White Wolf's WOD farewell
Was reading this off Garapata's blog.

The following lines struck me:

Don't doubt it, though, we stand on the shoulders of giants.(*)

Best regards,
Stewart Wieck

Co-founder, White Wolf, Inc.
Co-creator, World of Darkness
Co-designer, Vampire : The Masquerade & Mage: The Ascension

(*) Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson for creating the rpg industry. Greg Stafford, the great shaman himself, and the whole crew of 1980's Chaosium for creating the first art in rpgs. Tracy Hickman for bringing story to the medium.

I love hearing from game designers and their influences. Most authors have something similar to this, but nobody really gets to read that much about it in the game industry. While I'm familiar with Gygax and Arneson, and the work of Stafford.. I'm floored by his mention of Chaosium and Tracy Hickman.

Chaosium did come out with some of the best RPGs in that era. Runequest and Call of Cthulhu and Pendragon come to mind. They also were among the RPGs of that time that placed equal emphasis on art and design and layout for the finished product. The black & white art of the early Cthulhu books (and some of the full collor plates too) were astoundingly beautiful and frightening. I miss my old hardcover Call of Cthulhu book.

Tracy Hickman I'd NEVER thought of. But if he's referring to the Dragonlance modules, where players not only went through a series of tactical obstacles as part of a campaign (as in the G1-3 series involving the Giants and the Drow series of D&D modules) but also became familiar with the motivations and triumphs and tragedies in the unfolding Dragonlance story... it's true. The Dragonlance modules had a real 'meta-plot' that tied them all together...

If this is one of the influences, then World of Darkness really has to end the story... to tie things off and move on to other things... where new stories can be told. We can always re-visit the old World of Darkness. Just hopefully not as badly as some of the Dragonlance novels that came out after the first trilogy.

And now, Dean's rendition of Sturm Brightblade's death foreshadowed:
Dean: [looks meaningfully at Sturm] "ONE OF YOU will die..."