How this sucker's going to work. (Read me first please)

Most of you who know me, know that I am a fan of World of Darkness games and White Wolf/Onyx Path Games Studio.

But one of the things that I really enjoy is making the details that surround my characters.  I like making the people and places that my characters bounce off of during the course of regular play. It's actually kind of rare for me to make a character anymore that doesn't have some built-in kind of soap opera going on his background.

And you know, with a sandbox style of play, it has become interesting to me to watch OTHER people bump into my bits of story. I enjoy the feeling as a storyteller or as a player to see people interact with the things i've made.

So, on those occasions when I am playing a larp or Java-chat game, and the Storytellers allow me to do so. I like to create those things and add additional toys to the sandbox we're all playing in.

I call it, "Painting the Corners of the World of Darkness"

This blog will be a repository for those sorts of things. 

The Content will consist of the following:

• Floaters are NPC's that your players can bump into in play, that aren't necessarily attached to a specific character or NPC. For instance, any game set in a city is going to need someone who can manufacture fake identification. I've seen exactly ONE PC that was built around this concept in my whole career as a gamer. So, odds are good that there's a NPC out there who does this sort of work, and maybe he knows stuff and maybe he don't  Crimelords, Crazy street people, members of the city council, any person like that.    This is the World of Darkness, so expect that any portrayal of race, creed, orientation,gender, religion, and political, and mental pathology is, by the very nature of the WOD, unflattering.

• Drop ins A drop-in is a description of a place, and maybe there's hinky supernatural stuff going on, and maybe there isn't. A drop-in normally has a full description of a place and some text about the people that normally inhabit it. Nightclubs, strip bars, all-night gas-n-go, stuff like that.

• Widgets: Things with some kind of mystical juice that are floating around the supernatural landscape of your town. Mostly this will be a description of the item and just a bit about what it does. But you don't want to go into a lot detail, which i'll explain in just a bit.

• Legends: The sort of urban/campfire story that never really goes away. Is it true? Is it bullshit?  Maybe someone should go down to the docks and find out.

The one rule I'll try to adhere to in making these things is that I'm not going to get terribly hung up on mechanics. I'm not writing these things for ONE game. I'm writing them for ALL the World of Darkness games. In fact, if I can stay away from mechanical stuff and using too much setting material, there's no reason whatsoever that you can't co-opt these people,places, and things for whatever modern/urban fantasy game that turns your crank.  By statting something up for a specific game system, I might make it unusable elsewhere.  A human that is a stiff crunchy antagonist for Werewolf is liable to be a real problem in something else. An antagonist who is pretty crunchy to a Vampire might be Hors de Combat in a Mage or Werewolf game.

The premise behind this is to make it look as if you've done an enormous amount of work detailing YOUR world of darkness. And if you want to file off the serial numbers so people don't necessarily know everything about these things, You are MORE than welcome to do so.

A word about Comments:

Have suggestions and thoughts that I might have missed. I WELCOME additional possibilities and flourishes in the comments.  

Also: If you use something like this in your game, I'd like to hear about it. Tell me how it went.  Hell, If it's cool enough, I'll add it to the characters backstory with your kind permission.