W.W." Werewolf the Forsaken

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W.W." Werewolf the Forsaken

Post by Trinity »

New WoD setting compeltly. Now I like it. It has a lot of new-modern mythos refernces, and has a very horro movie feel to it.

St' are encouraged to make it as scarry as they want, and the plares I have are a bit put off against some of the thinsg I throw at them. I play off old movies I remember seeing, fears of both the players and the characters, spiritual things they can't touch. etc..,

Its really intresting to see them respond to system some of them didn't want to play. In fact they delegate to ME the dates they are willing to play adn want to play. I don't realy have to worry toomuch abuot organization. heh.

:)

Disscuss.

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Post by TakeWalker »

I tell ya, I really don't like the new werewolf. I can't put my finger on it, honestly, but it would be something along the lines of "it's lost that loving feeling". I guess... they've pigeonholed the feel of the game into something that isn't why it used to be fun. This is also why I stopped playing vampire when 2nd edition came out; they did the exact same thing to the Malks.

Granted, they did a good job slimming some things down. I actually find myself liking the new vampire a lot more than werewolf. Maybe it's sour grapes; I didn't think werewolf was broke, so why did they fix it?
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Post by Scott Gardener »

A lot of it may be familiarity; we're used to seeing the original, so a revamped version feels like an imitation, even if it's done by the same people. I've tried giving it a fresh look myself, but I can't make myself be interested, simply because I'm already used to the Old School version. I know it's a bias, but I can't help it.

I do get the impression that the new version is more versatile and less tied in to a specific world setting, however, and that's a plus. But, with that in mind, if I'm going to the trouble to design my own world, how much more of a stretch is it to design my own game system to it, or at least rewrite an existing one on my own? (I also tend to favor open-license games, so that the work could at least theoretically be publishable.)
Taking a Gestalt approach, since it's the "in" thing...
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Post by Trinity »

The Strengths of the game, as I see it, is that unlike the previous one, its a little more ST driven. But then my own style of ST'ing is more story-based then some that are more combat-oriented.

The werewolf system was based around the newly revamped mechanics engine. I try to have at least one combat senerio invovled so that we all get used to working the same system. Getting a feeling for it is important, as a lot of the tricks and twists of teh actual mechanics are a LOT different from before.

It has the ability to fit the other genre games into it a lot more smoothly. They can be intergrated more easily as the WW team have a core basis to work with for each and every genre setting.

What I don't like is having to buy the corebook, then the others as suppliments. Smacks too much of the "expansion" style D&D.

I have always been a fan of different views on the old werewolf mythos. Now I do have my biases, but I try to keep open minded. I find trying to figure out the "creators" "laws of reality" is what keeps me intrested. Now true there are some things I =don't- like about the new setting, but they are far fewer then others seem to have.

Many who play the WWtA table top and LARP systems are very much split into three camps as of right now. They hate it, absoulutly abhor it with a passion. Others think its intresting and worth trying. Some sit the fence, waiting to see how others react and respond.

For me, again stated, its about the story. If you can get a set of players hooked on a story then you have the ability to ease them into a new system. Of course as you mentioned, Scott, its teh raw FACT that its not an entirely new system. The mechanics and setting are different, but its a re-vamp on the old WW werewolves. The familiarty most people have, and the loyality they have to the old WoD keeps them from allowing themselves to experience the newere version to its fullest.

There is also the notation that instead of working an entriely NEW setting, they took the old one, changed the over-arching story, and merges Tribes and archetypes into somethign different. Its like trying to make sugar cookies with left over cake crumbs.., some people will like it sort of.., others will HATE it and wonder what kind of crack one was sniffing when they were made. ;) heh

But, the one thing I don't like, is though its more beastial and the characters become more and more absorbed with their wolf natures, its very insular. You don't often interact with other werewolves on teh same level that one used to in teh old WoD.

Its your pack and you pack's rules, or death to those who oppose you. Spirits, vampires, humans, what ever.

Your character is a true predator, more so then what vampires ever truely could be. The werewolf archtype embodies teh beast in all its forms and guises. There is nothing HUMAN about a werewolf after the first change. They are.., werewolves.

Some people may be put off by that faucet as well.

The over-arching idea of it, for me, as I said before, is to give it a horro movie psycho-thriller feeling, and let the characters move the plot forward as they will.

I'm still half and half on the game, only because I feel a bit irritated that WW stoped producing ANYTHING for their old lines. Its like they wanted to abort the child they created in order to make room for teh new one. That tastes like ashes to me. :P

Over all I think Forsaken has some positive aspects to it.., but its going to take a long long while for it to really develop a fan base as potent as the old. It seems to me, though i may be seeing things, that like attracts like.

werewolf players are more passionate and loyal to different aspects of their life, gameing includinded. I wonder if that has anything to do with a lot of the dissention. :) heh.,
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Post by vrikasatma »

Well, WW:tA was really two games, with different creative teams. There was the initial creation team who really went with the earth spirituality angle. I knew some of them. Around the mid-90s the old guard started to wander away and the new school came along in dribs and drabs, young turking it to a more snarky, in-your-face and more splatterpunkish angle. This was explained in the metaplot as the Apocalypse drawing closer.

The new school stopped the game and created this game. They said they were streamlining it after something like ten years of troubleshooting; in effect, they recreated werewolves according to their own vision. That's cool, and it gave us essentially a new game.

I see the two games as two books in a single genre, The Apocalypse being one and The Forsaken being another. I've got my head wrapped enough around the concept that I'm in the first stages of internalization and identification. I'm asking myself the same questions I asked when I was first learning W:tA: which Tribe would I be if I really was a werewolf? Things like that.

I like how the tribes in this game have different aspects of Wolf for their tribal totems. It reads better than a tribe following something other than what it is: Unicorn?!? Cockroach!??!? Whose ideas were those? It makes more sense to me that a werewolf would follow Winter Wolf, or Black Wolf, or Dire Wolf than to humble themselves before another beast.

By the same token, I liked the flexibility of W:tA. Some of the stuff in Forsaken smacks of the developer "busting cop-outs," by making the Umbra at least as hostile as this side of the Gauntlet and limiting time in the wolfman form. It's a cop-out, sure, but I liked how in the old game, if things got hairy landside, there was always the option to bolt for the Umbra until things cooled off somewhat. My Fenrir giant uses the Umbra like a rich drunken fratgirl in that regard, he claims that he does it to protect the Veil and he's not altogether wrong. He practically lives in the shadow, he only comes out two or three times a month so he doesn't become a spirit. But that's one of the things I loved about The Apocalypse, there was a lot more spiritual and allegorical power than there is in the Forsaken.

Edit: So what would you be? I'd probably be a Meninna Ithaeur.
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Post by Trinity »

Not sure what Tribe.., but I'd be either an Ithaeur or a Cahalith. heh Depnds on which aspect of my brain isin gear. ;)

Maybe a Boneshadows Caha, or a Blood Talon Itha.

You are right that the game is a lot less animist in the sens that its not as spiritualy empowered. They are anatognists and not allies. in order to gain allies, you have to go through a literal heck and back again. *rolls eyes*

You can't jump the gauntlet just anywhere.

There are NO other werebeasts.., only wannabe, spirit-ridden things that play at what used ot be Annanasi and ratkin..., :P feh.

The other thing I don't like is that certain aspects of the game are WAY over powered. One of the characters in my game, while they were still human, KILLED a high-level, high-rank'd werewolf Alpha....

1 ) Decent level in firearms.
2 ) Silver bullets
3 ) Super secret ninja stealth ability ( he never Didn't roll at least one succ, yeah :P )
4 ) spend a will powerf or more dice.
5 ) the ability to roll -all successes- the first roll in the middle of combat turns ( so said alpha had already taken some leathal damage )
6 ) Shooting him a second time, while alpha attepts to flee in "aka- fear frenzy", with same dice pool, with nearly same success rate.

Yeah.

O.O

A bit much for sure. heh.
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Post by TakeWalker »

Like I said, I like the new Vampire for some reason. Can't say what. I like the fact that the new system is starting off by organizing everything into a unified whole; they don't pretend in the vampire and werewolf books that mages don't exist, for example. I do also like that they really defined the spirit world in WW, because it was something highly lacking in the old system.

But there's still just... a feeling in werewolf that's just wrong. They've either removed or changed some aspect of the game that made it fun for me; now, I never want to touch the game. I await with mild interest the new Mage book. And what the heck happened to Changeling?

Which reminds me. It's still illegal for werewolves to have sex with each other... So what happens when they do? There's no Metis anymore. I didn't notice anything regarding that.
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Post by Trinity »

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Post by TakeWalker »

O-ho-ho! Now, that's actually a pretty decent result, I have to say.

Still doesn't make me like the system. But you can't win 'em all.
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Post by Trinity »

*nods*

I think for a lot of folks they still have WtA on the brain when they come over to this newer version. There is almost NOTHING the same between the two. As was mentioned, it is a completely new look at the werewolf mythos. Problem is.., peopl ewho have played WtA before, come over with several pre-concieved notions.

Now I have a feelin gthat if we were to get a group of werewolf fans together, that have either a ) never hear dof WtA .., or b ) never played WtA.., or c ) both a & b.., then we'd get a different reation altogether. Issue with that is as I see it.., there isn't many fokls.., who aren't gamers.., who haven't heard or played the old system before.

As I noted before, it relies heavily on an ST's abiality to truely -craft- a story. Not just based on what the Cannon is. This is primarily ( as I see it now ), because there isn't a lot of cannon material to go with. Being completely new.., its open to all sorts of possibilities, twists and turns. That is until White Wolf starts stepping on its own toes again trying to "explain" things.

Current Books out now that are revelent - WOD Main, WTF Genre Book, Predators ( anatognists, mostly spirits ), and The Rockies Setting Book. I think I have them all here..., hrrm. There are more coming out I know, but for now this is what they offer.

The other thing that is a little off are the "Totems". The Tribes follow "Aspects" of Wolf ( Death Wolf, Blood Wolf.., etc ).., but packs find other spirits to bind themselves to.., and these can be based on Real World representations.., or.

My party was going to go for 'Bunny'thulu'. I had been doodling something and they asked what it was. I said, prolly in the WTF universe some children's Nightmare creature. They flipped, thought it was SOOOO cool. heh.

But they instead went with a Snake Totem. Go figure. :)

I am thinking about running and online version of said game ( sans dice rolling since we can't really do that with any serious honesty.., ;) heh ), but I'm not sure where.
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Post by TakeWalker »

If it's any help, I used to play WWTA via Yahoo Groups. Could be a good place to start.
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Post by Trinity »

Well there is a thought..., but who would be intrested?
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Post by WordWolf »

Not me.
I LIKED that there was more than just the violence in the old game.

For me, the new one is a large step BACK.

But hey, if you like the new one, have a blast.
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Post by Trinity »

Yeah Word! :) hi hi.

See that's just it. What most people felt of WtA, when I first got involved, was that it was a hack-n-slash fest. Not many people ( who didn't like the idea of werewolves and a werewolf culture ), wanted to play such a thing.

Yeah that made sense.


In any case, I've giving this the benefit of teh doubt..,

Although after looking through teh Mage book.., I think I may have foudn a new favorite. ;)
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Post by Uniform Two Six »

I'm yet another person who can't quite put my finger on why I don't like WTF. Maybe it really is just that I came over from WTA with preconceived notions of what the new game should be, but ... I don't know.
There definently are some good points. Specifically, the new system. The whole thing is much better thought out, and the game can now support a mixed bag of character classes without one group being left out because they aren't the same combat monsters that the Garou are. All in all, very well thought out.
My thing is that it really feels like the story is lacking. I liked the idea of the religious zealot werewolves. I mean, right there you have two of the most scary monsters, all rolled into one. On the one hand, the Garou are hard-core religious fruitcakes who can use their religious beliefs to justify any act, no matter how depraved (think the Impergium). Now, that alone makes them as dangerous as those wackos who blow up abortion clinics, or Al-Qaeda. Now add the facet that these religious lunatics are werewolves who actually have real divinely granted power. By human standards, they're practically unkillable. Which leads to all kinds of stuff like ego-trips. It's one thing to believe that God is on your side, quite another to know he (she) has granted you the power to lay waste a small city's police force, should you choose. I always loved that play between the ideal that the Garou supposedly strove for (think Children of Gaia), versus what they often wound up being (Red Talons). You don't really have that kind of thing any more. Now it's just territorial grudge matches between neighboring packs of werewolves/vampires/spirits/ etc.
Oh, and I miss the lupus breed too. Why did they get rid of that, anyway?
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Post by HELLHOUND »

I'm another one who dislikes W:tF for an Unknown reason.
I dislike V:tR too for an unknown reason.
I havent bothered with anything else from WW since then.

Now i love W:tA, V:tM, M:tA...oWoD has a Passion they new stuff just lacks. I ignored the metaplots in oWoD, but the writters had PASSION. The nWoD is very dry and boring to read.

I found myself looking to other rpgs. I Found Unisystem by Eden Studios. They wrote the Buffy and Angel rpgs. Their Witchcraft game has various werecreatures under the name "Ferals". Cursed, Acceptance, Born. They lack the super-power "Gifts" WW's Garou had. Ferals are physical bada**es. Not magic users like the Garou. Ferals can be found in the Witchcraft sourcebook "Abomination Codex". I highly recomend it.

Anymore if i feel the need to play Garou, i use my copies of Gurps Werewolf, Vampire, and Mage. Gurpse did these around 1993/94. They are better than the WW version in all honesty. In fact i discovered WW through the Gurps WoD books.

I like WW's Exalted:Lunars much better than their W:tF stuff also. If anyone has not seen or heard of Exalted/Lunars, you build your own Were-creature form and Charms (powers). It very good. Exalted 1e though. Ex2e has not released their updated Lunar info yet.
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Post by HELLHOUND »

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Post by GhostSong »

I think the Werewolf games sort of manifest diffrent ways in diffrent people. WWtA was always very superheroish. You could heal fast, you had super powers, you were destined to fight against the slimy, crawly, vile things spit out by the wyrm.

WWtF, had a more horror movie-ish feel than WWtA but to me I didn't care for the spiritual angle as much as they threw in. I thought it was kind of a cop out, a sort of vehicle for the combat that people have come to expect from a Werewolf game - its not a bad idea don't get me wrong. But I wanted a game that was terrestrial. I ended up writing up a bunch of house rules to make the werewolves like classic movie werewolves. Transform during the full moon automatically, voracious appetites, classic Werewolf signs (ring finger as long as middle, unabrow, purple pee, tail stub in human form) when thier Harmony drops to 6 and lower)

But I wanted to toss at them humanish problems and let them deal with that, while the players are dealing with thier own personal alienation from society and all that. When I actually ran the game it worked pretty well. Alot grittier. I drew my inspiration from The Shield, The Sopranos and Carnivale :)
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Post by Searif »

at first it sounded to me like they remade everything just to get more money but once I started looking at it I relized how much I liked it more, and out of all the tribes in there I would be a iron master, before I would only be a vampire because I liked the city enviroment more, but now I can be a iron master :P (P.S. Im hopefully getting both V:Tr and WW:TF)
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Post by HELLHOUND »

Hey GhostSong...

Sounds like you would love WITCHCRAFT's FERALS. I know I do.

WITCHCRAFT by Eden Studios
Abomination Codex ... sourcebook for Witchcraft. (this is were the FERALS are, many types of Ferals)

FERALS are alot like the Movie/legendary Werecreatures of Lores.

Accursed = Those Cursed by Wizards or Gods/Spirits into becoming a FERAL.
Born = One of your parents was a Feral.
Skinchanger = Witches/Wizards/Shamans who use magic to transform into Feral-like forms.

Accursed Ferals can even become Ferals just by Killing a FERAL, the Animal spirit takes it's revenge by latching onto the murderer. Also if severally Injuried or Killed by a Feral may turn you into a Feral. Accursed Ferals have little ot no control over themselves. The can Learn control over time though by accepting their dual natures and instincts.

FERALS are what I wanted from WW's Werewolf the Forsaken. No Spirit World crap, no "Gifts". These guys are down and gritty Physical monsters.
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Post by Blue-eyes in the dark »

man it's been such a long time since i've played and i don't know where my charector sheet went. :cry: Gosh ma diggity i'd love to do it again some time but noone around me either likes it or hasn't ever heard of it and just assumes it's just for nerds who live at home with their parents eating nothing but snack food becomeing over weight and never haveing a companion of their very own unless it's their own hand which they aptly name "fleshy left hand" :lol: .
so i guess i'll have to run with a different pack or just realize i'm not ever going to be accepted as i am. :(
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Post by vrikasatma »

I haven't had the money to keep up on all the books but from what I've seen it looks like they're trying to "backfill" all the OWoD stuff into the new game. And I do like the idea of meta-tribe Lodges.
When they were in the flux between the old game and the new one, I was on the White Wolf bbs and a lot of the regulars were throwing all kinds of ideas and speculations around. I guess the disappointment for me was that when the book finally came out, none of our ideas were in there. I felt snubbed.
I only get to play once or twice a year, because I don't have a group up here. I wind up with my old group down in the Bay Area when I go back to visit; I just call 'em up and say, "Hey, I'm in town. Wanta do a game?"
We used to play a "WoD with-a-pulse" free-for-all game. The only rules was "No vampies, no ghosts," so we had two Garou, a Corax, two Mages and three Changelings palling around together. No, it wasn't a train wreck but the Mages tended to dominate things (it didn't help that one of the Mages was actually the guy who revamped the Spheres system and knew it running up a hill sideways — and a crackerjack roleplayer to begin with).
So they're not all that crazy about the NWoD and we invariably fall back to the old game. I've been giving Kevin a break from STing and running the games, so naturally it's W:tA, but a more liberalized one.
For instance, in my game, the War of Rage didn't happen and the Impergium never really stopped, Fera are more common than in the canon, and each of them has a vision of three beings when they undergo their Firsting: The Kin they'll love, the Sheep they will kill, and the Hunter that pursues them. Just a vision, a picture, nothing else. It's entirely up to them to recognize these beings and how to proceed once they cross paths. So each were' only kills one human and once that happens, their part in the Impergium is over, they're free to live out their lives. And because the Sheep are hunted, and know they're being hunted, they're a LOT twitchier so the Curse and the Delirium are more intense.
The first thing I did was give the Children of Gaia more teeth. They're not tree-huggers, they're angelic — in the Jungian sense ("every angel is fearsome"). They're not crazy like eco-anarchists and granola punks, but if they're protecting something you ain't getting near it — end of discussion. Think of the Hunters In Darkness interfaced with Lancelot in <i>Excalibur</i>.
The second thing I did was increase the number of lupus breed. Sure, wolves are endangered, but if we follow the pattern of 1 Garou for every ten births, then every other litter would have a lupus Garou. And they grow up fast. I explained this as a survival adaptation: it was advantageous for a wolf pack to have a Garou, who was fast, powerful and unkillable by conventional weaponry. The Garou would make an excellent alpha because of this and as the alpha, she'd be able to deal with hunters that came after the pack. Even a lupus-born metis would be an advantage, they'd never be out of water and could always know when the Wyrm was about.
So basically in my game, the breeds were roughly equal in numbers, with a slight preponderance of the homid breed (because there's so damn many of us).
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