White Wolf, Inc.

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White Wolf, Inc. is an American gaming company, most famous for the Vampire: The Masquerade roleplaying game. The company was founded in 1991 by Mark Rein-Hagen and Steve and Stewart Wieck. Taking their name from the fiction of Michael Moorcock, they have become one of the world's most successful role-playing game companies.

White Wolf publishes a line of several different but overlapping games set in the "World of Darkness", which generally resembles our world with added supernatural elements, and whose tone is generally described as "gothic punk." In the World of Darkness, vampires, werewolves, mages and other creatures of the night exist and fight each other while remaining hidden from normal humans. The company has also begun publishing some d20 system material under their Sword & Sorcery imprint and revived the Ravenloft gothic horror world owned by Wizards of the Coast.

To complement some of the company's game lines, there is a LARP system dubbed Mind's Eye Theatre.

White Wolf has a mixed record in the collectible card game market with Arcadia, Rage, and Vampire: The Eternal Struggle (formerly 'Jyhad'). V:TES, perhaps the most successful of the bunch, was originally published by Wizards of the Coast in 1994 but was abandoned just two years later. White Wolf acquired rights to the game in 2000, despite it being out of print for nearly 7 years.

Video games based on White Wolf's role-playing properties have also been developed.

Contents

The World of Darkness game lines

In 2003, the company announced the "Time of Judgment", which brought an end to their current series of World of Darkness game lines. A revamped series of World of Darkness games launched August 21, 2004, beginning with The World of Darkness (a set of core rules, akin to the D&D Player's Handbook) and Vampire: The Requiem.

Historical variants

Mind's Eye Theatre (LARP)

The New World of Darkness

Age of Sorrows

Trinity Universe

Other

  • Pendragon
  • Pimp: The Backhanding (A card game in which one plays pimps who make money by prostituting people that one keeps in line with violence. Marketed at the teenage male crowd.)

Current controversies

In 2004, Steven Wieck and his brother, who own White Wolf, started an e-book publishing company called Drive Thru RPG. Through Drive Thru RPG, White Wolf released its games (as well as those of others) with Digital Rights Management software, which was controversial. They later dropped DRM from their games and offered them as plain (albeit watermarked) PDF files.

In 2005, White Wolf announced that it would charge license fees to any organization running games using their system that charged money to participate — whether the purpose was profit or merely recouping costs of rental halls, snacks and meals, etc. — and force groups to join the Camarilla for a $20 yearly license fee, under the claim that it had the right to do so under copyright law. The announcement was made and the new license was posted on White Wolf's forums, presumably to apply to materials already purchased by White Wolf's customers. White Wolf's LARP books explicitly suggest the charging of players in order to recoup costs for a play space. They have since announced that this policy has been dropped and will not be implemented.

See also

External links

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