Good news, spooky nerds: The World Of Darkness games are becoming TV shows and movies
Film Features World of Darkness
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Arrival screenwriter Eric Heisserer is teaming up with production company Hivemind (from The Witcher and The Expanse) and The Punisher and Castle writer/producer Christine Boylan to develop a “shared universe” based on the World Of Darkness line of tabletop role-playing games created by Mark Rein-Hagen in 1991. If you’re not familiar, the World Of Darkness encompasses things you may have heard of like Vampire: The Masquerade, Werewolf: The Apocalypse, and Hunter: The Reckoning, which are all separate games that take place in the same cool goth-punk world and focus on various supernatural creatures going about their goth lives. Unlike Dungeons & Dragons, they’re less about fighting enemies and more about telling stories and cosplaying as your vampire OC.
The World Of Darkness stuff has been adapted into loads of other mediums, like video games and books and comics (plus one short-lived TV show), and now it’s being translated into some kind of interconnected movie/TV universe. The Hollywood Reporter story doesn’t get into exactly what the creative team is planning or where any of this might end up, but it’s almost certainly being positioned as the next Game Of Thrones-y entertainment franchise. It also sounds like Heisserer and Boylan are going to specifically focus on some of the timely themes that the original games embraced, with Boylan noting that they “always made a point of including equal gendered characters, protagonists and antagonists of every race, and representation of all creeds,” which allowed the games to become “a place where women, POC, and the LGBTQI community feel welcome.”
Paradox Interactive, the video game publisher that currently owns the rights to World Of Darkness, is also involved in all of this. It’s been working on a sequel to cult-classic World Of Darkness video game Vampire: The Masquerade—Bloodlines for years, but development has been… let’s say troubled.
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Unlike Dungeons & Dragons, they’re less about fighting enemies and more about telling stories and cosplaying as your vampire OC.You also have to keep up The Masquerade, of which failure to do so has severe consequences…
If it doesn’t feature characters clipping through the scenery and failing to complete missions due to missing dialogue, then I’m not interested. I’m joking, of course. Despite it’s many, many bugs Vampire: The Masquerade was a lot of fun. Please make one of the main characters a Malkavian who consistently threatens to mess everything up because they’re so mental.
did you ever play Paranoia? if so then i report you to The Computer as a total Death Leopard commie mutant spy
Shame about the Werewolf game.
Kotaku liked it.https://kotaku.com/werewolf-the-apocalypse-earthblood-is-dumb-fun-90s-1846200494
i’ve gotten depressingly into vampire dark ages with the three people who will sit on IRC and play with me for the past 8 years. 🙁
See, that’s just not fair to our clan, honestly. You call it “messing up” but it’s merely because you’re only seeing a 3d picture of what’s happening while we’re looking at the 6d picture through a kaleidoscope.
As long as it doesn’t fall into the same pitfall that many other lore-heavy adaptations do and substitutes world-building for story-telling, I think it would be a nice shot in the arm to vampire fiction.
Hold on is it suddenly 1999 again?
Not suddenly.
Worst episode of HBO’s Real Sex ever.
Here’s what I’m thinking: Three CW shows, one vampire show, one werewolf show, one random other things show. Lots of pretty people giving longing looks at each other. Over 20 episodes per season. Most of it will be people talking in the same dark rooms about how they want to be together but can’t because they’re a vampire/wearwolf/whatever and the other is a human. Every episode ends in a short action scene against a monster of the week with poor CGI. Every year you get a big World of Darkness crossover between the three shows.BoomHordes of fangirlsLicense to print money
Eh, with the werewolves, they can’t be together because they’re both werewolves.
i thought this was a great idea in 1995, but in 2021? There wasn’t ever any story, just loads of “Queen Victoria was totally Ventrue” lore, i don’t know what survived through to the next generation. This is literally what happens when a film-buff Malkavian goes into torpor for twenty years and returns to resume exactly where he left off.
That being said, what they published for Mage: the Ascension, was never popular as a game, but man, it was a lovely game. And the Technocracy! Fantastic. And the way they conceptualise the internet. That could play well as a tv show, but inevitable bad inertia would make it end up as rip-off Matrix for sure. It’s easier to throw in the Akashic Brotherhood then to write good non-Paradoxical Entropy attacks every episode.
All I want is the Technocracy to burst out of nowhere and start taking out reality deviants Agent Smith and T-800 style. Just to watch people who aren’t familiar with the lore go “WTF was THAT??”
I think shows like Legion demonstrate there could be an audience for a Mage series.
yes, but Legion had legions of comic book readers, and years of story to adapt. Mage instead has dozens of former players, and no story to adapt.
I’m not sure Legion is really a good example of that. It’s ostensibly an X-Men TV show, but it really just takes an obscure character and runs with it, doesn’t it? Maybe things change a bit in the later seasons, but the first season stubbornly refused to have much to do with the source material, nor did it really advertise itself as such. The X-Men mythology wasn’t used to promote the mythology, and they seem to create practically everything BUT David out of whole cloth.
If anything, I’d say that Mage is a better choice because there simply is so much to work with. While the nature of the source being a TT roleplaying game means that there aren’t stories you can directly rip off (apart from licensed novels, I guess), there’s no end of story materials to draw from — and unlike with Vampire, those materials haven’t been strip-mined already.
Please, please, please not the CW. Just, like, please no. No no no.
It won’t be on the CW. CW is for WB and a few CBS productions only. This could be a pretty interesting series. Vampires would be obvious but I’d love something based on Mage. That said, a more action oriented What We Do in the Shadows (a Malkavian and a couple others who live together).
While I’m sure the TV shows will be their own “universe” in the sense that the MCU isn’t part of the same canon as comic books, will this be based mainly on the original 1990s World of Darkness or the more recent reboots?
If you’re talking about the full-on reboot, nope. They rebranded those books as the “Chronicles of Darkness” when Paradox yanked classic WoD back from the trash. To my understanding, their publisher (Onyx Path) is basically free to do their own thing with it, but it won’t be getting attention from Paradox. It’s a pity, because the reboot actually has some interesting stuff going on. and classic WoD is…. a little dusty. It’s also largely lacking in ongoing metaplot, but that could be a strength or a weakness.
And to maintain the integrity of the source material, at the season finale of the vampire show, the main characters all get turned into lawn chairs.
I sincerely doubt that WoD’s brand of fiction is going to get another chance to be taken seriously by both artists and audiences simultaneously. The 90s, in hindsight, really were a razor’s edge where you could be boldly progressive and boldly misanthropic simultaneously. What’s worse is that, overall, I don’t think the material aged poorly. I think we did.I find it pretty frustrasting generally when people shit on “grimdark.” Yeah, it got excessive. Everything does. Imitators and profiteers and straight-up crazies always Forrest Gump the football all the way out of the stadium, no matter what the football happens to be. The movement radically expanded the possibility space for what you could actually sell to a reasonably large audience, and, just like the quote in the article says, it ended up exposing people to a lot of queer stuff (all puns intended) that may have incidentally knocked some fucking empathy and perspective into their noggins.
I get the Werewolves and Vampires… but how does Fred Dryer fit into this story?
I’m always curious about who any of these World of Darkness multimedia products are for. And I say that as someone for whom the tabletop game was a formative experience. I was down with that goofy quasi-activist edgelord silliness from the fairy werecats all the way up to the corpse-fucking vampire mobsters — but it’s a series that’s very much dated to its time. Mostly to me it comes down to what separates this series from the wealth of other modern fantasy fiction? Most of the qualities that Vampire: The Masquerade focused on — the idea of a masquerade, the squabbling clans, the feudal/aristocratic structure, the raging beast within — are now saturated throughout the genre. And I’m hard pressed to see what name appeal the franchise is going to have for viewers. I know there are still hardcore WoD fans out there, especially in the LARPing community, but I’ve heard next to nothing about Paradox’s revival. I’m just really intrigued as to what the larger vision is for VtM et al as intellectual properties.
“Supernatural” is basically “Hunter: The Reckoning.”
What We Do in the Shadows is already the best WoD series possible.