[Request] Anatomy of Failed Design: The Werewolf Triat

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[Request] Anatomy of Failed Design: The Werewolf Triat

Post by Prak »

Can I get a deeper dive on what's wrong with the Triat in Werewolf? I mean, I get the problems of Werewolf as a game, and the inclination towards rapey-ness of the setting and how bad that is.

But the triat as I understand it doesn't seem all that terrible. You've got Chaos, Stability and Destruction. Chaos makes shit, but can't stop making and changing shit. Stability takes the shit that Chaos makes that actually works, and, well, stabilizes it so a world can exist. Destruction reaps things because a world where things come into being but never leave or decay is bad, mmkay. Then the central tension of Werewolf comes in because Stability went to Chaos and said "STOP CHANGING SHIT" but couldn't actually make Chaos, well, stop. So Stability instead stopped Destruction, because it could at least put a damper on that. And as far as a Just So story cosmology, that works fine. Granted, there's a little bit of Holy Trinity weirdness where the Triat is part of Gaia and Gaia is the Triat, but, fuck, it's a fantasy game and Three-In-One bullshit need not impact the game.

So, did I subconsciously mindcaulk the setup and there's some particularly egregious thing I don't know about (beyond being part of Werewolf which Frank has a particular, understandable, hateon for), or do I understand the set up correctly and am just not seeing the problem?
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Post by Username17 »

If one of your axes is "Destruction" you can't actually have conflict between the other two. If you set up the conflict as between Creation and Destruction between two of the corners, there is nothing for the third corner to represent.

Having three sided arguments is fine. But when one of the argument sides is "Destruction" you are pretty much boned. All conflict and change is mediated by Destruction. That's all possible forms of conflict.

It's possible to set up a three way conflict between the Peacekeepers, the University, and the Spartans. A simple 4X strategic distinction between Builder, Perfectionist, and Conqueror. And maybe that's what they were going for. But the Wyrm is literally the spirit of destruction. Every time you fight at all, that's "of the Wyrm." You can't proactively do things for any of the other sides.

Stability is also not a thing you can fight for in a metaphysical way. I mean, you can fight against people who are trying to change shit, but the people changing shit are using elements of destruction and you fight against them with elements of destruction as well. The best thing you can do for stabliity is "nothing." And that's not particularly interactive.

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Post by Prak »

Well, I don't know how much White Wolf was ever aware of it, but I realized pretty early on that the Weaver was the one that really should be fought. I mean, I guess that sucks for reality as it is, but it's the one that went psycho and fucked shit up.

But ultimately, the in-universe answer is to basically play group counselor to the triat, and I can understand that doesn't exactly make for scintillating game play.

But, ok, I get that. It seems a bit semantical, to be honest, but I get the semantics. I like the basic idea of the Triat, the Force That Creates, the Force That Makes Creation Stable, and the Force That Tells Creation Its Time To Go So More Creation Can Fit In. And the names Wyld, Weaver and Wyrm aren't terrible. So is the problem mostly one of associations?

Fuck me, even if you just clean up associations and describe shit better, there's still the problem that... you can't meaningfully advance the Wyld and the Weaver in a way that works in Werewolf. The best you could do is load up werewolves with crazy mutation and crystallization powers and let them fight the forces of the Wyrm by mutating fomori and BSDs until they're physically innocuous and then lock them in that form, and that doesn't feel like being big dick werewolf combat machines.

Hmmm.... thanks, Frank.
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Post by Username17 »

Prak wrote: I like the basic idea of the Triat, the Force That Creates, the Force That Makes Creation Stable, and the Force That Tells Creation Its Time To Go So More Creation Can Fit In.
Those forces can't meaningfully be in opposition to each other in any kind of cosmic way. You can't pick a side. It's like having a triad of Past, Present, and Future. It's cool and mystical sounding, but those aren't teams you can join or fight against.

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Post by Ancient History »

Well...you could make an argument.

Image

But it's way high-minded. There's not a balance to strive for. You just have people and organizations that randomly pick one to dedicate themselves to and use that as a justification for whatever they do.
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Post by hyzmarca »

Prak wrote: And the names Wyld, Weaver and Wyrm aren't terrible.
Wyld and Wyrm are terrible because of their gratuitous Ys. Use real vowels, dammit.

FrankTrollman wrote:
Prak wrote: I like the basic idea of the Triat, the Force That Creates, the Force That Makes Creation Stable, and the Force That Tells Creation Its Time To Go So More Creation Can Fit In.
Those forces can't meaningfully be in opposition to each other in any kind of cosmic way. You can't pick a side. It's like having a triad of Past, Present, and Future. It's cool and mystical sounding, but those aren't teams you can join or fight against.

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Past, Preset, and future can be in opposition. And the Past winning and overwriting the Present can explain all of the nostalgic remakes we're getting.

The point is that they are monomaniacs who are mentally incapable of thinking or wanting anything outside their boxes. They need to work together in order to keep the world running, but none of them care about running the world. They just care about doing their thing and are completely unable to see any value at all in the other two things.

You can pick a side, you just shouldn't, because a world where any of them wins is a completely broken and non-functional one in which life cannot exist.

In Werewolf, you're supposed to be working for Gaia, who represents life and balance. Which means no member of the Triat winning.

So you really have three sides. Asshole who wants to destroy the world, Asshole who wants to destroy the world for a different reason, Asshole who wants to destroy the world for a different, different reason, and Asshole who wants to force the other Assholes to work together and keep the world running.
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Post by Mord »

hyzmarca wrote:Wyld and Wyrm are terrible because of their gratuitous Ys. Use real vowels, dammit.
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Post by FatR »

FrankTrollman wrote: It's like having a triad of Past, Present, and Future. It's cool and mystical sounding, but those aren't teams you can join or fight against.
Uh. Teams fighting for Past vs. Present or Present vs. Future are quite plentiful in fiction (granted, most often when the author wants to send a shitty message).

As about the Triat, Prak, you have to undertstand that none of the members are supposed to be a side a sane creature may want to ally with. The fact that they complete with each other, and try to strangle each other, and recruit for competing teams, even though their roles presume none of that, is almost certainly the exact thing broken about WtA's universe. And make no mistake, one of the core premises of the game is the universe being broken. The best you can do during the course of your normal (as in, before the Apocalypse strikes for real) activities is trying to jury-rig a semblance of balance by beating on those members of the Triat which are currently stronger.
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Post by TheFlatline »

FrankTrollman wrote:If one of your axes is "Destruction" you can't actually have conflict between the other two. If you set up the conflict as between Creation and Destruction between two of the corners, there is nothing for the third corner to represent.
I get what you're saying. The problem is that the Weaver has no real point. It's not creation- that's the wyld. I guess there's some metaphysical bullshit going on that whatever the wyld creates has no set form until the weaver sets it. But then you're splitting creation into two entities and destruction as only one.

If you're going to do that, you need to split the Wyrm into destruction and decay/recycling. Then you have basically a replication of the seasons and you split your primordeal forces into sharing traits with their neighbors and still having an opposite enemy.

1. The wyld takes up open space and uses the raw detritus of reality to create... stuff.
2. The weaver takes the new creations and gives them form and function
3. Destruction wyrm tears down the form and function
4. Decay recycles the destruction back into raw detritus and open space.

If you wanted to bring it back to the triad, I guess you could tell the myth that the weaver went insane and trapped the destruction wyrm, and then corrupted the destruction wyrm, who killed decay. So the entire cycle is fundamentally broken and throws all that shit out of whack. Instead of decay, the wyld ends up consuming the remains of the destruction wyrm and creating... perverted shit. So the cycle itself is broken and explains why shit just keeps compounding and getting worse.

I am literally free-forming this out of my ass so this is basically just a musing.
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Post by talozin »

It would sort of fit in with the general theme of Werewolf for the division to not make sense. It's not like all the other things Werewolves do have much in the way of internal consistency or common sense; why should we expect their cosmology to hold together any better than their ideas on population control or social hierarchies do. They're a bunch of wolfmen who came up with some ideas about how the world works at around the same time humans were coming up with some equally unlikely ideas, and they've been slamming their square peg into a round hole ever since.

It would even kind of be fitting that they have fucked-up ideas about the underlying structure of the universe around them, in that maybe part of the reason shit has gone so far off the rails (from their perspective) is that that they got it all wrong and haven't been able to overcome their own prejudices enough to realize that no, Zeus does not actually live atop Mount Olympus.

But this would require that the Werewolf writers had a degree of subtlety that I frankly don't credit them with. And it doesn't mesh very well with the game mechanics actually published in the line.
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Post by Longes »

It also doesn't help that the werewolves spout religious nonsense very often. For example, they claim that humans are "of the weaver" because humans have technology(?) and like peace and hierarchical structures and that vampires are "of the wyrm" because they frenzy and drink blood. Meanwhile, Garou live in a rigidly hierarchical society that hasn't changed its form since the dawn of time, hasn't invented anything, and is 100% built around war. How is anyone more "of the wyrm" or "of the weaver" than werewolves is beyond me. Even vampires had an anarch rebellion and major societal changes. The big societal change werewolves had is when they successfully went full Hitler on every other kind of shapeshifter.
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Post by Ancient History »

The thing about the Werewolf Triat is that it is the highest-level cosmology that White Wolf ever created - not the highest level that existed, because Christianity basically ran as de facto (and sometimes explicitly) real background cosmology in Vampire and its spin-offs, Wraith, and Hunter: the Reckoning.

And that's the entirety of its appeal. Each of the game lines set up primary antagonist groups - Vampire had Camarilla vs. Sabbat, Wraith had the Empire vs. Spectres, Mage had the Traditions vs. Technocracy, Changeling had Seelie vs. Unseelie...and Werewolf initially had the Tribes vs. the Wyrm in its various forms.

But while those were primary conflicts, there were all sorts of other internal and external conflicts between groups and individuals, so that major Sectarian differences were only one aspect of fighting to be Student Council President.

The only thing that makes Werewolf's Triat background stand out is that it was a higher-level cosmological reason for sectarian strife than pretty much anybody else had...and even then, it gets drowned out at the low level of "people you actually interact with." Like, yeah you could be a werewolf and run into a were-spider or were-cockroach, but just because they're technically batting for another team doesn't automatically make them ally or enemy unless you're being a complete dickwad...and "other team" could in different contexts mean a different sept, tribe, changing breed, type of supernatural critter, etc. Does it actually matter to a werewolf if your Etruscan necromancer is technically Weaver or Wyrm-affiliated? Only so far as they have two versions of "Detect Evil" to fucking deal with at any given time, and they need to know who to kill.
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Post by Voss »

But werewolves don't really need a direction on who to kill. If it's a freaky looking abomination, kill it. Unless it's a Metis living in your caern. If it's human... Well, it's probably OK to kill it.

For having a 'higher level' cosmological reason it actually mattered less, since going out and murdering whatever was actually encouraged by (and for) character progression through the wacky horseshit called the rage and 'honor' mechanics. The other games made attempts to squash casual death through horrible mechanical punishments (like humanity) or setting bullshit (like the Camarilla), whereas werewolf was constantly finding new and horrible was to one up itself with rage driven murder to cannibaliism, rage fucking and all sorts of grim derp shock rules. If they could kill player agency in the process, it seemed all the better to WW
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Post by TheFlatline »

I wonder how Werewolf would have gone down if they treated the Triad as a myth creation story.

Like... One of the scenarios in Apocalypse was literally you went into the Umbra and saw the Wyrm flying around wrecking shit. The triad was literally something that the Garou *knew* existed.

But what if it was unclear if they existed? What if a cynical or doubting mind could easily point out this is just the justification for the Garou fucking shit up? I mean, the renown system granted renown points from spirits and from the Garou nation, so it didn't come from an arbitrary good/evil morality and *never* came from the Triad. If you stripped out the "you literally see the fucking wyld, weaver, wyrm from time to time" part of it, you could roll with the Triad just being the werewolves excuse to fuck shit up.

It might make for a more interesting setting. But it might also fall into something similar with Vampire about how Cain officially wasn't the first vampire or shit like that.
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Post by Prak »

I mean, I can't speak for any other groups, but that's pretty much how it worked in the group I played Werewolf in...

No Pentex, either. To my disappointment.
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Post by Mechalich »

I always saw the trait as supposedly to be Maker, Shaper, Breaker. The Wyld makes raw stuff - it'just spewing elemental energy (and in Mage, Prime energy) all over the place. The Weaver takes the raw materials and forms it into functionally everything of importance. The Wyrm tears down constructs that are no longer viable and thereby replenishes the resources of the Wyld.

The problem is, much as Frank mentioned, that even in a situation where these forces are 'sane,' you're going to end up opposing the Wyrm - because you, regardless of what you are playing, are a shaped thing and you need to exist in a stable Weaver-governed reality where the laws of physics don't change every five minutes.

When you map the Mage factions onto the Triat - which was at least occasionally something that was necessary - the books keep trying to suggest that the Traditions are of the Wyld and the Technocracy is of the Weaver, but the reality is that both of those groups are Weaver based, the Traditions just want a little more Wyld in their lives to spice shit up (and some, like the Celestial Chorus and Order of Hermes, are just as dogmatic and Weaver devoted as the Technocracy, they'd just like the weaver to make some slightly different life choices).

The actual faction devoted to the Wyld is the Maruaders - who are literally batshit crazy. meanwhile the Wyrm faction is the Nephandi, who are also insane but its the nasty mythos kind of insanity that makes you and everyone you have ever loved suffer for eternity. These aren't viable factions and the idea that they should be obliterated completely is manifestly the correct one.

It is certainly possible to have global society reach a point where it has become too stagnant and life has become a regimented stagnant hellscape (ex. North Korea), but there's no evidence we're even close to that point. Ironically, White Wolf started pushing that viewpoint of absurd Weaver dominance shortly after the Soviet Union fell and just as the Internet - a massively dynamic invention produced from the most Weaver-ish origins possible - was becoming a serious thing. Oops.
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Post by Prak »

I mean, honestly, it might have helped if they had written Possessed and the Books of the Wyrm, Wyld, and Water before anything else, because even Possessed take about how truly insane Wyld spirits are. One anecdote is about a Gorgon (Wyld-possessed) that seriously had something like OCD as a randomly occurring part of the effects of being Possessed, in addition to probability manipulation.

It might be cute to empty a claw machine of every single item one by one, but when you can't not do it, the "cutest" actions are still part of a horrific affliction.
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Post by Voss »

TheFlatline wrote:I wonder how Werewolf would have gone down if they treated the Triad as a myth creation story.

Like... One of the scenarios in Apocalypse was literally you went into the Umbra and saw the Wyrm flying around wrecking shit. The triad was literally something that the Garou *knew* existed.

But what if it was unclear if they existed? What if a cynical or doubting mind could easily point out this is just the justification for the Garou fucking shit up? I mean, the renown system granted renown points from spirits and from the Garou nation, so it didn't come from an arbitrary good/evil morality and *never* came from the Triad. If you stripped out the "you literally see the fucking wyld, weaver, wyrm from time to time" part of it, you could roll with the Triad just being the werewolves excuse to fuck shit up.

It might make for a more interesting setting. But it might also fall into something similar with Vampire about how Cain officially wasn't the first vampire or shit like that.
Well, vampire is objectively much better without Cain and the Christian God tea bagging the whole concept of vampires. it doesn't have any impact on who gets bragging rights in Dallas or whatever.

But... Werewolf really can't strip that shit out. Werewolves themselves are part spirit and part of that creation myth shit (the clawed pointy bits of natural justice, supposedly), and can step into the spirit world to have tea with the moon with enough effort. You'd have to leave out half the game.

Besides, we know how this turns out anyway. New world of darkness pretty much does exactly that. The cainless version of vampire generations and origins is much better even if they fuck up the politics with other crap, but the new version of werewolves are just directionless murderers who are also inexplicably prey for the other angry werewolves. There isn't anything to do in new werewolf, nor any reason to do it. As bullshit as the triat is, it at least gives a theme and a direction to werewolf stories.
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Post by TheFlatline »

Longes wrote:vampires are "of the wyrm" because they frenzy and drink blood.
Let's not forget that vampires are "of the wyrm" because werewolves have a spell "gift" called Detect Evil "sense wyrm" and it bings around vampires.

Now... You *could* argue that you've just called it "sense wyrm" because the spirits that teach that gift have ulterior motives and you don't know for *sure* that it actually detects wyrm taint, but yeah, that requires a level of subtlety that WW never had.
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Post by TheFlatline »

Voss wrote:
TheFlatline wrote:I wonder how Werewolf would have gone down if they treated the Triad as a myth creation story.

Like... One of the scenarios in Apocalypse was literally you went into the Umbra and saw the Wyrm flying around wrecking shit. The triad was literally something that the Garou *knew* existed.

But what if it was unclear if they existed? What if a cynical or doubting mind could easily point out this is just the justification for the Garou fucking shit up? I mean, the renown system granted renown points from spirits and from the Garou nation, so it didn't come from an arbitrary good/evil morality and *never* came from the Triad. If you stripped out the "you literally see the fucking wyld, weaver, wyrm from time to time" part of it, you could roll with the Triad just being the werewolves excuse to fuck shit up.

It might make for a more interesting setting. But it might also fall into something similar with Vampire about how Cain officially wasn't the first vampire or shit like that.
Well, vampire is objectively much better without Cain and the Christian God tea bagging the whole concept of vampires. it doesn't have any impact on who gets bragging rights in Dallas or whatever.

But... Werewolf really can't strip that shit out. Werewolves themselves are part spirit and part of that creation myth shit (the clawed pointy bits of natural justice, supposedly), and can step into the spirit world to have tea with the moon with enough effort. You'd have to leave out half the game.

Besides, we know how this turns out anyway. New world of darkness pretty much does exactly that. The cainless version of vampire generations and origins is much better even if they fuck up the politics with other crap, but the new version of werewolves are just directionless murderers who are also inexplicably prey for the other angry werewolves. There isn't anything to do in new werewolf, nor any reason to do it. As bullshit as the triat is, it at least gives a theme and a direction to werewolf stories.
I wasn't talking about stripping the animist spirit world out. I agree that stripping out the metaphysics and the spirit world is a terribad idea.

But the triad aren't spirits. They're more primal than that. And with some restructuring of the setting, you can call into question if they actually exist or not. It could just be the myth cycle the werewolves/shapeshifters/spirits use to justify the pogrom against so-called "wyrm-tainted" creatures.

We already have something similar to that with the War of Rage and the pogrom on other shapeshifters. There's a story that is very possibly/probably bullshit about why the Garou killed the living jeebus out of the other shapeshifters. So Garou coming up with convenient propaganda to make their deeds moral and justified is already totally in canon.
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Post by Voss »

Aren't they? I don't remember anything from werewolf that suggested they were anything but older, bigger spirits.

But anyway, if you aren't actually editing some of the spirit nonsense, I'm now at a loss to what your suggestion does. Yes, as is, you could go sightsee the Worm or the Wild, but that fucks people up so they don't.

But the Triad existing or not existing doesn't change the absolute fact that werewolves are murderous assholes. That the Wild might not personally sanctify their genocidal urges doesn't change anything. Really, making the existence of God dubious doesn't make religious fanatics less murderous
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Post by Prak »

So, as it stands in Werewolf, Gaia and the Triat are big, ancient spirits, specifically Celestines. The hierarchy is basically Gaia at the top, then the Triat, and then other celestines like Helios and Luna (The preponderance of Latin/Greek names in animistic, psuedo-First Nations, supposedly pre-human Werewolf bugs me so fucking much...).

You could probably cobble together a better metaphysical setup by looking at Werewolf's Triat and Mage's Metaphysic Trinity and taking bits and pieces from each. But, leaving the existence of Gaia and the Trinity up in the air probably does make for a better setting, if for no other reason than because you can swab some moral-greyness on Garou combat machines who are technically promoting the Wyrm's portfolio by smashing shit and wrecking face.
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Post by Whipstitch »

Voss wrote:But the Triad existing or not existing doesn't change the absolute fact that werewolves are murderous assholes.
At least they wouldn't necessarily be murderous, cultish assholes, and I'm only being a tiny bit facetious when I say that. The fact that werewolves buy into all that weird shit is just a huge ask when it comes to selling people on the game. Frankly, it'd be easier to grok the concept of being magically cursed with poor impulse control for no good reason at all than it is to put yourself into the mindset of a rage machine/eco-terrorist who actually feels like much of their weird cultural bullshit is largely justifiable.
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Post by Voss »

Prak wrote:So, as it stands in Werewolf, Gaia and the Triat are big, ancient spirits, specifically Celestines. The hierarchy is basically Gaia at the top, then the Triat, and then other celestines like Helios and Luna (The preponderance of Latin/Greek names in animistic, psuedo-First Nations, supposedly pre-human Werewolf bugs me so fucking much...).
well, it probably should bug you. But it shouldn't surprise you, given the preponderance of 'white people are correct about everything, especially metaphysics and cosmology' that infests WW writing,
You could probably cobble together a better metaphysical setup by looking at Werewolf's Triat and Mage's Metaphysic Trinity and taking bits and pieces from each. But, leaving the existence of Gaia and the Trinity up in the air probably does make for a better setting, if for no other reason than because you can swab some moral-greyness on Garou combat machines who are technically promoting the Wyrm's portfolio by smashing shit and wrecking face.
. Hmm. Moral-grey is an odd position to wish for. Part of the point is inhuman monsters that fucking eat people. It'd be like wanting the teetotaling vampires of discworld in VtM. Half the point is being the monster, and werewolf isn't sadly with the humanity trait to fuck everything up.
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Post by Prak »

Sorry, I meant in-character moral greyness. If you can actually go see the Wyrm thrashing around, it's hard to argue smashing shit and wrecking face doesn't bolster it, but if no one's really sure the triat exists, it's a little more gray whether killing Wyrm-cultists hinders or helps the Wyrm.
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You should gain sanity for finding out that the problems of a region are because there are fucking monsters there.
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