WishIWasABrujah

Today White Wolf made an announcement that they are working at a new in-house VTM project.

Some information was given during the last Darkness Emergent LA event, but has not made public at the moment.

The note describes it as such:

The new project is our love letter to the 30+ years of vampires that have led us here. We’re celebrating the connection between lore and mechanics, rules and storytelling. The design is focused on player agency, collaboration, and making the experience feel personal. The art direction is built around illustration, with a strong commitment to human-made work.

The project will be fully announced during Gen Con 2026, starting on July 30th, including a presentation, playtesting groups and live Actual plays.

Also as a side note, the post also mentions the following:

We’ve been reading your chronicles, your Discord, Reddit, and Tumblr posts, your correspondences, your house rules, and your feedback about what's been lost and what still matters. We’re making sure your voice matters to the future of White Wolf.

I know White Wolf and Paradox are no strangers to Discord and Reddit, but Tumblr??? that took me off guard, the community here is much more smaller and kinda different, but there's a non zero chance that White Wolf staff have seen our posts and activity here.

OK that's all, link of the full note bellow, now to wait until Gen Con

Today White Wolf made an announcement that they are working at a new in-house VTM project.

Some information was given during the last Darkness Emergent LA event, but has not made public at the moment.

The note describes it as such:

The new project is our love letter to the 30+ years of vampires that have led us here. We’re celebrating the connection between lore and mechanics, rules and storytelling. The design is focused on player agency, collaboration, and making the experience feel personal. The art direction is built around illustration, with a strong commitment to human-made work.

The project will be fully announced during Gen Con 2026, starting on July 30th, including a presentation, playtesting groups and live Actual plays.

Also as a side note, the post also mentions the following:

We’ve been reading your chronicles, your Discord, Reddit, and Tumblr posts, your correspondences, your house rules, and your feedback about what's been lost and what still matters. We’re making sure your voice matters to the future of White Wolf.

I know White Wolf and Paradox are no strangers to Discord and Reddit, but Tumblr??? that took me off guard, the community here is much more smaller and kinda different, but there's a non zero chance that White Wolf staff have seen our posts and activity here.

OK that's all, link of the full note bellow, now to wait until Gen Con

Dungeons & Dragons is owned by Hasbro. Yes, the same Hasbro that owns Monopoly and My Little Pony.

Hasbro wants D&D to be the only tabletop RPG that anyone plays.

In order to accomplish this, Hasbro needs D&D to be a universal entry-level game.

D&D is not a universal entry-level game.

All game rules are opinionated about how the game ought to be played, and as tabletop RPGs go, D&D's rules are more opinionated than most. This is not a flaw, but it's not what Hasbro needs.

D&D is also on the high end of complexity as far as tabletop RPGs go, and it's complex in a way that strongly rewards system mastery, so it's pretty far from "entry level".

Hasbro could produce a version of D&D that's at the very least less opinionated and more entry-level than it presently is, but they don't want to, because they've determined that certain rules features which run counter to both of those goals are critical to D&D's brand identity.

They also don't want to produce multiple versions of D&D tailored for different audiences, because they want every single D&D group to be a potential purchaser of every single D&D product; they'd be effectively competing with themselves for their own customer base if the published game was actually modular in any meaningful way.

So how does Hasbro square that circle?

Simple: they lie. They insist that D&D is in fact a universal entry-level game in spite of all evidence to the contrary, and back their advertising up with sponsored thinkpieces and podcasts and such to "prove" it.

Further, they've spent decades fostering a culture of play which conceals the gap between the game they're advertising and the game they're selling by ascribing any appearance that D&D isn't a universal entry-level game to the incompetence or malice of individual GMs.

The game the rules want to produce disagrees with the game the group wants to play? Nonsense – even the rankest beginner should be able to produce any experience of play using any set of rules, and if your GM can't, they're a Bad GM.

The game is hard to learn? No, it isn't – your GM is merely gatekeeping you. This wouldn't be a problem with a Good GM.

The upshot is that the published rules are more or less irrelevant with respect to achieving the desired experience of play, because they're operating within a culture of play which dumps 100% of the work of making that desired experience of play happen on the GM.

Indeed, much of what modern D&D presents as GMing best practices are really methods of working around the fact that the rules you're using disagree with you about what kind of game you're playing.

(It's not a coincidence that D&D's entrenched culture of play also insists that it's normal for GMs to be miserably overworked and treats GM burnout as a big funny joke, then turns around and loudly wonders why there's a constant GM shortage.)

The trick is, because you're still at least notionally using the rules of D&D, the fruits of all that GM labour are perceived as the product of "playing D&D", not of the GM's hard work.

In essence, Hasbro's business model for Dungeons & Dragons is selling you your own GM's labour with a D&D sticker on it.

It's a very neat trick, if you can pull it off.

Now, at this point some readers may be asking: well, sure, but not all GMs are doormats. What about "killer" GMs who do gatekeep and railroad their players and otherwise act like complete tyrants? I hear horror stories about them all the time.

As noted above, all game rules are opinionated about what kind of game they wanted to produce. This isn't just a matter of setting (though setting-neutral games are often misleadingly called "universal" games), but also a matter of the basic structure of the narrative which emerges when you follow the rules.

The rules of Dungeons & Dragons are not less opinionated than those of your average indie RPG, and in fact are more opinionated than most. (Again, having strongly opinionated rules is not something that's wrong with D&D; it's merely something that's inconvenient for Hasbro's marketing goals in a way they're unwilling to address.)

In brief, D&D really, really wants your game to be a sword and sorcery dungeon crawl. If the GM is using the framework of play furnished by the rules at all, or if the players are responding to the rules' player-facing incentives even a little bit, it's going to squish your game into something dungeon-crawl-shaped.

(This should not be surprising; it's literally in the name!)

The rules of D&D being opinionated in this way tends to fly under the radar for a couple of reasons, one less problematic and one more so.

The relatively benign reason is that many popular RPG premises are not done any great violence by being squished into the shape of a sword and sorcery dungeon crawl.

A cyberpunk smash and grab caper? Basically a dungeon crawl already.

A special forces op in a modern military game? That doesn't need to be shaped like a sword and sorcery dungeon crawl, but it can be shaped like one and remain intelligible as what it's supposed to be.

Gritty logistics-driven survival horror? Not inherently dungeon crawl shaped, but the two genres are compatible – a game can be both at the same time, as video games like Fear & Hunger and Look Outside demonstrate. (Indeed, Look Outside's apartment building follows the structure of an old school D&D megadungeon nearly beat for beat!)

Thanks to D&D's pervasive cultural influence informing what people expect a tabletop RPG to be, as long as this kind of compatibility is present, many folks won't even notice their intended premise is being squished into the shape of a sword and sorcery dungeon crawl.

If your chosen premise isn't compatible in this way, or if the group notices what's happening and decides to push back against it, though? That's where the sleight of hand I alluded to above starts to come into play.

Remember: a Good GM™, even a total novice, ought to be able to use any set of rules to produce any desired experience of play, right?

So get to work!

i.e., just as much of the game's putative approachability is the product of Hasbro selling the players their GM's labour in a D&D-shaped box, much of D&D's putative flexibility is the product of the GM being sold their own labour in a D&D-shaped box.

To be clear, this is not militating against homebrew content or rules. Homebrew is perfectly cromulent, and certainly, some games are more or less structurally amenable to it (though modern D&D tends to fall on the "less" side).

The problem is that what we've got on our hands is a culture of play that wants to have its cake and eat it too: when doing extensive homebrew is treated as part of the GM's basic, entry-level responsibilities, it's easy to fall into the trap of thinking of the product of that labour as merely being a feature of the game.

I've been thinking recently about Vampire the Masquerade in regards to the other World of Darkness games, with this post by ProphetCassandra being the main catalyst for it.

In my opinion, one of core concepts of Vampire the Masquerade is the struggle of maintaining one's humanity as an immortal monster. As a player you are expected to lose it over the course of play, either as a result of failed dice rolls or decisions the players make within the story of their chronicle. There is however a gameplay issue within all editions of the game which I believe hampers this concept.

There is no mechanical incentive for characters to risk losing their humanity. It's either the result of players choosing to do so, a bad dice roll or decided by the ST as a result of a character's actions. Losing humanity is a punishment in all versions of the game, either willing or arbitrary. In my opinion, this makes most players less inclined to have their characters act in ways that would put their humanity at risk, which I think hinders the core concept mentioned earlier. 

Previous editions had the Paths of Enlightenment as an alternative to the Humanity system, I do not personally think it is a sufficient solution to this problem, in addition to being hard to wrap your head around and portray convincingly by players and ST alike.

V5 does Humanity Tracking and Degeneration far better than previous editions with the Touchstone, Stains and Remorse systems in my opinion. Yet they all are built on the same premise that losing humanity is a failure state to be avoided or is inevitable. 

Perhaps that is the point of the game design, and I just don’t get it or enjoy it. 

That being said, I do believe there to be more varied story potential in giving low-humanity gameplay benefits that tempt players to consider indulging their Beast and letting their humanity degrade. Expanding on the reasons why so many vampires choose to abandon or refuse to maintain their personhood by having mechanical incentives for it. 

Perhaps becoming less human means the vampire can more easily direct what violent actions they do in a frenzy as the line between their personhood and the Beast becomes thinner.

Or that social dice rolls or discipline powers that manipulate a low-humanity kindred mind are made harder as their ability to be sympathetic or feel emotions has grown more numb. 

I've been thinking recently about Vampire the Masquerade in regards to the other World of Darkness games, with this post by ProphetCassandra being the main catalyst for it.

In my opinion, one of core concepts of Vampire the Masquerade is the struggle of maintaining one's humanity as an immortal monster. As a player you are expected to lose it over the course of play, either as a result of failed dice rolls or decisions the players make within the story of their chronicle. There is however a gameplay issue within all editions of the game which I believe hampers this concept.

There is no mechanical incentive for characters to risk losing their humanity. It's either the result of players choosing to do so, a bad dice roll or decided by the ST as a result of a character's actions. Losing humanity is a punishment in all versions of the game, either willing or arbitrary. In my opinion, this makes most players less inclined to have their characters act in ways that would put their humanity at risk, which I think hinders the core concept mentioned earlier. 

Previous editions had the Paths of Enlightenment as an alternative to the Humanity system, I do not personally think it is a sufficient solution to this problem, in addition to being hard to wrap your head around and portray convincingly by players and ST alike.

V5 does Humanity Tracking and Degeneration far better than previous editions with the Touchstone, Stains and Remorse systems in my opinion. Yet they all are built on the same premise that losing humanity is a failure state to be avoided or is inevitable. 

Perhaps that is the point of the game design, and I just don’t get it or enjoy it. 

That being said, I do believe there to be more varied story potential in giving low-humanity gameplay benefits that tempt players to consider indulging their Beast and letting their humanity degrade. Expanding on the reasons why so many vampires choose to abandon or refuse to maintain their personhood by having mechanical incentives for it. 

Perhaps becoming less human means the vampire can more easily direct what violent actions they do in a frenzy as the line between their personhood and the Beast becomes thinner.

Or that social dice rolls or discipline powers that manipulate a low-humanity kindred mind are made harder as their ability to be sympathetic or feel emotions has grown more numb. 

Verbena Newbe: “Wait I thought all those things were metaphors for different plants…”

And then White Wolf did a very White Wolf thing where they got angry that too many people were having fun playing vampire punks and not brooding warrior scholars so they introduced the concept of the True Brujah, who were descended from the original Brujah Antediluvian and never lost the whole warrior scholar thing, had the opposite curse of the Brujah, while also having motherfucking time travel powers. It was a pretty mean spirited change to the lore meant as a middle finger to Brujah players, and, to this day, a lot of players consider the Trujah one of the worst things in VtM

But… hot take, but I kind of love the Trujah, and I think they actually enhance the Brujah. See, for me, I’ve always imagined the Brujah having a much greater connection to past heros and elders of their Clan than other Clans. The average Brujah, for me, will do that classic leftist thing of waxing poetic about Marx and Engles, and whatever other revolutionary heroes, if you get them going. But Brujah will also throw in names like Tyler, Smiling Jack, and, of course, Troile. The existence of the Trujah make Troile so much cooler. Because, now, not only was she the first vampire to overthrow a tyrannical elder and claim their power for her own, but she overcame the Trujah curse of having no emotions and, in fact, her rage at the injustice of vampire society was so great that she completely inverted her own Clan curse. She made the Clan her own. The whole punk revolutionary attitude that the Brujah have isn’t a bug in this version of the lore, it’s a feature they inherited directly from Troile.

That's not to say we didn't find Trujah a bit iffy, but for completely different reasons unrelated to White Wolf or whatever perceived antagonism they had with their primary playerbase.

See, Trujah were introduced in the Dirty Secrets of the Black Hand (1994), a supplementary book that was, from my experience, generally poorly received because... well, how do I put it? Let me quote a review from 1998:

Probably the biggest mistake of DSotBH is that it tries to tie together all the various White Wolf game lines together with Vampire the Masquerade taking the lead.  Publishing DSotBH as a Vampire the Masquerade book puts all the other creatures as subservient to the needs of vampires.

Basically, Trujah were introduced in a book that tried to integrate the lore of all its game lines into one big meta-plot through the Tal'mahe'Ra (aka the True Black Hand) being the true manipulators of everything behind the scenes. In doing so, it introduced a lot of disciplines that could easily be abused and disrupted the established lore people were already working with in their games in service of a world-spanning, comic-book-epic-type meta-plot that conflicted with the themes of personal horror.

Temporis, for instance, wasn't seen as a "vampire power." Not horror or monster flavored enough, some claimed. It made vampires feel like X-Men more than vampires, some claimed even further.

Your mileage varies on whether you agree — I certainly think time manipulation can very much be utilized for horrific scenarios. But I do agree that Temporis is an ability that is very disruptive to the lore.

Prior to DSotBH, time manipulation was mainly a mage power, having an entire sphere of magic dedicated to it. Sure, other supernatural beings can do timey-wimey stuff but only incidentally, like a vampire slowing down their perception of time through Celerity.

With the introduction of Temporis, WW basically gave vampires a very mage-coded ability without the usual mage drawbacks. Trujah don't suffer paradox backlashes and have no restrictions aside from the usual blood and willpower. So in that context of overall supernatural power-scaling, putting that kind of ability on an already hard-to-destroy vampire body is extremely OP. WW would later tone down Temporis and introduce "temporal burn" whenever Trujah mess with time (so basically, paradox backlash).

I personally love the concept of True Brujah and love the idea of Troile the Elder being both alive and dead, having stepped out of time before he was destroyed. What juicy horror it is to be stuck in the moments before your childe stabs you in the heart, or having to repeat that over and over again as you try to find a timeline where you don't end up being destroyed.

HOWEVER, I dread the day a player comes up to me and wants to actually play a Trujah. I have never met an ST that allows PC Trujah, and for good reason. From 1-4 dots, Temporis is pretty useless with only niche utility that can be done more efficiently via Auspex or Celerity. More advanced powers accrue temporal burn, and often isn't worth the hassle. Their clan weakness of having no emotions leaves players with limited options for RP. Brujah are all passionate, but they can be passionate about anything, leading to diverse personalities. They can be punk idealists but they can also be fascists or hopeless romantics or religious zealots or raging bigots — any flavor of ideologue. Trujah, on the other hand, by nature of their clan bane, all have the same flat emotionless character.

And Vampire is ultimately about playing characters who care about something, whether that's survival or power or humanity. Because the moment a vampire stops caring, what's stopping them from succumbing to the Beast or falling into torpor? A vampire that doesn't care about anything is... well, a vampire that has no reason to exist.

TEMPORIS

¤ Time Sense - sense the passage of time, including any disruptions to it

¤¤ Ramble On - cause a single target to repeat their actions

¤¤¤ Zombie's Curse - cause a target to perceive time being sped up (ie slow the target)

¤¤¤¤ Cowalker - stop time for a moment, allowing the vampire to appear in two places at once [btw you can basically do the same teleporting with Celerity 3 losing only the advantage of appearing like a mirror image, and you can make an illusory mirror image at Chimestry 1/2/3. The ability's description explicitly disallows a player from using the double bodies for direct combat or to "affect objects in the time stream" (DSotBH, p. 75), so this ability ends up being an objectively costlier and riskier version of Blink and Apparition.]

¤¤¤¤¤ Frozen Object - stop time for an animate object for an indefinite length of time

6¤ Control Aging

7¤ Outside the Hourglass - step outside the time steam, the vampire stops time allowing her to do actions while everything else is frozen around her

8¤ Rewind Time

9¤ Summon History - basically pull an event fro the past into the present [like what I do in my fic, Veritas Filia Temporis]

TIME (SPHERE OF MAGIC)

¤ Time Sense - sense the passage of time, including any disruptions to it

¤¤ Past/Future Sight - the mage shifts their perception backwards and forwards in time (ie precognition/postcognition)

¤¤¤ Time Contraction/Dilation - slow or quicken the passage of time [target non-specific, mage powers are more dynamic than disciplines and are usually only limited by the their imagination and paradox, so this can and does usually function like Zombie's Curse]

¤¤¤¤ Time Determinism - cause absolute shifts in time (ie instead of slowing and speeding, a mage can now freeze time entirely) [most definitely functions like Frozen Object]

¤¤¤¤¤ Future Travel/Time Immunity - mastery over the stream of time [ie all the advanced Temporis abilities]

Caveats: Magic mastery and advanced vampiric disciplines (6¤ onwards) are not typically available to PCs, so these are more often used as plot devices rather than standard abilities. If given these reality-bending abilities, PCs can easily derail and take over a chronicle, so they're usually reserved for powerful NPCs.

However, as you can see, while there is the attempt to make lower-ranked Temporis more "undead flavored," it's basically just linear time magic with little to no connection to the blood. An ST will have to pick up the slack to differentiate these abilities as vampiric.

imagine if I said "we need to create and support programs to provide children with accessible and free high protein/nutrition meals" and you responded with "why don't we just eliminate poverty/capitalism though".