Trivia / Vampire: The Masquerade 5th Edition

• Colbert Bump: 5th edition received a boost in popularity when Geek & Sundry did a livestream of an LA by Night campaign.
• Creator Killer: A complicated example of such but the controversy over the Anarch and Camarilla sourcebooks resulted in White Wolf Entertainment being absorbed into Paradox Interactive. The license for Vampire: The Masquerade 5th Edition was then held by Modiphus Entertainment. Then Modiphius was fired and White Wolf as a marketing division is now licensing products to Renegade Game Studios and other sources.
• Promoted Fanboy: Matthew Dawkins started doing Youtube videos explaining the World of Darkness to initiates. Now he's an in-house developer for Onyx Path Publishing. He also got a short series of videos where he appears as his Youtube character, The Gentleman to explain the changes happening in V5.
• Streisand Effect: The Chechen government attempted to get a chapter removed from The Camarilla due to its RL depiction of them as persecuting homosexuals. The chapter had been widely loathed among LGBT+ reviewers and allies as trivializing a real-world atrocity. However, the government's actions brought the book to national attention that it never would have achieved normally. There was also a controversial decision to hint that Razman Kadyrov, the real life leader of Chechnya, had been ghouled and turned into a blood puppet of the Camarilla led to the game getting widespread coverage in Russian media as an example of "look what the West says about us." So, that... helped?
• Troubled Production: Fifth Edition and its surrounding projects have a bunch of issues ranging from controversies like the Chechen issue described above to the inability to get products out consistently, leading to the firing of the original V5 staff inside of White Wolf and then in late 2020/early 2021 Modiphius was fired and it's now being licensed to others via a restructured White Wolf. Some of the video games have been also hit with similar issues, most notably Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2, with the firing of Hardsuit Labs in February 2021 from development of the game, which had its own issues before that point including a situation that had resulted in several key staff including a returning writer of Bloodlines, all leaving or being let go. As of the end of August 2021, Paradox hasn't spoken on who has taken over from Hardsuit.
  • At 2023's PAX West, Paradox Interactive confirmed via trailer that indie developer The Chinese Room (of Dear Esther and Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs fame) had taken over production from Hardsuit Labs. The Chinese Room themselves confirmed that they were able to use assets left over from Hardsuit's earlier development.
• What Could Have Been: Onyx Path Publishing had initially planned to do a 4th edition of Vampire: The Masquerade themselves. Instead, the 20th Anniversary Edition they published was retconned into being the 4th Edition.
  • Many of the plotlines set up in Beckett's Jyhad Diary (made by Onyx Path) set up some narrative threads that are directly contradicted or rendered impossible by the V5's core book or its supplements.
  • White Wolf Entertainment was originally going to publish a Sabbat handbook to complement the Anarch and Camarilla ones. But after several controversies, Paradox has restructured White Wolf and stopped making gamebooks entirely. They will only be licensing them out to companies like Onyx Path & Modiphius until further notice.
  • The above became a What Could Have Been of its own when late in 2020, Paradox cut ties with Modiphius, releasing a Companion that introduced several clans and bringing core rule book production back in-house, which in turn canceled without a word the already in the progress 5th edition of Werewolf: The Apocalypse.

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