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Tabletop Game / Old World of Darkness

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Official gamelines:
For fan-made gamelines, see FanWorks.The World Of Darkness
For non-RPG works set in the WOD, see Franchise.The World Of Darkness
For tropes related to the setting's reboot, see TabletopGame.Chronicles Of Darkness

The World of Darkness is a Gothic Punk Tabletop RPG published by White Wolf. The universe is a dark reflection of our own, where humanity is not the master of the world or its fate. Throughout all of human history, supernatural forces have manipulated mankind from the shadows.

The original or "classic" World of Darkness and the Storyteller System began in 1991 with Vampire: The Masquerade. Over the next 13 years, it expanded to nine different "gamelines" with assorted setting- and era-based spinoffs and hundreds of books, until it officially ended in 2004. Starting the same year, the new World of Darkness was created as a reboot with a new system and is ongoing under the name Chronicles of Darkness. The Old World of Darkness returned to active publishing in 2011 with the release of 20th anniversary editions of several of its gamelines, along with new supplements.

Each supernatural creature in the setting has a unique niche, theme, and back story. Crossovers between gamelines were initially meant to be optional. The resulting incompatible histories and cosmologies and lack of clear equivalents to various supernatural power sources, as well as differing relative strengths of the creatures created significant mechanical and lore conflicts when the second edition made such events more common.

In later editions, the old WoD setting acquired an overarching back story and an ongoing metaplot, advanced via both the game books themselves and an assortment of tie-in novels and comics. The Time of Judgment books note were dedicated to The End of the World as We Know It, covering scenarios that were often, but not always, exclusive to a particular gameline. Orpheus was another gameline with its own end-of-the-world scenario, that also doubled as the end to Wraith.

At one point Exalted was set up as a prequel to The World of Darkness; this is especially obvious in Hunter: The Reckoning with the eponymous hunters being the equivalent of Solar Exalted returning yet again to a world that needs heroes. This eventually was changed and Exalted is now considered a separate game, although it still shares similarly named characters with Kindred of the East.

The gameline is currently in an unusual position edition-wise. While Paradox Interactive produced the 5th Edition, Onyx Path Publishing (creators of the 20th Anniversary Edition) never actually lost their license and have continued to produce new products, mostly available online as PDFs and print-on-demand. This has effectively created two separate continuities.

This role-playing game provides examples of:

  • Always Chaotic Evil: Most of the games had some always evil faction (Baali for Vampire, Nephandi for Mage, Black Spiral Dancers for Werewolf, etc.) that was at least initially unavailable for player characters. Later, White Wolf came out with the "Black Dog" brand to publish Splatbooks for these groups.
  • And I Must Scream:
    • Clan Tzimisce vampires are particularly notorious for this, thanks to their body-sculpting powers that allow them to reshape victims into house furniture, while keeping them alive and aware of their condition.
    • Wraiths who have been soulforged into inanimate objects are said to be aware of their existence but unable to express it. As a result, most wraiths try really, really hard to forget almost everything they interact with that isn't a relic was once a soul like them.
  • Animorphism: Werewolves, vampire Clan Gangrel, Changelings of the Pooka Kith, and Orpheus ghosts with the Marrow Shade can all turn themselves into animals with varying levels of ease and flexibility of form.
  • Apocalypse How: The Time of Judgement, a series of sourcebooks and a trilogy of novels that presented various end-of-the-world scenarios for the different gamelines, ranging from ancient vampires awakening to entire Werewolf tribes falling to the Wyrm
  • Arcadia: The home of the fae in Changeling: The Dreaming.
  • The Artifact: The references to Exalted are ignored now that the game is no longer a prequel to the World of Darkeness.
  • Ascended Demon:
    • Golconda for vampires. Particularly in the early editions, it was a state that removed many of the more monstrous aspects of being a vampire, such as the danger of frenzy and the need for frequent consumption of blood, possibly even offering a chance to become human. Later editions downplayed this.
    • Demon has the possibility of reaching zero Torment, indicating that the character in question has overcome the hate they feel over being sent to hell and have regained their former selves.
  • Astral Projection: A common power among the supernatural creatures that populate the world:
    • Vampires with the Auspex discipline can learn to astral project at high levels. Additionally, one path of Giovanni necromancy allows uses to project themselves (and occasionally other people) into the Shadowlands.
    • Skimmers in Orpheus use astral projection to reach the world of the dead. Similar to the Auspex example, they are connected to their bodies by a thin silver cord.
    • Werewolf places a great deal of importance on the Umbra, a spirit realm that exists alongside our own and can be reached by "stepping sideways".
    • Mages with the Spirit Sphere can either do the traditional astral projecting or can "step sideways" like the werewolves do.
  • Awesome, but Impractical:
    • The classic, pre-fifth edition World of Darkness is often considered this. The classic World of Darkness puts players in incredibly lore-rich and creatively unique worlds, with each gameline featuring its own complex societies and histories and wish fulfillment appeal that makes them intriguing to imagine oneself innote, often based on specific real-world mythologies, and epic and apocalyptic conflicts and events of a world-spanning nature omnipresent, even where they can only be experienced tangentially or from the ground level. At the same time, however, the gamelines were often so highly developed they were prone to becoming their own thing entirely, diverging quite considerably from what a new player might hope for and expect from the concept of playing, say, a werewolf, making it difficult to be individually flexible, and most gamelines had at least one element which could easily become an invoked Audience-Alienating Premisenote. The powerful globally-established factions meant you were always someone's bitch and made it hard to players to sandbox or carve out a niche for themselves in the world, and their deep lore could lead to accusations you were playing your character "wrong", especially in the case of the highly organized groups which could just easily force you to act as they expected you to. The epic scope also made it difficult to have more low-stakes, personal adventures, and the cultural-based mythologies could come across as preferential treatment. Also, the mechanics could be quite janky and the factions not particularly balanced against each other, with crossovers nominally allowed but made difficult by a lack of unified game rules or balance, not to mention outright contradictory cosmologies.
    • In contrast to this stands Chronicles of Darkness with its Boring, but Practical approach, significantly tightening up and unifying the rules, standardizing and balancing crossover mechanics, bringing the splats closer to what one might colloquially expect by their names even at the cost of much lore and uniqueness (except for, perhaps, Demon: The Descent), foregoing much of the big conspiracies, factions and world-spanning conflicts in favor of more localized adventures, with an agnostic mythology, and generally treating the entire system as more of a toolkit for the Storyteller to do with as they please rather than an introduction to a specific setting.
    • Downplayed with the fifth edition line of World of Darkness games, which aim for a "best of both worlds" approach between the two, keeping much of the lore of Classic and much of the gameplay improvements and freedom of Chronicles.
  • Badass Normal: Non-Imbued hunters, at least those few of them who weren't using some form of magic or the True Faith.
  • Beast Man:
    • Changelings of the Pooka Kith each have an affinity with a specific animal and take on features of that animal, with most falling somewhere between this trope and Little Bit Beastly
    • All the werewolf (and other changing breed) forms except for homid and lupus are beastmen, with different forms at different places on the Sliding Scaleof Anthropomorphism
    • The clan curse of Gangrel vampires causes them to take on animal traits every time they frenzy, leading to older Gangrel becoming beastmen
  • Beethoven Was an Alien Spy: It got to the point where virtually every historical figure was some sort of supernatural creature. Of particular note was Rasputin, who was claimed by about five vampire clans, a Mage Tradition and a Werewolf tribe. They ultimately explained that Rasputin was all of the above and the ultimate Big Bad of Vampire: The Masquerade. Instead, he's eventually revealed to be a bodyriding Wraith. The revised editions clamped down hard on this sort of thing, making it very clear that most human things happened for human reasons with the supernaturals at most altering details. Of course, that doesn't stop numerous clans/tribes from lying about it.
    • Absolutely and unequivocally denied in the case of the Holocaust, according to Charnel Houses of Europe. The writers flat-out state it would have been in astoundingly poor taste to say that the Real Life genocide of millions was the plot of some fictional vampire cabal.
  • Being Good Sucks: Unless you're a Mummy, most supernatural creatures in the World of Darkness spend their lives fighting against dark parts of themselves- The Beast for vampires, Rage for werewolves, Torment for demons, etc. While resisting these is possible, the things player characters have to do regularly, such as fighting or using their powers tend to make that fight more difficult. A common source of conflict in the game is the tension between the power offered by doing wrong and the moral benefits of remaining on the straight and narrow.
  • Beneath the Earth: Where you'll find Nosferatu warrens and the underground tunnels of Black Spiral Dancer hives. According to the other Changelings, Sluagh have this going on as well.
  • Beware the Superman: Several factions, such as Mages and Garou, are dealing with the far-reaching effects of their ancestors lording over humans.
  • Blessed with Suck: It is not fun to be a supernatural being in many gamelines of the old WoD (in particular, in Wraith and often in Vampire, in other lines becoming a supernatural is more of a mixed blessing).
    • Changelings are blessed with incredible talents via their Birthrights and can use Glamour to shape reality, but must constantly balance themselves- too much Glamour will drive them mad, while too much Banality will lead them to forget about their supernatural heritage entirely.
    • Hunters have their eyes opened to the supernatural forces at work in their world and are given powers to fight them with, but find themselves in constant danger from creatures more powerful than they are and alienated from friends and family who can't perceive what they can.
    • Vampires are difficult to kill with anything except sunlight, fire, or True Faith and have powers ranging from Super-Strength to Emotion Bombs to Blood Magic, but at the cost of their humanity, leaving them driven by their inner Beast, forced to prey on humans to survive, and unable to experience sunlight or eat normal food.
    • Werewolves are prone to berserker rage, and will more than likely rip to shreds someone (or something) they care about.
  • Blue-and-Orange Morality: The various alternate morality systems in Masquerade, referred to as Paths of Enlightenment in the modern day and Roads in the Dark Ages games. Depending on the Path followed, the greatest "sin" a vampire can commit could be anything from admitting another's superiority to helping demons to not feeding when hungry.
  • Body Horror:
    • A large part of the Tzimisces' hat in Vampire: the Masquerade is inflicting And I Must Scream-style changes on their victims.
    • For many Garou in Werewolf: The Apocalypse, the First Change qualifies. Garou who are unaware of their werewolf nature are horrified when they transform into an eight foot tall beast with fangs and claws. Lupus Garou are often alarmed when they suddenly transform into a human.
    • Body horror is a common experience among Wyrm servants in Werewolf as well. Fomori (living beings possessed by bane spirits) take on grotesque physical characteristics. Black Spiral Dancers frequently exhibit mutations due to Wyrm taint, inbreeding, and generations of exposure to balefire.
  • The Caligula:
    • The actual Caligula was apparently a Setite plot, as revenge for the whole "Subjugation of Egypt" thing.
    • Black Tooth, a Simba king who oversaw the attempted genocide of the Ajaba (were-hyenas) and used their skulls to decorate his palace before forcing a benevolent Wyld spirit into slumber in case its presence touched off the apocalypse.
  • Church Militant:
    • The Inquisition, aka the Society of Leopold, an order of the Catholic Church (with later help from various governmental secret services) dedicated to finding and destroying evil caused by supernatural forces.
    • In Werewolf: The Apocalypse the Order of Our Merciful Mother (a camp of Black Fury nuns) worked to redirect the Inquisition's wrath at Wyrm servants.
  • Clap Your Hands If You Believe:
    • A matter of life or death for Changelings in Changeling: the Dreaming, as the central premise rests on the fae being driven into human forms by the growing unwillingness to believe in the fantastic among humanity. This tendency, referred to as "Banality," can drive a changeling to an early grave, and must be overcome if they wish to work magic on a target.
    • In Mage: the Ascension, Paradox, the backlash created by the subconscious disbelief of non-mage humans, can be the strongest force against mages, making magic a risky blur of this trope and Cast from Hit Points.
    • In Vampire: the Masquerade, vampires are only affected by symbols of faith- be they crosses, stars of David, or credit cards- if the wielder has true faith to put behind them.
    • In Hunter: The Reckoning, Hunter's powers and second sight depend on their Conviction, a measure of their willingness to stand against monsters and believe in themselves and their mission.
  • Cosmic Horror Story: Most of the game lines offer their own brand of this.
    • Mage stands out a bit by the players themselves frequently being the big bad threat to the stability of reality itself. Usually by accident. "Reality has enough of your bullshit and erases you" was actually the setting's primary antagonist, and being a walking madness-inducing eldritch abomination was often one of your better qualities once paradigms started combining with Avatar.
    • Vampire has the Antediluvians, millennia-old, immensely powerful, utterly inhuman vampires who lie dormant somewhere. Their awakening would be basically The End of the World as We Know It (for humans and vampires both), but only the Sabbat officially treat this as a realistic possibility.
    • In Werewolf: The Apocalypse, the Weaver (the cosmic force of order and stasis) trapped the Wyrm (the cosmic force of destruction and renewal) in the fabric of reality, causing the Wyrm to go insane. Much of the corruption and evil in the world is a direct result of the Wyrm madly trying to free itself.
  • The Cracker: Virtual Adept Mages have this attitude towards reality itself.
  • Crapsack World: The oppressive helplessness of the setting is what appeals to many.
    • In Vampire, the player characters have been transformed into inhuman creatures who must constantly fight against their darker impulses or lose their minds. The various factions are constantly at war with each other and older vampires lord their power over younger ones (and humans), using them as pawns in their games and often treating them as disposable. And the end of the world is coming, but only the most violent, inhuman of the sects seems to acknowledge or care about this fact.
    • Changeling is an exception, where the object is to prevent the world from becoming a Crapsack World by retaining the power of imagination and possibility.
    • Mummy: The Resurrection was primarily written as a direct subversion of this trend. The main tagline for the game is "Where there is Life, there is Hope," the NPCs are folks who lived crappy lives in the crappy world and returned with the mandate to change the world for the better, and the entire setting treats the idea of changing the world as something more than the seeming impossible.
    • The Hengeyokai (and possibly also the Kuei-Jin) believe that the crappiness of the world is cyclical and that, so long as the coming 6th age (the ultimate in crappiness) is finite and temporary, the universe will eventually become a better place to live (although there is some concern that this 6th age is going to be so bad it may break the Wheel of Ages).
    • Werewolves have to contend with the fact that the three entities that shape reality are hopelessly out of balance, resulting in everything from destruction of the wilderness to twisted horrors that used to be normal creatures. The mistakes of their ancestors have left them hopelessly bound up in conflict between their tribes and the other shifters, all the while fighting the slow decline of their population. And if they can't manage to find a way to get everything back into balance, the world will end.
    • Wraith played Crapsack World straighter and harder than any of the other games. The world may bite, but it's still a paradise compared to the despair and horrors of the Shadowlands.
  • Crapsack World, Escapist Sanctuary: On top of all the mortal atrocities in this setting, it's infested with vampires, werewolves, mages, changelings, ghosts, demons, mummies, fanatical monster hunters, and even stranger entities - all of them playing elaborate games for the fate of the world, all of them committing atrocities and having atrocities inflicted on them in turn. Also, every single supernatural group seems to have some kind of apocalypse scheduled in the very near future. In the face of this bleakness, Mage: The Ascension is one of the few games in the setting that offers escapism to the inhabitants of this dismal realm, with the mages opting to alter or even escape the grim reality rather than try to work within it. Most notably, the Virtual Adepts regularly drop into the Digital Web in pursuit of adventure and missions to recode reality in their favor. For good measure, the Technocracy - Iteration X in particular - like to dismiss the Virtual Adepts as fantasist kids who want to abandon their bodies for meaningless thrills in VR.
  • Creative Sterility: When a new Vampire is Embraced, it puts them in a mental stasis, as well as physical, making it very difficult for them to do anything truly innovative or creative.
  • Cross-Melting Aura: Baali vampires are vulnerable to symbols of faith, but a merit allows them to destroy such symbols that enter their proximity.
  • Crossover Cosmology: Each game line in the Old WoD had a long, intricate Back Story, full of probably intentional internal inconsistencies and an independent cosmology. Needless to say, they did not play well together. This was a reason for several Ret Cons.
  • Cursed with Awesome:
    • Vampires are doomed to live forever without the sun, at the mercy of the Beast and dependent on human blood... but they're also very difficult to kill without fire or sunlight and have a wide range of superhuman powers.
    • Werewolves find themselves targeted by a Corrupt Corporation and fighting a losing battle with cosmic forces, but it might be worth it to gain Voluntary Shapeshifting into a giant man-wolf hybrid with supernaturally damaging claws and the ability to regenerate from most injuries.
    • Humanity in Vampire, which was supposed to punish characters for committing certain evils by making them lose touch with their mortal life. What actually ended up happening was players having a mechanical point at which their characters stop caring about committing mass murder.
    • Discussed often in Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines: A number of other vampires you meet are convinced that their condition really is a pretty sweet deal, what with having a good chance at an eternal or at least really long life of doing whatever the hell they want. A low Humanity character in particular can cheerfully talk about how they like their new power.
  • Darker and Edgier:
    • Being this, by comparison with DnD and its clones, became one of the main marketing points for World of Darkness games when they first came out in the beginning of the 1990s, featuring heavier sexual themes, graphic violence, and more mature themes.
    • On a more meta level, the World of Darkness is a Darker and Edgier version of the real world- things are mostly the same, but the shadows are a bit longer, the bad a bit worse and the good not quite as good.
  • The Dark Side: A major mechanical and thematic aspect of the setting is that committing evil acts makes it easier to do more (and more extreme) ones in the future.
    • Losing Humanity in Vampire means that it will take a more severe act of evil to force a humanity roll next time, essentially meaning that the more evil you do, the less you care about it.
    • Similarly, in Werewolf, the Wyrm taints its victims and actively encourages them to commit atrocities, thereby opening them up to greater control.
  • Dark World:
    • The Shadowlands in Wraith, a decayed, deathlike version of the land of the living, inhabited only by ghosts.
    • The World of Darkness is a darker, more worn down version of our world, where supernatural creatures stalk the night.
  • Decadent Court:
    • The Camarilla often functions this way, being composed of Vampires scheming, plotting, and backstabbing their way to power as they feed on the blood of mortals.
    • Owing to their status as The Fair Folk, Fae courts are also havens of deadly intrigue and twisted pleasures. Given that the Fae live on creativity and emotion keeping things interesting like this is a survival strategy.
  • Demonic Possession:
    • The player characters in Demon: The Fallen. The upside to being a Fallen in a mortal shell is that the shell can't be possessed by something else.
    • Spiritual corruption in Werewolf: The Apocalypse can leave openings in mortals souls, ripe for filling with malevolent Bane spirits that hijack their hosts minds and bodies.
  • Depending on the Writer: Storytellers and writers generally painted the other types of supernaturals with different colors than their "home" books when they showed up in other continuities, especially in the Old World. Hunter: the Reckoning is a particularly stark example of this, as many of their books encouraged STs to make sure that the players saw the hunted as monsters.
  • Dhampyr: Revenants and dhampir. The former are families of ghouls serving their vampire masters, while the latter are natural children of thin-blooded vampires. Mechanically, they're nearly identical.
  • Dysfunction Junction: AND HOW! Vampire: The Masquerade, Mage: The Ascension, and Hunter: The Reckoning all stand out as this, with game mechanics encouraging player characters to come from a variety of traumatic and unusual backgrounds and the nature of their supernatural identities warping their perspectives.
  • Earn Your Happy Ending: Despite the darkness and horror of the World of Darkness, almost every gameline had some ending scenarios in which the apocalypse was stopped and the world became a nicer place.
  • Earth Is Young: If the cosmology of several of the lines is to be believed
  • Empty Shell:
    • Soul loss turns a person into this over a period of time.
    • Long-term bane possession can also turn fomori into this.
  • The End of the World as We Know It: Imminent throughout the Old World of Darkness... and then in Time of Judgment, it happened. In at least five different apocalypses. All at once. Each race got 3-5 different apocalypses for a story teller to choose from, with the results ranging from bittersweet to incredibly depressing. Only one of the Mage endings was totally unambiguously happy.
    • There was a full-on semi-officially sanctioned ending for all the game lines used in the official New Bremen DigiChat online text-based game run off of the White Wolf website, since it catered to all the game lines together and crossover (while discouraged) was frequent and inevitable. In the end, the Antediluvians rose up to devour their vampiric progeny, werewolves had their final battle with the Wyrm, Lucifer's Black Cathedral rose out of Los Angeles as a base from which to fight his Earthbound former captains, the changelings headed off to Arcadia, mages found their powers overflowing now that humanity's belief in the supernatural was restored and either killed each other or Ascended, the sun went out, untainted humans disappeared to some unknowable reward or destination, and the Metatron showed up to collect all the Fallen who were willing to come with him to take another crack at this whole "Creation" thing before the world simply collapsed. It was, in fact, fairly epic.
    • Oh, and to expand a little bit: The final scenes for the game were for Werewolf and Demon and happened simultaneously. At the same time as the Metatron took the Fallen off to get involved in Creation, the Wyrm was released (by Player Character efforts, no less) from the Pattern Web and shattered the material universe, restoring itself and the Weaver to balance so that a whole new and better creation could happen. They way that it was run left room for both groups of beings to witness the destruction of the universe at the same time, and for each to understand the very same obliteration from within their own lens. As said above, it was epic and it ended on a very bittersweet and hopeful note. Plus the good guys got to go out in style.
  • Enemy Within:
    • All vampires suffer from The Beast, the animalistic, id-like force with a hint of supernatural malice, that attempts to compel them into immediately satisfying their instinctive urges, such as craving for blood, fear of sunlight, or anger at a slightest provocation, no matter the circumstances.
    • The Shadow from Wraith: the Oblivion, and the P'o, its Kindred of the East equivalent, fits this trope even better; in both cases, it is intelligent and consciously attempts to turn you to The Dark Side.
  • Enlightenment Superpowers
  • Everyone Is Bi: While not outright stated or heavily enforced, it was implied that most of the Fae were bisexual in Changeling: The Dreaming. Especially since a husband and wife could reincarnate as two men or two women, among other reasons.
  • Evil Counterpart: The Sabbat, Black Spiral Dancers, Nephandi, Spectres, and Thallain all existed to be Evil Counterparts of the PC supernaturals.
  • Evil Feels Good: Morality, in gamelines with a Karma Meter, is lost by not showing remorse for misdeeds. You also can still lose it anyway if the dice screw you.
  • Evil Tastes Good: Vampires find themselves enjoying the taste of blood more than they had ever enjoyed any food or sex they had experienced before their Embrace.
  • Eviler than Thou: Default playable factions in both Worlds of Darkness tend to be morally dubious at best and outright evil at worst. Then there are guys like the Sabbat, the Technocracy and the Black Spiral Dancers, who are firmly lodged in the "outright evil" camp, despite their rhetoric. But even they pale before the crazy, dog-raping, demon-worshiping, apocalypse-mongerers that usually serve as each game's worst faction.
    • The Technocracy certainly started out as "outright evil", but this was ameliorated steadily over time; when they actually became player characters with the Guide to the Technocracy book, the designers made it very clear that as world-straddlingly huge a conspiracy as the Technocracy must contain multiple factions, and that your players were intended to be firmly in one of the better-natured ones (Friends of Courage, Harbingers of Avalon or Project Invictus).
      • Indeed, what may be interesting is that, since Guide to the Technocracy, the Technocracy may be "antagonists" but by no means are they the "bad guys." The difference between the Traditions and the Technocracy is that the Traditions tend to want a better world (though better for whom?) and the Technocrats tend to want a safer world (though safer for whom?). The Technocracy's often over-stifling control might even be downright necessary in a world where reality itself is based on consensus - a world where anything is possible and the laws of physics are constantly in flux is downright horrific. If you end up playing Technocratic PCs, they tend to be Reality Cops.
      • And it cannot be stressed enough that the Technocrats are NOT a hivemind! Whatever you think about the overarching goals and actions of the order, it's extremely silly to think each and every agent is "outright evil" (White Wolf themselves even coined the term "Soulless Technocratitis" for that kind of one-dimensional portrayal and mocked it repeatedly). The Technocracy is home to countless different ethosesnote  and philosophies, and features people from every Character Alignment. The book gives many examples of good Technocrats and the like ...
    • Similarly, the Sabbat got this treatment in the Revised Guide to the Sabbat. The book presented the idea that the Sabbat isn't just a howling mad group of nutcases who want to murder humans 'cause it feels good, but rather they want to destroy the Camarilla due to feeling that it is a pawn of the Antediluvians. And because they think they're better than humanity. There are plenty of examples of Knight Templar Sabbat.
  • Evilutionary Biologist: Pentex in Werewolf: the Apocalypse has the trappings of this trope, but is actually run by outright evil cultists. Developmental Neogenetics Amalgamated is a straight example. Progenitors and Etherites in Mage: the Ascension could be this.
  • Extra-Strength Masquerade: Depending on the game, you're sometimes left wondering "okay, how the hell can they cover that up?"
  • Fantastic Fragility: Most supernaturals can get all the new powers they want, and more cheaply and quickly than working honestly would bring... at the downside of getting loaded down with (usually permanent) potentially crippling weaknesses. Have we mentioned being a supernatural is Blessed with Suck?
  • Fantasy Kitchen Sink: Each game line in the original was incredibly insular; vampires could go centuries never meeting a werewolf, though for a vampire, meeting a werewolf is good way to NOT go any more centuries.
  • Fighter, Mage, Thief: The "big three" gamelines fit this pattern nicely when taken together, both in terms of abilities and game-feel. Werewolves are the most combat-capable of the three, and also have the most martial and militant role, that of essentially a Super-Soldier in a world-wide war, making them the Fighter. Meanwhile, Mages are often squishy, but have the most flexible supernatural power system in the entire setting, and much of their existence is all about philosophy, abstraction, esotericism and furthering their understanding. Finally, Vampires are the Thief, with both abilities and a society that revolves around secrecy, deception, betrayal, crime, long-term plotting, and social play.
  • From Bad to Worse: The entire point of the Time of Judgement line. Plus you can mix and match.
  • Functional Magic: Usually used by Sorcerers or Mages, but almost all have their own supernatural powers. Some mortals even get True Faith.
  • Game Face: A Werewolf's Crinos warform could considered this, and a Demon's Apocalyptic Form definitely is.
  • Genius Bruiser:
    • Vampire: The Masquerade had Beckett the Gangrel Adventurer Archaeologist.
    • The Akashic Brotherhood Tradition has Mind as their specialty Sphere, and practice Do, the ur-Martial Art. They tend to be more philosophic than scientific but they are still sharp cookies.
    • Garou can be very intelligent as well. The Garou Nation has produced poets, philosophers, historians, and scientists. Among the Black Spiral Dancers, W. Richard MacLish (a.k.a. Writlish) is a professor of anthropology and a walking repository of Wyrm history.
  • Glamour: Many supernaturals can make themselves seem beautiful, trustworthy, desirable, and invincible to onlookers.
  • Gollum Made Me Do It: Shadows and Spectres, in Wraith: the Oblivion.
  • Gothic Punk: The old World of Darkness defined this trope.
  • Growing Up Sucks: In Changeling: the Dreaming, changelings tended to lose their fae side as they grew up, succumbing to banality and becoming dull adults.
    • The worst thing about the game was that all of your abilities could be duplicated if you were playing insane psychics. This puts a different spin on the whole thing.
    • Arguably inverted in the new Changeling, in which the focus is no longer on keeping your innocence and naivete in a harsh and dark world but rather about finding the way back from the loss of innocence and the pains of life and learning how to put yourself back together and discover what comes next.
  • Half-Human Hybrid: Every game has at least one sub-class of mortals who have some of the parent supernaturals' strengths, but none of their weaknesses. It's worth noting that most of the following examples are not exclusive of each other or even the main supernaturals (Mages can be ghouls, Changelings can be Kinfolk, etc., though too much crossing over is frowned upon):
    • Vampire: the Masquerade has Ghouls (mortals who gained a portion of supernatural power and longevity by feeding on vampire blood) and Dhampyrs (the offspring of Vampires conceived under very specific conditions, which vary depending on whether they're the Eastern or the Western variety).
    • Werewolf: the Apocalypse has Kinfolk, relatives of werecreatures who inherited a whisper of the spiritual nature but not the ability to shapeshift. They're immune to the Delerium/Lunacy effect that befalls most humans who see shifters in their war form. They sometimes have access to Gifts. At best they're treasured allies, family members, and lovers of the Garou; at worst they're treated as brood mares to make more werewolf babies.
      • On a side note, some Werewolves are the offspring of a Spirit and another Garou, and will have some spiritual boon from the ethereal parent's side and improved relations with other spirits of that type.
    • Mage: the Ascension has Sorcerers, humans who lack the "spark" of mages, instead practicing linear paths of magic like tarot cards or weathercraft. They can't rewrite reality and their spells tend to require more preparation, but they're immune to Paradox backlash. Mages who scoff at their perceived weakness sometimes don't live to make that mistake twice.
      • Mage also had an entertaining inversion in the form of Sleepwalkers, mages that hadn't actually "awakened" and disbelieved in magic even while using it. Actually a substantially more annoying, and potentially terrifying, foe for a mage to fight than another mage, because they usually specialized in counter-magic (making them walking null-zones with disbelief piled on top) and just existing was enough for a mage to challenge their paradigm ("magic's not real, I'm just really lucky"), which is a free pass to homicidal rage town.
    • Changeling: the Dreaming has Kinain, people of True Fey blood (diluted now, but the True Fey were horny bastards when they were still around) who have the ability to interact with fae existence to a degree without experiencing the risk of Banality.
    • Wraith: the Oblivion has Mediums, who are not hybrids but follow the theme: humans who can speak to the dead and often give them a hand on the other side.
    • Hunter: the Reckoning has Bystanders, humans who were given the ability to perceive the supernatural by the angelic Messengers but "refused the Call", gaining none of the anti-supernatural powers of the various Hunter Creeds but also not having their lives steadily taken over by the life of the Hunt. A major theme of Reckoning was that you only get one chance at the Call and Bystanders can never "awaken" into true Hunters, serving as NPCs and sidekicks — but that you could play a particularly tragic game by having a Bystander try to take on the supernaturals without any Hunter powers and doom himself to a tragic end (albeit the same end most Hunters head to eventually). Interesting note: the gameline recommended that while "normal" Hunters come from typical, everyday backgrounds and have no special occult knowledge, combat training or other unusual resources, that it would be appropriate to have such a character introduced into the game as a Bystander for the sake of "balance". Think Buffy and Giles.
    • Demon: the Fallen has the Nephilim, offspring of Angels and humans, considered an aberration by both and (probably) all dead back at the dawn of history, though some Demons speculate that some or all of the other supernaturals might be their descendants.
      • Demon also had Thralls - humans who had made pacts with Demons in return for (sometimes supernatural) gifts.
  • Hermetic Magic
    • Technically, all magic is a result of pure enlightened will, but the Order of Hermes explicitly advocates this (obviously) along with some of the Sons of Ether who've implanted themselves with their gadgets or quaffed some mutagens to gain "psychic powers" instead of more traditional paradigms.
  • Historical Rap Sheet: Explicitly averted in one specific instance. Almost anything else is allowed to have been a Vampire/Werewolf/Mage plot, but the Holocaust is required to remain a purely human atrocity. Or not: in several splatbooks, the Get of Fenris are stated to have been involved.
  • Hollywood Dreamtime: The Umbra in its entirety was built upon ideas of the Aboriginal Dreamtime.
  • Horror Hunger: Vampires need blood. If they go too long without feeding, they'll end up doing anything (to anyone) to get it.
  • Hypnotic Eyes: The vampire discipline of Dominate works entirely via eye contact until you're powerful enough to take the sixth rank, then you can use Dominate Disciplines via touch.
    • Eyes of the Serpent allow you to hold a mortal, or kindred to a limited degree, in place. Also overlaps with Supernatural Gold Eyes.
  • I Know Your True Name: One of the power branches in Mummy: The Resurrection is called "Nomenclature," where knowing anything's True Name (which requires varying amounts of time invested in study to learn - it's easier to learn the Names of simple things like plants and animals than, say, the Name for humans, which is even less complex than an individual human's personal True Name, and so on) allows for varying effects, culminating in (at the highest level) total erasure from existence. Of course, that last one automatically costs the Mummy a permanent dot on the Karma Meter, no matter who you do it to.
    • True Names play a very important part in Demon: The Fallen. Certain rituals, invocations and evocations require knowledge of the target's True Name to work properly (granted, you are able to try and use a target's Celestial Name — their "common" angelic name — if the target is another fallen and you don't know their True Name, but it's far less reliable and generally much more difficult to do so); the fallen's Abyssal Lords can use their subjects' True Names to contact them even from inside the Pit; knowing a target's True Name makes many rolls you can make against them substantially easier; and a demon's True Name can be invoked to have them hear what you're saying (and possibly who you're saying it to and where you're doing it, given enough successes on their roll) from anywhere in the world, regardless of their distance to you — in fact, invoking a demon's True Name will very likely send shivers down their spine and make their extremities tingle, regardless of whether you want them to notice you speaking of them or not. And this is just to mention but a few of True Names applications in Demon. The sourcebooks are crawling with other fun and interesting uses for them ("fun and interesting" for the user, not the target, obviously).
      • In Demon, a True Name isn't even really a name per se. Rather, it is the metaphysical representation of something or someone: you don't have a True Name, you are your True Name. Before the Fall, when the angels still had access to the full breadth of their power, they could use True Names as the targets of any evocation or invocation, instead of having to be in the presence of the actual being or thing — this was, in fact, the preferred/official method of relaying God's orders across the cosmos, and even of transporting oneself across the cosmos, depending on which House the angel was from (e.g. if you knew Earth's True Name, you could teleport yourself from wherever you were in the whole Universe directly to Earth, by using the appropriate evocation with its True Name as the target).
  • Immortality Immorality: Oh, where to begin:
    • Firstly, vampires. While it is possible to live by drinking the blood of animals and to only drain humans of minute amounts, succumbing to Frenzy is a bitch and most vampires come out of it with a dead human or three on their hands. Killing humans while feeding is strongly frowned on by the Camarilla; for one it brings you closer to the beast and the last thing you want is a vampire frenzying in Elysium. For another, there are only so many corpses you can hide before the mortal authorities catch on and put the Masquerade at risk.
  • Immune to Bullets: Vampires tend to take less damage from gunfire than some other forms of attack. Werewolves can easily shrug off most non-aggravated damage, including gunfire, except when faced with silver bullets. This is part of the reason that werewolves and vampires do not get along: werewolves can rip a vampire to shreds without a lot of effort due to a combination of their aforementioned damage resistance, and the fact that they deal out Aggravated Damage with their claws.
  • Ironic Hell: The Demon book "Days of Fire" had three different visions of the end of the world. In the first one, every Clan, Tribe, and Tradition gets a unique end; Ventrue's refined tastes become so refined that they can't feed off anyone, the Black Furies are enslaved and submit to men, the Cult of Ectasy reach their perfection only to realise how futile it all was, etc.
  • Karma Meter: A prominent feature of Vampire, but more optimistic/action-oriented gamelines, particularly Mage and Werewolf, avoided this.
  • Katanas Are Just Better: In those gamelines of the old World of Darkness where mundane weapons did matter.
  • Kill It with Fire: The most surefire way to kill something in the WoD is with fire: if it isn't extra vulnerable to fire, rest assured it's probably not invulnerable to it either.
    • Averted with the Devils in Demon: The Fallen, whose apocalyptic forms are completely immune to fire. Otherwise, Demon is actually the one old World of Darkness gameline that uses aggravated damage where fire isn't a source of said damage.
  • Killed to Uphold the Masquerade: The short version is, every single supernatural group has very good cause to keep their existence hidden, and while some are quicker to resort to this solution than others (vampires are frequently very quick on the trigger), all of them are willing to kill a sloppy member of their group. Moreover, since the reveal of one type of supernatural is likely to get people questioning which other types are real, not to mention several of these groups are actively antagonistic (werewolves and vampires most notably), it's quite possible to get killed to uphold someone else's Masquerade.
  • Knight Templar: In Hunter: The Reckoning, even normal Imbued that had Zeal as a primary virtue often leaned towards this. But they paled in comparison to Waywards, who were prepared to eradicate every last supernatural on the planet - and didn't care about humans who got in their way. In Werewolf: The Apocalypse becoming a Knight Templar is a major occupational hazard, considering that werewolves were created to defend all existence from Cosmic Horrors that are indeed every bit as cosmically horrible as werewolves believe, and also extremely good at corruption, seduction and infiltration.
  • Live-Action Adaptation: Kindred: The Embraced, a short-lived 1996 series on Fox, based on Vampire: The Masquerade.
  • Liminal Being:
    • In Vampire: The Masquerade, Kindred straddle the line between living and dead (being undead), as well as between human and beast (as former humans who cling to their human traits as they struggle to keep their Beast at bay).
    • In Werewolf: The Apocalypse, the Garou and Fera are beings who straddle the line between human and animal, partaking of the natures of both.
    • Deceased persons in Wraith: The Oblivion straddle the line between living and dead. They are no longer alive, but not truly dead, since they can still interact with the world of the living and are not yet able to pass on.
    • In Changeling: The Dreaming, the eponymous Changelings are creatures of both the Autumn World (physical reality) and the Dreaming, existing simultaneously in both.
    • The fallen angels of Demon: The Fallen are supernatural entities who now inhabit human hosts, partaking of both human and angel impulses.
  • Lord British Postulate: Averted. There are rules for fighting Cain: You lose.
  • Mad Scientist: The Sons of Ether. Within the Tradition, Mad Scientist is an official designation.
  • The Magic Goes Away: Almost every game line describes magic as not being as strong, or at least not as accessible, as it used to be.
    • Each successive generation of vampires is weaker than the last, and the default generation for player characters (the thirteenth) is the last one to be "full" vampires, with their progeny being half-breeds.
    • Changelings and traditional mages both rely on human belief in the supernatural to practice magic (and in the changelings' case, to exist in the first place). With science and reason being the order of the day, both groups are reduced to a shadow of what they used to be. Not so with the Technocracy, a group of mages that use human belief in scientific advancement to make magitek.
    • Demons have the same problem as mages and changelings (in their case it's specifically faith they need), and also suffer from a) the world having been broken in the Fall so that the occult resonances that they use to rely on to amplify their magical workings no longer function, b) having been stripped of large parts of the power by God before being thrown into the Pit, and c) trying to make what's left work while occupying a human host whose brain was never made to comprehend celestial Lore. On the other hand, their return to Earth signify the return of the divine and cause an upswell in religious fervor and faith, for better or worse.
  • Magic versus "Science": The Traditions vs Technocracy.
  • Magitek: Weavertech is described as this. Various other factions also make use of it, with the Technocracy specializing in it almost exclusively.
  • Manipulative Bastard: In some gamelines, particularly Vampire and Demon, being this is almost a requirement for obtaining any power or status within your supernatural society.
  • Masquerade: Vampire: The Masquerade is the trope namer. Each supernatural enforces their own, but vampires and mages are typically first to do clean up. Still, sometimes the ability of supernatural beings to maintain it stretches the suspension of disbelief, considering their penchant for superpowered violence.
    • They don't always maintain it - storytellers were suggested to use both kinds of hunters in response to Masquerade breaches, and even then, you have the capital H Hunters that are capable of nearly ignoring it.
  • Massive Race Selection: Just look at the list of games; nearly every title is named after a separate playable race (although mages, sorcerers, and hunters could all just be called humans).
  • May Contain Evil: Taken to insane lengths by the Pentex Corporation in Werewolf: The Apocalypse. Pentex's subsidiaries frequently sell products that corrupt the bodies and souls of consumers. Once in a while, they even sell products possessed by banes.
  • The Men in Black: Merely one type of agents for the Technocracy.
  • Metaplot: Yeah.
  • Mind Control: Almost everyone can potentially do this, but vampires and mages are particularly notorious for this.
    • One of the big edges of old WoD Hunters over normal people was total immunity to mind control as long as second sight was running. A sourcebook tells of a Hunter that was once Dominated while off-guard by some mid-rank vampires (who had heard about the Imbued and wanted one as a pet), then activated second sight (or had it activated by the Messengers) eight months later, used a candlestick and the Cleave edge to dust ten vamps, and got away alive.
      • Not to mention that old WoD Fallen (demons) are immune to mind control at all times, period. Suck it, Ventrues.
      • The exception being the Blood Bound that comes from drinking a vampire's blood, which works via supernatural chemistry rather than psychic commands and explicitly bypasses the Demon's usual protections by affecting the body they're wearing. So best not to suck on a Ventrue...
  • The Missing Faction: Just about every game line has at least one.
  • Monster Lord: Vampire elders below 7th gen.
  • Monster Mash: Essentially the premise of the game. The core game lines introduce vampires, werewolves, witches, fae, and ghosts.
    • Supplementals also include mummiesnote, huntersnote, gargoylesnote, mad scientists note, hunchbacksnote, gypsiesnote, and demonsnote. There are even references to "Prometheans", who are effectively a race of Frankenstein's Monsters.
  • Mr. Vice Guy: Potentially any and every player and character. The Toreador clan in Vampire, the Cult of Ecstasy Tradition in Mage and the Satyr Kith in Changeling are some of the more ready-made examples.
  • Mystical Jade:
    • Jade, specifically that found in China, can be used to store Yin- and Yang-aligned chi. Black Jade is aligned with Yin, and can only store that; Red Jade, aligned with the element of Fire, stores Yang; Green Jade, aligned with the element of Wood, and White Jade, aligned with Air, can store either kind, but not as much of either as the specialized variants; Grey or Yellow Jade can store large quantities of either type. Jade can also cause grievous wounds to the Hsien, the little gods of China.
    • The area of the Underworld connected to China is referred to as Dark Kingdom of Jade.
  • Naked Nutter: In the crossover game Midnight Circus, it's mentioned that the Nephandus Devyn Cavendish managed to make his way into the uppermost ranks of the circus by becoming an apprentice to the current Ringmaster, a hedge wizard by the name of Mauritius. Once Cavendish had learned everything he could from his master, Mauritius was soon found inexplicably naked and barking like a dog - allowing Cavendish to claim the post of Ringmaster... but not before having his now-insane predecessor ripped to pieces by his own hounds.
  • Omnicidal Maniac:
    • In Vampire: The Masquerade, the Giovanni want to bring about the end of life as we know it For the Lulz. Setites are also working towards Gehenna, though most of them don't know it, but they are doing so in the name of their god.
    • In Werewolf: The Apocalypse, the Black Spiral Dancers and various Wyrm cults seek to either (1) free the Wyrm from the Weaver's web, which would destroy the fabric of reality in the process, or (2) empower the Triatic Wyrm to destroy Gaia and the cosmos.
  • Onesie Armor: Downplayed, while some armors are called things like "armor t-shirt" or "flak jacket", the armor with the highest rating is simply called "full suit". While this makes some sense, it raises the obvious question of why you can't just attack someone wearing a flak jacket in the legs to ignore their armor, other than just because the game rules say so.
  • Our Vampires Are Different: Thirteen clans worth of "different". However, the differences between political views and origins are much more pronounced in the new WoD. All vampires share the same common weaknesses (fire, sunlight, staking), but each clan has a unique weakness on top of this.
  • Our Werewolves Are Different: Moreso in Werewolf: The Apocalypse than in Werewolf: The Forsaken.
  • Personality Powers: In Hunter: The Reckoning a hunter's edges — the supernatural powers they use to fight evil — are determined by their beliefs and personality. In Mage: The Ascension the ways a true mage used his power also depended on his beliefs.
  • Point Build System: You put dots into your Attributes and Abilities and whatever other specific items from the gameline, and those determine the number of dice rolled to accomplish things.
  • Power Born of Madness: The Marauder mages and the Malkavian vampire Clan.
  • Power Perversion Potential: White Wolf was willing to acknowledge it sometimes. There even was at least one supernatural power specifically aimed for this. Just please don't dwell on Tzimisce body-altering powers for too long.
  • Pushed at the Monster: This is the reason Clan Nosferatu participates in the Camarilla and Sabbat despite their interests not aligning with either organization. They believe that the Nictuku are on the way to devour all Kindred. The more Kindred the Nosferatu surround themselves with, the more chance they have to escape while the monsters chow down on their less subtle sect-mates.
  • Rank Scales with Asskicking: Movers and shakers of the setting tend to be on a completely different level of power than normal starting characters, as supernatural abilities tend to increase in power on an exponential scale and many of the higher-level ones take decades (or in the case of vampires, centuries) to master.
  • Red Right Hand: All of vampire Clan Nosferatu, as well as Metis Werewolves. Tzimisce deliberately do this to themselves.
  • Resurrective Immortality: The mummies are immortals who would resurrect every time they were killed. It is possible to destroy them outright, but not particularly easy (like putting them at ground zero of a nuclear explosion).
    • Subverted as it is not unlimited, as mechanically, each resurrection drains the mummy, and repeated resurrections without time to recover what they lost can slowly push them into being permanently locked in the afterlife. But in-universe, it is sold as infinite to inspire fear.
  • Recycled In Space: Every game has one or two historical supplements [the Dark Ages and often one other]. Plus, The Year of the Lotus event gave Eastern counterparts for every gameline. Some, like the Kuei Jin, are a totally different type of creature but conceptually similar, while others, like the Hengeyokai, are the same creatures as before in a different setting.
  • Renowned Selective Mentor: Placing four or five dots into the "Mentor" Background will give one of these to your Player Character.
  • Roguish Romani: The basic stock for members of the Ravnos Vampire Clan are the Romani. Their clan discipline is making illusions, and they are one of the few clans who prefer the open road to city strongholds (though unlike Gangrel, they seldom have friends amongst the Were). They are also mistrusted by the more citybound kindred, and often accused of any petty acts of larceny when the Sabbat or Giovanni aren't handy.
  • Romanticized Abuse: Common in the relation between vampires and their ghouls, among other things. Also, in the book Possessed, you can build a character with superpowers based on one of the seven deadly sins. The "lust" ones pretty much run on this trope.
  • Science Is Bad: If it is not used by a fascist Ancient Conspiracy to control humanity, then it is a tool of an Eldritch Abomination that strives to eliminate free will and change.
  • Science Is Wrong: Mage: The Ascension (usually) posits that all Science is Wrong — except when enough people believe that it's not. The Technocracy convinced humanity that science is right during the Enlightenment, though, so mundane reality works on observable principle as long as people believe it does. The whole point of the game is that Awakening allows the True Mage(tm) to flip mundane reality and the collected observers the bird and do things through "discredited" systems of magic/faith/pseudo-science. The mere presence of mundanes who believe in conventional science also tends to make True Magic go awry in non-repeatable and/or fatal ways, making it basically impossible to objectively observe magic.
  • Self-Parody: "Black Dog Game Factory" was an in-universe RPG studio (in contrast with White Wolf's "Black Dog" brand of books). It had a number of parodies of their own works: Fiend: The Pacting, Human: The Protagonist, Lycanthrope: The Rapture, Pixie: The Delusion, Revenant: The Ravishing, Spectre: The Annihilation, Warlock: The Pretension, Zombie: The Putrescence.
    • Which begs the question, did those games have their own fictional game studio in-in-universe also? And just how Grimdark would that "World of Darker Darkness" setting be?
  • Serial Killer:
    • The Wayward creed from Hunter: The Reckoning, just... focused on supernaturals. Of course, if some mortals die when they blow up that apartment building with a vampire living in the basement, well, that's collateral damage for you.
    • In Werewolf: The Apocalypse, Black Spiral Dancers are often serial killers. Wyrm cults such as the Pretanic Order and Seventh Generation have racked up a significant body count through their human sacrifices.
  • Serial-Killer Killer: In Werewolf: The Apocalypse, some factions and individuals hunt down serial killers and related scum. The Get of Fenris' Hand of Tyr camp hunts down those who harm the innocent, such as murderers and rapists. The Black Fury tribe ruthlessly kills domestic abusers, sexual predators, and serial killers who target women. The narrator of the first edition Nuwisha tribebook describes how he tormented a serial killer with the voices of his victims until the serial killer committed suicide. Two characters from Warriors of the Apocalypse — Volcheka Ibarruri and Gere Hunts-The-Hunters — maim and kill wolf hunters.
    • Hunter: The Reckoning can be seen as "Serial Killer Killer: The Game", if the Hunters target the more vicious supernaturals in their area.
  • Sinister Nudity:
    • In the Bygone Bestiary sourcebook, a few of the more humanoid entities in the book are depicted nude in order to make them seem more upsetting. The Ghul, for example, is portrayed naked in its Shapeshifter Default Form, both so that the reader can clearly see its telltale hooves and to emphasize the fact that the Ghul can also be a sexual horror to its victims once it's finished killing and eating them. Thankfully, the depicted specimen's groin is hidden both by a Censor Shadow and its own immensely thick lower body hair.
    • The Midnight Circus adventure "The Wasteland" features a charming image of two horribly emaciated-looking women, completely naked and with their backs to the reader: one of them is eating a live spider, and the other is clutching a plank with a few nails driven to it. The text soon reveals that these are the Rampall Sisters, two Hollow Men formori working for the Malfean Nephandi Rod Lightner in his dealings with the Circus. For added horror, they're described as looking attractive from a distance, up until you notice the withered builds, the decomposing skin, the bite marks from autocannibalism, and the spiders crawling out of their bodies...
  • Sliding Scale of Turn Realism: Action by Action.
  • The Soulless: How a number of Fallen end up with a human body to possess.
  • Sourcebook: And frequently several revisions of each as well.
  • Special Snowflake Syndrome: Almost every game has several smaller splats mentioned in the various sourcebooks, for players who somehow can't create interesting characters otherwise. Vampire has Bloodlines, Mage has Crafts, Changeling has Thallain, etc.
  • Splat: Essentially the Trope Namer, more or less.
  • Stages of Monster Grief: Just about every splat has members who deny, love, hate, or go off the deep end after changing from mere human.
  • State Sec: The Technocracy definitely has elements of this trope, what with the secret agents, cyborg and bio-engineered soldiers and what-not.
  • Super Loser: Many starting PCs.
  • 13 Is Unlucky
  • Tzadikim Nistarim: The Mogen ha Chav, a small faction of Sorceror-level mystics guiding spec-ops style bodyguard missions on behalf of the thirty-six people who justify humanity to God. The tsaddikim themselves are to be unaware of their secret protectors.
  • Unluckily Lucky: The dhampyr suffer from this. Since their birth (a child of a human and an eastern vampire) is so unlikely, it messes up their fate. As a result they gain supernatural luck, which they can learn to consciously manipulate, but at the same time they tend to attract trouble.
  • Unstoppable Rage: Vampires or Werewolves in Frenzy.
    • Werewolf's crossover rules lampshade this by mentioning that mages do not quantifiably explode in Rage.
  • Urban Fantasy: Authors prefer to define the genre for most World of Darkness games as Horror, but actually WoD fits this trope.
  • The Usual Adversaries: Humans!
  • Van Helsing Hate Crimes: Hunters generally don't know the difference between the good supernaturals and the bad. You can't really blame them.
  • Wainscot Society: Multiple, intermittently interacting hidden factions — of vampires, werewolves, wizards, faeries, etc. — each have substantial, organized social systems of their own. Vampires have their Masquerade; other beings have less formal systems of secrecy.
  • The Wall Around the World: The borders between the physical realm and the spirit worlds.
  • Watch the World Die: The line had a battery of books about how the world Ascended To A Higher Planeof Existence/concluded / ceased to exist / got destroyed.
    • A scenario for Vampire: The Masquerade included a group of vampires hiding away from God's judgment to hold vigil and repent; even though the Player Characters might not leave the church they are stuck in, the fates of vampires the world over were written with detail.
    • A scenario for Mage: The Ascension included an illustration where a mountain tallNephandus with burning eyes is breathing atomic fire on cities. The PCs were welcome to survive long enough to see how the victorious Nephandi and their Malfean masters tore holes in Reality and raped it to death. Depressing as it is, the book for MtA included other scenarios where the player factions won and ended the world for a better, more comfortable age.
  • Well-Intentioned Extremist: Hunters and Werewolves in general are at risk of this, but in the old WoD, Waywards especially, being willing to kill hundreds of normals just to take out -one- supernatural.
  • We ARE Struggling Together: Hoo boy.
  • Wolf Man: The Garou.
  • Wolverine Publicity: The Gangrel Beckett, who appeared in various Sourcebooks and novels, sometimes without adding anything to the story or even advancing his own quest to uncover details about Cain. Perhaps the worst was his appearance in a Hunter/Mummy crossover trilogy of novels where he never met any of the main characters and it seemed his only purpose was to artificially stretch out the story.
  • World-Wrecking Wave: The Sixth Great Maelstrom, which not only was powerful enough to put an end to Wraith, but set into motion many of the events that ended the other games' story lines as well. It simultaneously managed to spawn three new gamelines.
  • Your Vampires Suck

Alternative Title(s): Classic World Of Darkness

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