#W5

[songoftrillium]

Likes don’t increase visibility to others! Please reblog this to spread the word! 

I think Werewolf is an inherently queer medium

This is all a part of a larger long-term project.

I am trying to hold the World of Darkness to higher standards of inclusivity.

Book 1: Cliath

Meet The Gaians — a chosen people blessed by Gaia of whom among them there are heroes who are born, blessed with the power to Change. They have been charged with the duty of protecting her and her brood, and among them are fellowships from every culture. They are largely comprised of Kinfolk. Vanguards of the earth, they follow the Codes and Creeds of renown in chiminage to the spirits in exchange for favor, protection, and power to strengthen their Fellowships and they form one of several primary factions.

A small number of Gaia’s chosen have been gifted the ability to shapeshift through either bite or birth into animals; warriors joining the fight against the Wyrm. The Gaians have many secret names for these shapeshifters between their cultures, and they range across many animal species and tribes, but the most common among them in these times are Garou.

This sourcebook includes information on First Changes, Rites of Passage, how people become werewolves, and what they're fighting for. Book 1 is effectively a players guide, including enough comprehensive character creation rules for people to create rank 1 Garou.

The World of Darkness is implied to exist just beneath a facade that all others take for granted as simply being a world gone wrong. When the Change happens to a Garou, human or otherwise, the world they once knew ceases to be. The Apocalypse is said to be something happening to everything, everywhere, simultaneously, and on every level. This transcends the concept of everything succumbing to a singular event but many small ones.

In many ways, the Garou themselves are emblematic of this Apocalypse, with these former lives ending and sweeping the cub into something far bigger than themselves. A Call To Action is the theme of Book 1.

Book 1: Cliath goes into warborn, bitten, wolf-born, and human-born lives leading up to the change. It presents a curated depiction of the Garou from the perspective of those who would mentor them. There are not a lot of conflicts, profound lore, or politics so much as 'this is what we are, this is what we do.' Functionally, this can be considered a Players’ Guide, containing your attributes, abilities, advantages, and Merits and Flaws. Gifts and rites will be truncated to rank 1 for the most part. Guidelines for new STs will be found here, including enough powers and enemy stats to keep their troupe of players on their toes. This will also include things like chargen and descriptions of attributes, abilities, and advantages. This will also have many details on packs and the importance of one's packmates. And what better way to introduce new players than to have it happen in an all-new setting for storytellers to introduce their players to the game: the first three chapters of Dead Mountain!

Dead Mountain isn't going anywhere. In fact, it will be used as the foundation for this series. Already-finished parts of the Dead Mountain will be released over the next few months, and a delayed release of the full chronicle will come next spring. The scope of Werewolf: the Essentials will strongly diverge from past game traditions. In past core books and settings, there was an intent to showcase the world at large, written from the perspective of people who had never been to these places. In the end, many details were laughably wrong or mediocre representations that didn’t appeal to the groups they represented. We want the World of Darkness to be HUGE. So, we will be laser-focusing this project to represent the Garou from the Pacific Northwest as an example, with guidelines on how to make your own World of Darkness at your locale HUGE too!

CALLING ALL CHARACHS!

We cannot make this happen without your help.  We are putting out the call for folx from all parts of the queer, lesbian, trans, bisexual, gay, and asexual werewolf fandom looking to help make this the best possible release we can:

Artists

Horror writers

Editors

Consultants

Hype Wolves to help spread the word

Indie TTRPG creators

Working together, we can create a game that is fun, engaging, and genuinely representative of the diverse community of players and fans who love Werewolf. To help us out, click here We look forward to providing you future updates!

UPDATE: Our team has grown huge, and we're grateful to the fandom for rising up and howling with us! We received far more applications than we were able to fully process, but we promise to deliver you the best possible Sourcebook anthology we can! Meet the Writing Team Meet the Art Team Follow our official account for future announcements! To check out a book preview and help us hire cultural consultants click here

Social Media Shout-out! I offer my thanks to @peltofash and @a-boros-named-seamus for supporting me on the Adren and Athro tiers! Your contributions are directly helping make this game more inclusive!

[inficetegodwottery]

So. Werewolf 5th Edition.

Werewolf 5th edition sucks. A lot.

Edit- I made some errors in my initial edit of this post that were fuelled entirely by being underinformed and almost insensible with anger, disappointment, and anxiety.

Some very informative responses have been made that I intend to incorporate into a much better and less rambling post with those updates and corrections. I'll probably delete this one soon as I type that one together, so folks only see the updated version.

Sorry for any mistakes I made on this old version, again, I was in an extremely poor place mentally and thoroughly dispirited by the total butchering of what was supposed to be a less shitty and mean-spirited version of a setting I care deeply for despite its foundational flaws and 30+ year history of exactly this thing happening.

I'm still very, very angry. But it's important to be angry and correct. This post was not made by someone informed of all the facts, and I intend to correct that.

Paradox Interactive has made the brave decision to reboot the controversial Werewolf the Apocalypse setting entirely rather than try and fix it, and have somehow done a worse job than the games studio that released an RPG book titled an ethnic slur.

It's taken me almost a month since this came out to be anywhere near mentally prepared enough to even collect my thoughts on it.

Man, it is rare to see an edition of ANYTHING that pisses off old players, new players, players who want to keep the lore the same, players who want to change the lore, conservative players, radical players, and even powergamers.

How do you set out with the intention of making an infamously dated and poorly researched/outreached setting LESS uncomfortable and racist from a modern perspective.... and end up with something EVEN MORE racist and uncomfortable, but also suffocatingly tonedeaf, insincere, and deeply sinister and corporate in its erasure of existing issues rather than addressing them whatsoever.

We made the Get of Fenris irredeemably evil because some of them in the past were nazis and also nazis like Germanic mythology, so the viking werewolves are all nazis now.

Okay, I understand why you did that from a modern political perspective even if its kind of heavy hand-

The Native American werewolf tribes have been removed entirely and replaced with American Murican werewolf tribes. Renaming and rewriting them to be more respectful was just too much work! Now they're more inclusive. :)

The Irish werewolf tribe is now the Nature Werewolves tribe, like every other tribe of Werewolves also is, but also stripped completely of celtic origins.

The Red Talons are openly genocidal ecofascist malthusians and somehow NOT IRREDEEMABLY EVIL like the Get of Fenris are.

Also the feminist all women werewolves are no longer all women or even feminist. AND ALSO SOME OF THEM ARE SOCIAL DARWINISTS AND THATS SUPPOSED TO BE A GOOD THING!?!

Also we entirely dropped the themes about how forcing children to be a part of a war they barely understand while also lying to them about the crimes their ancestors committed that led to the current crisis is fucked up and evil.

Now its actually awesome to be a child soldier born into a repressive apocalyptic death cult with a siege mentality and everything is cool about that actually, you're the Good Guys, and no amount of covered-up historic genocides or internal/external bigotry will ever change that! :)

Also we solved the way people were uncomfortable with the idea that werewolf society is transitioning messily from being horrible ableist assholes that discriminated for centuries against those they view as deformed, disabled, or sexual deviants to new generations that don't care about that stuff, by removing disabled werewolves entirely! Problem solved! No more discomfort or moral conundrums! We are the liberal-est!

There's just something so unbelievably fucked up and suspicious about erasing entire minorities from a fictional universe because they were handled poorly in the first edition, rather than talking to writers and outreach specialists FROM the real world equivalents to those minorities to try and rewrite them.

Don't worry, we removed the group the setting was bigoted against! Problem solved! Just remove the minority!

I've written my own post on why the Metis/Crinos-born should be renamed and probably rewritten, but as a severely disabled individual with multiple hereditary disabilities that severely impact my QoL, outright removing disabled characters in a work of fiction because the prejudice other characters showed them in-universe made people uncomfortable makes me want to tear out someone's throat with my teeth.

Sure, completely remove my ability to play disabled a character fighting back against prejudice and bigotry, rather than rewrite the most uncomfortable aspects of YOUR FUCKING PORTRAYAL OF THOSE CHARACTERS to make it more clear who the sympathetic one is supposed to be.

It's just so unbelievably cowardly and whinging and wretched.

So fuck it, I guess!

Fuck the deeply applicable themes of being born into a well-intentioned but deeply flawed and bigoted society, and trying to create the better world your parents always told you your ancestors fought for, while dealing with the fact that your world is built on mass graves those ancestors helped fill.

Fuck a game that deals with intergenerational trauma and the ethical hellscape that is a highly religious society devoted to the very same ideals it often violates just to win fights against the enemies it created through its own arrogance and prejudice.

Fuck a game that lets you play someone born different, born strange and sickly, bouncing constantly between people who pity you and people who view you as subhuman, before finally finding the people, the family who love and accept and fight alongside you for a world that has never accepted you, but WILL FUCKING KNOW YOUR NAME.

That's not relevant to the real world at all!

There are no kids born in deeply flawed and hypocritical societies, who grew up on stories of the glorious future their society would create, forced then to reconcile the hopeful dreams of a better world with the comprehensive list of horrific things done in the name of that future.

There are no children born confused and alone in their navigation of the maze that is past atrocities, ethnic conflicts, religious prejudice and dogma, or modern propaganda attempting to erase the histories of all of those things.

There are no disabled teens who spent their lives believing they didn't belong in the world, kept going only by the connections they forged with other outsiders and people who fought back against the kind of wretched bigotry that suffocates children to death, who found homes and families they could trust outside the pissant communities they were born into.

Apparently those people don't need a game! They don't need to explore those feelings!

Just throw some more nazis in, so we can pretend we care about social issues or understand the redeeming threads of a deeply flawed gameline, ostensibly so we market it to leftist youngsters, but while we also erase the entire point of a game WHICH IS ALL ABOUT BEING PUNKASS YOUNGSTERS DESPERATELY TRYING TO FIND THE REDEEMING THREADS OF A DEEPLY FLAWED AND PREJUDICED SOCIETY THAT CONSTRAINS THEM, FINDING A WAY TO REBEL AGAINST BOTH THE EVILS OF THE RACIST BASTARDS WHO RAISED THEM AND THE POMPOUS SHITHEADS WHO WANT TO DESTROY THE WORLD OUT OF GREED.

No! We want a squeaky clean, sterile white game that AmericanTM parents can be proud of their kids for playing! A marketable game, that advertisers will gladly pay Revenue to put their products in! Play the good guys, everyone! You're the good guys! Be a big werewolf UwU!

Don't worry about historical atrocities or the flaws of the society that raised you! That's Pentex propaganda!

Fighting bad guys means you can't do anything bad yourself! The Emperor told me so! Deus Gaia Vult!

A hollow, performative, offensive jizzstain that should've been scrapped in its crib. I have no idea how this edition got past a quality assurance team.

Hell I have no idea how it got past a legal team, given the number of real peoples' likenesses they used without permission.

Devoid of artistic integrity or merit.

[reikiajakoiranruohoja]

Why the Apocalypse in the title matters and how W5 fails to address it

Even if it is by this point a joke, all WoD games have a title what creature it lets you play and then one of the core elements of it.

Yet, it is odd that a werewolf game puts the end of the world as one of its most central concepts. After all, werewolves aren't really associated with the apocalypse in myths. The closest is Fenris-Ulf in Norse myths, but Fenris was a monstrous wolf, not a werewolf. Shouldn't Changing or Fury be a better descriptor?

Well, WtA's werewolves draw from older material than the movies and the focus is not on being a werewolf. The focus is on the state of the world, the way nature is being destroyed and such. In the game, being a werewolf is more akin to a spiritual guardian than a cursed being.

The Apocalypse in the title not only refers to the literal end of existence but to the little apocalypses happening every year. Species dying, people losing touch with their ancestral cultures, etc. WtA is about looking at the state of the world and feeling the horror of just how hard it is to fix it if not impossible. Never mind the sadly now very real horror of greed over care and ennui towards your fellow humans and nature.

This genuine approach and call to action has, of course, created an opposite reaction that calls WtA's tone childish. More recently, as we actually start seeing the effects of climate change, the reactions have also become ones of denial, apathy and fear of doing the wrong thing.

It is the latter that W5 shows the clearest in its depiction of the apocalypse.

The apocalypse in W5 is invisible to normal people and other supernaturals. At most, it is the fall of the garou nation as the climate change happening in the real world. Despite this, W5 is very clear about discouraging its PCs from taking action further than locally.

In effect, W5's apocalypse and what it wants the players to do about it is toothless. The game spends page space detailing what not to do, but very little on what to do and what the apocalypse looks like. Because it is afraid to take a stand, instead focusing on passive-aggressive remarks here and there.

W5, despite its blurb stating it is about striking back at pollution, isn't willing to have its PCs be eco-terrorists (though some do slip through) and actively calls direct action the wrong method.

It isn't just what W5 tells the PCs shouldn't do, it is also how much the PCs don't have to do. It's the end of the world as we know it and you can still go to McDonald's in peace. The world is lost and you still have to go to work. If we weren't told the apocalypse was raging, we'd assume it was still in the future. The game is, intentionally or unintentionally, saying that there is no need to do anything. Even if the world is ending, it won't inconvenience you.

To put things plainly, W5's apocalypse is the way it is so there won't be paid sick days for the employees. It is an end that preserves and protects the status quo.

Of course, an apocalypse that changes nothing is not really an apocalypse. Indeed, W5 wears the apocalypse label more out of legacy than any real intention of addressing it. It wants to focus on werewolf packs and caern tending, not something as serious as the fate of the world.

In fact, I'd say W5 doesn't want to be about the garou at all but instead about werewolves. It wants to be Werewolf the Fury.

[wolfhidewinter]

A snippet of a piece I'm working on for an awesome project for an indie RPG model of Werewolf: the Apocalypse by https://www.tumblr.com/songoftrillium. If you're interested in the project read more here! Can you tell who I got tasked with drawing? hah

[lord-soth-dk]

Well, at least they fucked up every other Tribe, not just the Fenrir

[thecyberrecord]

Werewolf: the Apocalypse 5th Edition and the Anti-Indigeneity in the Gaming Industry

[redratt]

Bro forgive me but there's something very sad about seeing what felt like essential parts of werewolf be stripped and celebrated. The Umbra. The Nation. The changing of the Black Furies' Patron. The Glass Walkers have no ambiguity now. They've got Spider. The Garou-Born are just... gone, and as a dyke with disabilities I loved them dearly. Younger Brother has been named in a way that just ignores the winter of them, the cold rage, the refusal to assimilate.

And, of course, once again the Stargazers have been removed, because I guess the writers can't write an Asian tribe of Garou without being fucking racist, so they just cut it entirely.

Worst of all is the attitude of "oh well the war is lost actually :)"

Like... fuck off, very sincerely, with that.

[unlimited-puppies]

By join I do mean you become one and are given a motorcycle

[chunkleosteus]

Picked up Werewolf 5th and in love with my anxious son.

Here’s all of his forms!

[tacitgadget]

LOL LAMO

[syntheticmortal]

just saw an art piece from one of your players that hit me with the most incredible sense of nostalgia and happiness. i used to run Lupines -- not Garou, because i was a teenager then and hadn't touched Apocalypse (even though I love apocalypse dearly now) and sometimes think about going back and making Lupines a thing again, ahah. Also, if you want, I can send you some stuff for old Werewolf source books, I saw your 5e post!

God that piece is, on a personal level, one of my absolute favourites to come out of The Little Black Door chronicle :')

And Lupines is such a fucking mood mate, keeps my poor players on their toes when the things outside the city are just 'nah they're not really statted, they'll just sort of kill you' - you've never seen more desperate drive rolls in your life XD

Which is my way of enthusiastically encouraging you to work on your own Lupine concepts!! And take that as an excuse to come show me if you do!! I rather like the Garou, and have used them in one VTM game where I revealed a Kindred as Kinfolk - but it's so much fun to screw around with new ideas, keep the table fresh

(plus, personally, adding new elements keep the horror alive, players can't treat threats like they're from a bestiary if they can't be sure what's going on >:D)

And thank you for the generous offer! I've actually been fortunate enough to scrounge the old lore thankfully - it's just very awkward because I don't know what's meant to still gel with the W5 lore. With Garou Tribes kinda being something one chooses I struggle to define them beyond a loose spiritual brotherhood - as opposed to the culture of a shared permanent curse with VTM Clans, or the inherent variation that comes from within a rather large ethnic group a la the old Garou Tribes

And then in turn how does this extend out to things like the Black Spiral Dancers? I can make decisions for my own games but if things are _different_ now they are not adequately defined anew for my liking as a Storyteller (or even a Player trying to make something withn the context)

That said, to echo the post you mentioned, I think I'm starting to get a grip with making my own antagonists - and in turn I've started to think more about Sept cultures, rather than Tribal cultures, and treat Tribes like specialisations almost. With any luck, there'll be enough to run a game with when it becomes time to do it! :') <3

[laresearchette]

Saturday, March 2, 2024 Canadian TV Listings (Times Eastern)

WHERE CAN I FIND THOSE PREMIERES?: SINGLE BLACK FEMALE 2: SIMONE'S REVENGE (Lifetime Canada) 8:00pm

NEW TO AMAZON PRIME CANADA/CBC GEM/CRAVE TV/DISNEY + STAR/NETFLIX CANADA:

AMAZON PRIME CANADA PRISCILLA

NHL HOCKEY (TSN3) 12:30pm: Jets vs. Hurricanes (SN) 4:00pm: Oilers vs. Kraken (CBC/CityTV) 7:00pm: Habs vs. Lightning (SN) 7:00pm: Rangers vs. Leafs (SN1) 7:00pm: Sens vs. Flyers (SN360) 8:20pm: Calgary Flames - Miikka Kiprusoff Jersey Retirement Ceremony (CBC/SN) 10:00pm: Penguins vs. Flames

MLB SPRING TRAINING (SN/SN1) 1:00pm: Atlanta vs. Jays

CURLING (TSN) 2:00pm: 2024 Montana's Brier: Pool Play (TSN/TSN3) 7:00pm: 2024 Montana's Brier: Pool Play (TSN4) 9:30pm: 2024 Montana's Brier: Pool Play

MLS SOCCER (TSN4) 4:30pm: Miami vs. Orlando (TSN4) 7:00pm: Vancouver vs. Charlotte

W5 (CTV) 7:00pm: Arsenic Air/Aysanabee

KNIGHTS OF THE ZODIAC (Crave) 7:00pm: When a headstrong street orphan unwittingly taps into hidden powers, he discovers he might be the only person alive who can protect a reincarnated goddess who was sent to watch over humanity.

HAUNTED HARMONY MYSTERIES: MURDER IN G MAJOR (CTV) 8:00pm: A new teacher at an Irish prep school is shocked to find a ghost in her house. She decides to help solve his murder in hopes that it will allow him to move on.

FALL INTO WINTER (2023) 8:00pm: Life quickly changes for Kerry as she has to work alongside her high school nemesis, Brooks, an old friend of her brother's who unexpectedly buys into Kerry's family-owned candy shop.

A MISSED CONNECTION (Super Channel Heart & Home) 8:00pm: After finding a spark with a woman on a train platform, a photographer posts a missed connection in the newspaper, but never hears from her. Five years later, they're seated next to each other on a plane heading to the same wedding - hers.

NBA BASKETBALL (TSN5) 8:30pm: Nuggets vs. Lakers

AQUAMAN AND THE LOST KINGDOM (Crave) 9:00pm: Black Manta wields the power of the mythic Black Trident to unleash an ancient and malevolent force. Hoping to end his reign of terror, Aquaman forges an unlikely alliance with his brother to protect their kingdom and save the world from destruction.

ONE DAY AS A LION (Starz Canada) 9:00pm: Jackie Powers is a nice guy but a lousy hit man who takes a waitress hostage after a job goes bad. When Jackie reveals he needs money to get his son out of jail, she cooks up a scheme for them to get cash from her dying mother.

PLEASE BABY PLEASE (Super Channel Fuse) 9:00pm: After witnessing them commit a murder on the streets of 1950s Manhattan, newlywed couple Suze and Arthur become the dangerous obsession of a gang of greasers.

MONEY MONSTER (CTV) 12:35am: After losing money on a stock tip, a disgruntled investor (Jack O'Connell) holds a Wall Street guru (George Clooney) and a producer (Julia Roberts) hostage on live television.

[reikiajakoiranruohoja]

W5: Why do I think it is bad

When W20 (Werewolf the Apocalypse 20th anniversary edition) came out, it was a joyous occasion for multiple reasons. First, it was the first proper book released for the game in 10 years. Second, it was proof that the old game still had fans who were willing to try a new edition.

And third; W20 was about hope.

From its beginning comic about rising up to fight despite the odds to the way the book offered chances to play the lost tribes, to the way the supplements followed suit in offering more options and interesting ideas to use, W20 was about going on despite the odds.

This is not the feeling one gets reading Werewolf the Apocalypse 5th edition. Despite being a reboot, the book spends pages guilt-tripping players about playing garou. There is little hope, because being a garou sucks and most importantly; The fight for Gaia might not even be real.

Now, I am not one to say no to Alternative Universes, I enjoy the concept a lot. But W5 is still a game and so needs more than a rant about how badly the garou screwed up, it needs gameplay. And the gameplay W5 offers is sitting in your caern defending your turf while the world around you burns and if you dare to take action? You might become mad and become a fascist.

I need to remind you all that the core of WtA is the fight against pollution, systematic oppression, your own ancestors and your own Rage. The horror is how impossible the fight seems, how easily you can turn on your friends and how tempting an easy way out is.

The horror in W5 is how bad your ancestors were and how terrible it is to be a garou.

Personal Horror has always been the wheelhouse of Vampire the Masquerade, as being a vampire forces you to create justifications for your actions. Werewolf is titled Feral Horror for a reason, the horror is more external than internal. Yet W5 tries to make it internal like in VtM, leaving behind all the environmental horror. Indeed, W5 is written quite clearly with purely urban characters in mind with very little focus on nature.

Anyone who is familiar with NWoD/Chronicle of Darkness should by now notice that this sounds quite a bit like Werewolf the Forsaken. This is because W5 has taken a lot from Forsaken, but without truly understanding the way these parts make Forsaken what it is.

But all of this is, as we say in the community, fluff. What about the mechanics? Surely they are at least fun?

The way Rage works in W5 is extremely punishing because Rage has its own dice that replace normal dice the more you have. If you fail with these dice, your character will destroy something. At best. Worse is that any Rage above the hilariously small maximum of 5 gives your character willpower damage. The kicker is that you cannot choose to use Rage Dice when you want to, nor can you control their use. It is all or nothing.

Rage in the previous editions of WtA was a power versus control trap. You could do amazing things with your Rage, but the more you had the easier it was to lose control and the harder it was to deal with humans. What made Rage such a clever trap, was that gaining more was often based on player action. Those seeking a fast way to power would end up being creatures with very little to no self-control.

Rage Dice are not that, they make the life of a PC hard no matter what they do and at times punish players by taking actions as werewolves.

Another mechanic that punishes and in fact has some really unfortunate implications attached to it is Hauglosk. Stated to be the opposite of Harano, Hauglosk is in reality a way for the ST to punish any player who plays in a way that the ST does not approve. Worse, Hauglosk is at one point stated to be equal to fascism.

On the fluff side, Hauglosk also serves as a way to limit what the PCs can do as the book helpfully notes it manifests in the form of absolute certainty to your cause and the want to act NOW. Since we are on Tumblr here, I should not have to note how baffling that is in a game about activism.

The way Hauglosk is written is most likely to justify the removal of a tribe from the playable roster. The Get of Fenris might have had their issues, but W5's cult of Fenris is said to be utterly lost to Hauglosk. By wanting to keep fighting the Wyrm with certainty. The sheer vitriol this book has for the Get of Fenris is to the point where some tribes do worse things than they do but are still playable. Worse, by the book itself, you can redeem a Black Spiral Dancer but not a Cult of Fenris member.

Let me repeat that; You can redeem a rapist torturer who willingly pollutes and eats humans but you CANNOT redeem a person fighting on the same side as you who is a bit more fanatic about the cause.

This push to make the tribe into essentially fascists didn't come from an edgelord writer. It came from the Brand Manager who pushed for it very hard, while doing their damnedest to take away feminism from the Black Furies and ignored suggestions from Indigenous writer about the Native American tribes. Sadly, because this person still IS the Brand Manager, Furies are no longer women-only and no tribe has ties to any human culture.

(Also, just to be clear; Paradox denied the Onyx Path developers any name changes to the Native American tribes and the only reason their names were changed in W5 is thanks to the aforementioned Indigenous writer fighting for the changes tooth and nail.)

These are only a few things that make W5 a mess, but I hope I shed some light on the issue.

[rametarin]

More grumblings about Werewolf: the Apocalypse and V5. And missed opportunities. (Settle in, because this is going to be a big screed.)

One of my biggest issues with World of Darkness is it's usually fine when you can separate the ideological hamfistedness and occassional diatribe by the authors that so DESPERATELY have wanted to use fun gothic punk horror as a recruiting ground for anarcho-communists, from the actual fun fanciful macabre and horror.

Except, the problem arises because the socio-political people seek to browbeat and reinterpret what is allowed or acceptable in horror, and by extension, literature and culture. So anything that deviates out of what they want to be acceptable cultural messages gets removed and suppressed. No room for questions, they don't even want the possibility that you may answer anything but what they want you to come away with.

No horror monsters or mythological creatures that they ideologically disagree with, either.

So if your culture has a mythological creature that amounts to the ghost of a stillborn baby haunting it's mother, or any mother, out of revenge? "That's misogyny and punishment against women! Such patriarchal myths perpetuate an anti-woman view in culture and society, and so they shouldn't exist!!! It also perpetuates the idea you have to be female to be a mother, so THAT is a problem too!" So they simply make that problematic mythological creature disappear into omission and edit it out of the folklore canon as if it's not there, and stigmatize the retelling as something only a stinky evil monstrous male chauvinist would do. While they'll hem and haw and hoot about being sooOOoO Inclusive, for the credits, if your culture and community has any elements it finds an issue, it will 1.) avoid mentioning that out loud, because contradicting the Oppressed Minorities while giving them a platform means they may be gunshy about being voices against "the mainstream," or supporting them as they selectively browbeat white people as oppressive or ignorant. 2.) try to get the young people inside those communities themselves to be the ones to argue such mythological or folklore figures should stop being talked about and stop being considered part of the culture, because they, "perpetuate bad thoughts and sentiments."

They love folklore for the fact it's a window into a culture, they just hate that these aspects of culture and folklore exist, and their definition of, "folk" is very specific and one they demand everybody else exclusively adhere to, no questions, no alternatives. They just say it indirectly and often through force, when they can enforce it.

So why did I go on this screed above? Because it's padding to talk about an example of this in gameplay and how our species works. The monkey babble and rules and perceptions of human beings, as we relate to the horrors of our own biology.

Biological exclusivity and inclusion into how we determine culture. Birthright. Maternal and paternal exclusivity and privileges based on whom your biological parents are, somehow mattering on a legal, biological and spiritual level.

The problem is they ideologically disagree that biology should be destiny and that ethnicity should be based on biology. They argue that the ONLY important factor should be culture and nurture, and that elements such as the state can embody and lead said cultures, not individuals from said in-group. That you shouldn't be allowed to have a group based on characteristics that can't intellectually or socially just be appropriated and majoritied, because that's some sort of social evil and oppression.

So how do they characterize people that believe birthright and heredity play a role in culture and society and family are the devil?

Why, they do what they always do. They treat you like a child and antagonize you, loudly bringing up, "OH. OKAY, NAZI. SURE, NAZI. THAT'S SOMETHING NAZIS BELIEVE. YOU BELIEVE THIS IS TRUE, THEREFORE YOU MUST BE A NAZI, NAZI. WANNA EUGENICALLY CLEANSE ME FOR BEING NEURODIVERGENT, NAZI?" as a way to shame you if your culture treats hereditary connection to a community as a qualifying characteristic.

However, they do not levy this weapon equally against all cultures. They will absolutely invalidate any claim to validity from any white ethnic community and argue, VIOLENTLY, that there's no such thing as any cohesive European ethnic group, or any kind of coherent 'whiteness' at all, for that matter, treating Europeans as some sort of cultural anti-culture that are just incoherent static of human beings. Not individuals and cultures unto themselves, not a valid community, not a valid People.

They will not, similarly, say the same things about capital B Black people, or Asians. To them, Black and Asian are demographics.

But it has become out of vogue to refer to black as a race. Races, it's believed, are, "social constructs," and not real. This argument isn't had directly between Black ethnonationalists and Black identitarians or Black separatatists and the social constructionists in the far-left, because that would represent a skewing schism in the allyship. So, one seeks to constantly circumvent and go both over and under the others' heads in just whom tells whom what to do and define the other and the parameters of how they're defined.

So they started capitalizing the B in Black to refer to the social group of Black people. Whom is black? Anyone with sub-Saharan African phenotypes and hereditary characteristics unique to that part of Africa.

Can a person without that ancestry thus be capital b Black? If Blackness is culture and not subject to heredity, can a person be a fair skinned, red freckled ginger and be certifiably black as Wesley Snipes?

No, they argue, because the characteristics of being Black necessitate a level of racial pur- I mean, "passingness", that unless you grow up characteristically resembling a person of that ethnic group, you don't get the valid "experience" of growing up Black. Thus, capital B Black people are left as the only vaid "culture" where you have to be born from a Black mother or father in order to be Black.

Cultures can be joined or left and have no biological necessity, so the thinking goes, and surely no uprigth person would dare entertain something so racist and bioessentialist as a culture or community exclusive to a certain hereditary line.

But surely you aren't suggesting that these rules apply to Capital B Black culture, right? Because if you were, that poses an existential threat to Black peoples' existence! That would mean that defining Black as anything more deep or ingrained or exclusive than a Jazz band or a basketball court or a big Christmas dinner or Muslim family gathering, would be bioessentialism and share characteristics with Nazism. Right?

Hm. Sure are a lot of competing points of view here. Irreconcilable differences and immovable objects as different views vy for dominance in what is right and wrong. I wonder which values will pan out the winners in the argument, or if there'll be some sort of division in the narrative. Or hypocrisy.

So anyway. This is Rachel Dolazel.

Rachel got in trouble relatively recently. See, she's a white woman. She has no immediate Capital B Buhlack racial heritage. She falsified her ethnic identity and took selective ambiguous photos with older black men that she passed off dishonestly as potential dads in order to get a career speaking up about the oppressions black people face in Academia, where due to the way she did her skin and hair, it could be assumed she was mixed. She spoke on behalf of black people and their problems and her proposed solutions. And she, "considers herself Black."

Now, competing schools in progressivism have been arguing internally about this for a long time. Because on the one hand, they really want black allies and narrative in their struggle for narrative and social dominance of values. And those values are, biology should not be a legitimate determining factor in any social culture or community. That you should be able to join any group without the biological necessity to inherit those characteristics or birthright.

And the other side that says, "if you aren't born from our in-group, you are not of our in-group, and thus, not entitled to our love, compassion, resources, or social organization. You are an outsider, you are an enemy, and our culture is closed to your input."

They really want those oppressed ethnic and social groups to be on their side as allied communities to use as collective democratic vehicles of social organization, but they don't want those groups to be autonymous and structurally exist outside of the control of society. So it's a careful dance of saying and not saying things until those groups have no choice by law or by the grass roots values of their children, to change how they can validly define themselves.

They vehemently disagree that any validity exists to any culture or community that uses paternal or maternal heredity to define and distinguish itself as true and valid. And they don't just want that to be opinion, they want to be in a position to tell said people, "you are not valid, your culture is not valid, and you do not exist. You will not be treated as a distinct culture or community if your culture and community use hereditary birthright as sacred things."

So, surprise surprise, modern folklorists and urban fantasy, gothic punk horror writers choose not to have fun with the tropes of "harmful" culture, but to argue against the participation of it at all in society or pop culture.

In Werewolf: the Apocalypse, that game departed from the conventional pop culture folklore where a werewolf was not the result of being infected or baptized into darkness by the bite of a werewolf, but through biological heredity. W:tA Werewolves were this hereditary community of shaman and spirit workers that were fighting an attritional war against an overwhelming for.

The Garou as a culture in the old games existed as a kind of anomaly. Only 5% of the children a werewolf would have (male or female) would be a werewolf. The rest would be either normy human beings, or spiritually aware but unchanging humans called Kinfolk that could relate to the were-wolves and serve as go-betweens for the more supernaturally inclined monster folk and basic humanity. Often taking the roles of a support system. They were the Alfred Pennysworths, the Lois Lanes. Kinfolk drastically raised the potential of a werewolf being able to produce another werewolf.

And this problemed, bizarre biology that fought so hard against large losses against their adversary was one of the horrors of the setting. You had to balance modern sensibilities about how your horrible supernatural biology functioned, how new members of your group are made, vs. just how dehumanizing that could be, all in the face of the grind of the enemy at the front gates and time itself threatening to destroy your community.

W:tA set the werewolves up as having screwed up bigtime in the past, treating humans like chattel and breeding stock. This was their history and something they had to come to terms with. It was part of the body horror that is synonymous with werewolf and the knowledge of horrors of things groups inflicted on others in the past. All because the only way you get more of your in-group is due to biological heredity, and that without that component, the pacts with your spirits, the traditions that make your group's magic function, don't work.

This unchangeable facet of existence, this immutable, static part of you, that you just have to live with and even if you can transform and change some parts, cannot change around by yourself, was part of the horror. That some social structural changes are beyond one person alone to change. That no matter what you do, you cannot change heredity and the choices that people preceding you have made. You can only live in the environment and time created by circumstance and inherit that culture and history. For better or worse.

These were themes in werewolf that were very heavy and their own source of terror.

So how did W5 decide to play off these deep, juicy source of not just body horror, but social horror?

Take the entire thing and put it in a dumpster and start fresh, actively and intentionally refusing to even touch them.

They determined that werewolf tribes would not directly grow out of existing folklore or pay homage to cultures and communities with their own were-wolf myths, incorporating those folklore stories and their origins. Not just because, "that would be cultural appropriation," on behalf of Native American or African stories of people turning back and forth between animals, but because acknowledging the different narrative traditions and cultural tales of say, Greek werewolves Vs. Roman werewolves Vs. Irish werewolves would necessitate acknowledging that there are cultures within white European people that are themselves indivisibe, distinct and didn't just exist, but are currently alive.

And we've already covered, they do not believe to be white or European should be considered a culture in and of itself the way they feel being Asian or Black are cultures with valid racial characteristics that are endangered by whites when mixing.

So naturally they do not want to include an Irish tribe of werewolves.

Then we come to the most reviled tribe of all to these new guys.

The Get of Fenris are a tribe in Werewolf: the Apocalypse that borrows heavily from Norse mythology, as the name implies. The Get of Fenris are a viking werewolf culture that claim to descend from Fenris the Wolf, whom they venerate most.

They use old Norse runes, weapons and iconography, and are a result of Neo-Pagans in the anti-Christian revivals of culture that were popular throughout the 60s-00s. They were fun, cheesy, deathmetal and axe slinging motherfuckers. Fucking viking werewovles! What's not to love?

But as you well know from the tone of this post, there's no room for fun in the hamfisted ideological platform that is modern World of Darkness. The 90s "everything's good, lets just incorporate everything equally" gave way to further editions trying to wag a finger at Werewolf: the Apocalypse fans and reminding them that white supremacists existed that were taking the Get of Fenris and just using them to validate the idea of white genetic supremacy, or, gasp, the idea a 'white' culture exists or existed at all. Not like those noble oppressed ethnically homogenuous demographics, whom are definitely cultures unto themselves.

They exaggerated the number of actual W:tA players supposedly unironically trying to play out their nazi Werewolf fantasies of blonde haired, blue eyed Norsemen, and so by the Revised (third) edition, set up the Get as having an internal racism and sexism problem that the players had to punch. They set up lore about the Get fighting on both sides in World War 2 and the Nazi get losing by, you guessed it, getting punched. And overall just browbeat and negged Get players by attaching this stigma of "suspected Nazi" to them just by virtue of the Get being Odinist themed.

They went out of their way to emphasize the number of Get that themselves were either Asian or blacker than the Ace of Spades, took great pains to acknowledge horrible and disgusting Get existed and had their own political group within the tribe that all the right thinking Get hated and marginalized and wanted to go away, and overal just made the bad guy Get the mincing racist, sexist, patriarchal stereotypes for protagonists to punch. Just, so, y'know, you get the message.

But that STILL wasn't enough contrition and self-flaggelation of the Get for them.

So by Werewolf, 5th edition, the Get of Fenris are no longer the Get of Fenris. Right out of the gate, the CULT of Fenris are no longer playable characters. The Cult of Fenris are radical white supremacist snarling ultra-radical militarists that have charged down the mouth of the Wyrm and become an unplayable lost Tribe. They just simply took them off the table in the most mean spirited "fuck you" to Werewolf fans of the past, just to do that limp wristed solidarity fist and say, "no platform for Nazis," in a room with no Nazis in it.

Now compare and contrast this to what they did to the werewolf clan that took Irish werewolf myths and made them ethnically Irish; they just made them Hearth Keepers and excised the Irish from them, so being descended from Ireland had nothing to do with your attachment to the tribe. No mention of Shileleighs or guiness or bardic stories.

They did not turn the Irish tribe into god damned evil monsters, they just removed the Irishness from them save for some vague, ghostly nods to some fragments of folklore of werewolves originating in Ireland, but kept the rest of the tribe somewhat valid.

They did not decide arbitrarily that the celtic cross wielding tribe decided to just become raging lunatics and throw themselves down a fairy circle to fight Satan, thereby becoming demons themselves.

They structured the entire basis of the Cult of Fenris not just to make them unplayable, but make them cursed corpses and read any of the people that wanted to play them as assholes. Not just reinterpreted out of the game without mention, like the Fianna, but made examples of. That isn't just, "I hate this group and don't even want to mention them in my game," this is, "fuck your group, and fuck you." That's active hostility. The Get could've just been reimagined. Instead, they were pilloried.

No matter how much they tried to expand upon the concept of werewolf tribes to make them racially inclusive, acknowledge sexism and paternalism as tragedies in the past to overcome, try to underline what role the players had in trying to become part of the solution to restructure or reform these tribes and their cultures to be something else, it was never enough. Just being a culture that necessitated coming from Europeans was enough to get something characterized as, "inescapably Nazi," the more it necessitated European origins instead of flavorless homogenuity. Europeans are not allowed to have culture, merely exist, and folklore isn't allowed to come from recognizable and distinct "folk."

They also took issue with the hereditary nature of being a werewolf. Because, as stated above, they do not believe culture and literature should perpetuate the idea that birthright and heredity plays any role in destiny or group affiliation, and don't even want to perpetuate myths and folklore of such things operating that way. You know, because, "then the little people may get ideas about perpetuating it in culture and literature."

So in V5, there's absolutely no hereditary tribal structure that passes down the tribe. It's all arbitrary, postmodernist, "how much do you vibe with these spiritual characteristics that all individuals possess." Nothing unique to a bloodline or hereditary group, nothing that is a unique mutation that only members of a certain group possess or you have to marry into to perpetuate.

Kinfolk are not distant cousins and fellow descendants of these shamanic tribes, they're individuals who resonate with your supernatural values that can come from anywhere, and it's the virtue of their beliefs and feelings that matter, not their blood.

And the fucked part is, the actual lore, if they bothered to even fucking read it, ALREADY SET UP for stuff like this to happen! They could very, VERY easily have worked these changes into the franchise, if they wanted. By the end of 3rd Edition, they talked about mysterious humans appearing that had NO biological, hereditary attachment to tribes like the Get of Fenris, that had the Pure Breed Tribe spiritual characteristic of 5/5, as if they were sired by a famous Get of Fenris themselves. They previously SET UP the modern era to start having people that weren't the byproducts of generations of grooming and in-culture to authenticate their tribal affiliation.

And then these new people took the meta of progress towards these changes to not just the game, but the meta, and said, "No platform for Nazis and TERFs," and just.... threw it all in the trash. Because, "we know better. :^)"

Every single issue they had a problem with could've been addressed and solved and the integrity of the game maintained. And they chose the most flavorless, bland way to just reset the game possible in the interests of homogenuity and modularity and "intersectional inclusion."

And congratulations, you took what was interesting and unique about the game and how it approached body horror, social horror and social issues, went, "I'M RIGHT, YOU'RE WRONG, WE TALKED ABOUT IT AND I'M RIGHT AND YOU'RE WRONG!" and tossed it in the trash.

I won't even get into the overcorrection involved in stripping the Native American tribes from their roots and overcompensating by treating the Wendigo as too sacred of a figure for even non-Natives to mention the name of. These people would use this same argument to scream Christians shouldn't even be allowed to write God because some Jews refuse to reference them by name, and it's sacred to them.

The level of bad faith that went into this edition of the game means I'll still be playing 20th edition and basing things off 20th edition lore. This ain't it. You couild've warded away the fash/naz players in so many better ways, could've done more with "inclusion and cultural sensitivity" with the Native American tribes using the tools of the setting, could've done so much more

And you fuckers chose the laziest, most ideologically masturbatory ways to do everything, right down to sticking obligate MAGA hats on the, "white supremacist tribe," and roasting them in a pot as a middle finger to imagined strawmen.

[lord-soth-dk]

Man, they really butchered the lore in this edition lol

[audiovenue]

Monitor Audio Platinum 200 3G speakers, in store now. . #audio #musical #audiovenue #loke #wilsonaudio #maidenhead #hifi #audioealing #hifiealing #musicalhifi #audiophiles #hifishop #ealing #audiovenue #w5 #monitoraudio #monitoraudioplatinum3g #platinum2003g #luxuryspeakers #platinum200 . @monitoraudio . . Would you like to try hear this system, feel free to call us on 0208567 8703. or email us w5@audiovenue.com or feel free to DM. (at Audio Venue) https://www.instagram.com/p/CoHOfK5IPOF/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=