Thursday, February 25, 2010

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...

4 comments:

  1. Daniel keeps encouraging me to go into more detail about how I'd change Werewolf, and it sounds like so far we're on the same wavelength about this. :)

    My group was expecting An American Werewolf in London, but the game was more like Captain Planet and the Furry Superheroes with Moccasins.

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  2. I'd also be very interested in seeing how you'd revamp Werewolf.
    and regarding the "fuzzy superheroes" vibe from W:TA; Yeah. it was like that.

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  3. Awesome that Stuart is here as well. :-)

    Mike, thanks for the set up beyond the game into the actual myth part of the creature. I agree, the werewolf was *the* true archetype of the "beast within" struggle. But then again, so was Jeckyll & Hyde. And obviously now the vampire. I'm not sure that just because vamps now own that conflict, as you put it, that the werewolf can't have it as well. Ultimately they are going to manifest in different ways, and that's where the opportunity lies.

    Stuart, could I get you to unpack what exactly you mean when you cite An American Werewolf in London? I have a vague idea, but I think it would be more useful if we can lay the cards on the table, so to speak.

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  4. Hey, Mike, look this way.
    http://www.dmperez.com/2010/03/09/rebuilding-vampire-related-reading/

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