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chuckroWhile the history of the World of Darkness is always a conflicted and mutable thing, I appreciate books that attempt to nail it down in a coherent (and at least self-consistent) fashion. This is one such book, detailing the history of the werewolves and other changing breeds from the prehistoric times through the modern era; and providing plot hooks for major events and points in time.
There are two major campaign suggestions presented by the book: One is a time travel story in which a minion of the Wyrm has discovered a way to break history at critical points, and the party must restore the proper timeline before Gaia is torn apart. The other takes advantage of the echoes of history that exist in the Umbra as collective memory, and the characters must stop the Wyrm’s attempts at corrupting them before all of the changing breeds fall into inescapable despair.
A lot of the focus is on flashpoints of the War of Rage, and the extinctions of various other tribes of shapeshifters at the hands of the Garou, including the Apis (wereauroches, the matchmakers of Gaia), the Camazotz (werebats, Gaia’s spies), the Grondr (wereboars, who rooted out corruption) and the Bunyip (weremarsupials, who guarded the flow of time). Fun historical events that figure into this include the competition between Cro-Magnons and Neanderthals, the flooding of the English Channel, and the European colonization of the Americas and Australia. As a general rule, virtually all of the problems come down to werewolves being self-righteous assholes. This book doesn’t pull its punches with the metaphor of werewolves as hubristic white men.
The part I found most interesting, actually, was the alternative to Exalted as a distant prehistory to the World of Darkness: The first shapeshifters Gaia created, long before she created humans, were the Dragon Kings—precursors to the Mokole who had a hominid “drachid” form and learned to breed non-shapeshifter drachid offspring. Using the power of the mnesis, the layer of pure imagination between the material world and the Umbra, they build an amazingly advanced society. But, as one might expect, they went to war with each other and then discovered that the mnesis was a finite resource that they had exhausted. Their society fell, fire and ice covered the world, and when the last few Dragon Kings emerged from a long slumber beneath the earth, Gaia had created many new changing breeds and a hairless ape she apparently favored.
Overall: There are some really fun ideas here. Is this the “true” history of the WoD? No, of course not, there is no such thing. But it (or pieces of it) might be for one campaign, and does anything else really matter?
There are two major campaign suggestions presented by the book: One is a time travel story in which a minion of the Wyrm has discovered a way to break history at critical points, and the party must restore the proper timeline before Gaia is torn apart. The other takes advantage of the echoes of history that exist in the Umbra as collective memory, and the characters must stop the Wyrm’s attempts at corrupting them before all of the changing breeds fall into inescapable despair.
A lot of the focus is on flashpoints of the War of Rage, and the extinctions of various other tribes of shapeshifters at the hands of the Garou, including the Apis (wereauroches, the matchmakers of Gaia), the Camazotz (werebats, Gaia’s spies), the Grondr (wereboars, who rooted out corruption) and the Bunyip (weremarsupials, who guarded the flow of time). Fun historical events that figure into this include the competition between Cro-Magnons and Neanderthals, the flooding of the English Channel, and the European colonization of the Americas and Australia. As a general rule, virtually all of the problems come down to werewolves being self-righteous assholes. This book doesn’t pull its punches with the metaphor of werewolves as hubristic white men.
The part I found most interesting, actually, was the alternative to Exalted as a distant prehistory to the World of Darkness: The first shapeshifters Gaia created, long before she created humans, were the Dragon Kings—precursors to the Mokole who had a hominid “drachid” form and learned to breed non-shapeshifter drachid offspring. Using the power of the mnesis, the layer of pure imagination between the material world and the Umbra, they build an amazingly advanced society. But, as one might expect, they went to war with each other and then discovered that the mnesis was a finite resource that they had exhausted. Their society fell, fire and ice covered the world, and when the last few Dragon Kings emerged from a long slumber beneath the earth, Gaia had created many new changing breeds and a hairless ape she apparently favored.
Overall: There are some really fun ideas here. Is this the “true” history of the WoD? No, of course not, there is no such thing. But it (or pieces of it) might be for one campaign, and does anything else really matter?
