There's an evil twin to "has only ever played Dungeons & Dragons and thinks all tabletop RPGs are as complicated as Dungeons & Dragons" that lives somewhere in the vicinity of "went straight from Dungeons & Dragons to rules-light storygames and thinks Dungeons & Dragons represents the high end of tabletop RPG complexity". Like, buddy, you have no idea.
Every time I make a joke about some unreasonably baroque bit of tabletop RPG rules tech and some chucklefuck in the notes is like "OP, you can just say D&D", they should be legally required to conduct a cover-to-cover reading of Shadowrun 3rd Edition. There will be a test.
We spoke with Jason Carl Brand Marketing Manager for White Wolf, about the move of World of Darkness to the classic White Wolf branding.
Jason Carl, brand marketing manager and the 'face' of the VAMPIRE THE MASQUERADE community, spoke about the company's recentd decision to relabel as White Wolf.
Biggest thing is a focus on doing everything in-house and maintaining its current partnerships as well as expanding its creative team.
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The Tabletop RPG game Call of Cthulhu is surprisingly popular in Japan. Call of Cthulhu is the most popular tabletop game in the country. With the earliest translation to Japanese being 1986(ish) by Chaosiom Inc./the Kadokawa corporation. It seemed to take off around the same time as an anime called "Haiyore! Nyaruko-san", which was a magical girl comedy, but they instead transform into Lovecraftian gods, and neolarthetep as one of the main cast. It was a huge hit in Japan, and its director was a huge Call of Cthulhu fan, and loaded the show with references. There was also 'Replays', a uniquely Japanese media phenomenon. These were a video or a written log of a Tabletop RPG session, usually edited with anime art, a voice synthesizer (Like text-to-speech synthesizers), and some sort of hacked dating sim engine. Kind of like the modern-day Let's Play or 'actual play' popular in America and Britain. (For context, some replays become compelling enough that they were turned into actual anime series, like the record of Ladas war). These replays made Call of Cthulhu RPG really extensible, and people who were interested wouldn't need to read multiple rulebooks to learn the mechanics. teaching them how to play the game in a digestible format.
In Japan, horror is a very popular genre. One of the main things that made the mechanics stick was the possibility of failure. Much of the audience in Japan didn't see the possibility that their characters could lose, die, and go insane as a bad in the game. In horror, it's expected that things could go wrong. It's an expectation of the horror genre that many players were aware of. Masayuki Sakamoto, who is a big Call of Cthulhu scenario writer, even said that 'when the players fail, it's not their fault, it's just horror.' In Japanese Call of Cthulhu scenarios, they're set in Japanese settings instead of in 1930s to 1920s America that we're used to. Most scenarios that people play are just regular familiar settings like being salery men in an office, or friends on a trip, with the thred between all of themis the unraveling of some sort of cosmic mystery.
It also helps since all of Cthulu is that players don't need to know any lore. It's a mystery, and the whole point is that you discover things say you play. You don't have to know what an elf is, or what the difference between a Kobold and a goblin is. The whole point is like, you don't know what Lovecraftian gods are, you don't know what's going on, and you figure it out as you go. This premise is really appealing to a lot of people, and is often larger than the usual scope of fantasy. Add the fact that Chaosium really supported the fan base with a clear license for how their creators can contribute to the game. With over half of all Call of Cthulhu scenarios in Japan being fan made. With Kadokawa handling translations and distribution, while players made tools, accessories, and endless replay videos, all perfectly legally, and have little to no problems with it. In 2020, the seventh edition of Call of Cthulhu launched and caused another spike in sales. Today, it sells more copies in Japanese than in all other languages combined, including English. They also have a variety of modules that one wouldn't usually expect. Having modules for romance and slice of life models.
Bringing occult detective work to the common man! This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we hang out with reporter Carl Kolchak, TV's most important monster hunter. Truly, you don't get stuff like The X-Files, Supernatural, Buffy and even maybe The Sopranos without Kolchak, not to mention a couple of Dungeons & Dragons monsters!
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