World Of Darkness Berlin Live Blog

At this moment Mike is flying across the pond to Berlin, with 8 hours until I begin my journey, but the games have already begun.

Enlightenment in Blood, a pervasive Nordic LARP takes place over multiple venues in Berlin on Friday night, but even now the players are in character interacting via our own social network for the game.

Called “Undernet”, this social network site will be a hive of activity on Friday, but already players are posting in character information, be it status updates, photos, or already talking about the initial events on Friday.

Seems I won’t be bored at the airport tomorrow!

As I sit downing a coffee before heading off to travel to Berlin, I though I would just give you a brief overview of the day's schedule.

Today Mike will be sitting down to check out the new cards created for Vampire the Eternal Struggle, while later this evening we will be watching "World of Darkness: The Documentary", and attending the after party with "Elysium" dress code.

An interesting documentary that tracked the history of White Wolf and Vampire the Masquerade. Certainly investing questions raised we will follow up tomorrow.

The documentary has distribution and will be shown at numerous horror cons over the next months.

So as a nice perk of being here at WoD Berlin, I got a deck of VTES cards. Now I have been told that a good number of these cards were never in high distribution back in the day, so for the fans, having these cards available like this is a real boon.

There are plenty of seminars today. The big one will be the Vampire the Masquerade 5th ed Q&A which I am sure will generate some lively discussion, both regard to the setting and game mechanics.

We will also be attending the seminars covering Bleed, and Slavic Folklore. The European nature of this fan convention means fans from a diverse section of the world can come and talk about their games. The Slavic Folklore seminar will cover how such myths and legends fit into their games.

Bleed in larp is where your in game experience flows into your real world experiences, and how you can learn from them.

We will also be interviewing Natali Manzurenko about the Russian speaking WoD community, and how Russian and the USSR are presented in the World of Darkness games.

Vampire 5th edition is in pre-alpha, and exclusively tomorrow are playtests that the WoD Berlin attendees can take part in.

What we know, the game system will be familiar, withs dots and d10s, but with interesting new mechanics that reinforce the nature of feeding, blood, and the the hunger of a vampire.

Kenneth Hite is Lead Designer, with Mary Lee as lead art director, and Karim Muammar as chief editor and also game system designer.

The new Vampire game will initially see a small, concise introdutory game book, with more lavish setting books released after.

Beckett's Jyhad Diary for V20 is also the jumping off point for the new edition of Vampire the Masquerade.

Numerous things have been announced. A new community website for the World of Darkness will allow fans of the games to interact, no matter if they play larps, tabletop, computer, or card games.

Also announced is the Storyteller Vault, allowing fans to create and publish their own material, and earn money doing so.

A new larp event was also announced, Tampa By Night, taking place in Florida.

The next year is going to be very interesting and there is still more we need to tell you about.

Just a hint of the keynote talk.

So today we have a less busy schedule, which good as I am running on 4 hours sleep after a 5 hour immersive larp experience where Mike and I did not die, and achieved our character objectives!

At 15:30 we will be running the live podcast stream.

At 17:30 we will be giving our talk on using Chronicles of Darkness to remix your World of Darkness games.

Today we also have keynotes given Mark Rein*Hagan and Justin Achilli.

Plus we will be interviewing Martin Ericsson and Tobia Sjogren of White Wolf Publishing.

First off, sorry for the live stream. Technical issues, but please please please listen to the podcast we did still record.

Moving on, at the after party last night we had joint winners announced for the VTES tournament, the dance off to be the best dancing Clan, and the winners announced for the scenario writing competition.

I had a great time last night, chatting to the White Wolf/Onyx Path/Ny Night Studio family, with topics ranging from gaming for education, alchemy, science, and coffee mugs.

Would I come again. Oh yessss!

There is still more VTES going on today, and hopefully a few chances to get some more interviews recorded.

Put a stake in me - I am done!