Hungry like the wolf

Say you're a vampire. You're strolling along one moonlit night, minding your undead business, when you're beset by three street thugs. Do you:

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A) Use your "Shape of the Beast" power to turn into a bat and fly away.

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Use your high "Blood Potency" to beat up your attackers while continuing to pass as human.

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C) Use your "Sovereignty" to enthrall the muggers and drink their blood, without worrying about spoiling your appetite or your latent Humanity.

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All of the above are correct — they just depend on the roll of a 10-sided dice.

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If wrestling with such situations — or other people who share such supernatural interests — is your idea of fun, you're a born player for White Wolf Game Studio. Gearing up for several live events at this year's Dragon*Con, the Stone Mountain-based company publishes hundreds of titles, from books of fiction to its upcoming, first-ever board game, Vampire: Prince of the City. White Wolf earns its highest Blood Potency, however, through its extensive line of role-playing games. Most of its "modern gothic storytelling" games depict things that go bump in the night, including:

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• Werewolf: The Apocalypse: a pen-and-paper role-playing game that casts shape-shifting wolf-people as eco-terrorists trying to prevent the end of the world.

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• Vampire: The Eternal Struggle: a collectible card game set in the World of Darkness, in which players take the guise of ancient vampires trying to eliminate their rivals.

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• Pimp: The Backhanding: Spoofing a different type of underworld, this card game from White Wolf's sister company, Arthaus, features pimps who collect cash while keeping their ho's in line.

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For many of us, our knowledge of "pen-and-paper" role-playing games starts and ends with high school rounds of Dungeons & Dragons. You — or maybe your brother — would use graph paper and lead figurines to plot out missions into mythological castles, with winners rescuing princesses and losers winding up in a dragon's stomach.

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What Frodo Baggins and Conan the Barbarian are to D&D, Anne Rice's chic bloodsuckers are to White Wolf's World of Darkness line, which put the young company on the map in 1991 with the launch of Vampire: The Masquerade. Games hinge less on mano-a-mano fights than on staggeringly complex and intricate power struggles between factions of Machiavellian monsters.

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Justin Achilli, White Wolf's 31-year-old manager of editing and development, has played various role-playing games since he was 9 years old but got bitten by White Wolf in his early 20s. "A girlfriend introduced me to White Wolf games and from that point on, I was in full-bore nerd mode. Pen-and-paper play ran about four hours each week, and often to about twice that. I was always typecast as a vampire from the Ventrue clan. They're aristocratic, blue-blood, old-money vampires — basically, everything I'm not!"

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Becoming seriously involved with White Wolf games can become a way of life. Each month the company publishes five or six game books (some in hardback volumes with hundreds of pages) that feature overlapping continuity and can be played in weekly "chronicles" for literally years. Achilli became an ardent participant in live-action versions of the game, which would involve dozens of players gathering in costume. "I tended to wear dark, understated suits. The guy who looks the most like a vampire is usually the one who gets killed first."

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More flamboyant fans go all-out, from capes to fangs to leather corsets. "We're one of the last cultures where there's still a market for hatboxes," quips marketing director Phillipe Boulle. This year's Dragon*Con fantasy convention includes a three-night, live-action Vampire game with an anticipated 60 to 70 players, and White Wolf's annual fan meeting, the International Camarilla Conclave held in Phoenix this Halloween, could draw up to 1,000.

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Achilli spends less time playing games during his off time these days. "If you're involved with games 40, 60 hours a week, the last thing in the world you want to do when you come home is play one," he says. But writing and designing games has turned White Wolf's creators into unlikely celebrities. Achilli signed autographs for more than 500 people lined up at a convention in Rio de Janeiro last year.

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At a time when electronic console games like PlayStations earn fortunes, burn hours of playing time and dazzle with flashy graphics, "pen-and-paper" games can feel a little ... 20th century. But White Wolf workers point to their synergies with videogame companies, who license paper versions of electronic games and vice versa.

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Oscar Garza, White Wolf's organized play coordinator and a former champion player of the company's collectible card game, Vampire: The Eternal Struggle, compares electronic vs. face-to-face games to online vs. real poker. "If I'm sitting at the table with people, I can bluff. I can say, 'I've got a ton of cards I can beat this guy with,' and if they believe me, that gives me an edge."

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And at heart, White Wolf's games offer face-to-face camaraderie that computer monitors can't. "It's much more akin to the Tuesday night card game than guys zoning out with an electronic game like World of Warcraft," says Boulle.

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"Not that we don't do that, too."