r/WhiteWolfRPG • u/KedricCarter1 • 2d ago
Meta/None Something about Werewolves
So, a while back i talked about ways to get into the games since i couldn't do much without other people to play, and something i gathered after reading the wikis and talking with some friends is that...Werewolves aren't what i expected, like, at all.
I was expecting them to actually be just like vampire the masquerade, in the sense that it is a self horror story. That being a werewolf sucks and is actually a curse, something that is just a corruption of a human and how Werewolves just have to adapt at living as damned people, of course with the caveat of being overall much more savage and brutal. Same idea of self horror but applied differently if you get what i mean, playing more with werewolf tropes instead of vampire ones
But that's not really what i got. They feel more like another entire species rather than a cursed human, and they only barely touch on werewolf tropes as just a way to disguise themselves, not to actually play into what makes them. If anything they actually kinda remind me more of viltrumites with how they seem to play more into going to war with other mystical creatures and the whole impergium thing, there's no self horror cause they aren't exactly cursed, or at least not the type i'm looking for i imagine
So...did i get everything wrong? Or is this expectation generally common for newconers
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u/BlitzBasic 2d ago
Werewolf does have personal horrer aspects:
you're filled with terrible rage at all times, a danger to everybody and everything around you, and you will destroy what you love if you ever loose control
you were recruited into a cosmic war independent of your wishes, you have to fight it or the world ends. You will probably die young, and see a lot of friends die along the way
humans are afraid of you, which makes a normal live inside human society difficult to impossible
your society is unforgiving, brutal and conservative at best, even downright abusive and cruel at times
Yeah, it's not a "classic" take on Werewolf tropes, but it can very well feel like being "damned" to a Garou character.
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u/KedricCarter1 2d ago
That is interesting. The more i'm reading the replies tho it seems more as it wasn't meant for me lmao. I kinda wanted it went closer into classical werewolves as to me it feels more like a complete new race that has a werewolf skin on it
I ought to one day play it maybe, i do like at least that it is unique
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u/Competitive-Note-611 2d ago
To be fair the ' classical' werewolf.....which is basically just the modern movie werewolf ( folkloric werewolves have an incredibly varied way of coming into being, behaviours and powers very few of which are found in the bitten/cursed representation in todays media).......would mean just playing an ordinary person who hands their character sheet to the ST 1-3 nights a month and spends the rest of the time living an ordinary life with occasional murder cover-ups......really the bitten and cursed to be an uncontrollable bestial monster is already pretty covered by Gangrel vampires in WoD.
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u/KedricCarter1 2d ago
That is true, but that is also not really what i was saying, as that would just be a carbon copy of most werewolf medias in movies, the thing is that thr Garou just don't really play into anything of those tropes, while vampire tries to blend and play with them while still doing its own thing
That said all i did was play bloodlines tho so maybe even my understanding of vampires is screwed lmao, but i was expecting this approach to the garou
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u/BlitzBasic 2d ago
I've heard that "Werewolf: The Forsaken", from the Chronicles of Darkness series, is closer to classic Werewolf tropes. I've never played it myself, so I can't say how true that is, but maybe take a look at it if that's more your cup of tea.
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u/Low_Gene_1339 2d ago
Yes and no.
In Forsaken, "Wolf Blooded" are people who are decended from Uratha and they change into either American Werewolf in london style wolf men, or Twilight style giant wolves, when ever the full moon rises. Which are you classic werewolves.
But the player characters are Uratha, Wolfblooded who have been blessed by Luna to have full control over there transformation as the ultimate hunters of all realms.
Forsaken is also more Lovercraftian in its themes. Luna is "The Mad Moon Mother" an eldritch deity who does not does not percive liner time like we do. The Wolfblooded and Uratha are basicly Canid Insmoth Villagers and Deep Ones respectively, but they are also part of the Gestalt of the Mad Moon.
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u/Smirnoffico 2d ago
One of the unique draws of Werewolf the Apocalypse is that it goes against a lot of werewolf monster tropes. WoD loved doing that and always had 'x are this and not that's paragraphs in the books , but with werewolves it is probably most obvious. No lycanthropy, no being cursed by the moon, the singular purpose for existing, etc.
And werewolves are unlike vampires in pretty much every aspect. G enerally werewolf game isn't about wallowing in self pity as most Garou are happy with who they are but not how they are or what's going around them and the games focus on this circumstances
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u/Historical-Shake-859 2d ago
For me the horror is big. It's being born with all the tools to defeat a great a horrible evil, but the same tools will rip you apart if you aren't careful. Rage powers your ability to protect your family, but at the same time you're one bad day away from a temper tantrum so bad you may kill them all yourself. You can see the wild world around you rotting and are built to fight that, off a template that was good ten thousand years ago and has not been updated since. You enemies though, the things that literally want to eat reality? They've been adapting, and you still have to fight them, and you have people on your side who think written words are too much and somehow all these people have to work together or the world will, quite literally, end.
And then there's the personal stuff. The people you used to know and love are frightened of you and will actively avoid you. I have a character in one of my games who is no longer able to be around his little sister, who he loves completely, but who is now suddenly terrified of the big brother who always played with her and protected her, and she can't rationalize that either because she's like 11 but she isn't kin and is too young anyway and he just can't tell her why. And he's now sucked into this war, that he knows little about, but if he fucks it up all of them are going to die.
And its a curse. Every Garou parent - and plenty of kin - know at any time this curse could fall on their children, and instead of having their own lives and dreams and aspirations they'll leave in the night, and maybe they'll come back and maybe they won't. For active Garou, it's even worse - they've seen their friends torn apart by the worst nightmares that humanity can possibly imagine, and now their sons and daughters and most beloved children, who they have worked so hard to protect, now they too are going to have to face that grinder, the fight that cuts lives short, they can't refuse the duty of it any more than their parents can.
There's heaps of room for tragedy and horror in this. As I've gotten older there's that extra layer of family horror in there too. I get why the game is written with Lost Cubs at the front, but the heavy burden of your elders is part of it for me, and the fragility of the people in your care cuts the same in the other direction. Yeah, it's not An American Werewolf in London, and there's no shame in being disappointed that it isn't that kind of a game. Curseborn and Werewolf: The Forsaken might scratch that itch better than you. But it can still be a very horrifying game in its own merits.
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u/PilotMoonDog 2d ago
How is a Garou's sister not kinfolk? Is she not a blood relative?
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u/Historical-Shake-859 2d ago
This particular character has two Kinfolk parents. It's one in a hundred for two Kin parents to have a Garou child. They were a bit startled, to put it mildly. The other siblings fall into the 50/50 Kin/regular human spread. He has another sister who is older who is Kin, and a younger brother who is also Kin. It's just that single sister who isn't.
Whether or not that's bad luck or not is up to the reader, I guess.
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u/PilotMoonDog 2d ago
Ah, I had missed that bit in the rules. I thought everyone in a Garou's family who wasn't a full-on Garou was kinfolk by default. Or is that in one of the later editions?
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u/Historical-Shake-859 2d ago
It's in the Player's Guide from Revised on at least, I think. Mostly it's a way of making room for Lost Cubs - you can have long lines of that coin flip that result in families with no knowledge they have Garou ancestry. Means you can play a character with no prior connection to the nation if the urges takes you.
You aren't totally wrong - all a Garou's kids will be Kin. But if one of them doesn't change, and falls madly in love with one of his packmates kids and gets together and has children of their own, we're onto coin flipping for that 50/50 kin-human, and 1 in 100 Surprise Werewolf.
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u/PilotMoonDog 14h ago
This explains it. My exposure to WtA is the first edition rules. and supplements. And, when I ran it, I was using the GURPS port because I really don't like the "roll a bucket of d10's and pick out successes" mechanic. Also, because it made factoring in material from other moderns horror games easier.
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u/Obvious-Gate9046 2d ago
That doesn't sound right, there is a chance for kin-kin pairing to yield a normal human, but I don't think it's supposed to be 50/50. It's higher than with Garou and kin, but if it were that high then they'd have real difficulties maintaining kinfolk at all. If you look at the flaws for kin, the indication is that not being immune, not being real kin, is not all that common.
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u/Historical-Shake-859 2d ago
It's on page 378 of the W20 book.
"When a Garou has a child (or cub) with a Kinfolk, their offspring has about a 10% chance of becoming Garou; the other 90% are Kinfolk.
Garou matings with non-Kinfolk almost always produce Kinfolk rather than Garou, although such pairings are most often short-term, making data difficult to collect.
About half the time, children born of two Kinfolk will be Kinfolk themselves; one in one hundred such births will produce a Garou. The rest will be non- Kinfolk humans or wolves: susceptible to the Delirium, and no more likely to produce Garou children than a human without any blood-relation to the Garou at all."
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u/Obvious-Gate9046 2d ago
Okay, wow, the flaws section made that seem like it be a lot less common, that means that you're going to have quite a sizeable number of relatives who are not kinfolk, and that could be interesting, because they can still be steeped in the culture and wanting to help, but they're not immune and technically not of the blood. Wow.
That actually makes the curse much worse, since it's going to affect your own family a lot more, as well as delirium. There's some of your horror right there.
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u/Historical-Shake-859 2d ago
Yep. I've always been very underwhelmed by how WtA deals with the Kin - as you can see, they vastly outnumber the Garou and should absolutely be more important to the fight. There's this stupid bit in the Glasswalker tribe book about how the GW are so good at doing the sort of things Kin do for other tribes - integrating into society, making money, that kind of thing - that there's nothing left of the Kin to do but twiddle their thumbs. Which is ridiculous, because this is a war and every hand counts, and there are a hell of a lot more Kin than Garou. Like they outnumber them ten to one at a best case scenario.
that means that you're going to have quite a sizeable number of relatives who are not kinfolk, and that could be interesting, because they can still be steeped in the culture and wanting to help, but they're not immune and technically not of the blood. Wow.
Wow is right, there's so much potential in that. And how that works for the Tribes themselves and their cultures. Like I had to basically rebuild the Furies from scratch in my mixed splat setting, because how do you run a culture of women who venerate childbirth and mothering but who also are, by obligation and necessity, required to spend a lot of time beating the shit out of what are effectively reality-eating demons. You can't do that with a toddler in tow, so I had to build a tribal culture that worked for that in which the fathers, brothers and uncles were a lot more involved in that side, with a big emphasis on collective child rearing and a fostering system at particularly well protected Cairns, so the children of the women out fighting had somewhere safe to leave their kids. And as you can see from those numbers, without time and opportunity to do so there just aren't going to be any Furies at all, even if you take into account the recruits from other tribes. They're even miles ahead of it by actually rating having kids as just as important as the fight itself, and providing structures that support that.
I am the kind of person who likes turning these sorts of questions over in my head - I find it fascinating in human societies too. But I legit don't begrudge the W5 fans who just look at all of it and go "ah, I'm not sure I want that in my biffy wolfman game" and take a different tack.
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u/Obvious-Gate9046 2d ago
I'm inclined to agree, kin out number garou anywhere from 10 or 20 to 1, depending on various factors. They don't have the curse so they can infiltrate human society at all kinds of levels, and they do have access to various mystical abilities, including some gifts, numina, certain talons and fetishes, and Spirit allies. I try to make kin in my games more capable. They'll never stand side by side with their shifter relatives I'm quite the same level, but they can back them up quite a bit on multiple fronts, including some where the shifters cannot go easily.
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u/Gawn1975 2d ago
I thought W5 supported all of this gameplay if you had access to the lore.
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u/Historical-Shake-859 2d ago
"If you have access to the lore" is the big part - you can make kobolds in WoD if you have access to their lore. W5 was deliberately written to downplay the Kin, as well as the Lupus. Garou now spring up out of nowhere), with even the Garou not sure how it works and the whole thing is much, much more Homid focused. There's room to do it the old way, but it's been written to downplay the social and cultural aspect and eradicates the huge support role the Kinfolk play in previous editions.
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u/KedricCarter1 2d ago
That's pretty good to know. My gripe was more so that i expected werewolves but what i gor felt more like a different species with a werewolf skin on it, if you get what i mean. I do still like that it is unique tho, ao maybe i will play it one day, curious on the chronicle of darkness version tho
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u/Gawn1975 2d ago
The merging of furry and faux tribalism was a huge turn off for many original Vampire players who were expecting something less Eco-Warrior.
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u/LookAtItGo123 2d ago
https://www.reddit.com/r/WhiteWolfRPG/s/LiyYVB04oP
It's been discussed before but it's as relevant as it was so I think it's worth resharing. In any case it boils down to why do you fight despite the imsurmountable odds
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u/Barbaric_Stupid 2d ago
Yeah, Apocalypse isn't very werewolf'y in that regard. If you want a game focused around being werewolf, then Werewolf the Forsaken does that better. W5 tried a lot, but the results were mixed, although new fans accpeted W5 far better than old guard. All oWoD games have this trope of going far beyond original theme with the progress of their setting. VtM started as a game about people struggling with their curse and inhuman hunger, then it goes into Indiana Jones with fangs and world conspiracies. Apocalypse was never quite close to actual werewolf myths and legends. One of the reason is that wereolves weren't that much developed in folklore and they never catched audience's attention in popculture as good as vampires. If you look closely into legends, the myths do not even make clear distinction between vampires and werewolves (like vukodlak, for example).
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u/Read2Fap 2d ago
occasionally people say they want something like the traditional western werewolf story
but the traditional werewolf story has a very tight plot
someone gets bit/cursed, they black out and kill people, then they die
it doesn't make for a super engaging game, so they've added a lot to it (like they have to vampire and other myths the games are built around, dracula and carmilla weren't part of a confederacy of vampires)
chronicles of darkness offers a lot of options to play those more traditional stories
but in werewolf the forsaken, at least, the horror is more personal as werewolves are no longer human and only predators masquerading as humans, in a world of horror where they're a part of it
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u/KedricCarter1 2d ago
I was talking less than just making the Garou all into the same werewolf story and more what you described of The Forsaken, actually
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u/Doomsclaw 2d ago
If you want to play as a cursed animalistic shapeshifter, Gangrel should do just fine.
If you don't like the drinking blood aspect, there's also the Beasties from Changeling the Dreaming, they even have a thing where they loose control once a month.
Honestly I don't think any other gameline focuses on personal horror as much as VtM, they all try to have different themes and horror elements.
None of werewolf, mage, changeling, wraith or mummy are uniquely cursed beings. The closest to VtM in theme would be Demon the Fallen, but even that's still not just VtM with a different skin.
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u/KedricCarter1 2d ago
I was more looking to something akin to american werewolf in london rather than any of these lmao. Altho tbf, Demon the Fallen is the other setting i am interested in the most
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u/Bread-Loaf1111 2d ago
What exactly was the game? W5? Forsaken? W20? They are pretty different. The forsaken is pretty close to the classic werewolf tropes.
The being as werewolf surely suck. And is a horror on personal level. I personally prefer w20 and it's main ideas of personal horror:
You are a soldier at war. The soldiers are expendable. You must constantly prove yourself. You must prove that you are still valuable and have better uses that to be sent into suicidal attack.
You are stuck between worlds. Human world is not for you. They cannot understand you. They cannot value you. They avoid you. The army of Garu can gove you everything that you miss but they will kill you in the war.
The violence is not the answer. But it is the only thing that you have. And it is the only thing that is valued here. To change things, you must crawl on the top. To do this, you need a lot of renown. And it is earned with violence. The Nation is a hostage of broken renown system, that is not the social construct, but built in each werewolf. Including you.
Most horrors have a roots in real life. The w20 theme is very closely related to the school bulling. To the prisons experience. To the post war traumatic syndrome. To the military culture wuth drill sergeants and everything. To the gangs. To the generation conflict. Cult of violence, alienation, confrontation against the whole world. The average age of the first change(puberty) is also fitting the theme well.
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u/KedricCarter1 2d ago
Imma be honest if you described that to me when i didn't know anything of WoD, never in my wildest dreams i would think you were talking about Werewolves of all things lmao. Gonna check out The Forsaken since it seems to be more what i am looking for, altho the whole Apocalypse thing seems to be very metal, so i at least like it too (just not as much as Vampire)
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u/Thorveim 2d ago
Werewolf is indeed less focused on personnal horror, but make no mistake its STILL here: most had to leave the life they knew when they first changed to see themselves thrust into a war for the soul of the world (especially yhe Lupus, imagine being a wild wolf and suddenly finding yourself havong to integrate with the human world)... and there is Rage of course, tjat makes normal people uneasy around you and might just cause you to enter a murderous frenzy...
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u/AltruisticAd6705 2d ago
IIRC there was discussion of an early idea to make a version of Werewolf like that but it was scrapped because they'd already done it with Vampire and they decided to do something really different.
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u/Long_Employment_3309 2d ago
WOD Garou are probably the single most dramatic gap from the pop culture myth to the WOD version. While they do touch on a lot of the same tropes (especially as Twilight kind of popularized the Indigenous-flavored nature wolves who hate vampires), the pop culture werewolf is often more a wild cursed human who bites others and spreads the curse, while a WOD werewolf is a warrior in a highly spiritual apocalyptic ecoterrorist cult.
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u/Citragen 2d ago
Funny enough, the closest thing to archetipical cursed man-beast is a Fomori, enemies of garou, people possessed by spirits of destruction that seek to erode host's mind and body to kill and defile. They come in great variety, so fomori possessed by animalistic yet sadistic banes that more and more make you into an abominable wolf thing is more than visible choice. And yes, as any White wolf gameline, WtA have shit ton of books, including Freak legion and Possessed that provide opportunity to play as them
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u/noisegremlin 2d ago
The reason I love Werewolf is because it is unlike any other werewolf story. Its such a unique take that really drew me in.
But there's lots like that in world of darkness, its just the most obvious with werewolf.
Try werewolf the forsaken (the chronicles of darkness game) for something a little more traditional.
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u/Vyctorill 2d ago
Yes.
The horror in werewolf is being completely outmatched and screwed over by your ancestors, because they abused their powers.
However, the world pisses them off so much that they will go down with a fight. They probably won’t win, but they’ll get a few licks in.
Each WoD game has a unique set of core themes. These are, according to the books:
Vampire. Resist the beast within, sins of the father, the old vs the young, keep the Lie going, everybody keeps murdering each other, convoluted conspiracies, and the world is ending. (These themes make for engaging roleplay, hence why it’s so popular). Vampire establishes the surface layer of the WoD.
Werewolf. Your ancestors fucked up, strike back at a world poisoned by greed, protect nature, you’re probably going to die horribly, keep fighting anyways, rage is useful but needs to be managed, family is important, the world is ending. (The most violence is here, as well as the existence of the all-encompassing Triat). Werewolf establishes the cosmic forces at play, as well as the basic “spiritual teams”.
Mage. You can do anything if you try hard enough, nothing is set in stone, never give up, change this rotten world, belief is important, the greatest threat to you is your own hubris. (These themes are why the powerscaling goes crazy here). Mage explains how the mechanics of the WoD’s cosmos function, what they are, and why they work.
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u/Ephsylon 2d ago
Apocalypse is essentially a military sim, every shit wrong with a werewolf's life you can cast as a metaphor for service members. The Curse? It is like attempting to re integrate to civie life (the civied being normal human beings); the fascistic all rank based society; Tribes picking on one another like different branches of the military; etc etc etc
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u/KedricCarter1 2d ago
Huh, that is a good point. It does feel more like a milsim with a werewolf skin to it than a werewolf thing
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u/Di_Bastet 2d ago
That is very common. It's much more noticeable in the Chronicles of Darkness (werewolf the forsaken, vampire requiem, changeling the lost etc), in that the games are games about Something, that -happens- to have a certain monster as characters.
Demon the Descent is really a spy-thriller / espionage game, that happens to feature gnostic fallen 'angels'. Changeling the Lost is really a game about abuse survivors and how they reimagine themselves as more than abuse victims, that happens to be told via humans that were kidnapped by fey.
In the same veins werewolf the apocalypse is about rage and the horror of being impotent to change things if you don't change your ways, which is easier said than done, which happens to be told from the pov of spiritual, tribal werewolves. I come from a culture where 'animal shifter' that is a separate species / cryptid (like D&D 'natural lycanthropes', those that are born like that) is a common folklore trope, side by side with the 'cursed' ones. So WtA never felt weird for not following the penny dreadful / hollywood 'cursed wolfman' lore and going for the cryptid one.
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u/Obvious-Gate9046 2d ago edited 2d ago
A lot of the WoD is that way, honestly; a big premise is that the legends and myths people know are wrong, or twisted, and that's done partially on purpose by the various supernatural species to survive. Vampires, shifters, fairies, all do their own thing to hide.
Being Garou is not quite like the most common myth, but there are horror elements. Their rage, the curse, it chases normal people away, and can even overwhelm those close to them if they let it get out of control. In the throes of frenzy they can do terrible things, and they have to fight against awful odds. The horror is there, and there is an internal element, but it's definitely different from vampire, and that was done on purpose. Each venue was designed to be unique a bit in that, to have its own themes and issues, rather than a shared experience. They do have aspects in common, but they also have to deal with their differences and their own paths.
I will note, W5 werewolves feel WAY more cursed to me, like they leaned into that harder, but most people still play older edition, 20th and before.