Quote from: Orphan81;846706Speaking of French based Urban Fantasy RPG's... Steve Jackson games made their own version of In Nomie, which had something of a following in the 90's as well...

Looking back at it...If you wanted to make a competitor to the WoD that was different in it's own way.... Angels and Demons might be the way to go..You could always expand from their with adding Mages as well, as another playable type...

Throw in Vampires and Werewolves, but as lesser beings.

Of course, Angels and Demons might not have the same draw as they did in the 90's...given the continuing falling of religion in the current cultural sphere.

Being an Atheist this doesn't bother me so much, but it's just something I thought of which might impact such a game.

I think an "Angels & Demons" game could work!

Personally I'd be getting Enochian with it.

Chaosium's got After The Vampire Wars in the pipeline for BRP.

Precis Intermedia's Ghostories can do any kind of urban fantasy, but you have to come up with most of the fluff yourself.

Quote from: 3rik;846723Precis Intermedia's Ghostories can do any kind of urban fantasy, but you have to come up with most of the fluff yourself.

I wasn't very impressed with Ghostories myself. Bought it last year, and it came across as very lackluster. I also wasn't a fan of the setting...

Beyond that, however, you bring up an even greater mark against it. "come up with most of the fluff yourself."

Probably the best part of Cwod, was it's fluff. It's something gamers could talk endlessly about... The different practices of the Clans, and the Sects, Machinations of Methuselah's...

Vampire's Fluff is what sold it. Along with the fluff of all of it's other games too.

To be a strong competitor to whitewolf, I would argue your fluff is actually more important than your system. System is important too of course, but it's Fluff that gets people in the door of Whitewolf games.

Quote from: Just Another Snake Cult;846633Are you listening, Stellar Games of Ohio? Get crackin' on that new edition of Nightlife: The Role-Playing Game of Urban Horror!



(Crickets chirp. Faint sound of a lone dog howling in the distance.)



Oh well, I would buy it.

I'd buy it too.

jg

Quote from: James Gillen;846743I'd buy it too.

jg

I still have my battered copy of Nightlife. I would love to see it get updated, preferably with a much better system.

Quote from: TristramEvans;846621On a more serious not, I always thought GURPs CABAL really deserved its own gameline. It was modern supernatural occult gothic adventure, like oWoD, except the person writing it really understood what all those terms meant.

GURPS Cabal was amazing. Just flat-out amazing. One of the best RPG books I've ever read, and so useful that I've ported a lot of the information from it to other games (it's amazingly useful for Kult games, in certain ways!). It's one of the few games that I would always be willing to play, no matter what.

I do wish that there were more analogues for Vampire and the other World of Darkness games. Hell, I wish Onyx Path would get off the edition treadmill for a while... I've never really gotten into the New World of Darkness, despite a desire to do so (as I've said here before!), because they keep pumping out new editions that makes it next to impossible for me to determine where to start, what supplements are important, etc.

I guess I could just play Old World of Darkness, since I still have all the books. It'd be nice to use the 20th anniversary rules, though apparently those are going to be replaced with new editions soon... Maybe I should dig out my old copy of Nightlife? That was a good game...

It seems like the worst move you can make in game design is to follow the path of a big success. It's like all the games in the '80s that wanted to be D&D. The games we remember from the '80s are the ones that did something different. When White Wolf became huge, lots of companies tried to move into their space and mostly just crashed and burned.

You see the same thing in computer games where everyone has been trying to make the WoW and utterly failing.

If you want to attempt it, the best way to do it is to approach it from a level of dissatisfaction with the big game. Runequest was a result of not liking the way D&D worked. Unknown Armies was a result of not liking the way oWoD was completely unmoored from humanity, with humans having absolutely no significant role. It made a game where the occult was rooted in personal human concerns. It actually worked as a reversal on both oWoD and Call of Chtulhu.

The trap though is one they thing you are dissatisfied with is too small to justify a new game, which is where most attempts fail.

Quote from: Baulderstone;846749It seems like the worst move you can make in game design is to follow the path of a big success. It's like all the games in the '80s that wanted to be D&D. The games we remember from the '80s are the ones that did something different. When White Wolf became huge, lots of companies tried to move into their space and mostly just crashed and burned.

You see the same thing in computer games where everyone has been trying to make the WoW and utterly failing.

If you want to attempt it, the best way to do it is to approach it from a level of dissatisfaction with the big game. Runequest was a result of not liking the way D&D worked. Unknown Armies was a result of not liking the way oWoD was completely unmoored from humanity, with humans having absolutely no significant role. It made a game where the occult was rooted in personal human concerns. It actually worked as a reversal on both oWoD and Call of Chtulhu.

The trap though is one they thing you are dissatisfied with is too small to justify a new game, which is where most attempts fail.

This is a very good point, and excellent insight. It is the problem in a sense. White Wolf cornered the market on playing Monsters in the modern day.

Nightlife came before WoD, but it's system was far to complex. Vampire had the double whammy of not only playing Monsters, but a system that was very easy to get into and learn.

Nightbane was another awesome "Play the Monsters" game with an excellent setting that wasn't just a rip off of WoD....but it suffered from being wed to the Rift's system...

So really you're playing with two factors here. A Setting that's different enough to not be consumed by what Whitewolf has done before...And a system that's approachable and easy enough for anyone to learn quickly.

Quote from: Orphan81;846747I still have my battered copy of Nightlife. I would love to see it get updated, preferably with a much better system.

Ever listen to an amateur punk album on cassette and it sounded rough and awesome, then you replaced it with the CD and on CD it just sounded tinny and fake?

I think Nightlife might be like that. That gleam comes from the light hitting the jagged edges, not the facets.

Quote from: TristramEvans;846621Well, there's Vampire: The Undeath from Dark Phoenix publishing

Its completely original and not like any vampire rpgs you've ever seen, honest.

Oh. My. God. :eek:

Quote from: Mark Plemmons;846762Oh. My. God. :eek:

You want even scarier? Go to the youtube channel of the guy who created Vampire: Undeath...

Or go to their Forums, and see how empty they are, except for a hundred+ Posts made by the creator...

Oh, by the way...should you want to run your own Vampire: Undeath, Larp Games...you can totally give them 20 bucks and be part of their "Global" Chronicle.

It pains me to say this, but I think the reason no real contender has come forth to compete with World of Darkness is because the whole genre is just a very, very, very nineties thing.

Twilight, True Blood, Anita Blake, and all the horny housewife werewolf romances are really a separate genre. Dresden Files is the Mormon kids at Church Camp version.

I've never read Nightbane, but I've heard good things. How closely does it adhere to the Rifts system? Does it do anything unique that traditional Rifts doesn't?

I ask because we've got Savage Worlds Rifts coming early next year, so theoretically there's one avenue for Nightbane to be converted into a simpler system.

Quote from: Just Another Snake Cult;846765It pains me to say this, but I think the reason no real contender has come forth to compete with World of Darkness is because the whole genre is just a very, very, very nineties thing.

Twilight, True Blood, Anita Blake, and all the horny housewife werewolf romances are really a separate genre. Dresden Files is the Mormon kids at Church Camp version.

Well put.

I just got done doing a read on Society of Night, a vampire game by Michael Scott and Randolph Allen that is powered by StarCluster3*. Unlike my own Blood Games-OHMAS-Outremer series, where the PCs are assumed to be more human type investigators of the occult world, it is based on PCs being part of the vampire family of creatures. They both apparently prefer the percentile resolution mechanics, as not only is it the only mechanic in the book, all of the modifiers are given directly as percents. The game is pretty much complete now except for illustrations. I don't know what they are planning as for how they are releasing it, but I assume it is ready for playtest.

*This is not my game, but it is using my game engine under free license.

-clash