Good news, spooky nerds: The World Of Darkness games are becoming TV shows and movies
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Arrival screenwriter Eric Heisserer is teaming up with production company Hivemind (from The Witcher and The Expanse) and The Punisher and Castle writer/producer Christine Boylan to develop a “shared universe” based on the World Of Darkness line of tabletop role-playing games created by Mark Rein-Hagen in 1991. If you’re not familiar, the World Of Darkness encompasses things you may have heard of like Vampire: The Masquerade, Werewolf: The Apocalypse, and Hunter: The Reckoning, which are all separate games that take place in the same cool goth-punk world and focus on various supernatural creatures going about their goth lives. Unlike Dungeons & Dragons, they’re less about fighting enemies and more about telling stories and cosplaying as your vampire OC.
The World Of Darkness stuff has been adapted into loads of other mediums, like video games and books and comics (plus one short-lived TV show), and now it’s being translated into some kind of interconnected movie/TV universe. The Hollywood Reporter story doesn’t get into exactly what the creative team is planning or where any of this might end up, but it’s almost certainly being positioned as the next Game Of Thrones-y entertainment franchise. It also sounds like Heisserer and Boylan are going to specifically focus on some of the timely themes that the original games embraced, with Boylan noting that they “always made a point of including equal gendered characters, protagonists and antagonists of every race, and representation of all creeds,” which allowed the games to become “a place where women, POC, and the LGBTQI community feel welcome.”
Paradox Interactive, the video game publisher that currently owns the rights to World Of Darkness, is also involved in all of this. It’s been working on a sequel to cult-classic World Of Darkness video game Vampire: The Masquerade—Bloodlines for years, but development has been… let’s say troubled.