White Wolf, Inc. is an American gaming company and book publisher, most famous for the Vampire: The Masquerade roleplaying game. The company began in 1991 as a merger between Lion Rampant and White Wolf Magazine, and was led by Mark Rein·Hagen of Lion Rampant and Steve and Stewart Wieck from the magazine. Taking their name from the fiction of Michael Moorcock, they have become one of the world's most successful role-playing game companies.
White Wolf publishes a line of several different but overlapping games set in the "World of Darkness", which generally resembles our world with added supernatural elements, and whose tone is generally described as "modern gothic." "Modern gothic" means that it is set in the modern world. Unless by explicit storyteller explanation, all things in the modern world remain the same. Places, technologies, laws, medicine, police procedures etc will be as they are in the normal world. However, gothic expressed that the world is a dark place. Normal humans see everything like they normally would, but the supernaturals see a dark underlying evil which gives the game its dark, gothic feel. In the World of Darkness, vampires, werewolves, mummies, mages, changelings, wraiths, and other creatures of the night exist and fight with and alongside each other while remaining hidden from normal humans. The company also publishes the high fantasy Exalted RPG, the modern mythic Scion (role-playing game), and d20 system material under their Sword & Sorcery imprint, including such titles as the Dungeons & Dragons gothic horror campaign setting Ravenloft, and Monte Cook's Arcana Unearthed series.
To complement the World of Darkness game lines, there is a LARP system dubbed Mind's Eye Theatre. Many grassroots gaming groups have sprung up to play games based on this system.
White Wolf has also released several series of novels based on the Old World of Darkness. All game books and novels set in the Old World of Darkness are currently and indefinitely out of print.
White Wolf has a mixed record in the collectible card game market with Arcadia, Rage, and Vampire: The Eternal Struggle (formerly 'Jyhad'). V:TES, perhaps the most successful of the bunch, was originally published by Wizards of the Coast in 1994 but was abandoned just two years later after a revamped base set and name change (V:TES) and three expansions. White Wolf acquired the rights to the game in 2000, despite no new material having been produced for the game in over 4 years. Since then, VTES has released several expansions, and is the only official source for material for the Old World of Darkness.
Video games such as Vampire: The Masquerade - Redemption, and Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines, are based on White Wolf's role-playing property, Vampire: The Masquerade. There are also several Hunter: The Reckoning video games.
More information on White Wolf can be found on their official Website.
