To my mind, one of those reasons is that any elevator pitch you offered for the game would either be a) way too long and complicated to be meaningfully described as an “elevator pitch” or b) extremely misleading due to all the detail it left out. The most recent-but-one attempt at this, Beast: the Primordial, was something of a botch, for many and varied reasons, not all of which were to do with the actual design of the game (but which certainly left a bad taste in people’s mouths and made them disinclined to be generous to it). Still, the tricky thing here is to come up with a splat which feels distinct enough from the existing ones that you can offer a compelling answer to the question “why is this not just a supplement for Earlier Game?”, and which has a cool, vivid elevator pitch which quickly and succinctly sums up the appeal of the line to get people hooked. Some might question the creative necessity of such – I often do – but there is a compelling commercial argument, in the sense that as is often the case with RPG lines core books tend to sell way, way better than supplements do. However, now Onyx Path has hit this point, it must turn its attention to considering the possibilities of new lines.
With the second edition of Chronicles creating some system space between it and the standard World of Darkness iterations of the Storyteller system, and the second editions of the earlier Chronicles games doing a good job of dialling up what worked well and scaling back on what fell flat, to the point where I can confidently say (for example) that Mage: the Awakening is a just plain better game and setting than Mage: the Ascension, which labours under a fatal burden of lingering 1990s nonsense which no amount of well-intentioned labour can quite fix.
But this varies: even in its second edition, Vampire: the Requiem hits a lot of the same notes as Vampire: the Masquerade, and arguably more artfully. Geist isn’t all that much like Wraith and Demon: the Descent has only hazy thematic connections to Demon: the Fallen. Admittedly, some of the Chronicles equivalents are fairly distant from their World of Darkness forebears, particularly since the resurrection of the original World of Darkness has meant that the Chronicles no longer need to be a safe haven for players of the old games starved for new material. Chronicles has long since passed the point where it’s produced equivalents to the old World of Darkness game lines.
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