Jess Lanzillo, former vice president of franchise and product for Dungeons and Dragons, has announced that she left this role to become creative director at White Wolf. White Wolf is best known for publishing rival TTRPG Vampire The Masquerade, and Lanzillo says it’s “directly responsible for convincing teenage me that games could be serious art”.
Lanzillo announced her new position via LinkedIn on July 10. “It’s official”, she says, “a lifetime of vampire LARPing has somehow led to me becoming Creative Director for the newly relaunched White Wolf”. “Turns out ‘extensive vampire roleplay experience’ is actually a legitimate professional qualification for exactly one job!”
“Now I get to bring my full creative arsenal — years of building worlds, creating awesome games, and, yes, extensive costumed vampire experience — to help share the possibilities of World of Darkness with everyone who hasn’t discovered it yet”, she adds.
Lanzillo revealed that she was leaving Wizards of the Coast on June 16 after eight years working in various roles on D&D and Magic: The Gathering. Coincidentally, her announcement came the day before Wizards announced that another prominent D&D figure, Todd Kenreck, had been made redundant. On the same day, top designers Jeremy Crawford and Chris Perkins – who had themselves departed from D&D a few months before – announced that they were joining up-and-coming competitor Daggearheart.
In true vampiric form, White Wolf is a company that has been recently resurrected. First founded in 1991, it was taken over by CCP Games in 2006 before being sold to Paradox Interactive in 2015.
In 2018, White Wolf received backlash for publishing Vampire: The Masquerade content that featured content based around anti-LGBTQ+ purges in Chechnya. After the scandal, Paradox announced that White Wolf would no longer operate as a separate entity, and it would stop publishing products internally. White Wolf was rebranded to World of Darkness, and a large portion of its work in the next few years was cooperating with licensees.
White Wolf’s resurrection as a brand in May 2025 marks the return of in-house tabletop RPG publishing. Presumably, this will be a large part of Jess Lanzillo’s new role, as well as work on the upcoming Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines 2. The videogame is currently set to release in October 2025.
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