Noticias
The Book of Nod – «for Dummies» edition
Working with all these cards to prep and upload an usable database for the VTES store has made me reminisce about the rich World of Darkness (WoD, from now on) milieu. You see, I never was into RPG games, but at the time, working at a game store had me fascinated about this series of huge games under the collective WoD umbrella, of which Vampire the Masquerade (VtM) was, by far, the most popular and best selling.
The WoD is our world, only darker. Its history, is ours, but even bloodier, with all kinds of supernatural beings plotting and maneuvering at the very fringes of the collective vision field of humanity, since pre-History until now. VTM in particular was about Vampires (duh!) of which Caine was the first!
The RPG line eventually ended. It went into torpor for about a decade – a blink of an eye, really – until it woke again in the last few years and we learned all those End of the World scenarios were just that, scenarios. That was just the last call before the End, which hasn’t come, so the eternal struggle goes on, for now…
VTES was a card game by WotC based on the above mentioned VtM role-playing game. The designers introduced a lot of characters that weren’t really canonical to the original setting. Eventually they ceased production of the game and, after a few years, it went to White Wolf Publishing (makers of the original game and owners of the IP), and they took the chance to better align characters and events in both their games, more closely reflecting the shared world. The card game lasted even a few years after the end of the original RPG line, but eventually it closed its coffin-lid, too. Then it woke again, shortly after the RPG did the same.
But has the RPG has been redesigned for its Fifth Edition and some concepts have been changed in major and minor ways. Now the card game has had to follow suit under the new V5 umbrella and some mechanical elements have had to change, too. The game is still the same, all cards are playable and compatible with each other, but some… let’s call them “Legacy” design elements, apparently will not be further supported, at least not in the core products.
Anyways, I’m rambling… while preparing this database I keep finding details that return me to the rabbit-hole nature of the WoD, and have me looking for further information about events and characters depicted in the cards. So, I said to myself, why not put to use all that time “wasted” and turn it into useful (or, at the very least, mildly entertaining) content?
So, with no promises on regularity, I’ll put together some short essays on different aspects of the world of VTES, as it strikes my fancy. These will be in no ways authoritative. The truth is, the history of this world precludes that, being at many occasions contradictory. Anyways, any corrections, especially those that make these entries more interesting while keeping the reading light, will be always welcome!
Now if I’m doing this correctly, you’ll be able to click on a growing list of entries as shown below this line: