Earlier this month, Paradox Interactive announced that it was rebranding its World of Darkness group to White Wolf, with further plans to build out the group and shift much of its development efforts in-house. This came with several big questions, including what was to come of the relationship between White Wolf and Renegade Games Studios, the current publisher of World of Darkness material, and what the rebrand meant for the future of the various World of Darkness games.
To get some answers, EN World sat down with Jason Carl, the brand marketing manager for White Wolf. In our interview, we spoke about what the rebrand actually means, what future games are currently in development, and what steps the White Wolf team is taking to prevent missteps similar to White Wolf’s previous iterations.
EN World: White Wolf is back. We’ve just heard that there’s this big rebranding in place, but a lot of people have asked what does that mean for the various World of Darkness TTRPGs specifically. Obviously it’s a multimedia brand – you have a lot of pokers in the fire, so to speak. But what does this mean for the tabletop RPGs? There’s three World of Darkness games currently being supported, and there’s always more that can be brought back.
Jason Carl: That’s a big question. This has bigger implications for the brand than TTRPGs, but they’re vitally important to what we’re doing and they’re a big part of why we decided to do this. So obviously, as you know, we declared our publishing intentions. We will develop internally and publish World of Darkness TTRPGs, and I think the benefits to our players, our customers are obvious. This means more games faster and games that we know people want, but that are more difficult to do purely as licenses.
The World of Darkness has been a licensing organization for the last eight years or so, and we still have a fantastic network of, I believe over 50 licensees. Not all of whom we’ve even announced yet because some of them are working on video games and those take a lot of time to develop, and we don’t like to announce that until we make sure we have something to show. So not all of our licensees are publicly visable, but there are over 50 of them. And we’ve had a very, very successful relationship most recently in the TTRPG space with Renegade Game Studios led by Scott Gaeta. And it has been a fantastic relationship. It’s been very successful. We’ve managed to develop and publish together Vampire: The Masquerade Fifth Edition, and it’s various supplements, Hunter: The Reckoning Fifth Edition, Werewolf: the Apocalypse Fifth Edition. I couldn’t be happier with the relationship that we’ve had with Renegade.
In the foreseeable future, the very near future. Nothing is going to change with that relationship. Renegade is going to continue to publish supplemental products for, and accessories for those three games. And I think that even when we have finished the job of unifying our ecosystem for TTRPG in-house, it’s very possible that Renegade wishes to continue to develop books as a licensee.
But the principle development of those IPs will now be in-house instead of with licensing. Frankly, the demand for the brand, the demand for the IP and the interest in it that we get from various partners named and unnamed is so strong and so high and frequent that we simply need to be our own publisher. Just to keep up TTRPGs are incredibly important to IP development in this space, and I think you know that, and I think your readers will be aware of that too. They form the foundation of the creative vision and the imaginative approach that these story brands can achieve, and we think the best way to continue to meet the need and the demand for them is to bring that development in-house and be our own principal IP developer and publisher.
From what I have understood the relationship between Paradox and the World of Darkness brand and Renegade is that World of Darkness was developing the core game. So is that accurate? So World of Darkness developed werewolf, the apocalypse, like the core game, and then Renegade took it from there to develop the supplements?
Carl: I mean, I don’t think that it was fair to say that we developed completely in a silo. Certainly the principal development happened led by Paradox and the World of Darkness team, but it did involve a lot of other people outside the building. We didn’t write every word or edit every word of it ourselves. So it was definitely a collaborative effort, but we certainly took the lead development role for that book.
So from a technical scale, obviously it’s too early to say what the relationship with Renegade and White Wolf is going to be moving forward, but if there is a hypothetical decoupling so to speak, they have developed their own expertise, their own TTRPG group, how do you make up for that expertise? Are you going to beef up your own internal TTRPG team?
Carl: The first step is to search for and hire a new World of Darkness/White Wolf creative director. That search is already in progress. We’ve interviewed a number of extremely compelling candidates, and that person will lead the creative vision of the brand all up and including TTRPGs as well. Then we’re going to grow the team out more under that new creative director, and that means that we are going to need development help. We’re going to need publishing help. We’re going to need people who understand printing, distribution, sales, online sales, all those skills and pieces of the TTRPG business will eventually live in our White Wolf team.
So yes, now managing all that takes time. It takes people and it takes time to get there, but it doesn’t mean that we are going to have an army of writers, editors, and artists all working full time at White Wolf. That just wouldn’t be feasible. Our plans are a bit too big to have that army of people working directly for us in our team in Stockholm. So I think that it’s fair to say that a lot of the writing, a lot of the editing, a lot of the art is still going to happen with freelancers and consultants, but that relationship with those individuals will be managed centrally by White Wolf.
So the reason all of this came up was because Renegade has not announced any World of Darkness core RPG products in about a year. Was that just a coincidence based on the timeline or was that influenced by restructuring?
Carl: Oh, good question. No, that’s simply on the work calendar. That’s simply how it fell out. As I said, we have over 50 licensees and sometimes it’s difficult to coordinate all the releases you want in a given year, and sometimes you have more, sometimes you have less depending on how the workload is distributed and how the calendar falls out. But those two things aren’t related.
You mentioned that this structure is going to allow for more RPG releases a quicker pipeline. Obviously you haven’t announced anything yet, but the people are going to immediately start speculating.
No idea what you mean, Christian.
Let’s frame this in a way that you can actually answer it. Are there any games that the fanbase has been particularly clamoring for that might be coming down the pipeline?
I can give you even a more concrete answer, I don’t think we make any secret about the games that we are thinking really deeply about that we may have even started to develop as long as we stretch the word develop to include ideation, concepting, discussions in the office, shouting across tables of esoteric concepts about paradox and pride.
I think it’s no secret that we have ambitions to get our new team working on Mage: The Ascension as quickly as possible. We realize that our audience would really like to see some Mage from us as quickly as possible, and we intend to deliver that.
But two other games that are occupying a lot of our brain space right now are changing the dreaming and what that might look like today. Obviously, Changeling: The Dreaming is near and dear to the hearts of many people in our community. The way the world has changed will definitely affect the game and thinking about what they will be like in the world of now occupies a fair amount of our imaginative cycles.
And the third one that we’re really looking very closely at is actually the Dark Ages line, the dark medieval game that was particularly near and dear to my heart. It’s one of my favorite expressions of World of Darkness and especially Vampire: The Masquerade. I definitely think it’s time for a fresh look at the dark medieval world and what it can teach us about the world we live in today, how the struggles of the creatures and the people living in those time periods are related to what the world is going through now. And frankly, it’s just a lot of fun to play Vampire with a sword in hand.
So those three things have got our attention right now, but there will be more. I think it’s fair to say we will look at every legacy brand. I can’t promise that each and every one of them will see an expression as a fifth edition tabletop RPG, but there are many other ways to express these games and these ideas that aren’t necessarily tabletop. I think that Wrath: The Oblivion Afterlife, the VR game published by our licensee partner of Fast Travel was an exceptional way to reintroduce Wrath. It wasn’t te Wrath experience you might have as a TTRPG, but I thought it was really effective as a horror video game experience.
It’s true that we might not get to something like Demon or Mummy as quickly as people might want, and it might not necessarily happen as a TTRPG but I wouldn’t be surprised if those creatures make an appearance somewhere in our story ecosystem.
Is it time to start looking at a Vampire Sixth Edition yet, or are you pretty content and happy with how Vampire is performing right now?
Those are many different questions disguised as one question, Christian. I think would be tough for us to be happier with how Vampire Fifth Edition has performed. Renegade has done a fantastic job in helping us build out that product line. They’ve come to us with pitches for great products that we greenlit. We suggested some of them, and it’s a pretty robust game at this point. I think there is something for everyone in it, and it covers a lot of ground.
Is it time for a new edition, a new full edition? That is a question we have been asking ourselves for quite some time. I ask myself that maybe at least once a week. I think that we should be guided by our audience and what they want and need from us.
We’re really lucky that our community is so vocal and so engaged with the World of Darkness and now with White Wolf. They aren’t shy about telling us what they want, what they expect, and it’s pretty clear that at least some segment of our players want, if not a new edition, than at least a refresh of what they have now. They would also very much like to have more concrete details about the creatures and the locations that exist in Vampire: The Masquerade. We haven’t done a lot of, for example, the traditional city books and a lot of the world has been largely undefined, which made sense for the goals that we had and how we decided to approach it. It might be time to take a look at some of those locations and in greater detail and provide that information to players. I think that that’s one of the most consistent requests that we get.
Another consistent request we get, it’s not universal, but it’s frequent, is that the players would, and storytellers would like to have a little bit more metaplot information. What is actually happening that we can share about the greater metaplot? We certainly went metaplot-lite with Fifth Edition. It’s there, but it’s more subtle and a lot of the information is a little bit more obscure. And because we’ve been a licensing organization, some of the details of the meta plot have been expressed in other ways. You might not know what’s going on in with the vampires of St. Louis, Missouri, for example, or the Twin Cities, unless you happen to read Winter’s Teeth, the comic book series. You could get that information on our Wiki of course, but there’s more detail for you there. You might not necessarily be aware of what’s happening in New York or Los Angeles unless you’re catching an episode or two of New York by Night or LA by Night.
Likewise, in Seattle, Seattle by Night is a precursor. The actual play events happen immediately before the start of what happens in [Vampire: The Masquerade] Bloodlines 2. I think that’s exactly what a transmedia story brand should do, but it’s very clear that our players would like that information more conveniently delivered to them, and in a way that’s a lot more accessible. And the best way to do that is TTRPG books.
Obviously Paradox moved away from the White Wolf branding because there were some past issues, What sort of guardrails have you put into place to prevent something like that from happening again?
I think that we all hope no mistakes will ever happen, and I think that’s true of every TTRPG publisher, everyone in the entertainment business, everybody who’s in journalism, everybody in any public facing role ever hopes that no mistakes will happen. And then you hope if mistakes do happen, they’re made in good faith, that they’re acknowledged, and that you learn something from them that will help you prevent those mistakes from happening in the future.
I think that’s true of White Wolf as well. I’ve think the current White Wolf team has done a great deal to grow trust and transparency with our community to be accountable when we make mistakes, acknowledge them, tried our best to learn from them, and to commit to being responsible with this story world that everybody loves.
I don’t know that I could promise that no mistakes would ever occur again, but I can promise that we would approach them in good faith, that we would do our best to learn from them, and that we’ll be guided by people who are experts in the fields that could be potentially challenging for us. I think we’ve done a very good job of that, and I don’t see that changing.
Everybody who works at White Wolf today are very passionate about this brand. We care a lot and we feel a great sense of personal responsibility to get it right. So I think these people and being willing to be held accountable and responsible for doing this right is definitely an example of how we’ve grown.
I think we’re all very aware of past mistakes, and I think that everybody is committed to being the kind of accountable, responsible people that I just mentioned. No one is unaware of those controversies and those mistakes, and no one wants to repeat them. We might make new ones, but if we do, we’ll make ’em in good faith and we will do our best to consult with people who know better than we do in those areas.
Well, that’s actually all the questions I have. You gave me a lot more than I thought it was going to get.
You didn’t expect me to tell you what three games are top of mind for us, right?
About 18 months ago, I made the mistake of admitting that Justin Achilli and I had sketched out an idea for Mage on an actual napkin while we were having breakfast one morning. And since that time I have heard no end of it. So we might as well just admit that yes, the napkin does exist, but it has evolved into actual developmental thinking about what Mage will look like.
I keep the napkin in a box on a bookshelf at the Paradox Office in Stockholm, and I check on it every time I visit there to make sure it’s still in the box. It still is. I don’t think anybody’s actually found it yet, although once they read your article, they might go looking forward.
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