Article:
White Wolf: Good News is Old News

Back on Halloween weekend last year, White Wolf held their annual International Camarilla Conclave in Atlanta. The event primarily focused on a series of official live role-playing (LRP) games set in their World Of Darkness setting and using their Mind's Eye Theatre rules, but it also gave the company a chance to mix it up with the fans and make some proclamations regarding the future.

The Camarilla was once an independent organisation, run by fans, for fans, which co-ordinated an ongoing epic global chronicle made up of interlinked local LRP games from all around the world. By joining your local Camarilla branch you got to make a character which you could play not just in your home town, but which you could take to other games in other cities and countries across the globe.

In 2005, White Wolf instituted a new licensing agreement in an attempt to control their intellectual property and stop third parties from profiteering off of of the back of it. One of the consequences of all this was that the Camarilla was brought in-house to become the 'official' fan club. In other words, if you paid the Camarilla a membership fee this was ok, because it was endorsed by the company. The flip side of this being, of course, if you paid anyone else to play a World of Darkness game and they weren't paying themselves to use the license, then they were likley to incur White Wolf's wrath.

With the Camarilla now in the fold, the company got to have a say in how the organisation conducted its business. One of the early stipulations was that all officially licensed play would be of the 'new' World of Darkness games, and not the old ones. If you were a fan of Vampire: The Masquerade rather than Vampire: The Requiem then sorry, you were out of luck. The structure of the organisation and the way it used the setting and the rules of the World of Darkness was defined top-down, with all Camarilla branches expected to follow in the company's footsteps.

Perhaps the lowest point of all this came in late 2008 when the UK branch of the Camarilla was asked to renew their expired licensing agreement. The new document provided by White Wolf had some unpleasant legal ramifications for the board of the Camarilla UK, and when the board asked the company to revise the document they declined and refused to compromise. Reaching a stalemate, the UK fans chose not to sign the original document, and so they went from being 'official' to 'unofficial' overnight. The Camarilla UK is now called the Isles of Darkness (IOD), and their players are no longer permitted to participate in international stories alongside global Camarilla members. These players can join the international group, but then they can't play with in the IOD's games.