Interview: Eddy Webb and Rich Thomas from White Wolf\CCP

Hey everyone! Eddy Webb and Rich Thomas from White Wolf\CCP have stopped by today to hang out a little and talk games and digital revolutions!

• Okay guys, you’re only as good as your geek cred, so what is it that makes you guys geeks?

EW: Being an incorrigible gamer isn’t enough? Well, I also know a disturbing amount about Transformers, Sherlock Holmes, and professional wrestling, when I’m not making games or writing.

RT: I’m not just a geek gamer, I’m a geek dad passing it down to a whole ‘nother generation. D&D, Dr. Who, Buffy, Wild, Wild West, my complete run of The Avengers, Elfquest, and Astro City – all stuff I’ve enjoyed with my kids. I’ve hung out with Fuji from Ultra Man and Morimoto from Iron Chef. But like Eddy says, end of the day, we make and play games for a living – we couldn’t do that if we weren’t massive geeks.

• If you two could have any superpowers to make a dynamic duo teamup, what would they be?

EW: At the Grand Masquerade (GM) convention, I learned that my superpower appears to be “get lost in New Orleans, even if I have a map.” I’m sure it’ll be useful at some point.

RT: Hmmm. If it’s a team-up then my powers have to relate to Eddy’s in a semi-useful way, I guess. How about “Able to find the bars with Sazerac cocktails even if lost”?

• Awesome, so what do you guys do at WW\CCP?

RT: I’m Creative Director for CCP Transmedia and White Wolf (WW). Basically, I define the overall strategy and goals for projects that aren’t MMOs and then make sure they’re created to the highest quality. Sometimes that means I’ll fall back on my old skills and art direct, do graphic design, or illustrate, as well.

EW: I’m the Senior Developer for CCP Transmedia and White Wolf. Basically I take the strategy Rich mentioned and break it down into individual projects, which I then manage (and sometimes contribute to) to make sure they stay on track. I balance Rich well – I’m the writer half to his artistic half.

• Tell us a little about WW and CCP.  What exactly is their relationship?

RT: CCP and WW merged over five years ago in order to bring WW’s years of experience to the EVE universe and CCP’s MMO building genius to WoD. This enabled those of us from WW originally to really stretch what we could do in terms of tabletop RPGs, including allowing us to change our entire publishing model to PDFs and Print on Demand. Now any WW fan will be able to order a PDF or PoD book from both Worlds of Darkness, or Exalted, or any of our settings.

EW: I’ve been working with the company since the merger, so there’s never really been much of a divide between “White Wolf” and “CCP” in my head. It’s been more “these are the guys who work on MMOs” and “these are the guys who work on books.” But even that’s been getting blurrier and blurrier over time.

• What games are you guys making right now? And give us a quick synopsis of each.

EW: Right now we’re getting started on both Werewolf: The Apocalypse 20^th Anniversary Edition, as well as Mummy for the new World of Darkness. Werewolf will be a celebration of twenty years of the Apocalypse property, and Mummy is a whole new game taking playing a mummy into whole new directions.

RT: Also, for the first time in seven years we’re working on new Vampire the Masquerade products; following up our gratifyingly successful Vampire 20^th Edition book with the V20 Companion and Children of the Revolution. Another project is Victorian Lost - a book detailing play in a Victorian era where the fogs of London conceal gateways into The Hedge from Changeling: the Lost. There’s going to be everything that makes that era cool, plus Changelings and a touch of steampunk.

• I was certainly a fan of World of Darkness and New WoD as a break from the D&D mechanisms all RPG’ers knew about.  What gave you guys the inspiration for the game system and settings?

RT: The goal of the earliest incarnations of the World of Darkness, and this really carried through any of our books, was to have the rules serve the story and the roleplaying experience. And the story deliver mood and drama so that the way the rules were used supported that.

EW: Absolutely. The World of Darkness games were the first to bring narrative language like “scenes” and “chapters” to gaming, and that dramatic undercurrent is entwined in our designs, I believe.

• So we’re at the 20^th anniversary of Vampire the Masquerade, what’s that like having a game that’s been a standard for so long?

RT: Having worked on the first book, it’s exhilarating. I heard from a lot of fans at GM last week that we’d changed their lives, inspired careers (particularly gratifying for me when they became visual artists), and taught them about ideas, religions, places; all outside their own experiences. Wow.

EW: I met my wife through Vampire, so it was particularly exciting and nerve-wrecking to work on a property that meant so much to me personally. I spent a lot of time working to make sure it felt right and was treated with the right amount of respect, while at the same time making the hard choices that a book like this needed. It certainly was not an easy task.

• One of the things we’ve talked about in the past is the move of game developers and content providers to digital or hybrid publication formats.  You guys have actually moved recently to the same all digital model.  Do you think digital formats are going to be replacing print in the future?

EW: Replace? Hardly. I think that the ongoing discussion talking about either/or models is too narrow. Ideally, I’d love for our games to be format-agnostic. It won’t matter if one player has a physical print book and another one has a tablet and a third uses a laptop; they’re all playing the same game.

RT: Exactly. There’s nothing like the feel of a book in your hands – but how you get that book will continue to change. And while that is changing, you’ll be able to get the same info in various forms of ePubs that will have other advantages that the buyer can pick and choose from.

• What are some of the benefits you guys see to digital publication?

RT: Notice how I segued right into this question? For the fans, there’s the ability to get our entire back catalog, hold all those PDF’s in their tablet, and have access at any gaming session – all without breaking their backs carrying 15 pounds of books. For WW, it’s the idea that we aren’t fighting for shelf space, which means we can offer all of our books with the infinite shelf space of our publishing partner DriveThruRPG. Actually, that’s pretty good for the fans too.

EW: Rich is a master at the segue. But it’s true – each format has its own advantages, and being able to have an entire reference library at your fingertips that you can quickly search are a couple of the major benefits to digital products.

• How have your fans been responding to the change?

EW: Overall, very positively. There are still people that feel that PDFs are “killing” physical books, but as we put more and more of the print-on-demand books out, that seems to be subsiding. The community is really starting to get their heads around this model of a spectrum of media for the same content, and we’re hearing a lot of positive discussion around it.

RT: And I really understand the concerns – it’s why we never thought that just moving to PDFs was enough. But for years the quality of Print on Demand just wasn’t good enough – so I wouldn’t OK publishing our books that way. But now, I’ve seen some PoDs that you can’t tell weren’t the original printing- and the quality is just getting better from there.

• So what can fans look forward to on the horizon for WW\CCP?  Any word on Mummy?

EW: I just got a first draft of a bible treatment for Mummy as I’m writing this. I think there’s going to be some exciting things on that horizon. Beyond that, we certainly want to keep working hard on getting our older RPG books available in print-on-demand, as well as exploring new areas.

RT: Mummy is also where we’re going to be trying something we’re calling a ‘virtual box set”. The idea is to create a bundle of electronic products including splitting Mummy into two books, adding an adventure as a third element, maybe a sound file to play in the background, perhaps an interactive character sheet- that sort of thing- and let the fans opt to buy those parts all together in a “box” or separately, or just a single Mummy volume like we’ve always done before.

• Okay last one, and given the current state of the possible zombiepocolypse we may need to be ready to go underground, so if you could only take 3 things/party members into a dungeon with you what/who would they be?

EW: A gun, a shovel, and a vampire-hunting kit.

RT: A crowbar, a crossbow and quarrels, and Aaron Voss who wrote the gun tables for V20- he’ll bring the survival gear.

For our readers, if you want to keep pace with the latest news from White Wolf\CCP you can find them on Twitter @wwpublishing or online at www.white-wolf.com. So thanks to Eddy and Rich for hanging out a little with us and look out for the upcoming winners of the GC & WW\CCP cosplay contest.

Eddy Webb

Rich Thomas