A not-so-indepth overview of 4 fairly popular Chronicles of Darkness fanbooks, Chapter 1: Introduction
It's getting close to Halloween, but I'm historically really really bad at keeping focus, so imagine this was released like. 2 weeks from now, OK? OK.
So! World of Darkness. Used to be my favorite punching bag, read it, now I have a weird sort of respect for it. I still don't really think its a great system, but I can really appreciate a lot of what it does, especially in the newer Chronicles line, and hell I'm one of the few people defending Vampire V6 nowadays!
Now, World of Darkness is very much not indie. White Wolf is a very large company, WoD was never really indie, I mean as early as 1996 it was getting these fairly large scale videogames, sponsoring Wrestlers, there was a soap opera. TLDR: World of Darkness really, really wanted to be a big fucking deal, a cultural touchstone. And in a way, I really do think it did succeed! I think a lot of vampire media nowadays is kinda directly inspired by it in sneaky and not-so-sneaky ways. But, the game isn't exactly indie, So, I can't really talk about it... right?
Well, let me ask you a question: What appliance uses rotational force to cool down a room?
Fanworks! it's a staple of most TTRPGs, but I think (other than 5e and Mork) World of Darkness is one of the games where Homebrew is as strongly a part of the community as the core games' content. The comparison to 5e and Mork might sound... backhanded, but I do think this is generally a good thing, I'm a copyright abolitionist, and I'm of the belief that the TTRPG space's norm of borrowing mechanics and baseline mechanics, and things like the old SRD are great examples of how art can flourish in a copyright-free world. World of Darkness has entire homebrew game lines, effectively meaning brand new, entirely original games set within the same setting as the World of Darkness and using its same mechanics.
So, I picked out 4 fairly notable ones, how did i choose which are notable? well its quite a complex process so maybe scroll down a little if you don't wanna read all of it:
I checked which ones had a TVTropes page, and then I chose the ones that bothered to add an image to the page.
After the arduous process, I ended up picking the 4 that seemed either interesting or just generally notable, Yes I'll talk about the two you're thinking of don't worry.
Oh also, as part of this, I'll be making a character for each of the games we talk about. maybe they're all in the same insane party or something
Ok so, I was going to have them all be in this post. but then as I wrote the Genius one I realized: These Are 400 page long books. they are fucking Long, so! Instead, I'm gonna post this today, September 18th 2026, and then release the other chapters over time. I won't start posting them until I'm finished writing them though! No canned projects this time!