Fantasy Heartbreaker, by Rose Bailey

Blood and Smoke

I released two core books in 2013.

Demon: The Descent is a game of techgnostic espionage, where you play a rogue angel who’s defected to the human race.

Blood and Smoke: The Strix Chronicle is a standalone update to Vampire: The Requiem that revitalizes the game’s focus on visceral drama and personal horror.

Deeper personal reflections on these might be in order at some point. Demon is my game about the masks we use to get through daily life, the different identities we adopt with our family and friends. Vampire is my game about the difficulties of adult relationships, and what happens when they slide into exploitation.

I also stepped up as Onyx Path’s development producer, coordinating the schedule and all products in the manuscript process. That’s been an interesting road. While our project lifecycle is similar to that at White Wolf until the PDF/print stages, the work environment is totally different. For a company that’s spread out across the Western world, much less one composed mostly of freelancers, you have to take a very different approach to managing teams. I’ve learned a lot from software development here, and am continuing to work on refining the process.

Cavaliers of Mars is running late because of all the WoD and administrative work this year, but it’s moving along. The core system works, and merely needs some additional playtesting for recent tweaks, and sections of the corebook (like the bestiary) still need writing. Onyx Path is still lined up to publish it as our first creator-owned project.

I’ve been doing a lot of game hacking this year that hasn’t made it to Fantasy Heartbreaker. I’m not sure how I feel about that. I tend to get more feedback over on Google+, but I think people’s eyes glaze over faster when I start to get into detail. I’m rather attached to my blog, but when you’re doing game design, feedback is fundamental. For example, I got way more comments on my space opera hacks of Cortex Plus Action there than here.

My latest small hack is Mouse Guard to run a game in the spirit of Hero’s Quest/Quest for Glory. Mayhap I’ll post more on it here, but the G+ issue lurks there.

I don’t know if anyone’s still bothering to comment here after my long silence, but if so, what are your opinions on the social network/blog divide?

Happy new year, everyone!

I haven’t gotten Fantasy Heartbreaker back off the ground yet, but I’ve been pretty busy with gaming stuff. I’ve taken another day job in video games, and I’ve been hard at work on tabletop stuff, mainly for White Wolf/Onyx Path.

The next big Vampire book is Blood and Smoke: The Strix Chronicle. This is a massive book combining a new setting with a top-to-bottom overhaul of the Requiem rules. The rules are being playtested openly. Here are the dev blogs I’ve posted:

• Year in Review
• Auspex
• Animalism/Dominate
• Majesty
• Protean

Diehard GameFAN has also named Blood Sorcery their 2012 sourcebook of the year. We’re in good company, alongside Shadows of Esteren and Cthulhu By Gaslight, among others.

I can honestly say without hesitation that Blood Sorcery is the best Vampire: The Requiem book I’ve read in a very long time (perhaps even since the inception of the line) and it really gives Storytellers and players alike some truly terrific ideas to play with. Theban and Cruac players rejoice, as White Wolf has given you the best sourcebook of 2012.

–Diehard GameFAN

Thanks, DGF!

Cavaliers of Mars is coming along, and we’re looking at a really interesting online project as part of that. More news soon, hopefully.

Hope your new year’s looking as promising as mine!

It’s been one year exactly since I was laid off from CCP. Feels like longer.

What have I been up to?

I took a job with ZeniMax and moved to Baltimore. Great team, great project… but my partner couldn’t make the move, so I’m headed back to Georgia. Between that and some other personal life stuff, I’m pretty happy.

We announced the Onyx Path and the new White Wolf schedule. That’s a huge deal for me. There aren’t many things more important to me professionally than Vampire, and all of the effort involved in getting it together was worth it. We’ve also got Cavaliers of Mars on deck for release in 2013.

We started open development on Sexmurder, the most exciting Requiem project since The Danse Macabre. My team’s been trucking along, doing a lot of great work that you’ll see over the next few months.

We released the quick start for Cavaliers of Mars, to a lot of downloads and positive attention. That project’s still on its way, and I’ll be back to it just as soon as I’ve got the next Vampire book and the new Demon out to writers.

I got a Requiem tattoo.

I’ve barely updated the blog at all. I’m going to make an effort to address that in the future. I couldn’t talk much about what I was up to at ZeniMax, and I frankly didn’t have much free time.

So, busy year. Good year. Time to get back to work.

Blood Sorcery: Sacraments & Blasphemies

Blood Sorcery: Sacraments & Blasphemies for Vampire: The Requiem is out now. You get an improv ritual system for Theban Sorcery and Cruac inspired by Mage and Witchfinder, plus a new class of sacrifice-based charms called Threnodies that let you add a little bit of black magic to any character. We round that out with some cool new antagonists, like the Sons of Phobos and the Empty Liars.

I’ve written more about this over at the White Wolf blogs.

Cavaliers of Mars, art by Chris Huth

At Gen Con, White Wolf creative director Richard Thomas has announced his new venture, Onyx Path Publishing. Onyx Path has a really cool lineup of roleplaying games, including:

• Cavaliers of Mars, my game of swashbuckling Martian adventure.
• Both Worlds of Darkness and Exalted, under license from CCP.
• Trinity and Scion, which Onyx Path now owns.

The Onyx Path web site will go live soon.

I’ve been waiting a long time for this news to go public. I literally jumped for joy.

Today has been a physically awful day for me. However, I couldn’t be more excited to pass on news of the 2012-2013 White Wolf/Onyx Path schedule, which I think is the best one in years. New Requiem fiction, Exalted 3rd Edition, and…

…Demon.

I’ll be attending White Wolf’s Grand Masquerade in New Orleans this week. I’m planning to devote a lot of my time to talking to players, so, please, come and find me. I’ll be the guy with bright red hair talking about vampires as horrible lizard-brain boyfriends.

When I get back, I’ll be releasing the third part of “The Apprentice’s Tale” for Cavaliers of Mars.

Ennie Award Nominee

The Danse Macabre has been nominated for an Ennie award, and also received two honorable mentions. Congratulations to co-developer Chuck Wendig and the writing team of Benjamin Baugh, David Brookshaw, Christopher Cowger, Bethany Culp, Matthew McFarland, and Greg Stolze. Congratulations also to cover artist Michael Komarck and art director Craig S Grant.

Thanks to everyone who made this book such a success. I couldn’t be prouder.

I sat down with Eddy for another White Wolf Roundtable. We talked about developing v20, the process of getting feedback from fans, and some of the fun of revisiting Masquerade bloodlines.

A game of modern gothic storytelling. A game about you.

Long ago, a group of vampires sought a bargain with a Strix. They asked for the power to call down dreams and reshape the world to match their nightmares.

The Strix bade them: “Gorge yourselves upon the blood of peasants.”

The vampires did so, but they did not gain the power they had asked for. They returned to the Strix.

The Strix bade them: “Gorge yourselves on the blood of lords.”

The vampires set upon the lords and kings of every land, but they did not gain the power they had asked for. They returned in a rage to the Strix.

The Strix bade them: “Gorge yourself on the blood of wizards.”

The vampires flew across the land, scooping witches from their hovels and towers, and dragging them before the Strix and then devouring them. But the mages’ blood burned inside them, and destroyed them like sun from within. The mages, meanwhile, rose from the dead.

“Look around you, my children,” said the Strix, “for I have cleared a kingdom for you to rule.”

And with the Strix in their ears and thoughts and blood, the wizards raised the dead kings to rule and the dead peasants to serve. And they ruled the land, and named it Mu, and the eldest of them they named Tremere.

Tonight, the Tremere remain. They have the greed of mages and the hunger of vampires. They must feed only rarely, but in the most gruesome fashion. Their victims live, yes, but with neither heart nor soul, and little more than automatons. Even larvae have a better half-life.

This is a bit from my Requiem games and notes. I tossed it out on the White Wolf forums recently, and I thought it’d be fun to post it here, as well. First of several Vampire treats I have for the near future.