White Wolf Game Studio, and its World of Darkness line have been spectacularly successful in the RPG industry. Their books rival the venerable Dungeons & Dragons in shelf space. WoD, most notably Vampire: the Masquerade, forms a distinct subcommunity among gamers, and those who don't like it are fearful enough of its spread to go into histrionics when the subject comes up. Vampire and its cousins have a distinct angst-ridden tone, and it's written to the hilt. If you like the moodiness, you'll love it; it you don't, you'll despise it.
But love or detest them, everyone must admit White Wolf has had an enormous effect on many games besides their own. The basic premise of all the WoD titles ? Vampire: the Masquerade, Mage: the Ascension, Werewolf: the Apocalypse, et multiple cetera ? is always the same. The world is a grim reflection of our own, where spiritual values are crushed under the ruthless advance of technology and centralizing power. The players take roles in an in-crowd of superhumans who, in theory, hopelessly struggle to preserve spirituality, but in practice, spend all their time in bitter internal feuds. The masses of humanity, meanwhile, are blind to the great struggles going on about their banal lives. Many words are needlessly capitalized.
Since Vampire's success, I've seen half a dozen products which follow much the same pattern. The angst may not be quite so pure, nor the cause so doomed, nor the politics may so sharp, but they are all there. In Nomine features Angels desperately trying to save humanity from itself and Demonic influence, all the while in danger of accumulating sufficient dissonance to Fall themselves. (Or, if you swing that way, Demons trying to corrupt humanity against the will of an omnipotent God.) Naturally, each Choir (or Band) has its own opinions on how to handle humanity, and each Archangel (or Demon Prince) requires his Servitors to toe his own line on how to handle the celestial War. In Dreamside, the main characters are Lucid, capable of operating consciously in the Dream World, while trying not to become too attached to dreams and Fall Through. And now I have Continuum, in which time-travelers visit, gossip, and otherwise enjoy the time-hopping lifestyle, free of mortal concerns, while desperately avoiding accumulating the Frag which arises from causal paradox. Naturally, the time-traveling community has ten or twelve politically charged schools with distinct philosophies.
And, oddly enough, I don't think these works are entirely copycats. Each has distinct and interesting elements which prove their authors' creativity. (In Nomine, in particular, has increasingly drifted back into the offbeat humor so common at Steve Jackson Games as more contributors have built upon the background.) Rather, I think there's something terribly appealing in the angst and secret society elements they share for gamers.
Lots of us gamers were pretty geeky back in our adolescence; lots of us still are, twenty years later. Not all of us got over being on the outs back then. I think all these games allow geeks who haven't gotten over it to live out unrequited fantasies that the world just doesn't understand how sensitive and intelligent and cool we gaming geeks are (or like to think we are). ?Someday I'll have a bunch of friends. But it will be a special, secret club, and we'll all be cooler than you plebeians can believe, or even imagine anyone being. And we'll all laugh at you for your ignorance. And we'll do great, earth-shattering things. And we'll have superpowers. And??
Here I mercifully draw a curtain on things best left back in eighth grade.