Jason Carl on the new White Wolf and getting it right this time

On May 23rd, the company that owns the highly influential World of Darkness games announced that it was reviving the White Wolf brand. “The wolf is back, baby”, said Marco Behrmann, World of Darkness executive vice president at Paradox Interactive. 

White Wolf was initially founded in 1991 by Mark Rein-Hagen, Stewart Wieck, and Steve Wieck. Despite a number of extremely successful products, the company struggled financially at various points. It was sold first to Icelandic developer CCP Games in 2006 and then eventually taken over by Stockholm-based Paradox Interactive in 2015. Rein-Hagen would leave (and then partially return to) the games industry. Steve Weick would go on to co-found DriveThru RPG and is now President of Wolves of Freeport, the company formed by its merger with Roll20. 

This revival comes 7 years after White Wolf was ignominiously shuttered as a brand and its functioning taken in-house after writers folded ongoing human rights violations into the game’s narrative. Reporting on the incident in 2018, Charlie Hall wrote in Polygon, “Leadership changes are underway, after the studio used the imprisonment, torture, and murder of Chechnya’s LGBTQ community as the backdrop for a major plot point in that game.” Since then, tabletop games have come through licensees such as Onyx Path Publishing and Renegade Game Studios.

Many people who started playing RPGs in the 90s fell in love with the hobby’s possibilities within White Wolf’s broader ecosystem. At the same time, many have some kind of horror story dealing with more toxic elements of the fandom. One of the people who knows this history extremely well is Jason Carl, who over a long career that includes different roles at Wizards of the Coast and Paradox Interactive, now finds himself as the Brand Marketing Manager of the new White Wolf. 

Rascal sat down with Carl to discuss what this news means for fans.

This interview has been edited for size and clarity.