Huh, I was assuaged that C:TL 2e was going to be just fine, and now I'm not so sure, going by your last paragraph which hints that you aren't so sure that Requiem or Forsaken 2e are going to work well. Or is it more a 'tone thing' where Requiem 2e as a whole is fine, but the focus on these Strigoi is just a misstep?
 
Werewolf? Both of them? Miss out a lot of the werewolf themes and mythos. You're too in control and "being a danger to your friends and family" is a very minor theme. There's the fact it's all related to bloodlines, rather than... you know, being bitten by a werewolf. You don't need to worry about losing control when you see the moon. There's all the spirit stuff. There's how hilariously badly designed Gifts are compared to Disciplines when it comes to emulating the stories and proving "magical things werewolves can do". And above all, there's the frankly bemusing decision to make it so both kinds of Werewolf were never human to begin with.

But @EarthScorpion don't you remember all the werewolf stories which had as an important plot point the werewolf's ability to turn to living metal and make it so that technology up to and including knives didn't work

Those were my favorite werewolf stories
 
So what are good themes to build Werewolf around? Vampire is about abuse and trauma (while I believe rape to be a significant part I find that the whole deal is a bit bigger), but what can Werewolf pull on other than puberty metaphors? Take some ideas from Wraith with an evil side (as the older werewolf media has to do with a loss of self control). Tribalism, pack mentalities, and us vs themism? Mental illness? Body hair?
 
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But @EarthScorpion don't you remember all the werewolf stories which had as an important plot point the werewolf's ability to turn to living metal and make it so that technology up to and including knives didn't work

Those were my favorite werewolf stories

See, I would actually consider "making people's phones, flashlights, and electric lighting stop working and make fires flicker and risk going out" to actually be a core werewolf power. Like, legitimately I would consider it as a field around you if you're in an "unnatural" form, which I'm defining as "not a human or a wolf". Seriously, a "movie monster" aura around you not only fits the thematics appropriately, but also makes the whole masquerade thing work - and strongly incentivises the werewolves to attack at night, rather than broad daylight.

But then, when I was throwing together ideas for what I'd do, it was sort of coming out that the game was all fundamentally about risk-vs-reward and balancing your Monster trait. Like, legitimately, rather than a classic WoD-style Power Trait, your Monster trait was both your power-points and your Power Trait - and would wax and wane in play a lot. If your character wound up getting frustrated and angry with things, they'd pick up several dots of Monster, and their forms would be more powerful and their "horror movie aura" stronger, but they'd also be at more risk of losing control and to act in normal society, you'd want to find a way of burning it off on something. You'd burn Monster points to assume forms which weren't just "human" or "wolf" - and the more you spent, the more deadly the form was but the less in control you were. The versions of "near wolf" and "near man" were just "a somewhat boosted transformation and I'm mostly in control of myself", while things like the wolfman and the wolf-the-size-of-a-car were "I burned quite a few points on this transformation and so are barely in control". And at high Monster, you'd find that your "human" form was near-human and your "wolf" form was near-wolf.

Basically, if the horror in Vampire is that you're a monster and you have to do terrible things to survive, and the horror in Mage is that you have so much power and almost nothing that stops you doing whatever you want, the horror in my ideas for Werewolf is that your power is not your friend. Not in the Vampire sense, where it wants you to do horrible things, but in the sense that whenever you cut loose, you're playing with fire, but you need to find acceptable means of letting it out or it'll overwhelm you. If you're sensible you keep your Monster low, and make sure to vent it off on acceptable targets - you transform and hunt people's pets at night, you eat spirits who escape into the world (because these Werewolves certainly have Morality, but delay all Morality checks until they transform back to human, and so waking up in the morning realising you killed multiple people is going to ding your Morality hard), you try to feed on raw meat in in safe ways (buying steak), and so on.

But there's always the temptation to let it build up, because you have an excuse for why you need the power right now.

(And of course, Werewolves are caused by being bitten. Specifically, they're caused by being attacked by a Morality 0 werewolf and managing to survive, because Morality 0 werewolves usually shoot up to Monster 10 and turn into hungry more-spirit-than-flesh beasts which live in the Shadow and sometimes venture out to eat flesh-things. Basically, from a certain PoV Morality 0 werewolves are Wolf Hosts, and werewolves are the immature form.)
 
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I've put some thought into how I'd design Werewolf from scratch to actually be a game about werewolves with the werewolf classic themes of things like body horror and thinly veiled puberty metaphors [1].

Having done some light research on the topic (read: Wikipedia), I believe the puberty metaphors are a fairly modern invention, in the same vein that the drug-like addiction of vampires is a product of 1970's drug culture. Outside of the "turn into a wolf"-aspect, pretty much the only thing werewolf legends have as a strong common theme is that it's associated with witchcraft, and usually involves dressing in a wolf-skin (like many shapechanger myths).

Werewolf? Both of them? Miss out a lot of the werewolf themes and mythos. You're too in control and "being a danger to your friends and family" is a very minor theme. There's the fact it's all related to bloodlines, rather than... you know, being bitten by a werewolf.

The werewolf curse being transmitted by bite is as far as I can tell a modern (1930's) invention, mostly cribbed from vampire mythology. A somewhat recurring theme in the modern pop-cultural conception of werewolves is actually that most of it was liberally stolen from vampire stories, (in Serbia, vampires and werewolves are admittedly the same creature, and Count Dracula could turn into a huge black dog) in order to fill out a somewhat meager and uninteresting mythology with the verisimilitude of details and the horror of convoluted rules.

(For all its weird elements and cartoonish simplicity, having the werewolves in Apocalypse be warriors of nature is fairly natural. At the high level, it was about tipping into the 90's environmentalist sentiments just as those Captain Planet sought to promote, but at the same time the association between werewolves and nature is a standard one. Wolves are creatures of nature, and dangerous ones at that - over a roughly 700-year period until 1918, wolves in France killed an average of 10 people per year.

Werewolves are frequently associated with cannibalism due to the whole image of wolves eating humans, which while itself based on reality, also reflects the fear of an apex predator. The wolf that eats humans upsets the fragile human conception of ourselves as in charge, because powerful beings eat less powerful beings. By eating humans, the werewolf represents the fear of nature asserting itself over humans. Kenneth Hite notes this is a fear of nature, and a fear of of Gaia's punishment for man's indiscretions (and he wasn't even speaking about Apocalypse, but instead historical man-eating lions).

The narrative of Apocalypse werewolves being ecoterrorists fighting evil polluting corporations is simply the narrative of nature itself actively fighting back against human violations of some perceived ideal state of nature. The wolves are here one of the more fear-inspiring avatars of nature, and one that an Euro-American audience would be culturally familiar with. Upgrading them into werewolves makes them supernaturally potent while retaining their association with nature, and once you're conceptualizing nature itself fighting back, talking about the spirit of the Earth itself, "Gaia", is a fairly natural step. Add in some popular 90's racist projections of middle-class values like environmentalism and New Age spiritualism onto native peoples, and the existing spirit themes, and you get the Native American angle too.

It's easy to see where the game comes from, though the result is not something I would call particularly good. The word I want to use starts with "r" and ends in "acist".

Masquerade was a game heavily tied to vampire-themes because it was intended to be derivative to capture a specific demographic - goth vampire-fiction-lovers. Werewolf was far more original in concept, and as far as I can tell, not made to draw upon an existing body of werewolf fiction-loves. Instead, it seems aimed at another group within the same socio-economic class; New Age environmentalists. Just like Vampire offers goths power-fantasies about rebelling against your elders, Werewolf offers environmentalists power-fantasies about destroying evil corporations.)
 
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Having done some light research on the topic (read: Wikipedia), I believe the puberty metaphors are a fairly modern invention, in the same vein that the drug-like addiction of vampires is a product of 1970's drug culture. Outside of the "turn into a wolf"-aspect, pretty much the only thing werewolf legends have as a strong common theme is that it's associated with witchcraft, and usually involves dressing in a wolf-skin (like many shapechanger myths).



The werewolf curse being transmitted by bite is as far as I can tell a modern (1930's) invention, mostly cribbed from vampire mythology. A somewhat recurring theme in the modern pop-cultural conception of werewolves is actually that most of it was liberally stolen from vampire stories, (in Serbia, vampires and werewolves are admittedly the same creature, and Count Dracula could turn into a huge black dog) in order to fill out a somewhat meager and uninteresting mythology with the verisimilitude of details and the horror of convoluted rules.

(For all its weird elements and cartoonish simplicity, having the werewolves in Apocalypse be warriors of nature is fairly natural. At the high level, it was about tipping into the 90's environmentalist sentiments just as those Captain Planet sought to promote, but at the same time the association between werewolves and nature is a standard one. Wolves are creatures of nature, and dangerous ones at that - over a roughly 700-year period until 1918, wolves in France killed an average of 10 people per year.

Werewolves are frequently associated with cannibalism due to the whole image of wolves eating humans, which while itself based on reality, also reflects the fear of an apex predator. The wolf that eats humans upsets the fragile human conception of ourselves as in charge, because powerful beings eat less powerful beings. By eating humans, the werewolf represents the fear of nature asserting itself over humans. Kenneth Hite notes this a fear of nature, and a fear of of Gaia's punishment for man's indiscretions (and he wasn't even speaking about Apocalypse, but instead historical man-eating lions).

The narrative of Apocalypse werewolves being ecoterrorists fighting evil polluting corporations is simply the narrative of nature itself actively fighting back against human violations of some perceived ideal state of nature. The wolves are here one of the more fear-inspiring avatars of nature, and one that an Euro-American audience would be culturally familiar with. Upgrading them into werewolves makes them supernaturally potent while retaining their association with nature, and one you're conceptualizing nature itself fighting back, talking about the spirit of the Earth itself, "Gaia", is a fairly natural step. Add in some popular 90's racist projections of middle-class values like environmentalism and New Age spiritualism onto native peoples, and the existing spirit themes, and you get the Native American angle too.

It's easy to see where the game comes from, though the result is not something I would call particularly good. The word I want to use starts with "r" and ends in "acist".

Masquerade was a game heavily tied to vampire-themes because it was intended to be derivative to capture a specific demographic - goth vampire-fiction-lovers. Werewolf was far more original in concept, and as far as I can tell, not made to draw upon an existing body of werewolf fiction-loves. Instead, it seems aimed at another group within the same socio-economic class; New Age environmentalists. Just like Vampire offers goths power-fantasies about rebelling against your elders, Werewolf offers environmentalists power-fantasies about destroying evil corporations.)

*Rubs chin*

Yes, this explains everything...! No wonder corporations hunt hippies with Machine Guns! They've read the old rule books and haven't realized that 2e makes that so much less effective!:p
 
*Rubs chin*

Yes, this explains everything...! No wonder corporations hunt hippies with Machine Guns! They've read the old rule books and haven't realized that 2e makes that so much less effective!:p

That's Werewolf: the Apocalypse. Werewolf: the Forsaken is the new game which has gotten the recent 2E update.

WtF has different themes and ideas going for than WtA.
 
That's Werewolf: the Apocalypse. Werewolf: the Forsaken is the new game which has gotten the recent 2E update.

WtF has different themes and ideas going for than WtA.
To expound on this:
Apocalypse was about being furry death dealing Captain Planet. Forsaken is about keeping the material and spirit worlds in balance.

The Forsaken don't really care about pollution and such they just want to make sure that whatever humanity does don't too terribly upset the spirit world and that the spirits don't screw too much with humanity. Unfortunately first edition made the forsaken less like rage fueled murderbeasts and more like some strange combination of shamans and cops with anger issues. 2e so far seems to rectify this issue, they're still intent on keeping the balance but there's more of a focus on their nature as apex predators.
 
If you want my guess, it's probably because of just how much of Forsaken is a reaction to Apocalypse, rather than a thing in its own right. Awakening was a reaction to Ascension by basically starting all over again (same for Lost to Dreaming) - by contrast, Forsaken reacts to Apocalypse by basically shaping itself to avoid certain features and mistakes.
Wait, isn't this basically the same problem 2e Lunars had in Exalted? Is this some kind of curse of writing a game about werewolves?

A somewhat recurring theme in the modern pop-cultural conception of werewolves is actually that most of it was liberally stolen from vampire stories, (in Serbia, vampires and werewolves are admittedly the same creature, and Count Dracula could turn into a huge black dog) in order to fill out a somewhat meager and uninteresting mythology with the verisimilitude of details and the horror of convoluted rules.
See, this is interesting because I had the honour of reading an essay by Dean Shomshak on the widespread roots of therianthrope and vampire myths, so I recognize this oddity of the mythology, where you have the pop cultural idea of werewolves that liberally cribbed from vampire myths, and then you have actual therianthrope mythology, which covers things like the Khond people of eastern Bengal summoning a spirit to transform into tigers, or Sigmund and his son Sinfjotli stealing magical wolf pelts to escape pursuit in the Volsunga Saga.
 
That'd make an interesting Splat, really. Different themes in a Skinchanger story than a pure Werewolf, but some of them are still relevent. Perhaps something like 'affinity' and the themes would emphasize less 'Gaia's revenge' or 'Shamans of the balance' and instead focus on the cruelty, the senseless competition and life and death and rebirth of nature. Turning into a creature might require something of affinity, becoming like it...or becoming like your *conception* of it, thus the stories of werewolves as vicious, out of control monsters "Men are wolves to other men" and so on. Their idea made reality when they change.

And the farther in you get to your "Affinity" the less you're able to fully emphasize with and understand humans, technology, and so on, eventually reaching the point where, if this is set in the North America, you can't interact with society and have to be put down like an animal, hidden away, or you just abandon your life, fly away like a bird or stalk off like a wolf.

I'm not sure how/if biting and silver and moons would be tied into it, but perhaps something more nordic/runic rather than "Magic Native Americans"? Like, it'd be interesting if the bite of a Skinchanger marked the change as being possible, like where the bite happened there is a runic symbol or something that ties you in with the Affinity, if you wanted to keep the 'bit and become Werewolf' but. And the moon could be somehow tied into the cosmology in such a way that its presence forces their magic from dormant to ever-present.

With a Derangement system that instead marks, not so much insanity, as inability. Starting with silly things like eating stake rare and ending with losing huge parts of your memory, sense of self, and understanding of the modern world.

Perhaps if you want a sub-theme you could go for the melancholy fact that they're dying? Sorta like the Blood Weakness/thin-blood thing, but more in the 'Modernity has left them behind' sense, that a type of magic and being that once had huge advantages now has to operate in the shadows and is slowly dying out.

An additional theme since I know White Wolf loves having parts of them be themes related to the players lives would be the 'person left behind.' The job cut and shipped overseas, the person fired because a computer does it better, the person who enters a field just as it is made obsolete. The PCs are the heirs to a powerful tradition going back to the first men who watched the beasts and dreamed of their power...and yet its a tradition that is dying, something that no longer matters nearly as much.
 
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Well, you learn something every day.

Anyways, so I suppose that's why they stayed away from those particular myths for nWoD Werewolves, because they were going to use it in another book.

Though it does leave little enough meat for Werewolves, especially if they're not taking the infectious bite thing which, while a bit of a ripoff of vampire themes is still sorta a core aspect of them if you're not going to build them as Skinchangers.
 
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Werewolf? Both of them? Miss out a lot of the werewolf themes and mythos. You're too in control and "being a danger to your friends and family" is a very minor theme. There's the fact it's all related to bloodlines, rather than... you know, being bitten by a werewolf. You don't need to worry about losing control when you see the moon. There's all the spirit stuff. There's how hilariously badly designed Gifts are compared to Disciplines when it comes to emulating the stories and proving "magical things werewolves can do". And above all, there's the frankly bemusing decision to make it so both kinds of Werewolf were never human to begin with.

That sort of depends how far back you go.

See, this is interesting because I had the honour of reading an essay by Dean Shomshak on the widespread roots of therianthrope and vampire myths, so I recognize this oddity of the mythology, where you have the pop cultural idea of werewolves that liberally cribbed from vampire myths, and then you have actual therianthrope mythology, which covers things like the Khond people of eastern Bengal summoning a spirit to transform into tigers, or Sigmund and his son Sinfjotli stealing magical wolf pelts to escape pursuit in the Volsunga Saga.


THANK YOU.

Because for all it beat the Native American drum, werewolf always had a much stronger Norse theme to it then anything else. The single best book White Wolf has ever made for playing a werewolf is Skinchangers. If I was going back in time and designing the nWoD werewolves from the ground it, that would be closer to my starting point. The connection between animal spirits and transformation is culturally broad, werewolf just failed to tap into it. Seiðkonur spying in the forms of animals. Fox Brides and Fox Possession. Cannibalism and transformation. Various warrior sects turning into bears, tigers, and I believe in at least one case a shark.

It moves you away from just 'werewolves,' but it brings a much broader mythology to draw upon, and it would be my starting point. People who steal power from spirits, or who have spirits steal form from them. Back and forth, trapped between two worlds. They care about balance not because balance is good, but because it makes things easier for them. The spirits world grows to strong, to invasive, and they start losing control. The physical world starts to dominate and they're too weak when something comes looking.

There's lots of dark mythology you could tie into that as well. Year kings and wicker men. Many things were used to placate the natural world.
 
I think part of Werewolf's issues and design conceits come from the fact that there are two different and separate "werewolf" mythologies.

One is the theriantrope mythology. It's what Imrix and TheLastOne describe - a complex mythos that can be found in many different forms in many different cultures, one of witchery and trickstery, where you make cloaks of animal skins and magic belts, where you turn into birds to spy on people, where you consume human flesh, where the line between animal, human and spirits blur with men turning into beasts, beasts turning into men, and gods crossing from one to the other. It's a very rich, very old mythology, which has spawned separately across many cultures, and which if it were given its own gameline might look something like nWoD Skinchangers blown up to full gameline rather than as a supplement, or some aspect of oWoD's Fera lore.

The other is werewolf mythology. Now, it ultimately comes from the same sources, and occasionally goes back to it, but it's actually a separate mythology - a very modern one. It has very little to do with magic and witchery and with the idea of a broader supernatural world - in fact, some of its most common features are unwillingness and lack of control of the character, and an aspect of horror frequently coming from the intrusion of this lone supernatural creature into an otherwise normal world. It's one where man transforms into a hybrid monster rather than an animal, where the transformation is out of his control and extremely brutal. It often has Freudian undertones - the werewolf acting out the frustrations and desires of the unfortunate - but just as often it's a mindless rampage. It's transferred by a bite or by bloodlines, in both cases things the individual doesn't control; it's connected to moon cycles, again something over which you don't have powers. It makes lycanthropy a curse rather than a power. It's the mythology of An American Werewolf in London, The Wolfman, Ginger Snaps, all that jazz - in fact it's the mythology the average person in the street is likely most familiar with. It's a story about rage, violence, powerlessness.

Modern werewolf mythology is self-consistent in the same way vampire mythology is - while each individual work has its own quirks and occasionally draws upon external material, it is distinctly recognizable to the public as "a werewolf story" in a way that wouldn't be true of a movie about African were-hyenas. It's also very shallow, because it's while you can tell some really good stories about characters whose main feature are lack of agency and serial murder, you can't tell a lot of stories. Each modern-werewolf story has its quirks, but is ultimately more similar to each other than any two vampire movies are likely to be.

The thing about White Wolf Werewolf games as I understand it is that they never sought to be theriantrope stories. They set out to be modern-werewolf stories, and were immediately confronted with the fact that this mythology is shallow, and that you cannot base a gameline solely on them. At that point, a valid design choice might have been to "go back to the roots," which is to say make a game about the theriantrope mythos, but that's not what they wanted. They wanted a werewolf game - a game about rage, about turning into a horrible man-beast from nightmares and tearing shit up out of instinctual violence rather than magic trickery. So they created their own mythology to support the shallow modern werewolf mythos - and because that background lore has esoteric overtones and a lot of mythological references, it seems like it's based on "traditional" theriantrope mythos -at least enough to draw people's attention - but it isn't. Which creates much confusion and annoyance about people who are more interested in a game about traditional skinchanger stories than in White Wolf freewheeling and creating their own mythology from the disparate scraps of others.
 
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It's a very rich, very old mythology, which has spawned separately across many cultures, and which if it were given its own gameline might look something like nWoD Skinchangers blown up to full gameline rather than as a supplement, or some aspect of oWoD's Fera lore.
what about changing breeds tho
 
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