pyat

We re-started the old D&D campaign tonight, the one that began in January of 2002 with velvetpage, doc_mystery, mar2nee, Daniel, and shadow_maze.

Sometime in the Spring of 2002, I joked that the campaign would likely not end until mar2nee's kids were in highschool. Not so much of a joke as a prophecy, it turns out.

We're near the end of the campaign, which I put on hiatus in Fall of 2007 because I was finding it overwhelming. Just before the game started, I spent an hour going through hand written notes, trying to remember plot threads from sessions run a half-decade ago, taking furious little notes...

I made a coffee run five minutes before people were scheduled to arrive. I saw the horizon covered with black clouds, with occasional flashes of forked lightning. D&D weather if ever there was any. The signs were right. I confess that setting up the old screen (complete with skull and cross bones stickers indicating player fatalities) felt good, and in some ways like going home. velvetpage was certainly happy to be once again running "Velvet", her first RPG character to last more than a single session. Velvet has come a long way from that 1st level Rogue the party rescued from a kobold prison. The characters now range in level from 16 to 18.

The game went quite well indeed, and all the plot threads are coming together. The players are in the prison of a fallen god, who turns out to have been shadow_maze's secret patron all along. Next session - God Fights, Dragons, and Glory!

I had a touch of insomnia last night, and sat up reading Werewolf: The Forsaken. Now, the original version of this game, Werewolf: The Apocalypse, was the only White Wolf game I'd successfully GMed. I made a couple of efforts to run a Mage: The Ascension game around 2000, but never got past character generation.

I had the majority of Werewolf specific splatbooks published until 1996 or 1997 and ran a couple of campaigns set in New York City. The players in these games ran a mix of Garou and normal humans in a weird sort of loose pack, led by an elderly bag lady (a Bone Gnawer, natch) who carried the pack's caern around in her shopping cart. They fought Vampire-led street gangs, evil corporations, the usual. Some of the most memorable adventures took place in the Umbra. I recall in particular a visit by the Glass Walker members of the pack to the Get of Fenris Umbral home, where they took part in a great hunt that inspired that rather good roleplaying on the part of my players.

When my original set of players drifted off here and there, I ended up selling all my Werewolf: The Apocalypse books at used game sales. I've regretted that once or twice, most recently while reading The Jungle.

It strikes me that the setting and motifs of Werewolf: The Apocalypse would be perfectly suited to a game set in the world of The Jungle. Glasswalkers and Bonegnawers would seem to fit right in. Also, "Packingtown" is inhabited almost entirely by Irish, German, and Slavic immigrants, and the Chicago stockyards stand at the center of a great network of railways that spread out to the furthest outposts of the American Frontier. So, werewolves from several tribes could easily be written into the setting. Wererats and Ravens would also fit in well. A “first change” sort of tale would also work well, with the players discovering each other amidst the morass of oppressed humanity, and trying to find out just what they are.

Certainly, there would be plenty of opportunity for conflict. Packingtown itself is a nest of gangs, unions, political parties, and confused alliances, all infiltrated by agents of the meat packing interests. The packing plants and cattleyards and slaughterhouses might be real-world personification of Wyrm-tainted Weaver spirit, the center of a vast, tainted web that draws in life - animal and human - and consumes it. Who is behind all this pointless carnage? Why are packing men sent to work in darkness some nights, hacking away at meat they cannot identify? Is it merely tubercular cows and diseased hams they're working on? Maybe it's vampires running the show, though perhaps they're just there taking advantage of the blood and terror. Perhaps its something deeper, and more sinister.

And what of the narrow tunnels being dug by the meat packers, without the knowledge or permission of the city? Labyrinthine miles of dark walkways and miniature railways, they connect all the banks and places of power, yet were often built without the knowledge of those who dwell above. What secret commerce takes place in these tunnels, and is it a hidden parallel to the larger business of butchery above?

In any case, I'm unlikely to actually run this, or even develop it very well. But hey, there are precise maps of those tunnels on the Internet if I ever do!

Now, then, as to my impressions of Werewolf: The Forsaken... it does not grab me as strongly as the first edition did, back in 1992, even with all the references to page “xx”. My friend Bill had picked up Vampire: The Masquerade earlier that year, and we intended to run parallel campaigns. This plan never worked out, and later another friend would purchase Mage, and that became our primary game throughout university.

I did not like what I perceived as the amorality of Vampire, and I had a serious antipathy toward Vampires in general because of my innate resentment of anything popular. Mage confused me. Partly, this was because the GM was a misanthrope who refused to tell us anything about the setting, or who was simply unable to explain it properly. Partly, it was also very unlike anything I'd read before. At the time, I fear I also labored under a kind of knee-jerk anti-intellectualism of the “plain talk and objective truth” sort. All this stuff about “paradigms” and “paradox” actually just sort of went over my head, mostly because I refused to engage the effort needed to appreciate it.

Werewolf had a sort of simple viscerality that appealed to me. There was right, there was wrong, and the best way to deal with wrong was to bite it really, really hard. It was more like the black and white RPGs I was used to. Sure, there was a lot of moral ambiguity as well, but diligent mayhem always seemed like the surest path to victory.

Now then, roll on 16 years. The new edition has removed the easy hook of “Wyld vs. Wyrm” and replaced it with a general struggle against the spirit world. The setting does not grip me at all, though it seems fairly well put together. However, what I'm wondering is this – Would the 18-year-old Pyat have liked this game? Is the reason I don't find it as gripping just that I'm older? It has the same “too cool for school” sample characters and urban angst and the like – so am I not just as interested in that these days? I mean, I still find it fun, but it strikes me as fun in the same way as escapist action movie is fun. There would no longer be as much of an emotional investment in the setting.

Or, maybe it's just because it's new. I'm not sure. I really liked the new World of Darkness core rules. In any case, given that I have a couple of active RPG games on the go, it's unlikely that I'll be running or playing Werewolf in the foreseeable future.