Our game is meant to be a fundamentally cooperative endeavor, and part of that is recognizing that the input of our players is always going to be part of the feel of the IC world. We can declare as much and as loudly as we like that the game is supposed to be X, but that only goes so far if everyone’s playing as if the game is actually Y. That borne in mind, we do want to lay out some of the ideas we had when creating the game, that informed the way we set it up, and that are going to influence how we think when creating storylines and determining how the in-game world continues to develop and evolve. These aren’t absolute rules, and even if they were, we know that everyone will have different ideas about what they mean; but they may help you make a little more sense of the game and why it is what it is.

• Realism. And, of course, we mean that in the sense of “a realistic world where vampires, werewolves, wizards, and faeries exist.” A better term might be verisimilitude, meaning “the appearance of being true or real.” In other words, within the laws of reality defined by the game, things should tend to behave realistically. People should act like real people. If they have magic powers, well, they should act like real people with magic powers would act. Politics, big business, everyday life should all behave just as they would in a version of our OOC world where magic and monsters really existed, and were constantly influencing events from behind the scenes.
• Secrecy. The World of Darkness is not (by and large) a game world where vampires and werewolves battle it out in the streets for the news cameras on a nightly, or even yearly, basis. It’s a world where magical and mystical creatures intentionally conceal their existence because they know, from long and bitter experience, that if humans — or even other supernatural creatures — found out about them, fear would take over from there, and the best they could hope for would be a long and bloody struggle that would leave both sides devastated. So instead they fight their battles and wars secretly, with subtlety and deniability.
• There’s Always a Bigger Fish. The most powerful vampires walking the Earth today are chaff before the might of a Methuselah. The Methuselahs are only children next to the Antediluvians. The Antediluvians themselves cannot stand before Caine. No matter how great you might become, the smart course is always to act with restraint, because the odds are good there’s someone greater out there watching and waiting. Even Queen Anne fears the day when Mithras awakens once more.
• Darkness with Hope. Things in the World of Darkness are worse than they are in our world, and our world already has it pretty bad in some ways. The forces working to make the world better are outnumbered and outpowered by those working to do the opposite. The most likely outcome is for things to keep getting worse, and worse, and worse, until the world ends in a Gehenna, an Apocalypse, or a Long Winter. That doesn’t mean that the good guys never win, and it doesn’t mean that every triumph has to be immediately wiped out by something terrible. There’s still hope out there, even if it’s just the hope of staving off disaster for a little longer. But every step will be a struggle against tremendous odds, and even the victories will be bittersweet in some way.
• Wonder and Horror. The world is brimming over with both. There are amazing things to be uncovered, unimaginable sights to be seen — and many of them are disturbing or terrifying as well as amazing. Vampire: the Masquerade‘s Cathedral of Flesh is a prototypical example, an almost unimaginable feat of architecture, art, engineering, and sheer persistence that was also a sickening death camp for uncountable human beings whose flesh and blood were treated as mere building materials for one great, but twisted, mind’s vision of splendor. Though the Cathedral itself is long since vanished, it’s a creation that sums up the way in which even the most wondrous and inspirational sights tend to have some horrifying aspect to them like the proverbial worm in the apple.
• The Sins of the Past. Each World of Darkness game revolves in one way or another around the mistakes made by prior generations. Though it’s most overt in Vampire, it’s just as true in Werewolf (with its history of self-destructive internecine conflicts and hostility toward the very humans whose help they now desperately need), in Mage (where the Traditions’ haughty arrogance pushed humanity to the seemingly more egalitarian Technocratic vision of the world), and in Changeling. Many of the problems that these groups deal with today can trace back to decisions made in the past, and it isn’t enough to just shrug and declare that the past is the past. Those decisions and the legacy they left behind must be faced up to, and the reasons behind them understood, in order for there to be any chance of lasting change.
• Worldviews in Conflict. The things that separate the game’s different factions aren’t just simple misunderstandings — if that were all it was they would have been solved long since. Vampires, Garou, Magi, and the Fae all have different needs and different desires, and to shape the world according to any one group’s will necessarily be to the detriment of the others. Yes, sometimes one group will work with another for mutual advantage, but any such alliances are ultimately temporary, and everyone involved — at least, everyone who’s thought about the subject in any depth — knows it.