"'Would you like to dance?' she asked me. I died that night." — From the prologue.

After Dungeons and Dragons, the venerable granddaddy of the role-playing industry, White Wolf's Vampire: The Masquerade is undoubtedly the most popular RPG on shelves today. It has legions of live-action game participants, entire rainforests worth of printed supplements, a rather surprising percentage of female players, more Goths than you can shake a Hot Topic at, and perhaps that final crowning achievement, a short-lived Aaron Spelling-produced TV series on Fox.

And yet for some reason, White Wolf decided to cancel the entire Vampire game line, ending it all with one final apocalyptic supplement a few months back. Then they rewrote and streamlined their entire game mechanics system, revamped the Vampire concept, and started everything over from scratch.

The World of Darkness

The core game mechanics, what White Wolf calls the "Storyteller System," now take up an entire rulebook all of their own. Called The World of Darkness, this book is intended to provide a backdrop to the world that these new vampires inhabit, in addition to basic rules for things like character creation and combat. The world it describes is a sort of goth cross between H.P. Lovecraft and The X-Files, with average joes who get an unwilling glimpse into Things Man Was Not Meant to Know and are irrevocably altered by the experience.

The mechanics as presented in The World of Darkness are focused almost exclusively on that concept. The character creation rules let you make only human characters. In other words, you can be Mulder, but not Buffy. Also, one of the new additions to the Storyteller System is the Morality stat, which basically tracks how much of an evil, amoral bastard you are. It changes based on the horrific things your character does and sees, making it a combination of Vampire: The Masquerade's Humanity stat and the Sanity trait from Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu RPG. At the back of the book, there are brief rules for ghosts and some of their powers, but they seem more like an afterthought than an attempt to really give players the tools to pit their characters against the supernatural with just this core book.

There are other, more substantial changes to the Storyteller System. The basics do remain the same, with nine stats divided into Social, Mental, and Physical categories, corresponding sets of skills, and a stat-plus-skill dice pool setup. You still roll one ten-sided die for each point in your pool, and you have to meet or exceed a target number to get a "success". In the new Storyteller System, however, there's only one target number, 8, and the infamous "botch" result has been eliminated. Modifiers now change how many dice you have in your pool or how many successes you need, rather than changing the target number itself. Nice and simple.

The rest of the rules have likewise been streamlined. The biggest change is to the combat system, which had been a horrifying mish-mash even before White Wolf screwed things up even further with their ill-conceived combat supplement for the original Storyteller System. The damage system seems to be a bit more complex than it used to be, but overall things are still a lot simpler and seem a lot faster than they used to be.

Vampire: The Requiem

Despite having all the rules and a setting overview in a self-contained book, to really use The World of Darkness to its full potential you're going to have to invest in one of the separate setting books. The first setting book for this new World of Darkness is Vampire: The Requiem, showing that while White Wolf may be shaking things up in their role-playing universe, they definitely know which side their angst-filled undead bread is buttered on. Like the World of Darkness core book, Vampire: The Requiem is a mixture of the familiar, the new, and the simplified.

The basic nature of White Wolf vampires hasn't changed in this new game. They're still divided into clans, they still reproduce by draining a mortal of blood and then giving that mortal some of their own vampiric blood, and they still have "disciplines" such as Auspex and Obfuscate that grant them supernatural abilities. The real changes are in the way these different elements are applied. The words are the same but the song is different, you might say.

Most of these elements have changed very little. The disciplines have been cleaned up, re-balanced and simplified, and some of them have even been renamed (with a few new ones added for good measure), but at their core they really haven't changed much at all. Celerity still lets you move really fast, and Dominate still lets you control someone else's will. A lot of the setting details have barely been touched as well, with elements such as the Blood Bond and Ghouls pretty much the same as they were in Vampire: The Masquerade.

So what's actually changed? The politics and society of the Kindred, mainly. This may not seem like such a big deal, but considering that political machinations drove the background of Vampire: The Masquerade and are a big factor in many live-action Vampire games, this actually alters the whole tone of Vampire: The Requiem.

The number of clans have been reduced from — um, a lot — to five, though there are a number of smaller "bloodlines" to keep things nice and varied. The formerly monolithic vampire society has been splintered, with the struggle between the Camarilla (who manipulate humanity but still live among them) and the Sabbat (depraved, destructive vampires out to kill things and break stuff) being replaced by a half-dozen different factions. These factions are also a lot more shades-of-grey than the Camarilla and Sabbat.

Among the new divisions are a group of intensely religious vampires struggling for control against other groups. There's a libertarian organization of young vampires opposed to the overreaching power of the Princes, and a group of power-hungry vampires out to dominate their fellows through the true acknowledgement of their vampire nature. None of these groups dominate the others, which forces them to work together to keep vampire society from shattering entirely and becoming vulnerable to humanity, while at the same time giving them plenty of opportunities to scheme and backstab as they jockey for political power. To use another analogy, if Vampire: The Masquerade was the Cold War, with its clearly-defined ideologically-opposing sides, then Vampire: The Requiem is the world after the fall of the Berlin Wall, with no central conflict but an ever-shifting palette of allies and enemies.

The New Era

Also eliminated is the generational struggle between older vampires and younger vampires. In fact, the "generation" stat, which determined how powerful you were as a vampire based on how far your blood had descended from the original vampire, has been removed entirely. Now, all vampires have a "blood potency" stat which determines the level of power they can wield. Blood potency can be increased by experience or the simple passage of time, and too much potency forces a vampire into the near-death state known as "torpor" until the blood thins enough to let them become active once again. This means that not only can any vampire potentially gain as much power as the most powerful of the elder Kindred, but there's also an upper limit to just how powerful those elders are. This levels the vampire playing field in a way that might shock gamers used to the rigidly stratified power levels in Vampire: The Masquerade.

This new political setup gives players a lot more freedom. If the original game seemed to be all about stereotyped "splats" and low-powered vampire punks (unless you were some kind of a powergaming munchkin, anyway), this new incarnation is all about freedom. It's much easier to create the specific kind of vampire you want to be, and to work your way up the hierarchy of the Kindred in a manner of your choosing. There are also rules for creating your own bloodlines, either to make your starting vampire unique or as something for your vamp to work towards on his path to establishing his own legacy in the world of the undead. Vampire society is not so restrictive as to keep newbies marginalized the way they were in Vampire: The Masquerade, but at the same time it's not so fluid as to hand a player character the Princedom of a city on a silver platter. Vampire: The Requiem may make it easier for new vampires to play the political game, but it's still not a pushover.

The designers at White Wolf have really outdone themselves with Vampire: The Requiem. It takes all the elements that made Vampire: The Masquerade such a huge hit in the first place, strips out all the overwrought goth and powergaming baggage that weighed it down, and mixes in some new goodies designed to let you customize your vampire experience to taste. Even if you're a long-time Vampire: The Masquerade player who's already poured far too much of your hard-earned cash into the game line, put aside your skepticism and check this game out. And if you've never played any of White Wolf's Vampire games before, then Vampire: The Requiem is the perfect way to get started.