In an article on the WW site Matt McFarland has announced that the Dark Ages line is coming to a close.


What it seems to come down to is that it doesn't really make sense to continue the old World of Darkness, even if it's a setting that takes place 800 years before the Time of Judgment.

This, as they say, is it. Or to use another cliché, here we go again.

Not so very long ago, I found myself writing an essay to end Changeling: The Dreaming. And now, here I am doing the same thing for Dark Ages. I’ve got a lot less to say about Dark Ages, which is funny, considering that I did more work on this line.

Well, let’s start with the obvious answers. Before anybody starts wailing and gnashing teeth, pointing out that the master list of books on the web site listed four other Dark Ages titles (waaaaay back before Vampire: The Requiem was released), let me explain. We had originally budgeted for Dark Ages to continue on after the modern World of Darkness ended. We scheduled a normal eight-book run for 2004, and hired authors and so on…

…and then we really took a hard look at it, and decided that continuing Dark Ages just didn’t make a lot of sense. Yeah, it’s 800 years before the modern World of Darkness, and so not affected by the Time of Judgment directly. But it draws on the same continuity, and so keeping the line going, we felt, was going to be confusing to new players jumping into the exciting new worlds we’ve got planned, and a disservice to the work that we’ve put into the Time of Judgment.

That was the decision. It took a while for me to come around to it; there were some books that I really wanted to see done. But in the end, I had to bow to the wisdom of the folks making the decisions, and for the second time, here I am writing a brief essay about the end of a game line I really love.

The thing is, though, that Dark Ages isn’t at all incomplete. Between the five hard-covers detailing character types, the regional sourcebooks (most of which are centered around vampires, but are workable for other characters just the same), books like Right of Princes which are usable across the board, and the companion books like the Dark Ages: Mage Grimoire, there’s plenty of information and chronicle potential out there. The game line is ending, but that doesn’t mean your games have to, or should, end.

I hope they continue, and I wish you years of happy gaming!

— Matt McFarland, Dark Ages Developer

Matt pretty much said it all, but I wanted to add my two cents. I came to White Wolf as Dark Ages developer, picking up the line from the more-than-capable hands of Richard Dansky and had a wonderful time with the line. Getting a chance to revisit Constantinople and to spearhead the revision to Dark Ages: Vampire are highlights of my career. As fiction editor, I also oversaw the Dark Ages Clan Novels and that was just as much fun. I’d like to thank all the fans, writers, artists and readers who stuck with the line and helped make it the gem it is. We never could have done it without you. Thanks.

With Dark Ages: Fae and Devil’s Due, Matt has ensured that the line ends on very high notes indeed—no less than it deserves.

— Philippe Boulle, WW Marketing Director & former Dark Ages Developer

Join Matt and Philippe for a chat about Dark Ages this Friday, October 1st, at 4 p.m. Eastern.