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For fan-made gamelines, see FanWorks.The World Of Darkness

Chronicles of Darkness is a Tabletop RPG published by White Wolf. The setting is a world much like our own, albeit darker. Shadows run deeper, mysteries exist around every corner, and humans aren't at the top of the food chain. The Earth is shared with various supernatural creepy crawlies that prey on humans like cattle, kill them out of convenience, and use them as pawns in eternal conflicts.

Originally known as just The World of Darkness, the new WoD was created as a reboot for the old World of Darkness. While Chronicles of Darkness shares many tropes with the WoD it also has many differences, since it was rebuilt taking into account many criticisms of its predecessor. The biggest change was that the new Storytelling System had a unifying (though not always balanced) set of rules note  for all the following "gamelines" to build onto. The first gameline that came out detailed ordinary humans (and ghosts in brief), while also serving as the core rule-book, creating a modular design meant that a Story Teller could run a game with all or no supernatural creatures from other gamelines. Because of this, some see the new setting as a retcon of the old, looking to fix mistakes and imbalances. Indeed, the Translation Guide series of books allows using old settings with the new rules, or vice-versa.

While no plots return wholesale, several themes, clans, institutions, and other things were ported over. The new setting is also a Crapsack World, though it focuses on hidden horrors, kitchen sink despair, and moral degradation. Once again there are three primary supernatural species: Vampires, Werewolves and Mages. There are many secondary ones: Changelings, Prometheans, Sin-Eaters, Mummies, Demons, Beasts, and Deviants. note  

There's also a gameline for humans who hunt monsters. Normally in Chronicles of Darkness, a group of humans has little chance of survival when going toe-to-toe with just one supernatural creature. But most creatures agree that humanity as a whole is dangerous and should be kept ignorant of their existence. The handful of small-time monster hunter societies in Hunter: The Vigil show just how effective an organized group of humans can be. And how bad it would be to have a technologically advanced and warlike species numbering in the billions declaring open season, on much smaller populations of supernaturals. The authors even covered this scenario in Mirrors, where humanity discovers that vampires exist. (The exception is Mages who already rule the world and only hide their Ancient Conspiracy because normal humans seeing them cast spells draws the attention of the magic destroying Abyss to them.)

The modular design of CoD also created more room for homebrew gamelines. There are plenty that are worth looking into and TV Tropes has a list of fan-made gamelines here.

Notable events:

  • 2004 — The end of the old World of Darkness and the start of the new World of Darkness.
  • 2006 — CCP Games (the folks behind EVE Online) acquired White Wolf Publishing.
  • 2010 — White Wolf announced that it would be moving away from traditional print in favor of focusing on print-on-demand services and publishing to PDFs. While the outcry was expected, the new WoD has continued on with new gamelines released afterwards.
  • 2012 — invokedWhite Wolf celebrated the 20th anniversary of the old World of Darkness and the 8th anniversary of the new World of Darkness. Both the old and new Worlds of Darkness were licensed out to Onyx Path Publishing, along with Exalted.
  • 2013 — The God-Machine Chronicle was released, expanding and formalizing on hints and references to the entity made throughout the line. In addition, it overhauled some key systems of the line: Morality became Integrity, Social Maneuvering was introduced, experience is gained through "beats", etc. The games started being updated to the GMC rules, beginning with Blood and Smoke: The Strix Chronicle for Vampire: The Requiem.
  • 2014 — It was announced that the updates would officially be renamed as second editions of their respective games, with Blood and Smoke becoming Requiem second edition, and that the core World of Darkness mortals rulebook would receive a second edition as well. All pre-GMC lines are in the process of being summarily updated to bring them in line with the new systems, and all post-GMC lines, starting with Demon: The Descent, will be compatible with the new systems out of the gate.
  • 2015 — Paradox Interactive acquired White Wolf from CCP. The new World of Darkness was officially renamed Chronicles of Darkness to further distinguish between it and the old World of Darkness, making clear that they were two separate settings. All the individual gamelines kept their original names.

There's also Android: Shadow of the Beanstalk, a Spin-Off that uses the Fantasy Flight House System.


This role-playing game provides examples of:

  • Ability Depletion Penalty: Spirits have a pool of Essence points that they spend to fuel their supernatural abilities. If they run out completely, they fall into slumber until they somehow regain a point. A spirit at zero Essence also suffers Permadeath if its Hit Points are exhausted.
    • Changelings are physiologically dependent on Glamour, to the point that their digestive systems shut down if they run out.
    • Satiety measures how well-fed a Beast's supernatural half is. A ravenous Beast suffers the physical symptoms of starvation and cannot use their Mind Rape powers. Starvation also cripples a Beast's ability to feed; only the greatest effort on the Beast's part will restore even a single point of Satiety to a Beast without any.
  • Ancient Astronauts: Implied in the corebook.note 
  • Ancient Conspiracy: The Seers of the Throne. While the exact power they wield over ordinary humans varies between stories, every human institution is being manipulated by them to an extent to keep the setting a Crapsack World. Depending on the Seer in question this is either out of a selfish desire for power or to stop an evil Mage Species from destroying each other.
  • Animorphism: Werewolves, skinchangers, vampire Clan Gangrel, the Orphans of Proteus from Mage, Changelings of the Beast Seeming, and the various other changing breeds introduced in War Against the Pure.
  • Anthropomorphic Personification:
    • Spirits, although sometimes for very loose definitions of "Anthropomorphic."
    • Geists have become, in part, Anthropomorphic Personifications of aspects of Death in order to overcome some of the limitations ghosts normally have. This causes them to overlap with spirits, which are (often much less) Anthropomorphic Personifications of things. The possible causes of this are briefly discussed, but ultimately discarded as unimportant to this particular game line.
    • Some of the True Fae can possibly be seen as this. Baron Fairweather, for example, personifies corporate greed.
  • Apocalypse How: The Sourcebook "Mirrors" presents numerous scenarios for catastrophic events, even using the scale on the page.
  • Astral Projection: The Auspex discipline for vampires, some mortal merits from Second Sight, and a mage ability.
  • Attack Failure Chance: To attack you roll a number of d10s equal to Strength + Brawl - the opponent's Defense (if it's an unarmed attack), Strength + Weaponry - the opponent's Defense (if it's a melee attack with a weapon), Dexterity + Athletics - the opponent's Defense (for thrown weapons) or Dexterity + Firearms (for ranged weapons like guns and bows)note . This represents, for the most part, the attack's chance to miss — partially or completely No Selling an attack is represented by Armor (which, once an attack hits, reduces the amount of damage you take).
  • Authority Equals Asskicking: Well, the vast majority of roleplaying games use this trope at least sometimes, to rein in possible sociopathic behavior of Player Characters, but in the World of Darkness it is particularly prominent. Movers and shakers of the setting tend to be on a completely different level of power than normal starting characters and the main reason this is less noticeable in the new WOD is general downgrading of supernatural abilities, which makes the scale of abilities less steep.
  • Back from the Dead:
  • Beast Man: There are a lot of these, but generally this is the stereotype held against the Beast seeming of Changelings and basically every Werewolf. Oddly enough, the actual Beasts look perfectly normal, unless they are in their Lairs. (At which point it's less Beast Man and more Eldritch Abomination.)
  • Beauty, Brains, and Brawn: This is how the various statistics are organized in the new world of darkness: Social (beauty), Mental (brains), and Physical (brawn).
  • Badass Normal: Rippers from the Slasher supplement deserve a mention- most of them are ordinary humans who can be just as dangerous and terrifying, if not more so, than the inhuman horrors that inhabit the World of Darkness... until they get powerful enough, at which point Ripper becomes Scourge and displays powers that stretch the bounds of "normal".
    • Honestly pretty much any mortal played as a character instead of an NPC will fit this trope. Experience points invested in skills tend to exist on roughly the same "power level" as experience points invested in crazy supernatural powers, and mortals lack the usually relatively obvious supernatural weaknesses as well as powers, if you've actually annoyed them enough to make them figure out what you are and come for you.
    • Also, mortals can outright banish ghosts by force of will (with sufficient humanity) and dispel the powers of Mages just by thinking about them too hard.
    • Mirrors provides a template named "Extraordinary Mortals", allowing to play characters who technically are entirely humans, but have skills impressive enough that they can go toe to toe with supernaturals.
  • The Beautiful Elite (and/or heavy subversion of Beauty Equals Goodness): Requiem's Daeva and Lost's Fairest are typically supernaturally gorgeous and get powers to match - but have trouble resisting their Vice or staying on top of their Karma Meter. Arguably Promethean's Galateids also deserve a mention here, though subverted in that their beauty is artificial and ends up inspiring hate or jealousy in mortals courtesy of Disquiet.
  • Being Good Sucks: Basically, trying to adhere to a higher level of benevolence is extremely difficult, to the point it's incredibly easy to lose those high level dots in Morality or equivalent with incredibly minor effort. To put this in perspective, if you boost your Morality to 10, you can then lose it by virtue of having to take (and fail) a Morality check if you have a selfish thought.
  • Blessed with Suck: It is not fun to be a supernatural being in the new WOD. In theory.
  • Blood Bath: Immortals has The Blood Bathers, who gain a sort of immortality by bathing in blood.
  • Blue-and-Orange Morality:
    • Bog-standard for spirits, as given particular attention in Werewolf: The Forsaken. Even the most intelligent spirits is fundamentally alien, with a viewpoint that can be summarized as "promotes my area of influence = good" and "denies my area of influence = bad". This is why spirits can never truly be reasoned with, and certainly not trusted; a fire spirit has to burn things, and simply cannot care about anyone it maims or kills, while a spirit of love may well force someone who is experiencing Domestic Abuse to stay with their abuser, simply because "they still love each other", and thusly the pain the abuser inflicts is unimportant compared to the diminishing of love that would be caused by separating them.
      • As beings that are fundamentally part spirit, werewolves themselves are like this; Harmony focuses on promoting and understanding their nature as lupine spirit-beings, and so it is drastically different to Morality. Killing humans is only bad if it is done for no reason, and even then it bothers werewolves far less than murder does for humans, whilst betraying one's comrades-in-arms is a caliber of sin that humans reserve for mass-murder.
      • The second edition of Forsaken takes the concept further, to the point of playing 'blue and orange morality' more or less straight. The Harmony mechanic no longer tracks any sort of moral compass of the werewolf, but measures how balanced they are. Ideally, the 1-10 track should be around 5. The lower you are, the more spirit-like you are. The higher you are, the more human-like you are. The further you stray from balance, the harder of a time you have keeping control of yourself, and you find it difficult to cross the barrier between the physical and spiritual worlds in one direction or another. In fact, if you drift too far in one direction, it's actually in your best interest to act in extreme ways to even yourself back out (like killing humans if you lean too far towards 'flesh,' and refusing to perform certain rituals if you lean too far towards 'spirit').
    • The True Fae of Changeling: The Lost have this explicitly stated as part of their psyches.
      • Changelings, however, don't have this; even though "Clarity" is supposed to be a Sanity Meter, it still functions as a near-replica of Morality. In Second Edition, it functions much less like a Karma Meter and fluctuates much more easily, though it should be noted that heinous crimes like murder, torture, and kidnapping are still all high-dice Clarity attacks.
    • Ghosts develop this bad as a part of their descent into undeath.
    • Geists, being strongly implied to be ghost/spirit hybrids, naturally get a double dose of this.
      • Sin-eaters, meanwhile, are similar to werewolves in that their Karma Meter, Synergy, focuses on their nature as walking geist-human hybrids and thusly they are far removed from the ordinary concerns of human morality.
    • Demons zigzag on this; their "Morality" meter actually measures how well they can disguise themselves as humans, and thusly it is not only based on the Integrity mechanic (making it very different to the old Morality mechanic), but it also has no ill-effects on their minds as it drops low, as it instead makes them easier for the God-Machine to track. At the same time, their own personal morals are alien enough that they can actually reverse the meanings of virtues and vices.
    • Beasts don't even have a Morality meter as the other game lines would know it. Their equivalent, "Satiety", measures how well fed they are instead. In order to keep it up, the Beast's Hunger almost always requires them to commit various acts that would ding the Karma Meter of an ordinary person. Beasts are fully aware that, by definition, they are monsters that have to hurt people to survive, and any given Beast may or may not attempt to justify this to themselves somehow.
  • Blue Is Calm: Calmness appears as a pale blue light to people with emotional Aura Vision powers.
  • Body Horror: Everything in the cult section of the Second Sight supplement. See Lovecraftian Superpower for more.
  • Bringing Running Shoes to a Car Chase: A character on foot can attempt to catch up to a vehicle that's passing right by them or starting from a dead stop. It requires a difficult skill test, plus a second test to jump on board or attack, and the game acknowledges that only characters with Super-Speed have much chance.
  • Broken Masquerade: Exemplified by at least three minor templates; "Ghouls" are humans who have been fed vampire blood to become super-powered minions to vampires, "Sleepwalkers" have partially Awakened enough they can interact with mages and magic without stuffing it up like humans do, and "Ensorcelled" (or their 2e equivalent, "Fae-Touched") have been granted the ability to see through the illusions shielding Changelings.
    • A hunter's raison d'être. Wolf-blooded also count, as they can see past the lunacy most other humans suffer on seeing a full-blown werewolf.
  • Canon Welding: White Wolf is releasing "translation guides" which give guidelines for mixing-and-matching New and Old World of Darkness material. The 2e books also increasingly consider tables running crossover games where even the players might be running mixed parties of supernaturals.
    • Beasts are one of the strongest examples so far: according to their monomyth, all supernatural entities other than Demons are kin, if sometimes adopted siblings or distant cousins, and their lore attempts to bridge concepts like the Mages' Supernal Realms and the Changlings' Hedge with the Beasts' own Primordial Dream. They are frequently shown acting as intermediaries, mercenaries, and Wild Cards in supernatural society, reflected mechanically by abilities allowing them to pass between realms and factions with ease, and to act as an integrating component in a mixed party.
  • Cardboard Prison: Subverted. With all the superpowers the characters, both player and non, have, keeping them confined should be ridiculously impossible. So the FBI built their own Superjail and called it the Lansing Facility. It's actually very effective at keeping its prisoners in- the real issue is that, thanks to many supernaturals being either immortal or Long-Lived, they are starting to run out of cells, and the president doesn't take VASCU's job quite seriously enough to finance the construction of a new one...
  • Children Are Innocent: Can be averted or played straight. There may be a sourcebook about playing children "called" Innocents, but the innocence in the title refers to a lack of experience rather than a lack of evil. Child PCs have "Faults" instead of Vices, but these include "Cruel" and "Greedy". Played straight if the character has the "Kind" Asset.
  • Children's Covert Coterie: Innocents may result in the player characters establishing these as a result of their experiences, forming secret groups to pool supernatural knowledge and resist further attempts to prey on them. One example in the gamebook, "The Forever Club," starts out as a disorganized study group of junior anime fans - only to find themselves having to delve into the occult when a life-drinking old lady targets one of their number as a means of extending her lifespan.
  • Church Militant: The Malleus Maleficarum, the Order of St. George, and the Long Night in Hunter. Also the Lancea Sanctum in Vampire.
  • Clap Your Hands If You Believe:
    • In Mage: the Awakening, Paradox was changed from being caused by the subconscious disbelief of non-mage humans to merely being aggravated by it, and is ultimately caused by a flaw in the structure of the universe, and the fact that reality is actually a lie.
    • In Changeling: the Lost, the changelings who were originally humans can become more like the fae they are attempting to escape if they lose their grip on the true world, called "Clarity."
  • Clockwork Creature / Human Resources: The Patchwork People of Immortals have clockwork hearts that can keep them going indefinitely without sleep, and maintain their immortality by stealing the organs and other body parts of unwilling victims.
  • Colour-Coded for Your Convenience: Each gameline from the New World of Darkness has a signature color, used on supplement spines; World of Darkness ("Mortals") is Blue, Vampire is Red, Werewolf is Brown/Orange, Mage is Aqua, Promethean is White, Changeling is Green, Hunter is Teal, Geist is Dark Blue, Mummy is Sandy Brown, Demon is Grey, Beast is Purple, and Deviant is Maroon.
  • Competitive Balance: While it was something of a problem with the Old World, the New World is a bit better, but given the very different nature of each variety of supernatural and their abilities, 'balance' can be a hard thing to define.
    • It's generally agreed that a Mage with prep time can smoke everyone. Justified in that it's hard to compete with someone who can change reality with their mind, and also by the fact that a Mage without prep time is as squishy as any other human.
    • Actually, mortals, similar to Mages, can take apart pretty much anything in the setting if they have decent willpower and occult knowledge, even if you don't take into account their usual numbers advantage. While this was initially changed in order to prevent the supernaturals from ceasing to care about the masquerade, it has actually made "not supernatural at all" a completely viable choice for a player.
  • Conspiracy Kitchen Sink: Like the previous one but replaces a few world-dominating conspiracies with dozens of little ones.
  • Cosmic Horror Story: Averted, actually. Part of the horror in the New World of Darkness is you can understand the people and phenomena that are ultimately responsible for the suffering in it (apart from Changeling: The Lost, and even that's a bit of a subversion). Second Sight actually encourages you to avoid this trope when making an Eldritch Abomination cult and focus on the Cult itself.
    • Played with in God-Machine Chronicle: The God-Machine is an alien, utterly amoral supercomputer which views humans as useful but unnecessary tools or meaningless obstacles to its obscure goals...and it also screws up its own plans on a regular basis, is strapped for resources, bound by time constraints for its plans, and has to work extremely subtly in order to get anything done, often with human cultists which it rewards generously if they prove successful. It's ST prerogative if the world is actually Lovecraft Lite or not, and it recommends that you should at least be able to Earn Your Happy Ending for people you actually care about.
  • Crapsack World: The world is unfair, merciless, and fundamentally flawed, not very many people care or are hopeful enough to fix it, and the people who want to fix it either have no idea how or (perhaps rightly) view each others' ambitions as threats. Humans Are Flawed, and trying to fix those flaws is usually a mark of the most flawed of all. Maybe someday, you'll get a happy ending, maybe even make your little part of the world better, but the rest doesn't care-and getting there usually involves confronting the worst parts, with no guarantee you'll ever come close to winning, especially if you're stupid enough to believe you won't need to go against your own morality. Grit your teeth and buck up-it's going to be long and hard.
  • Crazy-Prepared: The God-Machine's most characteristic ability is that it arranges for events to happen using Rube Goldberg methods so subtle that they are the equivalent of a butterfly flapping its wings, except that the God-Machine knows what butterfly wings need to get flapped. In one story, the God-Machine manipulated one of its agents into changing single digits in legal records or losing seemingly unimportant documents that would later result in a bridge collapse. It makes Batman and Xanatos look absent-minded.
  • Creative Sterility: Vampires, Prometheans, True Fae, and assorted others.
    • Inverted for Mages, for whom 99 in 100 crises are the result of someone accidentally being more creative than they intended to be.
  • Crossover Cosmology: Though mostly averted, the core gamelines reference each other, and a semblance of an interconnected setting can be found in many sourcebooks. Individual ST's can decide to create one wholesale or cobble it together as a Schrödinger's Gun. Easing the possibility of having crossover games was also attempted by downgrading and equalizing powers and installing Karma Meters in every game line.
    • The Morality systems hilariously backfired in this regard: they were supposed to punish the character for committing certain evils, but what actually ended up happening was players having a mechanical point at which their characters stop caring about committing mass murder. By the time Geist rolled around, White Wolf seems to have said "Who are we kidding?" and points out that Sin-Eaters will likely find the suggestion of Supernatural Angst hilarious.
    • The Dark Eras series of books are explicitly devoted to historical crossovers ranging from the Stone Age to the Twentieth Century. Every setting is about the interaction of two or three of the various game lines.
  • Cursed Item: Many artifacts are also cursed, tempering the benefits with terrible drawbacks.
  • Dark Is Not Evil:
    • The Moros "Necromancer" mages, who have the capacity to be as good or evil as any other mage. That said, there's a Moros-only Legacy of Black Magicians (Tremere Liches), but that's because of what they do to sustain their immortality - they eat souls. Yes, you read that right, they eat souls. If that doesn't fall under Immortality Immorality, nothing will.
    • Similarly with the Mastigos warlocks: You would think a guy whose entire schtick is the "Mind Control" half of Psychic Powers and deals with The Heartless on a regular basis would be a Manipulative Bastard, but their Awakening actually helps counteract that, and they have the unique distinction of having a Mastigos-only Legacy of Good Black Magicians (the Fangs of Mara), who enter the nightmares of Abyssal beings to find what they fear and use it against them.
    • Same thing with the Darklings from Changeling: the Lost. They've been shaped to be nightmares, but that doesn't mean they're necessarily bad guys (although having the ability to, for example, heal yourself by sucking the life out of others certainly does make it easier.)
    • Lucifuge in Hunter: The Vigil, explicitly stated to be Demon-blooded Hunters who use their powers to fight and bring down other Demons.
    • Beasts are Eldritch Abominations that have to cause fear or destruction in order to survive, but most of them try to use fear as a teaching tool, not a weapon. And they are *very* protective of their family, whether they be mortal or supernatural.
  • The Dark Side: Every supernatural (with the exception of Demons) in the new WOD runs the risk of degeneration and turning into something fully monstrous by losing all points on his Karma Meter. Subverted, as in both cases the degeneration carries nothing but severe penalties.
    • Not always subverted. Death rage, the primary penalty for degenerating as a werewolf, does make you incapable of distinguishing friend from foe, but it's also significantly more powerful than 'sane' rage in that it lasts until everything is dead instead of 5 to 8 rounds. Similarly, the vampiric rages have mechanisms for intentionally invoking them, because the Beast is powerful as well as indiscriminate.
    • Furthermore, low-Clarity Changelings may expect some drawbacks, e.g. in dealing with mortals, but some rolls regarding fae magic actually benefit from this. Come to The Dark Side, indeed.
    • Then you have Mage's slipping in some Abyssal Magic into their spells because they might be desperate and it improves the spell/their chances. Too bad it's addictive.
  • Dark World: Several.
  • Death as Game Mechanic: The Purified are a rare variety of immortal who specialize in Astral Projection. Physical death merely forces them out of their bodies temporarily; they can repair any physical damage with enough Essence, and many learn a Merit to teleport the corpse to a safe location.
  • Decadent Court: Most of them, though Requiem's Invictus fit the stereotype best. And Lost's Gentry.
  • Deadly Road Trip: Midnight Roads is dedicated to provide what you need to base your campaign on this trope, describing all the things you can meet on roads outside cities.
  • Demonic Possession: World of Darkness: Inferno has a very very nasty form of possession which might as well be a Trope Namer.
  • Eldritch Abomination: Many of the New World of Darkness game lines offer them - Maeljin and magath spirits in Werewolf, Abyssal entities in Mage, the Strix in Vampire, the qashmallim (particularly Lilithim) in Promethean, the Kerberoi in Geist, and the True Fae in Changeling.) The worst of them all though are probably the Annunaki who rule the Abyss. Their effectively undead universes and they want to cannibalize the true reality.
    • In Demon, you are one, and you used to serve one, the God-Machine.
    • There are rules in the Second Sight sourcebook for building a character who worships them. And then gets weird powers from it.
    • Archmages are this as well. In this version of Mage an Archmage isn't a Mage who's mastered magic, that's Master level Mages, an Archmage is a Mage who's visited the Supernal Realm a second time to become a Physical God who lives inside their own soul and can Retcon reality accidentally.
    • Beast allows you to play a human whose soul has been replaced by one.
  • Eldritch Ocean Abyss:
    • The infinite black ocean Oroboros at the furthest edge of Astral Space represents the end of reality. Anything that enters it ceases to be; anything that crawls out of it is an Eldritch Abomination trying to become real.
    • The Ocean of Fragments is an endless expanse at the bottom of The Underworld. Creatures who enter can breathe and see unimpeded, but slowly lose their memories as they sink deeper and deeper, ultimately disappearing to an unknown fate when everything is gone. Its only denizen is the Leviathan, a titanic, inscrutable Undead Abomination.
  • Empty Shell: Soul loss turns a person into this over a period of time.
  • The End of the World as We Know It: The New WoD sourcebook "Mirrors" presents various scenarios in which the world might end (and what might come after).
  • Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: Quite possibly the only thing that saves the World of Darkness from total annihilation is that the various forces aligned against its continued existence literally cannot understand that not everything is as twisted, nihilistic and spiteful as they are. Particularly true of things like the Fae, who are so alienated from human compassion that committing acts of genuine altruism can actually kill them.
  • Evil Feels Good: Morality is lost by not showing remorse for misdeeds. You also can lose it anyway, if the dice screw you.
  • Evil Makes You Monstrous: Slashers.
  • Evil Tastes Good: Vampires and blood.
  • Evil Twin: Entire race of 'em, the Enemy Within/Without (it depends on the spell used to summon them) Goetia in Mage, who are literally the emotions a person hates about himself given a form similar to his own and a mind. The minor ones just annoy people while they're in the Oneros, while the big ones personify his Vice and cannot truly be defeated as long as he lives.
    • Cannot be defeated as long as he lives? The quickstart begs to differ on that count, with a character who has the listed Vice "None" because he beat it. Granted, if it was originally Pride, it may have come back with a vengeance...
    • And then there are Changeling: The Lost's Fetches, who are created to be replacements for those taken by the True Fae. These can either reinforce or subvert the Trope, depending on how aware and how moral the Fetch is... and how moral the Changeling they replace is when they get back.
  • Eviler than Thou — Default playable factions in both Worlds of Darkness tend to be morally dubious at best and outright evil at worst. Then there are the Outside Context Problems. Requiem had VII and Belial's Brood, Mage has the Seers of the Throne and Scelesti, Werewolf has the Pure and Bale Hounds, and Promethean had the Centimani.
    • Some Seers aren't even EVIL, they just think the Exarchs can't be defeated, and sign up to be on the winning side and get advantage of all the assorted Swag that comes with serving the Exarchs. If you have to pick a side, why not go with the winning one that gives you shittons of cash? They may be opportunist assholes, but they just don't want to die horribly when the Exarchs eventually crush the Pentacle Orders.
    • Changeling: The Lost tends to avoid this on the large scale. The 'society' of the Freehold is based around 4 Seasonal Courts who differ in general approach to governance and how one should deal with the threat of the Others, but aren't outright malevolent (Autumn Court notwithstanding). The 'other' factions are depicted as individuals or tiny groups of loyalists still beholden to their True Fae abductors or privateers out for themselves. There is no large scale 'Court of Evil' for the setting. One can point to the Gentry as the darker side of the coin, but they aren't a faction per se, unless one wants to argue that the Wyrm of Apocalypse or the Antediluvians of Vampire: The Masquerade were a 'faction' of their respective gamelines.
    • Also true for the Sin-Eaters. The Archetypes describe how a Sin-Eater approaches their second chance at life, but again, none are outright malevolent. A krewe may go off the reservation, but there's no evil Sin-Eater wide group.
    • True of the demons, too. The Agendas generally relate to what a given demon intends to do with their existence, but aren't necessarily malevolent. Even the Integrators, who seek reconnection with the God-Machine on their terms, aren't antagonistic to their fellow Unchained. If a demon goes against their kind, it's going to be for their own reasons.
      • Centimani are also usually not 'evil'. They're often just Prometheans who are tired of being hurt by the world, and decide to hurt it back.
  • Evil Versus Evil: While not universal many game lines have one enemy faction who is evil opposed to another who is far, far worse. Werewolf: the Forsaken has the Pure, werewolf-supremists who want to enslave humanity at best and knock down the borders between earth and the spirit world, fighting with the Bale Hounds, werewolves who think the spirits of evil are the most powerful of all and so willingly serve them and want to turn the world into one endless Wound. In Mage: the Awakeing the power mad Seers oppress and enslave mortals for their own benefit, but even they hate the Scelesti who wish to unleash the horrors of the Abyss, most notably the Scelesti's masters the Annunaki, on the universe so they can eliminate the laws of physics and rule the World of Chaos that will appear after the universe's destrucion. Vampire: the Requiem has on the side of evil... basically almost every vampire ever, but even vampires fight the Strix, never-living bird shaped demons who want vampires to abandon every scrap of humanity.
  • Expy: The "Lost Boys" from Chronicles of Darkness are specifically, and rather unapologetically, inspired by Adam Jensen from Deus Ex: Human Revolution, being soldiers-forcibly-turned-cyborgs whose augmentations rely on regular intake of a particular chemical and whose arsenal contains several of his disntictive signature moves, like spraying tiny bombs around, his cloaking device, and his wrist blades.
  • Extra-Strength Masquerade: Deconstructed. With certain gamelines, you may wonder why anything is still secret given the amount of weirdness and destruction supernaturals can cause. Answer: it really isn't, but supernaturals have created such a climate of fear that the average mortal gives it the widest berth possible. Certainly enough to not know anything concrete.
  • Fantastic Fragility: Most supernaturals can get all the new powers they want, and more cheaply and quickly than working honestly would bring... at the downside of getting loaded down with (usually permanent) potentially crippling weaknesses. Have we mentioned being a supernatural is Blessed with Suck?
  • Fantasy Kitchen Sink: Each game line in the original was incredibly insular, Vampires could go centuries never meeting a werewolf. The new one made the setting modular to help "write in or out" other supernaturals as the ST needs.
  • Functional Magic: Each supernatural has its own form of "magic" with its own rules and origins. Vampires have Disciplines, Werewolves have Gifts, Mages have... well, magic, Changelings have Contracts, Beasts have Nightmares.
  • Game Face: A number of supernaturals have this, especially werewolves. Beasts somewhat avert it, in that they appear as completely normal humans to mortals, even when they are breathing fire or throwing cars. Other supernaturals, though, see an overlay of the Beast's monstrous aspect when they use their powers, and a Beast in it's Lair is the monster they have the soul of.
  • Genius Bruiser: Mirrors has the wargaz, the purely fleshy descendants of Father Wolf. As one might expect, they're viking berserkers...who also have a vested interest in having high Mental stats, since their pack-forming abilities depend on Intelligence. "Brilliant and savage warrior" is the main keyword here.
  • Glamour: Many supernaturals can make themselves seem beautiful, trustworthy, desirable and invincible to onlookers.
  • Glass Cannon: Both Mages and Hunters are incredibly scary when attacking. Prepared mage is commonly considered "the perfect assassin" of the setting, and for hunters, unlike most other splats who generally go about their business, killing supernaturals is explicitly their business. Both are also physically human (or the closest to one among splats) with little to none supernatural capability to withstand assault, which makes them quite squishy compared to hardened, regenerating and sometimes outright nigh-indestructible creatures which other players are.
    • Demons are one of the truest examples of this trope in all of table-top gaming. On one hand, a Demon in human form is just that - human. They don't have the regenerating powers of Werewolves or the resilience of Vampires but still have to face off against creatures that can override reality to a limited degree. While they can get an edge by manifesting abilities from their mechanical form these tend towards masquerade breaking, and this is far worse for a Demon then it is for a character from one of each of the the other lines combined. On the other hand, a Demon can punch you so hard the last action you took is erased from the timeline.
  • Gloomy Gray: Depression shows as a grey glow to emotional Aura Vision powers.
  • God Is Evil: It is unknown if the God-Machine is either a Ditzy Genius with regular bad intel from glitches and errors in its Infrastructure, a master of the backup plan which doesn't care if a scheme fails if it has more in the oven, or both. Either way, Mr. Deus Est Machina is not your friend, and probably not the worst enemy in the divine realm you could have in a horror setting (though it's still damned scary).
  • Good Is Dumb: For spirits of negative emotions, even the stupidest ones cause downward spirals in their victims that exacerbate the spirit's emotion and feed it more and more. For spirits of positive emotions, they're so stupid, shortsighted, and ignorant of human culture and morality that they're just as likely to cause horrible tragedies which only end up starving the spirit. No wonder positive spirits are so rare and weak. For example, a toy spirit in an abandoned toymaker's store only wants children to have fun playing with handmade toys, so instead of teaching people about keeping traditions alive or a lesson in anti-commercialism, it teaches children to murder anyone who tries to bulldoze the store.
  • God of the Dead: The mysterious Kerberoi who rule over regions of The Underworld appear to be powerful Fisher King-like spirits and/or avatars of their domains. One of them, Mictlantecuhtli Polydegmon, might be a true god, as he's a Domain Holder with the truly unique power to return the soul of anyone who's ever died, no matter how much Deader than Dead they ended up.
  • Gothic Punk: Toned down significantly from the original. The constant grimdark angst is gone, and even the bleakest gamelines have hope for their protagonists. Humans are also every bit as dangerous as the supernatural creatures that feed on them. The "punk" side is also out, as the anti-authoritarian politics of the original gameline weren't ported over.
  • Greater-Scope Villain: The God-Machine (often abbreviated as G-M) is one over the entire setting. An entity so large it occupies multiple planes of reality, with such mastery over mundane and occult physics to bring forth effects that even reality warpers would find impossible to recreate, so pervasive and powerful that it's best described as 'an ecosystem' with the goal of maintaining the status quo. To this end, it sends its Angels to manipulate mortals and other supernaturals it has an eye on. Even its ex-servants who hate it with a passion know to keep a low profile, as openly challenging it is not going to end well.
  • Half-Human Hybrid — Every game has at least one sub-class of mortals who have some of the parent supernaturals' strengths, but none of their weaknesses. It's worth noting that one can only have one template on a character at a time to prevent some of the oWoD wonkiness.
    • Hunter: the Vigil has the conspiracy known as "the Lucifuge," who are humans that have demon blood in their family trees but have chosen to turn their heritage to good ends. Inferno gives us their dark counterparts, "L'Enfants Diabolique," who embrace their heritage.
  • The Heartless: Inferno demons are like this...Sort of. They either begin as nameless, formless creatures called Whisperers or corrupted versions of spirits and ghosts until they gain enough power through tempting sinners that they gain a True Name and become Dominions, which then do whatever they please.
  • Hermetic Magic
    • Of special note are the hunters of the Ascending Ones, who accept Hermes Trismegistus as one of their patrons.
  • Horrifying Hero: Due to playing as a horror monster, any PC from any gameline (with the possible exception of Hunter: The Vigil and Mage: The Awakening) is one of these. Yes, you may be working for good, but you`re still a supernatural murder machine Made of Iron.
  • Humans Are Flawed: In a change of pace from the Classic WoD, humans in general (especially in 2nd Edition) are portrayed as well-intentioned and meaning, but prone to very stupid or callous behavior because they at least subconsciously suspect what kind of world they live in and are scared out of their minds.
  • Hybrid-Overkill Avoidance — Used in the new WoD to avoid a new Samuel Haight. It's made very explicit in all books that major supernatural templates cannot be combined.
  • Hypnotic Eyes — The vampire discipline of Dominate works entirely via eye contact.
  • I Know Your True Name — Shows up in Mage (where knowing someone's true name makes magic easier to use on them), Changeling (where swearing Pledges on your True Name has specific effects, and many Storytellers expand the concept considerably in keeping with its importance in fairy tales), and Mummy (where knowing a true name gives you power over someone, and true name magic is the speciality of the Lost Guild).
  • Immortal Genius:
    • One faction of immortals known as the Seekers of Knowledge specifically devotes themselves to gathering occult secrets over the centuries; as such, their immortality - achieved via Body Surf - is acquired specifically for the purposes of preserving rare information.
    • The Reborn are often examples of this; though their Born-Again Immortality makes them a bit on the squishy side compared to other immortals in the book, their past-life memories allow them to retain vast knowledge and experience. A common trait suggested for them is a mastery of human psychology, on the grounds of having interacted with human beings for so long that the Reborn know how to play them like puppets. They also possess the supernatural ability to access the Akashic Records, allowing them to temporarily buff their knowledge traits in almost every conceivable field.
  • Immortality Immorality — Oh, where to begin:
    • Firstly, vampires. While it is possible to live by drinking the blood of animals and to only drain humans of minute amounts, most are so greedy for Vitae that they don't really care.
      • And the older and more powerful they get, the harder it is to get sustenance from animals. Then harder to survive off of humans. Until eventually they can only feed from other Kindred.
    • From Immortals, we have Blood Bathers, who have to kill people to fuel their life, but the "curse" aspect rings hollow when you realize that they choose this on purpose.
      • It is actually possible — although not terribly common — to have a Blood Bathing ritual that doesn't require you to kill the subject... but generally, that only means you're guilty of Serial Assault and Mutilation, rather than Serial Killing. It's still one of the explicitly recommended options for Player Character Blood Bathers so they don't fly screaming off the "Unplayable" end of the Karma Meter in a handful of sessions.
    • Also from Immortals, we have Harvesters, who extend their lives by killing other immortals.
    • Another Immortal splat, the Patchwork People. Super rich people buying new bodies from a secretive network of unethical doctors who do their job by forcibly taking the body parts from unwilling victims, and stealing the Spark of Life from Prometheans.
    • Geist: The Sin-Eaters gives us abmortals, highly ritualized serial killers that live forever as long as they can shunt the death off somewhere else. Naturally, their existence generates hordes of angry ghosts, putting them at odds with Sin-Eaters. Unfortunately, they can be extremely difficult to kill, as they can only be truly finished off by their Weaksauce Weakness, which tend to be extraordinarily specific. Typically, the weakness is tied to their mythology and method of killing people (an abmortal that shoves people off a specific bridge every full moon might only be truly killed by being pushed off the bridge himself during a full moon, for example).
    • And finally, Tremere Liches. With Soul Eaters.
      • By the time a Tremere is old enough for immortality to be useful (Age 100+), they are eating a soul every month.
  • Immune to Bullets — Vampires tend to take less damage from gunfire than some other forms of attack. Werewolves can easily shrug off most non-aggravated damage, including gunfire, except when faced with silver bullets.
    • Every Mage Arcanum has a protective shield that fits this trope to a lesser (Mind: people just miss) or greater (Death: your bullets just get tired and give up, then fall laconically from the target after giving him a light tap) degree.
    • Several of Taskforce: VALKYRIE's Endowments are specialized rounds made to avert this, ranging from silver bullets, to bullets made of wood that splinter to act like stakes, to bullets that can hurt ghosts, and bullets that have a little bit of everything in them, allowing them to be more effective against all threats but not as effective as the specialized rounds.
  • Infernal Fugitives: Living and dead escapees from The Underworld's Lowgate Prison become the quarry of unique, powerful ghosts called Judges. They can sense their target's location, conjure up Supernormal Bindings, and - almost unheard of among ghosts - operate freely in the physical world.
  • Jackass Genie: The Swimming Hole, featured in both the Mysterius Places supplement and the 2E revised corebook, is a wishing well allowing anyone who bleeds inside it to get their wish granted. Unfortunately, said wish always comes at a price, usually in the form of a cruel twist allowing you to get it. Exemples include a man who wished for his ex-girlfriend to come back and be with him forever- only for her to come back as a seemingly immortal super-strong being who punishes him whenever he tells other people about her, forces him to get raw meat to feed her (and tries to eat him we he can't get it), and just won't leave, and a man who asked a million dollars, only to get them from insurance money after his entire house burnt with his entire family inside it.
  • Karma Meter — Universal in the new WOD, and comes with various mechanical punishments for bad behavior.
    • For Mortals, this is now averted and replaced with a Sanity Meter...sort of. See the proper entry on Sanity Meter on this page.
  • Katanas Are Just Better — Averted. Unlike in the Old World of Darkness, Katanas have the same stat as all other swords, though extremely expensive "genuine" katanas are more durable. Moreover, starting with Blood and Smoke, vampires no longer have any special vulnerability to slashing weapons, meaning swords no longer are more effective than guns against them.
  • Kill and Replace: Subverted, in Hurt Locker; the metro station in Shinjuku has a ghostly platform that replaces people who get on its train with impulsive cyborgs called kishimono...to fill the occult vacuum caused by the platform's actual purpose, creating a brand new life for people who were borderline suicidal due to the circumstances of their current one. The original person is still out and about, just wearing a different face.
  • Kill It with Fire — Overall, much less true in the NWOD than the old; now only three splats have it as a real weakness. Vampires are specifically burned and blighted by fire as much as they are by sunlight. Prometheans also take aggravated damage from fire. Being instantaneously healed by electricity is a nice trade-off, though. Mummies take aggravated damage from fire and relic weaponry. Other supernaturals have their own banes, of course. Werewolves don't like silver. Fae don't like Iron. Mages don't like....reality. Fire itself specifically only harms vampires and Prometheans more than, say, getting stabbed in the chest does.
    • Subverted in Changeling: the Lost. Fire is not a common weakness among changelings. It might work fine on most of them, only sometimes it doesn't. But things might get more drastic. Instead of just shrugging it off, the changeling might throw it back or end it all with a true Infernal Retaliation. Of course, these powers have a short duration.
    • Some of the Anathemas that a Hero can inflict on a Beast make them vulnerable to a specific thing, even if they would be otherwise immune to it. Yes, this means a Beast that is otherwise immune to fire can be harmed by a burning torch in the hands of a Hero that has caused it to be vulnerable to such.
  • Killed to Uphold the Masquerade: As usual, most supernatural have no qualm about killing mortals who know too much about them so their existence will remain a secret.
  • Life Drinker: The supplement Immortals details a number of types of people who have managed to overcome the limitations of age—generally through this trope.
  • Light Is Not Good: Most shown in Hunter. Sure, you're trying to make the world a safer place against the uncountable monsters for humanity's sake, but the sacrifices weigh on the soul, and you might just become... Heroes from Beast are even worse, as whereas Hunters might end up becoming Knight Templars obsessed with killing monsters and with little regard for human life, Heroes start out like this.
  • Literary Work of Magic: In the sourcebook Reliquary Shakespeare's lost play The Witches serves as a summoning ritual that opens a portal to... well, it's not a very nice place. The backstory says Shakespeare got the entire audience together after the first performance to promise that it would never be used again.
  • Long Runner: 2012 was the 20th Anniversary for the World of Darkness as a whole. The New World of Darkness had been running pretty strongly for about 8 years by then.
  • Mage Species: The Diamond Orders claim that all humans naturally can use magic and accuse the Seers of the Throne and their godlike masters of breaking reality to stop most humans from doing so.
  • Manipulative Bastard: In some gamelines, being this is almost a requirement for obtaining any power within your supernatural society.
  • Masquerade: Each supernatural enforces their own, but vampires and mages are typically first to do clean up. Still, sometimes the ability of supernatural beings to maintain it stretches the suspension of disbelief, considering their penchant for superpowered violence. When they don't maintain it - storytellers were suggested to use hunters in response to Masquerade breaches.
  • Masquerade Enforcer: There are various forces and entities in each game-line that force the various supernatural entities to hide themselves from the world. For Mages, there is Paradox, the Abyss and the Exarchs. For Demons, it is the God-Machine. And so on.
  • The Men in Black: Task Force VALKYRIE are the men in black, and work for the US government. There's also Division Six, but they're not a real government agency and actually are the pawns of a Seer of the Throne.
    • And then we have the Men in Black of Summoners, who aren't human in the least...
  • Min-Maxing: With enough XP and tricky manipulation of game mechanics, supernaturals can be capable of some pretty insane stuff. Examples include golems so heavily armored they can survive nuclear blasts, vampires that can jump 13 stories in a single bound, waterborn Changelings that swim at 1569 MPH, Immortals that can pump their stats up using money and Mages possessed by their own sins that can attack ten times in a row with 27 dice worth of lethal damage without even skirting Paradox.
  • Mind Control: Almost everyone can potentially do this, including mortals, but vampires and mages are particularly notorious for this.
  • Monster Lord: Vampire bloodlines, or just plain elders above Blood Potency 6. Changelings with Entitlements, at least in the eyes of the Gentry. Beasts actually use this idea as a mechanic, with the most powerful/feared monster in a given area, known as the Apex, influencing the local Primordial Dream to reflect it's nature.
  • Monster Mash: Just like Old World of Darkness. You've got vampires, magic using humans, werewolves, Frankenstein's monsters, mummies and demons. Then there's more exotic stuff like Sin-Eaters (those who came back from death's gate with a hitchhiking ghost in tow), Slashers (slasher film villains, natch), and Beasts (any mythical creature that doesn't fit into the above, especially ones connected to Jungian archetypes and primal fears).
  • Mr. Vice Guy: Potentially any and every player and character.
  • The Multiverse: In the New World of Darkness, though the full picture only emerges if you piece together Werewolf: The Forsaken, Mage: The Awakening, Changeling: The Lost, Geist: The Sin-Eaters, and Beast: The Primordial. The various planes of existence are...
    • The World Of Flesh/The Real World: The mundane world in which humanity lives. Referred to as the Gurihal by werewolves.
    • Twilight: Partially a state of being and partially a plane in its own right, people and things that are "in Twilight" are intangible and, usually, invisible. It serves as a kind of border-realm between the Underworld and/or Shadow and the World proper; thronged by ghosts that have yet to truly pass into the Underworld and Spirits who have crossed over from the Shadow. It's basically the job of Sin-Eaters and werewolves to clear it out and ship them on to their proper places.
    • The Shadow: A Spirit World that resembles a Dark World in form, inhabited by the animistic spirits of the world. Spirits of elements, objects, concepts, animals, places, everything, all have their home here. Referred to by werewolves as the Hisil.
    • The Gauntlet: Less of a plane and more of a planar phenomenon, a kind of barrier between the World and the Shadow. When it's too weak, spirits can more easily slip through — this is not a good thing. When it's too strong, though, the spiritual disconnection negatively affects the world, so it's just as bad.
    • The Underworld: A Dark World (or perhaps a specifically focused form of Spirit World) that is the resting place of all human souls. Ever wonder why human spirits don't show up in the Shadow? It's because they go down here. Also visited or partially inhabited by animistic death spirits — geister are technically magath (unnatural hybrid spirits) formed of a fusion between a human ghost and a death spirit.
    • The Hedge: The twisting, treacherous border plane between the second Arcadia and the World proper, earning its name because it most commonly takes the form of a great field of thorny, soul-tearing brambles. It does take other forms too, mimicking the mortal world it is entered through, but it's always labyrinthine and dangerous to body, mind and soul.
      • The previously-listed planes of existence are collectively known, in Mage, as the "Fallen World." The planes listed below are known as the "Supernal Realms" (well, maybe. See Arcadia below regarding some uncertainty on that point).
    • Arcadia: 1 — One of the five Realms Supernal from which the Mages draw their power, associated with the arcana of Fate and Time. Said to be a beautiful, terrifying place of emotional extremes and ever-present glamour, home to the myriad forms of faeries. 2 — The nightmarish, ever-shifting domains of The Fair Folk, the terrible hell-realms from which the Changelings have escaped. Whether the two realms are one and the same is intentionally left nebulous so that Storytellers can choose whichever configuration makes for a better story.
    • Pandemonium: A twisted, purgatorial plane also known as the Realm of Nightmares, as it is infested with entities that resemble fear come to life and often resemble various forms of demons. One of the five Realms Supernal, associated with the arcana of Mind and Space.
    • Stygia: A dark, gloomy, plane of barren wastes and decaying ruins and moaning spectres. One of the five Realms Supernal, associated with the arcana of Death and Matter. Possibly connected to or part of the Underworld.
    • Aether: A plane that calls to mind the heavens, both in the terms of stars and celestial bodies and its portrayals in various religions. A world of crackling energy and pure magic, it is one of the five Realms Supernal, associated with the arcana of Forces and Prime.
    • Primal Wild: One of the five Realms Supernal, associated with the arcana of Life and Spirit. As the name suggests, an iconic wilderness, untamed and vibrant with emotions and life. Possibly connected / part of the Shadow.
    • The Abyss is an anti-existence between the aforementioned Supernal Realms and the Fallen world, filled with cosmic horrors and embodiments of nihilism galore. It taints the magic from the Supernal, and corrupts the people in the Fallen just by (un)existing.
    • The Lower Depths, a canonically mentioned but less developed realm supposedly "below" the Underworld, which may or may not be related to...
    • The Pit/Inferno/Hell in the classical sense, which has a mentioned-but-underdescribed Empyrean/Heaven counterpart, either of which may or may not be related to the Pyros of the Qashmallim.
    • The Primordial Dream, where the Horrors of Beasts have their Lairs. It touches most of the other planes, and Beasts are able to use it to access any other plane they can find a portal to.
    • There are also a range of optional "Outside" or "Other" realms, which range from generic homes for homebrew Lovecraftian horrors to more specific "places" populated by undead sandworms and the Men in Black.
  • Muggles Do It Better: Subverted. While there are advantages to technology like it being easier to use and more reliable, the sheer power of Atlantean Sorcery eclipses almost anything mortals can accomplish. Adept mages can already make themselves win at Casinos, observe anyone from a distance, give themselves a Gender Bender, see the future and cure cancer. Later on Master Mages can trap souls in ashtrays, move between dimensions, make themselves supernaturally lucky or time travel amongst many other things. Ultimately though, this gets Reconstructed. The Pentacle Order (who make up the majority of Mages) are the 'good' Mage faction because they want to share magic with mortals by making them Mages too.
    • The subversion of this trope gets taken to the point of practically being a Cosmic Horror Story in the Imperial Mysteries supplement. Anything mortals have accomplished can be undone at the whims of a single Archmage. That's not a theoretical example, it already happened as Christianity in the World of Darkness is only the dominant religion in Europe because an Archmage made it that way, accidentally. And after he did it only he could remember it was ever any different. The only reason Archmages (and the tiny number of beings who can challenge them like the strongest Kerberoi) don't directly control reality is because they have a noninteference pact since last time they fought each other they literally broke the universe creating the Abyss. Note that despite this Archmages still have human drives, personalities and emotions.
  • Mundane Utility: Subverted in Mage: The Awakening: while it's possible to use magic for everyday chores, doing so is considered an (extremely minor) act of hubris and dings the Karma Meter.
  • Narrative Beats: The GMC rules update redefined Experience points to be comprised of these. 'Beats' are gained when a character accomplishes player-defined goals, has a mental breakdown, or suffers a Dramatic Failure on a dice roll, among other things...
  • Non-Health Damage: The second edition has a Sanity Meter for mortal humans, Integrity...which cannot actually hit zero except under very special circumstances (read here; there's precisely one monster that can do that, and it does so explicitly as part of eating its target).
  • Not-So-Harmless Villain:
    • This is the effect the Hunters have when brought into play against the supernatural protagonists of the other game lines—suddenly, the "mere mortals" have very sharp teeth and can completely level the playing field against supernaturals... if not imbalance it the other way when vampires and the like go up against the plasma cannons, biotechnological augmentations, and less... mundane weapons the Hunters can bring to bear.
    • The Malleus Maleficarum, Lucifuge, Aegis Kai Doru, Ascending Ones, Cainite Heresy, and Knights of Saint George all bring considerably less conventional tools to the fight. Or recall where the Cheiron Group gets the things they implant into their agents. In no particular order, the Conspiracies mentioned use things like mini-Eldritch Abominations on a leash, on-the-spot divine intervention from God, blood magic rites even vampires don't understand...
    • And there's a couple of Cheiron Group weapons which consist of grafting an Abyssal Intruder into your body and living in symbiosis with the thing. Life tip #1: do NOT give the humans prep time...seriously.
  • Omnicidal Maniac: One of the possible motivations for worshipping an Eldritch Abomination in Second Sight.
  • One-Steve Limit: Averted; this setting has no issue using the same term to design completely different things. Among other things, the term "Beast" might refer to a vampire's Enemy Within, a Changeling Seeming, and an entire species of nightmares made into flesh.
  • Otherworldly Communication Failure: This happens to ghosts all the time in Chronicles of Darkness. The nature of ghostly existence means that they need specific, special powers to communicate with living people at all. Even using gestures or mouthing words gets increasingly more difficult as a ghost ages and loses its connection to its mortal life. One of the abilities of Sin-Eaters is that they can actually talk coherently with the dead without any extra work.
  • Our Souls Are Different: Souls can be affected by powerful magic, and every supernatural race has different troubles involving theirs. It is not, strictly speaking, necessary to survive...but losing one is a delayed Fate Worse than Death. See The Soulless.
    • Beasts take this to a whole new level: Their ''souls' are actually extra-planer Eldritch Abominations that have to be kept fed or they go rampaging throughout the human dreamscape, inflicting nightmares and attracting Heroes to the Beast.
  • Our Vampires Are Different: Five clans' worth of "Different" in the new setting, which is less than the thirteen featured in the old setting (though there are both lost clans and newly forming clans as well). However, the differences between political views and origins are much more pronounced in the new WoD. All vampires share the same common weaknesses, but each clan has a unique new weakness and each Bloodline (a sub-group of a clan) has an extra one.
  • Our Werewolves Are Different: Moreso in Werewolf: The Apocalypse than in Werewolf: The Forsaken. The nWOD also provides werewolf options beyond the Forsaken.
  • Outgrown Such Silly Superstitions: Zigzagged. Becoming a member of the supernatural races often does a number on a person's faith, but sometimes it doesn't, and the general attitudes towards "human" religions varies widely throughout the NWoD even going by "race".
    • With vampires, not only is there the Lancea Sanctum, which is essentially a vampiric take on the Abrahamic religions — most obviously Christianity, though references are made to Islamic and Judaic-based sects — complete with Crystal Dragon Jesus in the form of Longinus, their "first vampire", but many vampires believe God exists — and hates them, personally. One splat even presents an alternate mythos (which may or may not be true) that vampires are literally the sons and daughters of Eve's bastard offspring by the Snake in the Garden of Eden. On the other hand, they also have, among other things, the Circle of the Crone (vampire Wicca with a heavy emphasis on Blood Magic) faction, and minor/optional beliefs like the Blood Gods cult (vampires are literally gods that have lost their power due to growing corrupt) and Mithraism (a claim by vampires they are descended from the "God of Darkness", Ahriman, of Zoroastrianism).
    • Werewolves have a very hard time holding on to Abrahamic beliefs they held before their First Change — constantly travelling to the spirit world and interacting with the animistic spirits that are the reality of the World of Darkness tends to erode such beliefs. "Blood of the Wolf" even implies that the tendency for new werewolves to violently argue with and break away from their former church is something that Hunters can take advantage of. Indeed, many werewolves are Naytheists, though some do come to worship spirits in their own right (particularly those who used to adhere to more "compatible" religions beforehand). However, some do retain their old beliefs; the most notable mention of these, though, is that they have actually led hunters to their "heathen" kin more than once.
    • Many Mages break with their old religions upon awakening, others don't. Notably, despite it being an obvious choice, White Wolf didn't go with the angle that those who were strong believers or The Fundamentalist before are more likely to become Banishers (mad mages who seek to kill all magic users). Admittedly, two of the most notable Christian mages mentioned are a somewhat-unwitting founder of an Abyssal cult and a Holier Than Thou type who actually used his powers to become an inquisitor and hunt down other mages — he failed to realise what his spirit-infused axe was learning from his actions and ending up being beheaded with his own weapon after being condemned as a witch himself. Some Mages, most notably those who Awaken as Obrimos, even become more devout as a result, seeing their powers as a gift from God - although they're advised not to let either the Long Night or the Malleus Maleficarum find out about it.
    • Changelings may or may not experience religious changes as a result of their trauma. Many do become Naytheists, though — especially those who believe the Gentry are angels that, abandoned by God, have gone mad.
    • Prometheans provide an interesting inversion: most spend at least some time exploring religion as part of their attempts to understand what it means to be human. While they may or may not formally adopt a faith or come to believe in a higher power, many find lessons in observing faith communities, and resonance in humanity's own existential musings.
    • Sin-Eaters, surprisingly, are the least-likely to lose faith, even though the Underworld looks absolutely nothing like heaven or hell. On the other hand, they are very, very willing to create their own new belief-systems, mixing and matching whatever details and ideas sound good to them.
    • Also subverted in general for the mundane parts, in contrast to the Classic version: While mortals generally claim to not believe in monsters, the books often emphasize that this is, in general, complete hogwash. They know perfectly well that something goes bump in the night (despite what they may tell themselves), but (a) don't want to be seen as eccentric or crazy, and (b) suspect (probably correctly), that if they talk about it, they make themselves targets. Thus, the general response to suspected supernatural activity is to very loudly ignore it. As a side note, this is also noted as one of the main differences between Real Life and the World of Darkness-people are more deceptive and paranoid in the setting, which is probably the main reason why it's a Crapsack World.
    • Hunters zigzag all over the place, with multiple groups that are explicitly religiously motivated (in particular the Long Night and Malleus Maleficarum), but Null Mysteriis is a third dominated by extreme rationalists who hold no stock in religion anymore.
    • Mummies typically had their belief in the gods of Irem validated with the Rite of Return; meeting the judges of the afterlife will do that.
    • Demons have their perceptions of divinity tied in with the God-Machine, and tend to view it and the Judeo-Christian as synonymous. Most are also Nay Theists, though Integrators, who want to rejoin it on their own terms, tend to be quite religious.
  • Parabolic Power Curve: All supernatural characters have a "Power" stat that determines how much Mana they can store and impacts the power of their abilities. Raising it above 5 usually starts to incur drawbacks: Mages have to roll more dice for Paradox (and successes = bad stuff), Werewolves lose Essence over time, Sin-Eaters start having to spend a part of each month in the Underworld, and so on.
    • Balanced with the exclusive advantages: raising supernatural advantage ("Power") over five is the only way to permanently raise attributes over five, and the amount of supernatural "mana" you can hold at one time increases exponentially. (At advantage 1 you can hold 10, advantage 5 you can hold 14, advantage 8 you can hold 30, advantage 10 you can hold 100) Supernatural advantage is also used to resist other supernatural powers, and each race has their own perks for raising their advantage over five.
  • Permafusion: Spirit-claimed are rare gestalt entities that form when a Spirit merges with a mortal, body and soul, rather than simply possess their body. A Claimed is a single person with aspects of both their components, and can only separate in a long, difficult, excruciating process that irrevocably changes both mortal and spirit.
  • Perpetual Poverty: Player characters are assumed to have the means to meet their basic needs. The "Resources" Merit represents disposable income and assets, so a PC without any points in Resources isn't necessarily destitute, just unable to make any significant expenses in gameplay.
  • Point Build System
  • Power at a Price: Many gamelines make this as a rule. You can only progress to higher power levels at the cost of something. For Changelings, you'll gain Fantastic Fragility. For Sin-Eaters, you will have to create Fetters to sustain your powers. For the Unchained, you'll develop Glitches.
  • Power Perversion Potential: White Wolf's willing to acknowledge it sometimes. There's at least one supernatural power per major splat specifically aimed for this.
  • Prestige Class: Each game has a set, used to further specialize or develop a character. Vampire has Bloodlines, Mage has Legacies, Werewolf has Lodges, etc.
  • Protagonist-Centred Morality: The ethics by which spirits abide consist of "increases my area of influence= good" and "decreases my area of influence= bad". Thus, a fire spirit regards spreading fire as good regardless of the death and destruction caused by the flames and a love spirit may force someone to stay with a Domestic Abuser because their separation would lead to a decrease in love.
  • Quieting the Unquiet Dead: Every ghost stayed behind due to something, from its unsolved murder to simply wanting to experience more of life. If that's resolved, the ghost peacefully vanishes forever, no matter whether it's an earthbound poltergeist or an Undead Abomination in the depths of The Underworld.
  • Recycled In Space: Or rather, Recycled IN ANCIENT ROME! in the case of Requiem.
    • The historical settings and 'world shards' are basically this. New Wave Requiem transplants Vampire to the 1980s (whilst the earlier "Requiem for Rome" and "Fall of the Camarilla" splats allowed one to play Roman Empire-era games). Mage Noir is Mage post-World War II. Victorian Lost is Changeling in Victorian Britain. Bleeding Edge is the World of Darkness as Cyberpunk. And Infinite Macabre does this literally, making the WOD Space Opera.
  • Renovating the Player Headquarters: Most games in the series have a Player Headquarters option with attributes like "Security" and "Amenities" that can be improved through gameplay and the Point Build System:
  • Romanticized Abuse: Common in the relation between vampires and their ghouls, among other things. Also, in the book Inferno, you can build a character with superpowers based on one of the Seven Deadly Sins. The "lust" ones pretty much run on this trope. Averted in Changeling, which focuses entirely on the "abuse" part.
  • Sanity Meter: An option presented in Mirrors allows for human characters to learn Things Man Was Not Meant to Know, gaining power at a price.
    • Clarity in Changeling is quite literally this, though it also doubles as a Karma Meter.
    • With the new rules in God-Machine Chronicle, humans' Karma Meter (Morality) has been replaced with Integrity, which is this...kinda. Unlike most sanity meters, it doesn't go down when exposed to most supernatural events, only things that the character would find genuinely traumatic (watching a monster kidnap a human when the character had that same thing happen when she was a child would ding it, seeing a zombie after being informed of their existence, especially if the necromancer controlling it is friendly, would not). That, and many of the things that ding it would, in fact, be Karma Meter violations (again, you're encouraged to customize it), and derangements are no longer a thing, meaning an Integrity 1 Stepford Smiler is just as functional in daily life as someone with Integrity 10-and it's actually impossible to slip any lower.
  • Sapient House: From the second edition core book, the House That Hates. This horror feeds on the trauma of its victims, keeping its central victim alive for as long as possible to extract its meal. Once a victim's Integrity reaches zero, he is consumed entirely, never to be seen again.
  • Science Is Wrong: Subverted it in ''Awakening''. While other books did hint that science might have been a device of the Exarchs to keep humanity in line, the book about their servants makes it explicitly clear that they actually hate it, since as science helps humanity grow into the truth, the better chance they have of Awakening, something the Exarchs do not want. Well, actually it's their servants who hate it, but the odds of their masters not sharing their opinion are slim at best (to Luddites). Additionally, the Free Council - the Pentacle order with the closest alignment to modern Western values - generally loves science and thinks it, like all mortal works, contains magical secrets.
    • In general, science gets a far better shake in the New WoD than the old... with the painful exception of Second Sight.
  • Sealed Cast in a Multipack: Ubiquitous.
    • In Vampire: The Requiem, this is usually some kind of elder vampire in torpor. The awakening of just one of them is enough to change the power dynamic in a town.
    • In Promethean: The Created, these are the Pandorans, failed Promethean creations that lay dormant until a Promethean gets near them. They are not nice. They are less characters and more like (extremely nasty) forces of un-nature.
  • Serial Killer: Any old person or supernatural can be one. Special mention goes to the Slashers from the source book of the same name.
  • Seven Deadly Sins: By fulfilling their Vice, the character can gain a point of Willpower due to gratifying their ego. However acts that fulfill Vices are usually going to damage the Karma Meter.
  • Shout-Out: The new World of Darkness has several that border on Mythology Gag or Continuity Nod, in the form of references to the Old World of Darkness. Division Six and Panopticon are both nods to the Technocracy from Mage: The Ascension, while the Cainite Heresy, which is portrayed here as a Hunter faction, is a nod to vampire history in Vampire: The Masquerade. In fact there are a fair amount of nods to the Technocracy in Hunter: The Vigil, up to and including arguably the entirety of Task Force VALKYRIE and the entire Cheiron Group.
    • Look closely and you'll see this happening all over the NWOD. Werewolf: The Forsaken's 'Hosts' are essentially two of the changing breed races with completely monstrous personalities. The Lancea Sanctum is most certainly a latter day Sabbat (tweaked to be a little less 'evil by evil's standards', of course, and given a Crystal Dragon Jesus touch). And then there's the pinnacle of this trope: Mage: The Awakening has their 'Supernal Realms', which amongst other things are pretty blatant shout outs to Changeling: The Dreaming, Wraith: The Oblivion, Demon: The Fallen and arguably Werewolf: The Apocalypse.
    • A very specific one in Armory Reloaded: the legend of Black Dawn incorporates elements from a famously unpublished issue of Hellblazer by Warren Ellis.
  • Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism: Quite far on the cynical end of the scale. Power is fundamentally corrupting and usually comes at a too high price (especially in capacity for free will and choice), there are problems in the world nobody can fix, and moral purity is usually a weakness, and a privilege enjoyed by those who don't have to do anything of importance any more. You can make it better-somewhat-but you may hate yourself getting there, if you hope for a decent chance at winning.
  • Sliding Scale of Turn Realism: Action by Action.
  • The Soulless: notable examples in Mage: The Awakening, Changeling: The Lost, and Promethean: The Created.
  • Sourcebook
  • Special Snowflake Syndrome: Almost every game has several smaller splats mentioned in the various sourcebooks. Vampire has Bloodlines, Werewolf has Lodges, Mage has Legacies, Changeling has Entitlements, etc.
  • Splat: Essentially the Trope Namer, more or less.
  • Stages of Monster Grief: Just about every splat has members who deny, love, hate, or go off the deep end after changing from mere human. Except Prometheans, who weren't human but still feel the effects of their inhumanity, and Demons, who likewise aren't human, and instead react to their newfound independence from the God-Machine.
  • Stringy-Haired Ghost Girl: Hurt Locker uses Tokyo as an example setting, so it's really not surprising it features one haunting Shinjuku Station. What is surprising is how the Tek-Tek managed to hack the God-Machine's Infrastructure in the area and turn it into a way to prevent the tragic circumstances of her death (see Kill and Replace, above-that's her doing). Just don't expect her to be happy if you decide to go back to your old life...
  • Students' Secret Society: In the gamebook Immortals, several highly exclusive private schools around the world play host to a network of student-run secret societies; known simply as "The Club," it's populated by students who have made themselves immortal through psychic power. Addicted to a life without adult consequences, the members use their abilities to destroy the lives of select students outside the club, eventually driving them to suicide... whereupon the club member responsible enacts a Grand Theft Me on the target, patches their new body up, and goes on with their life until an attractive "new model" catches their eye. By now, some of its members are centuries old, and the Club itself has become legendarily depraved: on top of gleefully indulging in corruption and date rape, they've also turned the search for new bodies into a sickening breed of sport, even offering prizes for the best-engineered suicide.
  • Super Loser: The default for a player character.
  • Superpowered Evil Side: The Dreamers from Hurt Locker are people who have had an assassin personality subliminally implanted into them as a Sleeper Agent. Accessing their sealed memories gives them their other half's powers and skills, at the cost of falling under the influence of whoever programmed them.
  • Take That!: Lots of little tidbits around, but Dudes of Legend is an entire book of take thats.
  • Thin Dimensional Barrier: Verges are sites where the barrier between the physical world and Shadow Realm has been worn away completely. Some only open when a particular condition is met; others allow anyone to wander between worlds, usually with very bad results.
  • Third-Party Deal Breaker: Changelings are very nervous of Awakened mages and their Wrong Context Magic, especially Fate spells that can modify or negate the Magically Binding Contracts that Changeling society is built on.
  • Thou Shalt Not Kill: Since God-Machine Chronicle, this is now an inherent part of the human condition; it is always an Integrity check to kill other human beings, even for soldiers, police and other "hardened" individuals.
  • Tokyo Is the Center of the Universe: Thus far, Tokyo is the only city which has appeared as a sample chronicle location in all Chronicles of Darkness lines, and the generic expansion Hurt Locker even has a chapter dedicated to it. As a result, whereas other cities may appear to be only primarily occupied by a single type of unnatural phenomena, Tokyo is packed to the brim with vampires, werewolves, mages, agents of the God-Machine, and every other inhuman entity under the sky. Oddly enough, Beast: the Primordial establishes that the most supernaturally influential creature, or Apex, in the city is an independent ghoul.
  • Touched by Vorlons: The origins of Changelings in Changeling: The Lost, Only they were touched in the worst way possible. Imagine experiencing a combination of kidnapping, sexual abuse, Mind Rape and some terrors humans don't even have words for. As a result of this, you are horribly mutated and in many ways no longer essentially human. The only plus side is that you MIGHT have enough power to keep yourself from getting taken back after you escape (if you even manage to escape; the escape rate is fairly abysmal). Deviant: The Renegades has aspects of this as well.
  • Touch the Intangible: Ghosts and spirits in the physical world exist in a "Twilight" state where they're usually invisible and intangible, but they will always be vulnerable to their Bane. Blessed objects allow mortals to harm ghosts and spirits. Each playable gameline (Vampire, Werewolf, Mage, Changeling, etc.) also has a few spells that allow the user to enter Twilight themselves to interact with what lives there — if a denizen of the physical world is brave/foolish/unlucky enough to enter the Underworld (for ghosts) and the Shadow (for spirits), those ethereal beings are tangible there all the time.
  • Tuneless Song of Madness: Crops up twice in Innocents.
    • The main villain of the sample scenario "With A Song In My Heart" is John Clerk, an immortal serial killer driven by the need to amplify the music he hears in his head via murder. As such, singing is one of his Character Tics, but since he's the player characters' mild-mannered music teacher, nobody finds anything particularly unusual about this habit... right up until the characters find themselves stranded in the middle of nowhere, at night, with the corpse of Mr Clerk's latest victim in front of them, and that song slowly closing in...
    • The eponymous villain in the scenario "Mountain Mother" is also prone to this: an ancient subterranean being believed to be the last of her kind, she's taken to kidnapping children in an effort to raise them as her own, and her most recognizable lines are described as "eerie singing in a language that hasn't been spoken in tens of thousands of years" - an indication of just how lonely she's become over the eons.
  • Unequal Rites: The feelings between the Lancea Sanctum and Circle of the Crone in Requiem.
  • The Unmasqued World: Mirrors gives you several suggestions on doing this and the possible consequences thereof. Scenarios range from simply the Internet making it impossible to hide anything anymore, to all-out warfare between the supernatural factions.
  • Unstoppable Rage: Vampires when they frenzy, Werewolves in frenzy/Death Rage, and certain Prometheans (mostly Frankensteins) in Torment.
    • Werewolf's crossover rules lampshade this by mentioning that mages do not quantifiably explode in Rage.
  • Urban Fantasy: Authors prefer to define the genre for most World of Darkness games as Horror, but WoD actually fits this trope.
  • The Usual Adversaries: Humans!
  • Van Helsing Hate Crimes: Hunters generally don't know the difference between the good supernaturals and the bad. Can't really blame them.
  • Villain World: The world of darkness is controlled by two evil powers, the God-Machine and the Exarchs. While neither is unassailable and resistance against them is possible, no one has figured out how to break their hold on humanity. (Yet. It's up to you.)
  • Violence Is Disturbing: 2E takes a very cynical view of violence and people who resort to it as a first option. Hurt Locker is all about how hurting people weaker than you ends up creating more problems than it solves, and the fundamentally self-destructive nature of hate. It does admit up front that violence is still pretty cool to watch, though.
  • Virtue/Vice Codification: The first edition used this, based off the Seven Deadly Sins and Seven Heavenly Virtues: Charity, Faith, Fortitude, Hope, Justice, Prudence, and Temperance for the Virtues, Envy, Gluttony, Greed, Lust, Pride, Sloth, and Wrath for the Vices. Indulging in either grants Willpower. Vices can be indulged more often, but offer a lesser benefit. The 2nd edition removed the codification, allowing players to define their own Virtues and Vices.
  • Wainscot Society: Multiple, intermittently interacting hidden factions — of vampires, werewolves, wizards, etc. — each have substantial, organized social systems of their own.
  • Walking Wasteland: If a Promethean settles down for too long, the world around them begins to suffer.
  • The Wall Around the World: The borders between the physical realm and the spirit worlds.
  • Well-Intentioned Extremist:
    • Hunters in general are at risk of this. They want to protect humanity against monsters, but their lack of information on the supernatural means they frequently end up making the situation worse without even realizing it.
    • One of the many, many dangers of traveling the roads is the risk of running into Gremlins, which are one half this, one half Mad Doctor, and all Body Horror. They want to fix things... cars, machines, people, they don't care what. They live to fix things. But they aren't very smart: if something moves, it's working, if it's not moving, it's broken. If you stop near a gremlin's lair, be it consciously or not (say, you have a crash), then the gremlin will come to fix you. Or use you to fix something else. They'll just keep tampering and tinkering until you die, all in the name of trying to get you to "work". Then they'll take you apart and keep the best bits for future "repair jobs".
    • Also, be careful around hobgoblins. They mean well, but sometimes...
  • Wolf Man: The Uratha, naturally. They actually have a sliding scale of forms; human, wolf, "dire wolf" (really big wolf), "near-man" (this trope), and "war form" (the form modernly associated with werewolves; essentially an anthropomorphic wolf... only very muscular and stuck in a berserk rage that can easily lose focus on the werewolf's enemies).
  • Wrong Context Magic: Just about anything from the perspective of a different gameline. However anything related to the Divine Fire is in a league of its own for being incomprehensible to other forms of magic. Even Archmages can't understand it. Faerie magic isn't nearly as far out of context but still plays by different rules to most other magic.
  • Your Vampires Suck: Like the previous setting, the vampire book includes a section clarifying which facts are true or false about vampires. Toned down in the second edition, where almost all the stories about vampires have some truth to them—it's just that they apply to vampires individually rather than as a whole.


Alternative Title(s): New World Of Darkness

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