Justin Achilli

The other day, I said I’d scare up a few more photos of the original green marble cover artifact for Vampire: the Masquerade. They’re better resolution this time, as promised. You guys who came to visit that grainy photo spiked the hell out of my page views, so here’s a little more for you.

Up in the Danger Room, all sorts of relics of the World of Darkness and White Wolf Publishing dwell. Part library, part IT morgue, part game room, and part Federal disaster area, the Danger Room is upstairs, next to the server room. It’s where people run some of the office games (the Elysium meeting room is better for this, to be honest), and it’s where a lot of the uncatalogued White Wolf history lives. There’s a copy of everything we’ve ever printed up there, from some coffee-stained storypath Whimsy Cards to the complete run of World of Darkness titles, old and new. There’s even peripheral stuff — if you look on the left, you can see one of the standees from the Hunter video game. That kind of orange rectangular piece against the bookshelf in the back is an autographed Brom print of Stewart’s. Just above that, a little to the right at the top of the bookshelf are a pair of countertop Rage standees, for the core set and the Wyrm supplement. I also found one of Mark’s notebooks with handwritten sketches for a science fiction game. (It’s not the one that became Exile, sorry.)

There are also several piles of dead computer junk, broken Nerf guns, and various other things in storage.

In the center of the room are a pair of carpenter’s tables, which we hijacked from the building supervisor and turned into gaming tables. There’s a game up here most of the middle weekday nights. Those are also the old meeting room chairs, and I once swiped one of them for my office chair because the chair I had previously used became… somehow broken and on fire. I blame the Sabbat.

It’s called the Danger Room because it’s only partially floored. Walk too far and you’ll fall through the ceiling of the World of Darkness development area on the first floor.

Here’s a better shot of the cover slab I turned up while rummaging last week. Weirdly, that’s my old desk up there, too. I worked on everything from Clanbook: Cappadocian through Revised Edition Vampire through the relaunch and Requiem on that faithful old beast. It’s about six thousand pounds and full of sharp metal flanges. I’m not sure why we kept it, to be honest. Sarah Timbrook had that desk before I did, when she came up from the warehouse to do inventory and eventually international sales. I was 22 when she had that desk, and I was 25 when I inherited it. I’m 37 now.

I remember my then-girlfriend introducing me to Vampire. We were both big Anne Rice enthusiasts, and very much interested in the darker side of things, the beauty and sensuality of danger, and the wonder of the night. Once I took my first step into the World of Darkness — with Mage, ironically, and not Vampire itself — I was hooked. I couldn’t escape… and I didn’t want to. Every shadow hid a lurking Kindred, every early-morning fog hid a Telluric mystery, every visit to Celestial Park was a peek into something beyond the Veil. Two years after being introduced to the game, I packed up my pickup truck with my few belongings and moved to Atlanta to work for the company. Three years after that, Rob Hatch turned Vampire over to me, to work on what ultimately became Exalted. Even though I’ve quit twice, I still can’t escape the powerful allure of the Kindred, and I’m now helping guide them into the realm of MMO computer games, 20 years after Vampire first arrived and 16 years after I first joined the carnival.

(Hey, look, Eddy’s talking about the look back over at his blog, too.)

And here’s the real gem, a side-by-side comparison of the object art and the printed book itself. Notice that the subtitle is different — I think in the first edition, the marble slab had no subtitle on it and it was dropped in during digital layout. Thereafter, for the second edition, the subtitle had its font change and the vinyl graphic applied to the marble plate itself. The color-correction is different on the print copies, too, giving the books a little more of a blue tint.

I feel a little bit like that rose myself, sometimes, a little beaten up and wearing those years with some degree less elegance than I might. But it’s been a wonderful ride with Vampire, and it’s a dazzling look back here on the precipice of two decades. To all the players, readers, and admirers of Vampire, thank you. You’ve made 20 years of serving the Kindred — and here’s to many more! — well worth having.