<span class="SFPTagline"> From SCIFIPEDIA </span>

Vampire: The Masquerade was the first of White Wolf Game Studio’s seminal World of Darkness role-playing games. First published in 1991, the game was a watershed moment in role-playing game design, both for its subject matter and for its approach to game play. Unlike many previous role-playing games, which followed the Dungeons and Dragons paradigm of chart-based, systemized game play, Vampire: The Masquerade used a looser, more abstract system that emphasized storytelling over dice roll mechanics.

More significantly, the game introduced mature themes of violence and sexuality into a genre that previously had been seen as largely superficial and juvenile. Where other role-playing games pitted players against monsters or villains in a contest for glory and loot, in Vampire: The Masquerade the players were the monsters, and the game ostensibly focused on the conflicts inherent in such an existence.

Set in the White Wolf’s signature World of Darkness, Vampire thrust players into the world of the Kindred: seven clans of vampires that borrowed heavily from a wide range of literary and cinematic origins, from Bram Stoker's Dracula to Murnau's Nosferatu and Anne Rice’s Interview With the Vampire.

The game's setting was a bleaker, more cynical version of the present-day Earth, and vampires existed under the ever-present shadow of a coming Gehenna, when the most ancient of the Kindred would rise from their slumber and consume their progeny. True to its origins as a story-based role-playing game, Vampire: The Masquerade enjoyed a vast, detailed backstory and an ongoing plot that continued to evolve during its thirteen-year run.

The game's success spawned a live-action role-playing game network named the Camarilla (after one of the large political factions in the game), a short lived TV series called Kindred: The Embraced, a series of novels published by White Wolf and a number of computer games. The game line was discontinued in 2004, when White Wolf phased out their World of Darkness product line. A new version of the game, with less emphasis on backstory and a new rule set, was published by White Wolf that same year under the title Vampire: The Requiem.