Who the fuck thought this game was a good idea? I've only recently gotten to read it (in part due to Werewolf 20th) and I have to ask what the actual fuck was going on in people's mind when they made it? Oh sure on the surface it sound cool but my god! The setting. It read like how a pretentious, edgy kid from the '90 think the world is and how he's plotting his revenge against his rich religious fundamentalist Republican-voting parents or something. This game is ridiculously spiteful, childish and hating on society.
And just when I thought it couldn't get worse I decided to check the other supplements and the Fomori breed are so ridiculous I'm not sure if I'm angry at the stupidity or laughing until I pass out.
Can't help but feel there was a vaguely useable concept of a game in there but its buried under a level of childishness and edginess that make Mage and Vampire look positively good and mature by comparison.
>>48241866
Yeah we were pretty disappointed when our group finally got a copy of the book, back in the day. We dumped the fluff pretty quick and just made our own version.
Fomori are funny though, Freak Legion is one of the most gleefully tasteless reads you could ask for.
Good thing you didn't get into the Players Handbook with the weresharks and werespiders and so forth.
Behold!
The prophecy is true!
The lord of Slowpokes has arrived!
>>48241904
>Fomori are funny though, Freak Legion is one of the most gleefully tasteless reads you could ask for.
When I first read about Fomori they seemed, conceptually, to be more akin to Chaos Spawn and the Possessed of warhammer 40k. That seemed all fine and dandy. The I read about Throwbacks and Normalite...
>>48241907
Hey well, not my fault I was playing better RPG until I decided one day to take a look at this to see if it was as bad as I had been told.
Its worse.
>>48241866
People in the 90s who weren't oversaturated with edgy shit yet, when environmentalism was still something people didn't know about, when punk was still a thing.
>>48241866
>not liking edgy
Kill youself kiddo.
>>48241983
>dat underager
The '90s were the definition of edgyness. Environmentalism has been a thing since the 70s. By the time Werewolf came along full-blown ecoterrorism didn't seem that unrealistic. Punk was nothing but a commodity like it always had been.
>>48241866
Why do you think that new world of darkness werewolf took so little from old werewolf?
You know what bugs me with Fomori? Oh sure, like I previously posted, the idea of a corrupted/possessed human deformed into an inhuman monster and a beacon of corruption is cool. But then there's the Freak Legion/Book of the Wyrm. If you dig into it you realize the message is this:
"People who disagree with me are not only evil, they are outright monsters who must be destroyed." Maybe I'm reading way too fucking much into this game, but the implication is clear: things the author of the game disagree with only exist because of corruption.
>>48242018
Warhammer 40 000 is edgy but its at least not pretentious about it.
>>48242026
the 90s weren't the definition of edginess untilyou look back on it now as a hipster
environmentalism wasn't made popular until then, recycling wasn't a commonplace thing until the 90s when it became a law and everyone had recycling bins
you don't know what you're talking about
>>48242055
You mean you think wasters, molesters and abusers aren't corrupt?
When're you going to move out of your brothers basement?
>>48242085
No I mean childish shit like 'dudebros are degenerated monsters who look like cavemen with permanent erections'. Yeah sure, dudebros are unpleasant assholes and might be rather rude but its a little fucking overblown to say they are possessed by pure evil.
Shut the fuck up, Aspel.
>>48242129
That's because they aren't, you stupid fuck. The beer from King Breweries is, and it's advertised directly to dudebros and some are corrupted because of it.
>oWoD
There's your mistake.
>y goth-tribal anti-establishment setting so anti society?
>i want b teamjacob
this is prettymuch why most WoD games end up being about superheroes
>>48242148
>advertised directly to dudebros
Why bother advertising? Dudebros will buy literal cat piss in a can if it gets them drunk for under a dollar a can. Just make the shittiest cheap beer you possibly can, don't advertise, let word of mouth take care of things from there, corrupt hipsters and dudebros alike.
>>48241866
>It read like how a pretentious, edgy kid from the '90 think the world is and how he's plotting his revenge against his rich religious fundamentalist Republican-voting parents or something.
I knew the developers and that's pretty much what happened. Read Andrew Greenberg's forewards, introductions, afterwards, and political writings. It's pretty much exactly that.
But also keep in mind that it was a different world. White Wolf was riding high on the success of Vampire the Masquerade. You could get open bar top shelf liquor at their parties at cons-- and more than a little of their profits went up their noses, too. Hot goth girls threw themselves at even the low-ranking employees.
Also, this was post-cold war / pre-9/11. There had been a huge economic boom, then a brief mild recession lasting a couple months, then the dot com boom. The Internet was changing everything. Communism had fallen apart, turned out to be slave labor camps, oppression, poverty, racism, and environmental destruction, and even the most radical right-wingers had been vindicated. Or at least felt that way. The radical Left had to outwardly abandon socialism; they hated Evil Corporations but couldn't really discuss what they wanted to replace them with. They were focused on boutique causes: gay rights, environmentalism, religious liberty for wiccans, animal rights, and lots of rear-guard actions against republicans, who were on the march.
Go back and watch the Matrix or Fight Club. Those movies look totally different post-9/11, when terroristic violence isn't just some sad pictures on TV from some far-away foreign country. It was kind of cool, sexy even. Monkey-wrenching for Earth First, ELF, or PETA had a certain cachet: you got to be violent and destructive and act out, but still tell yourself it was all for a good cause in the end.
Anyway, Werewolf was meant to be much more explicitly left-wing and aim for young politically conscious teens. It mostly hit the mark.
>>48242327
Price isn't really a factor when it comes to dudebros. Their favorite beer is Bud Light, which is utter shit and isn't that cheap. Yuengling is the same price but much better, while PBR is much cheaper and even that isn't as bad. It's because Bud Light has the most marketing.
>>48241866
Edge is what sold in the 90's. Just be thankful you weren't a comic book fan in the 90's.
>>48241983
>>48242026
>>48242062
While causes like gay rights and feminism went moderate and scored big gains, environmentalism in those days went the other way. There was widespread consensus about clean air and water, but the eco-radicals were struggling to come up with new demands to put themselves out on the bleeding edge. Many went full-on anti-tech / anti-industry / anti-people. Overpopulation was a big deal in those days (at that point there was no evidence that world population would level off at ANY point). Selling the apocalypse always works better in times like this when things are falling apart. In the 90's, people were comfortable and getting laid all the time. Yeah you could believe that bad shit was on the horizon (in fairness, it was) but you didn't really believe it.
The 80's had been characterized by simple, bold, basic archetypes. Clear heroes and villains. Intentionally avoiding the moral complexity and navel-gazing from the 70's. Fun, happy stories. It wasn't sappiness, it was a conscious decision to reject what we call edginess.
So then the 90's hit and by then people are bored of simple stories again. So in comes Dark Knight and The Crow and Interview With a Vampire. The edginess had been out long enough that it wasn't cliche anymore, and so for a new generation it was fresh and new.
In roleplaying, complex stories had never really been a big thing. So Vampire hit like a lightning bolt. Plus the goth craze meant you had a whole wave of cool kids who'd never played an RPG before suddenly getting into gaming. And at that moment, the titan of RPGs, D&D, was falling apart.
Werewolf was an attempt to recreate Vampire's success. Punks and metal-heads instead of goths. Eco-activism instead of capitalist dystopia. Lots of combat (Vampire was a game that aimed for the literary story-telling types, Werewolf would aim for the younger, combat-centric gamer who was getting out of D&D.
>>48242883
>Welcome, dear readers, to Historic Extra Special Holographic Collector Edition Issue #1 of BLOODPOUCH MURDERDOOM, the edgiest and most badass hero ever! He has over 400 pouches on his torso alone, has -5% body fat, and is 4'5" and 300 pounds of PURE BADASS MUSCLE!! His parents were murdered before he was even born and he was raised in hell! Then he PUNCHED HIS WAY OUT OF HELL and now he fights DEMON NINJA MUTANTS!! A NINJA WILL DIE ON EVERY PAGE!! BLOODPOUCH MURDERDOOM, ART AND WRITING BY ROB LIEFELD!!
>>48241866
The 90s were a magical place.
Not everything from back then holds up nowadays, though. Times and tastes change.
>>48242674
This so hard. Go back and read anything subcultures were pushing in the late 80s and early 90s. It was all like this. Early Poppy Z Brite, for example. Or zines. Comics from the time included spawn, serious house on serious earth, the dark knight returns, etc. Even though it was towards the end of that period, fight club. Or music from that time. It was all modern primitivist fight the power free love criminal mastermind porn about enlightened tiny tribes of young adults adrift in an uncaring world where most people were corporate stepford drones with no souls who wanted to rape the earth and lie about everything and shop at ikea.
>>48241866
>This game is ridiculously spiteful, childish and hating on society.
Which is exactly what made it fun. Trying to rip apart society while being a 9 foot tall rage fuel murder machine was far different then playing just about anything out at the time. Vampire and this is what inspired far more of the explorations of the dark side of roleplaying. Playing the monsters and learning how to justify it as being dedicated to a cause, even if it was just survival. Without those Vtm, WtA, and MtA you lose a lot of new roleplaying games that are out now. Before these, it was often number crunching and dungeon crawling and that was all that was expected, even in other settings. These put character development first and allowed you to really explore things that just weren't normal at the time. And the pointed out that things that main-stream society views as normal, are not always beneficial or right. Heady stuff coming right out of the 80s when the stories were much more black and white. Not quite 50s black and white, but close.
In essence, learn the times, then you can understand the choices of people of that time. Otherwise, shut your ignorant hole and stop proving yourself a complete tard.
>>48241866
This just in; Anon discovers evidence that 90's White Wolf was full edgelord.
Film at 11.
>>48243321
>corporate stepford drones with no souls who wanted to rape the earth and lie about everything and shop at ikea.
Hey, I take offense to that. My Borkënshëlfing and Dëskënbork are quite nice, thank you.
In 10 years or so everything from this time is going to look shitty, too. We're going to look back at all the social media and fanfic pandering, the now dated references to other popular shows, the way the heroes don't take anything seriously, the way everyone always has the latest iphone and tv pretended everything was happy while our economy and political climate was shitty and make relentless fun of that, too.
>>48242674
Here's the thing: it worked. >>48242883 is right. I remember talking to a WW developer in those days and thinking it was V:tM, and then all other games were basically treading water. He said I was flat-out wrong. Vampire was the flagship, but Werewolf was doing great and for a while was actually the bigger source of revenue. They more or less DID snare all those D&D players, at least for a while.
Changeling and Wraith were more or less flops, at least as product lines. Mage was winning awards and it wasn't dying but was not a big success either. Mage was innovative but hard to game and suffered from its own post-modernist politics being incomprehensible to anyone but a true believer. With Changeling, they went back to aiming at subcultures. Changeling was supposed to appeal to Rave culture-- the problem being that they didn't care about RPGs.
Wraith went back to goths, and goth was still big, but those people were already playing Vampire. And there's a difference between being tragically hip, angst-ridden superheroes who mope around and irrelevant nothings in a genuine dystopia who can't do anything BUT mope around.
Plus by that point other RPGs were getting bigger, and internet gaming, and CCGs. What capped it was D&D 3.0 coming out at precisely the moment when WW was creatively spent and people were getting bored of tragic modern-fantasy dystopian storytelling and light-weight mechanics. They wanted to play old fashioned fantasy, which hadn't been a thing in nearly a decade, and with comprehensive and (comparatively / for the time) very tight rule set. WW never quite figured out what went wrong, and didn't have the financial stability to ride it out.
>>48243489
>WW never quite figured out what went wrong
What could have they do differently?
>>48241866
Yeah... back in the day, it pretty much killed my interest in White Wolf.
>>48243358
>>48241866
Okay so what if I told you Werewolf was mainly PLAYED as a game of high powered murder hobos killing demons and industrialists with equal glee? Even the weakest member of a sept is a nigh unstoppable combat beast compared to any other splat in the world of darkness.
Embrace the rage, destroy the Weaver, feed the wyrm, protect the wyld.
>>48242055
>"People who disagree with me are not only evil, they are outright monsters who must be destroyed." Maybe I'm reading way too fucking much into this game, but the implication is clear: things the author of the game disagree with only exist because of corruption.
The tone of the game is a balance between an objective morality that makes some activities and elements of modern life intrinisically evil and the hubris this endows werewolves with.
Read the full setting: Werewolves' original job is to do what the Wyrm is supposed to do: Destroy things, but specifically *bad things*. And they're certain that things that are "tainted by the wyrm" are evil and need destroying. And they have special powers to sense "wyrm taint", and when they think they've identified something as wyrm tainted they destroy that thing and make the world worse because they were wrong.
But *this time*, in the final nights before the apocalypse, they're certain they've identified something as wyrm tainted and they have to destroy it all, and this time it will *totally* make the world better.
The entire metaplot makes sense if you assume the werewolves are all just well intentioned minons of the Wyrm, the Wyrm marks things to destroy with wyrm taint, werewolves destroy those things, and this makes the world gets more wyrm tainted.
And the werewolves never catch on.
Yet people don't understand why Coyote is always laughing.
>>48243453
It's just sturgeon's law.
There's tons of stuff from the 80's, 90',s and 00's that stands the test of time, and there's plenty from this decade that will as well.
There's just a lot of crap.
I mean a LOT of crap.
A LOT.
>>48245718
With hindsight not an awful lot. For RPGs, nWoD actually did really well. The financial crisis causing publishing costs to shoot through the roof at more or less the same time that OGL books flooded the market and crashed games stores really hurt them. CCP buying out White Wolf and then running them into the ground was out of their hands - Remember, at the time of the buyout they were able to put out Changeling the Lost and Hunter, both of which did really well in terms of sales and critical acclaim (Changeling especially). CCP murdered them through sheer incompetence.
>>48242674
>when terroristic violence isn't just some sad pictures on TV from some far-away foreign country. It was kind of cool, sexy even
I think part of this was the trend for the legit bad guys in earlier days becoming the new protagonists. Like in the 80's and to some extent 90's movies terrorists were stock villains. So then they transitioned to being ok enough to use as protagonists.
Same shit with serial killers. Look at Silence of the Lambs compared to fucking Dexter.
>>48241904
Freak Legion was indeed a funny read.
Though holy shit who in the fuck let that nigger SCAR ever do a an illustration for anything except picture books for retarded children!? Goddamn I had suppressed every memory of that shit! D:
Subsidiaries - A Guide to Pentex was a nice read too, and it gave us this masterpiece:
>/tg/.jpg
Steve Prescott was a national treasure, his work for Shadowrun 3e was top notch...
>>48249219
>thai cuisine
truly the work of satan himself.
>>48249219
>you'll never play a Revenant session with a swole qt
The Black Dog Games chapter was an awesome shit-take on everything from WW itself to GURPS and D&D.
>>48241866
I still play Werewolf, but my group tends to pay down the ecoterrorist/anti-corporate angle and focuses on fighting the Wyrm as an existential threat to reality.
>>48242997
> ART AND WRITING BY ROB LIEFELD!!
Toppest of keks.
>>48243489
that said, Wraith (and its follow up Orpheus) was a really, really good game if you got into it.
>>48246171
>The entire metaplot makes sense if you assume the werewolves are all just well intentioned minons of the Wyrm, the Wyrm marks things to destroy with wyrm taint, werewolves destroy those things, and this makes the world gets more wyrm tainted.
This is sort of canon, I thought. The wyrm's not doing it *intentionally*, because the wyrm's a huge cosmic force and not a moustache twirling villain. However, every werewolf has a dangerous rage in them, and risks falling into death frenzy and wyrm taint. That's, like, the point.
If you read some of the fera's books, you get an outsider perspective on the werewolves, and it's not pretty. The were-spider book, for example, explicitely states that as far as the spiders are concerned, the werewolves are only making things worse.
Plus the wyrm isn't even the real problem: the real problem is the weaver, which the werewolves are pretty unconcerned with.
>>48243321
>It was all modern primitivist fight the power free love criminal mastermind porn about enlightened tiny tribes of young adults adrift in an uncaring world where most people were corporate stepford drones with no souls who wanted to rape the earth and lie about everything and shop at ikea.
And yet nowadays they have all grown into sour, prude, no-fun-allowed-thought-policing-old-people.
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss, huh?
>>48252677
>And yet nowadays they have all grown into sour, prude, no-fun-allowed-thought-policing-old-people.
As they were, so are you. As they are, so will you be.
>>48251296
That's it.
Some people just take the werewolf's point of view of things for granted. Others don't actually read the books and just hear about it from shitty review sites before making threads about it here.
>>48251296
can you expand on this or tell me what exactly to read?
>>48252932
The avant-garde becomes garde, and then becomes the old guard.
Same as it ever was.
Since this here Worlds of Darkness-related thread is already up, I'd like to take advantage of that by asking a question here (rather than start a whole new thread).
Basically, I'm interested in getting into WoD, specifically Chronicles (or New Worlds) of Darkness. But where do I begin?
Also, I just know that my collector-mania will get the better of me and that I'll try to get my hands on all the different books so that I can mishmash the lore into one meta-setting... is this a bad idea?
>>48251237
ORPHEUS WAS SO GODDAMN COOL!!!!
>X-files at its best+Sixth Sense/The Conjuring/[whatever good 2spook you have]
http://whitewolf.wikia.com/wiki/Orpheus
Everything ever published for the system plus a really good fanbook for the Terrel & Squib antagonist firm.
>>48256641
...and forgetting the download like a dweeb:
http://www45.zippyshare.com/v/W2HXS6h6/file.html
>>48241866
>Who the fuck thought this game was a good idea?
As is common for terrible ideas, the answer is 'marketing".
>>48243358
>>48245803
>Before these, it was often number crunching and dungeon crawling and that was all that was expected, even in other settings.
>ORLY.jpg
Millenials detected.
>>48256610
Just grab everything from some share in a pdf thread and you'll have shit to read till 2020. Every game line has quite a lot of meta, and sometimes they even interact with each other a little.
Best thread on /tg/ this entire year.
>>48256641
Orpheus, at least to me, also had a much wider gaming appeal: You didn't have to be some subculture misfit to feel at home in the setting (this some postpeak-oWoD thing? seems much more pronounced in nWoD and the later stages of oWoD), the characters actually being total normie human beings that at some point of their lives had a real brush with death (good point of character creation/background btw). But the game itself was pure supernatural exploration, with some nice exorcist/ferryman elements, exploring life after death, and what lies in the fucking darkness behind that once you start diving into the sourcebook metaplot.
The game also did itself a great favor by skipping all the the other supernaturals, eskimos and shit. Just being a story about the first astronauts of mankind into the great beyond.
>>48246171
>murderhobos
>not going throught the temperament test
shiggy
I thought all Whitewolf games were like this. Are they not?
Is world of darkness the worst aged rpg?
>>48259908
Street Fighter : The Storytelling Game is so campy you could roast marshmellows, but it's hardly edgy unless you get into the cybernetics and Shadaloo (and it's more comedically villainous than anything else).
>>48254564
Wew lad
>>48260165
Anon, you're the first person to have mentioned that game since 1998.
>>48241866
I really miss the 90s. I remember when shit like Werewolf was mind-blowingly awesome.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEXWRTEbj1I
>>48259944
Yes, but that's because unlike most RPGs (which take place in some generic fantasy pre-modern setting or some futuristic science fiction setting), the World of Darkness specifically took place on Earth during the 90's.
That means not only have the mechanics aged, but the setting has aged quite a bit since then.
>>48259908
Nah, some aren't.
Changeling is the definition of "not edgy." Its themes are more nostalgia, growing up, forgetting the things you used to care about and fighting to protect your personal sense of innocent and wonder.
Basically if you're too edgy in Changeling you'll give in to banality and lose all your powers.
Street Fighter was also pretty non-edgy.
Then you have niche games like Mummy the Resurrection, which are decidedly non-edgy (you have to a good person who uses your powers to help people and enforce the balance of Maat, if you don't, Osiris and his judges will kick your ass when you die).
>>48259864
Looks cute, what is it?
>>48242055
>40k
>not pretentious
For a game that started as a satirical look at sci-fi through a lens of satirical British humour, sure seems pretty up its own arse at this point.
>>48261581
Bretty gud n' RPG-y webcomic, Prague Race
http://www.praguerace.com/comic/start
One of the characters turned into a werewoof a a few months back.
>>48263590And it is very cute!
>>48261015
New changeling can be more edgy if run poorly. But it can also still be about growing up and the lose of innocence.
>>48259944
nah.
>>48265586
Poor man's Mage or what?
>>48241866
ITT: Summer being surprised Werewolf was product of its times
What next? Being surprised first edition of Vampire was about punk rebels that drink blood and are gay?
>>48241866
To be fair, it was written *in* the 90s, *by* a pretentious art-school edgelord.
>>48243453
How bad is all the progressive stuntcasting going to look a decade or two from now, it's going to be hilarious.
>Wait they refused to write actual black characters so they just made a white character black temporarily to appease people?
What would be a good setting to spice up a WWtA campaign, to not be "frenzykill ALL the wyrmlings, associates and third cousins" 24/7?
>>48272344
>"frenzykill ALL the wyrmlings, associates and third cousins" 24/7?
BSD campaign. "frenzykill ALL the gaialings, associates and third cousins" 24/7
>>48272344
I pretty much never liked WWtA,could never stomach DMing more than one shots, but I have fond memories of that one shot where the players (the less the better I'd say three at most) are part of of plane crash, left in the middle of the mountains with a dozen survivors and the dilemma of what to do with them.
It's a pretty simple set up, and sometimes it just goes to hell and the players murder everyone and you throw a black spiral dancer pack in the region and they have their epic fight and go home happy.
And sometimes they just try to keep everyone alive. From cold and starvation and the lone bear and the madness creeping. Even the pregnant woman. Even the casual racist. Even the industrialist. And it makes for a cool tale.
>>48273879
>>48273879
>DMing
I think I see the problem.
>>48269863
>Why do they say this movie is "Diverse" when it's three white guys, one of whom is gay (Who fucking cares), a Mexican woman who appears to be brain-damaged, the world's blandest ginger woman, and a black woman who really should be in jail for felony assault by now?
>>48274491
>I think I see the problem.
I started playing a long time ago and kept the lingo?
I DMed a game of this for about a year and a half, but yeah, we did end up playing Werewolf Superheroes. as I recall, one guy played a homeless punisher rip off, or in more concise parlance, an actual murder hobo
>>48267478
Sort of.
>>48272344
Umbra travels, coolest shit ever
>>48272344
Drop the werewolves into the Virtual Web is always a fun one, kinda fucks with their murderhoboy ways when they're hanging with transcendental cyberpunk haxors.
>>48274922
Have you tried not hating D&D?
>>48241866
I really liked how every Werewolf tribe has massive misconceptions about the nature of the Wyrm and how best to combat it. None of it read as edgy to me, it all seemed very tongue-in-cheek. Wendigo straight up blaming White People for bringing the Wyrm back to America, for instance.
>>48242722
Yingling is a great crap beer. I also kind of liked busch lite, specificaly for beer pong
So what would a Mokolé game be like, anyway?
>>48241866
>pretentious
>>48241866
Not sure what you wanted. It's a game about werewolves in a lore where they aren't human. None of the WoD titles are adventure games. If you want to play furry adventures, Ironclaw exists.
>>48284677
I ran a 1on1 Moloke game. He remembered his parents deaths in his dreams and traveled to find out why they died. Gaia replaces Luna as the big spirit who guides you, and Lizards don't run in packs. He found an old man down in Florida who taught him how to unlock the memories. It played somewhere between world spanning mystery and vengeance quest.
Speaking of, can you Dominate a Werewolf? I don't remember any rules for it, can anyone help with this?
