We live our days completely ignorant of the true terrors lurking around us. Only rarely do our
experiences draw back the veil of shadows and reveal the horror in our midst. These glimpses into
the supernatural can cause us to retreat into comforting lies—"There are no such things as
monsters"—or stir our morbid curiosity. Only a few, however, can overcome their fear and dare to
look deeper.
Abandon Hope All Who Enter
The World of Darkness Rulebook introduces a version of our contemporary world where the
supernatural is real. Players join to tell tales of mystery and horror, where theme, mood and plot
are more important to a character's experiences than his weapons or equipment. Inside are rules
for character creation, task resolution, combat and any activity your character attempts as he
delves into the shadows.
What you get here is just the core framework and implied setting for the NWoD line. That being said, what you get here is solid gold. For character generation you're pretty much limited to human beings and ghosts. Ghosts expected to be Storyteller run characters of course.
The rules are a refinement of the old WoD line, now far more straightforward and simple while still being extremely versatile. The implied setting is simply this world through a dark veil, where you assume that things really do go bump in the night. However nothing is really hard defined leaving it up to the story teller to flesh out the world to suit the story.
World of Darkness introduces all the base principles to the system you'll need to know to be able to play all the other NWoD games, and allows players to create mortals characters right off the bat.
It's a good game as it stands. The rules are simple, intuitive in most cases. The background is minimalist yet inspiring. It's the base book. The corner stone of the whole NWoD building, if you will.
I think it is good on its own. It becomes great when Vampire, Mage, Werewolf etc. are added to it. It's an improvement over the rules of the Old WoD, certainly.
After the tumultuous winding-up of the 'old' World of Darkness storylines, White Wolf has begun a rebirth, a renewal of the entire concept. On the face of it, little has changed. OK, so the 'Storyteller' system is now the 'Storytelling' system, but you still throw handfuls of d10s at each problem, you still get to be a werewolf or a vampire or whatever, the emphasis is still on role-playing rather than bigger weapons than the next guy...
But – despite my local group who to a man said they'd stick with the old system they knew and loved – there are genuine changes and improvements. To begin with, rather than having a core rulebook for each subset of the World of Darkness – Vampire: The Masquerade, Werewolf: The Apocalypse, Demon: The Fallen and so on and so forth – which were each different although cross-compatible, we now have a single core rulebook that contains the general rules under which the game is played. Then, of course, you can go down different paths as you please, purchasing appropriate supplements about vampires, mages or whatever takes your fancy. The idea is that now you are playing a 'Storytelling System' chronicle, in which vampires, werewolves and mages (and so on) can appear as NPCs or player-characters. The compatibility is total so that if you can find a way to stop them bickering – or biting each other! – you could have a player-character werewolf and a player-character vampire in the same game.
Overall, this is an excellent rationalisation and maturation of a familiar system.
You can read the full review at http://www.rpg-resource.org.uk/index.php?article=2728&visual=4
