Vampires lie in coffins by day and trending by night.

That means: It has become a little quieter around them since they went from being feared predators to bats of pop culture in films and series from the last vampire mania from “Blade” to “Buffy” to “Bis(s) zum Dawn”.

But they were never quite dead.

A world in which vampires are still allowed to be vampires, in other words: powerful fantastic beings whose machinations keep each other and other creatures of darkness in check in the great world-encompassing game of intrigue is the "World of Darkness".

Axel Weidemann

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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Started as a demanding pen & paper role-playing game that requires reading and patience and is also pursued with bloody seriousness in its life-action version, it describes a world once conceived by the Swedish role-playing publisher White Wolf, which is quite similar to ours, just a touch darker: there is less hope in the heart, but a little more lace.

It's called "Gothic Punk" in technical jargon.

In this world vampires, werewolves, vampire hunters, the catholic church, magicians and demons are busy making life or being undead difficult and rebelling against something.

You could also call the setting "gothic puberty", but that wouldn't take away from its momentum.

To save the honor of the werewolves it should be said that they embody something like the good guys here,

a kind of gripping proto-organization of "Fridays for Future".

They are called to protect the earth mother "Gaia" and meet earthly environmental sinners with tooth and claw.

In the original RPG of the series, Vampire: The Masquerade, as long as the player character doesn't meet the wrong contemporaries, the longevity of the dramatic staff allows you to play through era-spanning campaigns where you, as a vampire, witness the founding of Constantinople and something Lucky learns what or who really led to the city's fall in 1453.

Nothing new: an intrigue at the prince's court

Since the turn of the millennium, the world of darkness has also been embraced by the video game industry ("Vampire: The Masquerade - Redemption" in 2000 and "Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines" in 2004), but it hasn't been until now, thanks to the developers of " Big Bad Wolf” with “Vampire: The Masquerade – Swansong” can be virtually immersed in the same again.

While the two predecessors still placed a lot of value on action elements, "Swansong" is an almost flawless "adventure" in which the player slips into the roles of three vampires in Boston in order to track down an intrigue at the prince's court .

Because, despite being threatened on all sides, the majority of vampire society has not been able to say goodbye to their antediluvian organization, which divides their world into domains that are in turn ruled by a prince and his entourage, or to put an end to one another .

At the highest level, two sects cross each other: the Camarilla (vampires are to maintain the masquerade and rule the world in secret) and the Sabbat (vampires are to step out of the shadows and conquer humanity).

There is also animosity between and within the various clans - and in the end one of the ancient vampires with godlike abilities pulls the strings anyway, who only do all this as a kind of hobby to drive away boredom.