[Game a Day 16] Werewolf: the Apocalypse

[HellHound]

I’ve been playing Vampire since it was first released. As an industrial music DJ, ex punk, and always around the goth community, the game rocked for me. It also introduced a lot of ‘cool’ people to gaming. Werewolf was the second game in the “world of darkness” setting created by Vampire, this time focused on lycanthropic spiritual ecoterrorists.

If you dig around enough on the net, you’ll find the reviews of Werewolf when it was first released. It was very much a game of black and white, with the motto “When will you rage?” implying that rage against the rape of nature by modern ‘civilization’ is the one answer to the problem. The werewolves are the good guys, who can see the spiritual damage the rape and pillage of nature has on the earth itself, and the spirits who dwell linked to it.

However, as the game evolved, so did the ethics. Why was humanity so messed up anyways? Because of the werewolves. Why did the werewolves fail to protect mother nature in the first place? Because of their own infighting. Werewolves are their own worst enemy. These themes remained with the game through the two following editions of the game, but are not as strong in the new version, Werewolf the Forsaken (WTF – which I won’t be talking about in this game a day).

Werewolf uses the Storyteller system, a die-pool mechanic where a number of d10s (equal to the total of the statistic and ability being used) are rolled and compared against a difficulty number. The number of dice that successfully make the roll are ‘successes’, and more successes means better results.

I was first introduced to the game by Andy, one of my regular players dating back to the Ottawa University gaming club, who became one of the core members of my long-running Vampire and CyberPunk campaigns. He loaned me the game once our vampire campaign was running well and when I was looking for other games of interest.

Werewolves are represented in game terms as any other human-based character, with a set of nine statistics and a collection of knowledges, skills and talents. On top of this, they have the ability to transform into killing machines, and occasionally into wolves or humans. They are governed by two special abilities, Rage and Gnosis – Rage is what fuels the combat ability of the werewolf, and gnosis is the spiritual fuel that powers most ‘gifts’. Gifts are super-powers granted by allied spirits of the werewolves. To gain new gifts, a werewolf usually has to convince a spirit to teach it to him, creating a significant amount of roleplayed interaction between spirits and werewolves whenever a werewolf wants to ‘level up’ and learn a new gift. And of course, since the spirits are typically hostile to what is being done to them by humanity, werewolves often pay for their gifts in the form of further ecoterrorism.

Many of the werewolf games I’ve been involved in pretty much end at this depth – werewolves exist to destroy people who do bad things to the earth, and they get to fight, kill and destroy in the name of nature and the wild. Occasionally, they also fight internally for status within the pack or within the sept (community). On rare occasion, this fighting is taken to the spirit world instead of conducted on earth. But at heart most games of Werewolf seem to revolve around combat and ‘avenging’ the earth.

The other use for werewolf has routinely been as the NPC adversaries for vampires in the more popular Vampire: the Masquerade RPG. In this role, they hate vampires for being servants of the wyrm (evil corruption) who encourage humanity to build cities (for the weaver) because cities give vampires nice convenient schmorgasborgs of humans to feed from. As NPCs, werewolves were rewarding because they were deadly. One or two hits and some poor fool vampire’s head pops off.

But we played a few games of werewolf that were distinctly different from these. We played heavily into the social and spiritual aspects of the game – focusing on the need to establish a community in the face of hostility, and the desire to find common ground in the form of common spirituality to cement the bonds of this community. As young packs of werewolves, the players would have to make themselves visible and heard among their older septmates who acted unilaterally in the name of the sept against their perceived enemies – humans, vampires and werewolves alike.

To do so, they form their pack, with all the jostling for position entailed by the creation of a microsociety or sub-tribe, figuring out who is the acting leader between a few characters with aggressive and outgoing personalities, and then go on a spiritual journey to find their totem animal in the spirit world and then offer their own services to it in exchange for it offering them a portion of its own energy and essence to support them in their endeavours. By the end of this three-session prelude to the characters’ involvement in a pack, all the players walked away amazed with the game instead of annoyed with it (especially the Andy, who had loaned me the game proper because he had been annoyed by it from playing it at the local gaming club).

However, not all my games were so successful. I also ran a few epic werewolf sessions that spanned the world of darkness spiritual multiverse, and they just didn’t fly as well. The strangeness of the setting was not lost on the players, but the rapid changes from one strangeness to another was disjointed and eventually made everyone lose interest in the game.

Werewolf remains a game I enjoy, but one that suffered from some amount of power-creep over the years. In the later books about other changing breeds (were coyotes, were tigers, and so on) there were some races that were distinctly and terrifyingly more dangerous in combat than the werewolves, but who had been driven to near extinction by the wolves working as packs, in concert. Just like AD&D players flocking to the ‘rare’ exiled drow character, people started wanting to play werebears and the dreaded mokole (were crocodile). As an example of how over-powered the were crocodiles were, we ran several published werewolf modules with only one PC – one Mokole PC – powered up with a few defensive gifts and that one character often dealt with situation that would have killed several werewolves in a standard party.

In the end, werewolf was a game I really enjoyed many aspects of as long as we didn’t try combining it with Vampire and the other games with PCs playing characters of each ‘species’.

I look forward to trying out the new Werewolf game, from a somewhat different angle than my old games, however. And of course, I’ll write about it here.

 

[Crothian]

This is one game that was ruined for me for a long time by the Storyteller. It was my friest year in college and we were playing all sorts of game. I was introducing people to Rifts and Palladioum Fantasy, another gamer introduced us to Paranoia, another to Shadowrun, and then one guy wanted to introduce us all to Werewolf. Except he wouldn't tell us what we were playing. We all made up normal peopl,e and the first adventure we got attacked by werewolves. Now, if you know the system you can imagine how outclasses normals are by werewolves. We didn't know what was going on only we were useless and half of us died. The guy took a bathroom break and everyone bailed on him after taking a peak at what game he was running. That left a bad taste in my mouth for Werewolf for a long time and it wasn't until years later when in a Vampire Chronicle werewolves were used that I read and understood the book. But for the most part the early world of darkness games were never really my cup of tea.

 

[Seeten]

I loved Werewolf: The Apocalypse. I loved the themes. I loved the story. I loved the way werewolves were both good guy and bad guy at once, and yet, how it wasnt all tragic angst.

I had several successful werewolf games, and many of them were very combat light. We also ran 2 games set in Asia, with the Asian cosmology, and I liked that a lot too.

Unfortunately, Werewolf suffered from powergameritis. Many hack and slashers gravitated to it instead of to Vampire(although vamp had its share also) and Werewolf became known as the game where everything was a fight every 5 mins.

Overall, I loved werewolf, and was very sad to see it go.

I've bought and read the rules for the new werewolf, and I just cant say it has me at all interested.

 

[TheAuldGrump]

Yeah, I was in a Werewolf game that suffered from a Storyteller with a wandering eye... if a female player attempted something it succeeded, if a male player tried to do something it failed. Funny, after a while everyone left the game at once, males and females both. (After the game he would hit on the female players... he was a miserable excuse for a human being.)

I was not all that attracted to the culture of the werewolfs - in my estimation giving the werewolves a global community/culture was a mistake. (You have your American Indian werewolves, then you have your American Indian werewolves with Irish names, then you have your American Indian werewolves with Russian names... Bleah.)

The Auld Grump

 

[pogre]

I have a friend who is totally into wolves. He has accompanied groups to tag wild wolves and is actively involved in saving their habitat. His take on Werewolf was much more interesting - the pack, territories, vying for mates, all interlaced with human concerns made for an interesting game.

 

[Agent Oracle]

I read the rules for werewolf way back in the mid 90's, and put it aside in favor of the more human-friendly fare of hunter: the recokoning.

/still puts 5 points into wealth and spends it all on explosives.

 

[painandgreed]

Like the game and the backstory and stuff. Never really got into it though and only used werewolves for NPCs (good and bad, but mostly bad) in my Vampire games. Most everybody I met who played Werewolf was a combat twink and most of the games I've heard about were pretty much hack and slash things. However, the game's backstory sort of herded everybody into that mindset. Neat idea but needed a re-write to really work well, especially with the other ST games as originally envisioned.

 

[Nomad4life]

I read the rules for werewolf way back in the mid 90's, and put it aside in favor of the more human-friendly fare of hunter: the recokoning.

H:TR was my absolute favorite WW gameline. As I saw it, Hunter was a game about ordinary people losing their humanity in order to save it, and never with any full idea of what’s really going on or why- A game about watching your character slowly become a “monster” in order to survive in a blissfully ignorant world full of monsters. At best, the reward for your unrecognized sacrifices would be death or insanity. But you fought the good fight anyway, never realizing that you were nothing but a pawn in some kind of cosmic chess game.

Hated the artwork, though. The core book was full of rambo-esque avengers, which had almost nothing to do with the “paranoid underground resistance movement” feel of the rules- If you tried those kinds of stunts in-game, you wouldn’t last a single adventure! I always wondered how many potential gamers those goofy pictures turned away, without giving them the slightest hint of how the game was actually played.

Like so many others, I was turned off of Werewolf and V:TM not by the games themselves, but by bad experiences with creepy players of those games. Which is a big shame, as it seems like they could have been fun with a good ST and a table of players who weren’t antisocial outcast angst-bunnies.

 

[Evilhalfling]

I ran at least 2 chronicles of Werewolf, spanning about 2 years - I tried to stress the spiritual nature of the game, with dream quests and setting up each adventure as a Heroic Journey. The game got me into Joseph Campbell and universal myth theories.

Unfortunately I wasn't that great at it and we ran heavy into combat. Against mortals or even an average vamp the challenge was not to kill them. Against spirits it looked a little more like DnD - except far more rolls were require than in a 2nd ed game. Humans and vamps had what 6 health levels - and spirits had 15-60 hp.

There was a fair amount of intertribal dominance conflict sometimes physical, but not violent. and a fair amount of mystery, while much of the game was cleaning up the packs own mistakes or combat with spirits. It was the first modern game I played and I had a lot of fun modifying people and places in my home city into World of Darkness.

The most fun I have had was designing a version called "CATS! : the Apocalypse" which involved pre-gen werecats instead of wolves. They had cat personalities - Fat, Bitter female, Scarredy Cat, Playful kitten etc.. I modified the chrinos (combat) from to make them less combat focused and but left the rest of the rules alone. This was a great game, and I ran it or its sequel three times at conventions.

 

[Calico_Jack73]

Werewolf 1E was my introduction to WoD. In fact, the only reason I bought VtM at all was as source material for enemies of the pack. I had many good times playing and running Werewolf. In fact, Werewolf was my usual "introduction" game for people who had never played WoD. Take a hack & slash D&D player and tell them that as a starting character they can play a 9-12' tall mass of fur, teeth, and claws that regenerates and I generally had no problem finding new Werewolf players. After I hooked them in with the combat aspect of the game I could work on refining their roleplaying abilities.

As much as I loved Werewolf I am looking forward to when Mage: The Ascension is discussed. Definitely my all time favorite game. Nothing since has come close, not even Mage: The Awakening.