Re: [DL] Werewolf: the Savage West

[Brett Dixon <balance@tubas.net>]

On Friday, December 13, 2002, at 01:52  AM, David R Goecke wrote:
> Thanks. Homid and Lupus refer to whether they were born human or wolf
> right? So Stormwalker would be Homid? And Ahron, Philodox, etc. That's
> the phase of the moon they were born under?

Correct. Homid is used to describe those born as men, Lupis for those 
born as wolves. A third category, Metis, escribes those born of garou 
parents, but this is a big faux pas for several reasons.. The metis are 
all sterile (and the werewolves play a high priority on making more 
little wyrm-eating rugrats) and are alla fflcited with some sort of 
deformity. They are generally treated as the scum of the garou nation, 
but then again, so are the Ragabash and the Bone Gnawers. So a metis 
Ragabash Bone Gnawer is pretty much SOL as far as ever becoming a 
respected person to the garou, i guess.

aul-André Beaulieu's description of the auspices is correct, so i won't 
repeat him here, although there will be a couple of comments on that 
post, too...

> Man, I wish I had that book. No game stores in my area are going for 
> that
> White Wolf Sale, and I don't have a credit card to order it myself 
> before
> the sale is up. maybe i'll just have to make a personal adventure to 
> find
> one of the two stores in wisconsin partisipating.
> I wonder if PEG gets as much benefit from White Wolf as White Wolf gets
> from PEG. Sheesh. Those three Dime Novels are PEG advertising White 
> Wolf!
> (side note to Shane: you are too cool, advertising other games. I hope
> the Karma comes back.)

The ads might have been part of the licensing deal, but I definitely 
think the licensed books were good for PEG. White Wolf is truly one of 
the movers and shakers of the RPG world, and they have a LOT of fans 
who buy nearly anything they put out, so PEG might have gotten some 
direct sales... And if even a few players buy the Dime Novels for 
completeness, a few will be intrigued enough to get the Deadlands core, 
and then they end up joining the mailing list, and...

White Wolf has a weird on-off thing for crossovers. Crossovers for 
their main World Of Darkness games are considered unofficial, but fans 
do it anyway and they've put just enough in to make it 
kinda-sorta-work. One thing (which is nice) is that most splatbooks 
contain a brief note on how the covered tribe or whatever sees the 
other groups of it's game line and the other WoD stuff. It's nice, 
considering how many possible 'groups' exist in the WoD before you ven 
get down to the no-game-effect level of the secret societies that exist 
in the larger groups.

One weird thing is that a lot of their games have 'work alikes' for the 
other games... For example, Vampire has lupines, that fill the role of 
werewolves without the baggage of Werewolf werewolves, but are 
apparently more of jsut nasty critters.

Their Exalted game has some tenuous links to being prehistoric World of 
Darkness... I don't know all the details, but theirs moon-tied beings 
that I guess evolve into shape changers, sun-tied characters that are 
linked to the power-imbued hunters.

And the new Demon game apparently ties a LOT of things together.

yet crossovers are unsupported, mainly because I don't think White Wolf 
is insane enough to actually try and think of campaign material for a 
group including a Garou, a Bastet (Cat shape changer), a Ratkin (Rat 
shape changer), a couple of Vampires, a mummy, and a changeling. It's 
hard enough trying to combine the various changing breeds from Werewolf 
(A were-rat and a were-cat working together would be amusing, but then 
again I'm a weird GM.) especially as WW did not attempt to make power 
levels equivalent between games (Werewolf to Vampire) or in games 
(Garou to other shape changers).

It's interesting, and even for those who don't like WW games (the only 
one I really like is Werewolf, and that's because of a good GM) there's 
a lot of good ideas to grab since WW has apparently been doing 
something right...