Vampire - The Masquerade
The oldest of the White Wolf games, and the company flagship that made it famous and among role-players and others. Since it was first written it has managed to get a great number of referencematerials to it, a historical version of the game, but also a TV-series and a subculture in its own right.
The game revolves around vampires. In the modern age cities, vampires live as in castles, hidden from mankind, science and themselves. Ancient vampires who remember the horrors of the inquisition rule their younger lessers as princes of a rigid meritocratic and gerontocratic society, locked in ancient traditions, siege-mentality and power-struggles between the undead. Each city is a castle and a prison, a haven and a fighting-ground for the undying.
Unlike other horror-games, the players are not supposed to make way-cool heros who hunt down and destroy these monsters, but rather play vampires themselves. The horror lies not in hunting the beast, but in being the beast. The main theme of the game is humanity, what it is, how to maintain it and what it is worth sacrificing for. For though vampires possess great powers, eternal life, healing blood and the chance to gain great wealth and influence and learn vast and timeless secrets, their greatest and most precious commodity is their humanity. With the beast of the vampire raging in their bodies, their undying souls and minds are all too easy to lose and all too hard to regain.
This is a game of personal horror and of great philosophical questions. Good versus evil is a far too easy theme, so this game rather focuses on right versus wrong, necesity versus morality and hope versus cynicism. It is the easiest playable games of the series, and in many ways the most rewarding. Personally I recommend the Second Edition, but unfortunately the Third Edition has rendered it hard to find. Much of the later works are not as interesting as the 2nd Edition materials, which focused more on the themes than on manga figures and pointless rules-clarifications (the golden rule of the story-telling systems is that there are no rules, so go figure if I like the third edition that focuses on "better rules".)
But no matter the edition, if you are into more serious role-playing and love the dark gothic-punk vampire themes, buy it, play it and love it!
Werewolf - The Apocalypse
Werewolf is White Wolf's second game. It is probably also the second most popular game in the series. The original concept was that a certain percentage of the earnings of the sales would go to save the american wolves (nature funds and stuff), but as I understand that concept disappeared with the "Next Generation" of writers in the company´, those who wrote the third edition games, for example.
Werewolf is a more complex and difficult game to play than Vampire. Werewolf is about doint the right thing, though you may be loathed, hated, hunted and even killed for it. Werewolves are more than just shapechanging beasts killing people every full moon, they are a breed of their own, half man half wolf, half flesh half spirit, set and destined (or doomed as it may be) to guard and protect the earth and all her things from the encrouchings of science and industrial technology. They also have to maintain a spiritual purity from the natural forces of corruption and decadence that threaten to be the end of the world. Be it greedy humans, monstrous vampires or evil spirits trying to corrupt and warp, mutate innocent people into wickedness, the werewolves must be there to stop it. Meanwhile they are a dying people, their legacies disappearing, their holy places destroyed and their kin slowly forgetting their heritage. They are tragic heros ever feared and hated by those few who know of them. And what is worse, they are not immune to corruption and weakness themselves, as they are partly human as well. A good dose of infighting, bad blood between different tribes and old wounds that heal badly, adds to the bad odds of this valiant but often dogmatic and fanatic breed.
Werewolf is a spiritual and yet brutally action-packed game. It's strength is its pathos and its weakness are its rules. The systems are sometimes a bit too rigid and too much like old AD&D level-system like to be entirely enjoyable. It is, however, a game of epic heroism, great sacrifice and wild adventure, so if you like action with a little theme and mood in it (and not just pure hack'n'slash), this is the game for you!
Mage - The Ascension
Well. What is there possibly to say about this, the best game ever made.
This game is a philosophical game about reality, truth and possibilities. It is a game of knowledge and learning and wonder, and of human struggle and desire for greatness and/or striving for a better future. If one does not like philosophy, this game will quickly become dead boring.
Mage is about the enlightened, humans who have awakened to the truth that reality is far more complex, changing and changeable than most will ever understand. Through this understanding, they start to realise that reality is maleable to some extent, and can with the right procedures be changed. Thus, they become what normal people would call "mages": People who can change and alter events, things and phenomenon with means that most would find fantastic, scary or just strange. But this is not as simplistic as it seems!
For these are not mere sorcerers with spells and incantations. Rather, they have varying philosophies, goals and methodologies. Some use pentagrams and rituals and chemicals and numbers to call forth elemental powers, others invoke spirits of nature, yet some use blood and life as the key to their magic, and some use inventions and gadgets. For in this game, technology is magic as well. What we call commonplace and what we call magic is simply a question of reality paradigms. In the dark ages, a car would be an immensely magical thing, while a spirit of the dead, or a man walking across the water would be rare, but not entirely unexptected. Not things are the other way around.
The players must create mages, enlightened individuals on their way to ascension, the true enlightenment. They must battle their inner fears as well as their outward opponents, be they fearful mortals, power-hungry vampires, werewolves with a bad attitude or mages with opposing views on how the world should look.
Among the mages there are many groups, but four major factions battle over superiority over the masses (aka mankind) and their minds and beliefs: The Traditions are the classical mages, be they sorcerers, martial artists with advanced minds, odd crazy professors or naturalistic shamans. Their strongest opponents, and those who have the strongest grip on reality at present, is the Tecknocracy. The Tecknocracy wishes safety for mankind, but at the expense of the freedom of said mankind. The Marauders wish for total caos and disorder, for unhindered creation and change, while the Nephandi wish for the utter elimination of all of creation. Though their magics (or tecknology) alone cannot achieve this, they can alter reality by changes the consensus of mankind (that is, what people think is real). Reality in Mage depends greatly upon what people think is real.
If you want some reference material to what Mage can be like, there are lots and lots of books and films to take impression of. Richard Bach's "Illusions" and "Jonathan Livingstone Seagull" are obligatory reading, as are the movies "Matrix", "In the Mouth of Madness" (on consensual reality), "Fight Club" (on a very colorful Awakening) and, in part, "Sleepy Hollow" (on paradigms and paradox).
Unfortunately, this game has been printed in a third edition. This edition is a re-worked, supposedly "freer" game than the 2nd Ed, but the truth is that certain changes to cosmology made the game terribly illogical and faulty. If you want the game, make darn sure you get the second edition!
In my view, this is the best game ever made. Best mood, best feeling, very good view on magic and cosmology. A must for lovers of quality and wonder.
Wraith - The Oblivion
Wraith begins with that your character dies, and that is probably the best thing that will ever happen in this game.
Wraiths are dead people living in the realms of the dead. Basically, there are several layers of these lands. The shadowlands are a dark reflection of the "skinlands" that is the lands of the living. It is like looking through a darkly shaded mirror to the living world. Here the wraiths can see the world of the living, but in a far more gray and decaying version. All things dieing or decaying are seen much more sharply. Beyond the shadowlands lies the tempest, an ever-raging storm of memories, emotions and things lost. Here lie the kingdoms of the dead, realms of ghosts and shades trying to survive together against Oblivion. Oblivion is the destructive force of the universe (called Wyrm by werewolves). It is the nothingness which all wraiths may fall into and be lost. Some wraiths gone mad with pain and grief, called spectres, rever this phenomenon and wish to drag all wraiths down with them to nothingness.
The game revolves a lot around hope, life, death and lost chances.
Wraith is a very moody and good game, one of my favourites. It is stark, relatively simple and full of that dark angst that can raise the "joy de vivre" in the hippest goth-babe.
If you like games based on character-plots, emotions and memories, this is a must!
Changeling - The Dreaming
Changeling is a rather misconcieved game about dreams, longing and of being an outcast in a cold, reasonbound world.
Changelings are immortal souls from a place called the Dreaming, who for various reasons possess and merge with humans. They are born as human children, they live, they die and then they are reborn in another human being. There are a number of fixed races with and one must be either seely or unseely. The system of "magic" (cantrips) is ardously difficult, and if there is a point to the game other than showing that children are innocent dreamers and the rest of us are cold and dead, it is lost to me. The idea of a dreamer wanting anything else than a long, sex-filled medievil fantasy LARP seems lost in this game.
I must admit that I do not at all like this game. I find it to be plastic, pastelly and overly cut down into bound choices when it comes to character creation. For a game wanting to show freedom and dreams, it is far more bogged down into various concepts (and very binding concepts at that, characterwise) than any other game of the World of Darkness series.
Mummy
Mummy is one of the minor "games" (or rather supplements) to the World of Darkness setting. Yet it is interesting and well-written enough to be worth mentioning among the major games of the series.
Mummy revolves around a very small number of ex-human creatures generally referred to as mummies. They were great thinkers, warriors, priests and sorcerers during the ancient times, but were given the gift of eternal life by the first mummies, led by Horus, son of Osiris and the sworn enemy of Set. Mummies are immortal creatures but not undying. They live for a few years, around the length of a mortal life-time, and then they pass away (lest they are killed by violence or accident). Then their souls pass to the netherworlds (see Wraith above) for a while. After a time, depending on how harmed and damaged their bodies were at the time of death, they may return to their bodies and continue their work among the living. But there is no permanent, ever-lasting death among these immortals, which is both a blessing and a curse. Most of them have lived since pre-biblical times, and remember many horrors, or worse, forget things dear to them. They are timeless and vast, and yet but human and fragile. A mortal mind trapped in an immortal body.
Mummy is a game with a great sense of wonder and mood, and it is well-written as well. Unfortunately, the Second edition was replaced by a hardcover game that completely abandoned the original concepts and wasted the whole beauty of the game. If you cannot find the first or second edition, don't bother to buy the game at all.
