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So as of today I'm officially 33 years old. To celebrate I'll post a tip on how to make use of your old World of Darkness supplements for material to the excellent sword & sorcery rpg In a Wicked Age.
This idea stems from a short story game I run a couple years ago in Jyväskylä. The term short story game (novelliroolipeli or noverope in Finnish) was coined by our group; we noted we were too busy with life to complete long campaigns and opted for a story now! kind of solution -- cut to the chase and keep it short. No grinding, you want to play a master assassin, you play it now. No in-play setting of situations -- you want to play a guy with wife and children you don't have to woo, marry, build your housee etc. in play, just set that up pre-game. Et cetera. This was a couple of years before we even heard of Forge-style games.
But the game in question was based on the World of Darkness Hong Kong sourcebook. I had bought that game a hile ago for another short story game. At that moment I just wanted to see what other gamers thought interesting in Hong Kong, the setting of that other game.
 For the Midnight Dragon (which was the name of the WoD Hong Kong inspired game) I ripped the situation straight from the sourcebook, photocopied the major NPCs and gave them to players to choose as their player characters and run with that. It worked great.
The point being that most of the old World of Darkness sourcebooks seem to have a situation ready to explode and all the main characters (NPCs of course) that are related to the situation. This is exactly what an IAWA oracle brings to the table (and more).
While it isn't necessarily less work than choosing a random oracle, I think that prepping the sourcebook material into a IAWA starting situation is very painless. Just select a couple of characters to include, let each player choose one as their player character, leave rest to the GM and set up best interests as normal.
It is important to decide how much of the oWoD canon you want to adhere to in your game. For most, I would suggest making an agreement that any setting fact not coming up while setting the best interests is not set until handled during play. This will make the play more fluid in my opinion and negate the need to start browsing WoD sourcebooks in every scene. With a group consisting only of WoD enthusiasts you are of course free to make a different agreement.
A couple of words about why I think this is a good match. First, I think that IAWA and WoD share a similar attitude: Individuals are more important than the society is. At second thought this is probably only true for the NPCs in the sourcebooks, oWoD player characters created by the rules presented in the rulebooks are pretty much mooks only.
The other thing that makes this a good match in my opinion is the graphic and active nature of the powers of different character classes (ha!) in WoD games. The exchange of blows mechanic of IAWA is pretty compatible with it.
So that was the advice, now go play vampires and werewolves if you still have the books rotting in some shelf!
image: Satanica by BATH0RY (creative commons -licensed, attribution, share alike)
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. These abbreviations were adopted so that players can refer specifically to each line and not confuse one with the other. While the rebooted setting is superficially very similar, the overall theme is one of "dark mystery", with an emphasis on the unknown and the personal. The apocalyptic theme present in oWoD has been removed from nWoD, as have the gothic and punk aspects of the world setting. -