The Road to Gen Con!

Hi Vamily, and welcome to the first of many development diaries from the new White Wolf team. Since announcing that White Wolf has returned, we've grown the team a lot. We're producing so much more in-house now, and we needed the people to match. This includes Jess Lanzillo as Creative Director, Diogo Nogueira as Lead Game Designer, Meagan Maricle as Editor/Rules Manager, and Martyna “Outstar” Zych stepping into the role as Associate Creative Director. They are the ones who have contributed to this dev diary, and they are some of the White Wolf team members you’ll get the opportunity to meet at Gen Con very soon. We’ve also got a video version of this dev diary, so if you prefer to listen to us talk, you can find that here. 

It’s a very exciting time to be a Vampire: The Masquerade fan. We hope you will enjoy this first taste of what we’re working on. We want to tell you a little bit about who we are, how we’re approaching the project, what we’ve focused on first, and why it's important for us to stay true to the core of what being a vampire should feel like. This project is still in the very early stages of development, and we’re inviting you along on the journey as it grows from a fledgling to an Elder.

The change in White Wolf over the past year

For a few years, we’ve mainly been a brand management team, essentially guardians of the World of Darkness as a brand. When we relaunched White Wolf as a publisher last year, this called for creating new roles within the organisation so we could begin building the dream team to bring these games to life. We’ve started by hiring a small, in-house dev team focused on the new projects that we want to bring to this universe. The new team members joined us towards the end of 2025, and spent the first few months getting familiar with not only 35 years of the White Wolf legacy, but also a whole new country, including the gruelling, never-ending darkness that is Swedish winter. 

“The kind of winter that even I, as a former Seattleite, was not quite prepared for, but if you’re going to inhabit the World of Darkness, it was the perfect way to enter.” - Jess

Our in-house dev team is small! It’s a common misconception in hobby/tabletop gaming that there are big teams working on the “big games” like V:TM, D&D, or CoC, but TTRPG development is generally a lean, mean machine. The team members focused on the new project are Diogo, Meagan, and Matteo (our new Art Director). Jess and Marty lead the creative direction, and their work spans the entire franchise, not just tabletop. Of course, this is supplemented by the amazing writers and artists we will be working with on this project (by the time you read this, some of them may have already begun their work). We also have team members supporting our fantastic licensing partners, the ones who've been creating WoD's tabletop and video games for years and who will continue doing so. Other team members cover business, marketing, or community. We’re a tight-knit group with a shared love for this world.

Every aspect of the in-house product development for the new White Wolf has been rebuilt from the ground up, which is a weird thing to say for a game that has been around for 35 years. But just getting everything up and running has been a big part of our work over the last year, so we want to make sure to acknowledge the hard work everyone has put in to make the future projects run more smoothly. We’re truly in the thick of it now, and all of that hard work is beginning to pay off. Every time we see a new layout example, check out a new iteration of the playtest, or review some concept art that will function as reference for the illustrations we are creating, we get one step closer to where we want to go.

We are the custodians of history

Working on a project that means so much to so many people is always a balancing act. We want to take the best pieces from the past while still building toward the future. We know it’s impossible to please every single player, but we will still do our best. We are always keeping an eye on the opinions of our fans, and figuring out their favourite aspects of the game to inform our design decisions. This is to make sure that we know what will resonate with our existing players, and what will bring in new fans.

“One of our core design pillars is that you win by losing, and you lose by winning. So we wanted to reinforce hard choices in the game.” - Diogo

Two things we’re already focusing on: streamlining the rules and giving players more control over the story. The books should support everybody in telling their own stories, giving you enough information about the World of Darkness without ever feeling hampered by the metaplot. Characters should feel more unique, and the clans should stand out more from one another. Your choices need to feel impactful, to have weight, so you truly feel it when you're forced into a hard decision. Even when you fail a roll, you should still come away with more agency, not less. That's the kind of consequence that inspires more stories. And we want to support different styles of play, the kind of variety that lets V:TM feel so unique to so many different players.

We sank our fangs into all the nitty-gritty details

The history of the World of Darkness is sprawling, and as part of making this a love letter to all versions of V:TM, we dove into previous editions (including Requiem!). We analysed how the core Storyteller system changed, or didn’t change, over the editions. We looked at how Disciplines have evolved and what we felt the next stage of that evolution could be. Most importantly, we took notes on our favourite aspects of each edition, and we took notes on what we felt had room for improvement. Some of these notes included: 

• We liked the concept of Blood Points, but not necessarily its execution.

• We liked the constant struggle with the Beast that Hunger Dice provided, but we’ve noted that their mechanics promoted specific styles of play over others. 

• We liked the tiered Blood Bonds of older editions.

• We liked how V5 expanded the powers within each Discipline.

• The fact that Celerity, Fortitude, and Potence didn’t have powers in the pre-V5 editions could be improved.

• We felt that some Disciplines had real progression, while others felt like a single power that steadily got kind of better. 

“A fun thing that we found about the community was that people don’t like playing vampires that are afraid of smoking.” - Meagan

We ran sessions of each edition to get into the meat of it and refresh ourselves on all the ins and outs of the books. Our delights and frustrations with each edition inspired us to find ways to incorporate those sparks of joy, and try to solve what we felt wouldn’t work for the new project. We picked apart each edition to figure out what made it “tick” and researched the non-negotiables to discover which aspects of the game must stay the same and which areas have room for growth. We didn't stop there. We collected community feedback to find out players' pain points, what they love, and what they'd like to see changed. One of the ways we did this was by paying attention to what you’ve been saying online, whether that’s been on Discord, YouTube, Reddit, Tumblr, or wherever we’ve found people talking about V:TM. We will, of course, continue to do so as we hold more playtests in the future.

What will Vampire: The Masquerade look like in the future?

Another important focus for us has been the visual identity of our vampires, and our books in general. We browsed through legacy books in search of art that made them iconic, and we’ve done extensive research on typography, colours and visuals used in vampire media. We’ve looked at everything from book covers and movie posters to fan-art and LARP characters, all on a mission to make our books look and feel even more Vampire. We’ve spent a lot of time looking through both previous editions and other TTRPG books to discern likes and dislikes around reader experience, such as more accessible character creation and navigation throughout the book, and then we’ve applied these when working on a mock-up of the layout of our book. 

This led us to the decision to focus more on illustration, both coloured and black-and-white, to get closer to that classic V:TM feel while also creating a new identity that embodies the project we’re making now. We’ve dug deep into the visual identity of the clans, focusing on making them stand out from each other to complement the mechanics, while preserving what already makes them unique. We want future illustrations to tell a story, such as showing the reader what it actually looks like to use a Discipline.

“A very important part is also that when people get those beautiful tabletop roleplaying books on their tables, and pay a lot of money for it, they want human-made art, and that is a commitment that we are making.” - Marty

We are dedicated to human-made art, and we’ll be working with many exciting freelance artists on this project. To ensure better cohesion, we’re building a clearer process for how our art gets made, starting with concept art to better define what our iconic characters should look like moving forward. This includes new artist guidelines that ban the use of generative AI in production and require process pieces. Now that this process is run in-house again, we have more control over the whole thing, even though the art itself is made by our freelance artists.

See you at Gen Con 2026!

This is still very early in development. If you’re reading this, you’re getting in on the ground floor. There will be about a dozen in-person playtests run by our team and a hand-picked few storytellers from the community at Gen Con, and we’re delighted to say that they are all sold out, thanks to all of you. But even if you can’t make it there in person, we will have a lot more opportunities for playtests and feedback soon, so stay tuned! 

We will hold a panel at Gen Con about the Future of White Wolf, where we will talk more in-depth about a lot of these things, and while we won’t be able to record the full panel, we will make sure to share all the details (and more!) in future dev diaries so that everybody gets to stay in the know! We will also host an Actual Play based on the playtest material called “Not in Our Domain!” and run by Alexander Ward, which will be livestreamed and recorded to show everyone what the playtest can look like.

Until next time, Vamily. Don't be shy about sharing this with your friends or letting us know what you think. We want to know.

The White Wolf Devs