White Wolf appears to be currently composed of scientists rather than writers. There is simply too much experimentation going on with these guys. They have released pre-generated characters for players who need that sort of thing. With Block by Bloody Block, they release pre-generated parts of a city. This isn’t a [insert city here] by Night book. No, these are the sections of any city, ready to be dropped into whatever city fancies your gaming group. The question becomes if the scientists are congratulating themselves over champagne or staring dumbfounded with charcoal-blackened faces and lab-coats.

The layout of this supplement remains true to the Hunter: the Vigil line (this game is intended for players of that game or the basic World of Darkness corebook).

The first time I reviewed one of White Wolf’s ready-made character collections (Slaughterhouse V), I wrote a bit about experimentation and the benefits of pre-made characters.

Now that I’m reviewing my second character collection–this time a group of Hunters–I’ll blur right past that noise. This collection shows that none of the White Wolf lines gets special treatment as the Hunter the Vigil supplement receives its own supplementary material. In this twenty-six page (no ads) PDF, a five-person group of relative strangers band together after a notas- dead-as-they-thought party girl ends up fusing their lives together.

The layout to the PDF is amazing. Sometimes I feel the borders in games are a little hit and miss; however, the borders to this character collection fit perfectly.

Blood Drive ($6.99 PDF) is the newest installment from White Wolf’s Storytelling Adventure System. This Hunter: the Vigil adventure offers an action-oriented romp for slightly seasoned characters (XP 25-29). This adventure plays on a personal favorite of mine. It’s the classic tale of the supposedly “easy job” that becomes something else altogether. At eleven scenes and forty-six pages (none of which are ads), this is a healthy night’s adventure or (more likely) multiple sessions of fun.

The direction of this adventure, like other White Wolf products I’ve recently reviewed, continues to impress me. The layout of the adventure offers both the detailed story, which the Storyteller will have to go over and a collection of Scene Cards to act as Storyteller cheat sheets.

Play New Games. Meet New People.

Madison Games Day is a chance for gamers in and around the Madison, Wisconsin area to meet new people and play new games. Bring your friends, bring your game group, but while you’re here, sit at a table with folks you barely know—or don’t know at all—and try some games that you haven’t played before but maybe have always wanted to.

We invite everyone in the area (or willing to make the trek) to come and play some games! There will be indie and mainstream roleplaying games, card games, and board games. If you have something you’d like to play, bring it!

Everything is blood.

The heartland gushes. Highways like arteries. The map darkens with spreading red. At night, it’s all a great big bloody nowhere, a yawning mouth, a hungry shadow. And you have to cross it. It feels like a bad dream. It is a bad dream. This can’t be real. This can’t be what they want you to do. Of course, you know as soon as you wake up it doesn’t change anything. It doesn’t stop the fact that tomorrow night, this dream you’re having right now becomes really real, and let’s face it, you’re probably going to die out there.

Blood Drive is available at the Flames Rising RPGNow Shop.

Once upon a time, my friend David ran a Delta Green game. David was a huge fan of the in-game prop, especially when it came to this particular campaign. If our clues were photographs, we generally had photographs in our paws. If the clue was a recording of some nature, then we also received that. I mention this because White Wolf’s new Collection of Horrors line appears to follow in his beliefs that props are good things. CoH is associated with the Hunter the Vigil line as each entry describes a scene (using the SAS platform) that can either be fitted into an already existing campaign, spark a new campaign, or simply fill up a night’s worth of gaming.

As of this writing there are thirteen PDFs associated with this project (a couple more if you count the introduction module and Horror Recognition Guide).

This week we’re releasing the following kits in the Collection of Horrors: Mother of All Wrong Turns, Caveat Emptor, Body of Evidence, Good for the Soul and Serpent’s Tooth. Mother of All Wrong Turns is already up!

Just learning about the Collection? The Collection of Horrors is an anthology of Storyteller tools inspired by the Horror Recognition Guide that you can either use in conjunction with the Guide or as part of your existing Hunter: The Vigil chronicle.

Check out all of the Hunter: the Vigil products at the Flames Rising RPGNow Shop.

Looking for ideas for your Hunter game? The Collection of Horrors is an anthology of Storyteller tools inspired by the Horror Recognition Guide that you can either use in conjunction with the Guide or as part of your existing Hunter: The Vigil chronicle.

Each story kit in the Collection of Horrors (which you can buy individually, as a bundle or as a subscription) contains variety of appropriate tools; usually an SAS scene, a character with a character sheet, and props ranging from maps and reports to print out and hand to your players, to short imbedded audio files that you can play at your gaming table. These kits represent a collection of evocative story tools that you can write a story around, drop into an existing SAS or even string together. They aren’t stories in their own right, but rather pieces that you can snap together into whatever shape you want. Using the Guide can add even more props and ideas to this anthology, but it’s not required to use the various story kits in the Collection of Horrors.

White Wolf has a special place in my heart that goes both ways. It’s a classic tale of love and hate that dates back to the first edition of Vampire: the Masquerade I bought on a whim. As they dwindled down their successful runs only to reboot them, I found myself enjoying their releases less and less. I felt they were trying to reinvent their own wheel and, well, just couldn’t do it. I took on Hunter: the Vigil and hoped for the best.

This monstrous tome pushes four hundred pages and yet somehow manages to enrapture the reader. There are small bits off; however, this is an exceptional book. Let’s take a look at it. The layout of Hunter is typical to their new lines. A cropping of artwork throughout the book lines the upper border of the book while fading into a gray border that frames each page.

Review by Todd Cash

Under the Skin is the first adventure using the Storyteller Adventure System that I’ve read, so I found myself looking forward to reading it. Adventures are a tricky bag, especially to a setting as thick as White Wolf’s World of Darkness. I say they are tricky mainly because there always exists the tendency for them to railroad players in an attempt to make sense of the scripted adventure. Some games find a way around this by theorizing alternate endings or sometimes not even offering a true ending (though few do the latter). This adventure makes little effort in offering a free-form style, which we’ll discuss later in the review.

Review by Todd Cash

Something is inside my skin.
Shifting, itching and scrabbling for purchase. It takes me over, pushing me down to darkness. My voice is not my voice; my steps are not my steps. I see my friends… it sees my friends. I cannot scream. I cannot warn them. I am powerless and small in my own body.
Help. [...]

Strange Encounters

The Vigil brings no easy explanations — every night is a new mystery, a bizarre creature, an unknown terror. But hunters are humans, and humans must categorize — they take notes, keep journals, snap pictures and attempt to illustrate the horrors they meet on the hunt. By doing so, hunter cells try to find patterns, solve enigmas, and most important of all, keep hold of their sanity in these long, dark nights.

A Chronicle Book for Hunter: The Vigil

The Horror Recognition Guide is available at the Flames Rising RPGNow Shop.

The old woman totters off to enjoy her breakfast, as tiny drops of bile patter on the street behind her.

People are turning up dead with their organs missing, but there’s no evidence of scars or surgery. The deaths are clearly unusual and perhaps even supernatural, and when one victim dies right in front of the hunters, their involvement becomes crucial. While the hunters may at first believe they are simply tracking down a monster, their investigations soon reveal a pattern to the killings, which implies some guiding intellect behind the travesties.

A story in the Storytelling Adventure System for Hunter: The Vigil.

Spearfinger is available now at the Flames Rising RPGNow Shop.

Today’s monster is brought to us by author Jess Hartley (Hunter: the Vigil) and artist Jeff Preston (Key20 Games). This tale brings us a new twist on the legend of the succubus.

She just might steal your heart…

Falling for Her

Created by Jess Hartley
With Art by Jeff Preston

“Call it a birth defect,” she’d said, the first night they’d been together. He’d not stopped to ask more, too hungry for what she offered. And in the morning, she was gone.

Every night, he tried to ask her about it, that raw-tipped stub at the base of her spine. It seemed somehow important that he ask. But, although he knew everything else about her, every time he raised that topic she managed to change it, so swiftly and gracefully that it was the next morning before he realized he’d once again been distracted.

We’re back from GenCon and so are the Flash Fire Mini-Reviews.

This week we’re going to take a look at some of the cool new books we picked up over the weekend in Indianapolis. This mix of Horror and Dark Fantasy game products from large publishers and small press shows off just a few of the interesting items that were available at the convention.

I’ll be upfront and admit I have not completely read these titles yet. GenCon was only a few days ago and some of these books are quite hefty (Starblazer Adventures alone is 600+ pages). So, these are first impressions and notes from playing demos at the convention.

A Candle in the Darkness
The scales have fallen from your eyes. A fire is lit: is it a lamp perched over the inscription upon an ancient blade? Or a roaring conflagration consuming the house in which the howling fiends wait? Things will never be the same after this. You’ve set forth on a damning path. [...]

The Hunt

The Special Cases Unit of the Philadelphia PD was used to handling strange cases, but when a flesh-eating ghoul killed one of their own, they’re thrown into a new world where literal monsters roam the night. Now they’re working for an organization known as Task Force: Valkyrie, or they will be after they finish this hunt….

This quickstart for Hunter: The Vigil contains everything you need to play through a scenario (except for some 10-sided dice). This story is set chronologically before our other quickstart, One Year Later, but no knowledge of Hunter is needed to play this stand-alone product.

The Hunt is available for free at the Flames Rising RPGNow Shop.

Trailers Contest

In celebration of the upcoming August release of Hunter: The Vigil, White Wolf is bringing back the incredibly popular trailers contest that we ran last year! We know our fans are creative and artistic, so we are looking for people with vision to create the trailers that play on our website and on the internet.

Chuck Wendig has contributed to over sixty books for White Wolf Game Studios. His short fiction has infiltrated Whispers From the Shattered Forum, Not One of Us, and an upcoming Carnifex Press anthology.

In this interview Chuck tells us about how got his start at White Wolf Game Studios. He also tells us a bit about working on the previous World of Darkness, Requiem for Rome and, of course, Hunter: the Vigil.

Previous Hunter: the Vigil teasers have included sample Endowments and Professions as well as the Loyalists of Thule.

I don’t want to distract folks from the teasers that White Wolf has posted recently, namely A Game of Light in Shadows and What Hunter Is. Go read them when you get the chance, interesting stuff.

This week we are going to do something a little different…

I asked the authors of the Hunter: the Vigil core book to tell me a little something about working on the book. A few of them sent me some interesting stories…

UPDATE: White Wolf freelancer, Alex Greene, has sent me some of his thoughts on the new game. I’ve added them to this post.