There's a running joke in White Wolf that goes something like this: "You know how everyone has that little voice inside your head that tells you when not to say something? Mike (Chaney) is missing his." There was a list of "Things Chaney Is Not Allowed To Say Any More" posted outside his office, and some of the words on there were innovative and exceptionally crude neologisms that are better off stillborn. (He probably likes the word "stillborn," come to think of it.) Everyone will bust out the swears or the ugly speak at a Monday meeting, of course, but Mike is the king of that sort of talk. His wife is much the same way, which means whenever the two of them log on for our WoW weekly pick night, guild chat can get really lively.

Now, I wouldn't go so far as to say that this itch to push at boundaries is entirely emblematic of White Wolf corporate culture, but y'know, it's pretty close. The con parties we've gotten... infamous for throwing are another example of how we roll. And, of course, there are our books. The number one bit of evidence that White Wolf mucks around with boundaries. Some people may well ask if that little voice inside our heads that tells us when not to type something exists. The answer is that yes, of course it does — but it doesn't always feel the need to speak up.

(Okay, before I begin to talk more about what is considered "tasteful" and what is "in poor taste," a brief aside: I am not going to be using the terms "politically correct" or any of their ilk in this. They're valueless. "Politically correct" has become a threadbare excuse for people to be abject dicks to one another, a before-the-fact token apologia meant to shift the blame from the offending party to the offended party. Yeah, it's a tough world out there and you're not going to get far if you wear your hyper-sensitive skin. That doesn't mean that "I'm not going to be politically correct here" is some kind of badge of honor, like protesting "I'm just playing my character!" as an excuse to wreck the enjoyment of everyone else at the gaming table. "Political correctness" is a tarnished and foolish term, but I respect the original intent behind it in the first place: Think About The Other Guy's Perspective Once In A While. And despite enjoying the swears and trash talk, that intent is not such a bad thing.)

It's pretty noticeable that White Wolf books tend to veer a bit toward what might be popularly considered obscene. Even discounting Justin Achilli's "skullfuck" phase, a lot of foul language populates our books, and so do a lot of foul ideas. And of course, ideas that we think are pretty okay but that other people might think are foul. You know, like presenting homosexual characters for reasons other than condemnation. We're pretty content with that. Our two biggest settings are aimed at a fairly mature audience, and their source material is hardly PG in nature. But for all that, there is still a question of taste.

Good taste is ultimately subjective, and therefore observers may not agree whether or not we pursue a tasteful approach to, well, being really tasteless. It also is something that tends to vary somewhat by developer. There is an upper limit, of course; you could easily pitch a project that would be vetoed by management as just too tasteless for us. But it's left to each individual developer to generally set the tone for a line, and to handle judgment calls of individual obscenity or where to draw the lines. Which ultimately works out for the best, I think. There's no way I could have been the developer on the old Dharmabook: Devil-Tigers; I would have been disastrously uncomfortable with the opening comic, and the results might have been diluted on what several people have called our best splatbook ever. And you'll see these boundaries shift and change over time, as a line moves from the hands of one person to another, or even as we developers undergo those little changes that are part and parcel of being human, and our tastes shift ever so slightly.

Generally, I think you'll see that the developers here are interested in pushing boundaries not for the sake of pure shock value (although that definitely has its place in horror), but for communicating a concept or point. Take, for example, the topic of sexuality in Exalted. You find out a lot about the various Exalted's sex lives and their practices, more than is technically our business. That's not to be lurid or titillating, but rather to illustrate that the Realm is a different bunch of societies, with very different morés than our own. It also does help us to understand characters a bit better, of course; a lot of sexual aggression, for instance, may reflect other aspects of a character's personality. There's a strong undercurrent of abuse in Changeling: The Lost, which can be disturbing. On the other hand, being able to address the topic lets us talk about the strength it takes to survive, and the fact that people do survive and can go on to live happy lives instead of always being the victim — a powerful message of hope, if I do say so myself. And to be honest, the ability to define your character's durance means that you can set the "abuse" levels to wherever you feel most comfortable, even to the point of "I was deliriously happy, but then I realized that it was a hollow and artificial happiness, and I needed to go home." The game wouldn't be as potent as it is if we didn't talk about abuse. Nor would it be as elegant if we were more heavy-handed. And that's essentially the premise of the World of Darkness and of Exalted: robust enough to handle mature topics on a regular basis, but not ham-handed enough to make it not worth the bother.

I wasn't a developer at the time that we came up with the Black Dog imprint, designed for us to specifically go darker and/or more mature than usual. (Which was amusing in its own right, named as it was after a pretty comical self-parody subsidiary of Pentex.) At that point I believe that our current developers all thought there were specific ways to push the envelope that would be worth it: specifically, more splatterpunk, more explicit sexual content, and more overall viciousness. If I'm remembering right, the first three products to come out for that were Freak Legion, Destiny's Price and the first Giovanni Chronicles. All three achieved their mission, I think. But the book that justified the Black Dog imprint all on its lonesome was beyond a doubt Charnel Houses of Europe. If you think about the original concept — you play the ghosts of people who died at the concentration camps in Nazi Germany — that can seem pretty tasteless. But so can "a comic book where the story of the Holocaust is told with funny-animal protagonists," and Maus is a work of genius. So, for that matter, is CHoE. But I may be biased.

Black Dog eventually went away when we realized we didn't really need it — we could tell very dark stories and handle quite mature subject matter without the use of the imprint. What's more, we didn't have to go particularly splattery or lewd just to justify "being mature" — we had effectively broadened our range, without having to go to extremes all the time. That's a comfortable place to be, I think. Plenty of freedom to go just as mature as we need to — and we do like making games that involve mature topics.

The practical upshot of all of this from a developer's standpoint is that like so many other things like mechanics and setting expansion, the approach to "mature content" is something generally left to a developer's own cognizance. It's one of the things we have to consider. Is a reference to a supernaturally induced miscarriage handled well enough to justify its inclusion, or is it just gratuitous ick? If you leave too much implied, are you undercutting a scene's impact? Is there such a thing as too much cannibalism? These are tricky questions, and there's no one answer. So it varies from each of us. You'll tend to see a somewhat more subtle and implied level from me, most of the time, except in some cases such as the amount of gore in a Werewolf book. What can I say — my taste for horror was refined by Bradbury rather than King or Lumley. It also depends on the authors; if the writers you work with are neither trying to push the bounds of depravity nor serve up a sterilized document free from any hint of malfeasance, you probably have fewer judgment calls to make. So if you see "the line" jump around from time to time, and wonder why it is that subject material only gently alluded to in one book is dragged out into the spotlight in another, well, perhaps this explanation will help.