Rich Thomas, founder and Creative Director of Onyx Path Publishing, announced yesterday that the Kickstarter has launched for Chicago By Night, the company’s first supplement for the newly-launched Vampire: The Masquerade 5th Edition corebook.

Chicago By Night, which was announced during Gen Con: Indy 2018, expands, refreshes, and offers detailed information on one of Vampire: The Masquerade’s signature cities. The supplement will include everything players and Storytellers will need or want to tie this iconic location into their chronicle.

Hi everyone! I am pleased to announce two exciting things today! I will be at Special Guest at GameHole Con from Thursday, November 8th to Sunday, November 11th. During the show, I’ll be running a playtest of a Ravenloft campaign I’m working on for DMsGuild.com, putting in some booth time for Onyx Path Publishing, attending panels, and playing games.

To help sick kids, I will be playing a Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition game that’ll be live-streamed during the show. The fundraiser is called Extra Life, and it allows me to customize rewards for your pledges.

Once upon a time, many years ago in the closing months of the 20th Century, one of my best friends said to me “We’re going to do something new. Something different. We’re going to play Wraith.” being in a group of players that was consistently made up of myself, the significant other of my best friend, and my best friend-as-Storyteller, I was immediately intimidated. I had no idea how to play Wraith, and – truth be told – had no idea how the rules worked or how the setting would be laid out, etc.

Let’s be clear here; Vampire is easy. You’re a vampire and you live in a city and you blah blah blah all night long until the sun comes up. And let’s also be clear that with Werewolf, you’re a werewolf and you live in the near-city or wilderness – or, as I’ve proven in MY OWN games of Werewolf that I’ve run – in the city proper and you blah blah blah all day and night long until your phase of the moon hits and you’re rocking at full-tilt Gnosis and Rage…

But Wraith was different.

Wraith: the Oblivion 20th Anniversary Edition is one of the best core books for the World of Darkness bar none.  To say that it brought Wraith into the 21st Century in style would be a gross understatement, and for Onyx Path Publishing, the book is a triumph of literary accomplishment as well as updating the game and streamlining it while keeping the parts of it that absolutely needed to be held close.

Handbook for the Recently Deceased, however, affords both the player and the storyteller a succinct, capsulized glimpse at Wraith: the Oblivion that keeps the would-be storyteller who is anxiously awaiting the opportunity to throw his or her players across the Shroud from cutting deep into their printer’s ink reserves and spitting out chapters to serve as the building blocks for what they can expect from the game.

Onyx Path Publishing and Eschaton Media Launches the Kickstarter to Fund Dystopia Rising: Evolution, a New Tabletop RPG

Rich Thomas, founder and creative director of Onyx Path Publishing, in conjunction with Eschaton Media announced the Kickstarter to fund Dystopia Rising: Evolution has launched today. Dystopia Rising: Evolution is based on Eschaton Media’s popular post-zombie apocalypse themed Dystopia Rising live-action scenarios.

All the stories they told you about what it would be like after you died? They were wrong.

Are you ready to join them?

Wraith: The Oblivion is the Storytelling game of passion and horror. Take the role of a ghost whose unfinished business won’t let them rest.

HOME IS WHERE YOU GO…

They are the center of Kithain culture, the havens and shelters required when times get grim. They are dreams made manifest, and hopes kept burning. From the Mythic Ages to the present day, freeholds have been the linchpin around which the changeling world turns.

Fragile, powerful, mysterious and oft-dangerous, the complex natures of freeholds make for valuable commodities to all changelings, worth dying to protect or killing to acquire.

… WHERE THEY HAVE TO TAKE YOU IN…

Onyx Path Publishing is partnering with DriveThruRPG to allow independent content creators to publish material in the Slarecian Vault utilizing the OGL for both Pathfinder and Dungeons & Dragons Fifth Edition editions of existing and future Scarred Lands books produced by Onyx Path.

A world known to its inhabitants as Scarn, the Scarred Lands is a place of dynamic heroism, supreme villainy, and incalculable magic. Torn and twisted by battles between the titans and their children, the young gods —fought largely by monstrous titanspawn pitted against humans, elves, dwarves, and other “divine races” — Scarn is a world still wounded deeply by the Divine War that took place less than two centuries ago.

“Scarred Lands is a gem of a setting that’s flush with opportunities for great storytelling, adventuring, and good, old-fashioned monster hunting,” says Scarred Lands developer, Monica Valentinelli. “With this setting, there’s an unlimited potential for creators to explore Scarn by offering new classes, races, and more!”

“Fighting the Machine is like fighting the ocean. You literally cannot hurt it. Doesn’t matter how much poison we dump into the ocean. We’ll only kill the things in it. We’ll never kill it. Same with the God-Machine. Kill angels, traitors, stigmatics, cultists, cryptids, whatever, you’ll never hurt the Machine Itself. No, that doesn’t mean we stop trying. You stop trying, you drown. Screw that.”

—Mr. Bliss, Guardian Inquisitor

Rich Thomas, founder and creative director of Onyx Path Publishing, in conjunction with Eschaton Media announced a new partnership at Midwinter Gaming Convention. Onyx Path will develop a tabletop RPG called Dystopia Rising: Evolution based on Eschaton Media’s popular post-zombie apocalypse themed Dystopia Rising live-action scenarios.

“I’m really looking forward to working on Dystopia Rising: Evolution,” stated Eddy Webb, developer for the tabletop RPG. “The DR community has been very supportive so far, and I can’t wait to use this rich background to create a great post-apocalyptic tabletop experience.”

It’s ever been a loaded word among vampires. Jyhad is in force everywhere from lofty, perfumed Elysium to cloying, smoke-filled blood feasts. Jyhad’s the eternal game played by elders, Methuselahs, and worse — it’s the agenda of beings so utterly beyond humanity, one such as yourself could scarcely understand its movements.

Luckily for you, you’ve picked up a copy of my diary. With my help you may just take a step on the first rung of understanding. Information worth having is information you must earn through blood, and oh, how I’ve bled for what’s contained within these pages.

Changing Ways is an in-depth look at what it means to be a werewolf, both on a personal level and as part of a pack. It digs deep into what it feels like to have bones re-knit after breaking, the range of senses available across all forms, and the sudden heady rush of the Gifts and Rites bestowed by spirits. It also provides a look at what life is like for lupus and metis werewolves, characters who have had experiences alien to any person. It shows the many ways that werewolves organize in packs, and how those packs are designed as groups of warriors, rather than aligned to the behavior of wolves.

There will be dragons and there will be sirens and there will be all the armies of the otherworld sent to bring you back. But you will slay them and you will shun them and you will stand on the battlements of your fortress as they break against your walls of thorn and iron.

You will be free.

You know the stories. The hero leaves his village on a terrifying journey, or the waif finds her way through the cold, dark woods. In the end, they kill the giant or shove the witch in an oven.

But what happens next?

The Cavaliers of Mars Kickstarter is hurtling toward its final hours and we had the chance to catch up with developer Rose Bailey for a few quick questions about this new project as part of Onyx Path Publishing’s Many Worlds. One Path. line-up of excellent RPGs.

Cavaliers of Mars Kickstarter is a swashbuckling adventure setting from Rose Bailey, longtime developer of Vampire: The Requiem and other World of Darkness titles. Cavaliers draws inspiration from pulp fantasy and historical fiction, adding a modern edge and an exotic setting.

Return now to dying Mars in its last age of glory. A planet of flashing swords and choking sands, of winking courtesans and lantern-lit canal cities.

Mars, where fortune and heartbreak are two sides of the same obsidian chit, where lost cities and dry oceans stretch between the last bastions of civilization. Where the First Martians, the monument-builders, are but a haunted memory. Where the Red Martians become decadent and reckless in their last days. Where the Pale Martians rule the wastes, remembering a history whose weight would crush a lesser people.

We have shared the world with monsters for millennia…

Chronicles of Darkness: Dark Eras 2 starts out presenting a chapter for each of six historical eras; each of which features two Chronicles of Darkness game lines which include Vampire: The Requiem, Mage: The Awakening, Hunter: The Vigil, Changeling: The Lost, and more! The rules in this book are compatible with second edition Chronicles of Darkness.

Always Another Secret

The Chronicles of Darkness stretch back to the beginning of human civilization, and perhaps further. When people fearfully peered into the darkness past their campfires, the Begotten were looking back. When they opened their mouths and spoke, attaching sound to meaning, the Awakened bound those words in power and light. When humanity was forming tribes, werewolves were communing with their totem spirits. When the first cities arose, the undead licked their lips in hunger.

And through it all, forces larger and more dangerous than the whole of humanity worked their dire machinations. Even these forces, though, are subject to the tides of history.

The Clans are not the only vampires that strut, if I might steal from the Bard, upon this great stage of fools. There are the errant Kindred inaccurately collected under the sobriquet of “bloodlines.” While their role in the eternal conflict between the childer of Caine is small, it is often incredibly impactful.

As such, I provide this corollary to my original study. It would be the work of several lifetimes to find and document every tiny aberration or fleeting dead end that constitutes a variation from one of the thirteen. Instead, I have focused on nine that I know for certain have an impact in our little culture war of the dead. From the brain-washed abominations of Tremere magic to vampires twisted by demonic will to the remnants of Clans long thought dead, each of these so-called “bloodlines” have their place in society. There is no larger picture for them — for us — to be a part of. Here on the fringes, each vampire’s experience is unique.

We are free to create our own truths amidst the lies.

Dark Eras: Beneath the Skin

There is a face beneath this mask, but it isn’t me. I’m no more that face than I am the muscles beneath it, or the bones beneath that.

—Alan Moore, V for Vendetta

Ahuitzotl sits on the throne at the height of the Aztec Empire, overseeing his sorcerer-priests’ sacrifices and the endless flower wars his jaguar and eagle warriors carry out in his name to keep the altars well-supplied with victims. The gears of the Aztec Empire turn smoothly and inexorably, but not everything is what it pretends to be. Skinchangers take the shapes of animals to run the wilds or bring down human prey, the Unchained cobble together identities from stolen lives, and stranger things still lurk in the deserts and jungles beyond the walls of Tenochtitlan.

Prince’s Gambit is a casual card game where each player is a vampire called to the court of the vampiric Prince of the city. Players must cooperate to gain the favor of the Prince while deducing who among them are secretly the traitorous Sabbat infiltrators.

Designed by long-time Vampire: the Masquerade tabletop RPG developer Justin Achilli, Prince’s Gambit is a fast-paced social deduction game set within the world of Vampire, but which requires no special knowledge to play. Neophytes and experienced fans of Vampire both can jump right in.