Tribebook: Children of Gaia by Kurieg

Introduction

posted by Kurieg Original SA post

TribeBook: Children of Gaia

Before we go into this, I just found out that the author of this book is one Jim Comer, who has 3 other notable credits to his name:
1. Mummy the Resurrection
2. The Mokole Breed Book
3. Freak Legion
In hindsight this explains a lot.

Prologue
Yes, the oft imitated White-Wolf intro fiction chapter. For bonus points it's a 2nd person intro fiction chapter, and because they wanted the extra credit it's a framing device that will be carried through the entire book.
And one more thing.
I'm sure they'll handle this with all the tact it is due.

Our werewolf pack is introduced with them walking down the streets of Seattle. There's Ringer/Kevin, our POV character described as "Asian guy with hair falling in his face, wearing jeans and a T-shirt saying If Gays and lesbians are given equal rights then EVERYONE will want them. " Amanda who is "A big woman in a peasant dress and a hand-knit sweater." Joné who's wearing a fleece jacket cargo pants, combat boots, and an "oval coffee-and-cream face framed by dreadlocks". Joné also has tons of really neat tech toys, like a hands free phone/computer/pda system put together into a headset visor, in 1999, no I don't know how that works. Rich the "Tall red-headed pack mate" who is a Metis(Deformed Garou who are born from two Garou parents) and as Ringer helpfully informs us, Rich has seizures as his deformity. And Hack, a handsome gray wolf.
Oh did I forget to mention that?
Yeah they've got a wolf just walking down the streets of Seattle during one of the most heavily policed protests in history and no one seems to care, a few people seem to notice but most people just think he's a big friendly dog. Hack is drilling his pack mates, asking them what 'peace' is. So not only are they walking down the street with a wolf, they are talking with him, he's barking back in response, and they're answering his barks, and no one notices or cares. They best answer they come up with is "not War" and end up describing the various kinds of war and that the struggle is to keep wars just. They also mention that they're in Seattle to protest Endron and Pentex, who are basically pastiches of every evil big corporation ever.

There are people in turtle costumes, puppets on stick poles, dancers and performers. Honestly this is sounding more like a street fair than a protest. They namedrop the Direct Action Network (the real group that organized the 1999 WTO Protests). They finally reach their destination and join in with all the other Garou in enacting a rite designed to "Keep Gaia's ways alive." which Ringer describes as them hoping really hard for the WTO to see the human side of their horrible search for profit.
Also there are people using spider climb gifts to hang gigantic banners on the side of the building, because that's not obvious at all.

All of a sudden the ritual circle breaks and there's a tide of people running away from explosions. The police have arrived to break up their totally peaceful protest, the nerve of them. So Ringer gets hit with a gas grenade, and rolls around on the ground for a while before Joné shows up and washes his eyes out with a water bottle. They start performing triage on some of the other tear gas victims and
_{(No one was nerve gassed at the real WTO riots)}
So it's decided that the best way to save these people, as there are too many to carry normally, is to go into their giant man-wolf shape that makes people go temporarily insane if they see it and carry the bodies through the streets of Seattle.
But it's okay because Hack is going to run ahead in wolf form and make sure that they don't run into humans.
Also it's okay because 'the rage lets them move faster than human eyes can track' _{this isn't true in the slightest} so they just 'appear' at the hospital in human form carrying 8 people between the four of them, PROBLEM SOLVED.

After that's taken care of they rush back to the protests where they run into some people in black masks and black outfits who are smashing storefront windows, burning down an art gallery, and shooting eggs out of slingshots into peoples faces, the eggs are later discovered to be full of etching fluid . They're also chanting "DOWN WITH PRIVATE PROPERTY! DOWN STOP DEFENDING YOUR EXPLOITERS!" But see, they're Formori! So they're obviously just trying to defame the real protestors and make them look bad.
I'm not going to describe the fight, so have a picture.

The fight ends when ringer smashes someone's solar plexus into fragments and Joné summons a fear spirit to literally scare the formori shitless.
Seriously.

They namedrop John Zerzan for some reason and state that those formori were obviously following his paradigm, and therefore he is a bad person too. Then they watch TV on Joné's amazing computer-phone-visor-thing and get mad that the corrupt networks are only showing the looters and not their prayer circles and dancing.

Then they cut forward to noon and the labor march, and as they watch the parade of "Beefy Steel Workers and Solid-looking women" Ringer thinks, "'All these guys, for this?' For Gaia ?, he wondered. The alternative was for me? "

At this point they're just beating you over the head with it, but Ringer's gay. Very gay.

Then the cops show up, because they must. They shout at the protesters to disperse and then immediately start shooting at them with wooden bullets .
As an aside, wooden bullets exist, but they're basically blanks, wood can't withstand the stresses of being fired out of a gun and pulverizes itself into splinters either in the barrel or shortly after leaving it(or so the internet tells me). I'm sure the author was trying to make it sound like the ebil cops were filling them full of splinters but it's unlikely that they'd injure someone at anything less than point blank range and at that point it would probably be more from the gas escaping the gun than the bullet itself.
Anyways, the cops start spraying people with pepper spray, beating people in the streets with batons, formori are popping up out of nowhere and eating people, generally a bad time. Ringer and Joné get into an alleyway to hide when, well, this happens.
That pun hurts my brain.

More evil Wyrm anarchists are beating Hack with billy clubs or something. Another fight ensues. Hack begs Ringer to leave him there because he's bitten the Wyrm Taint and now it lives inside him. Ringer refuses to do so because he's his friend. Buddy cop quota fulfilled they continue on to find their other pack mates.

They run into Rich, hooray, and continue on through the streets of Seattle as night falls. The rest of this has to be quoted.
Search your feelings, you know it to be true.

So, Rich's father is a Black Spiral Dancer(Evil werewolves who serve the Wyrm, they also get bat-like features), and just so happens to be in Seattle, and just so happens to run into his son who also just so happens to be in Seattle. Dance Vader gives the normal 'join me and you shall be more powerful than you can possibly imagine!' sweetened by 'Your mother is with us too!', but Rich refuses. at this point Joné and Mandy show up out of nowhere and they beat him into unconsciousness and then take him captive. Because Joné said they should, for some reason. They do some quick street interrogation, find out that Dance Vader's real name is Mason, and Rich seems touched by this revelation for some reason. Then they march him off to the nearest safe house to figure out what they should do with a captive black spiral dancer.

That's the intro story.
Next up: History

History

posted by Kurieg Original SA post

Part 2


Chapter 1: History
I apologize in advance if this seems disjointed but that's because it is. In character stuff is blended with out of character stuff without any indication, lines are attributed to the wrong people, and the narrator changes points of view just because. I'll also be trying to provide a bit of system specific backstory and terminology explanation where necessary.
Anyways after the Seattle chapter, things can only get better right?

Yes, they're flashing back to Woodstock '99 , if you have any foreknowlege of that you know that this is going to be something special.

The prologue starts with Ringer and Hack driving to Woodstock to meet up with their new pack for the first time. Hack gets in for free because yet again people confuse him for a dog.

Amanda catches them first and helpfully informed Joné and Rich "Hey, it's Kevin!" Joné responds with "Sure he's not a ringer? The pod people are awful clever." and in an incredible contrivance(like everything in this book), Kevin's deed name is "Bell Ringing In An Empty Sky". For reference, Hack is "Snow on Hackberries", and Rich is "His Rich Antler", which either means that A:his actual name is Rich, and the person who gave him his deed name was really purile/uncreative. or B: Rich is his nickname, we don't know his real name, and Darth Mason is really good at guessing names. I'm not sure which option is stupider. The pack is here at Woodstock for a tribal moot, which is when a bunch of the tribe get together to talk about whatever and reinforce tribal unity. Normally having a Moot in a highly populated area is a very bad idea, but the Children are the peace tribe, so of course they're at Woodstock.

We now find out that Joné had her first change online on a webcam, because she was online when someone tried to crash her computer with a virus. This pissed her off enough that she spontaneously turned into a werewolf. But it didn't actually crash her computer, because her webcam kept broadcasting and a bunch of people saw her change and freaked out. That's kind of a big deal as far as the werewolf society is concerned, as humans aren't supposed to know that werewolves exist. Also, first changes normally kick in when your fight or flight response is triggered, not when you accidentally download a virus. Maybe that means she values her computer more than her own life? Thankfully a web spirit just happened to be watching and magically fixed everything. Then Joné dropped out of college and started a website design company and runs a big old werewolf message board for Garou and their families, and this is also apparently how our pack met. How the hell does that work? SHA AND SLT LFPACK, WILLING TO TRAVEL?

Ringer's first change was a bit more standard, his dad and his two brothers were in a car and crashed into a school bus and 2 other cars. He changed and escaped.
And saved his father and his brothers.
and everyone in the bus .
That's not supposed to happen, ever, like I said, first changes are Fight or Flight things, either you try to kill everything that has ever pissed you off, twice, or you run the fuck away. There's one or two canon characters that changed in response to family members being threatened and they saved them, but the only reason he saved an entire school bus full of children is so that the Children of Gaia can rest even more snugly on their designated good guy throne. But he didn't save the people in the other cars so that he can have tragic backstory .
Trust me this is only going to get worse.

The pack then has an argument over what they're going to have for lunch, for no real reason other than they can remind us yet again that Hack is a wolf and wolves are different , but then Hack gets mad at them and tells them that he's half-human and he'll eat whatever. So the argument is pointless, particularly because the meal isn't even described, they skip straight from that argument to them leaving to go to the Moot, which is being held in the Umbra(spirit world) which they do by 'stepping sideways', which is just a Neologism for 'entering the umbra', but you need a reflective surface to do that. I can't remember specifically why werewolves need a mirror to enter the umbra beyond SYMBOLISM/DM trapping everyone in a room without mirrors, but that's the rule. Luckily there's a convenient 'peace maze' with saran wrap walls that they can use. Apparently no one notices that hundreds of people go into the maze and never leave. Anyways, the moot!
Okay, first of all, Joné is being a special snowflake again, she seems to get the most ‘screen time’ second to Ringer and Hack. Rich seems to mostly just be there to be the token Metis, and Mandy is more or less a non-entity beyond her role as leader of the pack. Joné has more electronics than most Glass Walkers, has more spirit allies than most Theurges, has single handedly put together a giant werewolf message board that apparently everyone uses, and is still only Rank 1. (She also has an accent over the E in her name which I have to type every time she’s mentioned )
Secondly:
Paws-that-refreshes


After that we finally get into the History section, and since there’s a prize for ‘oldest tale’, we’ll be going backwards from present day to Pangea.

The ‘present day’ story is a second hand retelling of the ‘Allmoot’, which is apparently like a regular moot but bigger, and a speech given there by True Silverheels, who is one of the biggest lore NPCs the Children of Gaia have. What message is so vital to get across that they have to give it one of the most important mouthpiece in the tribe? “We must abandon the camps and factions, abandon all divisions in this most divided of tribes.”
Yeah.
To put this in perspective, Camps are to Werewolves what Bloodlines are to Vampires. Subdivisions of the tribes, but unlike in Vampire, they provide minimal mechanical benefit, access to a few extra gifts at most. Some don’t even give you that. Most tribes have three to four camps, CoG’s had nine. So I guess I can understand where they’re coming from with ‘most divided of tribes’ thing, but Children of Gaia are also the only tribe that had explicit rules allowing you to be in multiple camps at once. I’m not sure if this is supposed to be the author going ‘I hate camps get rid of them’ or a decision handed down from higher up, but there’s still 6 pages later in the book devoted to describing camps and how to join them.
And just in case you were wondering if the abolishment of camps was a good idea or not, Ringer immediately chimes in, “ Whooee, Ringer Thought. That guy had the stones! ”
See guys, if the POV NPC likes him that means he's okay!

Okay then, what’s next?
Wonderful.

“ ‘It sucks being a Child of Gaia!’ Rich complained. ‘Other tribes don’t trust us, and we can’t even agree on what we actually want to do!’ “ Considering the book you’re in Rich, this carries all the weight of a 13 year old complaining that their mother got them the wrong color iPod for their birthday. Amanda goes on to explain that the reason people don’t trust the Children of Gaia is that they got complacent after the 1960’s, when they last saw real progress, and then got lazy and didn't do anything for thirty years. She also describes a bunch of different things they did, fighting the Klan to secure voting rights. Someone named Summer Robinson was apparently a huge proponent of the Voting Right’s movement. And, oh yeah, this.
Yeah, remember how I mentioned Ringer was gay? So’s Hack.
You know, the wolf .
I’ll address this later when they bring it up again, don’t worry, but they’re not done yet.
I don’t think that you’re allowed to complain that the other tribes don’t take you seriously anymore and then in the same breath wistfully describe your uncle’s werewolf sex dungeon . And if the LD50 of Heroin that I found is correct, and the weight adjustments in the Werewolf core book are accurate. It would take roughly 2 liters of heroin to reliably kill a werewolf. Yes, that is a lot of smack Mandy.
Frankly so am I .
Last I checked, Roe V Wade hadn’t been repealed. Also last time I checked, it hadn’t been repealed in the World of Darkness, seems to me like that would probably be a way bigger issue than a throwaway line in a list.
What? This comes completely out of left field and reads way too much like an authorial soap box. I didn't edit anything out between the previous two quotes, at all. She literally just breaks down because those damned liberals made it cool to call women bitches.
And then, for cheap pathos she breaks down crying and the entire pack hugs her and comforts her and tells her it’s going to be alright.
And we find out that the current tale teller at the moot fire is a Ragabash telling everyone about how awesome Acid trips were



I think that’s a good place to stop for now.
Next up, History of the World Part 2

More History

posted by Kurieg Original SA post

Chapter 1 Part 2
A preface to this chapter, a friend of mine pointed out that Joné's Visor might be a Handspring Visor , and not a Geordi LaForge style piece of eyeware. This only makes her character marginally less stupid.

Also: this one is pretty big because I just want this chapter to be over and done with, and all the horrible shit is at the end. Enjoy.

The World Wars
I really don't have much to complain about here, the speaker is an Ahroun and an ex-member of the Imminent Strike, which is basically the camp of the Children of Gaia that believed that if you wanted peace, you had to fight the battles presented to you, ignoring a fight isn't peace, and that's a refreshing Point of view for the tribe to have.
He talks about the war crimes and horrors presented by both sides, and the spiritual ramifications thereof. He also talks about what caused World War II, the reparations and demilitarization inflicted on Germany post WWI and pushed for by France, and how they influenced the culture in Germany that gave rise to Hitler. He also says that turn the other cheek is rarely the thing you want to do in war time, which causes most of the listeners to start muttering angrily.
It's a very frank and realistic point of view to have and while I won't forgive the rest of the writing it's a breath of fresh air.

The American West
Again, I can't really find fault with this one. It tells of some of the metaplot from the Werewolf: Wild West supplement known as the Storm Eater. Basically a ridiculously powerful spirit that required all thirteen living tribes to gather together, and one powerful Theurge from each tribe sacrificed their lives to re-bind. Considering that the last time it was active it required an entire tribe to sacrifice their lives to put it back to sleep. The given message is that when a great need arises, no matter the tribal arguments, they will gather together and succeed.
Also good, no comments from the Joné and Ringer show.

The Enlightenment
But it's not to last.
Thank you Joné. I was almost enjoying the book for two pages, and this section isn't much better.
Apparently in 1754, the Children of Gaia had an Allmoot, and at this Allmoot...
He's quick to point out that the CoGs didn't *invent* these concepts, but they saw what a good idea they were and made sure that everyone knew it. And apparently the Children of Gaia were responsible for the constitution of the united states! one of the CoGs worked as a maid for James Madison and "Offered her own ideas." She also apparently had a working relationship with Ben Franklin.
You raised my hopes and dashed them quite expertly, book. Good for you.

The English Civil War
I'm not British, so I'm not quite sure how ridiculous this is, but they're co-opting yet another historical group for their own gain again. Apparently The Diggers were all Children of Gaia and Kinfolk. Apparently the only reason that history didn't document their contributions was because the Veil(the thing that makes people go kinda crazy when Garou go into werewolf form) made them forget. Then there's a little rant by Ringer about how gardening is awesome and that he should plant some chilli peppers in the caern.

The Age of Faith
If I call it the Age of Chivalry that makes it better!

I'm going to spare you more flowery prose and just give you a summary.
Apparently he was a CoG that the Silver Fangs(Basically a Garou Tribe who's 'hat' is Russia, Leadership, and Good Breeding. They're also the nominal leaders of the Garou Nation) trusted, very much. Since he had such trust, he decided to put it to good use.
By converting a bunch of them to Christianity , you know, since he was inspired by Francis of Assisi or something.
He personally converted Bertrand du Guesclin and Enguerrand the fourth to his ideals of Christian Knighthood.

I'm double-checking every name they drop just to see if they've got a Wikipedia page... So far I'm batting over 66%. I don't know why but I feel insulted.

The Roman Empire
I had to re-read this section a few times to get the gist of it, now my head hurts.
Okay, apparently one area of heavy CoG concentration was Judea. Yes, THAT Judea. After Judas Maccabeus's revolt, apparently lots of Kinfolk were systemically murdered over the next few hundred years. After King Herod rose to power things just got worse. So the Children of Gaia did what they could to get themselves under Roman Rule. Sure it was corrupt but it was "still a civilization with laws and a measure of stability." which they got in 4CE.
Of course, in 21 CE, Pontius Pilate was installed as Govenor.

Yes

The Children of Gaia hold themselves responsible for the death of Christ

What follows is something so stupid I have to quote the whole thing. It has to be seen to be believed.


Okay so
1: The wolf not only knows about Jesus, he's studied enough of the passion to know who Pontius Pilate is.
2: Jesus may or may not be a werewolf.
3: There's a first Werewolf Church of Christ.
4: Joné knows EVERYONE. She's also a giant asshole. "Do you get crazy weepy? I'm not making fun of you."
5: Jesus is viewed as some perfect figure that all CoGs should aspire to.

The author takes this as an opportunity not only to take a dig at Christians but also non Christians. Okay, now I just don't feel insulted. I know I'm being insulted.

Greek Nights
This is another Mandy speech section. Apparently the CoG's were rather entrenched in ancient Greece. "Women had it rough in Athens, but they had more rights in Sparta than anywhere else in the world." They also owned a bunch of slaves, but you know Women's Rights are whats really important. Many of the Greek Philosophers and Artists learned at the feet of the Children of Gaia, but they eventually got kicked out by the Black Furies who were pissed off that the CoGs were horning in on their homeland.
There's also this great dig
HAVE WE MENTIONED THAT RINGER IS GAY YET TODAY? WE HAVEN'T? OH, WELL THEN, RINGER IS GAY.

Oh, and a Child of Gaia was personally responsible for Healing Darius after the Battle of Cunaxa , we don't escape revisionist history in this section either.

Babylon
Okay I'm just going to skim through this because it's dumb but it's concentrated dumb.
1: The tale teller is a Ragabash with a T-shirt that says "Jesus Saves: But Gretsky Rebounds and he scores!"
2: Apparently Babylon was fucking full of demons back in the day.
3: A single Ragabash named Mocks Demons went to Babylon and started telling tales about how the Children of Gaia were hiding in the city and were only waiting for the right time to strike, which made the Demons doubt themselves.
4: There were no Children of Gaia, but the merest THOUGHT that they might be there heartened the people enough to rise up against the demons.
5: The Children of Gaia are so awesome they can save the day without actually doing jack shit.
Yes, I think I will.

Crete
Oh goody, Soldier-of-Paradise is here. Near as I can tell. Soldier is one of the Author's friend's characters.
But see guys, he's on the Michener, not the Mitscher, completely different person.

Joné also won't shut up about how awesome he is and talks about his time in boot camp for a while. Wait. How the hell does Joné know all of this?
So he's smart, witty, handsome, married, and sounds like Sean Connery.
Nnng, I had almost forgotten about this. Yeah, the author uses kewl instead of Cool pretty much every time the word comes up, and my brain breaks a little bit inside when I think of this southern military man talking like he accidentally swallowed a thirteen year old from '95 and is desperately trying to cough him back up.

His story is basically, "There were Were-Aurochs at one point in time, they're all dead now. The Minotaur was the last Were-Auroch, he was also a tortured individual who was put out of his misery by 'some human who doesn't matter'.

Also this
Joné knows his favorite drink order and is trying to set up him with her gay packmate
What the fuck.

Sumeria
There were two cities, Umma and Lagash. They fought, a lot. But the Children of Gaia showed up and installed one of their kinfolk as the leader of Lagash Urukagina , because, you know. no culture can actually develop or thrive without the CoG at the helm, it’s just not allowed. Oh, but then ‘Big Man’ Zaggesi, the king of Umma ‘broke the sacred peace’ and overthrew Lagash. And with a name like ‘Big Man’ I can only hope that he overthrew him by putting him on the turnbuckle and body slamming him onto the mat. But with his dying breath Urukagina cursed Zaggesi, and 25 years later Sargon of the Semites showed up and put Zaggesi on a literal leash. Because he broke the sacred peace, or something.
Sure why not.

The Impergium
The next speaker has an accent “A mix of Irish and Australian” that apparently makes Ringer think of ‘far lands, far times’... So the British Empire? Whatever.
I am without words, this next section needs a quote.
WHY
This is LUDICROUSLY STUPID . The idea is that Humans were somehow overpopulated, and the werewolves needed to kill them down to cull their numbers, which is a thing I guess i can understand. But Overpopulation happens when your capacity to breed exceeds your predators and other environmental dangers. We accomplished this by the creation of weapons, tools, and communal living. There’s still a hard limit on how many children a body can produce. YOU CAN’T JUST RAPE UP MORE. It’s also not brought up again since the problem is apparently that killing all the humans is what was feeding the wyrm, in addition to the Rapocalypse. making it COMPLETELY TANGENTIAL.

Then there’s this story where a Werewolf was sitting around watching the humans rape each other in a giant pile or something, lamenting the fact that they were growing too numerous. When a rat walked up to him and goes “Hey, is it possible to kill with love in your heart?” To which the wolf responds with "What the fuck are you talking about?". Well apparently Gaia told the rat to kill the humans, not ALL of them, just enough so they don't overpopulate the globe. So the wolf says “Yes. Eat their grain so they are less likely to breed and spread disease so the weaker die off. If Gaia has asked you to do this then it is an act of love.” the moral of the story is that if GAIA ASKS YOU TO MURDER SOMEONE IT IS OUT OF LOVE DO NOT QUESTION IT.

Oh and then the Hermaphrodite shows up.
Thank you Hermaphrodite Werewolf Jesus for saving us from the Love Rats.


Ringer asks if it’s true and Mandy replies that it probably is, if only because the other tribes curse his name so often. Since he interrupted their Murderfest.

Can the chapter be over now?


Mandy passes Ringer a flask of spiced mead to relax him, and I can understand why.

Anyways, the Wars of Rage are when the werewolves went to war with the other shapeshifters because they wouldn’t acknowledge that the werewolves were the best things ever, and of course, the CoG’s tried to save them. But they still blame themselves, because they were naive idiots.
See, basically what would happen was, the CoG’s would summon some of the other shapeshifters to a peace conference, and one of the other tribes would ambush them and kill them. Another time a Shadow Lord gave a mediator a ‘peace talen’ to help with the Grondr (were-boars), which turned out to be a fucking bomb, when the dude went to the Grondr to apologize they eviscerated him.
Joné, annoyed that they’re talking about people that she doesn’t know, takes the opportunity to use her visor to ‘stylus through several layers of email to a GPS page’, we get it, Joné is amazing, you can stop now. It also occurs to me that they might be talking about a Handspring Visor PDA and not a Geordi laForge ‘Visor’, but that only makes it slightly less stupid.

Ringer posits that since the ‘warrior tribes’ tricked them, it wasn’t the CoG’s fault. Mandy points out that yeah, they were tricked, but the CoG’s kept on trying and kept getting tricked and kept getting people killed. Also someone is passing around homemade cookies. It’s bizarre that they pick now to break out the mead and cookies? “Oh shit they’re talking about that time we fucked up GET THEM DRUNK AND GIVE THEM CHOCOLATE!”

Origins of the children of Gaia

So Joné recognizes the next person walking up to the fire as “Eric”, he’s carrying a guitar. and Ringer actually manages to get a chuckle out of me for once
But then this happens
That’s a Genre now?
Anyways he starts singing, in the Garou tongue, which is why none of the lyrics to the song rhyme, at all.
No, I am not typing out this stupid shit.
Rough summary: Gaia made Garou. Garou split into two factions. The factions fought. Gaia found 5 dead puppies. Gaia nursed them back to life. Those 5 dead puppies were the first CoGs.
Everyone claps.
Then Ringer notices the guy who told the stupid ass story about Sumer and asks him if the origin story was true. He says that there are other stories, and Joné activates her visor’s MP3 recording functionality. Fuck you Joné.
Imagine four werewolves at the edge of a cliff...

He just kind of rambles on for a page and a half about things that might have been, mentioning that at one time “We slew humans to prevent their numbers from growing, but also to prevent the skilled and powerful hunters from challenging our terror-rule over the two legs. We wanted to control their food-gathering, use them as breeding stock, drive them as cattle.” but then a couple of garou decided they wanted peace, and they were the first CoGs.

Then Rich, out of nowhere, stands up, shifts to crinos screams “The Garou are the children of Mother Gaia. Let no one dispute this!” and then falls over and has a seizure. They shove Ringer’s bo-staff in his mouth and then all four of them sit on him to pin him down so he doesn’t fucking murder someone by accident.

But then the tale telling is over, and the prize is announced. SURPRISE MANDY WINS! Since apparently while other people were, you know, paying attention to the people actually competing. The Judges were listening to Mandy explain things to her pack, which was the real point and therefore she wins. Also we finally find out her deed name “Steam Rising on Teacups”, so there’s that.
Then Rich sits up and says that everyone should go to bed now. And they do. Sure. why not.

Trials of the current age
These tales take place at “Another campfire, another night” which means we’re free of Joné and the wonder PDA for 2 whole pages

They’re short stories mostly just to patch in holes or let the author soap box some more.

1: Abolishing camps is probably a dumb idea, both wolves and humans are territorial, and, you know, wolves run in packs(even if wolf packs are family units. werewolf packs aren’t, but they don’t make this distinction because the author probably didn’t care) so trying to make one gigantic uniform uber-pack is a dumb idea.

2: AIDS is bad. And there’s probably a worse disease that’s coming down the pipe. AND THERE’S A SHADOWY GOVERNMENT ORGANIZATION THAT’S CREATING THEM HUNT THEM DOWN AND STOP THEM!

3:Countries have Rogue Nukes........ that’s... basically it. Countries have Rogue Nukes and you should be scared.

4: This is talking about the Metaplot from the end of the Time of Thin Blood book, when the Ravnos Antedeluvian woke up and started murdering everyone somewhere in India. Then 3 super powerful Kuei-jin block out the sky with storm clouds to try and slow him down. Also there’s a single solitary werewolf pack there basically looking up at Kaiju nightmare man and shitting their pants. Then the Technocracy drops a Spiritually Awakened Nuke on him, which not only kills everyone in the radius *but* Ravnos, but rips their spirits asunder, cracks open the walls of hell, creates the avatar storm, and allows wraiths to walk the world. Also since the Kuei-jin are dead now, the clouds part, and the Technocracy use their giant array of mirror satellites from Batman and Robin to focus all available sunlight onto Ravnos, which finally kills him.

What I’m saying is Time of Thin Blood was crazy

There, Chapter 1 is FINALLY done.

Next chapter has to be better, right?




Up Next: Werewolf Biker Gangs

Society

posted by Kurieg Original SA post

Chapter 2:Society

This chapter begins with a quote,
Which is apparently a real world quote, but I feel it’s only confusing the message somewhat.

We open with the pack sitting around a campfire, listening to a folksinger who apparently sucks, according to Ringer. "But it wasn't polite to let him know, no matter how much Ringer would have liked to put the guitar out of its misery by smashing it over its owner's skull." The Peace and Love tribe, people. Then he asks "So what are these 'camps' I keep hearing about?" Which is probably the most transparent set up I've ever seen. The response is that some are geographical, but most are ideological, and that all of the Children of Gaia ones are ideological, and all of them share Unicorn's ideal for Peace. We'll see how well that works out.

The Anointed Ones
These guys are the absolute peacenicks, "worse than Joné will ever be." and the point is raised that when your basic structure includes something named 'rage', total peace really isn't an option. As a result, the other tribes don't let them into their Packs, since you don't want someone watching your back who won't raise a finger to save your life.

Joné defends them, bringing up The Angels in the Garden, another camp, and their one real success against the Seventh Generation, which was basically the Arkham branch of NAMBLA. That while the other tribes were doing the actual, you know, destroying of the group, they were saving the children, and they even brought most of them 'into the veil' and made them kinfolk (yes that's a thing we'll get to later in chapter 3). While saving children is laudable, if that's your only claim to fame as a 9 foot tall death-beast, you've got issues. It's even more telling that the Angels disbanded right after the 7th gen fell, and they joined up with another camp.

_{Here we have our first piece of Leif Jones artwork, don't worry, we're easing you into this. This isn't bad beyond the fact that it looks pretty empty for Woodstock.}

Seekers of the Lost Tribes
That camp being the Seekers, which are honestly one of the CoG camps I actually like, though they're presented rather horribly here. What they are, is a tribe that tries to find information on the 3 dead Garou tribes, and the other dead shapeshifter breeds. They also try to do genealogical studies on kinfolk to try to find the last traces of Croatan blood, things like that. The reason being that they believe that the only way they can win the apocalypse is if all the Garou tribes and all the other Fera join together to fight the Wyrm. How they're presented here are a bunch of Bigfoot hunters who roam the nation hunting down 'ghost wolf' sightings and trying to 'redeem' black spirals back into the pure tribe they used to be. The only redeeming part of this section is that we find out that Joné is a seeker and the entire pack starts ripping into her being nuttier than a conspiracy theorist.

The Patient Deed
Yyyyyeeeeep.
Yeah, once again the Children of Gaia think the best of people and are shot down, and thankfully Rich points out that "I've heard this before." Ringer, on the other hand, points out that "I don't think this is related to some fault you see in the Children. We know better by now." Again, let me remind you that they're at Woodstock '99, no, they don't know better by now.

Back with the revisionist history again, and yeah this isn't going to end well.

So they drop acid with the Hells Angels, have orgies, etc. and think that the Hells Angels are as nice as anyone else because they only interacted with them while they were on acid . Then they invited them to an Anti-War march, and the Hell's Angels, being a motorcycle gang founded by WWII veterans, turn on them.

The moral of this story is to make us feel bad because apparently the Patient Deed did a whole bunch of good things before the march basically made the Camp implode, but no one remembers it because of the 1960s. And the rest of the Garou nation paints the Children of Gaia as stupid Peacenicks just because of the things they did during the 1960s. Which is an argument that I'd take more seriously if THEY WEREN'T CURRENTLY AT WOODSTOCK 1999.

Here, have werewolf bikers.

_{Yeah that's more like it. Look at that horrible anatomy and that 'Wolf'.}

Imminent Strike
This is the other camp I like, the way they're characterized here is as the members of the CoG who are sick and tired of the other tribe's idiocy when it comes to pursuing peace at all costs, and are the ones who are actually willing to fight to protect the peacemakers, or fight because fighting needs to be done, or fight because they're goddamn werewolves.
Joné calls them "Hardasses", which only serves to endear them to me more.

Servants of the Unicorn
These guys are the ones who try to make peace with the other tribes, and were the vast majority of the tribe before the camps were abolished.

As an aside, Ringer notes that the entire place feels 'kooky', because it was, apparently, a Caern at some point in the past. Caerns are locuses of spiritual power, and are incredibly valuable. My, how convenient that there's a Caern underneath the old Air Force Base where Woodstock is being held.

Anyways, apparently some of the members of this Camp try to make peace by showing how much they can contribute by gathering together members of other camps and pointing them in the direction of places of Wyrm Corruption. Apparently there's a group that goes on regular treks into the spirit world to hunt down Wyrm Sites, to which ringer responds " Kewl . Can I go?"

Then there's this rather bizzare aside talking about the Get of Fenris, which is the tribe that takes from Germanic/Norse stock and is basically the de-facto 'Warrior Tribe amongst an entire race of warriors' group. Apparently the Get and CoGs worked together in South America to fight apartheid, since they thought that if the Whites were so superior to blacks they could damn well fight to protect those rights without Laws. Which is darkly hilarious I guess. But then they go on to say how the Get LOVED the Zulu tribes, and bred with them because they were Brave and Strong. Which I can see them doing, but it seems rather tacked on and kind of a "SEE THEY AREN'T RACIST GERMANS I SWEAR" thing. Then there's this little gem.
uhh, okay then.

Bringers of Eternal Peace
This is the token 'evil' Camp that every tribe is required to have by law. Get of Fenris get The Swords of Heimdall, a group of Neo Nazis. Red Talons get the Lodge of the Predator Kings, who think that their tribe is screwed and that they should kill(and eat) as many humans as they can before they're gone.
Children of Gaia get the Bringers, who are basically 'Black Spirals who still think they're Children of Gaia', as Mandy puts it. They think that since peace is the only answer, they should just reach the easiest peace by giving up and letting the Wyrm win. Since if the world's destroyed everyone will be at peace.

Then we get into the various breeds.
Homid
The werewolves born as humans. They're most of the tribe, so Hack tries hooking Mandy up with a 'good Kinfolk stud.' she points out that it wouldn't really change much since as a Homid herself, she would have homid children, where as a male can impregnate as many wolf kinfolk as he wants, just so that image is lodged in your brain. They don't really go into much detail beyond the fact that they're very multi-ethnic
Thanks for reminding me that Ringer and Hack are gay, book, I almost forgot.

Lupus
The wolf born. Hack goes off on a little speech about how only about 1/50 Garou in the children of Gaia are Lupus, and most of them are born in zoos, like Hack was. There's also apparently a rite that allows homids to have lupus pups which goes completely against what they just said in the last paragraph. Hack also goes off a bit on how the wolves take extra time to understand 'peace' as a concept since fighting is kind of a part of life when you're a wolf. Ringer asks if he would prefer being wild to living with humans, Hacks says that he'd miss humans with their crazy ideas. Also Ice cream. And then Ringer says that the two of them should 'go for a walk'. While 'Music pummeled them as Blip-3.1416 began a set.'
As they're walking, Ringer again mentions that this place feels off, and hack agrees with him, saying that there's something bad going on.

Metis
Back with the not-gay people.
Wait, he's just lounging around in dire-wolf form? There's a wolf the size of a car just sitting around at Woodstock and NO ONE NOTICES.

Oh well, Rich and Joné snipe back and forth for a while about how technically the Black Spiral Dancers are PLENTY accepting of Metis. And Rich tells his pack mates that his father is a Dancer, and that his Mother was Fianna(the token Irish tribe).
Apparently the Dancers attacked their Sept while they were having a revel. His father "Raped her and mutilated her with silver, then left her alive to watch her packmates hanged, cut down alive, and skinned over a fire." You know, because otherwise we wouldn't know they're the bad guys. Then his mother escaped to a CoG Sept, bore Rich, then ran off to go regain her honor by dying in battle against the nearest black spiral sept.

There's some talk about how the Metis are hard workers because they have to ingratiate themselves to the other members of the tribe, and that they use the fact that they're stuck in Crinos form until their first change to work as heavy labor. Honestly it seems kind of exploitative since they're technically minors but whatever.

Kinfolk

_{That girl seems incredibly blasé about the fact that her face is melting}
Ringer and Hack rejoin the group, I'm not sure if they really just went for a walk or if they shagged behind a tree, but Joné grins at them when they return. Kinfolk are the humans and wolves that are related to Garou but aren't Garou. They're immune to the Delirium that affects most normal humans so they're a nice support network for them to have. Ringer points out that the kinfolk effectively are the Children of Gaia because they keep the various organizations that they've founded to promote peace running. Including the Church of Gaia, and I shit you not, the "Gaian Rainbow Action Community Explorers". Which is apparently the Gay Boy Scouts.

Sept Positions
Apparently the CoG's have their own special positions within the hierarchy of the sept. These are pretty pointless so I'm only going to mention the things that stand out

Voice of the Goddess
A female only position that serves as the speaker for Gaia in the sept. There's no real election, and Mandy pretty much flat out admits that it's basically the bossiest woman in the Sept who gets the position by default.

Arm of the Goddess
The main protector and 'get shit done' person in the Sept. Apparently Ringer used to date the Arm at his last sept. Which sounds like a really awkward masturbation euphemism which almost has to be intentional.


_{Supply your own Rocky or Shawshank Redemption caption}

The Heart of the Goddess
I hate you Joné.

The Heart of the Goddess is the center of the Sept, that's... basically it. There's no real description of it beyond the fact that it's often a Metis, or someone removed from the cycle of mating, and sometimes they're crossdressers. They try to keep the sept centered and operating without actually doing anything. There's a story about one Heart that collected the life stories of everyone on video tape, apparently that was a big thing.

Green Branches
Someone who speaks for nature, the plants and animals who can't speak for themselves

Cut Branches
Someone who speaks for the dead. Since they're usually real downers most septs don't keep them around anymore.

Then Ringer decides he wants to see if the beer tent is still open, and him and Hack walk off again, right past the mud wrestling pit.

Yes, you heard me correctly. There is apparently a mud wrestling pit, where two men and two women are fighting 'mostly nude'. Hack says that 'this is the tackiest thing he's ever seen'. Which it is, you can't just throw something like this in there and then say that it's tacky and get away with it.

Oh well, some random Theurge walks up besides them and asks if they want to go to a Rave, because he's going to hold a rite there. So Hack shifts up to human form, and he and Ringer go mosh at the rave for a while as the Theurge circles the mosh pit chanting.

Something tells me History-of-Clay drives around in a van with 'free-candy' written on the side.

The Litany

Yeah this seems like a good place to stop.
Next Time:
_{Kill Me}

The Litany of Funny Walks

posted by Kurieg Original SA post

Chapter 2 part 2: The Litany of Funny Walks

Sorry for the delay, now, where were we?
HAVE WE MENTIONE nevermind they aren’t even being circumspect about it now.
There’s going to be a lot of quoting for this section of the book because even I’d be incredulous of some of the things that the book is going to be throwing at us.
The way that Ringer and Hack's relationship has been played so far suggested that they'd been doing it for quite some time, so I don't know where the 'first time' stuff came from. At least they point out that they both stay human when they’re doing it, so that's some comfort I guess.
That said, kweerboy?
I’m not sure if it’s intentional, or if I’m reading too much into things, but the ringer hack relationship has a really weird vibe to it, like an ‘older man exploiting a younger less experienced boy’ thing. The fact that he’s flat out saying ‘well yeah i have sex with other bitches but it’s just to have kids’ doesn’t help things. Nor does the fact that most of the players in this scenario are literally bitches .

Enough of that tangent, the Litany! Basically it’s the Ten Commandments: Werewolf Edition. It’s a list of tenets that were (in theory) handed down by Gaia herself. The scenario via which we learn about the litany? We’re flashing back to when the entire pack were in a diner the previous day.
The wolf is just sitting there, in a booth, eating chinese food, and people are just looking at this and smiling like it happens every day.
Mandy goes on to state that “the litany is phrased the way it is for a reason” but also “Things change. Oh, things change.” so it’s written the way it is but it also changes, or something.

Anyways, you know how I’ve been harping on how the Ringer/Hack relationship is really out of place in Werewolf: the Apocalypse? The reason is rule 1 of the Litany.
No. Just No. This is the section of the litany that is most often reinterpreted by whatever author wants to put their agenda first, and it really shows here. Yes, the rule is there because Metis are a bad thing. But it doesn’t have a rider of ‘but gay is okay.’ The fact that Mandy is basically flat out telling Ringer to go have meaningless sex with a girl just to pop out a kid is really creepy. And they’re saying that the reason why the people ostracize them is because they’re jealous of all the Lycanthropic Buttsex they’re having. No, you’re being ostracized because you’re breaking the first commandment of their religion. I’m pretty sure that if I went into a Catholic Church and started talking up my brand new Golden Cow Idol, they’d ostracize me too, and it wouldn’t be because they’re jealous of my shiny new bull god.
Once again the Children of Gaia are the ‘real’ interpreters of the Litany because all the other tribes are doing it wrong. They stray very close to putting themselves at the center of a real world event citing the US/Japan peace as a major victory vs the Wyrm. AND once again Ringer goes on about how awesome it is to have a gay werewolf boyfriend. It’s the TB:COG Trifecta. Also, What the hell, Mandy. Maybe you could be a little less of a dick to Rich? This is the second time on the same page that mandy has said “Sorry Rich, but it’s true.”
So they're just having a nice conversation, walking through the front gate of Woodstock with their pet wolf, and he just starts off on a huge screed about respecting people's territory that to everyone else would come off as a series of very angry barks. Mandy backs off and boils the argument down to "It's good to be polite" and changes the subject as quickly as she can.

Accept an Honorable Surrender
This section is bad, but not 'quote the whole thing' bad. Joné argues that this tenet implies that it's even better to resolve a problem without fighting. Hack states that all of Gaia's children have ways to avoid fighting. Joné counters that Humans don't. Then Hack(the wolf) points out that humans created diplomacy, statecraft, and the Congress of Vienna.

Submission to those of a higher station
This part isn't horrible, just wordy.
Starts out with a "Not It" contest when they try to decide who their Pack Alpha is, then we get to Mandy, "'I am not some kind of patriarchal authority figure. I think it's an outmoded idea.' She folded her arms defiantly." Which of course pisses off Hack. They go back and forth for a while when a guy shows up out of nowhere and interrupts them.
Once again this one inconsequential pack, notable only because the POV character is in it, gets summoned to a big thing. You see, it's not the guy coming out of nowhere and inviting them to a random drug party that bothers Joné, it was all the flowery prose in their speech. Which they use to lead into the next bit.

The First Share of the Kill for the Greatest in Station
"STOP INTERPRETING THE LITANY IN WAYS THAT DON'T ALLOW ME TO HAVE SEX WITH RINGER GOD DAMMIT!" Welcome to the moral compromise club, Hack. The rest of the pack can keep you company there.

Ye Shall Not Eat the Flesh of Humans or Wolves
Hack dares Joné to re-interpret this one... and she rises to the occasion. "Just about every human society I ever heard of has rules against eating human flesh, most human flesh, most of the time. So is that one also a command not to 'eat' people by taking away their food? What they need to live?" what? If I eat a hamburger, I'm committing cannibalism by not letting someone else eat that hamburger? Then Ringer agrees with her and says that they should talk about that at the campfire they got invited to later that night. Also, it should be mentioned that Ringer has been practicing his staff-fighting forms since they arrived at Woodstock again, and at this point Hack bites said staff and they start playing tug of war.

Respect those beneath ye - all are of Gaia
This is basically a general "Don't be a dick to humans and kinfolk" Rule, though it's also a "Don't be an asshole if you're the alpha" Thing. Though Rich gets a dig in at the Get of Fenris "The Get are beneath us, beneath or contempt, at least. Do we respect them?"
The peacemaking tribe. Folks.

The Veil shall not be lifted
You know, don't let humans know that werewolves exist. Kind of the exact opposite of this.

_{Look, Leif drew a Werewolf on model for once. Give him a gold star.}
"This is the worst one for us. We're all of us closer to the humans than safety would wish... the Veil is weak for us." This is true, the CoG clan flaw is that humans get kicked up a few notches on the chart for if they remember the werewolves or go crazy or not. Mandy sees this as a great thing, "We can share Gaia's blessing with everyone. That's why she gave us this gift." Which is probably why they were talking about Garou breeding habits in the middle of a restaurant not two hours ago feeding their wolf pack mate leftover Chinese food.

Do not suffer thy people to tend to your sickness
Which they interpret as "Don't ask for help, but you don't have to turn it down if offered." The example give of this is a 110 year old werewolf howling, and Joné and Mandy geeking out about how awesome she was.

The Leader may be challenged at any time during peace
This section is completely disjointed due to the narrative.
1. the author gets in a dig at Hunters by calling them "those crazy humans with burning baseball bats."
2. Ringer once again comments at how awesome it is to have a gay wolf as a boyfriend since they're doing the head-in-lap thing again.
3. An Imminent Strike Philodox challenges True Silverheels for dominance of the CoG because he thinks that his passivity will get them crushed under the heel of the Wyrm. Like, just out of nowhere. Mid sentence he just interrupts the proceedings at the moot fire and issues a challenge.
4.The book gets an actual genuine laugh out of me. "Hack went to where halfMoons were gathering to judge. Ringer wondered how many years collectively had gone to legal wrangling while species went extinct daily. Gaia, forgive us for the snail darter. "


What's that? There might actually be some fighting over what's the proper course of action? NO! Ringer's personal hero will show up to stop things since the CoG can never be wrong ever. Oh, and that line there at the end?

You shall take no action that causes a Caern to be Violated
Yeah, there's a dormant Croatan caern here, on the Woodstock 1999 grounds. Yeah, they let thousands of humans just wander around here. Yes they address this, sort of.
Yeah... this is going to turn out wonderfully . Then someone passes Ringer the peace pipe and he tokes up.

And that's all the tenets of the litany. At least, that's all the ones that all the other tribes have. CoGs are so special they added another one.
Create and Pursue Peace Wherever you Can
This is completely ancellary. All it is is a sniping match between Hack and Mandy over whether animals are violent or not, while Ringer uses Joné's visor to search up pictures of Harpy knives... because large curved flensing knives are SUPER Peaceful.

Now we're REALLY done with the Litany, which means we get to move on to the next section that every white wolf book is required to have by law, Stereotypes!

I'll just point out the really bad ones.

Black Furies : They're all women, they're "Not all lesbos, most I know are hetero", they keep a few metis men around, since they can't father kids anyway. but otherwise they're probably the closest tribe to the CoG, even though they're all warrior amazons.

Bone Gnawers : Rich-"They are the best friends I ever had. Gnawers spoke for me in moot when the Children of Gaia would not. They love metis as well as two-legs. Honor to the sons of rat!' He seemed to consider the matter settled."

Fianna : They hate meits and all the fera. They would have let Rich's mom's die in childbirth if they could help it. CoG's see them as debaucherous assholes who don't want to do any actual work.

Get of Fenris
....
This one gets a quote.

I can't go into too much detail but, basically, this is so amazingly wrong in every single way save them not being nazis. And weren't they saying that the Get weren't racist this very chapter?

Shadow Lords : "They're really more like the kings of the spoiled potato salad. They love telling other Garou what to do, and they boss their kin around really badly. A lot of their kin leave, even go to other tribes. They love darkness, dark magic, it all stinks." apparently the only reason they haven't been kicked out of the garou nation is because they tricked the other tribes into thinking they're okay.

Vampires :
Alright, after the sterotype chapter, Ringer goes crowdsurfing at the Metallica concert while they play Fade to B...wait, what?
So you're fine with saying Metallica but not Fade to Black?
fine, whatever. After wards, Ringer decides to go take a shower and
Oh yay, it's the author's best friend, here to make my day worse.
And then he walks away without even a goodbye. Just so the author's friend's self-insertion character can point out that being a gay werewolf is the best thing.

After that there's a chapter on the Children of Gaia around the world, which is incredibly stupid. Why is it incredibly stupid? Because most of them are written in character as people sending Joné E-mails, or AIM Transcripts. It's hard to figure out what's canon information and what's bullshit.

_{I have no idea who this is supposed to be}

There's a few rants from the POVs of various characters around the world about how all the world governments suck equally and don't adhere as much to peace as they should. Generally stupid stuff.
Until you get to North America, where we get stories about how the Children of Gaia used Moon Bridges (Which are more or less exactly what they sound like, Caern to Caern paths through the spirit world made of moonlight) to smuggle slaves out of the South.

There is one story from Australia that deserves mentioning.
This isn't going to blow up in anyone's faces ever.
It does in the worst possible way

They do, however, leave us with a picture of Ringer and Joné.

Which is where the chapter ends.

Next Time: Magic Shit and Orgy Mechanics

Fetishes & Fetishes

posted by Kurieg Original SA post

Since it took me so long to get the last half of chapter 2 up, I figured I'd put some extra time in and get this finished up.




Chapter 3: Fetishes & Fetishes



Here we are, folks, the reason I wanted to review this book. Sure the other chapters have been bad, but this chapter can take the cake of all of them. Not only does this chapter have some of the worst IC Fiction of them all, it also has actual mechanics.

To set us off on the right foot, it opens up with a quote

Well first off, he got the name of the book wrong , secondly that's one hell of a cherry pick, as the quote continues


Which pretty much fits the Children of Gaia perfectly, how can you seek peace when you are literally born for war? If we had a better author maybe we'd be addressing that point, but these are gay hippie werewolves who love peace and can do no wrong, so we can't have any kind of dissent from our magic peace utopia.

There are a few more paragraphs before we get to the rules where we are told "It should also be noted that Children are very, very rarely creatures of passive resistance - they're werewolves, and as such potentially the least passive creatures on the planet." Which runs counter to most of the rest of the book, where we're shown peace lines preventing police from getting at a ritual, our pack running away from the police, and only beating up people because they were giving the rest of the peaceful protestors a bad name. Show, don't tell.

Backgrounds

There's nothing new here, and they paint in broad strokes around the fact that the other tribes don't really trust them enough to form any real lasting bonds, so most of their Allies and Mentors are other Children of Gaia. They also say that someone who has a bunch of Ancestors rating is usually cynical because they are "Well aware just how recent most Western cultural revelations are," which I'm not quite sure how to parse.

Gifts

There are a bunch of these so I'll be only including the notable ones.

Water-Conning(Level One)

By dipping your hand or touching your forehead to a body of water, you can cleanse it. Which itself isn't notable, the associated picture, however, is.



Which is apparently some kind of wolf-ferret thing.

Swallow Rage(Level One)

You can prevent yourself from going into a frenzy by either beating yourself until you stop, or shaking so hard your muscles/tendons break. Which I'm including because that's a pretty hardcore way to keep yourself from frenzying in public.

Domestic Seeming(Level One)

You make yourself look like a dog in wolf form temporarily. It says even vampires and mages are fooled. Which is kind of dumb.

Grandmother's Touch(Level Two)

There's a rank 1 gift available to every Theurge, CoG, and some tribal camps, called 'Mother's Touch' that only allows you to heal others. This one allows you to heal yourself as well. I suppose the idea is that if you are the mother, then your mother (the grandmother) can heal you.

The only reason I'm including this is because of the next gift.

Lover's Touch(Level Three)

That's a rather drastic escalation.




So yeah, if you really wanted to have your Ahroun fuck health back into a spirit, now you can.

Soothe the Savage Beast(Level Three)

By "being the catalyst for any sort of soothing music(singing, turning on a radio, playing a CD, etc.) the garou makes it more difficult to Rage." The idea being that you can have a duel between Garou and have soothing music playing so that they don't frenzy and kill each other, another example is when the Children must fight another tribe, they sometimes use this gift because they are more adpet at fighting without their Rage.

Which I'm picturing as the Get of Fenris getting their Asses kicked because one guy's standing off to the side holding up a boombox like John Cusack.

Next up are fe-


Oh, right, it's the last night of Woodstock '99.

Ringer peeks sideways and sees people tearing down the peace wall and throwing it into giant bonfires. then yells "You guys better step sideways right now!" and Ringer and his pack shift to human form and do so.


Now admittedly I wasn't at Woodstock '99, but I'm almost 100% certain that the Red Hot Chilli Peppers didn't do this.

Rich notes "Something is going horribly wrong here," but before anyone can act, Garret Faithful, Ringer's personal hero, points at a crowd and screams "They're raping that girl! Come!" The security crew start pulling the "idiotic band" off the stage, when Mandy notices a "Gauntlet of men forcing frightened, screaming women through their ranks." So she calls for the pack to go over there and stop them.

Ringer takes this opportunity to think "How had the peaceful air of the concert changed? Why had everyone become so violent?" Apparently he was too busy sleeping with Hack to have noticed Limp Bizket's set the night earlier. Or Rage Against the Machine's set immediately afterward where they Burned the American Flag .

Anyways, their first 'pack action' is a complete failure. Rich is snatching bottles of water and belts from the men who are using them to beat the women. Any who resist get a backhand to the ground where 'they lay very still.' Joné is comforting the women that they've already saved rather than helping them save more. Ringer is playing 'when all you have is a hammer' and bashing people bloody with his staff, and Hack is 'getting a little too into dealing out justice." To which Amanda comments "We need work."

Immediately after they disperse the 'wilding line', a horrible noise catches their attention, Rich feels his hair stand on end, and he steps sideways. He sees the spider webs that make up the spiritual reflection of the air force base bulging with black liquid, and steps back into the material world just in time to avoid getting covered in 'vile blackness'.


What?! Were they just hiding in the port-a-potties waiting for their chance?

Garret Faithful runs past and calls Ringer and his pack to action, citing "Trouble at the main stage - follow me!" and tells them to "keep peace, keep the human shape. Find the troublemakers and sit on 'em."

Hack's Immediate response is to say "So much for homid only!" shift to Hispo(dire wolf), charge the nearest Black Spiral Dancer, and sit on him while ringer beats his head in with his bo. Joné's in Glabro(big-ish human) form too, so they're just completely ignoring the stated procedure at this point.

Ringer and Hack(back in Human form) jump two guys hassling kinfolk by the speaker tower, only to get overpowered by them when they turn out to be Formori. Ringer's assailant picks him up and smashes him into the speaker tower a few times before one of the Kinfolk smashes the Formor in the head with a chunk of concrete. He takes the opportunity to get him in a choke hold at which point she hits him again, twice. Ringer throws him to the ground and kicks him in the stomach to make sure he's unconscious. At this point the kinfolk smiles and pulls out a switchblade, wait what?


Uhh yeah just ignore the fact that she had a switchblade and was asking if she should kill a dude Ringer, it's a completely reasonable reaction

At this point the cops show up, clean up the stragglers, disperse the rabble, etc. Amanda gets a chance to take a final look at the scene and realizes


Or, you know, if you guys had done the sensible thing and not let them hold Woodstock on top of a dormant caern you wouldn't have had to narrowly escape doom. This is the thing that bothers me most about the narrative (other than all the historical facts that they got wrong) the fact that they let all these humans onto one of their most sacred sites, because they hoped that all the peace love and happiness from the first woodstock would just open up a new caern of love and understanding right then and there. Which is violation of multiple tenets of the Litany on a tribal scale.

Alright, we're done with the Ringer and Joné show for now..

Now we're ready to take a swan-dive into the Abyss.

Rites

Rite of the Teachers

Use spiritual awakened drugs that are so toxic they deal bashing damage to you, so you can step sideways easier

The Bowels of the Mother

Author's Friend Soldier-of-Paradise is quoted as coming up with this rite, as he was serving on a Navy ship and couldn't get access to the earth required for his ritual. Which, being a ragabash and therefore godlike in the eyes of the author, prompted him to think "There's wind in your lungs, water in your veins, fire in your heart, and soil in your bowels. " Yeah, when I said this chapter had magic shit in it I literally meant Feces. Basically if you know this rite, you can substitute the body of another person (over your heart instead of over a fire, is a given example) for another Rite, but it makes the other rite harder to do.

Then out of nowhere


Rite of the Pregnant Mule

This rite is basically a rebirthing ceremony that lets a Metis adopt another child. "The adoptive parents are then counted as the true parents of the child in every way (including Renown)." Except I can't think of a single mechanical benefit of being considered someone's parent outside of a few gifts in a few books (not this one, notably), and being the parent of a Metis is actually a Renown penalty , so okay then.



_{Out of nowhere at the bottom of the page we have this image. Which is it's own special combination of amazing and horrifying. I'll let you guys chew on it without my commentary but I will tell you that yes, there was something there for me to censor.}

Rite of Comfort

The Ritemaster chants, burns mystic incense, and engages the sufferer in breathing excercises. The dispirited may leave before the rite begins, but not after it has started. The recipient takes the number of successes as extra Willpower, she may not harm herself until all the bonus points of willpower are gone.

Basically spiritual Intervention.

Anyways, we turn the page and this happens

Remember how I've been saying "Wait 'til chapter 3"? This is chapter 3.

Rite of the Clouds and Rain


Why does this need to exist.


Note that the mechanical benefits aren't actually expanded on, just 'control the tendency to frenzy', whether that's extra dice, a complete inability to frenzy, we don't know, and that's kind of the point. This is transparently just an excuse to have Crinos sex and lots of it. Note in the 'story' part it says that having multiple partners empowers the rite further, but the System section says that they must demonstrate genuine affection for each other... did I start reading Bliss Stage by mistake?


And thank god for that.


Rite of Anger's Purge
This allows you to literally beat Permanent rage rating out of someone, it's listed as a punishment rite but there's opportunities for this to be mechanically exploited. This is, supposedly, the way they subdued Dad Vader.

Rite of Talisman Adaptation
For the low low price of triple the gnosis points of the Rite of Talisman Dedication you can make your dedicated items shapeshift with you, like a backpack turning into a dog-pack.

Except that's what the Rite of Talisman Dedication already does .

Rite of the Sacred Peace
Other than using the word Peace so much that it ceases to have all meaning, this is *apparently* what caused that guy back in ancient sumer to get captured and put on a literal leash. I'm beginning to see a lot of rites that exist only to justify the stories the author came up with... or stories that were made to justify the existence of the rites.

Alternation of Generations
Case in point, remember that story that Hack was telling Mandy about a rite that would let her have wolf cubs? This is it. by spending a Permanent point of Gnosis, a female can birth a child of the opposite breed form, no guarantee that they'll be Garou... and the XP cost for Gnosis is rather substantial.
But that's not the worst part of this rite
That's... not how Garou breeding works... Lupus can have pups by human fathers and... let's just move on.

Rite of the Parted Veil
This allows Garou to 'adopt' humans as kinfolk. Which... dammit CoG's, stop being so stupidly trusting of people.


_{Behold the rare porcuwolf}

Merits and Flaws
Just going to touch on the notable ones, most of which are flaws.

Supporter (Merit)
You're REALLY GOOD at inspiring people. "(You must roleplay this, of course)" which gives you a -2 difficulty to social rolls... wait what? a 2 point merit that gives you a -2 difficulty to ANY social roll? *and* you give +1 die to any group effort? There's a reason they got rid of difficulty reduction merits in Revised.

Naive
Yup.
Vegan
Double Yup.

Docile
This one... I kind of like. for every flaw point you take your maximum rage is lowered by 2, to a max of 3/6. And you're "doglike" in appearance. There's also social problems, it oozes style and it isn't creepy. So i like it.

Burned Out
That didn't take long.
Triple Yup.

Ahimsa

You can't intentionally harm anything, you automatically get the Vegan flaw, and can't deliberately cause Lethal or Agg damage. Ever. As a creature with a bite and claw attack built in that deal Agg.

Yup

Totems
Nothing worth noting.


And we're back to the fiction. They're packing after the concert, and planning for Seattle.

Soooo much horrible in just one paragraph. Also, note that list of Groups, it will be important later.

Ugh. We've got another self defeating gay joke, A "Kewl", and casual sexism.

Fetishes
We've already had too many of those... Oh wait magic items, got it.

Dice of Challenge
I like this one just because it's literally described as a pair of d6s. The judge spends 1 point of gnosis per person competing in the contest, they all roll the 2d6 of justice, and whoever rolls highest 'wins' the argument.

Tattoo of True Shape
A fetish created by Soldier-Of-Paradise again (isn't he dreamy?) It's lets you shapeshift to larger forms in smaller spaces, like say, the hallways of a navy ship?

Pilgrim's Staff
Ugh, yet another piece of crunch that oozes 'peace'. You walk from caern to caern across the land, stopping at each one to speak out about peace, gather followers, and have kinfolk decorate the staff. When you finally arrive at your destination you get +1 die on peacemaking rolls for each caern you've visited which lasts for 1 day per caern visited. Apparently there's one elderly CoG that's been walking for forty years gathering Trinkets from caerns... you know, rather than actually doing any fighting.


_{Those are some creepy creepy faces on the men}

New Skills

Mediation
No.
Fuck you TB:COG.
Not going to talk about how AWESOME you are about making peace that you have your own skill.

Iskakku
That's better.

Garou Staff Fighting, it's got lots of flavor, and is described as a semi-non-lethal alternative to Klaviskar or Kalindo.


_{Shitty artwork though.}

They all aren't all that *useful* but they're still flavorful, I'd need someone else to tell me if the moves are even remotely translated correctly (they're all in gratuitous Sumerian) but they're still interesting.

And that's chapter 3

Next: Chapter 4: Elvis, Hillary Clinton, and General Martok

PCs and NPCs

posted by Kurieg Original SA post

Chapter Four and Epilogue: PCs and NPCs
This chapter is short enough to finish in one update because it's nothing but Premade characters and 'Tribal Personalities' read, historically important NPCs.

Which means this is the last update I have to do for this book!



Premade Characters
We start with a doozy


_{At least it's not Leif Jones anymore}
I have misgivings about this
I wonder if this section was written by the other credited author, because this character seems a little too self aware.
Yeah, it's a Werewolf fishmalk. As a plus it's a Metis with a flaw that makes them sometimes have 'fits of madness'. Like I said, it seems almost too self-aware.


It goes on to imply that her first change was during sex, and she killed the guy. But her mommy and daddy hired a good lawyer to make the problem go away. Also he was a Bully , so she doesn't feel guilty about it.
Except she DOES that's why she does all the drugs.
Maybe.
Not only is it a hippie pastiche, it's an example of why the hippie pastiche is a bad thing. The Roleplaying notes go into the fact that she's starting to do some real harm to herself, that even being a werewolf can't keep up with. And some of the spirits are showing up making demands she isn't comfortable with and threatening to blackmail her.
Also her equipment entry notes "Condoms, half a dozen secret stashes, spare set of 'party' clothes" to drive the point home the "Sex, drugs, and parties" thing.


I kinda like this concept, but that's because it's a huckster with the numbers filed off. His equipment even cites "Hoyle's book on games".



You know that guy who showed up to your elementary school class and brought in animals for you to pet and told you how awesome nature was? He was actually a werewolf secretly checking to see if anyone in your class was also a werewolf, and seeing if the school had any Wyrm taint about it.

It's a pretty good plot hook, and a perfectly serviceable NPC. But it's a really bad character. Having Werewolf Steve Irwin run up to you and let you know that there's a wyrm tainted teacher trying to corrupt a classroom of kinfolk and pre-change Garou and requesting your help to sort it out? Works pretty well. Being that NPC means you're either splitting the party or you've got the rest of the party traveling around the country/state with you waiting for you to find wyrm for them to punch.




Allow me to show you how angry I am THROUGH THE POWER OF INTERPRETIVE DANCE!


All of these characters come with pre-filled out character sheets, and they're all pretty much horrible. The Theurge and Philodox have no brawl, melee, or firearms skill. The Ragabash and Galliard have 1 dot of brawl each, and the Ahroun has (gasp) 2, and 2 dots of Iskakku. Everyone except the Ahroun have their physical stats as tertiary, and the Theurge has a stamina of 1. I'm all for having non-combat characters in games, but in a game like Werewolf you at least need to know how to throw a punch or shoot a gun. If you actually took these precons and made them into a Pack, they'd die horribly in the first combat encounter they couldn't fuck, dance, or gamble away.


The book heralds the next section as Peaceweavers but it's the important NPCs section, even more importantly is we're back to Leif Jones artwork.

Lore-Speaker Gron

_{Someone, somewhere, looked at this and said "Yes, Leif, that looks like a werewolf."}

"Him-Her" was covered earlier in the book, which makes me wonder why they're featured again here. But there's a lot of contradictions to the previously mentioned story. Apparently 1: They were not murdered by angry talons, their entire family was instead. 2: They didn't die before hearing the verdict on the repeal of the Impergium, they were killed in the first post-impergium city by vampires who wanted it for their feeding grounds.
So i guess even the authorial mouthpieces can be wrong?

Christine de Pisan

No. No, stop it TB:COG.
Yes, the author is claiming that the "mother of modern feminism" was a Children of Gaia Kinfolk. Yeah, not actually a werewolf (thank god?), but apparently City of Ladies was written to try and calm down the Black Furies, and one of her "Child of Gaia Allies" took her on regular Umbral journeys to talk to the spirits.

Raymond Love-Of-The-Goddess

Apparently he was a Christian missionary sent with the establishing fleet to Australia when they sent the first prisoners for the penal colony. Except that with his birth date (one is provided) that would have made him eighteen, pretty young for a priest even in those days. He chafed with the Silver Fangs over the treatment of the aboriginals and got sent to Norfolk Island to live out the rest of his days where he spent his time reforming rapists and murderers.

Elihu Steelwright

Yet another kinfolk, Elihu Barret was a legendary blacksmith and took a vow of poverty. Taught himself French, Spanish, German, Russian, Arabic, Chinese, and Hindi. And even Though he took a vow of poverty, worked through letters and personal visits to bring together peace workers in Europe and North America. He created the "League of Brotherhood", which was a Garou Organization working for peace in the Nineteenth Century. He died a elderly man saddened at all of the senseless death in World War I.

Except his name was Elihu BURRITT , his nickname was the "Learned Blacksmith" not "Steelwright", he created the League of Nations, and he died after the CIVIL war. He also most definitely did not look like an Elvis Impersonator. It's pretty amazing what authors thought they could get away with in the days before Wikipedia.

Garret Faithful

He's one of the heavy hitters in the Amazon war (and ringer's personal hero), but he's worried that war is only feeding the Wyrm and (Sigh) that he should seek Peace.

Otherwise he's completely bland. Next.

Edith Looking-Glass

She's the founder of Project Vajra, which sends Garou teams into countries in southeast Asia to get pictures and other evidence of human rights abuses to report them to the UN. Apparently several countries have sent kill teams after her.
Also I think Leif traced a picture of Hillary Clinton.

Cries Havok

The dude from the cover, and that picture looks really familiar for some reason. His background states that he's probably one of the best diplomats the Garou Nation has ever seen, and he'd probably be able to bring down the tribal barriers if, you know, it weren't for the fact that he's got ram horns, making it a little difficult to move around in human society.
He's also given a statblock and roleplaying notes, which contain this gem.
The "White Boy" is Evan Heals-the-Past, a rather important NPC who raised some hackles amongst the players and authors of W:TA because he's (the only) canon non-native to have been accepted by Wendigo, and the Scruffy Fianna Ragabash is Stalks-the-Truth, the example used for character creation in the W:TA core book. Making this a really bizzare snipe at the other authors for no reason I can discern.

Samuel "The Skinner" Haight

Odds are you've heard of this guy, because he's the entire reason that revised World of Darkness games basically said "NO CROSSOVER, EVER".
He started out as any other kinfolk, but he was snubbed because he, unlike his father and brother, did not change. So he sought out a vampire and became a ghoul, as a ghoul he worked out some hedge magic, and found some cultists in India that taught himt he Ritual of Sacred Rebirth. Turns out if you skin 5 Garou under the same moon phase, and preserve their skins, then make a fur suit out of them and put it on under the same moon phase (I.E. skinned 5 guys under a full moon, then perform the ritual on a full moon) you become a Garou of that auspice, and if they didn't give their lives willingly, the wyrm corrupts the everliving FUCK out of you.
So now he's Garou, except that's not enough. He assaulted the Verbenna and stole the root of their Life Tree, giving him a staff that gave him archmage level powers.
This still wasn't enough, so he woke up the Baali Antedeluvian in hopes of draining his blood to become an even more powerful ghoul .

He died, horribly.
And to drive the point home, in the Wraith corebook they point out that one of the highest ranking members of the Wraith hierarchy has an Ashtray made out of the living essence of Haight's soul.
Did I mention he's CoG Kinfolk? Cause he is. They fucked up big time and the other tribes won't let them forget it.

We're finishing this. Finally. They're back at the WTO conference and everyone's having a grand old time because they were able to keep the WTO from making a decision on Pentex. Everyone's singing and dancing.
I.. uhh... isn't that what the liver is supposed to do? Even then, you literally just got gassed, it hasn't had time to make it into your bloodstream none the less into your heart and to your kidneys in enough volume to start causing pain.
I, wait a minute. Are the rioters on your side or not, Ringer? Did you guys just let them loot and riot while you did your non-violent resistance thing? Cause if so then this response seems somewhat justified.
He really seems to like writing this kind of shit. I don't, though, so I'll summarize the rest. He shifts up to Crinos, people start running away, the cop stands there dumbstruck. He lifts up his claw and is about to tear him in half, "(No way a human could survive even one strike from him now)" and he eviscerates the guy and bathes in his entrails.

No, of course not, he notices the friendship bracelet on his arm that Mandy won for telling the best story, and remembers "Peace. Mandy's knowlege, Joné's hate of violence, Rich's iron willpower, his partner's love. " and that gives him the willpower to force himself out of a frenzy.

See, the unbroken cord is an actual fetish in this book, but it's kind of stupid and almost worthless. I completely forgot it was referenced here so I didn't put it in the review. I went back and looked at it just now.
It doesn't do this. It doesn't do anything even remotely resembling this.

Oh well.
He shifts back to homid form, and gently leads one of the police officers over to the curb to sit down.

No really


Where the fuck did the paint come from? Were the police shooting him with paintball guns in between baton hits? Spraypaint? What?
And that last line? Seriously?


We're almost at the end folks, just a few more pages.

I'm just going to tell you the SSC is in San Francisco. They just dragged subtlety out behind a shed and beat it to death shot it with paint balls.


This is an actual rite, in this book. Called Sin-Eating. I didn't go over it in chapter 3 because the way they describe it in this scenario is just so batshit insane, and they just throw it at you.
I mean, what would you do if you saw a dazed man stumbling around in a spiral away from a sand face, while people chanted, and the minute he fell to the ground someone put a plate on his back and started eating.

Anyways, they talk for a bit about if Rich really wants this to succeed or not, and if this is the right thing to do, or if it will even work. Odds are it won't, but they're hopeful.

Sterotypical Children of Gaia Bungalow, now complete with Bamboo Forest, get yours today!

You're namedropping SoP in Ringer's post-coital soul searching? Seriously? I think your friend is already appreciative man, you've mentioned him like, seven times. Also, Ringer's thoughts on the Apocalypse are, well, he's dangerously close to missing the point of the game entirely.

No. You aren't seriously doing this.
Fuck you Jim Comer.

And that's the end of the book and the story.

There's a short section by Chad Imbrogno on "Peace as a theme in Werewolf." that is relatively well written. It touches on the fact that having your players at least talk about what peace is can make the violence that they do partake in more meaningful. Make them actually think and talk about what they're fighting for rather than give them an endless parade of Banes to kill. It also asks a few questions like "What is peace" "Who has the right to enforce peace" "What means can you use to enforce peace without making things worse" and "Why even bother." It's good, and I can't entirely fault it.

Which means the last little bit is going to be horrible.

I'm not sure what 'research' Neal and Steph did for you, Jim, but it probably involved them telling you exaggerated, drug altered, stories about Woodstock and WTO'99, and *maybe* looking up historical figures that were once mentioned in the same paragraph as the word 'peace' for you to shove into your book with minimal to no alteration

Yes, you just paid Fifteen bucks to read a 100 page call to action for more donations to the author's pet charities.
That's the end.

Fuck you Jim Comer.