The Children of the Night

 Welcome to Of Darkness, a bog dedicated to the games of White Wolf and Onyx Path. Specifically this will about the Of Darkness games, as you may have guessed.  I fell in love with them in the 1990s, and now I'm not sure about them. The concepts are cool, but there's a lot that I simply don't know about, whether that's the assumption that people were on board with their knowing irony, or even the basic concepts they were playing around with. As I get older it feels more and more as if the games "scratch away the surface and there's a whole lot of levels", in a way that I didn't appreciate as a young person. Be that in terms of symbolism, mockery, pastiche, or something else. 

For example, I never realised in the 1990s that the Technocracy in Mage: the Ascension were designed to be a satire on the sorts of things conspiracy theorists were talking about back then. I took them as a job lot set of baddies, representing the sorts of thing that punks (more than goths) were angry about. The Technocrats held the power, so of course they were the bad guys. Werewolf: the Apocalypse had confirmed that people in authority were villains, after all. To add to that, Werewolf had established that science was pretty harmful, so a group of wizards who used scientific trappings were never going to be far away from baddy pot. 

I still don't know why White Wolf took the scientist to be an obvious form of villain, but there are bad scientists throughout the World of Darkness games. I guess it's a part of that old, fake polarisation between faith and science and it served as a way to ground that in the heartlands the company aimed their products at - in the form of urban and suburban America. Their games also captured a sort of ancient versus modern vibe, with modernism usually being the force for good. The elders of each supernatural race were largely depicted as monstrous and out of touch while the younger members (aka the player characters). Old may have the power but the young were motivated, and furthermore, had the moral high ground. Except in Mage, where the reverse was true at an institutional level, the old ways were superior to the Johnny Come Latelys that made up the Technocracy, even as the PC cabals tried to bridge the gap between old and new in many ways, and fought with their own elders who saw the world in black and white terms of what Ascension meant. To me that's an interesting dynamic, as is the idea that something that's meant to be beneficial may not actually be so. 

It's pretty ironic that that lesson from the game (that ultimately what was needed was a form of synthesis), has passed so many gamers by, really. But then, so have the hopeful elements and horrific elements of Wraith and Changeling, so perhaps it's no surprise. 

I currently have six of the 20th Anniversary Edition versions of the games on my laptop, and I propose to kick off this blog by working my way through them, starting with Vampire the Masquerade, and posting my thoughts.  See you for the first of those, I hope.