What do you think of applying the concept of "magic styles" to splats in general? It would mean greater diversity within splats.
E.g. the vampire archetype would include blood-suckers, succubi, leanan sidhe, etc; werewolves would include cursed irishmen of ossory, medicine men, krsniks, cadejo, hounds of God, etc; wizards would include hermetic adepts, wiccans, taoists, mad scientists, time travelers, templar knights, cyborgs, etc.
This isn't a new concept by any means, but I don't think I've ever seen a setting build around it. Even the original Nightlife is essentially about variations on the vampire archetype.
What do you think?
You certainly HAVE seen settings built around it... its called the Old World of Darkness. That's basically the setup for all their splats.
The Traditions were based off real magical practices;
- Akashics were Tibetan Daoists.
- Celestial Chorus was a smattering of faith-based magics including Mithrasism, Gnostics and Christians.
- Cult of Ecstasy is ecstatic practices descended from the Indian Dervishes.
- Dreamspeakers were indigenous shamanic practices.
- Euthanatos are a Cthonic Mystery Cult based who work magic through spiritual union with god-forms.
- Order of Hermes are, naturally, hermetics whose practices they trace back to Hermes Trimegestus.
- Sons of Ether are Mad Science.
- Verbena is pre-Christian European paganism.
- Virtual Adepts are modern chaos theory and attempting to build a Reality 2.0 inside the digital realm.
- Ali-Batani is Islamic mysticism.
- Taftani are pre-Islamic Middle Eastern mysticism.
- Solificati are medieval alchemists.
- Hollow Ones are New Age/Victorian mysticism.
- The Technocracy as a whole are super-science, but with specific fields like social conditioning (NWO), cybernetic systems (Iteration-X; note this includes classic cybernetics... i.e. the science of system organization not just implants and the like), financial theory (Syndicate), genetics (Progenitors) and space exploration (Void Engineers).
Similarly the original Vampire clans were essentially specific vampire archetypes;
- Brujah were Lost Boys style vampires.
- Gangrel were the shape-shifting, commands animals vampires.
- Malkavians were your obsessive-compulsive must count every grain of rice vampires.
- Nosferatu were your ugly monstrous vampires.
- Toreador were your Anne Rice vampires.
- Tremere were your extremely magical vampires.
- Ventrue were your Vampire Lords.
Its the same for werewolves, ghosts and fae. It wasn't until they started getting into hyper-specific splats like Mummy, Hunter the Reckoning (vs. generic Hunter's Hunted where there was plenty of diversity) or Kindred of the East that you started to see mono-cultures in relation to the splats.
The later additions got ever more specific because there's only so much you could do with the generic "must suck blood, burns up in daylight" limits they established; but you can see the whole "magical styles" setup right there from the start.