My White Wolf Experience

I attended the Atlanta Mini-Qualifier on Saturday at the White Wolf Headquarters.

In between rounds, Oscar Garza, the Organized Play Coordinator, took us all on a tour of the building. He showed us the Eve Online offices, the cubicles for the office staff, the store room, the conference room, the gym, wine cellar, game room, private zoo and aviary (and related pet cemetery), tennis courts, a waterfall and a large swimming pool area.

At the end of the tour I felt oddly ill at ease, as if I had missed something. I wandered into the White Wolf gift shop, looking at all the official Vampire gear.

Then I heard a “Pssst.” I turned toward the sound and saw a man in a black t-shirt with the words “White Wolf Inc.” embroidered on the front. He asked me in a low voice, “Are you a reporter?”

“Well..” I replied. “I do have a blog, so I’m practically a journalist.”

“Did I hear you saying something about ’something missing’?”

“Well, yes, as a matter of fact.”

“Well then, how would you like to see the building’s hidden basement?”

“What?”

“Come here, follow me.”

He took me out of the gift shop and down a hallway that lead to the basement. “Just follow me,” he said “I’m Joe Bobby Thorne (not his real name) — I helped design and put together some of the games here.

I followed Thorne downstairs to the massive basement below ground. Thorne flipped on the lights and low and behold there was a multitude of gaming exhibits, crates and boxes lined up. The room itself was huge. It was like the storage warehouse in Raiders of the Lost Ark.

“These are the forgotten and abandoned games White Wolf never put out” he said.

We walked over to one of the forgotten displays, entitled “Swampy Critters Carovan.”

“What’s this?” I asked

“This was going to be White Wolf’s next big project. Their way of getting their foot in the door with really young kids. It was going to be the World of Darkness for pre-schoolers - a fantasy world about cute lizard-like beings who entered our world from a strange mystical swampland. The bosses feared they were losing out on this key demographic. If little kids were thinking up their own fantasies and using their own imaginations, then where would that leave White Wolf if they couldn’t do it for them?”

“Wow, I had no idea,” I said.

Then we walked further in and I saw something that interested me - boxes and boxes of VTES boosters stacked on crates. But I didn’t recognize the names of these expansions. Even the artwork looked different.

“Those are the future unreleased expansions of VTES. They won’t be coming out for a few more years.” Thorne said.

“Really? They print this stuff that far ahead of time?”

“Oh yeah” replied Thorne. They’ve always done it like that. They printed Sabbat War all the way through Gehenna in just 2000 alone. Then they just release it a little bit at a time.”

I saw expansions that I never heard of before - one booster box entitled “Garou Gone Wild” was sitting on top. It had illustrations of werewolves on the sides. Another said “Fangs for the Memories” - it was a special 15th anniversary expansion that looked like a special DVD box set.

Other expansion boxes: Broods of Blood, Catiff United, Inconnu Incoming, and Caine Comes Calling were also sitting in the stack. I tried to take a closer look at all of them, but Thorne thought he heard someone coming and said we had to go.

We left the basement and Thorne went back to work. He mentioned something about having to put together a giant miniature castle they made him take apart just the night before.

I made my way back to the cafeteria for the rest of the tournament, of course I grabbed a few boxes of Caine Comes Calling on my way out