White Wolf Game Studio (thing)

White Wolf Publishing, Inc., started out as "White Wolf Magazine," published by Stewart Wieck, which in 1991 merged with Lion Rampant, a company founded by Mark Rein-Hagen for his role-playing game Ars Magica. Shortly after the merger, in addition to releasing a new edition of Ars Magica, the company came out with Vampire: The Masquerade, which was a huge success. This and some other RPGs by White Wolf Game Studios were set in the same universe, the World of Darkness, and used the Storyteller approach to gaming, which as the company's web site explains, gives an opportunity for the game's characters to grow and change like those of a good story, instead of just gaining more skills with a sword or gun.

With the great success of their games, the company branched out into related areas. As of 31 March 2002, their web sites lists their products as:

• RPGs:
  • Exalted - "epic fantasy in the Second Age of Man"
  • Vampire: The Masquerade (and the related Vampire Dark Ages and Kindred of the East
  • Werewolf: The Apocalypse
  • Mage: The Ascension
  • Hunter: The Reckoning
  • Mummy: The Resurrection
  • Changeling: The Dreaming
  • Wraith: The Oblivion
  • Aberrant
  • Trinity (formerly AEON; the name was changed due to a lawsuit from MTV who felt that their rights to Aeon Flux were being infringed)
  • Adventure!
  • the Mind's Eye Theatre line
  • distribution of other companies' products under the Sword & Sorcery imprint
• the trading card game Vampire: The Eternal Struggle (with introductory sets V:TES/Jyhad), which was formerly licensed to Wizards of the Coast.
• Fiction:
  • tie-in novels to the Vampire, Werewolf, Hunter, Mummy, and Exalted games
  • World of Darkness fiction, set in the universe of most of their role-playing games but not tied to particular ones
  • the Borealis Legends line of reprints of classic science fiction authors (currently Michael Moorcock and Fritz Leiber; they also did the first four volumes of Harlan Ellison's Edgeworks series of reprints before the author got back the rights and plans to publish the rest himself), and new works in the settings of those authors
  • the Borealis Fantasy and Science Fiction lines, with new, non-tie-in works
• and much other tie-in merchandise (t-shirts, blank books, etc.) for their games.

(CzarKhan says "No mention of Black Dog Games or Human Occupied Landfill, my favourite thing ever to come from White Wolf?" So now I've mentioned them.)

They have also licensed the rights to other organizations to make computer games based on their RPGs, and run electronic mailing lists for people to discuss the games.