World of Darkness Documentary

Watch it on Amazon Prime.

Finally got around to watching the World of Darkness documentary charting the rise and fall of White Wolf Studios, mainly focusing on their game Vampire: The Masquerade. I remember this coming out a couple years back but never got around to trying to give it a view. Which is odd considering how much time I spent running V:TM back in the day.

Although they do seem to show a lot more about the LARP version of the game while talking more about the tabletop version. But that's okay, it's easier to show what you mean with people in costumes than folks setting around a table rolling dice. But it does give us a nice view of the path from where the company started, when V:TM exploded and up to the inevitable end. So for those who do like a bit of history of gaming this is worth watching.

Now some of this I experienced first hand as the game came out when I was really doing a lot of roleplaying. I actually bought a copy the day it hit the game shop shelves and begin running it within a week. One this I will agree on is that it changed the hobby and was quite different from everything else out there at the moment. Different as nearly everything else out at the time was just another book full of rules (which they mention) with sourcebooks that were additional books of rules. V:TM was pushing to be something different than that, tried to make the system more light and wanted players to keep the roleplaying more important than the mechanics.

There is some eye rolling parts though. They attempt to lay claim to the shift of the club scenes into more goth and vampire that happened at the time. From what I've been told the shift happened before VTM and the game itself was more likely inspired by that than the other way around. Now maybe more convention parties went goth because of it but not mainstream clubs.

Also they covered the fallout that happened between the global live action community that had sprouted up and the company. Issues over copyright and IP infringement which led to a really jagged break between the two. The failure of the video game to materialize. Plus a few other downfalls.   

So I recommend this to just about anybody out there who has even some passing memory of the glory days of Vampire the Masquerade and White Wolf as a company.