Mind's Eye Theatre - History

Join us as we take a deep dive into the Mind's Eye Theatre - White Wolf's fantastic series of Live Action Roleplay games.  We talk about how MET got started, the various supplements released along the way, as well as some of the nuances of the LARPing scene.

This is part one of our MET episode - part two will feature a round table discussion where we put on our rose tinted glasses and talk about our favourite memories of the game.

Contact us at:

EMAIL: roll.to.save.pod@gmail.com
TWITTER: @savepodcast
FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/rolltosavepod
WEBSITE: https://rolltosave.blog

HOST: Iain Wilson
VOICEOVER LADY: Keeley Wilson
BACKGROUND MUSIC: David Renada (Find him at: davidrendamusic@gmail.com or on his web page).
TITLE, BREAK & CLOSEOUT MUSIC: Xylo-Ziko (Find them on their web page). 

Contact us at:

EMAIL: roll.to.save.pod@gmail.com
FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/rolltosavepod
WEBSITE: https://rolltosave.blog

HOSTS: Iain Wilson, Steve McGarrity, Jason Downey
BACKGROUND MUSIC: David Renada (Find him at: davidrendamusic@gmail.com or on his web page).
TITLE, BREAK & CLOSEOUT MUSIC: Xylo-Ziko (Find them on their web page).

Transcript

SPEAKER_02: 0:00

Welcome to Roll to Save, the RPG history podcast, Mind's Eye Theatre.

SPEAKER_00: 0:25

Hi and welcome to Roll to Save, the RPG history podcast. It's been a while since we've done one of these history episodes but today's is about what I'd argue has possibly been the greatest time sink for me in terms of the role-playing hobby and that's White Wolf's Mind's Eye Theatre. Met was the banner under which White Wolf gathered all their World of Darkness LARPs. I've run and played in many of these games and on nearly every occasion, with a couple of dishonourable exceptions which I'm sure to go on and rant about later, I've never had a gaming experience more powerful, immersive and enjoyable. LARPs have that unique ability of building communities around themselves and whilst that tabletop campaign that you and your friends are really invested in might get you a small group talking between games, I've never seen a type of game so complete dominate people's thinking in the way that Metal Arps do. Likewise, I've never seen games where people have got so invested in their character and their story the same way that some Metal Arp players do. Intriguingly, until recently with the advent of RPGs going more mainstream than they've ever been before, I've never seen a type of game able to draw in so-called non-gamers the way Met can and get them to come back again and again. Now, all of that said I've also never seen a type of game attract problem players the way I have in LARP power gamers man children sex pests of both genders and some genuine oddballs that often find it difficult to differentiate between what was in and what was out of character all came out to play at one time or another so what is it then about this type of game that makes it so unique well grab a bit average of your choice and a snack too if that's your thing, sit back and relax as we explore the history of Mind's Eye Theatre and you might just find out. Back in the early days of the role-playing hobby, the mention of live-action role-playing, or LARP for short, probably summed up connotations of running around in a field or woodland dressed in homemade medieval-ish gear whilst swinging other people with foam weapons and yelling out numbers or the names of spells. These games tended to fit the standard fantasy RPG mould, with groups of adventurers made up of most of the standard fantasy races and classes doing battle against various monsters or, in this case, other people in make-up made to look like orcs and goblins. Over time this branch of the hobby became more and more popular with various organisations and societies springing up to run games but although it became large it was never really part of the mainstream. From personal experience I knew one or two LARPers in my immediate circle. I'll be brutally honest and say that it never really appealed to me because every time one of my LARPer friends tried to explain how amazing it all was, it always came across as faintly ridiculous. Therefore, if you told me that live action roleplay was going to become a major part of my gaming life throughout the 90s and early 2000s, I'd probably have laughed. However, in 1993, a game was released that changed my and the perception of millions of others about LARPing forever. That game was The Masquerade, released in 1993 by White Wolf as part of their Mind's Eye Theatre line, or MET for short. Released as a box set, similar to the popular murder mystery party games that were very big back in the early 90s, The Masquerade took the setting of the best-selling tabletop RPG Vampire The Masquerade and said, what if we made this into a LARP? I won't go into Vampire's setting in any detail here. We've got a whole separate episode in that if you're interested. But in hindsight, releasing it as a LARP seems like a stupidly obvious move nowadays. After all, Vampire is an inherently social setting and it's therefore preferable to have a whole group of people playing the ensemble cast rather than having one frantic GM trying to do everything on their own. But at the time this thought was revolutionary. Now, I mentioned earlier that it was boxed up in a similar format to a murder mystery, and believe it or not, The Masquerade was initially touted as a party game. In fact, the back of the box describes it as a party game like you've never seen before. The initial setup seemed very like that. It had an introductory story, had briefing cards, characters, everything you needed to get started with the game. Now, I'm not sure sure if White Wolf understood what they had in their hands when they released the Masquerade or if they were just trying something different but the popularity of this game no doubt exceeded even their wildest expectations. It was a knockout success and White Wolf arguably had just created the most successful live action RPG of all time. Despite dressing like an early 90s party game the Masquerade was very much an RPG at heart. Sure it came with a sample story and characters you could parcel out like one of the innumerable Agatha Christie style whodunit games out there but reading the other books in the box you could see that this was a fully fledged RPG. That being said because it was a LARP it didn't use the storyteller system created by White Wolf for their tabletop games. It was clear that the creators had immersion very much in front of mind when they designing the masquerade and nothing is more immersion breaking than hauling out a fistful of dice and trying to find somewhere to roll them every time a challenge needed to be resolved. Indeed, the masquerade even came with a clutch of hand gestures that players could make to indicate that they were taking various actions without breaking character and saying things like, guys, I'm spending some blood just now to boost my physical traits. However, in this case, I think the intent was better than the practice. Not only were players being expected to learn over a dozen or so hand gestures that all meant various things and all looked fairly similar, they were also expected to be able to keep an eye out for them too. Ironically, these gestures were meant to be subtle, so they were sometimes overlooked, leading to a jarring breakdown in the flow of the game as the party who'd been trying to frantically indicate something was forced to break character and say something along the lines of, dude, I was trying to use dominate there we have to make a challenge. Truth be told in over a decade of playing these games I don't think I ever saw a player use any gesture except the thumb up for heightened senses or hands folded across the chest to indicate visibility which in fairness is a lot less immersion breaking than having to say to people yet guys just kid on I'm not here as they awkwardly stop their conversation when I sidle up to them. Hand gestures that put your average mason to shame aside the system underpinning the masquerade was fairly straightforward. Rules from Vampire the Masquerade were simplified. Most disciplines were broken out into basic, intermediate and advanced powers and the system of attributes and abilities were replaced with traits. Now in Tabletop Vampire, a character's physical pool would be made up of strength, dexterity and stamina with numerical values in each. In the Masquerade and other subsequent Minds Eye Theatre publications, characters would be defined by descriptive adjectives. For example, a tabletop vampire character might have strength 3, dexterity 2 and stamina 2, whereas a mech vampire might be brawny, strong, dexterous and sturdy. Rather than roll dice, the idea here was if you were competing against someone else, you'd challenge them and start bidding traits against your opponent. This goes back and forth until either someone backs down or you both end up drawing drawing at the same amount of traits and then you have to make a test which is a game of rock paper scissors with the ties going to the defender. Now the idea here was elegant. The book describes the challenges as being like a game of brinksmanship much like poker where you didn't necessarily know if you had more traits than your opponent. As a result there was a risk that you'd run out of traits before they did so you had to gauge who they were. In addition to make sure it wasn't just a game of numbers, you were only allowed to bid appropriate traits. What happened in practice if people were trying to do this was rather odd conversations along the lines of, well, I'm swift enough to hit you. Oh yeah? Well, I'm dexterous enough to avoid you. Really? Well, I'm so energetic that I can catch you. Doesn't matter. I'm resilient enough that even if you do, I'll shrug off the blow. Now if this is reminding you of a game of soldiers from when you were a kid and you had those exchanges of, I got you, you're dead, no I'm not, I got you first, don't worry, you're not the only one. White Wolf probably foresaw this as they included an optional rule to allow all traits to be bit once and in later editions they did away with the bidding element altogether and just made it a straight test with ties going to the person with the most traits. While the idea of having descriptive adjectives rather than numbers a fun one, again, in practice, this very rarely happened. Because traits only ever came in in the event of a draw, most of the time they weren't even mentioned, and when there was a tie, the conversations were much more along the lines of, look, I've got five physical traits, how many do you have? Rather than any kind of elegant wordplay around how adjective X was so much better than adjective Y. People were also meant to roleplay their traits, but again, this often didn't happen. Myself and my co-host Jason had an incident at a LARP that we ran once where one character made an earth-shaking speech in the no, I'm Spartacus mould and we actually had to call a timeout and point out to everyone that not only did this character have a measly three social traits, the lowest allowed in the game, he also had three negative social traits. So what they heard probably came out in character as garbled nonsense and they should disregard it. I know what you're thinking, this system sounds pretty awful. Why then was the game such a big hit? The answer to that is actually simple. The reason that the masquerade worked so well and the reason White Wolf saw sales skyrocket is because of the setting. Vampire's a social game. Despite the fact that the players all take the role of these apex predators who are literally ruled by raging hunger, they crave the company of others of their kind primarily because they spend the rest of the time, hiding their true nature from the masses around them. The society in which they move is social and political, and a good vampire game is about building influence, allies and pawns who can be used when you make your move to try to step up a rung in society. There's comparatively little combat and much more of a focus on in-character interaction. A sourcebook for the first edition of the tabletop game, Chicago by Night, did an excellent job of showing what a vampiric society might look like. But one of the problems faced by GMs was, how do you bring this to life at the tabletop? And the answer was, of course, with difficulty. However, with the advent of the Masquerade, you suddenly had the ability to drop over a dozen players into those roles and not feel like you had to sit and have conversations with yourself in front of your players to try and emulate the squabblings of the city's primogen council. Obviously, you still had to find players but as it turned out this wasn't going to be difficult. One of the phenomenal things about Vampire and about Masquerade in particular was that it suddenly started attracting people to the hobby who wouldn't traditionally be thought of as roleplayers. If Wizards of the Coast and Critical Role made Dungeons and Dragons mainstream nowadays, White Wolf managed something similar decades before when they attracted groups of people to the hobby of roleplaying who probably didn't give two hoots about how fantasy but who absolutely could get with the notion of taking on the role of a vampire. While the tabletop vampire game was already breaking grounds in this respect, the masquerade busted open the floodgates and the game sold like wildfire to audiences that wouldn't have previously considered owning an RPG. Now before I move on from the first edition of the game, special mention must be given to the storybook that came in the box. fairly innocuously named book came with some fantastic advice for fledgling storytellers. And yeah, you'll notice I didn't use the word games master or any other RPG specific word because White Wolf were extremely intentional in avoiding that vocabulary. I don't believe for a minute that this was done to disrespect vampires roots in gaming but it was rather because they knew that there were people who were going to buy the masquerade that didn't come from a gaming back and they didn't want to have them to think of this game as being D&D with fangs. Anyway, terminology aside, this book offers some excellent advice from finding a location to using music and lighting and even guidance on using makeup and props. There's some excellent advice on crafting a story, a lot of which today's gamers could do well to heed. One of the most common arguments you see nowadays on RPG Twitter is the question over whether an RPG is a game or a story game. Now unfortunately most of the really better arguments seem to erupt between those at surprise surprise the extreme ends of the spectrum. On one hand you've got the folks who want to treat tabletop RPGs like simulationist war games and on the other you've got the frustrated authors who want to tell a story and see their players as merely extras in the extravagant railroad that they have planned. The masquerade has a lot to say about writing stories, but the most pertinent piece of advice, and one that will serve anyone who's writing a plot for a game, regardless of whether it's vampire or not, is not to shove your story down the throat of the players. Instead, you want to create a dynamic environment with things that can happen depending on what the players do, but to ultimately focus everything on the player characters, their backgrounds and the stories they want to explore. What they do and what they want to achieve is often far more interesting than anything you can write. As someone who's run many vampire laps, I can attest to the validity of this advice, even if I can't pronounce it. There are many more great nuggets of wisdom to be mined from this book, from what you should be focusing on when you run the game, what pre-game tasks you should perform, how to use narrators and that's Met's term for NPC characters and even a section on what to do if everything starts going wrong and how to deal with problem players. This last piece is so very very relevant to anyone running a LARP indeed. In all my years of gaming LARPing is the only area where I've ever had the misfortune to come across true problem players so this advice for new storytellers is very very welcome. One final piece to and one that I wished more LARP players had paid attention to was that of not making a nuisance of yourself in public. There's an entire section that essentially says you probably shouldn't be playing this game in public but if you do, please, please, please, please, please don't make an arse of yourself doing what you think are cool vampiric things, they're probably not and you'll just give the rest of us a bad name. I'm paraphrasing of course but that's the gist of it and sadly it's something that not every LARPer paid attention to. I know of a few horror stories of people going from their gaming venue to a pub and deciding to carry on their game antics only to receive withering stares from those around them or worse being asked to leave and tarring the rest of us as that lot who play at the same venue with the brush of weirdo troublemakers. So with the masquerade out there sounding like hotcakes White Wolf did what any good gaming company would do and cast by releasing more books. Now, interestingly, they started initially producing a lot of LARP-specific books. The Book of the Damned came out the same year as The Masquerade and was essentially a lot of content from the main Vampire the Masquerade book pared down into a LARP-specific format. This was followed by The Book of Props and The Masquerade Player's Kit the following year. The Book of Props was exactly what it said it was, guides to costuming makeup, props and sets whilst the Masquerade Players Kit expanded in options for characters much like its tabletop cousins Players Guide did. Now I said it was interesting that White Wolf produced LARP specific books because in all of my years of running and playing Vampire LARPs all the players I knew simply bought the latest tabletop books if they wanted to know the latest and greatest about their favourite game line and they had zero expectations that a LARP friendly version be released. Anyway 1994 also saw the release of The Apocalypse, which was LARP rules for playing Werewolf the Apocalypse, one of Vampire's sister games. This allowed for mech players to take on the roles of big, furry threshing machines if they so desired. Although I've known people who played and enjoyed Werewolf, the lack of a setting so suited to social intrigues like Vampires meant that it never became as popular as its pale, velvet-clad sibling did. This year also saw the stuttering start, then dissolving, then reforming of the Camarilla, White Wolf's official fan club. This organisation quickly grew to become a global LARP organisation with the aim of running a world-spanning chronicle with the idea that a player in a Camarilla LARP in City X could go to City Y, play in an official Camarilla game there, have everything about their character carry over and take part in a story which would be related to the story back in their home city. That way, if they made friends in City Y, those friends could come to City X to visit and take part in the story there. Sadly, theory and practice often differ. I will not spend too long on this subject and I'll slap a massive Your Mileage May Vary sticker on this part of the podcast. But, to me, the Camarilla always came across as a boiling, festering high of cronyism, nepotism and all the other badisms smooshed together in a chain reaction of awfulness. Now again I'm basing this purely on my personal experience and some anecdotal experience of others so I'm well aware there are probably many other folks out there who had a grand old time at Camarilla LARPs. However my experience of the Camarilla was that it was ultimately underpinned by a mechanism called membership class that was probably originally designed with very good intent to get people to help out with games but which soon grew into some kind of pay to win old boys club. Basically the better your membership class the better the characters you got to play. Again I'm not going to go into specifics but this type of setup led to the following types of scenarios being possible. A new storyteller sets up a brand new game in their city and invites their friends to play. This new storyteller also applies for their game to become part of the Camarilla. The Camarilla okays this but provides certain plots and restrictions that the new storyteller has to adhere to. The Camarilla then advertises the new game. The new game starts and the new ST is suddenly faced with not just the players that he had invited but a boatload of high MC players whose characters have been approved by people higher up the chain. These new, in inverted commas, high MC players then proceed to go on a ramp and intend to make this brand new game and all the brand new players their own. Delightful. Now I had the pleasure, I think that's the word, of going along to a supposedly new Camarilla game once. Myself and a group of friends spent a great deal of time putting together our characters and ensuring that our backgrounds and concepts made sense together. We then turned up at the game excited because this was supposed to be virgin territory where anything was possible. and promptly find that we're pretty much at the bottom of the pecking order because there are a bunch of high MC characters checking out this new game. I spent most of the game unable to do anything because one of these individuals used some ridiculously powerful mind power on me and then most of us sat out the rest of the game as it became a four hour combat between several of these high MC individuals and we all sat and watched it. As I said, you're my age may have varied. Regardless, the Camarilla started falling out with White Wolf in the late 90s over trademark disputes and this eventually boiled over into lawsuits in 2002 after which White Wolf took control of the organisation and it dissolved. Right, that felt like a bit of a rant. Back to the game, where was I? 1994 and the masquerade's going strong, so strong in fact that a second edition is released. Unlike the first edition, this is not a box set but it is instead released as a standard format RPG book and as expected it sells very very well. White Wolf realise LARPing is indeed very popular. So come 1995 White Wolf decide to introduce some of their Year of the Hunter materials into the LARP scene. Again we've got a whole other podcast on Vampire so I won't touch on this too deeply but from 1995 onwards, White Wolf started designating every year, year of the something, to make the supplements for their various game lines thematically consistent. 1995 saw focus on those organisations that hunted the various supernaturals of the world of darkness. While the individual tabletop games received hunter books suitable to the theme, with Vampire's Entry being about the Inquisition for example, a book was released for the Masquerade called Antagonists. Rather than focus on one type of, well, antagonist, this book drew on material from The Hunters Hunted, Mummy, The Inquisition and Project Twilight, the latter being Werewolf's X-Files-esque hunter book. It was also notable for being the first LARP supplement to include rules for Sabat vampires, but because this was a Sabat pre-revised edition, they were much more along the let's murder every and summon demons for chuckles lines rather than the crusading army of vampiric fundamentalists that they became in later editions. This year also saw a book released called The Elder's Revenge that is notable for being the first and only adventure released for Minds Eye Theatre other than that which came in the original box set. This story focuses on a play which is written by one of the characters in the story and which is intended to be put I've never played through this scenario so I can't comment from personal experience but it feels a bit too amdram for my liking. Come 1996 it was time to give The Masquerade a facelift and it was re-released as Laws of the Night. As well as bundling together the various rules, changes, updates and errata that appeared over the last three years, Laws of the Night is notable for the fact that it published the book in a much smaller, A5 format rather than the traditional A4 format used by tabletop RPG books. This was an incredibly sensible decision as the LARP books were much more likely to be hauled from location to location than their tabletop cousins who got to stay in the same nice comfy home week in week out. Given the amount of times I've had to carry LARP books back and forth from various venues and games, I know I for one was grateful for the size and weight change. It also meant that the rules were much easier to peruse on the fly mid-game than if you had to haul out this huge weighty tome to do so. At the same time as Laws of the Night was being released, White Wolf also released Oblivion, or rules for playing Wraiths in LARP. I've never played in a Wraith LARP, nor have I ever met anyone else who did, but as a long-time storyteller for the tabletop game, I can only assume it would have been an absolute nightmare to run. Wraith is a very intimate, personal game and it's complicated enough to manage for a small group of players around the table. I can only imagine doing the same for 20 or so people would be a feat of difficulty several orders of magnitude greater. Plus, a huge part of Wraith is its introspective nature and balancing that feeling of nihilistic bleakness with small seeds of hope. Again, very hard to do for a small circle of players. On a larger scale, this would be nigh on impossible. And if the intention is simply to recreate vampire but with ghosts, then you've lost that quintessential something that makes a game what it is. 1997 was White Wolf's year of the ally, so naturally a book featuring rules for ghouls and LARP was released. White Wolf also gave the apocalypse the laws of the treatment in the form of Laws of the Wild. There were also rules for playing medieval vampires published in the form of The Long Night. This was more a grab bag of new clans and disciplines with a tiny sprinkling of setting so The Long Night didn't really add a lot to the overall Mind's Eye theatre scene. An ST with a copy of Laws of the Night and Vampire of the Dark Ages could undoubtedly run a 12th century vampire game with recourse to this book. However, seeing that, one of the most fun vampire larps I ever played in was one from these rules, so maybe there was some secret sauce there after all. By 1998, we had rules for playing elder vampires released in the form of Laws of Elysium. Most STs I knew who possessed copies of this book generally used the rules for creating narrator characters. The power level described was generally far beyond that of most player characters. The various Hunter books also got the Laws of the Treatment and were repackaged as Laws of the Hunt. Changeling also got its own met game in the form of The Shining Host which meant that girls with cat ears, neon hair ribbons and stripy tights everywhere could now lark away to their hearts content. Sarcasm aside, The Shining Host proved to be extremely popular so that shows what little I know about games design or the appeal of certain themes. Oh and if you are a cat ear wearing stripey tight clad changeling fan then more power to you. Much as I don't like changeling I'm not going to think for a minute to dictate to you what is and isn't fun. 1999 was White Wolf's year of the reckoning where the canonical world of darkness experienced the metaphysical equivalent of a car crash that changed most games forever. changes came to Met too, but mainly in the form of yet another vision of Laws of the Night. This might have also marked the beginning of my obsession with faux leatherette covers, because the version of Laws of the Night that I chose to pick up was, drumroll please, the limited edition one that came with a faux leatherette cover. All joking aside, it also came with two cloth bookmarks, which proved utterly invaluable when I was running games of my own. It also had silver edging to the pages, don't you know? Sadly, 23 years later these have largely worn off. However, the special edition of Laws of the Night ranks up there as one of the studdiest books I've ever owned. Between the years of 1999 and 2008 I was playing or running a Vampire LARP at least once a month and for the games I was running there were bi-weekly meetings at the staff so this old book was constantly being shoved in a bag and shipped from place to place and despite having a beer spilled over it on at least three occasions, it is still perfectly bound with not a loose page to speak of. Compare this to other more modern RPG products that literally fall from their binding when you stare at them too hard and you know that those extra pennies on the deluxe edition were very well spent. Anyway, at the same time as Laws of the Night was getting a revision, Laws of the Hunt got the player's guide to Laws of the Hunt. I'm going to take a pause here and ask why. In all my years of being involved with Met games, I have never played in a Laws of the Hunt game and I've never known anyone who has played in one. Despite this fact, at this point, Laws of the Hunt has had more releases than Werewolf and just as many as Vampire. Maybe there was a whole subculture of Arcanum Inquisition or FBI LARPs I was never aware of. Anyway, the Millennium saw several releases for Met but one book stood out for me. The Guide to the Sabbat. Now I've talked about this in previous podcasts and yes, that's a third hint to go and download our Vampire the Masquerade episode if you haven't already. But early portrayals of the Sabbat in Vampire were problematic. Not because they were inappropriate or offensive but because they tried to be shocking in the same way that a 12 year old swearing in front of his parents is someone trying to be shocking. Want a feel for the vibe? It went something like, look at these evil vampires they are killing people look they just treat humans like cattle oh no they've murdered someone else and look at how many of them worship devils haven't we created something shocking and evil you're shocked right oh and they're out to kill the antediluvians but don't worry they'll be spending most of their time murdering hookers and bums aren't they evil if you've ever taken a creative writing class in horror you'll learn that the actual horror component which is to say, the blood, the go, the monster, whatever, should only show up after all the other components of the story build in that direction. Without the signposts and foreshadowing, the horror component might briefly shock the reader before it just becomes noise. And before you know it, you're back to the literary equivalent of the tipped 12-year-old desperately trying to shock his parents by coming out with more creative uses of vulgarity. Like that self-same 12-year-old, the writer is onto a loser as the initial shock has passed and the audience is just becoming more and more irritated with the attempts to get a reaction. That is what the old Sabbat guides were like. Come revised, or in the case of Met 3rd edition, the Sabbat got a much needed makeover. Instead of our robing mob of murderhobos who were evil for evil's sake, the Sword of Cain were a fanatical fundamentalist army out to save the world from the antediluvians, the ancient progenitors of the vampire clans who were prophesied to wake up and bring about the end of the world. They were organised like an army and they had rituals not because they wanted to freak out the normies but because they used them to keep discipline and adhere to the spiritual codes of conduct. Sure, they still held mankind in contempt but they also grudgingly acknowledged that mankind was much more heavily armed and capable than he'd ever been before. Individual mortals might just be juice bags or cattle but a squad of them armed with automatic weapons could make a smug, self-righteous vampires and life very short indeed. Therefore, the image of the Sabbat as a group who murdered humans for funsies was quickly retconned as Camarilla propaganda. The Sabbat guide for Met took this new image for the Sabbat and gave you rules for running a whole chronicle based around the sect. Due to its military-like structure and the underlying intrigue, the Sabbat was a sect just as well suited, if not better, for a political LARP than its opposite number in the Camarilla. Not long after getting this book, I proposed to Jason that we run a Sabbat LARP, and this was one of the best decisions we ever made in gaming. As well as my beloved Sabbat Guide, the year 2000 also saw a Camarilla Guide, released for Laws of the Night, and the core game Laws of the East for Kindred of the East, allowing STs to run games focused on Cui Jin, or Eastern Vampires. When 2001 rolled about, the printing presses were set to get a workout as White Wolf had their busiest Met year yet. Lords of the Night got a storyteller's guide, as well as a book called Dark Epics. Now, this book was touted as a Met publication, but the vampire-esque cover and the content suggested there may have been one game line in particular that White Wolf had in mind when they released this thing. A lot of the content is very reminiscent of the good old storybook found all the way back in the masquerade first edition but it delves deeper into the art of administering long-running games there's tips on location managing the community that you'll build up around your game communication staffing a game and even how to run a convention game now amusingly there's also a section on running a network game that is to say a regional or global chronicle similar to those offered by by the Camarilla. Given that this book was released before the great split between The Cam and White Wolf, one can only assume that the writing was on the wall at this point, otherwise why would an official publication not be suggesting that prospective storytellers simply sign up to their official fan club's network game? There's also an interesting section on character creation with the caveat of, you don't have to accept every piece of nonsense that that player asks to play, you know? This is something I think any prospective storyteller should have had to read. The amount of times I've seen someone being given permission to play Last of a Dying Race because if they didn't get that permission, they'd walk from the game. There's also a brilliant section on influence endeavours. One thing Laws of the Night always did really well was allow players to have that feel of being an undead puppet master through the use of the influence background. A trait that covered all sorts of fields from academic Now while the basic system provided a menu of things that you could use your influence to accomplish, Dark Epics turned influence into a multi-layered minigame of such. The rules were great, but given the release date of this book, I'm not sure many LARPs, most of which had been running for many years before this came out, would have taken advantage of them. Overall, it's an interesting book with a lot of good material in it, but sadly it probably didn't get the exposure it deserved. Laws of the Wild got a new edition in 2001 along with more changing breeds books. The supplements allow you to play were-things other than werewolves. They also got the Book of the Worm for those games that really wanted to focus on the truly vile and evil things in the werewolf cosmology. Mage also got its first LARP, Laws of Ascension, and The Shining Host got a player's guide. There were also a couple of card decks released for things like disciplines and And the last issue of the Mind's Eye Journal, a periodical focusing on all things Met that had been running on and off for the last few years. Believe it or not, it took me five takes to say periodical. Don't know why, just one of those words. So I cut it out for you and then put this nonsense in instead. Sorry. 2002 arrived and guess what? Laws of the Hunt got a revised edition. You know how there are sometimes those guys who don't seem to have anything going for them, yet they always end up with a stunning girlfriend? Yep, Laws of the Hunt is that guy in book form. Again, I could be wrong and maybe there were gazillions of Laws of the Hunt LARPs out there and I was simply not cool enough to get invited to them but this continual need to revise and re-release what seems to be a really niche product seems absolutely baffling. Laws of Ascension, also got a companion this year, Laws of the Wild got another Changing Breeds book and Mummy received its own LARP in the form of Laws of the Resurrection. There was also another werewolf standalone game called Henge Yokai, I think I've pronounced that right, Way of the Beastcoats for playing eastern shapeshifters. By this point, White Wolf had made the decision to kill off the world of darkness during its time of judgement but despite this, 2003 was a strong year for the Mets scene. Laws of the Night got an Anarch guide, but this year also saw the release of three standalone LARP settings. Vampire by Gaslight for Victorian games, Faith and Fire, which was a revision of The Long Night, and Laws of the Reckoning, which provided rules for playing the Imbued from Hunter the Reckoning. I won't go into massive details about the Chronicle itself, but with Laws of the Reckoning I was able to get what, to my mind anyway, was the most satisfying LARP I've ever run. Hunter gets a ton of flak, usually from people who've never played it, and the complaints are always the same. This is just a game of superpowers. I much prefer The Hunters Hunted, which was about normal people. This is simply untrue. Hunter's entire focus is on normal people who are thrust into an abnormal situation and have to deal with it. Hunters Hunted and its spin-offs like Laws of the Hunt, focused on the organisations that bristle with high-tech weaponry, gadgets and magical powers going after the supernatural. When I ran Hunter LARP, despite the name, it saw all sorts of reactions to the supernatural, all the way from these things are evil and must be destroyed to we must understand and help these unfortunate souls. It was a very deep and nuanced story which ended up going in a very different direction from how I first envisaged but which ended, to my mind I anyway, in a very satisfying way. Anyway, thinking about it, these complainers are probably the Laws of the Hunt fanboys who saw it getting 80 zillion revisions. So when 2004 rolled around, it was time to kill the world of darkness, which meant there was only one more book for Met left to release. Actually, hang on, let me check my notes. No, there were two more books to release it seemed, because Laws of the Wild needed another changing breeds book just before the end came. Presumably the fan need to play where sharks and where snakes was reaching crisis point and White Wolf just had to act. Anyway, coelacomorphic and serpentic needs satisfied, White Wolf went about dropping the curtain on the Mind's Eye Theatre with the release of Laws of Judgment. This book was a mishmash of the various scenarios found in the main Time of Judgment books released for the tabletop game lines, along with rules and tips for concluding a chronicle. Consisting of 10 chapters, these cover Laws of the Hunt, and yes, of course, it's the first chapter in the book, Vampire, Werewolf, Mage, Changeling, Hunter, Kindred of the East, Mummy and Wraith. Oh, also, there was a final chapter full of general and this is about how you go about laying waste to a long run Chronicle tips. I'll be honest, the scenarios themselves are not massively useful other than in a and this is an example of how the world could end way. If you want detail, I guess that's what the tabletop books will provide. This book's tries to cover too much and therefore ends up short changing every game line. Far more useful however are the sections preceding the individual scenarios where various rules and ideas for ending the world for that chapter's game line are explored. Good as these sections are however the star of the show is the final chapter which contains some honest to goodness decent advice on how to finally end that chronicle you've been running for years. The content here is fantastic and you really get the impression that whoever wrote this genuinely cared about ensuring that these long-running games got the send-off that they deserved. With the release of Laws of Judgment in 2004, the classic Mind's Eye Theatre line came to an end. Ultimately, the books reappeared in 2013 under the stewardship of Bynight Studios and I'm pleased to see they still appear to be going strong to this day. In fact, Looking at their online store, they even appear to have a faux leatherette version of the latest version of Laws of the Night.

UNKNOWN: 44:35

Hmm.

SPEAKER_00: 44:55

And that was our Mind's Eye Theatre episode. We hope you enjoyed it. A round table where we don our rose-coloured, or should that be blood-coloured, glasses and talk about our memories of the game should follow in the next few weeks. We're a monthly podcast about the history of role-playing games. Our back catalogue includes a tonne of history episodes, round tables and interviews, not to mention reviews and actual play episodes. If you're new to our podcast Thanks again for listening and we'll see you next time.