I've only recently become of aware of the "old school renaissance" in regards to Dungeons and Dragons. By recently, I mean the last three or four years. Up until then I would have scoffed at anyone attempting to talk me into playing anything but the current addition of the game. That changed though, due to the Superhero Necromancer. He actually talked me into played OD&D (which he's explained to me a few hundred times, is different from 1st edition D&D.), and that in turn led to this whole old school world opening up before me.
I'm wondering now though, if a sort of old school renaissance is taking place among White Wolf fans. It looks that way. With the CCP?White Wolf no longer running or organizing the Camarilla Fan Club, a call has gone out among the rank and file of members to return to the Old World of Darkness. I'm not sure what the terminology for it would be though, did they end with 3rd ed. or was it 2nd ed. revised?
Either way, I'm behind it. As in, I support it. The New World of Darkness (especially Vampire), shows a decided lack of mythology that the original had. Werewolf has done a good job of capturing some of the flavor and spiritual interaction that Apocalypse had. I was never all that into Mage so I can't really comment. Changeling is even better in its newest incarnation. And Geist, wow, Geist is everything that Wraith should have been.
Rambling aside, hah, I suppose what I'm getting at is that I'll get the most out of a Vampire the Masquerade resurgence. Although a return to Werewolf The Apocalypse would be great, since I spent soooo much time and money on that setting.
It's all a moot point as White Wolf has apparently outlived its pencil and paper game usefulness to CCP and won;t be producing too much more tabletop gaming material.
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It seems to me that the possibility of White Wolf receding a bit from the front line of the tabletop business would be a good reason for an old World of Darkness Renaissance to really get going. Of course, as with all these kinds of things, what the renaissance would really need would be a few motivated and productive individuals leading the charge by supporting the old games with fan publications of various kinds. The OGL for D&D was a real boon to the old school D&D folks because it gave them a legal route for cloning the games.
ReplyDeleteVampire, Werewolf, etc. don't have that framework in place, though you could certainly still clone the core rules to some extent without getting yourself into too much trouble. The difficult part seems to be the settings, which are White Wolf/CCP intellectual property. That means that depending on their policies about fan websites, you'd be limited as far as what you could do. Hell, even with fairly open fansite policies, you'd still have to solve the problem of how to publish support for the game, I think.
This all assumes that a small publishing industry associated with the games would be important to this renaissance. I tend to think it's part of the success of the OSR crowd, but it may not be absolutely essential. If there's a way to get lots of players active in playing the older versions of the game, you have your renaissance in all the ways that really matter. If the LARP organizations are moving in that direction, that might be where the heart of this renaissance would live.