Werewolf the Apocalypse W5

Posted 02 Oct 2024 to Urban Fantasy

The Werewolf setting has been updated with a semi-reboot, and the system updated to align with V5.

 
 

XP Card

Sessions GM'd: 21
Sessions as Player: 0

I Used

I started with just the W5 core book. One of our players was enamoured with the old edition lore, and wanted to play a tribe that was dropped from W5. This necessitated incorporating some details from the old edition, but I largely confined myself to W5 to keep my life simple. I also found some fan-created content very useful. The Annihilation fan created document has some rewrites of rules which provide better clarity, and some extra ideas to help GMs build spirits. I used Foundry as VTT.

Overview

Twenty years ago, I played in a werewolf campaign that was loads of fun. When the new W5 book came out in 2023, a hankering grew in me to give it a try. I bought the PDF, and later bought the physical book also. Our campaign was set in a small town in Alaska, where our 2 PCs were school-going teenagers. I really enjoyed the small group, as everyone got plenty of spotlight time and we could play through their First Change in detail and their first steps into the supernatural world. The players were wonderful and their characters so different. Our story spread to other states as the PCs undertook a special quest given by their patron spirit, which ultimately had them travel into the spirit world and deep into top-secret government facilities. This game was a highlight of 2024 for me - in spite of my issues below.

 
 

The Good

  • Cool art style. A limited palette has been chosen for the book; black, white, and splashes of red. The art sticks to this style, is consistent and modern and I really like it.
  • Everything in one book. The core book contained everything I needed to run the game. There are stats for a smattering of monsters and antagonists. I needed more than they provided, but I guess there is a page count limitation.
  • Includes an adventure. There is a short investigation adventure at the back of the W5 book, which I really appreciated. It has some evil spirits doing bad things, and some murders have happened. It was nicely universal too, and could be plopped into a campaign set anywhere in the world.
  • Cleaned up and refreshed. Older World of Darkness material has been rightly criticised for being offensive and unnecessarily shocking. The writers have taken steps to clean up this content, and to make the setting more global and less culture locked. For example, there used to be werewolf tribes that were representative of specific human cultures, for example there were Irish werewolves, German werewolves, and Native American werewolves. The old writers sometimes made little effort to get guidance from people from those cultures. Now all those tribes that represented human cultures have been dropped from the game. A GM is still free to introduce their own regional interpretations of the broader werewolf tribes, so they could still create a Native American themed subgroup of the Silent Striders tribe for example. I think this is a sensible move. The core game needs to be a scaffold onto which GMs can add their own content. If they created a werewolf tribe that was focused on Native Americans, then what about those GMs who want to run a campaign set in Australia?
  • Some subsystems given. For example, the Caern system. Your players can design the advantages of the magical location (caern) they are connected to. There is a list you can choose from. Our group found this handy to help better visualise the place and cement our character connections to it. It would have been handy if they had provided a character sheet for the caern, as I had to make my own.
  • Werewolves are significantly weaker than previous editions. It costs 1 Rage check every time you heal 1 block of damage. It costs 2 Rage checks to change into Crinos battle form. Your maximum Rage is 5. In our game, our werewolves charged up to 2 mortal goons with shotguns. In previous editions, this would have been a fun romp, but in W5 our players quickly found themselves with lots of damage, and not enough Rage to heal it. I quite like the increased danger, so that ordinary guns are scary.
  • Touchstones are nice. These are important NPCs, like your family or loved ones. By playing a scene with them you can recover spent Willpower. This downtime is a welcome break.

    • The Not-So-Good

  • Toxic community. I really feel sorry for the writers of World of Darkness. On Reddit, it feels like a big segment of their audience has a knee-jerk reaction to oppose anything new that comes out, and who often attack or deride new GMs and players. Don't believe all the ranting and raving you read online, because much of it seems to come from entitled fans of older and more problematic products.
  • Enemy stat blocks are difficult to use. This is werewolf, perhaps the most combat-oriented of all the World of Darkness games. They do present a number of mundane enemies, like security guards, and a handful of supernatural enemies, like spirits. I felt like none of the supernatural ones could be run at the table with ease. Instead of providing a handy stat block that contains all the info I need to run the enemy, you are told to just use an equivalent werewolf power. For example, your players are facing a vampire. You need to be able to glance down at the monster page and know how to resolve their mind control ability. No luck. You are told to just use the werewolf ability Command the Gathering on page 156. Same thing for their celerity; just use Close The Gap on page 163. Figure it out, lol. The stat block for a magician is particularly useless; "The Magician may invoke the equivalent of all theurge and Ghost Council gifts".
  • Style over substance. As with all World of Darkness books, the writing style favours flowery text and descriptions of concepts over practical, gameable mechanics. I created my own rules summary that cuts out all the gumph and presents only the rules.
  • Rage rules as written need some work. Rage is a metacurrency that allows your werewolf to do cool supernatural stuff. It is part of the core game loop. But the Rage economy felt overly punishing, and our characters frequently were perilously low on Rage. You lose Rage for shape changing, for regenerating, and for using powers. Basically, you risk losing Rage every time you do werewolf stuff. But you regain it infrequently. If your Rage drops to zero, you Lose The Wolf and lose all supernatural abilities until you can next howl at the moon. If this happens halfway through a mission, the party might as well abort and go home. So our players were really reluctant to use their werewolf abilities because they feared becoming effectively human again. So I asked on Reddit for advice, and the overwhelming response was, "Oh yeah Rage is broken, we houserule it." This is a core game system. My house rules allowed much easier regeneration of damage between combats, and easier recovery of Rage.
  • Combat system needs work. Some of the rules seem to contradict themselves. For example, the paragraph "Multiple Opponents" on page 125 says you can use your full defence pool against incoming attacks from multiple opponents, minus 1 dice for each successive attack - but this only applies if you do not make any attacks yourself. The very next paragraph says the opposite. These writers seem pretty clumsy at describing game mechanics. Combat is definitely going to happen in a werewolf campaign. Combat against multiple opponents also. Not good enough.
  • My table was not the intended audience. I guess that W5 is intended to attract a new generation of players, who are looking to move on from D&D5e. It certainly is not intended to reinvigorate interest from the old body of players. One of the players at our table is a deep fan and knows all of the lore from 30 years of Werewolf. Such a player will be grossly dissatisfied with the limited lore and options available from W5. For me, the deep lore of older editions is more of a hindrance to me than a help. It is poorly presented and spread over innumerable books. I find it to be a straight jacket rather than an enabler. But if your group includes fans of the old editions, they may not be satisfied with the clean slate approach.

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    Verdict

    The game mechanics are not fully baked but despite this our campaign was very memorable and engaging. The W5 book gives enough of the setting to make a good starting point, in a digestible size. If I were to run a Werewolf game again, I think I would use one of the older editions. However, my experience with the old World of Darkness materials for this campaign have reinforced for me that I will not be returning to this setting and game soon. There are better presented, more gameable, and more modern ways to play the Urban Fantasy genre.

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