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World of Darkness commission guide: Vampire the Masquerade, Werewolf the Apocalypse, and beyond

Hector G. · Design Vortex founderMay 25, 20268 min read

Imogen emailed me about her V5 character on a Sunday night in March, and the first thing she wrote was, "She passes for human at thirty paces. I want the painting to fail that test." That is the World of Darkness brief in miniature. The character lives in the same world the reader does — cell phones, leather jackets, a bar two blocks from your apartment — and the painting has to honor that mundane register while letting one small detail tell the audience something has gone very wrong.

This is a working guide to commissioning art in the World of Darkness shared universe — Vampire the Masquerade (V5), Werewolf the Apocalypse (W5), Hunter the Reckoning, Mage the Ascension, and the looser corners around them. If you play in one of these games and you want a portrait that reads as modern but not normal, this is the brief I'd want you to bring me.

What the World of Darkness actually looks like
Vampire the Masquerade: clan as visual shorthand
Werewolf the Apocalypse: tribe, breed, and the Crinos problem
Hunter the Reckoning: the regular person who knows too much
Mage the Ascension: the hardest brief in the line
Era markers: when in the modern century does your character live
The "modern but supernatural" tonal register
Common mistakes in WoD briefs
How to write the brief

What the World of Darkness actually looks like

It looks like the world outside your window. That's the part new clients keep skipping past, because they want the painting to feel "Gothic" and they reach for the visual shorthand of capes and candelabras and crypts. Those are valid in specific corners of the WoD setting — a Tremere chantry, a Sabbat ritual, an elder's haven — but they are the exception. The default register of the World of Darkness is your city, your decade, your neighborhood, with one or two things off.

The line's whole appeal is that the supernatural is hidden inside the mundane. A vampire in a hoodie at a bus stop at 3am. A werewolf in a flannel shirt walking out of a Home Depot. A mage waiting tables. The painting has to commit to the mundane half before the supernatural half can land. If the character is dressed like a Renaissance fair refugee, the portrait isn't WoD — it's generic dark fantasy, and the genre's whole tension collapses.

So the first conversation I have with any WoD client is: where on the human-to-monster scale does this character sit, visually? Some characters can still walk into a coffee shop. Some can't. The brief needs to tell me which.

Vampire the Masquerade: clan as visual shorthand

V5 is the most-commissioned game in the line, and it carries the most visual baggage. Most clients arrive having already picked a clan, and the clan does a lot of design work for you if you let it. Here is the shorthand I work from. I keep it intentionally non-exhaustive — for the full visual cheat sheet across V5 and earlier editions, I'd point you at the WoD clans visual reference.

Brujah. Modern punk, leather, denim, band shirts that aren't ironic. The Brujah I paint usually looks like they would be the second-loudest person in any room. Visible tattoos, hands that have been in fights, a coat that has been bled on.
Toreador. The clan that still cares about looking good. Tailored. Expensive without being loud. A specific obsession — a single piece of jewelry, a brand of cigarette, a perfume. The face does most of the work and the face is almost too symmetrical.
Ventrue. A suit that fits. The suit is the entire brief. I paint Ventrue with the assumption that they have stopped caring about trends but still care about cut. Greying at the temples even on younger characters.
Nosferatu. The deformity is the brief. I push back on clients who want "ugly but still hot" — that's not the clan. The Nosferatu I paint look like something is wrong with them, and the painting has to commit. Sewer light, gloves, a hood not as a costume but as the only way to be in public.
Malkavian. This is the hardest clan to paint, because the visual cue is behavior and a still image can't show behavior. I lean on small disjunctions — one button done up wrong, hair that is half-set, eyes that don't quite focus on the same point. Whatever the brief asks for, I undercut by one degree.
Tremere. Modern witch. The blood magic stays implied. I paint Tremere with their hands doing something — holding a glass, sketching a sigil on a napkin, marking up a page — because the clan's whole register is craft.
Gangrel. The closest clan to feral. Eyes that have the wrong pupil shape. Nails too long, in a way that reads as deliberate rather than vain. A coat that has been outdoors for years.

What I avoid: clan-symbol earrings, embroidered clan crests on lapels, anything that turns the character into a heraldic tournament knight. V5 specifically pushed away from that aesthetic and toward modern dress. The painting should follow.

A V5 portrait that lands is one where you could put the character in a real bar in a real city and they'd order a drink and nobody would clock them — until the rim light caught the eye-shine, and then you'd know. That's the register.

The vampire painting that works isn't the one that screams vampire. It's the one that whispers it, once, in a single detail your eye finds three seconds in.

Werewolf the Apocalypse: tribe, breed, and the Crinos problem

W5 is the second most-commissioned WoD game in the studio, and it asks one design question V5 doesn't: which form?

A Garou — the in-setting word for werewolf — has five forms, from full human (Homid) through wolf-in-a-suit (Glabro) to full hulking battle form (Crinos) to dire wolf (Hispo) to actual wolf (Lupus). Painting a Garou character means picking which form goes on the canvas. The hardest choice is Homid versus Crinos. Most of the cool art the line is known for shows Crinos — the eight-foot tall furred warrior with claws — and most of the time the character actually lives in their Homid form.

My usual recommendation is to paint the Homid form with a Crinos shadow. Either literally — the human figure cast a wrong-shaped shadow against the wall behind them — or via a smaller cue: a slightly elongated jaw, eyes that catch light the wrong way, posture that says I have not been still all night and I am about to stop being still right now. The viewer reads "person" first and "wolf" second, which is exactly how the character moves through their own life.

If a client really wants the Crinos form, I paint it. But I push for the Crinos to be in motion, mid-action, glimpsed rather than posed. A Crinos standing heroically with arms crossed reads as fursuit. A Crinos shouldering through a doorway, half-lit, half-out-of-frame, reads as the thing the character actually is.

Tribes do less visual work than V5 clans, but they carry tone. Black Furies tend toward modern feminist iconography woven into the gear — armbands, patches, a specific kind of practical fashion. Bone Gnawers look like the kind of unhoused person you'd cross the street to avoid, and they would prefer you did. Get of Fenris are the closest to traditional Viking-coded werewolves, but the dress is modern — a metal band shirt under a leather jacket, not pelts. Glass Walkers are the tribe most at home in a city — they dress for board rooms and parkour in equal measure.

What I always ask the client: which form, which tribe, and which side of the war is your character actually on? W5 is a darker, more ambiguous edition than the editions before it, and the brief usually wants to honor that.

Hunter the Reckoning: the regular person who knows too much

Hunter is the WoD game most aligned with the broader modern character art commission guide, because the player character is just a person. No fangs. No claws. No magic. A schoolteacher, a paramedic, a retired cop, a delivery driver — someone who saw something they shouldn't have, and now they hunt.

This is the easiest WoD brief to paint and the hardest to make interesting. The character has no built-in visual shorthand for the supernatural. The painting has to find the resonance — the thing that says this regular person has been changed by what they know. I covered this problem in more depth in the regular-person character commission guide, and almost everything in that piece applies to Hunter.

What I look for in a Hunter brief: the work clothes, the small piece of weird tech or DIY gear the character has built or bought, the wound that hasn't healed right, the eye that has stopped expecting normal. I paint Hunters in the lighting of their actual job — fluorescent tube light, dashboard glow, an ER hallway, the wash from a kitchen pass — because that's where most of their life still happens.

A good Hunter portrait is a portrait that wouldn't look out of place on a real LinkedIn profile, until you spent twenty seconds with it.

Mage the Ascension: the hardest brief in the line

Mage is the hardest WoD game to commission, because the character's whole identity is cosmological worldview, and you can't paint a worldview. You can only paint the symbols that attach to it.

A Hermetic mage looks different from a Cult of Ecstasy mage who looks different from a Virtual Adept who looks different from an Akashic Brother. The Tradition does a lot of the design work — robes vs. hoodies vs. dance clothes vs. martial arts wear — but the better path is to paint the Paradox. Paradox in Mage is what happens when reality pushes back against the magic. The visual reads as: things in the background going slightly wrong, books on a shelf bent at impossible angles, a reflection that doesn't match the face, a small object floating that no one in the painting has noticed.

A Mage portrait that lands shows the character looking dead at the viewer, looking entirely modern, while one corner of the painting bends quietly out of true.

I have only painted three Mage commissions and all three were harder than the average V5 piece. Tell me you want a Mage in the first line of the brief and I will block more time for the sketch phase.

Era markers: when in the modern century does your character live

The World of Darkness has been running since 1991. It is not specific about its decade, which means the brief has to be. A V5 character can look like 1992 or like 2024, and the difference is enormous.

Things that anchor a portrait to a specific era without dating it:

Phones in or out of frame. A flip phone reads early-2000s. A specific iPhone model reads dated. A non-specific dark rectangle in the pocket reads timeless modern.
Cuts of clothing. Wide lapels and skinny jeans both date a portrait. A well-cut leather jacket, dark denim, a plain wool coat — those age slowly. I covered this in detail in the modern fashion in character art guide.
Specific brand iconography. A logo on a chest reads as 2024 the moment 2025 starts. I paint logos out by default unless the brief specifically asks for them.
Hair. Hair dates faster than clothing. I lean on cuts that read across decades — a long bob, a crop, a fade — and avoid trend cuts.

If the campaign is set in a specific year, tell me. If it isn't, I default to timeless modern, which is the version of the present day that won't make the painting look like a fossil in five years.

The "modern but supernatural" tonal register

This is the WoD-specific question that almost no other genre asks. The painting has to feel modern and feel like the modern is wrong. The way I think about it:

The setting is mundane. Bar, alley, kitchen, car interior, ordinary street.
The lighting is theatrical in a single specific way. Streetlight sodium yellow falling across a face the wrong way. A neon sign reflected in an eye that shouldn't be reflecting that color. A single warm window behind a figure in the foreground that should be silhouetted but isn't.
The character is mostly normal. Dressed normally, posed normally, doing something normal.
One small detail breaks the normality. The eye-shine of an animal in a human face. A reflection in a mirror that's slightly behind the figure. A shadow that doesn't match the body throwing it. A hand resting on a table with one finger held a fraction longer than it should be.

That single broken detail is where the painting lives. Everything else in the frame exists to make that one detail feel wrong.

Common mistakes in WoD briefs

A few patterns I have learned to push back on early:

Asking for "Gothic" when you mean "modern with supernatural undertone." The visual shorthand of Gothic — capes, candles, crypts — works against the WoD register. I gently redirect to streetlights, leather, and bars.
Listing every Discipline the character has bought. I don't need to paint Auspex, Dominate, and Celerity into the portrait. I need to know which one matters most and what it does to the body.
Sending only Bloodlines-era reference art. The classic Hunter the Reckoning and VTM cover art is gorgeous, but it leans early-2000s, and a portrait built off it will feel dated. Mix older art with current street fashion photography for a brief that ages better.
Forgetting the era. If you don't tell me when, I'll default to now. If you wanted 1998 Vienna or 1979 Berlin, the brief has to say so.
Skipping the IP note. WoD characters built on White Wolf / Renegade Game Studios IP are fair-use commentary in critical writing, but the painting itself is a personal commission for your table — not commercial publication. I'll deliver as such by default. If you're an indie publisher with licensing in hand, tell me up front.

How to write the brief

The brief I want for a WoD piece looks like this:

One sentence: the character's one-line pitch. ("A Toreador who hasn't gone to a gallery opening in nineteen years and is finally going tonight.")
Game line, clan/tribe/Tradition, era.
Three things they're wearing or carrying that anchor them to the modern world.
One thing that signals what they actually are. Subtle.
A reference image of the setting — a real bar, alley, kitchen, doorway — and a reference image of the character's face energy. Two refs is enough.

If you've worked through the broader commission brief guide already, you're 80% of the way there. WoD just adds the era question and the supernatural-detail question on top.

Closing notes

The reason I love taking WoD commissions is that they sit in the exact middle of the studio's range. They're not full-fantasy and they're not full-realist. They ask for a painted portrait of someone you might actually meet, with one thing wrong. That's a more interesting problem than most fantasy briefs, and a more grounded one than most horror briefs. It's a genre that lives next door to the horror commission guide without quite belonging to it.

If you have a Vampire, Werewolf, Hunter, or Mage you've been meaning to get painted, send me a brief — the WoD pieces are some of my favorite work to take. The portfolio has a few modern-supernatural pieces in it already, and the character work service page lays out the timing and the revisions. The faster you write the one-line pitch, the sooner the character ends up on the wall — and the sooner I can find the one detail that makes the rest of the painting feel wrong.