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    The White Wolf LiveJournal Community - Damnation City is Here
    Much wailing and gnashing of teeth.
    wordwill
    [info]whitewolf_lj
    [info]wordwill
    Damnation City is Here
    Damnation City is in our warehouse. The first copy out of the first box is here on my desk. It's been a while since I got this excited about a new book. It is fucking gorgeous.

    Somebody at RPGnet, and someone else below, asked what's in this book. Due to an oversight on our end, its webpage is still a little bare, isn't it? Here's more or less the answer I gave on RPGnet:

    What you won't find in Damnation City is a rigid, immutable system for accurately simulating municipal control or metropolitan governance over time, because this isn't a board game and there is no built-in victory condition.

    What you will find are valuable mechanisms (but not, in all cases, rules) for organizing and conceptualizing an urban game environment in such a fashion that vast interlocking networks of rivalries, agendas, schemes and loyalties become manageable for the Storyteller, and explorable by players and their characters.

    You'll find specific, actionable advice on using figurehead characters (e.g., the Prince) to define the city and thus the play space -- that can work just as well for a despotic werewolf or a cabal of secret wizards with subtle influence over the whole metropolis.

    You'll find dozens and dozens of sample neighborhoods and locations to assemble like building blocks into a facsimile of a real-world city or a real-seeming city of your design.

    You'll find a simple mechanism for altering a neighborhood's disposition and style over time through behaviors like gang activity, random violence, charity and deception.

    Here are a few low-res pictures I took of the copy on my desk, just because I love looking at this thing:

    Current Music: Digitalism, "Jupiter Room (Planetary Lobby Version)"

    Comments
    cwricheson From: [info]cwricheson Date: July 11th, 2007 05:50 pm (UTC) (Link)
    That looks really kick ass. Is that a relationship map in the second picture? If so, it looks really sharp.
    wordwill From: [info]wordwill Date: July 11th, 2007 06:23 pm (UTC) (Link)
    It is. It's one of several relationship, conflict and social diagrams in the book which we collectively call Schema.
    invisible_al From: [info]invisible_al Date: July 11th, 2007 08:26 pm (UTC) (Link)
    That's pretty hot right there. Will definitely have to take a look at this when it hits my local.
    verbena76 From: [info]verbena76 Date: July 11th, 2007 06:28 pm (UTC) (Link)
    I'm glad you finally got this particular beast wrangled, Will, I remember the delays. I look forward to seeing the pretty!

    ~Allan
    wordwill From: [info]wordwill Date: July 11th, 2007 06:37 pm (UTC) (Link)
    And to think it only cost me my self respect.
    verbena76 From: [info]verbena76 Date: July 11th, 2007 07:29 pm (UTC) (Link)
    ... you work in the gaming industry and you had self-respect up until this point?

    Wow.

    ;)
    ghoizdoz From: [info]ghoizdoz Date: July 11th, 2007 06:49 pm (UTC) (Link)
    Ooh, I can't wait to get my hot little hands on it.
    robin_d_laws From: [info]robin_d_laws Date: July 11th, 2007 06:50 pm (UTC) (Link)
    So is this streeting as we speak?
    wordwill From: [info]wordwill Date: July 11th, 2007 07:00 pm (UTC) (Link)
    It is currently still palette-wrapped in our warehouse. We're expecting it to street around the 25th. Author's copies get filed this week and should go out at roughly the same time.
    greyjoy From: [info]greyjoy Date: July 11th, 2007 10:45 pm (UTC) (Link)
    I'll buy you beer (good beer--hand-crafted, Pacific Northwest microbrewery beer!) if you'll ship this long-awaited tome of goodness now.
    dmoonfire From: [info]dmoonfire Date: July 11th, 2007 07:25 pm (UTC) (Link)
    That cover looks absolutely lovely. I want the book and I don't even play Vampire :). I just collect WoD books. :P
    arden_ic From: [info]arden_ic Date: July 11th, 2007 07:54 pm (UTC) (Link)
    Looks awesome, would it be possible for someone to put in a brief description of it in the pre-order section so that we could tell what it is about/has in it?
    cleverusername2 From: [info]cleverusername2 Date: July 11th, 2007 08:37 pm (UTC) (Link)
    What is it?
    tashiro From: [info]tashiro Date: July 11th, 2007 08:39 pm (UTC) (Link)
    It must be mine.
    vampir5 From: [info]vampir5 Date: July 11th, 2007 08:57 pm (UTC) (Link)
    So pretty...
    eynowd From: [info]eynowd Date: July 11th, 2007 09:28 pm (UTC) (Link)
    I'm curious: is this material related to the stuff I wrote for communities in the Gamma World D20 books a couple of years back?

    I'll have to have a good look at this one when I see it. I'd like to see what you guys have done with it.

    ndemeter From: [info]ndemeter Date: July 11th, 2007 09:31 pm (UTC) (Link)
    Apparently you will also find more new Bloodlines! ;)
    wordwill From: [info]wordwill Date: July 12th, 2007 01:23 am (UTC) (Link)
    Actually, you won't. There are no new bloodlines in Damnation City. The lady you're seeing in that image is the Oracle, one of ten archetypal Princes presented in the book. Each Prince has a style of rule that helps define the Danse Macabre -- and the style of gameplay -- for the city she commands.

    You'll find one Prince based on each of the five covenants, and five "oddball" Princes, like the Oracle and the Chieftain.
    jackofallgeeks From: [info]jackofallgeeks Date: July 11th, 2007 09:32 pm (UTC) (Link)
    I think you just sold me on this book. I wasn't really interested in 'another Vampire book,' but it sounds like this has bits I've been looking for.
    ultimate_ned From: [info]ultimate_ned Date: July 11th, 2007 09:57 pm (UTC) (Link)
    I will say I was looking forward to this book for a long time.

    When the advance copies came in for the matt, I nearly crapped my pantaloons for the 15 seconds he allowed me to look at it before he had to get back to work. Now that I've had some more time with the book, I know I'll be doing a lot more laundry.

    Will, Craig, and the crew--bravo.
    jedi_mario From: [info]jedi_mario Date: July 11th, 2007 10:40 pm (UTC) (Link)
    I think I'm more excited about this than Changeling. And I'm pretty damn excited about Changeling.
    dawngreeter From: [info]dawngreeter Date: July 13th, 2007 04:11 pm (UTC) (Link)
    This looks beyond awesome.
    jlburgos From: [info]jlburgos Date: July 14th, 2007 12:22 am (UTC) (Link)

    shit!

    Fucking 'ey! Thanks for the desc. It looks and sounds amazing. This is going in my basket at rpg.net as we speak.

    From: (Anonymous) Date: July 18th, 2007 07:51 pm (UTC) (Link)
    So if it's on your desk and in the warehouses, why did the release date slip from July 25th to August 1st? Man, I'm really hankering for this thing!
    wordwill From: [info]wordwill Date: July 20th, 2007 01:21 am (UTC) (Link)
    Lots of things are in our warehouse, and they go out generally in the order they come in. By the time all the orders were packed, it wouldn't ship in time to make July 25th, I guess. It's just the way these things go, unfortunately. But... soon.

    Soon.
    septembervirgin From: [info]septembervirgin Date: July 22nd, 2007 08:16 pm (UTC) (Link)
    Wouldn't it be deft if vampires in the MMO could manage portions of a social network of NPCs and indulge conspiracies much as crafting is done in typical MMO? Yes and sending mortals to do "gangbangs" or allocate their funds might also be interesting... this might even incorporate strategic planning and results of larger group conflicts (which should be opened as a possibility, at any rate).

    Consider it?
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