Breed Book: Rokea
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES
![Image](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51G6982FBFL._SX258_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg)
they made a bunch of these, I think cover art wasn't in the budget
Music: The Theme from Jaws (duh)
Warning: this review is coming from a sober, but highly biased perspective. I like sharks, a lot. I collect shark teeth. I bought this ninety dollar textbook with my own money to educate myself. I don't even really play werewolf, but I've read this book through like four times. So yeah, I'm more invested than the average player would be in this particular product.
So, background. The year is 2001. White-Wolf is spewing out sourcebooks at a rapid clip to move product and fill up their brand new revised edition. In the content of Werewolf this meant producing a line of books about all of the other Changing Breeds that originally were barely mentioned but gradually began to drastically alter the Werewolf game starting with the Bastet book in 1997. Rokea was the 8th of the so-called Breed Books and the last fully independent one (the Kitsune got lumped into a giant word-salad about East Asian beast courts for book 9). That makes it among WW's most obscure supplements, and one of the more formulaic, since this was round 8 there was an established policy for how to do these things. Which means that many of the problems with this book are also problems with other Breed Books.
This book has a very small production group. There’s one author: Matthew McFarland, who went on to write a whole lot of other stuff for White-Wolf but isn’t credited on the wiki for this because the book is that obscure. Ethan Skemp is credited as developer. Skemp, interestingly, is one of the authors of WOD: Blood-Dimmed Tides, the only other WW book dealing with the part of the planet covered by water in a significant way - which actually implies some level of planning involved in making this. Aileen E. Miles is credited with essentially all other duties. So this is basically the opposite of shovelware, but I doubt anyone else at WW even bothered to talk to McFarland and Skemp about this and they produced whatever the hell they wanted.
![Image](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51J0G3K8PQL.jpg)
the other oWoD book about the ocean, it's terrible
Anyway the book itself is a 141 page softcover with the typical bland breed book cover design. That’s a thick softcover that will still require the basic werewolf rules to play.
Opening Comic
Breed Books don't have opening fiction, they have opening comics. This is pretty much a universal upgrade. The Rokea comic involves some werewolves on a boat looking for the rokea only one of them gets mind-controlled by some weird worm-thing (which is totally not obvious at first and makes the whole thing extremely confusing), picks a fight with the Rokea and then the weresharks absolutely curb-stomp the wolfmen.
That's actually pretty good for an opening. Hooks were probably the thing WW did best, and this one establishes two pretty darned important things. One, that the Rokea are pretty clueless when it comes to the whole convoluted supernatural mess of the WoD, two, that they are sufficiently badass that it might not matter. 'Able to swallow a werewolf whole' - which is a thing that happens in the comic, is an appealing description.
The comic has some fairly decent art, IMO. The sharks look sleek and dangerous in their shark and were forms and this compares well to the wolves, who actually look kind of bothersomely fuzzy by comparison. In particular, the opening full-page shot on page one really triggers the ‘yes we took the most badass oceanic predators and needlessly turned them in even-more badass were-monsters simply because our inner 9-year old wanted to’ vibe that is pretty much the only reason to explain why Rokea even exists.
My inner nine-year old’s reaction to ‘Were+Shark’ is Fuck Yeah! But your mileage may vary.
![Image](https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/a5/36/9e/a5369e6efa1de7a2c17b8e3980d33283.jpg)
thematically, the artists understood where this book's appeal resides
Getting to the actual beginning of the book, there’s a table of contents on page 11 and the introduction starts on page 12, but at least the contents uses that number. There’s an introduction, then five numbered chapters, and one appendix, which is really more like its own chapter and it would have made way more sense to just number the chapters 1-7. The chapters have nonsensical titles: Chapter One is ‘The Long Swim’ while Chapter Three is ‘Breach’ but the ToC does have subtitles that tell you what the chapters are about in actual plain language, so it works if you squint.
Introduction
Having begun with a context-free comic this book jumps into a completely context-free introduction. This book absolutely assumes you knew what you were getting into beforehand. Considering this is Changing Breed Book #8, that's not an unfair assumption. In fact I doubt WW really even wanted to produce this book at all and asked around the office until they found someone who liked sharks enough to actually write the darned thing.
This chapter opens with a quote about the love of monsters by, of all people, E.O. Wilson. Okay, yes that's a giant of modern biology speaking, but Wilson is world-famous as a myrmecologist - the study of ants. You know what doesn't live in the ocean? Ants, or in fact insects of any kind. Would it have been too hard to find a quote by anyone working with something that swims? Points for trying. Minus points for fucking it up.
What is supposedly the introduction opens with a piece of third-person fiction. And not in special text or white print or anything, but just in the line printing like its the most normal thing in the world. This book was made at the height of WW's in-world narration phase. This is frankly incredibly annoying, because it makes everything longer than it needs to be, more convoluted than it needs to be, and far more subject to interpretation than plain language.
This bit of fiction is about some guy named Mateo fighting a Rokea named Guards-the-Shoals (Rokea names are funny descriptor things, you could play a cute guessing game called Rokea or Exalted? regarding the names) and ultimately reveals that Mateo is a rokea too, only supposedly there aren’t any human born Rokea. It stops there for the moment, but it will be back. Notably, Guards-the-Shoals is only talking to Mateo at all, as opposed to trying to eat him, because Mateo has a silver-loaded shotgun pointed at his head. This is taking 'unreliable narrator' to the point of lunacy.
The next bit, thankfully in plain text, explains that the weresharks are sharks that reason, and that they are ancient. It repeats the common myth that sharks are an ancient lineage and that they have been unchanged since before the dinosaurs (not actually true, but only a modest and somewhat forgivable exaggeration).
![Image](http://www.deepseawaters.com/images-ancient/Cladoselache.jpg)
this is Cladoselache, a common and widespread Paleozoic shark, unchanged it is not
It then very quickly (super fast by WW standards, like in a handful of short paragraphs) highlights a bunch of things about the Rokea – they see survival as their mission, they just want to be left alone, the whole race got nuked back in the fifties and lost half their population – which ties them into the whole ‘dying race’ theme of WtA – and that they are currently fighting a civil war over going on land.
There's a brief 'how to use this book' section which is basically a more complete table of contents and should have been placed in the actual table of contents. Then they have a list of references that are now mostly amusing and outdated, but they at least tried to include internet links in 2001 so that's something.
And then the stupid shows up. The introduction proceeds to list a glossary of some 30 terms that are all new to this book. Seriously, this is absolutely in the 'blood from a stone' phase of RPG product development for Werewolf and this book - which is practically the definition of obscure niche - proceeds to try and reinvent the wheel. Hilariously some of these terms are simply Rokea-isms for common, everyday things like Undersea. It's the sea floor. That's all it means. But no, they couldn't have just called the sea floor the sea floor. That would be too easy. This entire book is positively infected with term bloat.
![Image](https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/236x/f7/d8/88/f7d888bd46e48851ed4271f8dc1a4956.jpg)
when fighting aquatic term bloat, please think of the pufferfish
Next chapter covers the Rokea creation myth and view of the world.