Hacking Werewolf Part Two: Getting to the Cool

Apologies for the long delay in Werewolf articles. I've been wrestling with the issue of what I'd do with Werewolf the Apocalypse. I've been talking to my old gaming group from the 90s and lurking on some Werewolf discussions online as I try to figure it out.

So -to answer the question I posed last time: what would I change about Werewolf the Apocalypse?

1) Lose gifts and rein in the spiritual abilities. The game is about werewolves - not mages. Let's not muddy the waters. Also -- No stepping sideways. The Umbra was a bad idea badly implemented. To do it well - it would probably need to be the entire focus of a game. And that game wouldn't be Werewolf. If you want to keep some kind of spirit communication, OK. But make it much more difficult and much more ambiguous. You shouldn't just be able to call your totem on the big spiritual telephone for a clue

2) Consider getting rid of tribes or lessening their importance.Werewolves aren't overly political creatures. Yeah - politics are an intrinsic part of personal and group relations. And Packs are indeed political structures. But back room, Machievellian manipulations? Leave that for vampires. In terms of tone -- Werewolf is a game of action.

If you keep tribes - add more tribal diversity. More varied and contradictory cosmology between tribes.

Libra, over at the Mutants and Masterminds forum had an interesting take on Werewolf social structure: focus on packs as the primary social unit.

- While humans speak of 'tribes', 'clans' and occasionally a 'Werewolf Nation', as far as most werewolves are concerned they only live in packs (Which admittedly differ in size and precise composition). It's fairly uncommon to find a lone werewolf - but the most dangerous lycanthropes tend to be these lone wolves.

3) Lose the eco-jihad. It's a little troubling when you look at it hard. (It's ok to slaughter because my god (errm - Gaia) tells me its necessary). Also Pentex and the Black Spiral Dancers a little mustache-twirling as villains go.
(Note - yeah - several, but not all, of these have been addressed in the new incarnation of Werewolf)


4) Lose the other shapechangers. It's called Werewolf. Keep the focus on lycanthropy. Leave were-cats, bats, snakes, sharks, bears, spiders and ravens for another game.

5) Lose the Veil and the Delirium. So - when humans see you in Crinos form, they fall over twitching like a herd of fainting goats? That doesn't say spatterpunk horror to me. That says slapstick comedy.

So -all this begs the questions: What's the basic core of what I would argue was the "cool" behind Werewolf: TA?

It comes down to two elements
1) You're a primal, violent anti-hero

2) You're in a world of supernatual mystery and darkness were many things need fixing. And by "things" we mean "EVIL:. And by fixing -- we mean "violent death"

(As a sidenote -- you can make a decent, if not 100 percent, convincing argument that Werewolf: TA was cashing in the ridiculous level of popularity that Wolverine was enjoying in the 90s. In Werewolf, you're pretty much playing a character who might as well be related to Marvel's most stabbity mutant.

Claws - Check!

Beserker rage? Check!

Attitude ranging from philosopher warrior to classic bad-ass to anti-heroic sociopath? Check!)

Admittedly, it sounds simple, even goofy. And this is one reason I've been wrestling with writing this post.

It sounds particularly simple in comparison to the weightier themes that were fronted by other OWOD games like Vampire, Mage and Changeling. But, if I'm being honest, that was the core of the fun I had with Werewolf.

(As an aside: I say "fronting:, because, well --- How often did Vampire games actually incorporate angst and wrestling with the Beast vs Humanity? Seems to me like a lot of that that got lost in the violence and fangy superhero vibes - which I suspect is why Danel is talking about rebuilding it.)

Put another way: WTA was Supernatural if Sam and Dean were lycanthropes. Or Kolchak the Night Stalker if Kolchak was a werewolf.

 And, it was fun if certainly not as deep and serious as other White Wolf game. (I still remember a friend of mine holding Changeling in his hands - as though it were a family heirloom - and declaring that he didn't know any gamers in his city who were worthy of it. )

Next Post: 
Campaign ideas for the new, stripped down Werewolf concept

Heavy Lifting part 2

Another professional writer weighs in with skepticism on the e-book market-space as a silver bullet for unknown writers

Money quote from Joe Konrath. Check out the whole post -- but this is the section where he dismantles the ebook market as a magical cure-all

Q: Now that Kindle is adopting the agency model with a 70% royalty, and Apple is opening an iBook store, shouldn't I get in on this now before the market is flooded with shit?

A: Maybe. If you have an out of print backlist. If you have an agent with books she hasn't been able to sell. If you're a published author with some shelf novels. Then yes, you should get on Kindle and iPad and Nook and Sony and everyplace else that comes up.

But if you're a newbie author who hasn't even finished your first novel yet and is already designing the cover art, perhaps you need to slow down a bit.

I'm not out to crush anyone's dreams here. But writing a good book is hard to do, and not everyone can do it. There's a learning curve. We're all eager to get read. We all want to get published. But before you let the hard-to-please masses read your work, you really have to make sure it's good enough. Readers don't care about you, or your dreams, or how hard you worked on a book. They want to be entertained. Period. If they buy your book and don't like it, they'll let you and others know.

You wouldn't buy your first saxaphone, practice for a month, then go audition for the Boston Pops. You'd spend a long time practicing and learning before you were good enough.

One one hand, authors being able to instantly reach readers without any gatekeepers is a fabulous thing.

On the other hand, too many authors may jump into this too quickly, without mastering their storytelling skills.

I know this for a fact. I've judged self-published book contests. It was awful.

If you really want my ebook sales, here's the only path I know to duplicate them.

1. Write 9 unpublished novels and get over 500 rejections.

2. Sign a six figure print deal.

3. Mail out 7000 letters to libraries, visit 1200 bookstores, and travel to 39 states speaking at writing conferences, conventions, and book fairs.

4. Write a blog that gets half a million hits per year.

5. Sign six more book deals.

6. Get one of your big print publishers to release an ebook for free.

7. Study the market so hard your spouse thinks you're crazy, then take your early rejected books, make sure they're perfect, and upload them to Kindle along with several short story collections and collaborations.

8. Cross your fingers.

That's the journey I took to get here. Your journey will be different. But no matter your path to success, I urge you not to cut corners. There is no shortcut to selling a lot of books, because books sell one at a time. Learn your craft, learn the business, work hard, try your best. That's the secret.

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.)