As more roleplaying games have taken their cues from Vampire, expectations have been raised. Both the World of Darkness and the real world have grown and changed. It is clear that the time has come to update Vampire: The Masquerade for the coming millennium. 

It began with an interoffice memo from Vampire Developer Rob Hatch... 

Of late, people [at White Wolf] have been saying that it's high time to update our flagship game, modernizing it and making it of a quality similar to all our other second edition games. I couldn't agree more. While Vampire: The Masquerade Second Edition is a beautiful book, it is not nearly as complete as our other (second edition) books and deserves to be expanded, updated, and polished. 

I want to clarify the guiding principle of this new edition: V2 works.  It is the simplest of our games, the most elegant, and the most popular. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" has to be central to our thinking here. Most of us who have been in the RPG industry know the horror stories of perfectly good games "fixed" all the way into obscurity and ruin. 

That caveat aside, I propose the creation of a "revised" version Vampire: The Masquerade.  This book would be of a size similar to our other core gamebooks. Its primary purposes would be to update the book for the 21st century (new quotes) and to compile everything necessary to play (all the clans, all the Disciplines, etc.) under one set of covers; however, we would also tweak those rules that need tweaking, and most importantly, provide a lot of really cool bells and whistles.... 

In the coming months we will be releasing more details on the changes that occur in the new edition. For the time being, here are the answers to some soon-to-be frequently asked questions. 

Will this new edition be compatible with existing material?  Yes. The new core book is designed to be completely compatible with the existing rules system. The goal is not to make the current line obsolete--just to make a better introduction to the line. 

Does this mean that all of the World of Darkness core books will be revised?  Absolutely not.  Vampire Second Edition was a remarkable product from a young company.  We expanded on that effort with each subsequent game, and feel that the other WOD core books can stand on their own for many years to come. 

Does this mean that all of the books in the Vampire line will be revised?  Some of the core Vampire titles may be updated to reflect the more modern setting, but the line will not be changed whole cloth.  Most existing Vampire books will remain as is. 

Games 

Vampire: The Masquerade 
Newly Revised Edition 
Written by the White Wolf Game Studio. Art by Guy Davis, Jason Felix and Leif Jones, among others.  
ISBN 1-56504-249-2 
Stock #2300 
$29.95 U.S. 

The Midnight Dance Continues... 
They stalk in the shadows, moving gracefully and unseen among their prey. They are the blood-drinking fiends of whispered legends--Kindred, Cainites, the Damned. Above all, they are vampire. Their eternal struggle, waged since the nights of Jericho and Babylon, plays itself out among the skyscrapers and nightclubs of the modern world. But the vampires' grand Masquerade is imperiled, and the night of Gehenna draws ever closer. 

Until the End of All Things 
This new edition of Vampire: The Masquerade is an updated, revised version of the popular classic. In this mammoth volume can be found all 13 clans, all major Disciplines, and a host of brand-new information on both the Kindred and the ... things ... that hunt them. This book compiles everything that a Vampire player and Storyteller needs to know about the Kindred and the World of Darkness for the new millenium. Plus, the new edition provides all-new information on the changes that affect the clans, and on the beginning of the end of the Camarilla. Finally, the first of the Storyteller rulebooks is the best again. 

Also shown is the apparent new cover, only slightly changed. You cannot see it in this scan, I don't think, but the rose actually has a reflection in the marble: