OSSR: RAGE (Unlimited)

[Ancient History]

OSSR: TCG

RAGE


No.


Yes.

Frank

One of the key realities of Role Playing Games is that the rules are not complete. They don't cover all possible scenarios, and they are run “in your head” and as such your gray matter can smooth over any parts where the rules contradict themselves or fail to account for a situation. This normally stands in stark contrast with computer games and card games, which have computers or cards that perform the interactions – leaving no room for interpretation.


Did you read the card? Reading the card explains the card.

Well buckle up kids, we're going on a roadtrip where we look at a card game where reading the cards doesn't tell you jack shit: the game where the fans of the game agree that the printed rules and the text on the cards should be ignored at all times. Rage: a card based theater of the mind.

AncientH

Following the success of Vampire: the Eternal Struggle, White Wolf decided to get more of that sweet Collectible Card Game money by adapting their popular Werewolf: the Apocalypse RPG into a CCG in 1995!


According to Wikipedia, there are still sealed boxes of Limited cards which sell for well below their 1996 street value. I believe that.

Unlike V:TES, RAGE was developed in-house, and the result has been...well, welcome to the rabbit hole, Alice. Shit's about to get deep.

Frank

The printing and ownership of Rage are a hot mess. It was created in 1995 “in house” by White Wolf after they noticed that they'd sold their most popular brand Vampire to Wizards of the Coast. It was itself a hot mess and dogged by print runs wildly out of sync with demand, so it was a financial failure in addition to being a design and artistic failure. It ended up having the license sold and shared with fans and sold again. The rules were massively overhauled by fan groups that met up on message boards. When new companies got their hands on the thing they made new rules and cards that were completely unplayable with the previous material.

There are seventeen fan sets, each with different levels of “officialness” that are associated with rules revisions that are contentious and also not ever available in print form. Because it was sold to Five Rings for a while and Five Rings was sold to Hasbro, there's a very short period where Rage ended up being owned by Wizards of the Coast anyway, but they quickly handed that hot potato to a smaller more insane fish called Azrael, but the rights were hopelessly ensnared in bullshit at that point and new cards couldn't be made. Card sets eventually got made again, but only in a back alley printing-by-fans manner. You haven't been able to buy a new Rage set in stores since 1998.

People who care about this game recognize the following eras:

• 1995 White Wolf Rules
• 1996 White Wolf Rules
• 1998 Five Rings Rules
• 2001 Rules Rewrite
• 2003 New England Rules
• 2004 Tribal War Fan Conclave Rules
• 2006 Least Wanted Rules
• 2006 Alhadi Rules
• 2007 Revised Rules
• 2013 Call of the Sea Rules
• 2014 Call of the Sea Errata Rules

Some of those are supplementary to each other, while others are in opposition. The 2004 Fan Conclave Rules are a fan proposed revision of the Five Rings era card offerings from 1998, not an update of the 2003 New England Block Rules, which are a fan addition to the White Wolf era cards that were discontinued in 1996. Got that? Of course you don't.

The cards... are considered legitimate by White Wolf and are allowed in regular tournaments and for use in online play. They are not hosted on the main White Wolf server due to copyright issues with the artwork.

The bottom line is that if you met two random people who “play Rage” and showed them a card made in the last twenty years, the chances of them being able to successfully interpret its game effects the same way are... slim.

AncientH

Ah, but I remember the early days! My brother and I used to play RAGE, back when all CCGs were hot properties, and people were putting out all sorts of crazy crap. I have no idea where those cards are now - probably my brother used them for coasters at some point, or to scrape up cat shit - but I remember that we tried gamely to play the game, back in the day when werewolves were cool.

And werewolves were cool, dammit. RAGE as a CCG didn't have much going for it, considering that most of what we were familiar with at that point was Magic: the Gathering, but it had bloody combat maneuvers and hardcore looking motherfluffers and guns and knives and shit at a time when...well, it was a more substantive effort at being "edgy" than Highlander: the Card Game or Hyborian Gates.


I am genuinely unsure of how much of the original art was taken from RPG products or original to the set.

Frank

At its core, Rage is a game about collecting cards into a scored pile. Like Ascension: Chronicle of the Godslayer or Tanto Cuore. But instead of being a self-contained deck-building game like those games, it's a trading card game where players are expected to build their own collections of cards away from the table. Also, instead of being about an epic quest to amass ancient knowledge and slay powerful monsters or have sexy times with anime maids, this game is about fighting Captain Planet villains and having sex with dogs. It's a trading card game based on Werewolf: the Apocalypse, White Wolf's ill-fated and vastly less popular followup to Vampire: the Masquerade.

So.... what is the core gameplay of this game supposed to be? What are the important things you're supposed to consider about a card before you decide whether to put it in your decks (the game starts with you dividing your cards into two separate piles like Jyhad or L5R)? No one really knows. The cards include a lot of roleplaying elements. You have werewolves and you have enemies, and when your werewolves defeat the enemies, the enemies go to your score pile... but there's political actions, dreamings about past lives, allies, equipment, locations, magical spells, sex with dogs, and all kinds of shit that doesn't directly have anything to do with werewolves fighting pollution demons.


This card summons a magical buffalo.


This card is a combat action that also leaves a lingering debuff that interferes with future political actions.


That's no moon. Oh wait, I'm wrong, it is literally the moon.

Imagine if you will, a group of people brainstorming ideas for things that could be in this game. And then, instead of winnowing it down to core gameplay elements, they just made a card for everything on the whiteboard at the end of the meeting.

AncientH

Each player has a pack who are trying to prove that they are better than the other packs. They achieve this by earning Victory Points (VP). The main method of acquiring VP is by killing prey or members of other packs, but packs can also gain VP from Quests, calling and winning votes and by other means. As well as the Characters they start with, players have their combat deck (used to kill creatures - or prevent death) and their sept deck (which contains resources, game altering cards and alternate methods of getting VP). Packs can serve either Gaia or Wyrm. Both allegiances play using the same rules but, because they draw on a different pool of cards, they can play quite differently.

So, the basic idea is scoring an agreed-upon number of Victory Points (normally 20), and you win. You can also lose if all your characters are killed. You generally score VP by killing enemies, who are placed in your Victory Pile, but there are other cards that also award VPs, especially Quests. For the first sets released - Limited and Unlimited - there were only five Quests included, so while it is possible to have Quests be a major part of your strategy for victory, the game essentially boils down to how many enemies you can add to the Victory Pile.



As the big yellow text suggests, this saw a bit of abuse - several of the Moots in Unlimited are Renown 6, and if you can pass one you can probably pass three more - so this works out a bit like the Political victory in V:TES. On top of that, there's the Rite of Caern Building:



So with two cards you may well be half-way to victory without killing a single enemy.

Frank

Many games struggle with timing issues. The basic “My turn, your turn, my turn” thing isn't always appropriate in every situation. Formalizing when cards can be played is an important part of game design because both first mover and last mover advantages can exist and those become incredibly shitty without a framework to determine when an effect must be revealed. Rage doesn't really have one of those, and it's intended to be played with more than two players. There are in fact lots of edge cases in which a player would want to get a card on the table before another player did or where two players have the ability to cancel something but would rather the other player spent the resources to do so. And the game handles this with shouting matches and staring contests respectively.

Another issue is that the game doesn't have a clear idea of what its suits are supposed to be. In the RPG each werewolf is defined by being a member of one of 17 tribes, 5 auspices, and 3 breeds. And since those are independent selections, there are 255 possible confirmations. And as you might have guessed, that is a lot more than there are werewolf character cards. So if you spun the wheel and decided that you wanted a card that represented your favorite tribe, auspice, and breed – chances are very high that such a card simply does not exist. Of course, this also means that the various “hoser” cards are extremely perplexing. I mean, you could include a card to fuck over players who had one of the seventeen different tribes in their deck... but that's going to be a dead card pretty fucking often


Incest based genetic problems are surprisingly important in the W:tA mythos.

AncientH

Okay, so your "deck" actually involves two separate decks: one for Combat cards, one Sept deck (moots, rites, equipment, gifts, quests, allies, etc.); you also have a bunch of characters whose total Renown must be less than or equal to (<=) the Renown level of the game. So if the Renown level of the game is 20, you could have ten characters with Renown 2, or five with Renown 4, or any combination thereof.

You also have separate "hands" of Combat and Sept Cards, which can be a little confusing since it feels like you need three hands to play the game. Hand sizes start at 5, but different cards can change that during play. You also have separate discard piles. The logistics of this almost demand a battle mat.

Basic gameplay follows more-or-less on the M:TG model with distinct phases. At the start of the turn you refill your hand(s) (Redraw Phase), injured characters heal (Regeneration Phase), you play non-Combat cards like Allies or Gifts (Resource Phase), you do Umbral shit (Umbral Phase), you hold any Moots (Moot Phase), and finally you attempt to kill some motherfuckers and stack their bodies on your Victory Pile (Combat Phase).

Frank

So what do you do in this game? Mostly you fight things. Your cards are in two decks and one of them is mostly full of combat maneuvers. You fight monsters in the middle of the table, you move into an alternate dimension and fight monsters that are in the middle of the table but in the part designated to be in the other dimension. And you fight the werewolves belonging to the other players. You win by killing shit and putting the cards into your scored pile. There are a few other things you can put into your score pile, but I don't think there's any real possibility of winning the game doing side quests. But there are lots of side quests to do! You can make friends, call moots to kick out the friends other players have made, collect gear, wait for later periods in the month, and so on. And on and on.


This political action is simple and plainly interacts with the win condition of the game. All the others are neither of those things.

There are quests and rites and moots and gifts and these are all different things. And there are so many things, that there aren't many versions of any one thing. In the basic set there are only five quests. And they are super awkward!

Play immediately after a successful moot vote. If a moot you played passed, your pack gains a number of victory points equal to that moot's Renown requirement.

The core mechanic is that things go into your victory pile and are worth points at the end of the game, but this quest actually doesn't say how many victory points it's worth – you have to remember the number off a different card that it's not attached to. Some of the moots aren't instants, so they are still in play while this card goes out of play with the copied values of a card it is not in proximity to!

AncientH

Frank touches on this, but the Werewolf playing field is...complicated.

Okay, so you have your characters. One of them is the Alpha, and they go out front; they are the point man for your varsity squad. You're facing the other player(s). In the middle is the Hunting Grounds, where all the combat happens. That's where you play Enemies, and that's where your characters move when they're going to fight some shit. Some part of the Hunting Grounds is designated the Umbra, which is usually where the spirits go (there is a whole thing where you can fight spirits and bind them as allies for half VP, but we'll get into that nonsense later).

This kind of weird, semi-geographic take to cards is a hallmark of a number of games in the mid-90s, like Decipher's Star Wars, Star Trek, and the Middle-Earth and Mythos CCGs, but those normally involve some form of travel or narrative mechanic going on. For RAGE, it's a bit simpler: to win the game, you need to kill Enemies, to kill Enemies, you need Enemies, so players play Enemies into the Hunting Ground so they can send their characters to go in there and kill them. There's a bit of tactical consideration there, since your opponent can attack and kill and score the Enemies you have played (and vice versa). There's an added consideration on top of this, but that involves getting into how Combat cards actually work.

Frank

Next up... a deeper dive on Combat and Sept cards.

[Orion]

Someone showed me some Rage cards in real life at one point and I couldn't figure out what was going on. I feel retroactively vindicated.

[Thaluikhain]

this game is about fighting Captain Planet villains and having sex with dogs

I don't suppose there's some obvious reason why they included the latter in their Werewolf CCG, or Werewolf in general?

I mean, whether or not you think werewolves should be into that, from a marketing point of view it seems something you might want to skip.

But then again, I think that sort of thing is popular with elements of the Skyrim modding community, so maybe there's a market?

[Username17]

this game is about fighting Captain Planet villains and having sex with dogs

I don't suppose there's some obvious reason why they included the latter in their Werewolf CCG, or Werewolf in general?

I mean, whether or not you think werewolves should be into that, from a marketing point of view it seems something you might want to skip.

But then again, I think that sort of thing is popular with elements of the Skyrim modding community, so maybe there's a market?

Werewolf: the Apocalypse is very self consciously a modification of Vampire. So most of the design choices about White Wolf's Werewolf game are "Because Vampire: the Masquerade." All the things that are the same are the same "Became V:tM" and all the differences are "Because V:tM." The intention was to work within the framework of V:tM and have all differences be specific changes to variables defined by the original surprisingly popular product.

So Vampires are made, but there's a whole metaphor about childes and sires. So in Werewolf they decided to making the siring more literal. And because you have an animal form, there's also sex with animals as a central plot point.

I understand how you get there. Xanth books go there too. But the point is that when you stop think about this at an extremely facile 7th grade level and like actually think about it - this is gross as hell. Xanth books really don't hold up if you go back and read them as an adult either - there's kind of a lot of pedophilia and bestiality.

-Username17

[Neeeek]

Frank touches on this, but the Werewolf playing field is...complicated.

It's not, really. That graphic grossly over-complicates the game (at the time the graphic was made, at least. Don't know about post-90s stuff).

You have the evil demons that can be played. Generally, kinda dumb to waste slot to play them unless you needed some ability either in life or death from them for some reason. That's the middle bit.

The rest is just your team, your main dude (and the player with Golgol Fangs-First is going to win this game. Having him and Entrail Rends was completely broken), and your decks.

[OgreBattle]

that blue and orange sliced up texture seems iconic of that time. I had some dice that looked like that

[Thaluikhain]

Werewolf: the Apocalypse is very self consciously a modification of Vampire. So most of the design choices about White Wolf's Werewolf game are "Because Vampire: the Masquerade." All the things that are the same are the same "Became V:tM" and all the differences are "Because V:tM." The intention was to work within the framework of V:tM and have all differences be specific changes to variables defined by the original surprisingly popular product.

So Vampires are made, but there's a whole metaphor about childes and sires. So in Werewolf they decided to making the siring more literal. And because you have an animal form, there's also sex with animals as a central plot point.

I understand how you get there. Xanth books go there too. But the point is that when you stop think about this at an extremely facile 7th grade level and like actually think about it - this is gross as hell. Xanth books really don't hold up if you go back and read them as an adult either - there's kind of a lot of pedophilia and bestiality.

I get why, on first glance, it seems like a reasonable idea. I do not see how on second or third glance it does not.

How many people were involved in Werewolf that could have pointed out the problem there and didn't?

[Ancient History]

Lots of them. But once it was a whole thing in the first edition, it simply became a plot point. Walking back wolf sex is tricky when you have werewolves that are actual wolves, and it gets squicky fast when they explicitly make werewolf-werewolf mating lead to inbred, sterile metis children.

It's not just a problem for White Wolf. Terry Pratchett addressed the whole thing in Discworld, American Werewolf in Paris had that one bad joke...to get away from it, they really would have just needed to make the point that werewolves don't fuck wolves, because wolves are animals. They could have just made being a werewolf a contagious disease or inherited curse or something, but they wanted them to be a dual lineage of lupus and homid lines. You can't really avoid that kind of shit when half your population are literal wolves.

[Whipstitch]

Frank touches on this, but the Werewolf playing field is...complicated.

It's not, really. That graphic grossly over-complicates the game (at the time the graphic was made, at least. Don't know about post-90s stuff).

I don't buy this. Even your post seems pretty damning when you realize that each deck has an associated discard pile and that dudes can both be killed into the victory pile OR removed from the game entirely depending on circumstances and that this game was supposedly designed to comfortably support more than 2 players. My friends and I have collected over a hundred board & card games for our semi-monthly meet up. If there's one thing I know in my bones it's that if you collectively have more discard piles and draw decks at the table than you personally have fingers then shit is going to test the physical limitations of your kitchen table and appear impenetrable to the New Guy. I'll grant you that my own group could probably handle it no problem but that's because even by 2020 nerd standards we are quite decadent.

[Ancient History]

OSSR: TCG: RAGE

ALL CAPs

AncientH

Okay, we've talked a bit about the actual format of the game - how you set things up, the victory conditions, the general apparatus of play - and now it is time to talk about the cards themselves, how they work and how you build your deck(s).

Which is perhaps rather more thought about things than the designers put into it.

Frank

The original set of RAGE has 321 cards, which in turn are divided into three kinds of cards: Combat Cards, Sept Cards, and your Pack. For reasons that don't make any sense to anyone, the deck sizes and card limits are different in each. The Sept deck has a minimum of 30 cards and you are not allowed more than 3 copies of any card. The Combat deck has a minimum of 20 cards and you are not allowed more than 2 copies of any card. Your Pack isn't really a deck at all, because all the cards start in play and their total Renown has to be equal to the Renown limit of the game (generally 20) and each card can appear only once.

Cards can be restricted which means each player can only have one, or unique in which case only one player in the game can use it – and since in many cases such a card won't be played during a period where any one player has the speaking stick there are some instances of shouting matches and staring contests that we mentioned earlier. There are ways to gain control of other players' cards, and your guess is as good as mine what happens if you borrow a restricted card that you already had a copy of.

In any case, there are 41 combat action cards and 9 combat event cards and most of them are shit. Each combat deck must have at least ten different cards in it, and more than half of the cards are “deliberately bad” for purposes of trying to create chase cards for the collectibility of the collectible card game. As such, you will very definitely see the same combat maneuvers over and over again because there aren't enough of these to make there be variety.

There are 81 character cards. They are split between a metric fucktonne of werewolf tribes, but also a significant number of them are other weird crap. There's a Ratkin, a Werebear, and a Werepanther. The remaining 78 cards are distributed 6 per tribe for 13 tribes. Note that there are five Auspices and only 6 Werewolves of each tribe, so if you want a specific Tribe/Auspice combination you will normally have exactly one choice.

The remaining 190 cards are all the other stuff. Allies and Gifts and Quests and Moots and Enemies and Past Lives and Rites and Equipment. All the wacky shit that goes into the Sept deck.

AncientH

For raw comparison, Magic: the Gathering's Unlimited set at 302 cards. So this was a big set to start out with! But of course, the character cards are mostly limited, so in reality you had a relatively smaller number of options for building your decks. On the plus side, this meant there was plenty of room in the expansion. If you really wanted a Get of Fenris Ragabash, you had one choice:


This guy, right here.

The question then becomes, okay, why do you want a Get of Fenris Ragabash, and that gets more complicated quickly. There are only seven cards that require a Ragabash to play them, and this guy cannot use any of them as-is, because he doesn't meet any of the requirements to do so.

Which is where the complication comes in. If you're playing Magic: the Gathering, and you're playing a Red deck, you're not going to stick a bunch of White cards in there unless you have some way to cast them. The same general logic should apply for a RAGE deck: knowing what your pack is capable of from the get-go, why would you put in any card that they can't use from the get-go?

...unless, like Young Bobby, you just have a couple starter decks and not enough cards to actually have much choice in the matter.

Frank

Many people find the tone of Rage to be discordant and offputting. That's not unreasonable, as the target tone is “Nineties Teenage Edgelord.” This isn't your dad's game, man. There's blood. And swear words. And references to sex. And lots of incest-based-deformity. And bad jokes. Bad jokes as literal game mechanics.

Once per game after a round's combat cards have been played, Banana Split can cancel both his card and one opponent's card by interrupting with a bad joke.

You may find yourself offended by some of the art or text on these cards. That is because the game is offensive. It's intended to offend. It doesn't go any deeper than that. There's no message. The creators just think it's funny to piss people off by saying and doing offensive things. In 2004, White Wolf made a card game called “Pimp: the Backhanding” and firstly I am in no way making that up and secondly the offensiveness of that work wasn't in the service of any statement or social commentary either. It's literally exactly teenage edgelord humor. Nothing more.

It achieves nothing more than prurient shock humor because it aspires to nothing more than prurient shock humor. I don't know what your favorite “dead baby joke” is, or if you even have one. But I can tell you with absolute certainty that every writer, designer, and art director on this project definitely had a favorite dead baby joke.

AncientH

So, the choices for your Pack have immediate repercussions for what cards you want in your deck and what possible strategies you have for play. Except there are so many variables at play (Tribe/Type/Creed/Gnosis/Rage/Renown) that I think you genuinely need a spreadsheet to see what options each character unlocks, and that's at the start of play. Shit can change.

Combat cards are a good example, these all require some minimum number of Rage (and sometimes other factors). This goes from Rage 1...



...to Rage 10.



Entrail Rend looks bad-ass! But there are only two characters in the set with unmodified Rage 10, and that only in Crinos form.




So if you don't have one of these guys? Then Entrail Rend is a dead draw that will sit in your hand for the rest of the turn. Even if you have one of these guys, you can't drop this until they're in Crinos form, which means they have to get in battle, get hurt enough to activate Crinos, but not hurt enough that they immediately die.

I'm not saying there isn't the possibility of some tactical shenanigans here - Flesh Wound may seem useless, but it deals a minimum amount of damage. It could be a coup de grace, and if an opponent survives the fight and regenerates, Flesh Wound is going to come off first, so they might still be hurt. But the long and short of it is, if you're using Flesh Wound it's probably because you either don't have a better card, or your character is so shitty they cannot play a better card.

Frank

Many cards have hidden variables on them.

Twice per game, Guides-to-Truth allows you to look at an opponent's sept or combat hand.

There's no in-game means to track whether you've used this ability once or twice before. And since it interacts with only one of the other players at a time and doesn't directly harm them, there's no reason to expect the other players to track this ability either.

AncientH

All the crap about Rage and Combat Actions applies double for stuff like Gifts, Equipment, and Allies. There isn't any cost to put these into play, so as long as you meet the requirements - which you fucking should, you designed the deck and the pack - you should be able to play pretty much your entire fucking Sept hand every turn.



Equipment, Gifts, and Rites work a bit like enchant creature (auras) in M:tG. They modify your character and provide them with various bonuses and benefits. They come with certain requirements you have to meet to play them, and unlike in M:tG the cards are designed so that you can set them out and around the character and see the text.


There are six Black Furies. Four of them can use this card. That's not bad.

The upshot of this is, if you see who your opponent is fielding, you kinda already know what cards they're probably packing and what their general strategy is going to be. I mean yes, you might be facing off against a bunch of low-Rage characters who arm themselves with 9mm pistols and try to throw down with the Big Dogs with Renown 8 or 9, but this is sort of a Herohammer game - having bigger numbers does matter.

Frank

Some of the cards are extremely specific. There are 58 Gifts, and most of them have specific requirements of the character they are played on. The game doesn't have normal expendable resources (except obviously “charges” of abilities that can be used a limited number of times in the game – but there's no fixed method of tracking those), each card has a list of requirements and if you meet the requirements you can play the card. But some of the requirements are so specific that no character in the set actually meets them.

An example is Gaia's Vengeance, a powerful combat gift that is a bonus attack at the end of combat that does 8 damage – pretty much giving you the win in almost every encounter. Except it doesn't. In order to use it, you need a character who is a Red Talon Philodox whose mother had sex with dogs and has a Gnosis of 9. Now there is in fact a single character in the set who is a Red Talon Philodox whose mother had sex with dogs. Her name is “Stands-Like-Mountain” and she is a 3 renown character with a Gnosis of 3. There might be some collection of cards you could use to Voltron together a +6 Gnosis boost to that character in order to play that card – but to a first and second approximation that card literally cannot be played. And it's not the only one in that position. Gift of the Porcupine is only playable on a Bone Gnawer Incest Baby with a Gnosis of 4. But the only Bone Gnawer Incest Baby is the Banana Split comic relief character – and he only has a Gnosis of 1.

Note of course that there are 13 tribes in this set, three breeds, and 5 Auspices. So there are 195 combinations that could have Gifts assigned to them, but most Gifts aren't that specific and there are only 58 Gifts. There are two Bone Gnawer Ahrouns, but none of the printed Gifts care about that particular combination.

AncientH

There are Quest cards, which give you VP if you accomplish certain actions.



Like this one. This requires an item to be equipped, and then stolen. There is only one way to steal items.



Now, there are clever ways to abuse this, which probably make RAGE fans piss blood. You can put Sticky Paws on one of your Garou, steal a piece of equipment from another of your own Pack, play this Quest card, and then give the piece of equipment back and declare victory as you score the 2 VP. Now, you probably can't win the game doing that kind of shit, but it is within the realm of possibility to work out stupid loopholes like that. Hell, you can bargain with the guy who stole your shit and ask them to give it back, and they can just do that.

Other cards...Moots. Let's talk Moots.



So, remember how V:TES had vampire politics with votes and shit? Same with werewolves. Everybody gets a vote equal to their Renown (sometimes plus or minus), and people vote yay or nay. If you have the votes, the Moot passes, and whatever the effect is takes place. This is kind of quasi-balanced in that at the start of the game, each Pack has the same total Renown (20), but in a two-player game, if one starts to slip because a character dies or they start racking up the Renown...things get one-sided very quickly. If you were ever insane enough to do a multiplayer game, it could get interesting, but seriously, you're spending your game with people voting on shit like this was the PTA.

Other types of cards... Allies are dudes you can bring onto the table to help you out...



Actions and Events do...stuff...



Past Lives, which tend to be massive buffs.



...and, of course, Enemies.

Frank

There's a lot of things that could be done, and there are cards to fuck with your opponents who are trying to do extremely specific things. But of course, those cards take up slots that really desperately needed to be more generally useful things. There are only 15 Enemy cards, but one of them is “fake” in that it actually isn't worth any points and is just an irritating decoy for any packs whose alpha happens to be an Uktena. It's genuinely hard for me to imagine wanting to put something like that in your deck, and yet there it is taking up space in an already extremely threadbare card list.

As things stood, fleshing out the card list to just give fairly minimal coverage would take thousands of cards. So it may not surprise you to learn that the actual expansion material decided to bring up new combinatorials instead. So like, The Wyrm expansion lets you have a whole different pack setup where you're team evil and you have board meetings instead of moots and bane gifts instead of regular gifts and even the monsters you fight are “victims” instead of prey. Actually fleshing out the skeleton of a game they made would be an incredibly daunting project, but future designers chose to not even fucking try and instead recruit 30 to 50 feral hogs in just making more pieces of skeleton that could also remain painfully not fleshed out.

AncientH

Enemies are a problem because most of your paths to victory involve killing enemies in the Hunting Grounds. So you need something that your pack can kill, but also any Enemy you put up is a potential bag of VPs for your opponent to snag, and both you and your opponent are trying to kill each other's Pack by playing combat cards for the enemy, so...


Look, this guy is better than half your Garou on average.

It is entirely possible to put some big-ass critter in the Hunting Ground just to fuck with your opponent. If you decided to invest in a couple of high Renown characters and your opponent decided to invest in like 15 characters with Renown 1 or 2, throw an Elder Vampire in there and watch them work out how group combat works.



Basically, I think the main issue with this is the game is trying to do too much at once; it's bringing in tons of stuff from the RPG, but the actual playspace is massively limited by the characters available, and I'm pretty sure nobody did the spreadsheets. Anyway.

Frank

Next up: Beating people to death.

[DrPraetor]

Okay, not only have I read this review - but I've seen people play multiple games of Rage to completion and I still have no idea what is going on.

So the Elder Vampire can use any Philodox or Shadow Lord gifts.

Suppose there's a Shadow Lord+Dog Fucker gift - can the elder vampire use it?

The Elder Vampire is better if you're Philodox or Shadow Lord - because you can play gifts on it ( https://whitewolf.fandom.com/wiki/Rage_Basic_Set .... Geas?) , assuming any of these matter, to help it against your opponents, right? And it's likewise better if your opponent isn't, because then they can't?

[Ancient History]

Suppose there's a Shadow Lord+Dog Fucker gift - can the elder vampire use it?

The Elder Vampire would have to meet any other requirements.

The Elder Vampire is better if you're Philodox or Shadow Lord - because you can play gifts on it ( https://whitewolf.fandom.com/wiki/Rage_Basic_Set .... Geas?) , assuming any of these matter, to help it against your opponents, right? And it's likewise better if your opponent isn't, because then they can't?

All Characters are considered Restricted (each player may only put one of a given Character in their deck, but the same Character may appear in any number of packs).

I suppose you could end up fighting the identical Pack with almost identical decks, because there's only a limited number of good characters and those severely restrict the cards you can effectively play. But yeah, you can play gifts and equipment on an Enemy to fuck over your opponent (and vice versa), and theoretically you can make a bit of a monster that way.

[Neeeek]

Frank touches on this, but the Werewolf playing field is...complicated.

It's not, really. That graphic grossly over-complicates the game (at the time the graphic was made, at least. Don't know about post-90s stuff).

I don't buy this. Even your post seems pretty damning when you realize that each deck has an associated discard pile and that dudes can both be killed into the victory pile OR removed from the game entirely depending on circumstances and that this game was supposedly designed to comfortably support more than 2 players. My friends and I have collected over a hundred board & card games for our semi-monthly meet up. If there's one thing I know in my bones it's that if you collectively have more discard piles and draw decks at the table than you personally have fingers then shit is going to test the physical limitations of your kitchen table and appear impenetrable to the New Guy. I'll grant you that my own group could probably handle it no problem but that's because even by 2020 nerd standards we are quite decadent.

First time I ever played this game was a 8 player game about 3 days after it came out. No one seemed to have a problem understanding what was going on. The whole game took about 30 minutes.

Rage is not a difficult game to play. At all. Or wasn't, with the first set.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

1. 75% of the art for these cards is balls-out awesome. Very important for any playing card game.
2. "V:TES" is way too similar to "TES V" for me to not get confused for a couple seconds.
3. Cut to the chase and show us the dogfucking cards. I know they're in there.

[Thaluikhain]

If I'm reading this correctly, instead of having Werewolf A from Clan B cards, and needing lots of cards to make up all the combinations you could want, could they have instead designed things so that you have a Werewolf A card, which can have (or must have) some Clan card or other to go with it, and you make up your own combinations?

In a similar way to being able to pick an elf, dwarf or human for a RPG race, and then pick fighter, mage or thief for an RPG class and not have to develop Elf Mage or Dwarf Fighter and so on individually.

[John Magnum]

It's very weird to me seeing how adamant these cards are about mixing flavor text and rules effect text. With expectations set by stuff like MTG where flavor text is in an italic font at the bottom of a card or Hearthstone where it's not even on the card itself, the format of stuff like Alaskan Wolf Hunt and Elder Vampire is a shock.

[Username17]

If I'm reading this correctly, instead of having Werewolf A from Clan B cards, and needing lots of cards to make up all the combinations you could want, could they have instead designed things so that you have a Werewolf A card, which can have (or must have) some Clan card or other to go with it, and you make up your own combinations?

In a similar way to being able to pick an elf, dwarf or human for a RPG race, and then pick fighter, mage or thief for an RPG class and not have to develop Elf Mage or Dwarf Fighter and so on individually.

If your character is a Homid Glass Walker Ragabash you qualify to play a card that can be played by Homids or Glass Walkers or Ragabashes with a Gnosis (or Rage or Renown) requirement less than or equal to your character's value. But individual cards could specify more than one thing, in which case you'd need to meet all the separate conditions. Rage has multiple cards that cannot be played because the list of requirements is so stringent that none of the characters in the set meet them.

This is similar in concept to VTES but of course in VTES there are no cards that have clan and/or discipline requirements that no characters meet. The closest it ever came was a couple Ravnos cards that were only playable by one or two Vampires. Rage having multiple cards playable by zero werewolves was totally insane.

It wasn't impossible to have adequate coverage with 13 tribes, 5 auspices, and 3 breeds. If you'd made 2 gifts for each tribe, 4 for each auspice, and 4 for each breed that would be 58 gifts - same as the number they actually printed. But then each character would have 10 possible Gifts to potentially qualify for based on Gnosis. It's just that what they actually did wasn't checked for playability at all.

-Username17

[Neeeek]

Rage has multiple cards that cannot be played because the list of requirements is so stringent that none of the characters in the set meet them.

What cards couldn't be played?

As someone who played this game a lot when it came out, I don't recall ever encountering a card I couldn't find a way to play.

[Username17]

Rage has multiple cards that cannot be played because the list of requirements is so stringent that none of the characters in the set meet them.

What cards couldn't be played?

As someone who played this game a lot when it came out, I don't recall ever encountering a card I couldn't find a way to play.

If you can figure out a means to get +6 gnosis on a renown 2 or 3 character, I suspect that you could play all the cards. But there are multiple cards like Gaia's Vengeace, Odor of the Skunk, and Gift of the Porcupine all require combinations of traits available to only a single werewolf and in those cases the werewolf in question has a Gnosis well below the gnosis requirement of the Gift.

This isn't a one off issue. There are lots of gifts that require a specific tribe and a breed or auspice in a way where there's only one or two werewolves that meet those requirements. And since the gnosis requirements have not been designed with respect to the gnosis values on the actual existing characters... that was not a great design concept.

-Username17

[Whipstitch]

Even if it's technically possible to cast these goobers I'm leery of going too combo heavy with an initial card set design anyway. It's desirable to have archetypes that reward players for successfully constructing a megazord but getting that balance right is a tough needle to thread. It's easy to accidentally print a bunch of coasters because none of your payoffs are good enough and even that outcome may actually still be better than accidentally printing something that's too good and ends up oppressive.

[Ancient History]

OSSR: Rage

Combat!


If only...

AncientH

Combat is the heart of RAGE. There is quite literally no path to victory for the average deck that doesn't involve going into the Hunting Grounds and tearing some fucking Wyrm-foe into shreds and stacking their carcass on your Victory Pile. In Unlimited, I'm not sure it's possible to even theoretically win without combat of some sort.

And in large part, this was the kind of thing which CCGs were expected to deal with. Magic: the Gathering had its Combat Phase, and most other CCGs had some equivalent. RAGE was a bit different than others in that it didn't just do a raw comparison of numbers, but involved an entirely separate Combat deck...and that wasn't the only thing that was different.

Frank

Despite being very central to the game, indeed basically the entire point of the game, the combat in this game is very unclear. No one actually knows how it's supposed to work, there are only theories.

The basic concept is that you have your character and you are in combat with something you are trying to kill, and you play a combat card for your attack and another player plays a combat card for the opponent's attack and then you place your attacks on each other's character and then you repeat that until someone dies or everyone's hand is exhausted and the combat ends in a disgraceful draw. But there's more to it than that and a lot of moving parts.

There are a number of options that make no sense. Each player takes turns issuing combat challenges in order of highest Renown of the Alpha to lowest ( ties are broken with shouting matches or staring contests). Generally this means that you start a combat between your alpha and another player's alpha or one of the enemies in the hunting grounds. But you also have the option to challenge werewolves other than another player's alpha – but if you do that the other player doesn't have to start combat they just have the option of telling you to get lost and then you lose your fucking turn.


Offering your opponent the ability to consequence-free make you lose your turn is just so fucking bizarre.

But the big churning question is when and how many combat cards you actually draw. The issue under contention is that you refill your hand at the start of the turn (the whole turn that starts all the free-for-all phases, not your individual turn starting combats). But then later in the turn you have the chance to discard cards from your Combat Hand and draw to fill your combat hand at the “start of combat.” And it's very critical whether that means the start of the combat phase, or literally every combat. In a five player game that's the difference between you drawing cards twice in a turn and having about 5 you can actually play and you drawing cards six fucking times and being able to play about 25 cards a turn (your deck is 20 cards and gets flipped over when it empties and all the attacks that land stay in play, so that you could see the same card several times a turn). This question is incredibly crucial for obvious reasons, but even more so if anyone attempts to fight one of the Enemy cards in the middle of the table.

Combat is that one attack card is played for each participant, they get resolved, and then you do it again. Combat ends when both sides run out of cards to play. But with enemies in the hunting grounds all of your opponent's could play the attack for it, but none of them are required to do so. This makes whether the other players get to refill their hands between your fight and their fight extremely important. Because if they do, then in a five player game there are twenty fucking cards that your opponents have no incentive to not play and if they do not there's very little reason for another player to play cards for the monsters to fight back at all. This is critically important in the case that your attack cards don't wipe out the Enemy card right away, because in the latter case your character is going to get Tekken Juggled to death the moment you run out of cards against an Elder Vampire or whatever. In any case, who actually plays each attack for team monster is, as most things in this game, handled with staring contests and shouting matches.

This fundamental question of when and how many combat cards you actually draw during a multiplayer game has been answered differently by different rules clarification conclaves. And I just don't actually fucking know how it was originally intended to work. In any case, if you choose Enemies whose Rage is too low for your opponent's combat cards to be played, it doesn't matter.

AncientH

You might remember last time we talked about different types of cards. The distinction between a Combat card and a Sept card are crucial, in that you can theoretically at least draw more Combat cards during combat. However, it's also important to remember that many of the Sept cards actually deal with combat or initiate combat or do damage in some way. There are Combat Events and there are Sept Events that involve combat, and I for one cannot tell you why some of them are one and some of them are the other.


For example, you can receive damage and theoretically die from a Sept card while not in combat. Can you play this card outside of the Combat Phase? Maybe!


I mean, this card says it can be played before the first round of Combat. Are we making a distinction between the first round of Combat and the Combat Phase?


This is the closest to erotic this set gets.





Can you play these cards during the Combat Phase? Kind of important to know!

Basically, what RAGE needed were some hard rules on card timing and resolution, a la M:tG sorceries and instants. They did not get that.

Frank

I have many questions.

Reduces the damage of any one attack by up to 4 points.

If you stop all the damage of the attack, the attack is discarded. But if some of the damage gets through, the card is still attached to your character. But the block is discarded. So the damage on the card is just less, but there's no inherent system within the game of demonstrating that. And I'm not sure if that affects regeneration order or not. Each turn you discard the single card with the lowest damage number, and if one of them actually inflicted less damage but still actually has a higher damage number on it, I don't know. I just don't know!


I'm so blocking you Moon Moon.

AncientH

An added complication is the Umbra. In most games during Unlimited, you can pretty much ignore the Umbra. There are only six cards in the entire set that deal with the Umbra at all. Several of those explicitly deal with combat.



The thing about being in the Umbra is, only other creatures in the Umbra can attack you, and vice versa. Except for Spirits, who exist in both worlds, or if somebody has an Incarna sigil...



Most of this is academic, because for the most part you can only step sideways into the Umbra if you have a Caern. In Unlimited, you only get a Caern if you can win a moot:



And...there's not a lot of reason to go to the Umbra, other than that. Granted, it makes Umbra Escape a pretty good card, because unless your opponent has one of a couple different counters, they have no way to fucking get you.



I mean, it is entirely possible to move into the Umbra, and your opponent not being able to draw one of the few cards that could actually interact with the Umbra in any way in the next two turns, even if they're in their deck. You could theoretically go entire games without dealing with the Umbra in or out of combat at all.

Frank

There are 41 Combat Actions, which each have a minimum Rage to use:

• Rage 0: 1 card
• Rage 1: 8 cards
• Rage 2: 7 cards
• Rage 3: 9 cards
• Rage 4: 6 cards
• Rage 5: 4 cards
• Rage 6: 2 cards
• Rage 7: 1 card
• Rage 8: 1 card
• Rage 9: 1 card
• Rage 10: 1 card

The Rage 8 and 9 cards can only be used in Crinos form, and none of the characters have a rage of 10 out of crinos form. In fact, none of the characters have a non-Crinos rage of more than 6. There's a shotgun equipment that can let you use the single Rage 7 attack (it does 5 damage), but there honestly doesn't seem to be a way to play the Rage 8 or Rage 9 attacks without being in Crinos form. So I honestly have no explanation as to why the Rage 8 and 9 attacks specifically require being in Crinos form and the Rage 10 attack doesn't.

While a few of the cards at low Rage values are playable (the all important dodge and block cards only require Rage 1), for the most part the cards are Rage3 or less are garbage. Intentionally garbage. In most cases the combat cards you want to play will require some amount of setup. Either getting injured or frenzying and transforming into Crinos form, or acquiring a shotgun. There are only 6 characters in the game with a Rage higher than 3 without flipping or weaponing up.

AncientH

Because of the existence of Dodge and Block, there are theoretically some tactical options where you might lead with a low-damage card to use up a Block or a Dodge so that you can then open up a world of hurt with a high-damage card. Because low-damage cards are regenerated first, if you don't have enough damage cards in your hand to kill your enemy right away, you might just pile up as many wounds as you can so that they stay hurt longer.

Realistically, I don't see that being a major consideration in combat.


Hit hard, hit fast, hit often, hit with everything you've got.

Nominally, the consistency of your Pack will determine what goes in your Combat deck. If your highest Garou has Rage 4, you're probably not putting a Rage 5 combat action in there. On top of that, however, you can only put two copies of each card in there. So even if you have a very small, high-Rage Pack, you're mostly going to be playing the same cards as everyone else...over and over again.

Frank

Very puzzlingly, there are three combat maneuvers that are only available to werewolves who have mastered the secret Egyptian/Japanese made up werewolf martial art of Kailindo.


This is a Kailindo combat maneuver. It requires a Kailindorani who has a Rage of 4. There are only 3 characters with Kailindo. It may not surprise you to learn that none of them have a Rage of 4 in any form. There are wounds and equipment that subtract from or add to your Rage, but to a first approximation there's no difference between this ability requiring Rage 4 instead of requiring Rage 5. Of course, it is also hot garbage and the actual reason you'd consider a Kailindo based combat deck is because of Nerve Cluster and “Evade and Strike” and both of those can be used in breed form by two out of three of the Kailindorani. If you had all three werewolves who knew Kailindo, that would be 17 points of renown, allowing you to have one other character who couldn't use four cards in your combat deck.

AncientH

I want to point out that there's nothing about any of the Kailindo maneuvers that require you to be in Crinos form, so Morhei can use Kailindo with a 9MM or a Shotgun.



While we're on the topic of edge cases, Aggravated damage doesn't regenerate, although it can be healed.


I got you fam.

This is only one Combat action that deals aggravated damage.



There are other cards that have affects which cause aggravated damage like Klaives or Silver Ammo or pissing off a Mokole, but again, it's one of those cases where it's a part of the ruleset but not a big part of the ruleset. Like, something that should have been introduced in an expansion set.


I'm now imagining a Mokole deck that specializes in Rage 1 cards!

Frank

I just want to say that if you find yourself writing that a player may play a card and that it is illegal, you should kill yourself.

The way the card drawing system works, you sometimes want to get a card out of your hand more than you want to wait for a time you can legally play it. So there are various times when you can “play” a card but it's not actually legal and it goes to the discard pile (and therefore speeds up your run through your deck).



There are also cards that cannot be bluffed. Which means that you can't play them face down and pretend they are cards you could legally play. I don't even fucking know, OK?



When fighting the Pumpkin Man, you can't give up the combat as long as you still have a combat action in your hand, and Mangle can't be played illegally. Divide by zero error confirmed. Don't attack the Pumpkin King if you have Mangle in your hand, because it starts a rules argument and everyone at the table can participate.

AncientH

The combat rules have been so errata'd that trying to decipher the original intent is some Dead Seas Scrolls shit. The current version appears to be some sort of elaborate double-bluff thing where:

1. Play-card step: Each creature in combat may play a combat card face down.
- Players declare if creatures are using any weapons at this point; if nothing is said, it is assumed that creatures will use any weapons they are carrying.
- Players do not have to play combat cards for all (or any of) their creatures in combat.

2. Targeting step: Targets of combat cards are declared.
- Targets can be assigned to all combat cards, even if they need no target.

3. Reveal step: All face down combat cards are revealed.

4. Establish-bluff step: Bluffs targeting non-bluffing targets are discarded.
- Also discard all illegal cards.
- For these purposes, Combat Actions which have no (creature) target are considered to target all opponents. This also includes any Combat Action which can dodge or block, even if they have a targeted effect as well.

5. Resolution step
Fast Actions resolve. Creatures removed from combat (e.g. killed) discard any unresolved Combat Actions they were playing.
Normal Actions resolve. Creatures removed from combat (e.g. killed) discard any unresolved Combat Actions they were playing.
Slow Actions resolve.
- Cards which redirect or prevent damage are used when the damage would hit. Cards which heal damage cannot be used here.
- Where a creature takes damage at the same speed, the opponent decides which order the damage lands.
- Combat Actions which have no damage stat take effect before damage at the same speed.
- Non-frenzied creatures killed in combat are immediately removed from combat and sent to the appropriate Victory Pile or discard pile.

6. Withdrawal step: The attacker may announce a withdrawal, unless a creature is frenzied.
- Any effects which take effect (or end) "at the end of the round" happen (or end) now, before withdrawal.
- If the attacker announces a withdrawal, combat ends.
- If not, combat continues to the Between-rounds step then returns to the Play-card step.

7. Between-rounds step: Open Play. Players may play relevant "at any time" cards. This step uses Open Play timing.
- After this step, start a new combat round at step 1.

Part of the problem here isn't so much the Combat cards themselves, which are generally straightforward, but all the non-Combat cards and individual effects which can affect combat.

Then there's Frenzy.

Frank

Frenzy is utterly insane.



It turns your character into Crinos form, and then you draw as many cards as the Crinos form Rage of the character. There are only 20 cards in your combat deck. 5 of them start in your hand. You can discard and redraw 5 more at the start of combat. There are characters with a Crinos rage of 10. It is entirely possible to simply see every single card in your fucking deck in the first combat, which would very definitely give you the other Frenzy card so that you could do it again next combat.

If your deck contains a collection of dodges and strikes that will grant you victory in this match so does your hand. By the way, you have exactly 2 Frenzy cards in your deck if you're running the Frenzy strategy. It's pretty much self-sustaining once it gets going, but you have a 23.6% of not hitting either Frenzy in the first turn, in which case you probably can't play cards and you are not going to win the game.

The other option is pack fighting.



If you go for the “little guys and shotguns” model, you can have seven dudes in your pack and then play this card when moving in on an enemy and draw six cards. Your frenzies won't be as big, but you can use those as well.

The absolute key question of pack fighting is where dodges and blocks are pointed. Eventually the fans appear to have decided that players had to take turns putting down cards and committing to which character each card was pointed at. But in the original there doesn't seem to be any formal timing to decide when a player has to commit to which enemy they are attacking. Which means that if dodges and blocks are involved, there are shouting matches and staring contests. It's a major theme with this game.

AncientH

Combat ends when:

- there are no attackers or no defenders in the combat;
- the attacker withdraws from combat;
- no creature played a Combat Action during the current combat round;
- or a card that forces combat to end is played.

If one full round of combat passes where a creature has no valid targets, it is removed from the combat.

End of combat must be a breath of fresh fucking air. At least until it's the next guy's turn and they get first shot at your wounded alpha or whatever. Multiplayer games bust get "interesting" in terms of how many cards are being shot back and forth. I wish I had something clever to say about all this, but instead I'm going to talk about Lip Fillers.


Lip Fillers is a kind of two-edged sword card that must seem like a good idea for a Weenie Pack deck. She's one of two Enemy cards that will initiate a combat, as opposed to waiting patiently to be attacked. She isn't technically unique, so you could put 3 copies in your deck. It says you can only play 1 "per game," but if she dies and goes into the Victory Pile she counts as not in play, so...I don't know.



This is the other one. Honestly, there should have been more of these "pro-active" enemies. But there were just these two.

Frank

You actually get victory points for beating up other werewolves or beating up enemies in the middle of the table. Enemies in the middle of the table need to be played from hand but your opponents always bring their own doggies. Almost nothing is worth less than 4 Renown, so basically you're likely to need to win between 2 and 5 fights. Players choose their targets in order of renown, so the “big frenzy” character strategies fight first and the “big pack of skanky losers” strategies go afterward. Also the pack draw only works when attacking, so if the big frenzy player wishes to spend a turn murdering the alpha of one of the pack players, they can basically just do that. But of course, if that “alpha” is this guy:



Then it's not even worth the turn to do this, neh? Anything that isn't worth enough points to get you to victory before the game ends isn't worth attacking.

So basically, low rank alphas don't want to attack high rank alphas because the won't win. And high rank alphas don't want to attack low rank alphas because they are functionally (or literally) worth no points. Sometimes high rank alphas might want to attack other high rank alphas, and if that happens the winner gets a crap tonne of victory points and the loser loses their main combat monster – but because of the way Frenzy works probably both characters are going to die and so you'd normally only do that if it was exactly enough VP for you but not them.

What this really all comes back to is that the Enemies are extremely important. They are the thing the game is basically about. And there are two means of getting enough victory points to win in 2 fights (or even just one fight if you can also pass a Moot or do something similarly stupid).



Neither of these are particularly difficult fights. Pack defense doesn't come with card drawing, so actually fighting four or five Fomori at once isn't much harder or different than fighting two. Either of the “Draw your deck” strategies will turn these fuckers into a fine green mist. And then you have all the victory points.

AncientH

Given that you start the game with basically all the resources you should need to play any given card in your Sept or Combat deck, and you design your Sept and Combat deck, putting into play enough cards to guarantee victory should be a rather straightforward and swift process. The whole thing about a game taking only half an hour to play is perfectly fair. You can play an Enemy, build a caern, and kill an Enemy all in the same turn. It is theoretically possible to get all or most of the points you need to win in a turn or two.

Most games, in my experience, did not run that fast. You need to draw the right cards, you need to have actually built your deck to be speedy and have a clear vision of what constituted victory and how to get there. The Starter decks for RAGE did not do that. So games tended to go on longer. Much longer. It is entirely possible to play an Enemy so big that you can't actually kill it.


Also, this asshole. You can have three of this bastard in your deck. And in play. At the same time. That...can kind of drag things to a halt. Although I'm not sure how this works with Shotguns.

Frank

While we're on the subject of stupid shit and enemies,



OK, the obvious is that even in 1995 we all groaned whenever Samuel Haight got brought up, why the shitfuck would you make a card out of him? And secondly, this card is much more dangerous to fight than a fucking Pentex Refinery, so there's not much reason to do it.

But the thing that burns me up is that he has a Rage of 8. Why? He's not in Crinos Form! There's only one Rage 8 combat action in the game, and it requires that you be in Crinos form to use it. He could have a Rage of 7 and it would be almost exactly the same in almost all circumstances.

AncientH

Attacking to bind
When you attack a Spirit in the Hunting Grounds (whatever its status), if the attacker is in the Umbra, you may announce that you are attempting to bind it. If you kill the Spirit while it is in this combat, instead remove all damage from it and it becomes an Ally of your pack. While it remains an Ally of your pack, the bound Spirit is worth half its Renown (round up) in VP. The bound Spirit is worth VP as normal if it is killed by an opponent. Players only get victory points for binding Spirits if they bind them as a result of attacking them to bind.

Okay. So you either get the full VP, or you get half the VP and it becomes an Ally. There are three Spirit Enemy cards, and four Spirit Ally cards. Most of them aren't worth the time of fucking day, except maybe this guy:



If you bind this guy, he becomes an Ally, and leaves the Hunting Ground...but the effect remains. So none of the Utenka characters on the board can do shit until it dies, and it isn't going to die because you're not stupid enough to let it accept any challenges. Yeah, there are cards like Exorcism and Spirit Drain, but there are only about 7-8 spirits in the entire fucking set...and none of them are worth a damn. Do you really want to put in a counter for a fucking spirit in your Sept deck? Maybe if you're a Uktena.


I mean, theoretically you could bind this fucker too, but that's highly situational.

This is the kind of shit that was put in the game because it was in the RPG, but it shouldn't have gone in Unlimited. They should have saved this for a separate Umbra expansion when they could give it enough cards to actually be worth fucking considering.

Frank

The bottom line is that this game takes more time to set up than it does to play. It's not even difficult to imagine a scenario in which the game ends on the first turn. The first player frenzies and kills a Pentex Refinery. Then the second player attacks the first player, the First Player frenzies again and both werewolves die valiantly and the game is over. What the shit?

There's a lot of fucking moving parts. Why are Rites and Quests and Past Lives and Totems not just Gifts? Game mechanically the only important bit is that they have requirements to play and can't get stolen. But despite the number of moving parts, there's not a lot of time for any of this shit to pay off. Even shit like the Regeneration Phase: who fucking cares? The game is going to be over before enemies in the middle of the table meaningfully leverage regenerating wounds.

Also, many of the pieces of content are offensive in addition to useless.


This is your cousin Moon Moon, who is a regular wolf because your mom had sex with dogs and your cousin is an actual ordinary dog.

You're never going to play that card because it's fucking awful. But that's basically beside the point Why would you include something like that in a game?

AncientH

Which is the fundamental question. So much of the game revolves around combat, and yet combat has so many unresolved questions, and so much of the game is not geared toward making combat...better. They really were trying to kitchensink as much of the RPG into Limited/Unlimited as they could, and the result is that yes there's a lot there, but how much of it are you actually going to see in play? Or use? At all?

The thing is, the people designing this game weren't designing this game to stand on its own, they were designing it to appeal to players of the roleplaying game. They knew their market would bitch if they didn't have something in there, so they threw everything in there. Even if it was ultimately kind of pointless.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

Is... that the only mention of dogfucking? That seems relatively tame.

[Ancient History]

It's more hinted at than anything else.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

Just to clarify things: Do you spawn a horrible inbred cthulhu-wolf if you do the dogfucking, or do not do the dogfucking?

[Zaranthan]

You're never going to play that card because it's fucking awful. But that's basically beside the point Why would you include something like that in a game?

It's not even playable. It says right there: "Requires Lupus", and it's not lupus. it's never lupus.

Just to clarify things: Do you spawn a horrible inbred cthulhu-wolf if you do the dogfucking, or do not do the dogfucking?

It doesn't matter. You come from such a long line of inbred dogfuckers that you could mate with a star spawn and your horrid fish-babies would still have debilitating recessive genetic disorders that are otherwise exclusive to endangered wolves.