I received an email today from someone who was interested in reviving the old RPGWire site for use with the original World of Darkness materials:
Hello,I would like to start out by saying that the works you have
done on a lot of your projects have been remarkable. A good number of
the people I have talked to have to agree with this. RPGwire was a very
nice site, and made the creation of characters for the World of Darkness
very easy and efficient. It is a great unknown to many people to why
such a wonderful site just one day disappeared without any note. There
were many theories to why, but that’s neither here nor there. What all
of this is about is that I and others would like to see this site once
more exist. Ever since the Old World of Darkness was ended, at the (in
many peoples’ opinion) wrongfully ended and the new (Yet no where as
good as the original) New World of darkness came out, all good OWoD
sites have met the same fate.In hopes to keep OWoD alive, and keep those still faithful to it, is to
revitalize as many of these sites as we can, which RPGwire being one of
the best. A number of people online and offline could really benefit to
its return. I and others who run a cross platform game of OWoD see
RPGwire to simplify and ease the character creation process. We have
people who are willing to do whatever it takes to work on what ever is
needed for the site. We would like to ask what the demise of RPGwire
was, and if anything remains, or what is needed on your (if it’s not too
much of an inconvenience) part, or ours to bring it back. Whether it
means the need of us finding a domain and place to host, or whichever
depending on what we find out if you do reply. Hopefully you get this
and have time for a reply.Thanks,
Samuel Benke.
Thanks for your interest in RPGWire.
The RPGWire site was originally intended as a news resource for fans of RPGs, not just White Wolf. I shopped around the idea of distributing articles from discrete sites, such as nocturnis.net, but was met mostly with resistance to the idea of even partial syndication, which is practically ubiquitous these days via RSS.
So I turned RPGWire into a character sheet generator for mostly my own purposes. Originally, this idea was to be coupled with a scenario-building tool that I never completed, in which the characters from RPGWire could be tapped as well-developed NPCs for use in new contributing author scenarios.
It was soon afterwards that a friend of mine and I were contracted by White Wolf to produce the infamous White Wolf Character Generator CD - A nightmare project that took over a year and was not completed by our group primarily due to inadequacies in White Wolf’s ability to reproduce their issues with the software anywhere other than their office.
We terminated our project when my daughter was born, and I have been involved in few other things with White Wolf since, having grown a distaste for the material after having lived in it for so long.
RPGWire continued to live on, though. People were still adding characters and managing their sheets online. I would still get sporadic requests to add some feature or another, which I had no intention of doing.
Sometime around 2003, I suppose, I decided that paying for maintenance on the site wasn’t worth it. After all, I was paying for hosting for software on a system that I didn’t even play any more; software that had been outdated by the release of new game books - not the NEW World of Darkness, but the 3rd Edition books.
I offered the domain and its software for sale via the RPGWire forum at any reasonable offer, but there were no takers. And so the RPGWire.com domain has been bought up by one of those domain squatters, who is now happily hosting advertising for video games via Google’s AdSense program. More power to them, I say.
I believe that the code and database for the site are still around here somewhere, perhaps archived on a CD or something. I’m not really interested in offering them for sale again, and I’m certainly not interested in putting up the site again on my own. I’m currently deeply involved in WordPress development, and have many, many other projects that I would rather be working on (and paying for) than something that isn’t going to serve my gaming needs, which are now limited mostly to irregular once-weekly sessions of 3.5E D&D.
So that’s the status of things. I’m not sure it’s what you wanted to hear, but that’s where things stand.
