losing battle against the end of world. What launched the game into the imaginations of millions was the chance to play those creatures as they fight to control their monstrous side with their human feelings.
“You are the monster,” said Carl. “That has been at the core of the World of Darkness ever since its inception. It remains a core today. You are playing in a game of very personal struggle and you’re the monster. You’re not necessarily the antagonist or the bad guy but you are the monster. That was a revolutionary idea when it came out and it stood the role playing games hobby on its ear. Now, it’s not as revolutionary of an idea but the way the World of Darkness presents it and the way in which it invites you to engage with that idea is still unique.”
As a mirror to the real world, fans want to know what’s going on in their neck of the woods and how to experience it. The original games had a sprawling interconnected metaplot that the current edition moved back into shadow not unlike what happened with IP like Star Wars or Marvel. Moving forward, they want to rebuild World of Darkness in a similar manner by taking stuff from the past that works while also not being afraid to explore new ideas that resonate more with modern day players.
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“We’ve reached a point now where the demand for the IP is so strong and so high and where our players, our fans, our partners are expecting consolidation and centralization of that IP development,” said Carl. “They want to go to one place to learn who is the Prince of Milan tonight, right? What really happened in Minneapolis/St. Paul when that stuff went down in the Winter’s Teeth comic book series? Are the events of Night Road canon? Are those characters available to us to put in a video game? How should we stat them for our tabletop games? All that is perfectly valid. I think our fans and partners should expect that from us. But the best way for us to do it, at least with the maximum efficiency, is to bring it all inhouse and have that IP development run centrally.”
The tabletop roleplaying games side of the World of Darkness has been handled recently by Renegade Game Studios. They took over publication of Vampire The Masquerade while also bringing two other classic game lines to life: Hunter: The Reckoning and Werewolf: The Apocalypse. For the time being, the company will still be producing those games with White Wolf as a partner.
“No immediate change,” said Carl. “There’s no reflection on Renegade at all. They’ve been a fantastic partner with World of Darkness. As a publishing business we need to work more directly with developing tabletop RPGs. The demand for the IP is growing. It’s really significant already and it’s only growing. We need to do more with it. That means we’ve got to bring more people on board. We’ve got to build out our creative team. We have to build out our publishing. We have to build out our distribution. We need to be able to manage that business centrally now top to bottom. What is it the British say? Soup to nuts.”
Vampire: The Masquerade: Fifth Edition was released in 2018. Seven years into a gameline is often when publishers consider an undated corebook if not an entirely new edition. As White Wolf settles into its new role as steward of the World of Darkness, there are lots of ways the company could go.
“We’re going to bring on more people into the core team inside the White Wolf organization,” said Carl. “we’re going to take a really thorough look at the environment. We’re going to pay a lot of attention to what our TTRPG players and storytellers are telling us that they want. I do see the interest in a combined set of V5 or condensed set of V5 books that combine all the recent changes, all the updates that are in the Players Guide, all the new information across a number of source books. It makes sense that we should at least look at consolidating some of that material in a different format. Maybe they’re different. Maybe they’re prestige versions. Maybe they’re softcover versions. Maybe they’re PDF and soft cover together with a hardcover omnibus that follows later. I don’t think that we’ve made any decision about that yet. We owe it to our players and our storytellers to listen to what they’re telling us about that. And if it’s possible and it makes sense for the business, that’s exactly what we should give them.”
The first game published under the revived banner of White Wolf will be the long awaited Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines 2 video game currently slated for an October 2025 release.