I bought the new World of Darkness core rules some weeks ago, as an early Christmas present for myself. I’ve been quite interested in the Vampire setting for World of Darkness, but I’ve never actually played anything in WoD apart from two Vampire: The Dark Ages and Werewolf: The Apocalypse adventures at a couple of RPG conventions.

White Wolf recently ended all their RPG storylines and decided to restart the World of Darkness from a blank page, making fans all over the world scream bloody murder.

This time, the core rules are released in the World of Darkness rulebook instead of being reprinted in every setting book, and only contain rules for playing as a human. Individual setting books for each of the settings will be released, with rules for playing as that particular entity.

So far, only the new Vampire setting has been released, titled Vampire: The Requiem. I’ll probably pick that up at a later time, since this is the setting I’m really interested in.

The basic premise in World of Darkness is that the world is really a grim, dark place where monsters exist, but the majority of the population live on in ignorant bliss. A rare few, however, are Awakened and aware of the things that go bump in the night — vampires, werewolves, ghosts and demons. This was the setting in Hunter: The Reckoning in the last World of Darkness; humans who fought back against evil.

I’ll be back with more once I’ve read a bit more of the core book.