Hacking Werewolf

I've been reading Daniel Perez's discussions of rebuilding Vampire

And this motivated me to write down thoughts I've been tinkering with regarding how I'd hack Werewolf to optimize it for the kind of gaming experience I want from it.

I don't want to say "rebuild". That's what Daniel's doing with Vampire. He's stripping back to the core, keeping the cool essence and building from there.

What I'm doing is different -- I'm offering a different thematic take on the idea of lycanthropes as protagonists in an RPG.

Which begs the question: So, what was wrong with Werewolf?

First off, right off the bat let me say that I'm only talking about OWOD, Werewolf: The Apocalypse. I haven't played the NWOD version.

Next,  it bears stating: Werewolf: The Apocalypse was a fun game and I had a lot of good times playing and running it. I'm not saying "werewolf stinks!". This is a labor of love. Or like. :)

Having said all that -- my beef with Werewolf was this: It never really got over its "little brother" relationship to Vampire and never really came into its own.

Which is slightly curious- because upon reflection, it looks like the vampire myth really stole the whole "cursed protagonist struggling to retain his humanity and fight against his inner Beast" meme from the modern incarnation of the werewolf myth.

From the seminal 1941 Lon Chaney Jr film Wolfman 

Even a man who is pure in heart

and says his prayers by night

may become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms

and the autumn moon is bright.

Pretty neatly encapsulates the whole "angsty holding onto your humanity but failing tragically" thing, eh?


You can't blame White Wolf.

It was a cultural change. In the span of a few decades, Vampires went from undead and evil antagonist to sympathetic and flawed protagonist.

I'm not sure where it started -- but it was well underway in the 1970s.
 Just theorizing here -- perhaps the folks who really brought the idea of vampires as sympathetic characters into the mainstream were George Hamilton and Anne Rice  Hamilton portrayed a love-sick, charming Dracula in Love at First Bite in 1979. Rice's Interview with a Vampire was published just a few years earlier in 1976 and gave us the Platonic Ideal of angsty, sympathetic vampires: Lestat.

(I'm very sure there are some other examples that I'm missing. For example: Morbius the Living Vampire premiered in Marvel comics in 1971 and 1973 saw the introduction of Blade. )

Bottom line is this: While that meme used to belong to Werewolves, Vampires own that shit now. Lock stock and barrel. Complaining about it is like complaining that Star Trek and Star Wars  are bad sci-fi. Yes - they are. However, franchises like that are also the very definition of sci-fi to the majority audience.

So -vampires have stolen the main shtick that used to belong to lycanthropes, and its gone for good. (Although the latest Wolfman movie, IMHO, makes a credible shot at stealing it back. But that's a conversation for another time.)

 So, now, what do you do with werewolves?

WW's answer was pretty confused.

As mentioned above - Werewolf the Apocalypse was basically Vampire's little brother. It was a muddled mix of the angst of Vampire ("When will you rage?" is a catchphrase that would fit much more comfortably into how they were portarying Vampires in the OWOD), the byzantine politics that were a White Wolf trademark, and a sort of enthusiastically violent power-gaming vibe that (arguably) eventually polluted much of the rest of the OWOD.

Throw in a half dozen or more different changing breeds all with different backstories and agendas -- and, well, it was pretty freaking unfocused. Not that an RPG needs to be completely focused. But you've got to have a central unifying theme. Vampire stole the most likely one for Werewolf and White Wolf tried to fill the void with an angst/politics/power-gaming cocktail that didn't really satisfy completely.

 So, what should you do with Werewolf? (Or, rather, what would I do with Werewolf?)

That's a post for next time...

NEW AVENGERS LINE UP

apparently the new prerequisite for being an Avenger is having a movie deal

This Artist is Awesome Dan Christensen

Discovered this guy, Dan Christensen on the official Mutants and Masterminds forums.
Great artist -- really evokes the pulp era. Done some professional work too in Europe. Hope he find a publisher here in America.

Check out his gallery/blog
and here's his store

Stranded on a Distant Star --

Chuck Rice (my publisher via Vigilance Press) is trying a crowd-funding experiment called Stranded on a Distant Star.
Give it a look, eh?

The Heavy Lifting

http://mizkit.livejournal.com/541066.html

a post about crowdsourcing writing.

basically - getting your audience to pay you directly -- something only really viable over the internet.

Here's the most interesting quote for me

Right now is where somebody says “Ye gods, cut out the middleman!” Not a chance. I will never give up my traditional publishers and I dearly hope they will never give up me. For one, Jay Lake details just what a publisher does for a writer, and frankly, it’s most of the heavy lifting. I do the creative work. They do everything else. Critically, they introduce me to an audience willing to pay for my work–and some of those people find me online, become blog readers, and may even become patrons in the direct funding sense. I could not *accomplish* a patronage model without my traditional publishers; my friends, generous as they are, aren’t generally wealthy enough to actually support me.

And - that's the thing.

Which is one reason I don't get particularly excited about e-book readers, Print on Demand or patronage projects. Yeah - they're nifty. They're fun and new - and its interesting to speculate what effect having anew conduit is going to have. Are any of them going to be a cornucopia of opportunity for unknown creative people?

Case in point -- Some of the enthusiasm that I've heard some writers and RPG types express about the iPad and Kindle has the same starry-eyed quality as the Singularity crowd. Yeah, it's potentially cool.

But...
I wouldn't bet the farm on it is. The basic problem of drawing an audience is still there (and if you're doing table-top RPGs? Yeah, the problem is getting a little worse every day as your audience shrinks or decides to go play MMOs.)

It's like the old 1000 True Fans idea. You still need to find those 1000 people. And people are very distracted today. At the end of the day -- you still have to sell it to enough people for it to be viable. Does the internet or whatever shiny new technology of the day we're excited about today actually give you new ways to draw that crowd?

Yes - kind of. There's still only so much money and mindspace to go around. You've got to compete for it. 

And let's talk about the competition on that new toy everyone's talking - the iPad. Tthe kind of stuff I'm doing or interested in doing  (novels, stories, RPG books) aren't mp3s, iPhone apps or even youtube videos. On something like the iPad, you're directly competing with shit a lot louder and shinier.

(Having said that - it might be the perfect medium for digital comics. Once it's price point enters the realm of sanity. That bears thinking about.)