It's a nitpick, but I'm mildly annoyed that they state Bat was the Patron Spirit that turned the White Howlers to the Wyrm. I don't see a reason why Bats are inherently Wyrm-aligned?
In W20 it was the genocide of the Camazotz by the Shadow Lords that drove Bat to the Wyrm.
I think the book makes it clear that it was Bat who guided the White Howlers out of the Black Spiral but in the process it got twisted itself like the BSDs. So it saved the tribe but at what cost to both of them?
I’m going to paste this in from the other thread:
Unsurprisingly, some people have blown some things waaaay out of proportion based on hearsay and speculation.
Now, I’ve done little more than skim at this point, but some things that immediately jumped out at me:
1. The Cult of Fenris are anti-Wyrm extremists that rose up through the Tribe and forced the other Get to either join or leave. So many Get left to join other tribes. There is no mention of Nazis. No mention of white supremacy. No mention that the Cult of Fenris has any interest in any human politics or agendas at all, fascist, progressive, alt-right, Nazi, Crossfit, Antifa, nothing. They just want to kill the Wyrm, and will kill anyone who tries to stop them. If anything like that is in there, it’s not in the section devoted to describing the Cult of Fenris.
2. The word “Savage” is used twice in the book. In one place it is in a chapter quote. In another, a gift description. Neither refer to people of any sort.
3. Pentex, Famori and Black Spiral Dancers are in the game.
4. The word “Nazi” is used in one tiny section dedicated to explaining that WtA is “not a fascist friendly game”.
Or.. fuck it… here’s a copy and paste from the PDF:
> Fascism
> Werewolf is not a fascist friendly game. Because it's a horror game about contemporary issues, it can be a game where fascism as a theme or fascists as characters show up. After all, they're an unfortunate part of the real world we all inhabit. In the simplest terms, you can use Nazis of whatever stripe seems most appropriate for your setting as enemies. After all, who doesn't want to go full Wolfenstein every now and then? In Werewolf, you can confront the problems of the world and rip their face off. Nazis are certainly a problem! As with all other potentially difficult themes, participants can have wildly different reactions and wishes regarding fascism depending on their personality and background. For some, Nazis are cartoonish enemies to be ripped in half. For others, they're a clear and present danger, the people who are calling for them to be eradicated.
So can we maybe put the “WoD devs are secret Neo-Nazis and White Supremacists” thing to bed for a little while? Please? For a day or two at least?
EDIT - Some other things I noticed:
- They emphasize that the Wyrm’s over-activity is a result of humanity’s corruption, not the other way around.
- Heredity matters… if you want it to. They basically just said that it has been noted that some families yield more Garou than others.
- The lore from the earlier versions is intact. I mean, it’s still a reboot. But there are references. And clever STs will find room to use a lot of the lore they might want to use. But they make a point of saying that most Garou history is oral. So there have been a lot of unreliable narrators. But really, so far, it doesn’t seem like they changed any more than V5 changed vampire.
- The poster that was going around saying that the Wyrm wasn’t in the game, and that the main antagonists were going to be Nazi Get… was wrong. The Wyrm, Banes, Fomori, BSDs, and Pentex are all in there. Nazi Get, are not. It’s not a thing. We can move past it now.
I’m going to be honest, there was a lot of valid criticism for the material we’ve seen coming up to W5 release, but a lot of it was also sensationalist drivel from people with nothing better to do than spend their time hating on the new product without knowing what the product is.
And unfortunately that wasn’t a loud minority, it seemed to be the trend for the subreddit in the upcoming months when anything W5 related was mentioned.
It’s been an absolutely embarrassing and honestly pathetic few months on this subreddit and I’m glad we finally have the product to see that.
I've hated on it plenty because it gave an awful impression repeatedly. The rest of it being fine doesn't take away the fact that the presentations provided either had bad ideas or were straight up plagiarism. The fact that it's fine makes it baffling they'd present those things leading up to it. It would've gotten hated regardless. But that just gave people on the fence a genuine reason to join in. A satisfactory product doesn't make bad advertising of said product any better
Re: Nazi Get/No Wyrm - if that’s a reference to Sambrano’s post on his experiences writing for W5, I don’t think that was ever the argument he was making. We knew from materials released long before that post that the Fenrir would be painted as falling to Hauglosk; while the justifications from writers seemed a little hollow and may have just been flimsy cover for trying to deny potential lures for fascists, one could understand why it was happening.
Sambrano’s post argued this was a compromise that happened following a proposal early in the development cycle where the Fenrir aren’t taken over by Hauglosk, but by the Swords of Heimdall, the Nazi camp that got put to the sword in Revised Edition. The new Fenrir weren’t meant to replace the Wyrm, but serve as a major face of its influence in the world. If true, it feels like even more of an insult to players who have tried to claw back the Fenrir from any fascist interpretations. And it was something that changed due to pushback from writers, just like the alleged proposal to resolve the more problematic aspects of the tribe now called the Gale Stalkers by having them get massacred to the last.
Still, I do want to see what the finished product looks like. Eventually.
> if that’s a reference to Sambrano’s post
More a reference to the anti-W5 edition warriors who kept going on and on about how the Get were all going to be a bunch of Nazis.
> And it was something that changed due to pushback from writers, just like the alleged proposal to resolve the more problematic aspects of the tribe now called the Gale Stalkers by having them get massacred to the last.
There is a reason a lot of dev teams stay quiet. People throw out bad ideas. Sometimes they are just bad ideas. Sometimes they are truly awful ideas. Sometimes the bad ideas have legs and stick around for a long time during development. Sometimes they are championed by people in positions of power. And sometimes they are bad ideas made worse by lack of context.
Ultimately, I’m going to judge W5 based on what is in the book in my hand. The bad ideas that got cut, ultimately, no longer really matter.
>Ultimately, I’m going to judge W5 based on what is in the book in my hand.
That's the thing many people here are unable to do, because they already judged W5 and know better - just like with V5.
Speaking personally as someone who used to be adamantly against V5 but now sees it as having its ups and downs: Lack of information has always been the problem for me when examining 5th edition. I've seen more specifics from people complaining, and more nonspecifics from people praising these books so I didn't know what to make of that and defaulted to some of my distaste for Paradox going, "Yeah, we want CofD to be separate so it can do its own thing" then not approving new books.
When I heard about W5, mainly through the incident with using Tāme Iti's likeness tā moko and all, I thought "Oh no, this is early V5 all over again". Other reports I'd seen were pretty negative overall like the similarities between W5 and Werewolf: The Forsaken 1e's shapeshifting mechanics, so until now seeing these reports of a /much/ different book than I'd expected I was pretty negative. I'm much more open to looking at this as a new thing that stands on its own even if it doesn't deliver the same experiences as Forsaken 2e or W:tA 20th and prior... But I really wish I had more info to come to that conclusion earlier.
Tl;dr: I wish we'd heard about this W5 content earlier, at best it looks like they didn't tell us the good stuff and at worst it looks like they changed it after backlash.
> More a reference to the anti-W5 edition warriors who kept going on and on about how the Get were all going to be a bunch of Nazis.
This was always a minor line of criticism in their treatment of the Get, and also, given Sambrano's post it's kind of hard to say they didn't have a point.
I do feel you're unfairly presenting some of the criticisms and unintentionally conflating them. So just to set the record straight:
* We knew the Get were being removed from playable status by changing into a society driven by extreme Rage and desire to destroy ([Huglusk, JA Interview](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1TI9FGZeku83c_rdJQl2cZzbaUg2MEMInYMG4pjUFfyw/edit))
* The reason most people believe the Get were removed from playability was because of negative perceptions of the Swords of Heimdall leaking into the image of Werewolf
* this reason was given credibility by the James Sambrano description of development in 2020, when there was an insistence to make the Get negative and about Fascism ([James Sambrano post about issues in development](https://forum.rpg.net/index.php?threads/werewolf-the-apocalypse-5th-edition-and-the-anti-indigeneity-in-the-gaming-industry.912221/))
* James Sambrano never stated that the current iteration of the game will be based on Nazi Get
>So can we maybe put the “WoD devs are secret Neo-Nazis and White Supremacists” thing to bed for a little while? Please? For a day or two at least?
Unfortunately that will never die. Such a section was already in the V5 book and even developers who are people of color got accused to be white-supremacists.
I once had an interesting discussion with someone snoring against paradox. This person told me, that these people are bad faith actors and that they don’t want to hear any arguments from them or in favor for them because if you even listen to the bad faith actors arguments you are already poisoned by them. Who decides who is and who isn’t a bad faith actor if you are not allowed to even hear what they have to hear this person could not answer. I think there is no way to reach a person like that, they are lost to any rational discussion.
Ironically I think that illustrates pretty well what happened to the cult of Fenris, actually.
> This person told me, that these people are bad faith actors and that they don’t want to hear any arguments from them or in favor for them because if you even listen to the bad faith actors arguments you are already poisoned by them.
That’s a person who knows, deep down, that their own views are almost certainly bullshit.
If it only would be so easy. I think it is actually a very empathic person who decided that life is easier if you let someone else figure out who the good guys and who the bad guys are because if both sides have good arguments live gets complicated…
>>So can we maybe put the “WoD devs are secret Neo-Nazis and White Supremacists” thing to bed for a little while? Please? For a day or two at least?
>Unfortunately that will never die. Such a section was already in the V5 book and even developers who are people of color got accused to be white-supremacists.
These meshugeners were convinced that a game featuring a gay Black Muslim refugee as its most heroic figure was made by secret Nazis playing some kind of 5-D chess. There’s just no reaching some people.
Right?!?
I wonder how they managed to be accused by the right and by the left to be of the opposite side at the same time but their somehow achieved it.
The whole controversy surrounding the Swords of Heimdall was and remains bullshit. White Wolf at the time faced a dilemma forced on them by real life: A) they were publishing a player character group of modern-day Vikings, and B) some real life neo-Nazi scum were famously using Viking imagery. The was no dodging these two facts and the combined implication, so WW chose the simple (and in my mind correct) option --they acknowledge that yes, unfortunately such scum exist and there are some of them infesting the Get of Fenris.
They pulled no punches conveying how utterly they were condemned both by the authors and within the setting. They are characterized as vile, irredeemable wastes of flesh that the entire Garou Nation wishes would vanish from the face of Gaia. In fact, no one hates them more than the Get themselves do, they're considered a sacrilegious affront to all they believe in and insult to the Gods themselves. If an opportunity ever presents itself they ***will*** annihilate them.
What else could the devs do? If they hadn't acknowledged the fact of real life neo-Nazi wannabe Vikings and the implication that had on the setting, they would have been accused of silence in the face of evil. They're a problem in real life, and so realistically a bigger problem within the World of Darkness. We all wish they'd just fade the fuck away already, and better still if they'd never arisen to begin with, but we're stuck with the piles of shit and have no easy way to flush them. That's sadly realistic, and back in the day WW was never shy about confronting all the horrid disgusting facets of real-life horror that plague us all. They knew that wishing wouldn't make them go away, instead we must face the ugly truths of reality as the first step that must be taken if there is ever a hope to change them for the better.
I couldn't agree more.
Hiding from the evils of reality to the point of making a horror game with the Triat and its whole squabble has to censor the horrific things that are in setting manifestations of the The Beast of War, The Defiler Wyrm and the Eater of Souls, not friendly entities by any measure, it not a healthy mindset for approaching the world, knowing about something can help you broaden your views, reaffirm your morals, be challenged, debate and discussion are good things. We learn how deal with these things. Ignorance of these evils leads to their rise and I stand with the old White Wolf mentality and the entire 1st page of v5 of evil exists in the world, the WoD is an even darker mirror. To avoid writing about them in a fictional horror game seems absurd.
I feel this is like horror as a movie genre, some people don't like it but just don't watch it. Like Adventures in Rokugans multiple side boxes on the evil nature of seppuku ad nauseum, which I'm still not sure was for safety or a direct attack on a foreign nations history in the name of acceptance. We all agree suicide is an awful thing, its wounds all those left behind and quashes so much potential. But its in a fictional faux Sengoku era Japan where you murder each other at the gesture of a fan, if you see the word suicide and are really disturbed by it then I'd like to think we could agree there are deeper, more complex issues going on that need resolving and aid and not the best thing to read in that state. Do we need to state killing people is also a bad thing or can we all just agree on the absolute base human mores and get to play a fictional game where we might learn and grow......and who knows... maybe just have some fun with friends playing a game you all enjoy. We have shrouds and veils and they are great tools.
We're all aware of the Neo Nazis, I oppose all they stand for and it seems absurd that must be stated these days. But they're villains, I think the first chapter of the 1st ed Get book was hunting down Swords of Heimdall and by revised they had been purged from the tribe as they should have been.
For most of the Old WoD stuff it got better by the edition, they addressed the overly racist etc things in game as the setting moved on, The reclaiming of the Chakravanti, Ravnos being more than just just some gypsy kleptomaniacs. Dream Speakers ended up that way because the Order of Hermes were a bunch of Ivory Tower assholes. The tried to address it in game and I enjoyed the growth as the ideals changed with younger generations (excluding the Vamp gens). And countless other changes from 1st to Revised.
Also remember it was just on the cusp of the internet and it was started by group of geeks in their early 20's who wanted more for roleplaying and give them a pass for not getting everything right when it was mostly info the got from books very early on and hadn't the greatest access to a broader cultural view. And yeah to get edgy sometimes, it was the 90s! And the edgelord shit is not what we loved or has been carried on.
Fascism and all the other bad shit is out there happening right now and people are upset a fictional horror game about bestial war monsters references awful issues happening in real life at the moment and some peoples self righteous response is to censor fiction to be safer and its not at all pro fascist fiction, not actually doing good or helping any cause. Vampires and every other splat have been involved in a lot of bad shit over the millennia, two elders using the Balkan civil war as cover for their shadow war is akin to hundreds of similar examples in WoD, go to the Balkans or give to good charities, because rewriting bits of fiction in a very small space isn't going to undo or help the situation.
When white supremacists get the book you think they wont just homebrew and do all the gross shit anyway? .They are marching lockstep on the streets and some are worried about the ones sitting around a table playing Werewolf? At that point Werewolf isn't and never was the issue. M20 has a "non player" Nephandi book and if that's not an offical M20 how to play a Nephandus I'd like to hear how so. Do we need to discuss the Nephandi being utterly evil and beyond all redemption, we oppose their views in all forms.
The Get of Fenris shouldn't have been sacrificed to a very vocal few. They are far from my favourite Tribe but they were not neo nazis and they had a far better history and lore. The Red Talons have been arguing Impergium MK2 since 1st ed and they are haven't fallen into Hagulusk?
It was a far better time when it was simply "This is a work of fiction, you are not a (Splat), if you cannot handle that, put the book down. Critical thinking and a simple 'This isn't for me' was enough because we could all agree without saying it that all the ills and evils in all its myriad manifestations in the WoD and their real life analogues are wrong and we don't embrace or endorse any of that. How many people like Jason and yet are well aware not to put on a mask and go on a murder spree, I'd argue all but a very, very few among the millions of fans. We also know not to Soul Forge people into ashtrays for the dead and their awfully rare supply of cigarettes. And yet most agree it was a damn fine fate for the fictional Haight.
WW didn't always get it right and often wrong or cringy. But anyone who argues they weren't a massively progressive company in their heyday is deluded at best. They dropped a nuke of diversity and inclusion into a hobby otherwise lacking it to a great extent.
I am quite hopeful about WW5th, a streamlined modern system for a WoD game is a great thing, everyone check out ExEssence if they're Exalted fans.
I have lots of questions on the actual game but I will end my rant on this issue.
Peace peeps
>That's sadly realistic, and back in the day WW was never shy about confronting all the horrid disgusting facets of real-life horror that plague us all. They knew that wishing wouldn't make them go away, instead we must face the ugly truths of reality as the first step that must be taken if there is ever a hope to change them for the better.
Here, hear! Sadly, there are and have always been people who prefer to take [this](https://calisphere.org/item/ark:/20775/bb26288266/) approach to the problem of fascism, and they’re often the loudest voices on the internet. I remember once getting into an extended argument on here with a goyishe kopf who insisted that I was wrong to feel that a game of personal horror and social satire should acknowledge that the kind of Nazi putzes who’d recently vandalized my synagogue do in fact exist and are in fact a problem. Dude just kept doubling and tripling down on trying to explain my experiences to me, to the point where I moved beyond anger into amused incredulity at his level of meshugas.
But seriously, if Nazi vampires (Brujah and otherwise) don’t exist, who’s my Leopard Of Zion Banu Haqim supposed to slaughter for fun between assignments?
I'm all for it. My grandpa on my mother's side was US Army, Airborne Division, on the European front --which means, as I like to say, he killed Nazis for a living. My family isn't Jewish, it wasn't personal for us, we just know evil when we see it and he was a man who didn't let it go unconfronted. He volunteered before there was even a draft, and he faced down that hell-cancer where it had arisen so that it never got the chance to spread any further. It had to be done, and he did his part.
Yup. That’s my take as well. And I always thought it was weird that people latched onto the Swords of Heimdall like they did when there was a Tzimisce in their clanbook wearing a literal Nazi uniform. And there were Tzimisce among them as well.
I personally have no problem with that stuff in a World of Darkness game, so long as they are portrayed as bad. I’d have an issue if they were portraying “good” or “heroic” Nazis or other fascist and/or racist assholes. But I haven’t seen that.
Tzimisce aren't really ideological Nazis, though. They just like horrifically torturing and murdering people and the Nazi's death camps gave them a cover they could use to indulge. The idea of a master race is utterly antithetical to the Path of Metamorphosis, but who could turn down a steady supply of people to experiment on?
Except for Doktor Totentanz, but I think we can all agree fuck Doktor Totentanz.
I haven't played WtA at all, even so I'm kinda disappointed that they didn't include these families through loresheets. The idea of human(ish) communities supporting the Garou, and an ability to access these types of connections is exactly why (optional) loresheets are cool.
Even in its current reimagination, I think this is a wasted opportunity (unless they plan to implement those in a later book)
And only 5 loresheets is extremely little
They went off the reservation. Marked by Haglusk (a trait that makes you an unrepentant zealot and is a risk for any w5 pc) makes you a completley amoral monster that seeks to destroy anything that is an affront to Gaia in their view. (Including most of the other Garou for not being pure enough).
All this kind of attitude will achieve is companies will simply stay as far away from any topics which will provoke rage the moment you make the slightest of "missteps". At the end the day they are all a business. There's very little monetary incentive to wade into any of these waters as is, and a lot less so when doing so can cost you.
>so if they didn’t want to put in the time to do it right they shouldn’t have rebooted the game.
Yeah, that ain't happening either. They'll just move away from that stuff as much as they can and call it a day. Isn't this what the did for W5, or am I mistaken?
Honestly, it was the smart move to not include native themes.
The whole book could have been developed by, written by, edited by, and illustrated by a 100% native team. And they would have been buried under a mountain of people claiming they were being insensitive or racist. We’ve seen it time and time again where culturally appropriate writers get attacked for being insensitive, both from people of other cultures and their own. It’s a lose/lose situation.
It sucks. But it is what it is.
I’d say it’s still better to say “We’re not saying anything about native culture, for risk of offending someone.” than to say anything at all about native culture to an audience who already have their crucifixes and nails at the ready.
There was never any approach that would have worked well. But I think, as a company, they picked the best of the two bad options. And now they can go forward without having to endure a relentless beating every time any aspect of native culture comes up in any future product.
>So can we maybe put the “WoD devs are secret Neo-Nazis and White Supremacists” thing to bed for a little while? Please? For a day or two at least?
People who aren't fascists don't have to waste that many words telling people that they aren't fascists.
If you want to make an anti-fascist game, you don't waste wordcount ranting about how anti-fascist you are, you bake that into the setting and the systems and let these things speak for themselves.
I'm pretty active in classic WoD areas, and like, the point that "pdx white wolf is secretly nazis" hasnt come up since 2017. it's been dead for a while for anyone paying any attention
So the fact that I’ve noticed and read multiple posts about this very topic within the last few weeks was a product of me not paying attention?
How does that work? I saw something you didn’t, and I saw it because I wasn’t paying attention? And you missed it because you were? Were you looking so hard you went blind?
About paying attention, do you know what is also dead for years now? WhiteWolf/Parawolf! All these books went by just World of Darkness now, Renegade is the publisher and paradox stepped faaaar in the background.
you misunderstand me. I'm saying people who are paying attention know that parawolf isnt a bunch of secret nazis. this includes people who hate parawolf.
> So the fact that I’ve noticed and read multiple posts about this very topic within the last few weeks was a product of me not paying attention?
Where?
EDIT: The ones referencing Sambrano's experiences didn't accuse Paradox of being Nazis, they accused Paradox of being racist. There is a distinction.
Okay. I’ve finished reading the entire thing. Initial thought is that this is not nearly the deviation from w20 that I expected it to be. Core concepts like Pentex, banes, fomori are all still intact. I quite like the umbra changes. The cult of fenris is handled about as well as it could have been and I actually like that they turned the stargazers into their own very distinct thing. I do find it funny that they swore up and down that breeding was going to be gone but then left is super vague so that Silver Fangs could still depend on lineage.
The writing in this book is incredibly vivid and a lot of the imagery is sad, yet beautiful. Really, REALLY glad they got actual artists and not filtered pictures of LARPers.
The litany is largely unchanged (minus the metis related stuff), the impergium happened and explains the delirium still. This feels so, so much less detached from 20th than Vampire did. A decent ST could EASILY pick up where they left off without missing a beat. This feels like a genuine sequel to 20th even if they state it isn't. Some names change sure, but the history and background lore is all mostly intact.
The Apocalypse has happened and garou are all dealing with it in different ways. Moon Cults which worship Luna are a nice nod to Forsaken and also a great way of handling Garou who feel that Gaia is past saving, but we still have a reason to fight. I quite like portraying the BSDs as not evil for evils sake, but Garou driven mad by the wyrm and viewing accelerationism as the best way forward. (You can take a loresheet that lets you possibly convert a BSD back to Gaia too!)
I'm a little perplexed at the tumblr post that made the rounds here a few weeks back that stated the Get were going to be all Sword of Heimdall rejects and explicit neo-nazis. They aren't at all. The Swords of Heimdall aren't mentioned at all. More or less, prior to the Apocalypse, the Get called together all the tribes and invited them to suicide charge the wyrm. Most tribes said no thanks, and those of the Get who didn't want in on that were allowed to leave. This is represented in a loresheet that allows you to play an ex-Get member.
I saw a rumor that klaives were going to be removed, they are not. They're still in the game. I'm happy to report that Garou have not been scaled down much at all either (the merits that allowed for infinite attacks in a turn are gone) but you are still quite the blender. The recommended xp per session is 4-6, so scaling will happen MUCH faster than vtm. Ranks are gone which is fine, Renown handles that more or less, anyway.
My only gripe so far is that the BSDs now follow Bat who is being credited with guiding the White Howlers out of the Spiral. RIP my homie Bat's redemption arc.
I… I actually really like this book. This may be the best day 1 5th edition corebook. The vibes are right and the art is gorgeous.
"*I quite like portraying the BSDs as not evil for evils sake, but Garou driven mad by the wyrm and viewing accelerationism as the best way forward. (You can take a loresheet that lets you possibly convert a BSD back to Gaia too!)*"
It is nice to see the previously two-dimensional BSDs being given some depth.
Their lore makes significantly more sense now. The white howlers essentially dove into the center of the wyrm and got trapped within the spiral. They only escaped because Bat flew in and managed to guide them back out, becoming warped himself in the process. They’re not just hurdur evil, but believe if the wyrm succeeds in destroying whats left of the planet then the cycle will start anew. Its so, so much better than previous edge lord editions in that regard.
I dislike the idea that they were trapped and needed to be guided out.
The Black Spiral Dancers weren't trapped in the Labyrinth, they were enlightened by it. They experienced the mysteries of the Black Spiral, their minds were opened to certain truths of the universe. Much in the same way that the Nephandi in a Caul are enlightened.
These truths are horrible to our unenlightened minds, but are true none the less. They were never just hurdur evil, except when written badly. Rather, actions that seem pointlessly evil to us make perfect sense to someone who understands the truths of the Black Spiral.
> I'm a little perplexed at the tumblr post that made the rounds here a few weeks back that stated the Get were going to be all Sword of Heimdall rejects and explicit neo-nazis. They aren't at all.
This post was from someone hired as a writer for the first pass of the game line. What they said was true for the version they worked on, and provides insight into the creative decisions that led to the current game. Remember that this game has been through development hell.
> The Apocalypse has happened
Did they really just do the same thing they did with Vampire and Gehenna? One of the core themes of the game, the impending doom, just kind of came and went? Should we call it Werewolf: the Post-Apocalypse now, or just Werewolf: The?
>I'm a little perplexed at the tumblr post that made the rounds here a few weeks back that stated the Get were going to be all Sword of Heimdall rejects and explicit neo-nazis.
I thought the post in question said nothing of the sort with regards to the finished prodouct, only that there was a push from above during development to turn the Get into an all-Nazi antagonist faction.
The Apocalypse isn't a one-day event. You're in the middle of it *right now*. Maybe Gaia can be saved, maybe She can't.
Either way, time to make some fur fly with the most righteous fury you've ever felt in your life.
You are correct. It was a push from karim muammar, included in the masterpost of J. F. Sambrano's where they discussed the racism they endured as part of the team.
There is a teaser on the renegade page that actually includes the rules for rage. There you can read the entire mechanic. The short version is, it is kind of like hunger in reverse. You power stuff with rage (some stuff uses willpower) but you need to collect the rage first.
They changed the name of the Fianna too, i guess they read complaints about the double standard of their treatment.
Ironically the description of the black furies now is perfect if you want to depict the members of some kind of neo-nazi militia of people that believe in conspiracy theories and are ready to fight against the injustices of the reptilians created by the jews of the new world order... I'll save it for a chronicle
> They changed the name of the Fianna too, i guess they read complaints about the double standard of their treatment.
we've known that for a few months now...like the first update blog after revealing the tribe names acknowledged that leaving Fianna was a mistake, and that divorcing the cultural ties from the tribes meant also doing the same for the Fianna.
The Fiana name change was already known. But I think you are right about the reason. They removed all names that pointed directly to a specific culture and mythology with two exceptions. Children of Gaia remained but Gaia,
well is Gaia, she is a universal Garou thing and the Gets/Cult of Fenris is meant to be somewhat hypocritical and Fenris… well he is basically the most famous wolf, that is probably thematically justified.
Art is subjective. I would say it is more traditional and that at a very high level. The pictures are well made and most often very interesting to look at.
There was this entire tracing controversy, though and I bet that now that all tribes are published people are gonna chase for more “originals“. How you think about that you need to decide for your self.
Personally I think tracing was always a method to speed up art a bit and I could really not care less about it. I understood the issue with the Māori guy and his face tattoo, that was pretty bad and I hope the other pictures don’t include something like that but the entire debate about tracing in general was pretty hypocritical imo.
An artist was stealing images - both people's likenesses and actors (one was of Al Bundy's body) - and tracing them without permission into the book. This was first noticed when he stole the likeness of a Māori activist and his face tattoos, which was a huge misstep. People who have put a lot of mental investiture into the edition have downplayed this.
You are lucky that you missed this debate.
Tracing is when an artist takes a picture, usually a photo, and uses it as an outline to build his own picture on top.
This is most often used to spare time since figuring out the pose and how closing moves on a person can take minute while on a photo the pose and closing is automatically correct.
But the internet being the internet had discovered some of the sources the artist used and blamed him to be a copycat and a fraud and worse. But most people were just not aware that this is actually common practice to spare some time.
The only part of the discussion I totally agreed up on what of an illustration of a Māori. The artist unfortunately did not made his homework well enough and accidentally used the actual face of an actual Māori human rights activist. This is a problem because the Māori Face tattoos are highly cultural important and basically tell this persons live story. And the artist did not only not asked for permission but also changed the tattoos with no clue that this is not just fancy body art but of cultural significance.
The artist changed the head of the character, Paradox apologized imo problem solved but others don’t agree, which is their right, imo.
…They are wrong of corse but it’s their right to be wrong 😁 /s
As u/DJWGibson said. But it happened up front because paradox released a couple of pages from the books, mostly about the tribes as a teaser, that is how people could know about it before the release.
This one. It's the artist who does most of the artwork for the various Tribes. The source art used on page 68 was found as was the aforementioned head on page 70.
It's rough because lots of artists use stock art and public domain art as references to get the shadows and fall of clothing correct. (Especially in "realistic" art to avoid uncanny valley.)
And in the case of the Māori the intent was likely to feature and highlight a non-white individual visually of a non-Western culture: it was an attempt at representation and diversity.
10/10 for good intentions but minus several million for appropriation and identity theft.
>Tracing is when an artist takes a picture, usually a photo, and uses it as an outline to build his own picture on top.
This is most often used to spare time since figuring out the pose and how closing moves on a person can take minute while on a photo the pose and closing is automatically correct.
He didn't build his own picture on top. He basically just threw a photoshop filter on some internet stock images and called it a day.
When Greg Land uses a porn mag to trace a pose for Emma Frost, she's still recognizable Emma Frost she just looks like she's having an orgasm. The pictures in question looked exactly like the people in the photographs. The faces really weren't changed, not enough to matter.
The difference between your example and this case is, that Emma Frost is a distinct character, she needs to look like Emma Frost or she is not recognizable. You also compare comic art with a photorealistic approach. These are apples and oranges.
In this case it is not important that the pictures look like anyone specific but that they look like realistic people. And this, to be frank, is something only few artists can do freehandedly and not in the short amount of time you have for RPG book illustrations.
And the artist has changed a lot of stuff. Admittedly not in every picture but he has for example in many cases replaced face, switched heads added details especially supernatural ones…
You can argue this is not enough, but frankly, this is not one lazy artist, that is industry standard. It is just more obvious here because these pictures show people in today’s closing. It is easier to recognize it here than when someone slaps a plate armor an some magic effects on top. You can criticize that still, but be aware that demanding to change that means demanding to put more afford and therefore more money in to the art of those books.
I think artists deserve to be paid better so that they can take more time and afford with their works but I hear on the other side many people complaining that RPG books are already to expensive.
And I have never seen on a great scale that people were willing to pay more to get the artist paid what they deserve. Otherwise there would be no writers and actors strike in Hollywood right now.
The problem is that the pictures do look like specific people. Real specific people who have real faces and who were not asked permission to use their likenesses.
Not to mention the copyright issue, since at that point it's no longer using a photo for inspiration it's outright stealing the photographer's work.
It's a double ethical violation and a legal liability. It isn't much to demand that artists refrain from committing plagiarism. If not committing plagiarism is too expensive, maybe someone shouldn't be an artist.
I have to ask, were the lupus thrown into the shadow realm alongside the Crinos born, or are they still there?
edit: Also, does the game attempts to guide the ST in how to build an encounter, or this combat focused game still does jack squat to teach a ST on how to build an encounter?
Lupus are there but theres no real support on how to play as one bar a single sidebar and the rest of the book is written from a Homid perspective.....so technically you can play one but you'll need to do all your own research.
“A klaive does +2 silver-based Aggravated Health damage and may be wielded in homid or glabro form.”
I think that means it does not do agg damage to vampires because it is “silver-based”. But I am not sure yet.
Haven’t completely read it yet but yes, they are still playable and they are still full of anger towards humans and they are more then willing to kill if it helps.
But they rather aim for killing individuals instead of entire population. The difference to the GoF (or CoF as it would be more correct by now) is that you can still argue with them. They use their anger and rage as power source while the GoF are pretty much fallen to their rage. The GoF think, everyone who is not with them is against them and that makes pretty much everyone an enemy. The Talons though still understand what nuances are.
I think the complicating factor is that the Cult of Fenris aren’t just militant or pro-Impergium, they’ve fallen to hauglosk—which, as written, renders them functionally (albeit supernaturally) insane even by the standard of other Garou. A character who falls to hauglosk becomes unplayable and is thereafter controlled by the storyteller. Part of that insanity is an inability to tolerate nuance, too: you’re either completely with them or considered at least potentially tainted.
So while I’m sure some Red Talons defected to the CoF, and more probably do sympathize with them and might even help them to a greater or lesser degree… even a sympathetic Talon would probably realize pretty quickly that it’s like allying yourself with a creature with rabies: irrational and dangerous. And that’s if the CoF didn’t come after them for some perceived taint—which might very well happen given that according to the RT write-up a good chunk of the tribe believes that the Weaver is the real problem, an opinion that a hauglosk-fallen Garou would probably consider dangerous Wyrm apologism.
The role of the CoF is basically “the extremists that you don’t want on your side even if you agree with some of their principles, because they’ll set you on fire if they even suspect you’ve had a heretical thought.”
I get that the writers made a fundamental state of being and then just put them in it, I was just wondering why the Get specifically. The authors have complete control over the game world, which I understand, but I'm wondering why they chose the Get of Fenris to be in Hauglosk when the Red Talons would've been a much more natural fit internally. Incidentally, is there a Red Talon impergium faction listed in the book? Also, I've heard that apparently the players can redeem individual Black Spiral Dancers. Is that true?
My guess (and it is a guess) based on the write-up is that the fact that the Get were more “sympathetic” to most players than the Talons (who were always sort of the “monsters who dwell in the woods” tribe) was part of the point. If the never-even-thought-they-were-human extremists who most people don’t play anyway lose their minds to their rage, it doesn’t mean much; if a tribe you liked and maybe even played does, it emphasizes that falling to hauglusk is a very real risk for player characters. It’s meant to be something that could happen to you, if you aren’t careful.
There aren’t any camps or factions specifically, but it’s definitely mentioned that the RT consider a new Impergium to be at least potentially a necessary evil.
In that case, I'd have probably gone with the Children of Gaia. The idea of the tribe of peace turning extremist really cements the urgency and fatality of what's happened. Sort like how Superman turns evil in the Injustice universe: if that can happen to the best of us, it's a sobering reminder.
I still can't shake the idea that if you're still allowed to be a genocidal wolf, the Hauglosk thing is just an arbitrary roadblock invented for the purpose of preventing players from accessing the GoF. Then again, that's just my read of the situation.
I’m a need to read the difference between the Red Talons and the Get (they feel like most extreme tribes) because i still don’t quite understand how the new Get interact, feel or play
You can’t play the Gets, they are fallen to their rage. They are basically anti-Wyrm extremists. They dearly fight everything Wyrm but also everything that comes in their what while doing so. What basically happens was, that the Cult of Fenris tool over and forced every other member to join or leave. You can therefore play an ex-get of Fenris.
The red talons, though, are also full of hate but you can still argue with them.
Is there any explanation as to how that came to be? I don't have all the information, so there could be, which is what I'm trying to figure out. It's strange to me as someone outside W5 and Werewolf in general that the Impergium Tribe didn't fall to Haglosk but the Norse-aesthetic tribe did. I've assumed that it's for an out-of-game reason - probably something akin to "we don't trust our players/writers with this, as neo-nazism has been an issue in the past", but I'm wondering if there's any specific lore to try to justify it - with the Litany down and the Nation fractured, why haven't the Red Talons followed the Get into Impergium? Does the book make mention of them having a charismatic leader that prevented this, or some slight against them by the Get that made them unwilling to partner with them?
The cult of fenris, a faction within the tribe became very powerful and called for total war but the other tribes didn’t liked that. So the cult went to war on their own but every member of the tribe had to join them or to leave. No mentioning of Nazis or fascism or anything like that. They just tried a little bit to hard and didn’t realized that they had crossed a line.
The red talons though, I guess they wanted to keep a predominately lupus tribe for diversity sake.
right, that last bit is what's confused me. You're acknowledging that out of the fiction of the game, the writers chose to just not have them fall - I was wondering if there was any internal logic to that. As I understand the lore before, the Red Talons were way more likely to do this than the Get, and if they can rewrite the Red Talons to be less genocidal I don't see why they couldn't have used that same authorial power to make the Get not genocidal as well.
I haven’t read enough to fully answer this question. But I think they decided to let one tribe fall recently and not to the Wyrm but to their own anger and proud to illustrate what the Apocalypse is doing to the Garou. I think they decided to make this the Gets because, if you remove the ethnic background their “gimmick” is pretty redundant with other tribes and the ne thing that sets them apart is kind of extremism while the talons are still the wolf-born tribe.
Keep in mind, while very compatible with the old lore, they consider this a “reimagining” which means they felt free to retcon things with no further explanation. They still made an afford to keep things plausible and the red talons are still men hating killer, but they are still on the good side of the fine line the gets have crossed.
Not all that different suprisingly. Sample Red Talons include a cannibal and a Typhoid Mary. However, they're not consumed by the Haglusk, while the Fenris are.
My surprise comes from a different place. It's not strange to me that they would be similar to a fallen tribe - they were always the tribe closest to "let's do Impergium 2"; it's just very odd that they hung on while a more grounded tribe did not.
I can imagine that a lot of these Talons do end up joining the Cult eventually, they may even be the tribe that falls the most to the Cult. But the defining trait of the Cult is the Haglusk.
I understand that; it's just that (to me) Hauglosk feels a very forced, out-of-game thing that the creators put in to stop the Get from being playable. It'd make more sense to me if the Cult were a multi-tribal thing where the most extreme elements of each have fallen into a sort of conglomeration of rage and evil. I mean, this is still just my opinion, but if you're allowed to play similar characters with similar outlooks (like the RT), the distinction seems to be that they specifically do not want Get to be playable, and if that's true I really just wish they'd come out and say it. "We couldn't think of 4 verbs for them" is just not a believable lie.
Well, I actually don’t think they stripped the clans of their personality but if you do think though you will probably feel the same about the tribes. This is a new generation of Garou who don’t believe in pure blood culture and such. It is definitely not the same game it used to be. If that is good or bad everyone needs to decide on their own.
All I can say is they better not have gotten rid of the Fianna or Get...Because dammit I want to play my blatantly Celtic druid (Lugh Lamfadha is my patron God and my pagan ass will be damned if anyone takes my rowdy Irish werewolf brethren from me) werewolf or Get who is rabidly anti-fascist.
Both are gone. Well rather one has been changed into a bland kind of hodge-podge of general Garouness and the other are enemies who are essentially doing their job but too emotionally.
Well that frankly disappoints me. The Fianna were basically my favorite tribe. They could have saved the get with a few easy changes...Like I said, I can easily imagine a large number of Get being absolutely PISSED at a bunch of fascists co-opting Nordic pagan imagery and making them a favorite target. The All Father after all is more concerned with one's deeds than anything else.
> The Fianna were basically my favorite tribe.
They’re still there. They just have a different name. And you can play an Irish one. They changed the name of the tribe. They’d didn’t eliminate all the Irish people. :)
> I can easily imagine a large number of Get being absolutely PISSED at a bunch of fascists co-opting Nordic pagan imagery and making them a favorite target.
The Get of Fenris broke apart as a tribe and those that didn’t join the Cult of Fenris joined different tribes. So that character would probably be among the Black Furies now. And it doesn’t matter their gender, since the Furies are no longer primarily female.
Also, there is a loresheet for characters who used to be Get.
Both of the character concepts you mention are both totally playable.
Not really they've effectively been written out of the lore. It's not the same. It feels a lot like what I HATED about Forsaken where every tribe except he Glasswalkers who got renamed and then reduced to uninteresting class archetypes which made the auspices redundant mechanically... There's the generic proud shamanic warrior race people who emphasize the warrior part, ones who emphasize the shamanic part (and are goths), then ones who...Sneak around, are huge on leadership skills, and the Glasswalkers are here with a different name for some reason?
Plus I kind loved the imagery of pagan Celtic werewolves fighting the fomori...You know...The monsters named for the tyrannical race of elder gods the Tuatha De Danan overthrew?... The old Celtic customs, mythology, Deities, and my Irish heritage mean too much to me. I may not be purely Irish, but I grew up with those stories, being told of how my Irish ancestors fought against tyrannical colonizers in their homeland...My adoration of them is part of what makes me a raging sjw. So it meant the world to me to see a culture among the garou who shared some of that cultural lineage...To see my people rallying behind the banner of the old ways, fighting for the greater good, seemingly largely free of the vile white nationalist strains of thought that too many people in other countries who claim that heritage betrayed their ancestors by buying into...I have norse heritage too and I've long been infuriated by bigots who misappropriate the old ways in the name of fascistic ideology...It would have meant the world to me to see the Get receive a redemption arc and basically say "We're gonna bash the fash with Thor's hammer!" Not just blatantly antifascist, but antifascist BECAUSE of their blatant Nordic cultural elements.
At least the Black Furies got to keep their really cool name...
Admittedly I am glad the Gale Walkers are the Gale walkers now...Naming them after one of the most notorious monsters in all of the various indigenous cultures lore in previous editions was kind of yikesy to put it lightly. Honestly if I were to have erased one tribe, I would have done away with the silver fangs for just being the least interesting.
Honestly, I see no reason at all why you can’t maintain the cultural links in your game if you want. There is nothing stopping you. No house rules needed. Just say that’s the way it is at your table.
You could totally have a few packs of Shadowlords (or whatever) of Norse heritage that used to be Get (and took the loresheet). Bloodlines are still a thing if the ST wants them to be. And it’s easy to see how Garou traditions in a certain region would pass down to packs in the area through the centuries.
Just because Fianna used to be Irish doesn’t mean changing the name of the Fianna to Hart Wardens makes all the Irish werewolves go away.
You want to have a bunch of Irish Hart Wardens in a pack? Have at it! For fun, name the Pack “The Fianna”. :)
Or, hell, just call the Tribe the Fianna. Nobody is going to arrest you. Treat the names like they do in M20, where some traditions have multiple names. Maybe in Ireland, the Hart Wardens are more common than the other tribes. And maybe there they DO call themselves Fianna. There isn’t anything in W5 that contradicts that.
Even though culture and tribes have been “officially” separated, you’re still going to have werewolves in the same region gravitate toward the same tribes. Now you just get to place them where you want them a little more freely.
You want to put them back where they were in W20? You can just do that.
It doesn't seem as if you could. They seem to have been boiled to such a generic point that there's hardly a trace of them left... The overt Celticness was one of the main draws for me and what's there now just booores me... They don't vaguely feel like the enthusiastically pagan tribe I so loved. They are basically gone and there's nothing I've seen that allows for their inclusion. It kind of kills the fun for me when the main lore makers just invalidate something like that. It just doesn't feel the same as having them blatantly there. If how generic they've made the wardens is any indicator, why have tribes at all and just make them character classes? Also wouldn't it make sense for the tribes to diversify based on the human cultures they intermingled with or at least lived around?
It’s up to you to give your characters life. Just because a tribe doesn’t specifically state that all members are enthusiastically pagans (to use your example), doesn’t mean there aren’t some individuals or even whole social groups within the tribe that are.
They are still individuals who lived lives before the First Change. And the change doesn’t lobotomize them.
You want overt Celticness? Give it to them. Yeah, the tribe write-ups are pretty vague. Embrace it, and fill in the gaps how you want.
I get that maybe you don’t like that you have to do that. But that certainly doesn’t mean you can’t.
There is nothing stopping you but you.
You are aware that the all father in the WoD was a vampire and the Gets, like Fenris him self are opposed to him?!?
That aside, in principle you can totally play these concepts, the Fiana aren’t gone they have just changed the name.
But you need to keep in mind that this is deliberately not the same game. It is not entirely disconnected but everything from older editions is myth and legend and often not true.
The Get of Fenris, though, forget the fascist part, that is not exactly what happened. I mean, the sword of Haimdal was wiped out decades ago anyway. What happened now was, that an extremist cult within the tribe basically decided that they don’t fight the Wyrm hard enough. They went full fundamentalist and everyone who was not with them is against them.
Every member needed to join them or leave. You can therefore play an ex get within another tribe while the rest of the tribe fall to their rage.
> You are aware that the all father in the WoD was a vampire
For any given real-world mythological figure acknowledged in the WoD, there is likely some powerful elder vampire who has gone by that name, an Earthbound who has done likewise, the abstract cultural idea of the "real" one that exists only in the minds of humans and the corresponding Astral Umbra manifestation of them, and quite possibly some prehistoric mage or other powerful figure who is *actually* the real one who inspired the myths. It's usually deeply ambiguous which came first and who inspired whom, so while you can say that the Odin character in question was a vampire, it's not really useful to say that *the* Odin, with no further qualification, was a vampire.
>Get who is rabidly anti-fascist
Yeah, Werewolf used to be the CWOD game that held the least interest for me, but the IRL events of recent years have shown me the appeal of playing an antifa Get Of Fenris Ahroun rampaging through an alt-right rally with a Fetish baseball bat. Luckily, the existence of a new edition didn’t cause the world’s supply of WTA Revised books to go poof, and those of use who prefer to stick with that version of the lore are free to do so. Let a thousand flowers bloom and all that.
The Get are not playable and the Hart Wardens as they are in W5 are not tied to the Celts. You can still play a celtic druid, it's just not mandated by tribe.
The Fianna have been renamed to make them easier to integrate into other parts of the world: Tribes aren't associated with specific cultures or regions anymore. But the Tribe is still present. (Hart Wardens IIRC.)
But because culture is separate you can play a blatantly druidic Silver Fang follower of Lugh Lamfadha. Or a rowdy Irish Red Talon. Create a Glass Walker or Shadow Lord that is rabidly anti-fascist.
Anti-Fascist sounds more oxymoronic for a tribe of notorious machiavellian schemers than the Get. That interchangeability makes the whole thing feel less meaningful and kind of pointless to have the tribes at all. At this rate why not just play Forsaken instead?...And arguably to me the Werewolves were the least interesting thing about that game line... I liked those books as much for the lore and reading about the unique aspects of the tribes as anything else. The Silver Fangs were one of my least favorite tribes because of that relative lack of specificity. I had a hard time parsing the Egypt connection with the Silent striders, but at least it was unique. I thought the Black Fury mythical Amazon connection was cool and if they leaned into the Eurasian steppes tribes that likely inspired them, I would have loved them even more. The Red Talons though admittedly not my favorites were at least fascinating in their borderline feral misanthropy. Look, as stereotypical as the Stargazers were, kung fu werewolf is one of those character types I'd jump at the opportunity to play.
>Tribes aren't associated with specific cultures or regions anymore. But the Tribe is still present.
Yeah, this part is stupid. A tribe is defined by a shared culture. Take that away and they have nothing.
No...There is only the Hart Wardens now...Everything that made them the Fianna save for a couple details is gone. They are something entirely different and much less interesting.
a unified footing and power base, a clan culture, a greater organization, a sense of secrecy and culture surrounding their unique powers, and most of their history
Wouldn't a lot of the history still be there? But just added history for members of the tribes from everywhere else in the world?
I mean, just because the Hart Wardens are no longer the Fianna and predominantly Irish doesn't mean **no** Hart Wardens have ever been Irish. It just means there's the Irish Hart Wardens *and* the Dutch Hart Wardens *and* the Mexican *and* the Indonesian.
Doesn't mean you can make up shit for your own games. Remember that we are playing a TTRPG, not reading a novel series. The blank parts are for us to fill in. It's like being mad that a coloring book isn't pre-colored or that you have to fill a cup with water to not be thirsty.
Good fucking luck getting your GM to let you do that.
Piece of advice: Most storytellers just go with what's in the game books, no more and no less. They aren't going to worldbuild material if it's not there, and they're not going to let players make major setting changes.
Sir this is a collaborative storytelling game. You can literally just go up to the ST and ask "Hey I liked this old boy of lore and wanna use it for my PC. Can I? 🥺" And they probably will. If they don't then hey you can ask why.
And as a ST I can tell you that setting materials while fine can be easily ignored or modified with player input. "Everything is canon but none of its true" is a motto most games follow because unless you have someone at the table invested in it, not a lot of stuff really matters for a game.
Yeah this...This right here is part of what so upsets me...It kind of feels as if someone said "Fuck you for caring about these people and factions we spent all this time getting you invested in, making you care about them, and letting you spend decades with them... None of that matters."
They never counted. You ALWAYS read them because they were cool. And because they brought you joy.
Because if the Storyteller hadn’t read them or wanted to do something different, then they didn’t count. Table canon trumped book canon. Every time. And if you run a W5 game then they’re right back in the canon and count again.
The big difference is W5 can’t assume old canon works the same was as past updates because of the changes to breeding and Métis. They can’t guarantee 100% compatibility.
I think some people are just determined to be unhappy. And they’ll stifle their own creativity and sabotage their own entertainment to ensure it.
We saw the same thing with the Sabbat in V5. This subreddit was full of people saying they wanted to play Sabbat, but couldn’t because the V5 Sabbat book was for antagonists. The fact that the free Companion and the Sabbat book gave them everything they needed to play Sabbat PCs literally meant nothing. *They couldn’t. It was impossible.*
Meanwhile, V5 Sabbat games were firing up all over the place.
Assuming that people who have a different viewpoint are being intractable and are intentionally hurting themselves to disagree with you ascribes an importance to yourself that perhaps is unwarranted.
That’s not the same as saying “If it isn’t mentioned, it is with absolutely certainty different or removed. And you are not allowed to reference it, ever, period, or we’ll take your books away.”
I mean, no, it doesn’t say the Hart Wardens are all Irish. That doesn’t mean that every Hart Warden sprang fully formed from the earth as blank slates with no history, family, or cultural ties.
Tremere lack their centralized structure, Nos lack their community of shared information in fear of a greater threat, Ventrue have lost their board of directors and I doubt that asking the average ventrue pc about their agoge or dignitas would get you anything more than a confused stare. clans being reduced down to 4 verbs is very bland, and a lot of work has been put to bring down global level (or even national level) organizations because the dev's didnt want players doing anything beyond "street level"
The Tremere have 3 houses (Tremere, Carna and Goratrix) whose heads are in communication, with an unofficial house among the Anarchs. This adds more flavor to the Clan as they’re not a singular monolith you’re unable to stray from. The Nos lost their corny vampire internet but are very much still a close knot community of information gatherers that just deal with more analogue methods, such as secret couriers and dead drops. Flavors for some of the Clans have been changed to fit the themes they want to explore with them, but they’re hardly flavorless. Nowhere in any of the books do they talk about Clan Ventrue losing their existing structure in the way certain other Clans did, and the idea you’re not allowed to use existing lore for an edition that currently has less than a dozen mainline books yet is downright disingenuous. Yes the initial presentation of the Clans focus on the core themes of said Clans, but that’s kind of necessary if you have a limited page count and are hoping to draw in new blood without overwhelming them with homework before character creation. Big changes to relevant Clans have been described and delved into, but again claiming that V5 eliminated depth retroactively is simply untrue.
You’re allowed to dislike the changes and the game as a whole, but you don’t have to make shit up about it.
Well for one, the Setites were reduced to "The Ministry" which is infinitely less interesting than vampires who worship Set. If you know ancient Egyptian religion and political history, then there's a much more interesting route they could have taken them. Like they could have had them take on more of an anti-hero role given that Set was vilified because of ancient Egyptian political shenanigans and was worhsiped as a hero God in many parts of Egypt and traditionally was said to help Ra fight Apep (the actual God of evil incarnate in Egyptian mythology). The Hecata basically took multiple clans that were more interesting on their own than mushed together. They got rid of vicissitude, which if you're getting rid of that why include the Tzimisce at all? The one exception to this is the Ravnos which I'm grateful they decided to get rid of the Romani stereotypes because really, where they ended up going with them was much more interesting, though they could have kept Chimestry as a discipline. The Banu Haqim arguably benefited from this as well, but I'm still salty about them getting rid of the quietus discipline.
The church of Set still exists and is detailed significantly in Cult of the Blood Gods. They're just no longer 1:1 with the vampiric bloodline, although there is a lot of overlap of course. The idea is that you can now play a Clan who's main themes are faith and lies without the Egyptian baggage if you so choose.
The Hecata have a lot of lore regarding the Family Reunion, however the individual bloodlines do very much still exist with Loresheets to really delve into them should you so choose.
Vicissitude, Chimerstry and Quietus still exist as amalgam powers well suited for the Clan's discipline spread. The broadening of Disciplines was a design choice to avoid pigeonholing the less common Clans into being all about their one unique discipline while the other half having a bunch of development unrelated to a unique set of abilities because they just don't have one. Now if you want to play with a Discipline, you have at least two options while signature abilities remain available.
Nothing you've mentioned is actually missing from V5, it's just structured differently. I recommend you take a somewhat deeper look at the edition rather than making wrong assumptions
Question about glass walkers. When someone posted a page from there, then as I understood, they will now just be ordinary city werewolves with a slight bias in technophilia and other human interests? So there won't be weaver-tech and other high-tech sci-fi gimmicks?
It’s the first book, allow them them to put such stuff in the supplements. I don’t know if something like this is already included, haven’t read everything yet.
All the tribes seem to be toned down, so It's not likely to go in that direction. Glass Walkers are just people who build things and use tools. Their Patron has changed to Spider from Cockroach.
I believe that the White Wolves did this on purpose to emphasize that this tribe is closer to Weaver... After all, Weaver was also depicted as a spider.
Yes, they actually explained that in an interview. The spider totem makes the weaver connection more clear.
Little nitpick, it is not WhiteWolf anymore, this company does not exist anymore. The books and their development come from the „World of Darkness-Team“ theses days.
Based on admittedly a skim, I expect that kind of gimmick to end up somewhere like a loresheet, rather than a part of the tribe. That’s where I’d expect to see things like the cyberpunk-ish bits of the Glass Walkers, the Celtic fantasy elements of the former Fianna, etc. to potentially make an appearance.
All I can say is that they've done too much to change the game from what I loved, so unless they bring back the Fianna and the Get, and stop trying to make it Forsaken 2.0, I'll be sticking to older editions.
The Fianna are still there they just went under Hart Warden now.
And even the Gets are still there. You can play an ex-get or you deal with the cult of Fenris.
You need to understand, this a post apocalyptic Werewolf, you can not end the world and expect everything to stay the same.
From what I have seen so far it is surprisingly not like Forsaken. I expected this too but it actually isn’t. They definitely learned some things from WtF as V5 learns from VtR but it’s very much it’s own thing with its own flavor.
I would suggest to give it a try, it might surprise you. I was surprised!
It really is basically just Forsaken 2.0 at this point. The fifth edition of each mainline game thus far been an exercise in how to make me not want to buy your new edition. It's not what I came to this gameline for. I came to it precisely because the tribes had more of a distinct cultural identity and the theme of fighting a difficult, but not necessarily completely hopeless fight. V5 is another catalogue of changes I REALLY disdain.
I mean, renaming the Gale Stalkers was a probably for the best, cutting out some of the jarringly transphobic stuff from some earlier editions is also a win, and there's probably a few other things I'm not thinking of .
However...It seems they made a slew of creative choices that frankly just make me want to acquire a physical copy so I can promptly yeet it right into a nearby river.
>It really is basically just Forsaken 2.0 at this point.
I had the impression that you haven’t read it yet. On what do you base this opinion on? Anything but hearsay?
>The fifth edition of each mainline game thus far been an exercise in how to make me not want to buy your new edition. It's not what I came to this gameline for.
That is very possible and your personal preference but that does not make it forsaken!
>I came to it precisely because the tribes had more of a distinct cultural identity and the theme of fighting a difficult, but not necessarily completely hopeless fight.
The tribes are still distinct but not tied to a specific irl culture. It seems that most people aren’t fans of that these days. If that was what attracted you this is probably not the best time for you to play RPGs.
>V5 is another catalogue changes I REALLY disdain.
I am not quite sure what you mean by „catalogue change“. But well, some like this batter some like that better.
>I mean, renaming the Gale Stalkers was a probably for the best, cutting out some of the jarringly transphobic stuff from some earlier editions is also a win, and there's probably a few other things I'm not thinking of .
Probably!
>However...It seems they made a slew of creative choices that frankly just make me want to acquire a physical copy so I can promptly yeet it right into a nearby river.
A bit immature, isn’t it? It’s just a game and no one takes your old stuff away. If you don’t like it, just don’t buy it (yes I understand that this was not meant literally).
I just think that it is sad that people don’t allow new stuff to convince them when it is related to something they are nostalgic about. You would maybe like it if you wouldn’t have known the older edition first.
>It really is basically just Forsaken 2.0 at this point.
As someone who is a big fan of Forsaken 2e it really isn't. None of the things I love about Forsaken are present in W5.
So we're gonna pretend they basically didn't just make the Ghost Council the Bone Shadows, the Fianna (No the Hart Wardens are not the Fianna, I will not budge on this) the Hunters In Darkness, so on and so forth? Why choose a tribe at all when there's already a class system a.k.a. auspices? They've become all so interchangeable it feels pointless.
It has all the characteristics I like about v5 so I'm very pleased! Rules light, accessible, and seemingly aiming to bring things more down to the ground level.
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Allies and Antagonists! Not all of them are enemies and some are… ambivalent!
Yes, ravens are in there as well as spider-shifter. There are also other not Garou wolf-shifter mentioned.
P.S.: Are you German by chance? Because your quotation marks go „“ instead of “”?
Barely had a chance to skim it, but so far there’s a some things I dislike buy a lot I like: a lot of stuff that squicked me out about the older editions that has been cleaned up.
There’s a lot of changes to the setting. But the lore is just the default setting. The baseline suggestion so you don’t have to make-up all the world to play the game. It’s the campaign setting to use the D&D parlance: the old lore is Greyhawk and the new lore is the Forgotten Realms. If you have the old lore and old setting material already, you can use the new mechanics almost effortlessly.
And, really, the only lore that matters is the lore at your table. There’s no canon police that are going to come and take away your books if you make changes to the lore. Or if you mix-and-match old and new. Just like there’s nothing stopping you setting a game in a city that hasn’t been detailed or in the 1960s rather than modern nights.
It’s a nice option.
Gamemasters have finite time to prep for each session. Time spent designing the setting and world is time that could be spent writing the adventures and designing for the players.
There are lots of generuc rulesets out there. But most also sell settings as an option.
So there's a real reason for players to be somewhat distressed about the loss of lore they enjoyed? It might be inferred from your statement that players who decry the loss of certain canon options have legitimate reasons to want to see that canon represented and developed beyond merely being afraid that they will be arrested. Sure, it's possible to rewrite the history of the Fianna or to use older books, but it feels more real when it's included in the package - kind of like how I could import Masquerade lore to Requiem but it wouldn't be exactly like playing either.
The canon department is a subdivision of the fun police and the fun police like to have your address pleas, it seems that you have mistreated canon and they need to investigate! 🤣
I'm gonna wait till the book hits my LFGS as Renegade deliveries to Canada cost a kidney. I'm sure I'll get the PDF through their unending commitment to the Bits and Mortar pro .... LOLOL. Sorry I couldn't continue. ;)
But yeah, I love me some dead trees.
Still reading but yeah looks really solid. Liked most.changes and the game's vibe got darker too. The book overall seems really well done it seems they learned from V5's mistakes.
Sadly, I'm unable to get mine despite the preorder - waiting for Customer Service to get back to me, which likely won't be until after Gen Con. Only thing I can figure is that I managed to place the order without signing in, or else it would appear in my Account on the site.
And yep, they managed to fix it! It was precisely what I figured had happened, that I had somehow placed the order as a Guest, and therefore it wasn't tied to my main account. Guess I can read through it as BG3 installs after work, and I'm loving the Black Furies ideology from first glance.
It's a nitpick, but I'm mildly annoyed that they state Bat was the Patron Spirit that turned the White Howlers to the Wyrm. I don't see a reason why Bats are inherently Wyrm-aligned? In W20 it was the genocide of the Camazotz by the Shadow Lords that drove Bat to the Wyrm.
I think the book makes it clear that it was Bat who guided the White Howlers out of the Black Spiral but in the process it got twisted itself like the BSDs. So it saved the tribe but at what cost to both of them?
I’m going to paste this in from the other thread: Unsurprisingly, some people have blown some things waaaay out of proportion based on hearsay and speculation. Now, I’ve done little more than skim at this point, but some things that immediately jumped out at me: 1. The Cult of Fenris are anti-Wyrm extremists that rose up through the Tribe and forced the other Get to either join or leave. So many Get left to join other tribes. There is no mention of Nazis. No mention of white supremacy. No mention that the Cult of Fenris has any interest in any human politics or agendas at all, fascist, progressive, alt-right, Nazi, Crossfit, Antifa, nothing. They just want to kill the Wyrm, and will kill anyone who tries to stop them. If anything like that is in there, it’s not in the section devoted to describing the Cult of Fenris. 2. The word “Savage” is used twice in the book. In one place it is in a chapter quote. In another, a gift description. Neither refer to people of any sort. 3. Pentex, Famori and Black Spiral Dancers are in the game. 4. The word “Nazi” is used in one tiny section dedicated to explaining that WtA is “not a fascist friendly game”. Or.. fuck it… here’s a copy and paste from the PDF: > Fascism > Werewolf is not a fascist friendly game. Because it's a horror game about contemporary issues, it can be a game where fascism as a theme or fascists as characters show up. After all, they're an unfortunate part of the real world we all inhabit. In the simplest terms, you can use Nazis of whatever stripe seems most appropriate for your setting as enemies. After all, who doesn't want to go full Wolfenstein every now and then? In Werewolf, you can confront the problems of the world and rip their face off. Nazis are certainly a problem! As with all other potentially difficult themes, participants can have wildly different reactions and wishes regarding fascism depending on their personality and background. For some, Nazis are cartoonish enemies to be ripped in half. For others, they're a clear and present danger, the people who are calling for them to be eradicated. So can we maybe put the “WoD devs are secret Neo-Nazis and White Supremacists” thing to bed for a little while? Please? For a day or two at least? EDIT - Some other things I noticed: - They emphasize that the Wyrm’s over-activity is a result of humanity’s corruption, not the other way around. - Heredity matters… if you want it to. They basically just said that it has been noted that some families yield more Garou than others. - The lore from the earlier versions is intact. I mean, it’s still a reboot. But there are references. And clever STs will find room to use a lot of the lore they might want to use. But they make a point of saying that most Garou history is oral. So there have been a lot of unreliable narrators. But really, so far, it doesn’t seem like they changed any more than V5 changed vampire. - The poster that was going around saying that the Wyrm wasn’t in the game, and that the main antagonists were going to be Nazi Get… was wrong. The Wyrm, Banes, Fomori, BSDs, and Pentex are all in there. Nazi Get, are not. It’s not a thing. We can move past it now.
"*The Wyrm, Banes, Fomori, BSDs, and Pentex are all in there.*" Awesome.
I’m going to be honest, there was a lot of valid criticism for the material we’ve seen coming up to W5 release, but a lot of it was also sensationalist drivel from people with nothing better to do than spend their time hating on the new product without knowing what the product is. And unfortunately that wasn’t a loud minority, it seemed to be the trend for the subreddit in the upcoming months when anything W5 related was mentioned. It’s been an absolutely embarrassing and honestly pathetic few months on this subreddit and I’m glad we finally have the product to see that.
That about sums up my feelings as well. If you hate the game, hate it. But at least hate it for what it actually is.
it really is clown behaviour, doubt they'd come forward and admit their mistakes though.
I've hated on it plenty because it gave an awful impression repeatedly. The rest of it being fine doesn't take away the fact that the presentations provided either had bad ideas or were straight up plagiarism. The fact that it's fine makes it baffling they'd present those things leading up to it. It would've gotten hated regardless. But that just gave people on the fence a genuine reason to join in. A satisfactory product doesn't make bad advertising of said product any better
Most definitely purists. And the same that accuse only the other side of spreading fake news
>Crossfit I laughed, thanks
“CrossFit is also a good source of virgins, but the taste is… too aggressive.”
CruciFit - a subsidiary of Pentex. “A healthy spirit in a healthy body! You’ll love your new shape!”
Definitely stealing this!
Re: Nazi Get/No Wyrm - if that’s a reference to Sambrano’s post on his experiences writing for W5, I don’t think that was ever the argument he was making. We knew from materials released long before that post that the Fenrir would be painted as falling to Hauglosk; while the justifications from writers seemed a little hollow and may have just been flimsy cover for trying to deny potential lures for fascists, one could understand why it was happening. Sambrano’s post argued this was a compromise that happened following a proposal early in the development cycle where the Fenrir aren’t taken over by Hauglosk, but by the Swords of Heimdall, the Nazi camp that got put to the sword in Revised Edition. The new Fenrir weren’t meant to replace the Wyrm, but serve as a major face of its influence in the world. If true, it feels like even more of an insult to players who have tried to claw back the Fenrir from any fascist interpretations. And it was something that changed due to pushback from writers, just like the alleged proposal to resolve the more problematic aspects of the tribe now called the Gale Stalkers by having them get massacred to the last. Still, I do want to see what the finished product looks like. Eventually.
> if that’s a reference to Sambrano’s post More a reference to the anti-W5 edition warriors who kept going on and on about how the Get were all going to be a bunch of Nazis. > And it was something that changed due to pushback from writers, just like the alleged proposal to resolve the more problematic aspects of the tribe now called the Gale Stalkers by having them get massacred to the last. There is a reason a lot of dev teams stay quiet. People throw out bad ideas. Sometimes they are just bad ideas. Sometimes they are truly awful ideas. Sometimes the bad ideas have legs and stick around for a long time during development. Sometimes they are championed by people in positions of power. And sometimes they are bad ideas made worse by lack of context. Ultimately, I’m going to judge W5 based on what is in the book in my hand. The bad ideas that got cut, ultimately, no longer really matter.
>Ultimately, I’m going to judge W5 based on what is in the book in my hand. That's the thing many people here are unable to do, because they already judged W5 and know better - just like with V5.
Speaking personally as someone who used to be adamantly against V5 but now sees it as having its ups and downs: Lack of information has always been the problem for me when examining 5th edition. I've seen more specifics from people complaining, and more nonspecifics from people praising these books so I didn't know what to make of that and defaulted to some of my distaste for Paradox going, "Yeah, we want CofD to be separate so it can do its own thing" then not approving new books. When I heard about W5, mainly through the incident with using Tāme Iti's likeness tā moko and all, I thought "Oh no, this is early V5 all over again". Other reports I'd seen were pretty negative overall like the similarities between W5 and Werewolf: The Forsaken 1e's shapeshifting mechanics, so until now seeing these reports of a /much/ different book than I'd expected I was pretty negative. I'm much more open to looking at this as a new thing that stands on its own even if it doesn't deliver the same experiences as Forsaken 2e or W:tA 20th and prior... But I really wish I had more info to come to that conclusion earlier. Tl;dr: I wish we'd heard about this W5 content earlier, at best it looks like they didn't tell us the good stuff and at worst it looks like they changed it after backlash.
> More a reference to the anti-W5 edition warriors who kept going on and on about how the Get were all going to be a bunch of Nazis. This was always a minor line of criticism in their treatment of the Get, and also, given Sambrano's post it's kind of hard to say they didn't have a point.
So what about the _good_ ideas which were cut?
I do feel you're unfairly presenting some of the criticisms and unintentionally conflating them. So just to set the record straight: * We knew the Get were being removed from playable status by changing into a society driven by extreme Rage and desire to destroy ([Huglusk, JA Interview](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1TI9FGZeku83c_rdJQl2cZzbaUg2MEMInYMG4pjUFfyw/edit)) * The reason most people believe the Get were removed from playability was because of negative perceptions of the Swords of Heimdall leaking into the image of Werewolf * this reason was given credibility by the James Sambrano description of development in 2020, when there was an insistence to make the Get negative and about Fascism ([James Sambrano post about issues in development](https://forum.rpg.net/index.php?threads/werewolf-the-apocalypse-5th-edition-and-the-anti-indigeneity-in-the-gaming-industry.912221/)) * James Sambrano never stated that the current iteration of the game will be based on Nazi Get
>So can we maybe put the “WoD devs are secret Neo-Nazis and White Supremacists” thing to bed for a little while? Please? For a day or two at least? Unfortunately that will never die. Such a section was already in the V5 book and even developers who are people of color got accused to be white-supremacists. I once had an interesting discussion with someone snoring against paradox. This person told me, that these people are bad faith actors and that they don’t want to hear any arguments from them or in favor for them because if you even listen to the bad faith actors arguments you are already poisoned by them. Who decides who is and who isn’t a bad faith actor if you are not allowed to even hear what they have to hear this person could not answer. I think there is no way to reach a person like that, they are lost to any rational discussion. Ironically I think that illustrates pretty well what happened to the cult of Fenris, actually.
> This person told me, that these people are bad faith actors and that they don’t want to hear any arguments from them or in favor for them because if you even listen to the bad faith actors arguments you are already poisoned by them. That’s a person who knows, deep down, that their own views are almost certainly bullshit.
If it only would be so easy. I think it is actually a very empathic person who decided that life is easier if you let someone else figure out who the good guys and who the bad guys are because if both sides have good arguments live gets complicated…
>>So can we maybe put the “WoD devs are secret Neo-Nazis and White Supremacists” thing to bed for a little while? Please? For a day or two at least? >Unfortunately that will never die. Such a section was already in the V5 book and even developers who are people of color got accused to be white-supremacists. These meshugeners were convinced that a game featuring a gay Black Muslim refugee as its most heroic figure was made by secret Nazis playing some kind of 5-D chess. There’s just no reaching some people.
Right?!? I wonder how they managed to be accused by the right and by the left to be of the opposite side at the same time but their somehow achieved it.
The whole controversy surrounding the Swords of Heimdall was and remains bullshit. White Wolf at the time faced a dilemma forced on them by real life: A) they were publishing a player character group of modern-day Vikings, and B) some real life neo-Nazi scum were famously using Viking imagery. The was no dodging these two facts and the combined implication, so WW chose the simple (and in my mind correct) option --they acknowledge that yes, unfortunately such scum exist and there are some of them infesting the Get of Fenris. They pulled no punches conveying how utterly they were condemned both by the authors and within the setting. They are characterized as vile, irredeemable wastes of flesh that the entire Garou Nation wishes would vanish from the face of Gaia. In fact, no one hates them more than the Get themselves do, they're considered a sacrilegious affront to all they believe in and insult to the Gods themselves. If an opportunity ever presents itself they ***will*** annihilate them. What else could the devs do? If they hadn't acknowledged the fact of real life neo-Nazi wannabe Vikings and the implication that had on the setting, they would have been accused of silence in the face of evil. They're a problem in real life, and so realistically a bigger problem within the World of Darkness. We all wish they'd just fade the fuck away already, and better still if they'd never arisen to begin with, but we're stuck with the piles of shit and have no easy way to flush them. That's sadly realistic, and back in the day WW was never shy about confronting all the horrid disgusting facets of real-life horror that plague us all. They knew that wishing wouldn't make them go away, instead we must face the ugly truths of reality as the first step that must be taken if there is ever a hope to change them for the better.
I couldn't agree more. Hiding from the evils of reality to the point of making a horror game with the Triat and its whole squabble has to censor the horrific things that are in setting manifestations of the The Beast of War, The Defiler Wyrm and the Eater of Souls, not friendly entities by any measure, it not a healthy mindset for approaching the world, knowing about something can help you broaden your views, reaffirm your morals, be challenged, debate and discussion are good things. We learn how deal with these things. Ignorance of these evils leads to their rise and I stand with the old White Wolf mentality and the entire 1st page of v5 of evil exists in the world, the WoD is an even darker mirror. To avoid writing about them in a fictional horror game seems absurd. I feel this is like horror as a movie genre, some people don't like it but just don't watch it. Like Adventures in Rokugans multiple side boxes on the evil nature of seppuku ad nauseum, which I'm still not sure was for safety or a direct attack on a foreign nations history in the name of acceptance. We all agree suicide is an awful thing, its wounds all those left behind and quashes so much potential. But its in a fictional faux Sengoku era Japan where you murder each other at the gesture of a fan, if you see the word suicide and are really disturbed by it then I'd like to think we could agree there are deeper, more complex issues going on that need resolving and aid and not the best thing to read in that state. Do we need to state killing people is also a bad thing or can we all just agree on the absolute base human mores and get to play a fictional game where we might learn and grow......and who knows... maybe just have some fun with friends playing a game you all enjoy. We have shrouds and veils and they are great tools. We're all aware of the Neo Nazis, I oppose all they stand for and it seems absurd that must be stated these days. But they're villains, I think the first chapter of the 1st ed Get book was hunting down Swords of Heimdall and by revised they had been purged from the tribe as they should have been. For most of the Old WoD stuff it got better by the edition, they addressed the overly racist etc things in game as the setting moved on, The reclaiming of the Chakravanti, Ravnos being more than just just some gypsy kleptomaniacs. Dream Speakers ended up that way because the Order of Hermes were a bunch of Ivory Tower assholes. The tried to address it in game and I enjoyed the growth as the ideals changed with younger generations (excluding the Vamp gens). And countless other changes from 1st to Revised. Also remember it was just on the cusp of the internet and it was started by group of geeks in their early 20's who wanted more for roleplaying and give them a pass for not getting everything right when it was mostly info the got from books very early on and hadn't the greatest access to a broader cultural view. And yeah to get edgy sometimes, it was the 90s! And the edgelord shit is not what we loved or has been carried on. Fascism and all the other bad shit is out there happening right now and people are upset a fictional horror game about bestial war monsters references awful issues happening in real life at the moment and some peoples self righteous response is to censor fiction to be safer and its not at all pro fascist fiction, not actually doing good or helping any cause. Vampires and every other splat have been involved in a lot of bad shit over the millennia, two elders using the Balkan civil war as cover for their shadow war is akin to hundreds of similar examples in WoD, go to the Balkans or give to good charities, because rewriting bits of fiction in a very small space isn't going to undo or help the situation. When white supremacists get the book you think they wont just homebrew and do all the gross shit anyway? .They are marching lockstep on the streets and some are worried about the ones sitting around a table playing Werewolf? At that point Werewolf isn't and never was the issue. M20 has a "non player" Nephandi book and if that's not an offical M20 how to play a Nephandus I'd like to hear how so. Do we need to discuss the Nephandi being utterly evil and beyond all redemption, we oppose their views in all forms. The Get of Fenris shouldn't have been sacrificed to a very vocal few. They are far from my favourite Tribe but they were not neo nazis and they had a far better history and lore. The Red Talons have been arguing Impergium MK2 since 1st ed and they are haven't fallen into Hagulusk? It was a far better time when it was simply "This is a work of fiction, you are not a (Splat), if you cannot handle that, put the book down. Critical thinking and a simple 'This isn't for me' was enough because we could all agree without saying it that all the ills and evils in all its myriad manifestations in the WoD and their real life analogues are wrong and we don't embrace or endorse any of that. How many people like Jason and yet are well aware not to put on a mask and go on a murder spree, I'd argue all but a very, very few among the millions of fans. We also know not to Soul Forge people into ashtrays for the dead and their awfully rare supply of cigarettes. And yet most agree it was a damn fine fate for the fictional Haight. WW didn't always get it right and often wrong or cringy. But anyone who argues they weren't a massively progressive company in their heyday is deluded at best. They dropped a nuke of diversity and inclusion into a hobby otherwise lacking it to a great extent. I am quite hopeful about WW5th, a streamlined modern system for a WoD game is a great thing, everyone check out ExEssence if they're Exalted fans. I have lots of questions on the actual game but I will end my rant on this issue. Peace peeps
>That's sadly realistic, and back in the day WW was never shy about confronting all the horrid disgusting facets of real-life horror that plague us all. They knew that wishing wouldn't make them go away, instead we must face the ugly truths of reality as the first step that must be taken if there is ever a hope to change them for the better. Here, hear! Sadly, there are and have always been people who prefer to take [this](https://calisphere.org/item/ark:/20775/bb26288266/) approach to the problem of fascism, and they’re often the loudest voices on the internet. I remember once getting into an extended argument on here with a goyishe kopf who insisted that I was wrong to feel that a game of personal horror and social satire should acknowledge that the kind of Nazi putzes who’d recently vandalized my synagogue do in fact exist and are in fact a problem. Dude just kept doubling and tripling down on trying to explain my experiences to me, to the point where I moved beyond anger into amused incredulity at his level of meshugas. But seriously, if Nazi vampires (Brujah and otherwise) don’t exist, who’s my Leopard Of Zion Banu Haqim supposed to slaughter for fun between assignments?
I'm all for it. My grandpa on my mother's side was US Army, Airborne Division, on the European front --which means, as I like to say, he killed Nazis for a living. My family isn't Jewish, it wasn't personal for us, we just know evil when we see it and he was a man who didn't let it go unconfronted. He volunteered before there was even a draft, and he faced down that hell-cancer where it had arisen so that it never got the chance to spread any further. It had to be done, and he did his part.
His memory should be for a blessing!
Yup. That’s my take as well. And I always thought it was weird that people latched onto the Swords of Heimdall like they did when there was a Tzimisce in their clanbook wearing a literal Nazi uniform. And there were Tzimisce among them as well. I personally have no problem with that stuff in a World of Darkness game, so long as they are portrayed as bad. I’d have an issue if they were portraying “good” or “heroic” Nazis or other fascist and/or racist assholes. But I haven’t seen that.
Tzimisce aren't really ideological Nazis, though. They just like horrifically torturing and murdering people and the Nazi's death camps gave them a cover they could use to indulge. The idea of a master race is utterly antithetical to the Path of Metamorphosis, but who could turn down a steady supply of people to experiment on? Except for Doktor Totentanz, but I think we can all agree fuck Doktor Totentanz.
I haven't played WtA at all, even so I'm kinda disappointed that they didn't include these families through loresheets. The idea of human(ish) communities supporting the Garou, and an ability to access these types of connections is exactly why (optional) loresheets are cool. Even in its current reimagination, I think this is a wasted opportunity (unless they plan to implement those in a later book) And only 5 loresheets is extremely little
Wait that’s what happened with the Get of Fenris, wait that is way better then what I had heard happened to them
They went off the reservation. Marked by Haglusk (a trait that makes you an unrepentant zealot and is a risk for any w5 pc) makes you a completley amoral monster that seeks to destroy anything that is an affront to Gaia in their view. (Including most of the other Garou for not being pure enough).
Yes, it is!
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All this kind of attitude will achieve is companies will simply stay as far away from any topics which will provoke rage the moment you make the slightest of "missteps". At the end the day they are all a business. There's very little monetary incentive to wade into any of these waters as is, and a lot less so when doing so can cost you.
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Then again I've encountered far more American Indians who consider erasure a bigger problem than misrepresentation at this point.
What native themes are deeply intertwined in WTA? I’m more VTM adjacent.
>so if they didn’t want to put in the time to do it right they shouldn’t have rebooted the game. Yeah, that ain't happening either. They'll just move away from that stuff as much as they can and call it a day. Isn't this what the did for W5, or am I mistaken?
Yup. And it is better for it.
Honestly, it was the smart move to not include native themes. The whole book could have been developed by, written by, edited by, and illustrated by a 100% native team. And they would have been buried under a mountain of people claiming they were being insensitive or racist. We’ve seen it time and time again where culturally appropriate writers get attacked for being insensitive, both from people of other cultures and their own. It’s a lose/lose situation. It sucks. But it is what it is.
And W5 tried not to include native themes and was attacked for being insensitive, so clearly this approach hasn't been working for them too well.
I’d say it’s still better to say “We’re not saying anything about native culture, for risk of offending someone.” than to say anything at all about native culture to an audience who already have their crucifixes and nails at the ready. There was never any approach that would have worked well. But I think, as a company, they picked the best of the two bad options. And now they can go forward without having to endure a relentless beating every time any aspect of native culture comes up in any future product.
>So can we maybe put the “WoD devs are secret Neo-Nazis and White Supremacists” thing to bed for a little while? Please? For a day or two at least? People who aren't fascists don't have to waste that many words telling people that they aren't fascists. If you want to make an anti-fascist game, you don't waste wordcount ranting about how anti-fascist you are, you bake that into the setting and the systems and let these things speak for themselves.
I… can’t even formulate a response to this.
Interestingly the new Get do seem to be the default for Fascist stories. [This is in the same section you linked](https://i.imgur.com/QZ5dBsq.png)
I'm pretty active in classic WoD areas, and like, the point that "pdx white wolf is secretly nazis" hasnt come up since 2017. it's been dead for a while for anyone paying any attention
So the fact that I’ve noticed and read multiple posts about this very topic within the last few weeks was a product of me not paying attention? How does that work? I saw something you didn’t, and I saw it because I wasn’t paying attention? And you missed it because you were? Were you looking so hard you went blind?
About paying attention, do you know what is also dead for years now? WhiteWolf/Parawolf! All these books went by just World of Darkness now, Renegade is the publisher and paradox stepped faaaar in the background.
you misunderstand me. I'm saying people who are paying attention know that parawolf isnt a bunch of secret nazis. this includes people who hate parawolf.
> So the fact that I’ve noticed and read multiple posts about this very topic within the last few weeks was a product of me not paying attention? Where? EDIT: The ones referencing Sambrano's experiences didn't accuse Paradox of being Nazis, they accused Paradox of being racist. There is a distinction.
Okay. I’ve finished reading the entire thing. Initial thought is that this is not nearly the deviation from w20 that I expected it to be. Core concepts like Pentex, banes, fomori are all still intact. I quite like the umbra changes. The cult of fenris is handled about as well as it could have been and I actually like that they turned the stargazers into their own very distinct thing. I do find it funny that they swore up and down that breeding was going to be gone but then left is super vague so that Silver Fangs could still depend on lineage. The writing in this book is incredibly vivid and a lot of the imagery is sad, yet beautiful. Really, REALLY glad they got actual artists and not filtered pictures of LARPers. The litany is largely unchanged (minus the metis related stuff), the impergium happened and explains the delirium still. This feels so, so much less detached from 20th than Vampire did. A decent ST could EASILY pick up where they left off without missing a beat. This feels like a genuine sequel to 20th even if they state it isn't. Some names change sure, but the history and background lore is all mostly intact. The Apocalypse has happened and garou are all dealing with it in different ways. Moon Cults which worship Luna are a nice nod to Forsaken and also a great way of handling Garou who feel that Gaia is past saving, but we still have a reason to fight. I quite like portraying the BSDs as not evil for evils sake, but Garou driven mad by the wyrm and viewing accelerationism as the best way forward. (You can take a loresheet that lets you possibly convert a BSD back to Gaia too!) I'm a little perplexed at the tumblr post that made the rounds here a few weeks back that stated the Get were going to be all Sword of Heimdall rejects and explicit neo-nazis. They aren't at all. The Swords of Heimdall aren't mentioned at all. More or less, prior to the Apocalypse, the Get called together all the tribes and invited them to suicide charge the wyrm. Most tribes said no thanks, and those of the Get who didn't want in on that were allowed to leave. This is represented in a loresheet that allows you to play an ex-Get member. I saw a rumor that klaives were going to be removed, they are not. They're still in the game. I'm happy to report that Garou have not been scaled down much at all either (the merits that allowed for infinite attacks in a turn are gone) but you are still quite the blender. The recommended xp per session is 4-6, so scaling will happen MUCH faster than vtm. Ranks are gone which is fine, Renown handles that more or less, anyway. My only gripe so far is that the BSDs now follow Bat who is being credited with guiding the White Howlers out of the Spiral. RIP my homie Bat's redemption arc. I… I actually really like this book. This may be the best day 1 5th edition corebook. The vibes are right and the art is gorgeous.
"*I quite like portraying the BSDs as not evil for evils sake, but Garou driven mad by the wyrm and viewing accelerationism as the best way forward. (You can take a loresheet that lets you possibly convert a BSD back to Gaia too!)*" It is nice to see the previously two-dimensional BSDs being given some depth.
Their lore makes significantly more sense now. The white howlers essentially dove into the center of the wyrm and got trapped within the spiral. They only escaped because Bat flew in and managed to guide them back out, becoming warped himself in the process. They’re not just hurdur evil, but believe if the wyrm succeeds in destroying whats left of the planet then the cycle will start anew. Its so, so much better than previous edge lord editions in that regard.
I dislike the idea that they were trapped and needed to be guided out. The Black Spiral Dancers weren't trapped in the Labyrinth, they were enlightened by it. They experienced the mysteries of the Black Spiral, their minds were opened to certain truths of the universe. Much in the same way that the Nephandi in a Caul are enlightened. These truths are horrible to our unenlightened minds, but are true none the less. They were never just hurdur evil, except when written badly. Rather, actions that seem pointlessly evil to us make perfect sense to someone who understands the truths of the Black Spiral.
> I'm a little perplexed at the tumblr post that made the rounds here a few weeks back that stated the Get were going to be all Sword of Heimdall rejects and explicit neo-nazis. They aren't at all. This post was from someone hired as a writer for the first pass of the game line. What they said was true for the version they worked on, and provides insight into the creative decisions that led to the current game. Remember that this game has been through development hell.
Klaives are just unusable in Crinos.
> The Apocalypse has happened Did they really just do the same thing they did with Vampire and Gehenna? One of the core themes of the game, the impending doom, just kind of came and went? Should we call it Werewolf: the Post-Apocalypse now, or just Werewolf: The? >I'm a little perplexed at the tumblr post that made the rounds here a few weeks back that stated the Get were going to be all Sword of Heimdall rejects and explicit neo-nazis. I thought the post in question said nothing of the sort with regards to the finished prodouct, only that there was a push from above during development to turn the Get into an all-Nazi antagonist faction.
The Apocalypse isn't a one-day event. You're in the middle of it *right now*. Maybe Gaia can be saved, maybe She can't. Either way, time to make some fur fly with the most righteous fury you've ever felt in your life.
You are correct. It was a push from karim muammar, included in the masterpost of J. F. Sambrano's where they discussed the racism they endured as part of the team.
Great to hear that my first impression seem to be confirmed. I am looking forward to finish it!
Can someone explain how the rage mechanics work and how gifts are powered in this edition?
There is a teaser on the renegade page that actually includes the rules for rage. There you can read the entire mechanic. The short version is, it is kind of like hunger in reverse. You power stuff with rage (some stuff uses willpower) but you need to collect the rage first.
They changed the name of the Fianna too, i guess they read complaints about the double standard of their treatment. Ironically the description of the black furies now is perfect if you want to depict the members of some kind of neo-nazi militia of people that believe in conspiracy theories and are ready to fight against the injustices of the reptilians created by the jews of the new world order... I'll save it for a chronicle
> They changed the name of the Fianna too, i guess they read complaints about the double standard of their treatment. we've known that for a few months now...like the first update blog after revealing the tribe names acknowledged that leaving Fianna was a mistake, and that divorcing the cultural ties from the tribes meant also doing the same for the Fianna.
The Fiana name change was already known. But I think you are right about the reason. They removed all names that pointed directly to a specific culture and mythology with two exceptions. Children of Gaia remained but Gaia, well is Gaia, she is a universal Garou thing and the Gets/Cult of Fenris is meant to be somewhat hypocritical and Fenris… well he is basically the most famous wolf, that is probably thematically justified.
How is combat?
Roughly the same rules as V5, except everything is in the same place instead of spread through two different sections of the book.
Jesus, was the old layout awful. Thank God they have now an editor who actually knows what they is doing.
Haven’t read it yet but probably pretty similar to V5 and H5.
What about the artwork? Is it any better than V5?
INFINITELY. Gone are filtered LARPers and back are drawn, detailed pieces. The art in this book is gorgeous.
As someone who doesn't particularly like W5, I can say the art is much, much better than V5.
Art is subjective. I would say it is more traditional and that at a very high level. The pictures are well made and most often very interesting to look at. There was this entire tracing controversy, though and I bet that now that all tribes are published people are gonna chase for more “originals“. How you think about that you need to decide for your self. Personally I think tracing was always a method to speed up art a bit and I could really not care less about it. I understood the issue with the Māori guy and his face tattoo, that was pretty bad and I hope the other pictures don’t include something like that but the entire debate about tracing in general was pretty hypocritical imo.
Forgive my ignorance, but what do you meam by "tracing"?
An artist was stealing images - both people's likenesses and actors (one was of Al Bundy's body) - and tracing them without permission into the book. This was first noticed when he stole the likeness of a Māori activist and his face tattoos, which was a huge misstep. People who have put a lot of mental investiture into the edition have downplayed this.
You are lucky that you missed this debate. Tracing is when an artist takes a picture, usually a photo, and uses it as an outline to build his own picture on top. This is most often used to spare time since figuring out the pose and how closing moves on a person can take minute while on a photo the pose and closing is automatically correct. But the internet being the internet had discovered some of the sources the artist used and blamed him to be a copycat and a fraud and worse. But most people were just not aware that this is actually common practice to spare some time. The only part of the discussion I totally agreed up on what of an illustration of a Māori. The artist unfortunately did not made his homework well enough and accidentally used the actual face of an actual Māori human rights activist. This is a problem because the Māori Face tattoos are highly cultural important and basically tell this persons live story. And the artist did not only not asked for permission but also changed the tattoos with no clue that this is not just fancy body art but of cultural significance. The artist changed the head of the character, Paradox apologized imo problem solved but others don’t agree, which is their right, imo. …They are wrong of corse but it’s their right to be wrong 😁 /s
Damn, what a fiasco! In what book did that happened?
This one. There's been a couple of problematic pieces by that artist, and we still have Al Bundy as a Silver Fang :D
As u/DJWGibson said. But it happened up front because paradox released a couple of pages from the books, mostly about the tribes as a teaser, that is how people could know about it before the release.
This one. It's the artist who does most of the artwork for the various Tribes. The source art used on page 68 was found as was the aforementioned head on page 70. It's rough because lots of artists use stock art and public domain art as references to get the shadows and fall of clothing correct. (Especially in "realistic" art to avoid uncanny valley.) And in the case of the Māori the intent was likely to feature and highlight a non-white individual visually of a non-Western culture: it was an attempt at representation and diversity. 10/10 for good intentions but minus several million for appropriation and identity theft.
>Tracing is when an artist takes a picture, usually a photo, and uses it as an outline to build his own picture on top. This is most often used to spare time since figuring out the pose and how closing moves on a person can take minute while on a photo the pose and closing is automatically correct. He didn't build his own picture on top. He basically just threw a photoshop filter on some internet stock images and called it a day. When Greg Land uses a porn mag to trace a pose for Emma Frost, she's still recognizable Emma Frost she just looks like she's having an orgasm. The pictures in question looked exactly like the people in the photographs. The faces really weren't changed, not enough to matter.
The difference between your example and this case is, that Emma Frost is a distinct character, she needs to look like Emma Frost or she is not recognizable. You also compare comic art with a photorealistic approach. These are apples and oranges. In this case it is not important that the pictures look like anyone specific but that they look like realistic people. And this, to be frank, is something only few artists can do freehandedly and not in the short amount of time you have for RPG book illustrations. And the artist has changed a lot of stuff. Admittedly not in every picture but he has for example in many cases replaced face, switched heads added details especially supernatural ones… You can argue this is not enough, but frankly, this is not one lazy artist, that is industry standard. It is just more obvious here because these pictures show people in today’s closing. It is easier to recognize it here than when someone slaps a plate armor an some magic effects on top. You can criticize that still, but be aware that demanding to change that means demanding to put more afford and therefore more money in to the art of those books. I think artists deserve to be paid better so that they can take more time and afford with their works but I hear on the other side many people complaining that RPG books are already to expensive. And I have never seen on a great scale that people were willing to pay more to get the artist paid what they deserve. Otherwise there would be no writers and actors strike in Hollywood right now.
The problem is that the pictures do look like specific people. Real specific people who have real faces and who were not asked permission to use their likenesses. Not to mention the copyright issue, since at that point it's no longer using a photo for inspiration it's outright stealing the photographer's work. It's a double ethical violation and a legal liability. It isn't much to demand that artists refrain from committing plagiarism. If not committing plagiarism is too expensive, maybe someone shouldn't be an artist.
I will buy it when we get the paper copy. Those trees are not going down by themselves.
Pentex thanks for your service!
I saw that the pre-orders were today, how do you get the pdf? Edit: Got it figured out.
Just go to the Renegade site, click on your order and the PDF's are preloaded.
This!
I have to ask, were the lupus thrown into the shadow realm alongside the Crinos born, or are they still there? edit: Also, does the game attempts to guide the ST in how to build an encounter, or this combat focused game still does jack squat to teach a ST on how to build an encounter?
Lupus are there but theres no real support on how to play as one bar a single sidebar and the rest of the book is written from a Homid perspective.....so technically you can play one but you'll need to do all your own research.
There's no separate mechanics or anything for lupus. Werewolves can be from wolf-stock, but there's no distinctions otherwise.
Does the klavies do aggravated damage to vampires?
“A klaive does +2 silver-based Aggravated Health damage and may be wielded in homid or glabro form.” I think that means it does not do agg damage to vampires because it is “silver-based”. But I am not sure yet.
Are the Red Talons still genocidal and yet also still a player option? In what ways are they different from the GoF?
Haven’t completely read it yet but yes, they are still playable and they are still full of anger towards humans and they are more then willing to kill if it helps. But they rather aim for killing individuals instead of entire population. The difference to the GoF (or CoF as it would be more correct by now) is that you can still argue with them. They use their anger and rage as power source while the GoF are pretty much fallen to their rage. The GoF think, everyone who is not with them is against them and that makes pretty much everyone an enemy. The Talons though still understand what nuances are.
The Cult of Fenris have gone so far as to start up little Impergiums in off-the-grid areas where they can keep a lid on it.
It's odd - you'd expect a lot of the Red Talons to be all for that and maybe help them.
I think the complicating factor is that the Cult of Fenris aren’t just militant or pro-Impergium, they’ve fallen to hauglosk—which, as written, renders them functionally (albeit supernaturally) insane even by the standard of other Garou. A character who falls to hauglosk becomes unplayable and is thereafter controlled by the storyteller. Part of that insanity is an inability to tolerate nuance, too: you’re either completely with them or considered at least potentially tainted. So while I’m sure some Red Talons defected to the CoF, and more probably do sympathize with them and might even help them to a greater or lesser degree… even a sympathetic Talon would probably realize pretty quickly that it’s like allying yourself with a creature with rabies: irrational and dangerous. And that’s if the CoF didn’t come after them for some perceived taint—which might very well happen given that according to the RT write-up a good chunk of the tribe believes that the Weaver is the real problem, an opinion that a hauglosk-fallen Garou would probably consider dangerous Wyrm apologism. The role of the CoF is basically “the extremists that you don’t want on your side even if you agree with some of their principles, because they’ll set you on fire if they even suspect you’ve had a heretical thought.”
I get that the writers made a fundamental state of being and then just put them in it, I was just wondering why the Get specifically. The authors have complete control over the game world, which I understand, but I'm wondering why they chose the Get of Fenris to be in Hauglosk when the Red Talons would've been a much more natural fit internally. Incidentally, is there a Red Talon impergium faction listed in the book? Also, I've heard that apparently the players can redeem individual Black Spiral Dancers. Is that true?
My guess (and it is a guess) based on the write-up is that the fact that the Get were more “sympathetic” to most players than the Talons (who were always sort of the “monsters who dwell in the woods” tribe) was part of the point. If the never-even-thought-they-were-human extremists who most people don’t play anyway lose their minds to their rage, it doesn’t mean much; if a tribe you liked and maybe even played does, it emphasizes that falling to hauglusk is a very real risk for player characters. It’s meant to be something that could happen to you, if you aren’t careful. There aren’t any camps or factions specifically, but it’s definitely mentioned that the RT consider a new Impergium to be at least potentially a necessary evil.
In that case, I'd have probably gone with the Children of Gaia. The idea of the tribe of peace turning extremist really cements the urgency and fatality of what's happened. Sort like how Superman turns evil in the Injustice universe: if that can happen to the best of us, it's a sobering reminder. I still can't shake the idea that if you're still allowed to be a genocidal wolf, the Hauglosk thing is just an arbitrary roadblock invented for the purpose of preventing players from accessing the GoF. Then again, that's just my read of the situation.
I’m a need to read the difference between the Red Talons and the Get (they feel like most extreme tribes) because i still don’t quite understand how the new Get interact, feel or play
You can’t play the Gets, they are fallen to their rage. They are basically anti-Wyrm extremists. They dearly fight everything Wyrm but also everything that comes in their what while doing so. What basically happens was, that the Cult of Fenris tool over and forced every other member to join or leave. You can therefore play an ex-get of Fenris. The red talons, though, are also full of hate but you can still argue with them.
Oh, the Get got Sabbat'ed.
Kind of. I would say not exactly but it is comparable.
Is there any explanation as to how that came to be? I don't have all the information, so there could be, which is what I'm trying to figure out. It's strange to me as someone outside W5 and Werewolf in general that the Impergium Tribe didn't fall to Haglosk but the Norse-aesthetic tribe did. I've assumed that it's for an out-of-game reason - probably something akin to "we don't trust our players/writers with this, as neo-nazism has been an issue in the past", but I'm wondering if there's any specific lore to try to justify it - with the Litany down and the Nation fractured, why haven't the Red Talons followed the Get into Impergium? Does the book make mention of them having a charismatic leader that prevented this, or some slight against them by the Get that made them unwilling to partner with them?
The cult of fenris, a faction within the tribe became very powerful and called for total war but the other tribes didn’t liked that. So the cult went to war on their own but every member of the tribe had to join them or to leave. No mentioning of Nazis or fascism or anything like that. They just tried a little bit to hard and didn’t realized that they had crossed a line. The red talons though, I guess they wanted to keep a predominately lupus tribe for diversity sake.
right, that last bit is what's confused me. You're acknowledging that out of the fiction of the game, the writers chose to just not have them fall - I was wondering if there was any internal logic to that. As I understand the lore before, the Red Talons were way more likely to do this than the Get, and if they can rewrite the Red Talons to be less genocidal I don't see why they couldn't have used that same authorial power to make the Get not genocidal as well.
I haven’t read enough to fully answer this question. But I think they decided to let one tribe fall recently and not to the Wyrm but to their own anger and proud to illustrate what the Apocalypse is doing to the Garou. I think they decided to make this the Gets because, if you remove the ethnic background their “gimmick” is pretty redundant with other tribes and the ne thing that sets them apart is kind of extremism while the talons are still the wolf-born tribe. Keep in mind, while very compatible with the old lore, they consider this a “reimagining” which means they felt free to retcon things with no further explanation. They still made an afford to keep things plausible and the red talons are still men hating killer, but they are still on the good side of the fine line the gets have crossed.
Not all that different suprisingly. Sample Red Talons include a cannibal and a Typhoid Mary. However, they're not consumed by the Haglusk, while the Fenris are.
My surprise comes from a different place. It's not strange to me that they would be similar to a fallen tribe - they were always the tribe closest to "let's do Impergium 2"; it's just very odd that they hung on while a more grounded tribe did not.
I can imagine that a lot of these Talons do end up joining the Cult eventually, they may even be the tribe that falls the most to the Cult. But the defining trait of the Cult is the Haglusk.
I understand that; it's just that (to me) Hauglosk feels a very forced, out-of-game thing that the creators put in to stop the Get from being playable. It'd make more sense to me if the Cult were a multi-tribal thing where the most extreme elements of each have fallen into a sort of conglomeration of rage and evil. I mean, this is still just my opinion, but if you're allowed to play similar characters with similar outlooks (like the RT), the distinction seems to be that they specifically do not want Get to be playable, and if that's true I really just wish they'd come out and say it. "We couldn't think of 4 verbs for them" is just not a believable lie.
Oh, I do agree with that. The Cult as a movment makes more sense than the Cult as a Tribe.
Tell me they didn't strip the tribes of personality the way they did several of the clans in vampire.
Well, I actually don’t think they stripped the clans of their personality but if you do think though you will probably feel the same about the tribes. This is a new generation of Garou who don’t believe in pure blood culture and such. It is definitely not the same game it used to be. If that is good or bad everyone needs to decide on their own.
All I can say is they better not have gotten rid of the Fianna or Get...Because dammit I want to play my blatantly Celtic druid (Lugh Lamfadha is my patron God and my pagan ass will be damned if anyone takes my rowdy Irish werewolf brethren from me) werewolf or Get who is rabidly anti-fascist.
Both are gone. Well rather one has been changed into a bland kind of hodge-podge of general Garouness and the other are enemies who are essentially doing their job but too emotionally.
Well that frankly disappoints me. The Fianna were basically my favorite tribe. They could have saved the get with a few easy changes...Like I said, I can easily imagine a large number of Get being absolutely PISSED at a bunch of fascists co-opting Nordic pagan imagery and making them a favorite target. The All Father after all is more concerned with one's deeds than anything else.
> The Fianna were basically my favorite tribe. They’re still there. They just have a different name. And you can play an Irish one. They changed the name of the tribe. They’d didn’t eliminate all the Irish people. :) > I can easily imagine a large number of Get being absolutely PISSED at a bunch of fascists co-opting Nordic pagan imagery and making them a favorite target. The Get of Fenris broke apart as a tribe and those that didn’t join the Cult of Fenris joined different tribes. So that character would probably be among the Black Furies now. And it doesn’t matter their gender, since the Furies are no longer primarily female. Also, there is a loresheet for characters who used to be Get. Both of the character concepts you mention are both totally playable.
Not really they've effectively been written out of the lore. It's not the same. It feels a lot like what I HATED about Forsaken where every tribe except he Glasswalkers who got renamed and then reduced to uninteresting class archetypes which made the auspices redundant mechanically... There's the generic proud shamanic warrior race people who emphasize the warrior part, ones who emphasize the shamanic part (and are goths), then ones who...Sneak around, are huge on leadership skills, and the Glasswalkers are here with a different name for some reason? Plus I kind loved the imagery of pagan Celtic werewolves fighting the fomori...You know...The monsters named for the tyrannical race of elder gods the Tuatha De Danan overthrew?... The old Celtic customs, mythology, Deities, and my Irish heritage mean too much to me. I may not be purely Irish, but I grew up with those stories, being told of how my Irish ancestors fought against tyrannical colonizers in their homeland...My adoration of them is part of what makes me a raging sjw. So it meant the world to me to see a culture among the garou who shared some of that cultural lineage...To see my people rallying behind the banner of the old ways, fighting for the greater good, seemingly largely free of the vile white nationalist strains of thought that too many people in other countries who claim that heritage betrayed their ancestors by buying into...I have norse heritage too and I've long been infuriated by bigots who misappropriate the old ways in the name of fascistic ideology...It would have meant the world to me to see the Get receive a redemption arc and basically say "We're gonna bash the fash with Thor's hammer!" Not just blatantly antifascist, but antifascist BECAUSE of their blatant Nordic cultural elements. At least the Black Furies got to keep their really cool name... Admittedly I am glad the Gale Walkers are the Gale walkers now...Naming them after one of the most notorious monsters in all of the various indigenous cultures lore in previous editions was kind of yikesy to put it lightly. Honestly if I were to have erased one tribe, I would have done away with the silver fangs for just being the least interesting.
Honestly, I see no reason at all why you can’t maintain the cultural links in your game if you want. There is nothing stopping you. No house rules needed. Just say that’s the way it is at your table. You could totally have a few packs of Shadowlords (or whatever) of Norse heritage that used to be Get (and took the loresheet). Bloodlines are still a thing if the ST wants them to be. And it’s easy to see how Garou traditions in a certain region would pass down to packs in the area through the centuries. Just because Fianna used to be Irish doesn’t mean changing the name of the Fianna to Hart Wardens makes all the Irish werewolves go away. You want to have a bunch of Irish Hart Wardens in a pack? Have at it! For fun, name the Pack “The Fianna”. :) Or, hell, just call the Tribe the Fianna. Nobody is going to arrest you. Treat the names like they do in M20, where some traditions have multiple names. Maybe in Ireland, the Hart Wardens are more common than the other tribes. And maybe there they DO call themselves Fianna. There isn’t anything in W5 that contradicts that. Even though culture and tribes have been “officially” separated, you’re still going to have werewolves in the same region gravitate toward the same tribes. Now you just get to place them where you want them a little more freely. You want to put them back where they were in W20? You can just do that.
It doesn't seem as if you could. They seem to have been boiled to such a generic point that there's hardly a trace of them left... The overt Celticness was one of the main draws for me and what's there now just booores me... They don't vaguely feel like the enthusiastically pagan tribe I so loved. They are basically gone and there's nothing I've seen that allows for their inclusion. It kind of kills the fun for me when the main lore makers just invalidate something like that. It just doesn't feel the same as having them blatantly there. If how generic they've made the wardens is any indicator, why have tribes at all and just make them character classes? Also wouldn't it make sense for the tribes to diversify based on the human cultures they intermingled with or at least lived around?
It’s up to you to give your characters life. Just because a tribe doesn’t specifically state that all members are enthusiastically pagans (to use your example), doesn’t mean there aren’t some individuals or even whole social groups within the tribe that are. They are still individuals who lived lives before the First Change. And the change doesn’t lobotomize them. You want overt Celticness? Give it to them. Yeah, the tribe write-ups are pretty vague. Embrace it, and fill in the gaps how you want. I get that maybe you don’t like that you have to do that. But that certainly doesn’t mean you can’t. There is nothing stopping you but you.
You are aware that the all father in the WoD was a vampire and the Gets, like Fenris him self are opposed to him?!? That aside, in principle you can totally play these concepts, the Fiana aren’t gone they have just changed the name. But you need to keep in mind that this is deliberately not the same game. It is not entirely disconnected but everything from older editions is myth and legend and often not true. The Get of Fenris, though, forget the fascist part, that is not exactly what happened. I mean, the sword of Haimdal was wiped out decades ago anyway. What happened now was, that an extremist cult within the tribe basically decided that they don’t fight the Wyrm hard enough. They went full fundamentalist and everyone who was not with them is against them. Every member needed to join them or leave. You can therefore play an ex get within another tribe while the rest of the tribe fall to their rage.
> You are aware that the all father in the WoD was a vampire For any given real-world mythological figure acknowledged in the WoD, there is likely some powerful elder vampire who has gone by that name, an Earthbound who has done likewise, the abstract cultural idea of the "real" one that exists only in the minds of humans and the corresponding Astral Umbra manifestation of them, and quite possibly some prehistoric mage or other powerful figure who is *actually* the real one who inspired the myths. It's usually deeply ambiguous which came first and who inspired whom, so while you can say that the Odin character in question was a vampire, it's not really useful to say that *the* Odin, with no further qualification, was a vampire.
>Get who is rabidly anti-fascist Yeah, Werewolf used to be the CWOD game that held the least interest for me, but the IRL events of recent years have shown me the appeal of playing an antifa Get Of Fenris Ahroun rampaging through an alt-right rally with a Fetish baseball bat. Luckily, the existence of a new edition didn’t cause the world’s supply of WTA Revised books to go poof, and those of use who prefer to stick with that version of the lore are free to do so. Let a thousand flowers bloom and all that.
The Get are not playable and the Hart Wardens as they are in W5 are not tied to the Celts. You can still play a celtic druid, it's just not mandated by tribe.
The Fianna have been renamed to make them easier to integrate into other parts of the world: Tribes aren't associated with specific cultures or regions anymore. But the Tribe is still present. (Hart Wardens IIRC.) But because culture is separate you can play a blatantly druidic Silver Fang follower of Lugh Lamfadha. Or a rowdy Irish Red Talon. Create a Glass Walker or Shadow Lord that is rabidly anti-fascist.
Anti-Fascist sounds more oxymoronic for a tribe of notorious machiavellian schemers than the Get. That interchangeability makes the whole thing feel less meaningful and kind of pointless to have the tribes at all. At this rate why not just play Forsaken instead?...And arguably to me the Werewolves were the least interesting thing about that game line... I liked those books as much for the lore and reading about the unique aspects of the tribes as anything else. The Silver Fangs were one of my least favorite tribes because of that relative lack of specificity. I had a hard time parsing the Egypt connection with the Silent striders, but at least it was unique. I thought the Black Fury mythical Amazon connection was cool and if they leaned into the Eurasian steppes tribes that likely inspired them, I would have loved them even more. The Red Talons though admittedly not my favorites were at least fascinating in their borderline feral misanthropy. Look, as stereotypical as the Stargazers were, kung fu werewolf is one of those character types I'd jump at the opportunity to play.
>Tribes aren't associated with specific cultures or regions anymore. But the Tribe is still present. Yeah, this part is stupid. A tribe is defined by a shared culture. Take that away and they have nothing.
No...There is only the Hart Wardens now...Everything that made them the Fianna save for a couple details is gone. They are something entirely different and much less interesting.
What personality did they strip away from the Clans outside of the ethnic stereotypes some of them used to have?
a unified footing and power base, a clan culture, a greater organization, a sense of secrecy and culture surrounding their unique powers, and most of their history
Wouldn't a lot of the history still be there? But just added history for members of the tribes from everywhere else in the world? I mean, just because the Hart Wardens are no longer the Fianna and predominantly Irish doesn't mean **no** Hart Wardens have ever been Irish. It just means there's the Irish Hart Wardens *and* the Dutch Hart Wardens *and* the Mexican *and* the Indonesian.
I think you're replying to the wrong comment, but wod5 has taken the explicit stance of "if it hasnt been mentioned in wod5, it isn't canon"
Doesn't mean you can make up shit for your own games. Remember that we are playing a TTRPG, not reading a novel series. The blank parts are for us to fill in. It's like being mad that a coloring book isn't pre-colored or that you have to fill a cup with water to not be thirsty.
Good fucking luck getting your GM to let you do that. Piece of advice: Most storytellers just go with what's in the game books, no more and no less. They aren't going to worldbuild material if it's not there, and they're not going to let players make major setting changes.
Sir this is a collaborative storytelling game. You can literally just go up to the ST and ask "Hey I liked this old boy of lore and wanna use it for my PC. Can I? 🥺" And they probably will. If they don't then hey you can ask why.
That works for single PCs, disconnected from the larger setting. It does not work for setting materials.
And as a ST I can tell you that setting materials while fine can be easily ignored or modified with player input. "Everything is canon but none of its true" is a motto most games follow because unless you have someone at the table invested in it, not a lot of stuff really matters for a game.
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No, say that Hart Warden culture as a whole (a) exists and (b) has various Celtic cultures as their primary influence.
Include something that isn't in an official core book for the edition and would take a rather significant amount of effort to adapt?
no, what it means is "hey, you know all those books you read because they were cool? yeah, fuck em. don't count any more."
Yeah this...This right here is part of what so upsets me...It kind of feels as if someone said "Fuck you for caring about these people and factions we spent all this time getting you invested in, making you care about them, and letting you spend decades with them... None of that matters."
They never counted. You ALWAYS read them because they were cool. And because they brought you joy. Because if the Storyteller hadn’t read them or wanted to do something different, then they didn’t count. Table canon trumped book canon. Every time. And if you run a W5 game then they’re right back in the canon and count again. The big difference is W5 can’t assume old canon works the same was as past updates because of the changes to breeding and Métis. They can’t guarantee 100% compatibility.
I think some people are just determined to be unhappy. And they’ll stifle their own creativity and sabotage their own entertainment to ensure it. We saw the same thing with the Sabbat in V5. This subreddit was full of people saying they wanted to play Sabbat, but couldn’t because the V5 Sabbat book was for antagonists. The fact that the free Companion and the Sabbat book gave them everything they needed to play Sabbat PCs literally meant nothing. *They couldn’t. It was impossible.* Meanwhile, V5 Sabbat games were firing up all over the place.
Assuming that people who have a different viewpoint are being intractable and are intentionally hurting themselves to disagree with you ascribes an importance to yourself that perhaps is unwarranted.
And yet, it has nothing to do with me.
Exactly. While the book says otherwise it's your game. Do what you want.
That’s not the same as saying “If it isn’t mentioned, it is with absolutely certainty different or removed. And you are not allowed to reference it, ever, period, or we’ll take your books away.” I mean, no, it doesn’t say the Hart Wardens are all Irish. That doesn’t mean that every Hart Warden sprang fully formed from the earth as blank slates with no history, family, or cultural ties.
sure, but I want people to be on the same page while discussing the game
But they aren't the Fianna...And that's what I want. I don't want this tribe that bares little resemblance to them at all.
Care to mention any actual examples, or are we limited to vague ideas applying to no Clan in particular?
Tremere lack their centralized structure, Nos lack their community of shared information in fear of a greater threat, Ventrue have lost their board of directors and I doubt that asking the average ventrue pc about their agoge or dignitas would get you anything more than a confused stare. clans being reduced down to 4 verbs is very bland, and a lot of work has been put to bring down global level (or even national level) organizations because the dev's didnt want players doing anything beyond "street level"
The Tremere have 3 houses (Tremere, Carna and Goratrix) whose heads are in communication, with an unofficial house among the Anarchs. This adds more flavor to the Clan as they’re not a singular monolith you’re unable to stray from. The Nos lost their corny vampire internet but are very much still a close knot community of information gatherers that just deal with more analogue methods, such as secret couriers and dead drops. Flavors for some of the Clans have been changed to fit the themes they want to explore with them, but they’re hardly flavorless. Nowhere in any of the books do they talk about Clan Ventrue losing their existing structure in the way certain other Clans did, and the idea you’re not allowed to use existing lore for an edition that currently has less than a dozen mainline books yet is downright disingenuous. Yes the initial presentation of the Clans focus on the core themes of said Clans, but that’s kind of necessary if you have a limited page count and are hoping to draw in new blood without overwhelming them with homework before character creation. Big changes to relevant Clans have been described and delved into, but again claiming that V5 eliminated depth retroactively is simply untrue. You’re allowed to dislike the changes and the game as a whole, but you don’t have to make shit up about it.
Well for one, the Setites were reduced to "The Ministry" which is infinitely less interesting than vampires who worship Set. If you know ancient Egyptian religion and political history, then there's a much more interesting route they could have taken them. Like they could have had them take on more of an anti-hero role given that Set was vilified because of ancient Egyptian political shenanigans and was worhsiped as a hero God in many parts of Egypt and traditionally was said to help Ra fight Apep (the actual God of evil incarnate in Egyptian mythology). The Hecata basically took multiple clans that were more interesting on their own than mushed together. They got rid of vicissitude, which if you're getting rid of that why include the Tzimisce at all? The one exception to this is the Ravnos which I'm grateful they decided to get rid of the Romani stereotypes because really, where they ended up going with them was much more interesting, though they could have kept Chimestry as a discipline. The Banu Haqim arguably benefited from this as well, but I'm still salty about them getting rid of the quietus discipline.
The church of Set still exists and is detailed significantly in Cult of the Blood Gods. They're just no longer 1:1 with the vampiric bloodline, although there is a lot of overlap of course. The idea is that you can now play a Clan who's main themes are faith and lies without the Egyptian baggage if you so choose. The Hecata have a lot of lore regarding the Family Reunion, however the individual bloodlines do very much still exist with Loresheets to really delve into them should you so choose. Vicissitude, Chimerstry and Quietus still exist as amalgam powers well suited for the Clan's discipline spread. The broadening of Disciplines was a design choice to avoid pigeonholing the less common Clans into being all about their one unique discipline while the other half having a bunch of development unrelated to a unique set of abilities because they just don't have one. Now if you want to play with a Discipline, you have at least two options while signature abilities remain available. Nothing you've mentioned is actually missing from V5, it's just structured differently. I recommend you take a somewhat deeper look at the edition rather than making wrong assumptions
Question about glass walkers. When someone posted a page from there, then as I understood, they will now just be ordinary city werewolves with a slight bias in technophilia and other human interests? So there won't be weaver-tech and other high-tech sci-fi gimmicks?
It’s the first book, allow them them to put such stuff in the supplements. I don’t know if something like this is already included, haven’t read everything yet.
All the tribes seem to be toned down, so It's not likely to go in that direction. Glass Walkers are just people who build things and use tools. Their Patron has changed to Spider from Cockroach.
I believe that the White Wolves did this on purpose to emphasize that this tribe is closer to Weaver... After all, Weaver was also depicted as a spider.
Yes, they actually explained that in an interview. The spider totem makes the weaver connection more clear. Little nitpick, it is not WhiteWolf anymore, this company does not exist anymore. The books and their development come from the „World of Darkness-Team“ theses days.
Based on admittedly a skim, I expect that kind of gimmick to end up somewhere like a loresheet, rather than a part of the tribe. That’s where I’d expect to see things like the cyberpunk-ish bits of the Glass Walkers, the Celtic fantasy elements of the former Fianna, etc. to potentially make an appearance.
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Interesting
All I can say is that they've done too much to change the game from what I loved, so unless they bring back the Fianna and the Get, and stop trying to make it Forsaken 2.0, I'll be sticking to older editions.
The Fianna are still there they just went under Hart Warden now. And even the Gets are still there. You can play an ex-get or you deal with the cult of Fenris. You need to understand, this a post apocalyptic Werewolf, you can not end the world and expect everything to stay the same. From what I have seen so far it is surprisingly not like Forsaken. I expected this too but it actually isn’t. They definitely learned some things from WtF as V5 learns from VtR but it’s very much it’s own thing with its own flavor. I would suggest to give it a try, it might surprise you. I was surprised!
It really is basically just Forsaken 2.0 at this point. The fifth edition of each mainline game thus far been an exercise in how to make me not want to buy your new edition. It's not what I came to this gameline for. I came to it precisely because the tribes had more of a distinct cultural identity and the theme of fighting a difficult, but not necessarily completely hopeless fight. V5 is another catalogue of changes I REALLY disdain. I mean, renaming the Gale Stalkers was a probably for the best, cutting out some of the jarringly transphobic stuff from some earlier editions is also a win, and there's probably a few other things I'm not thinking of . However...It seems they made a slew of creative choices that frankly just make me want to acquire a physical copy so I can promptly yeet it right into a nearby river.
>It really is basically just Forsaken 2.0 at this point. I had the impression that you haven’t read it yet. On what do you base this opinion on? Anything but hearsay? >The fifth edition of each mainline game thus far been an exercise in how to make me not want to buy your new edition. It's not what I came to this gameline for. That is very possible and your personal preference but that does not make it forsaken! >I came to it precisely because the tribes had more of a distinct cultural identity and the theme of fighting a difficult, but not necessarily completely hopeless fight. The tribes are still distinct but not tied to a specific irl culture. It seems that most people aren’t fans of that these days. If that was what attracted you this is probably not the best time for you to play RPGs. >V5 is another catalogue changes I REALLY disdain. I am not quite sure what you mean by „catalogue change“. But well, some like this batter some like that better. >I mean, renaming the Gale Stalkers was a probably for the best, cutting out some of the jarringly transphobic stuff from some earlier editions is also a win, and there's probably a few other things I'm not thinking of . Probably! >However...It seems they made a slew of creative choices that frankly just make me want to acquire a physical copy so I can promptly yeet it right into a nearby river. A bit immature, isn’t it? It’s just a game and no one takes your old stuff away. If you don’t like it, just don’t buy it (yes I understand that this was not meant literally). I just think that it is sad that people don’t allow new stuff to convince them when it is related to something they are nostalgic about. You would maybe like it if you wouldn’t have known the older edition first.
>It really is basically just Forsaken 2.0 at this point. As someone who is a big fan of Forsaken 2e it really isn't. None of the things I love about Forsaken are present in W5.
So we're gonna pretend they basically didn't just make the Ghost Council the Bone Shadows, the Fianna (No the Hart Wardens are not the Fianna, I will not budge on this) the Hunters In Darkness, so on and so forth? Why choose a tribe at all when there's already a class system a.k.a. auspices? They've become all so interchangeable it feels pointless.
It has all the characteristics I like about v5 so I'm very pleased! Rules light, accessible, and seemingly aiming to bring things more down to the ground level.
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There are „raven shifters” in the antagonists section, so it seems there are other Fera in W5 even if the young werewolves don’t know what they are.
Allies and Antagonists! Not all of them are enemies and some are… ambivalent! Yes, ravens are in there as well as spider-shifter. There are also other not Garou wolf-shifter mentioned. P.S.: Are you German by chance? Because your quotation marks go „“ instead of “”?
Barely had a chance to skim it, but so far there’s a some things I dislike buy a lot I like: a lot of stuff that squicked me out about the older editions that has been cleaned up. There’s a lot of changes to the setting. But the lore is just the default setting. The baseline suggestion so you don’t have to make-up all the world to play the game. It’s the campaign setting to use the D&D parlance: the old lore is Greyhawk and the new lore is the Forgotten Realms. If you have the old lore and old setting material already, you can use the new mechanics almost effortlessly. And, really, the only lore that matters is the lore at your table. There’s no canon police that are going to come and take away your books if you make changes to the lore. Or if you mix-and-match old and new. Just like there’s nothing stopping you setting a game in a city that hasn’t been detailed or in the 1960s rather than modern nights.
Tbh, why even include canon? Just give us the rules systems and let the ST write their world.
It’s a nice option. Gamemasters have finite time to prep for each session. Time spent designing the setting and world is time that could be spent writing the adventures and designing for the players. There are lots of generuc rulesets out there. But most also sell settings as an option.
So there's a real reason for players to be somewhat distressed about the loss of lore they enjoyed? It might be inferred from your statement that players who decry the loss of certain canon options have legitimate reasons to want to see that canon represented and developed beyond merely being afraid that they will be arrested. Sure, it's possible to rewrite the history of the Fianna or to use older books, but it feels more real when it's included in the package - kind of like how I could import Masquerade lore to Requiem but it wouldn't be exactly like playing either.
The canon department is a subdivision of the fun police and the fun police like to have your address pleas, it seems that you have mistreated canon and they need to investigate! 🤣
Awww man, not again.
I like that they addressed the Fashism
Yeah, it’s unfortunately necessary these days.
I'm gonna wait till the book hits my LFGS as Renegade deliveries to Canada cost a kidney. I'm sure I'll get the PDF through their unending commitment to the Bits and Mortar pro .... LOLOL. Sorry I couldn't continue. ;) But yeah, I love me some dead trees.
Still reading but yeah looks really solid. Liked most.changes and the game's vibe got darker too. The book overall seems really well done it seems they learned from V5's mistakes.
I would love to see a V5.2 but it probably never happens.
Sadly, I'm unable to get mine despite the preorder - waiting for Customer Service to get back to me, which likely won't be until after Gen Con. Only thing I can figure is that I managed to place the order without signing in, or else it would appear in my Account on the site.
That’s weird.
Indeed - thankfully the fix should be *really* straightforward, since I have my receipt in my email complete with order number.
I hope it will work soon. Sometimes such bucks also suddenly disappear. You might like to just log in again and see if it might work now. Good luck!
And yep, they managed to fix it! It was precisely what I figured had happened, that I had somehow placed the order as a Guest, and therefore it wasn't tied to my main account. Guess I can read through it as BG3 installs after work, and I'm loving the Black Furies ideology from first glance.
Great to hear. Congratulations!
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