Everybody loves a secret language (remember "The Hobbit"?) The background of many paragraphs is littered with werewolf runes, which look cool and have the right gimmicky feel to appeal to new players.
Each tribe gets a picture, and these look nice, too. The five forms of werewolf shapechanging get one, although only three forms are mentioned in the text (a necessary simplification I fully agree with). White Wolf delivers as usual, with technically good black-and-white line art. Let's talk about the artwork for a while. The adventure seems to be pretty cool and a good introduction to a chronicle. "Rite of Passage", a two-page elaboration of a story idea ends the book. It's about confronting a pack of Black Spiral Dancers (the eeevil, fallen werewolves). While I thought "Endangered Kinfolk" to be too difficult (the booklet gives 3 lines of information on Kinfolk), I liked "The Doom Pack" a lot. I did miss a good example though, one that also offered a view on what role-playing is.įour story ideas give the beginning GM some material to run those first few sessions. If you're interested in these rules, you can also check them out in the Vampire: The Masquerade and Changeling: The Dreaming Introductory Kits, since they're essentially the same. Instead of ten-sided dice, you use six-siders. That's it.įour pages of Rules follow Character Creation with a simplified version of the Storyteller System. Then divide 5 or 6 points (depending on your breed) between Rage (supernatural fury & energy that drives werewolves) and Gnosis (spiritual wellbeing and awareness). You get a 1, a 2, a 3 and a 4 to distribute among on Physical, Mental, Social and Psychic. While the folks at White Wolf didn't simplify their setting, they did simplify their Traits (the attributes, abilities and advantages that make a character unique). While it's fun to have so much background, I think a beginning player would be happier with less tribes. There are twelve (12!) tribes to choose from, each with it's own advantages and restrictions. This determines the take on life your character has: is he a trickster (new moon) or a warrior (full moon). Auspices indicate under which moon the character is born: from new to full. There are three breeds (is your character born as human, wolf or she the child of two werewolves) and five auspices. As Darren MacLennan so finely pointed out in his review of Werewolf: The Apocalypse, werewolves are divided by breed, auspice and tribe. If you thought the aforementioned World of Darkness-stuff was overly complicated for beginning players, character creation is even more complex. What is a Werewolf, History of the Garou, the Umbra (the spirit world), the Litany (Werewolf law) and antagonists: everything gets it's own paragraph.Īfter this crash course we are deemed ready to make a character. After the obligatory glossary and opening talk ("What's role-playing" - oops, storytelling) we plunge right in the World of Darkness which is the background of Werewolf. Well, the setting is, as we've come to expect from White Wolf, elaborate. So the main question in this review is: Does the Kit succeed in combining these two, often conflicting, goals? Furthermore, it should be compelling enough to want to play the game and keep wanting more. First, it should be simple enough to begin play in about half an hour. An Introductory Kit should do a few a things.
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