Werewolf: the Apocalypse

Overall score:

One of White Wolf Game Studios ‘World of Darkness’ line, Werewolf deals in heroic fantasy, but the setting—the real world—does not support it well.

First, get the rules out of the way. Werewolf uses the D10 Storyteller system. This is very simple, aiming for a narrative approach. You either combine two stats which each have a maximun of 5, or use one stat with a maximum of 10. The stat in question is specified according to the task you are attempting. You then aim to equal or beat a target number. The number of successes, if any, tells you how well you managed it - 1 success is a fairly meager attempt, 5 successes is a masterwork of excellence. The rule of one, whereby any rolls of '1' remove another success, balances it out. If you fail to get any successes, and got one or more 1's then you have botched - bad news. The simplicity of the system allows you to concentrate on the roleplaying, but there can be difficulty with deciding just what a certain number of successes actually means for a certain task.

The world of Werewolf is that of the World of Darkness: a dark mirror held up to our own, in which every negative element of our own world is amplified. In this world, three basic, primal, forces are at work. These forces are the servants of Gaia, who have a very nebulous definition. Gaia seems to equal everything, the universe or possibly just Earth. The names of the forces are the Wyld, creator of life and the embodiment of the bountiful growth of spring; the Weaver, whose webs binds the wanton creativity of the Wyld into recognizable and maintainable shapes; and the Wyrm, who destroys the structured creations of the Weaver, sending them back to the Wyld for re-creation. At least, that is the idea. In reality, things are not so rosy.

The book goes on to say that, untold thousands of years ago, the Weaver went insane. She seeks to bind everything into her webs, regardless of whether it should be bound. She attempted to bind the Wyrm, and in the process sent it insane. Now not only is the Weaver attempting to bind all of creation into statis, but the Wyrm seeks to destroy all of creation, to unmake everything.

At which point in step the Werewolves, also named the Garou. The chosen warriors of Gaia, they fight for the Wyld. They fight the maddened excesses of the Weaver, and they struggle against the Entropyic madness of the Wyrm. But they are few, their enemies are legion, and the final days approach—Apocalypse draws near as the Wyrm prepares to destroy all of reality in one go.

Sounds grand, doesn’t it? Unfortunately, there are some very serious problems with this in my mind. Generally, the problem revolves around the nature of the game. Werewolf is, at its heart, a fantasy hack and slash in a system that fails to support it properly. For example, the game takes place in modern day Earth; this means that the whole premise of glorious battles against the Wyrm is difficult to pull off, due to the fact that the army would likely get called in if werewolves started fighting in the streets. The only ways around this is to either move it into the Spirit world (more on that later) or to have the big fights constantly happen out in the wilderness. Neither of which are particularly good at showing the type of fantasy this game seems intended for.

The game also has problems with its rules system. Its system, outlined above, is very quick and easy to use. However, it is rather poor at showing combat—it does not feel right, and is rather clunky and cumbersome in contrast to other systems. It is also very abstract, which is not really what you want for combat. This is not a big problem in other White Wolf games, since they are not very combat heavy, but in a game that seems solely a hack and slash, it suddenly poses big stumbling blocks.

The Spirit world is meant to play a big part in the game. It is another dimension that your characters can enter and fight and travel in. Unfortunately I do not have the faintest idea about what it looks like since the books description consisted of a elongated version of the following: “It is similar, but not identical to normal earth. Cities have webs. There are moon paths.” That, for what is meant to be half the game world, is rather insuficient. Why are the moon paths needed? There are tree spirits in the spirit world—do they totally replace the physical presence of a tree, or do they guard it? What enemies can be encountered? I imagine that all these questions and more are answered in the relevant supplement, but I am not reviewing that book here. The fact that you have to buy another book in order to learn what half the game world even looks like is not my idea of a good thing. This sort of problem occurs a few other times in the book, with the book not explaining apparently basic concepts to my satisfaction.

I always feel that a game's book is one of the most important factors when buying an RPG—I do not really want to read a poorly laid out and ugly book, nor do I want to try and reference stuff from a book with poor organisation. Unfortunately, this means I do not like the Werewolf book very much. Not only is the index a travesty, making finding something a laborous chore, but the presentation is lacking. The illustrations have very little atmosphere and the feral nature is implied only by the text.

Ultimately, this game feels like White Wolf was just doing it by the numbers. The fact that the various tribes (the racial grouping of your character) are poorly thought out and riddled with stereotypes is an indication of this. This is a pity, as some parts of the game, such as the half and half nature of the werewolves, is quite interesting, but the game fails to capatalize fully on this and falls down on other factors. It's a poor game which fails at its premise, but which a good GM could turn into something worth playing. Or he could just play something else instead. Guess which I am doing?

Written by Charlie82 on July 06th, 2003