OSSR: RAGE (Unlimited)

[Ancient History]

If you're both werewolves, you spawn a Metis. Inbreeding can happen no matter whether a dog is involved or not. Like, Moon Moon the wolf is this character's literal cousin:



And...she could bang him. Because he's kinfolk, but not a werewolf. So they would be more likely to have a werewolf baby, but it wouldn't be a Metis.

[Username17]

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

It's an ally, so the requirements are that you have to have one of your characters meet the requirement when you play the card.

Every character is Lupus, Homid, or Metis at the beginning of the game, so if you had it in your deck you'd be able to play it unless all your Lupus werewolves had been killed or flipped to Crinos form. You'd just never bother because even if you wanted allies there are much much better allies available.

-Username17

[Neeeek]

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

Neither. The horrible inbred cthulhu-wolf things are when werewolves fuck other werewolves.

[angelfromanotherpin]

I now want to make a card game with a focus on shapeshifting and traveling to the spirit world, because those are cool concepts and this game shouldn't be their representative.

[Thaluikhain]

If you're both werewolves, you spawn a Metis. Inbreeding can happen no matter whether a dog is involved or not. Like, Moon Moon the wolf is this character's literal cousin:



And...she could bang him. Because he's kinfolk, but not a werewolf. So they would be more likely to have a werewolf baby, but it wouldn't be a Metis.

So totally normal humans and totally normal dogs/wolves can create werewolf children, or do they have to be special or connected in some way?

I now want to make a card game with a focus on shapeshifting and traveling to the spirit world, because those are cool concepts and this game shouldn't be their representative.

I know, right, there's some decent looking ideas in there. Though ideas are easy, getting them to work is the hard part, of course.

[Grek]

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

My understanding of the issue is that horrible inbred cthulhu-wolf occurs when two werewolves fuck, regardless of form. In order to produce non-mutant offspring, a werewolf needs to either fuck a human or a wolf. Fucking a human results in human babies who have a small chance to eventually transform into werewolves around the age of 13, while fucking a dog/wolf results in puppies who have a chance to eventually transform into werewolves around the age of 2. Given that werewolves are somehow a dying species in White Wolf, the Werewolf Elders are going to strongly pressure you to take the dog fucking option, on the basis that it produces a whole litter of potential baby werewolves in two years instead of a single potential werewolf after a decade.

[Ancient History]

Alright people, you're conflating two different things here.

When two werewolves have offspring, the result is a Metis. All Metis are born in Crinos form and have some mutation. But they're not necessarily inbred; the parents don't have to be related, they just need to be werewolves.

Werewolf tribes with high degrees of blood purity tend to be inbred like the goddamn Hapsburgs. The Silver Fangs, the most noble of all the tribes, have been fucking their cousins for so many years that their family tree looks like an M. C. Escher painting.

But as long as it's a werewolf fucking a kinfolk, or (more rarely) two kinfolk fucking, the result is just going to be an inbred werewolf or kinfolk, not a Metis.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

Why the fucking fuck did they make werewolf genetics this complicated to begin with?

[Username17]

So totally normal humans and totally normal dogs/wolves can create werewolf children, or do they have to be special or connected in some way?

All werewolves have a human form and a dog form. When (not if) they fuck a normal dog while in their dog form, they create a dog "kinfolk" or (more rarely) a new werewolf puppy whose breed is "Lupus." The chance of making a werewolf puppy is higher if the dog that got fucked was a kinfolk dog. Every single character card in this game whose breed is "Lupus" (of which there are 25) is the result of another werewolf fucking a dog.

Then there are two different kinds of inbreeding deformity. First of all, any time a werewolf breaks the law of the garou to have sex with another werewolf rather than the approved methods of raping humans or dogs, you get a Metis. Metis are werewolves who have a deformity curse because of the punishment curse for having sex with peers rather than coercive sex with cousins like you're supposed to. The other kind of inbreeding is that your dog forms are literally bred like dogs and that very much includes fucking your literal cousins rather than the metaphorical cousins that all the approved mates are. And if you do too much of that, you can have accumulated inbreeding problems from being a "pure breed."

There are a bunch of layers to the cousin fucking and the dog fucking. There is cousin fucking and dog fucking that are supposed to be "good" and cousin fucking and dog fucking that are supposed to be "bad." And the books spend quite a bit of ink on the fine distinctions.

So if your character is the child of a dogfucker, you are born in a litter of puppies. And if you later have sex with your sister, that's good if she can't talk and bad if she can. Because if she can't talk, your sister is a literal actual dog who happens to be a kinfolk and your children will be "pure bred." But if your sister can talk, it's because she is also a werewolf and then your incest children would be Metis (but still pure bred).

The layers of dog fucking and incest in this game are overlapping and very complicated. And I can understand how it got that way, but it's still wild to me that no one with editorial control over this project ever stepped in to say "we can't have multiple overlapping labels of incest, rape, and bestiality as core character origin determinants for all characters because that's fucking insane."

-Username17

[Thaluikhain]

Ah, ok, that clears that up, thanks.

Well, apart from why no-one rethought the whole thing, yeah.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

It's almost as if someone thought "dog pedigrees are complicated and interesting, what if we put that in our werewolf game?" and didn't realize the implications of what they were doing, even as they were publishing it.

But humans can be kinfolk too, right? Kinfolk happen as offspring of a werewolf fucking a dog, or does the werewolf's genitalia imbue the dog with a couple INT points? I'm pretty sure it's the former, but this franchise is fucking weird enough for it to plausibly be the latter.
I'm sorry, I find this topic way more interesting than the weird card game itself. It's like a train wreck.

[Whipstitch]

The layers of dog fucking and incest in this game are overlapping and very complicated. And I can understand how it got that way, but it's still wild to me that no one with editorial control over this project ever stepped in to say "we can't have multiple overlapping labels of incest, rape, and bestiality as core character origin determinants for all characters because that's fucking insane."

One of the many things that compounded the issue in W:TA is that honor, negotiating with spirits and generally behaving like a "proper" werewolf interacted with rank and the character advancement rules. They really wanted you dwelling on the fact that your character is part of a super weird cult with rules about blood purity. Relating to someone who buys into werewolf subculture is a big fucking ask but the game really does seem to assume that post-indoctrination player characters are the norm and that's why I could never give a fuck about these assholes. I mean, shit, maybe Vampire was if anything too aimless, but I can at least understand why you'd sign on for immortality and a cut of the Ventrue slush fund. Sure, you're an evil fucker, but at least you get the keys to the company car.

[Username17]

It's almost as if someone thought "dog pedigrees are complicated and interesting, what if we put that in our werewolf game?" and didn't realize the implications of what they were doing, even as they were publishing it.

But humans can be kinfolk too, right? Kinfolk happen as offspring of a werewolf fucking a dog, or does the werewolf's genitalia imbue the dog with a couple INT points? I'm pretty sure it's the former, but this franchise is fucking weird enough for it to plausibly be the latter.
I'm sorry, I find this topic way more interesting than the weird card game itself. It's like a train wreck.

So werewolves have several means in this game of raping humans. And when they do that, they make human kinfolk or werewolves who are "Homids" born to a base breed form of "normal human."

So the most obvious is that if you transform into "crinos" you become a giant monster that also causes traumatic memory loss to humans you have sex with, allowing you to physically overpower people and rape them. Also to get away with it, because the traumatic memory loss keeps them from reporting it to the police. I... am not making that part up. The second is that every werewolf gets an intermediate form called the "Glabro" that is between the warform Crinos and the normal human form. It's big, hairy, and has hard nails, but is kinda sorta passable as a human. It's conceptually similar to the Wolfman from like Lon Cheney's Wolfman or Teen Wolf (either movie or show). While in this form you get an "aggressive animal magnetism" that allows you to be "sexually demanding and dominant" over normal humans. Uh... I'm not making that part up either.

So every single Werewolf in this setting comes equipped with a weird piece of stroke fiction in which they can turn into a "Chad" from creepy Incel writings and demand and receive sexual favors from normal humans that they force into submission with their strong chins and enhanced upper arm strength.

It's... really gross. This setting definitely didn't know when it was writing erotic fanfiction and when it was writing just the regular kind. But also, the eroticism in Werewolf: the Apocalypse is all rape, bestiality, and incest. Sometimes two of those or even all three.

-Username17

[Ancient History]

OSSR: TCG: RAGE

Making Sense of it All.

AncientH

Most of the weirdness in this game comes directly out of trying to encapsulate, in a single set, damn near everything that was in Werewolf: the Apocalypse. Even the other changing breeds!





But this was all amateur-hour wolfshit (or bear shit, rat shit, mokole shit, whatever). The game wasn't focused on actual gameplay or strategies, it was focused on trying to translate something of the roleplaying experience into the new medium of collectible card games. So in that sense, it's hard to see it as really a success. As a game, it has severe flaws, weird and kind of pointless mechanics that only a handful of cards interact with, and very few real paths to victory. As an RPG product...well, trying to translate the Werewolf experience to RAGE loses most of what little nuance there was. You kill a bunch of monsters and win. Whoo.

Frank

Rage folded in 1996 and when it was rebooted by Five Rings in 1998 it folded again even faster. The two production runs are not compatible. Like, at all. Basically because while there are some interesting ideas in Rage, it is also a fucking mess that isn't remotely salvageable without massively changing very integral parts of it. The Five Rings people came in with rolled up sleeves and a commitment to minimal changes and backward compatibility, and they still ended up with something that might as well have been written in Sumerian.

One of the key issues of course is that most of the changes from the Five Rings era are weird personal hangups of individual ascended fanbois rather than anything that made objective sense. I get the furious nerfing of Frenzy (because as noted, in the original rules frenzy is totally bonkers), but why have Gnosis be expended as Gnosis Points instead of being a prerequisite? Presumably someone was upset about some combination of high gnosis gifts or the total worthlessness of some low gnosis gift or both – but changing Gnosis from an individual salary cap to a collective salary cap does a lot more than address some fanboi's pet peeves, it utterly transforms what every Gnosis number on every gift and character means. Similarly, they tried to enforce variety in combat decks by putting symbols on the combat cards and making you have certain numbers of each – now leaving aside questions of whether that worked (narrator voice: it did not work), the simple and obvious fact is that none of the combat cards from the first set have those symbols and thus none of them can be used. Full fucking stop.

And then some of the things the Five Rings guys got a bug up their ass about just make no sense to me. Regeneration is slower. Why? It takes two fucking turns, the game is fucking over in two turns, why is this a thing?

AncientH

It's hard to say what the legacy of RAGE was. I mean, obviously it still has a fanbase, which is more than can be said for games like HIGHLANDER: THE CARD GAME or SIM CITY: THE CARD GAME; nobody fucking wants to put out new cards for HERESY or HYBORIAN GATES. But I am kind of tied as to what the appeal is, especially now that the game that inspired it - Werewolf: the Apocalypse - is scheduled for a 5th edition in 2021.

No, really.

Frank

Free for all card playing is one of those things that sounds like a good idea when you are ten. That's it. That's the statement.

The number of times in this game where you'd really like to declare your action before an opponent declares theirs or where you'd both like to declare an action and you'd rather declare your action after your opponent declares theirs is just way too high in this game. I'm not saying there aren't places you could improve the timing on Magic (I believe there is basically no reason for there to be a place for people to cast spells between first strike damage and regular damage, for example), but the basic idea that there should be a formal priority of play in which the speed with which you can slap a card on the table or the amount of time you can stare at your opponent without playing a card is never a thing that makes mechanical difference is just fucking obvious. There just isn't an argument that slow play or intrusive shouting should ever give a mechanical advantage in a fucking card game.

It doesn't really matter what the formal card playing priority is. It could go around the table to the left or be assigned by player age. I legit don't give two shits. It just has to be something unambiguous so that we don't ever have to resort to shouting matches and staring contests.

AncientH

What this game needed was solid basics which could then be built up and expanded upon in later sets. Like fucking Settlers of Catan. You don't start off with the goddamn fish in Settlers. You trade wood for sheep and earn your way to the goddamn fish. If you strip this game down to its basics, you could have maybe four tribes, a dozen Garou per tribe, and work out how each tribe had at least two possible viable routes to victory. You don't need Rites, Quests, Caerns, or the Umbra - you can add all that shit in later, if it's important.

But they didn't do that.

Frank

The thing where other players play cards for the monsters you hunt is just fundamentally incompatible with being a collectible card game. At least, as long as the monster you are fighting comes from your deck and the combat cards played for the monster comes from their deck. It would be like if your opponent in Magic the Gathering had cards they needed to tap your lands to cast and if they weren't the right colors they could get rekt.

Nowhere is this incongruity more obvious than the fucking Elder Vampire. It can use Shadowlords gifts. It has a really high Rage and Gnosis. If you go into combat with the thing and your opponent is happening to be sitting on two copies of True Fear and two copies of Massive Wound, you lose. It doesn't matter if you've frenzied up your whole fucking combat deck and have a gajillion attacks and defenses, you take 10 damage before you are allowed to play a combat maneuver. And that's the whole opera from overture to finale. But generally that isn't going to happen. There's 13 tribes and only one of the Shadowlords gifts is a thing you particularly give a shit if the Elder Vampire busts it out. Your opponents probably don't have Shadowlords in their deck, and if they do they still probably don't have True Fear. One of the Shadowlords can't even fucking use that card due to gnosis requirements.

If they wanted to do something like this, probably you should have to put up 20 Renown worth of enemies for your opponents to attack. If you really wanted to get sassy, you could have combat cards be double sided where they did one thing for team hero and another thing for team villain. You could even have it be such that some of the cards were “good” on one side and kind of shit on the other so there could be tradeoffs withholding cards that were good for monster hunting or good for team monster.

Regardless, the key revelation is that you should never be making a deck out of trading cards that you are then expected to play cards out of meeting the prerequisites on cards that are factually in another deck designed by another person who is in direct competition with you. The incentives are just all fucking backwards here.

AncientH

The two-deck (Combat & Sept) concept by itself isn't stupid. A little logistically weird, sure, but I think there's something to be said for having a distinct split in resources. That being said, there is less of a strict division between the two decks than there should be. Way too many Sept cards either initiate or effect combat; for fuck's sake, some of them deal damage - more damage than Combat Action cards! If you're going to have a division like this, it needs to be fundamental.

Frank

Attempting to do 13 tribes in the first set was a terrible idea. Just in general the card set tried to spread itself way too thin. But the fact that it tries to have thirteen fucking suits is pretty emblematic of how dumb this all is. Everything that shows up is way too much of a cameo. They need room to breathe. If you're going to have quests, you should have enough of them to have meaningful choices. And that extends to every fucking part of this Don't include the Umbra if you aren't going to include enough Umbra for it to matter.

But basically there should be few enough tribes in the first set that you could have an example character at each Renown level. Which means the absolute maximum that should have been in the first set is 7. That is, by the way, coincidentally the number of clans in the first set of Jyhad/V:tES. That's not an accident. It's about the limit of a plausible card set of this type. There's nothing wrong with having less suits, but you sure as fuck can't have more. L5R hit the shelves with 6 factions, Magic the Gathering with 5. All of those are reasonable. And with further expansions you could either add factions (L5R, VtES, Shadowfist), or you could keep the number of teams static (M:tG, Netrunner). Either is defensible as a lifestyle.

But basically there shouldn't have been both the Get of Fenris and the Red Talons and the Shadowlords – because all those dumb assholes are basically the same thing. That goes for the original source material as well, of course, but at the very least when making a card game there should be a hard think about how many card slots were needed to do justice to anything. And what they actually delivered was too scattershot and bullshit to do anything.

AncientH

Then there's the dog sex...look, Werewolf: the Apocalypse is what it is. I wish it were different. It would be a lot easier on everyone if it was just humans that turned into wolves and there was no dogfucking at all. That is the entire werewolf concept, when you boil it down: a man that turns into a monster, not a wolf that figures out it can fucking talk and pump gas.

And the thing is, a lot of shit in this game just makes no sense unless you're already elbow deep in the asshole of Werewolf lore. The Wyrm barely gets an explanation in the rules, the cards sure as shit don't help. Yes, the roleplayers know what Pentex is and what it means when you play a Pentex enemy on the board, but the casual players that picked up this game? Did they have any fucking clue what was going on? Do the cards actually communicate the game setting and plot well?

Fuck no.

Frank

Several times in this review I have found myself with mouth agape at some card or another that creates a hidden variable and just asks you to remember it for the rest of the game. That's not remotely acceptable. But it's also not necessary. In Magic you turn cards sideways to track used resources. In Vampiee you have little beads that you lose and spend to track damage and payment. Having a game where you count everything by leaving actual cards behind with numbers on them is fine. That's how Dominion works, and it's fine. But if that's your plan, you have to stick to that plan.

You could have things where every lasting effect was a card and that card stayed attached to whatever it was affecting until the effect was over. It just requires discipline. If a Block reduces damage, it needs to stay attached to the damage card it is modifying. And so on. You just can't have this “twice in the game...” shit. That's not OK.

And yeah, if you don't want to maintain card attachment discipline, it would be fine to have counters for health and victory points. Really, honestly, that would be fine. But if you say “This game doesn't use counters” then you need to stick that landing.

AncientH

There's no real distinction between card mechanics and flavor text. That sounds weird, because that is the simplest, most basic fucking thing to do. Magic figured that shit out years before RAGE hit the market, and they still managed to fuck that up. I can't even.

Frank

Why do we have victory piles if the game ends when we hit a specific number of victory points? I think the game would work a lot better if there was a fixed number of turns and the highest victory point total was the winner. As is, it's actually possible for all the packs to get wiped out without anyone hitting the magic number 20. There doesn't need to be a magic number at all! There could just be five full turns and whoever has the biggest victory pile at the end wins.

If you really wanted to go crazy, you could have night events like moon phases and police crackdowns and shit and flip one of them over each turn. You could even have a thing where the players brought their own “2nd night” and “3rd night” event cards and then you randomly determined whose got used for each turn.

AncientH

Or just use a 20-sided die to keep track of things.

The turn-counting down thing would actually work really well given the basic logistics of the game. Because the logistics are that you start with pretty much everything you have, and it's all fucking downhill from there. You may gain new allies and gear and gifts, but your pack is going to dwindle and the Hunting Grounds are going to fill up with enemies and oh shit the Apocalypse is coming. Having a turn/time limit would add pathos and drama to a game that can easily boil down to a bunch of furry kids voting and talking about dogpiling and people nearby are wondering if that's a sex thing.

Frank

Perhaps the most fundamental issue with Rage is that it is associated with Werewolf: the Apocalypse, which is an IP that is offensive and bad. Stripping the real White Wolf elements of this game out of this game would improve it in pretty much all cases. This would be a better game if it was generic werewolves fighting against generic demons.

But even if you do keep it “W:tA flavored” for marketing reasons, stick to the generic “werewolves are cool” part. Mentioning that the veterinarian is specifically related to your character but that your character has to have had dogs for parents is just... ew. That shit is gross, and it doesn't add anything. The vet could just be an actual normal veterinarian. They don't need to be a blood relative, and they especially don't need to be a blood relative to an actual fucking dog. Like, what the actual fuck? Why is that a thing I need to say?

AncientH

It's always hard to wrap these things up, because we're just talking about a card game, not a book. There is no index and character sheets and back cover to tell us it's over. We just wind up having less and less to say about what's left.



If there's a lesson to be learned in RAGE, beyond "don't do that," I think it's that love will carry a game a long way. A longer fucking way than mere sanity and rationality will. Fans have carried this game like fucking Samwise Gamgee hauling Frodo's dead fucking weight up the slopes of Mount Doom. But in the end, like the One Ring itself, this shit needs to burn. It may be precious to you, but it cannot be saved or redeemed.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

I can't believe this story you're telling me, it's macabre. Is all of this contained within the RPG and only references leak out, like in this game? Or does it get worse?

EDIT: Oh god, I didn't know there was a video game coming out. I wonder how much they're going to water this shit down?

[Ancient History]

Well, Frank and I talked about how this came to a head in Exalted: The Lunars when they tried to double down on defending raping humans and animals.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

But that's a different WW product, surely they have a different reason for including dogfucking and rape? Or was the reason "the writers were horny and edgy"?

[Ancient History]

WW writers are always horny and edgy. But Lunars were turning that up to 11 and then the dial broke off.

[Username17]

But that's a different WW product, surely they have a different reason for including dogfucking and rape? Or was the reason "the writers were horny and edgy"?

One of the things a lot of the White Wolf authors were building up to was a big time crossover where Exalted was the past of the World of Darkness and I think Alternity or some fucking thing was going to be the future. Like Shadowrun and Earthdawn in the mid-nineties. So The Lunars includes a bunch of rape and bestiality because of Werewolf: the Apocalypse. That's a setting tie-in easter egg.

The Lunars in Exalted are the progenitors of the Changing Breeds in Werewolf: the Apocalypse. At least, in the minds of the more "big picture, big connections" authors. A lot of the one-and-done freelancers didn't give a fuck about cross-line connections, which is why they often die of neglect rather than getting any payoff.

-Username17

[Whipstitch]

EDIT: Oh god, I didn't know there was a video game coming out. I wonder how much they're going to water this shit down?

The good news is if they concentrate on fighting the villains there is a path forward and that path is Furry Soldier Sailor Moon:

Remember Sailor Moon SuperS, where the Dark Carnival would show up each episode to try to find the chick who had the unicorn spirit in her dreams? And every episode they would grab some random object and fill it with black magic so that it grew into a carnival themed lady demon who went on a rampage (like Puko the Balloon Girl)? And then they would do some kung fu fighting and use some magic powers, and then Chibi Usa would reach into the mirror to call upon her Unicorn Pegasus Totem Spirit who would save the day?

Yeah. It's basically just like that. Only instead of the Dark Carnival, your villainous dudes are from the Pentex Corporation who are bad guys who want to pollute the Earth by puting a bunch of refrigerators in the antarctic to destroy the Ozone Layer or something. Then they use the dark power that they gain from gratuitous villainy (either by harvesting energy from people by encouraging them to engage in cheap materialism, or by Poisoning the Water Supply with toxic mind control chemicals) to grab the spirit of some random object, like a slot machine or a balloon. And then everyone pulls out Spirit Mirrors, and calls upon their Totem Animal, in order to use their Super Attacks.

I mean, it won't happen, but we can dream.

[Thaluikhain]

So the most obvious is that if you transform into "crinos" you become a giant monster that also causes traumatic memory loss to humans you have sex with, allowing you to physically overpower people and rape them. Also to get away with it, because the traumatic memory loss keeps them from reporting it to the police. I... am not making that part up. The second is that every werewolf gets an intermediate form called the "Glabro" that is between the warform Crinos and the normal human form. It's big, hairy, and has hard nails, but is kinda sorta passable as a human. It's conceptually similar to the Wolfman from like Lon Cheney's Wolfman or Teen Wolf (either movie or show). While in this form you get an "aggressive animal magnetism" that allows you to be "sexually demanding and dominant" over normal humans. Uh... I'm not making that part up either.

Er...so you get werewolf kids who don't know any other werewolves? How did they become part of the society and avoid breaking the Masquerade through ignorance and stuff?

[Username17]

So the most obvious is that if you transform into "crinos" you become a giant monster that also causes traumatic memory loss to humans you have sex with, allowing you to physically overpower people and rape them. Also to get away with it, because the traumatic memory loss keeps them from reporting it to the police. I... am not making that part up. The second is that every werewolf gets an intermediate form called the "Glabro" that is between the warform Crinos and the normal human form. It's big, hairy, and has hard nails, but is kinda sorta passable as a human. It's conceptually similar to the Wolfman from like Lon Cheney's Wolfman or Teen Wolf (either movie or show). While in this form you get an "aggressive animal magnetism" that allows you to be "sexually demanding and dominant" over normal humans. Uh... I'm not making that part up either.

Er...so you get werewolf kids who don't know any other werewolves? How did they become part of the society and avoid breaking the Masquerade through ignorance and stuff?

The general assumption was that a new werewolf didn't know any other werewolves, and grew up as a normal human or dog and then sometime during puberty they transformed for the first time and wrecked shit up and felt bad about it. Then sometime after that, other werewolves who are your 2nd or 3rd cousins show up and indoctrinate you into a "tribe" and then shortly after that your tribe farms you out into a "pack" of similarly aged werewolves from other tribes and tells you to go kill demons or die trying.

It's all very weird. If you grew up as a middle class white kid in Atlanta, why would you decide that you were culturally a Wndigo when you find out that you are related to Native American dog fuckers on your absent rapist father's side? Like, why would you abandon the family that actually raised you and also abandon the human culture you grew up with until the age of 15? What does Werewolf culture offer that's so compelling that everyone who became a werewolf would enthusiastically embrace it?

Werewolf: the Apocalypse never sold that well. There's a bit of "You're a wizard Harry" to get you to accept being a Werewolf. And there's a bit of "They Live" thing going on with Pentex where finding out about the Wyrm War may cause you to accept becoming an eco terrorist. But... the tribes also have their own culture and taboos and weird hangups about blood purity and shit, and there's just honestly no fucking reason given for the player characters to go along with any of that shit. As Whipstitch pointed out:

They really wanted you dwelling on the fact that your character is part of a super weird cult with rules about blood purity. Relating to someone who buys into werewolf subculture is a big fucking ask but the game really does seem to assume that post-indoctrination player characters are the norm and that's why I could never give a fuck about these assholes. I mean, shit, maybe Vampire was if anything too aimless, but I can at least understand why you'd sign on for immortality and a cut of the Ventrue slush fund. Sure, you're an evil fucker, but at least you get the keys to the company car.

Werewolf the Apocalypse had a huge buy-in problem. And when they made Werewolf the Forsaken, the buy-in problem was even worse.

The whole setup is that you transform into a Werewolf for the first time... and scene! Seriously, whether your game has Werewolves that transform after they survive a Werewolf Attack (like Teenwolf the series) or transform after their family genes activate for the first time (like Teenwolf the movie), the character is still a middle class white kid from Atlanta who is now going on an urban fantasy adventure where they discover new powers and new perils. White Wolf definitely lost sight of that fact and got way too deep into their own lore.

-Username17

[hyzmarca]

So if your character is the child of a dogfucker, you are born in a litter of puppies. And if you later have sex with your sister, that's good if she can't talk and bad if she can. Because if she can't talk, your sister is a literal actual dog who happens to be a kinfolk and your children will be "pure bred." But if your sister can talk, it's because she is also a werewolf and then your incest children would be Metis (but still pure bred).

You know, I actually assumed that Werewolf is an animated Disney movie and all dogs possessed human level intelligence and could talk. I mean, the metaplot is basically an edgier version of Ferngully: The Last Rainforest, so having talking Disney animals would fit right in. It would also most the dog sex from actual bestiality to the more comfortable and reasonable realm of non-anthro Furry. Having been enlightened, I have to say that my headcanon is better, because obviously.

[Username17]

A really significant number of people who read Werewolf the Apocalypse come away with the idea that the setting is about magical talking animals. Because otherwise the book is talking about raping normal dogs for page after page and that would be bad. The mind simply rebels, and fills it in with mind caulk.

It's just one of those really puzzling things. Like the existence of Childling Satyrs in Changeling the Dreaming. I get how after spinning the wheel of procedural content generation you could get there, but I just don't understand how editorial staff didn't say "No seriously, we can't have characters defined by being physically and mentally between the ages of 3 and 13 who specialize in sex magic."

-Username17

[Ancient History]

Werewolf is the X-Men fantasy mixed with the closeted homosexual fantasy. You grow up and you realize you're different from everybody else, and then people take you away to teach you how to control your power and be who you were born to be.

Except, y'know, with all the bad-touch stuff in there.