Every once in a while, I need to take a week’s worth of this blog and do kind of an Onyx Path Publishing primer.

Just go through our history, who we are, and how and why we do what we do. Usually this sort of “Who the Hell is Onyx Path?” blog is necessitated by external forces; by an influx of questions or misapprehensions here or on other bits of our social media.

And this is no exception.

This installment is brought to you by the letter V and the number 5, in fact.

The recent release of White Wolf‘s Vampire: The Masquerade 5th Edition (v5) has increased the number of folks stopping by here – hi, nice to see ya! – and with WW planning to continue to push further into new venues and media, I’m not thinking we’re going to see less folks confused by who we are and how we relate to White Wolf and V5.

And it is totally understandable that who we are and what we do is not obvious, particularly if you are used to the way the original White Wolf operated as a business. So, first I’m going to talk about Onyx Path‘s evolution through the last six years, and then end with reminding folks that our new Kickstarter campaign for our new game Dystopia Rising: Evolution starts on this coming Wednesday.

So, if you’re an long-time reader and know all this, please feel free to skip down to where I remind folks that our new Kickstarter campaign for our new game Dystopia Rising: Evolution starts on this coming Wednesday.

Okay, everybody else, skootch closer and I’ll tell you a tale. It’s a longer than usual blog post, so get comfortable.

In 1991, a gaming company called White Wolf published a ground-breaking tabletop RPG called Vampire: The Masquerade. It was massively influential and popular. More World of Darkness game lines came out every year, then other game worlds like Trinity and Exalted got lines, and the original WW kept expanding and then contracted big-time. In an effort to spur sales, the World of Darkness was ended in accordance with all the prophesies presented in the various lines, and a New World of Darkness set of game lines began publication.

Unfortunately, while the initial sales of the core rulebooks for each New World of Darkness line were huge, the overall trend of declining sales was not stopped. In an effort to keep publishing and also to evolve into the electronic games market, White Wolf merged with an Icelandic MMO (massive multi-player online game) company named CCP, and began work on a World of Darkness MMO.

For too many reasons to go into here, but maybe I will someday, eventually the project stalled and CCP laid off a lot of the US office, which meant they laid off most of the original White Wolf staff. (Later, the WoD MMO was canceled).

Which is where Onyx Path enters the story.

Onyx Path, that is, not me. I entered the history of WW many years earlier and had, in fact, been with White Wolf for years before Vampire: The Masquerade came out, and was responsible for all the visuals (art, layout, printing) for every project we created. As the WoD MMO was ramping up and our TTRPG publishing conversely was slowing down, they asked me to come over to help with the MMO. While the herculean efforts to make it were occurring, a few of us also put together a side project and convinced CCP to OK its publication.

That project was a special return to TTRPGs: an omnibus edition of VtM celebrating the 20th anniversary of its publication, which is now known as V20. Even with relatively little outreach and selling it from our own webpage, it did pretty darn well.

Even more importantly from my point of view, it reminded me how much I loved making game books.

So when the big layoffs came, I was faced with watching folks who I had hired into WW, some of them more than a decade before, and who had devoted that time to the company, lose their jobs. For me, it was time to go, but I wanted to not just go but to return to TTRPGs and not as an employee, but with my own company.

Thus, in 2012, Onyx Path Publishing was born!

With the feedback from V20 indicating that there were a lot of folks still interested in WW‘s Intellectual Properties (IPs) as TTRPGs, Onyx Path negotiated licenses to create new TTRPG books for the World of Darkness, Exalted, and New World of Darkness game lines. Onyx Path bought outright the Scion, Trinity, and ultimately Scarred Lands game lines that had been originally created and published by White Wolf from CCP.

It was never my intention to try and be the new White Wolf, even if there weren’t still people at CCP who needed to approve what we were doing with the license and might be a tad miffed if I started announcing that. You see, by the time I left, I was WW‘s creative director and responsible for not just visuals but every phase of creating our games. I knew the pitfalls we had fallen into previously and intended Onyx to follow a different Path.

With that in mind, we started with PDFs and then very quickly added physical book Print on Demand (PoD) versions as well via DriveThruRPG.com. The advent of Kickstarter enabled us to create Deluxe books and later books that were traditionally printed in other ways. Getting those books to backers was a challenge, but we kept on with fulfillment shipper after shipper.

Structurally, Onyx Path worked off of the Developer/Writer/Editor to Art Director/Graphic Designer book creation track that we had perfected during the WW days. Our processes were those processes, because that was what the folks I was working with and I knew best. And those creative folks were mostly developers and writers from the olden times of WW, along with some newer folks who were fans of those days. It was great to make books with Justin Achilli, Phil Brucato, Ethan Skemp. and many more folks again, as well as artists I hadn’t worked with in over a decade.

We followed that path of creating new projects for the WW IPs and in a few years I was able to add some new game worlds by working with creators on more of a partnership basis. Thus were Pugmire and Cavaliers of Mars brought onboard. So we had the licensed IPs from WW, these creator-owned lines, and the game lines we owned. I was able to hire some folks on as full-time staff, like Mirthful Mike Chaney as art director and numero uno layout artist, and Rose Bailey to help our developers.

Other than them, though, everyone else was (and pretty much still are) freelance contractors, most of whom have other full-time jobs and create what they create in their “spare time”. Despite that, their devotion to their game lines has been amazing and very gratifying. And while we hammered through a lot of challenges with deadlines, Onyx still published some amazing books and games, revitalizing WoD with our 20th Anniversary lines, Exalted with its 3rd Edition, and 2nd Editions for the Chronicles (New World) of Darkness.

Hold it. Something realllly important happened right at the point we started those 2nd Editions.

CCP sold all of what remained of White Wolf to a Swedish computer game company called Paradox Interactive, and they spun off a new company called…White Wolf! And why not, they bought the name along with all the IPs, after all.

We talked, we tweaked processes to work with how they needed them to be, and we continued with our Tabletop RPG licenses of the WW IPs. Current White Wolf is a lot more hands-on than CCP, as befits a company that want to build those game lines into RPGs plus other venues like computer games and other media like TV and movies. They have a lot more feedback for us on our licensed projects with them, they helped us rebrand the New World of Darkness into the Chronicles of Darkness to better differentiate the lines from WoD, and then, and then…and then they created the latest edition of Vampire: The Masquerade in-house: V5.

So, to be clear: until we started working on V5 Chicago By Night, we at Onyx Path really didn’t contribute anything to V5 directly. WW wanted it to be their baby, and we totally respect that as creators ourselves.

Continuing our clarity moment: we do not own WoD, Chronicles of Darkness, or Exalted – White Wolf does. We can’t OK your screenplay based on your Mage game, we can’t fire that guy who looks like Dracula at WW, and we pitch to WW book ideas for the game lines we have a license for, but they are the ones that OK them so we can work on them. We are one of what they hope to be hundreds of licensees, and WW is at the hub, licensing.

With the way WW is working with licenses, we at Onyx Path may or may not know about another one of the licensees, but we don’t know who is working on a license from White Wolf until WW tells us. We aren’t involved with who gets a license, who they or WW hire to work on a project – we only call the shots on the projects we’re creating under the WW license.

As of this writing and for as far into the future as I can see, Onyx Path is independently owned by your Uncle RichT, and I continue to look at building Onyx to last as a publisher forever, basically. It is a challenge, as we don’t have a safety net of a parent company or investor we can fall back on, so I’m very careful about how and where we expand.

With what I hope is some ongoing strategic thinking, evolution of our company continues.

We currently have four full-time staff members: myself, Mirthful Mike, LisaT in our business office, and Mighty Matt McElroy as our Operations Manager. Rose Bailey left early this year and has already produced about 14 zillion games you can get in on through her Patreon and on DTRPG.com.

Before Rose left, we were already evolving how to work with our developers and writers. We had changed and raised our pay rates, and then began to look at the challenges faced by our freelance creators. While it was obvious that trying to make the old WW processes work just wasn’t ultimately going to get us where we needed to be, we needed to be in a position where Onyx Path could provide more hands-on mentorship for our developers.

First, I lucked into being able to create a role doing just that with Eddy Webb, who had been involved with Onyx Path since the beginning, but now he was set to be our first full-time freelance developer “at-large”. In other words. Eddy was going to work with those developers who needed another dev to cover some of the very diverse responsibilities their position encompasses.

As Eddy and I were working out just what this new thing entailed, Matthew Dawkins approached me wanting to be more involved with Onyx Path. So he became our second of these contracted but full-time devs. And then, with Rose leaving, she suggested an outstanding editor who was kicking ass to step up, and Dixie Cochran became our third development overseer. Meanwhile, I talked James Bell, who has huge customer service experience, into running our Kickstarters full-time.

When you see a game line start to move forward with more and more timely releases, when you just have a blast being part of one of our Kickstarters, when you listen to our weekly Onyx Podcast for more news and insight into what we’re up to; these are the folks doing that.

As a company ethos, we believe that everyone should be able to enjoy and be represented respectfully in our projects and social media, and that, in the words of Buckaroo Bonzai, “we don’t have to be mean”.

I realize that this runs counter to a lot of the internet, but within our social media we do try to live up to that.

Just to come back to the evolution of Onyx Path in terms of our business, we are still working to license to other companies our existing game worlds for a variety of new projects that allow folks to enjoy those worlds in other ways, and to obtain licenses to other worlds that we think can be transformative TTRPG experiences as well as a lot of fun to play.

In fact, our new Kickstarter campaign for our new game Dystopia Rising: Evolution starts on this coming Wednesday.

We continue to offer PDF and PoD versions of our projects on DriveThruRPG.com, and at least our fiction so far on Amazon and the Nook store. Because we have been able to forge excellent relationships with Studio2 Publishing and Indie Press Revolution for post-Kickstarter sales, we have been able to start offering our physical products into retail channels in a way that is healthy for our business model. Studio2 is also able to put the books they handle for us onto Amazon, so you will see more and more of our projects there.

Just look below for even more venues for our projects.

Finally, because we actually do think of the worlds we create as springboards from which we can create art, we’re very proud to be working with several groups of folks who are dedicated to gaming as a therapeutic tool to help people around the world. Our friends at the Bodhana Group and iThrive are out there trying to make the world a better place. There is no doubt in my mind that gaming, and particularly roleplaying games specifically, has changed many lives for the better. I’ve just heard so many stories over the years about just that, and I’m proud the worlds we’ve created have made a difference in the real world.

OK, That’s who we are and what we do. You can all sit back now, lecture-time is over. 🙂

Oh yeah, please don’t forget that our new Kickstarter campaign for our new game Dystopia Rising: Evolution starts on this coming Wednesday. (And there’s even more info in the Blurbs! section below).

Finally, always remember this when you think of Onyx Path Publishing:

Many Worlds, One Path!

BLURBS!

KICKSTARTER:

Our next Kickstarter will be for Dystopia Rising: Evolution starting on Wednesday the 22nd at 2pm EDT.

Dystopia Rising is a post-apocalyptic roleplaying game that quickly grew into a live-action sensation. Now, Onyx Path is pleased to update the live-action setting with Dystopia Rising: Evolution, a tabletop roleplaying game that presents a fresh and exciting take on the post-apocalypse genre.

Dystopia Rising: Evolution will be powered by Onyx Path’s Storypath system, and includes all the rules you need to play as a survivor in the post-apocalypse, including rules for creating characters for up to 24 different Strains, variations on humanity that survived the Fall. It also has details on the powers of faith and psionics, along with advice on running action-adventure stories, webs of personal intrigue, or procedural investigations. And, finally, dozens of antagonists, including a variety of zombies and raiders to use in your series.

Throughout this Kickstarter campaign, we will be posting complete previews of the Dystopia Rising: Evolution manuscript as backer-only updates.

ELECTRONIC GAMING:

As we find ways to enable our community to more easily play our games, the Onyx Dice Rolling App is now live! Our dev team has been doing updates since we launched based on the excellent use-case comments by our community, and this thing is both rolling and rocking!

Here are the links for the Apple and Android versions:

http://theappstore.site/app/1296692067/onyx-dice

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.onyxpathpublishing.onyxdice&hl=en

Three different screenshots, above.

ON AMAZON AND BARNES & NOBLE:

You can now read our fiction from the comfort and convenience of your Kindle (from Amazon) and Nook (from Barnes & Noble).

If you enjoy these or any other of our books, please help us by writing reviews on the site of the sales venue you bought it from. Reviews really, really help us with getting folks interested in our amazing fiction!

Our selection includes these fiction books:

• Vampire: The Masquerade: The Endless Ages Anthology (Kindle, Nook)
• Werewolf: The Apocalypse: Rites of Renown: When Will You Rage II (Kindle, Nook)
• Mage: The Ascension: Truth Beyond Paradox (Kindle, Nook)
• Chronicles of Darkness: The God-Machine Chronicle Anthology (Kindle, Nook)
• Mummy: The Curse: Curse of the Blue Nile (Kindle, Nook)
• Beast: The Primordial: The Primordial Feast Anthology (Kindle, Nook)
• Vampire: The Masquerade: Of Predators and Prey: The Hunters Hunted II Anthology (Kindle, Nook)
• Werewolf: The Apocalypse: The Poison Tree (Kindle, Nook)
• Werewolf: The Apocalypse: Songs of the Sun and Moon: Tales of the Changing Breeds (Kindle, Nook)
• Vampire: The Requiem: The Strix Chronicle Anthology (Kindle, Nook)
• Werewolf: The Forsaken: The Idigam Chronicle Anthology (Kindle, Nook)
• Mage: The Awakening: The Fallen World Chronicle Anthology (Kindle, Nook)
• Vampire: The Masquerade: The Beast Within Anthology (Kindle, Nook)
• Werewolf: The Apocalypse: W20 Cookbook (Kindle, Nook)
• Exalted: Tales from the Age of Sorrows (Kindle, Nook)
• Chronicles of Darkness: Tales of the Dark Eras (Kindle, Nook)
• Promethean: The Created: The Firestorm Chronicle Anthology (Kindle, Nook)
• Demon: The Descent: Demon: Interface (Kindle, Nook)
• Scarred Lands: Death in the Walled Warren (Kindle, Nook)
• V20 Dark Ages: Cainite Conspiracies (Kindle, Nook)
• Chronicles of Darkness: Strangeness in the Proportion (Kindle, Nook)
• Vampire: The Requiem: Silent Knife (Kindle, Nook)
• Mummy: The Curse: Dawn of Heresies (Kindle, Nook)

OUR SALES PARTNERS:

We’re working with Studio2 to get Pugmire out into stores, as well as to individuals through their online store. You can pick up the traditionally printed main book, the Screen, and the official Pugmire dice through our friends there!

https://studio2publishing.com/search?q=pugmire

Looking for our Deluxe or Prestige Edition books? Try this link! http://www.indiepressrevolution.com/xcart/Onyx-Path-Publishing/

Here’s the link to the press release we put out about how Onyx Path is now selling through Indie Press Revolution: https://theonyxpath.com/press-release-onyx-path-limited-editions-now-available-through-indie-press-revolution/

And you can now order Pugmire: the book, the screen, and the dice! http://www.indiepressrevolution.com/xcart/manufacturers.php?manufacturerid=296

SPECIAL W20 and M20 SALE! Huge savings on our Deluxe printing overruns until 8/31! ONE WEEK LEFT!

https://www.indiepressrevolution.com/xcart/Deals-and-Specials/

DRIVETHRURPG.COM:

This week we are responding to the many, many messages asking for V20 Dark Ages Journals! So expect those to go live on our RedBubble store on Wednesday!

Dixie Cochran will be at High Level Games Con in Atlantic City October 12-14, running a Women in Game Design panel, Eddy’s RPG Developer Bootcamp, and possibly making a surprise appearance at another event!