Maragas
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Oh yeah, should share that as well. Here things I put to SB about the new Q&A with Justin.
And
Maragas said:So...Justin Achilli had a Q&A about W5. Here is a docs link to it.
I have many things to say about it but I do not want to color your views before reading it nor do I have the time for it.
Knightingale from the Onyx forums also made notes on it:
(There's talk here about the process of getting an RPG-book from idea to finished, physical copy… nothing too illuminating particularly about W5 is said here)
- Q1: What is WtA?
- Garou are werewolves and what makes them special is their spiritual side
- But you're also a creature of rage
- Spirit-world is part of the game and interaction with spirits is important
- Genesis of Garou is to fight for Gaia
- Gaia is dead or dying
- World is in a state of apocalypse and the reason for that is human greed
- Humans have abused Gaia for their own profit
- Werewolves as Gaia's original chosen warriors fight back against that
- A lot of werewolves believe that the war is lost
- But many battles can still be fought and that is what W5 is about
- Outstar comment: Unlike previous editions, this one is in the age of apocalypse and the fifth edition is going back to the roots in what the original game-splats were about
- Q2: But it also brings the game into the modern age and to a modern audience, so how does W5 show that?
- W5 makes a clean break with legacy-editions
- Intention to refocus on a personal, street-level presentation
- Which is why in W5 the apocalypse is happening
- Previously you fought to avert the apocalypse and there was this grand, almost legendary, heroic, epic style of "We're going to fight for the sake of the world!"
- But that makes it difficult to keep a very personal focus
- You can have personal stories in that mode too but you partake in this grand, epic fantasy to save the world
- But if you look at the world outside you see that humanity is in dire straits
- Young werewolves have to deal with becoming werewolves and the fact that the world is doomed
- And because of that individual choices become more important
- Werewolves don't know how much time is left before the world truly ends
- Q3: Is 5th edition/W5 more like a reboot?
- Justin: Absolutely
- Wants to go back to 1st edition
- Garou are warriors for Gaia
- Werewolves are opposed to
- Cosmology of the spirit-world: You've got three entities who aren't exactly spirits, more like demiurges, forces of nature
- Wyld: sense of creation, raw creation, chaos,
- Weaver: order, law, stasis
- Wyrm: collapse, decay, corruption
- There's a cosmological cycle to the world
- In the apocalypse of W5 the Wyrm is ascendant
- One reason is that people exploit the earth
- The cycle is out of balance like the rich get richer, people with connections can build more connections
- Once you start taking, you can't stop and that has elevated the Wyrm
- Weaver tries to put the Wyrm in check but it's not the Garou's friend
- Weaver putting order on things and fence things in
- Wyld also no friend to Garou
- Weaver and Wyrm are overclocked and try to crush Wyld
- All three threaten Gaia
- Q4: How does this play in the game?
- You the werewolf have to figure this out
- For example, there's no more gift like "Sense Wyrm"
- There's no power that can objectively tell you what is wyrm-tainted
- You're supposed to figure it out from the clues
- Is this disease-spirt a Wyld-spirit or a Wyrm-spirit, for example
- Q5: V5 and H5 are focusing on young Vampires and young Hunters, does W5 play in a similar way? How do young Werewolves learn about the cosmology, for example?
- Even though the apocalypse has happened, there are elder Garou out there
- Young Garou resent older Garou because "if you had done your fucking job, we wouldn't be in this situation."
- There are tensions between age-groups
- Finding a mentor important to young garou to understand legacy, though
- But it's a warrior-culture, a might-makes-right-culture and it leans into authoritarianism
- Older Garou are like "you have to do it our way." And believe they can turn things around.
- The culture is important, though, in making sure you're not just a rage-filled monster (like wights in Vampire)
- Or the truth about the universe could send you into a state called Harano (which is essentially heavy depression)
- Q6: Even though you fight for the betterment of the world, you are still a monster, you're not a hero.
- You're not playing the good guys
- You're the protagonist
- The cause of Gaia is righteous
- Touchstones could get hurt because of the Rage
- Q7: What concepts are there that 5th edition players would be familiar with?
- Touchstones are there to bring down the Rage and will help you restore Willpower
- There are Loresheets in W5
- They're still working on figuring out what they exactly are
- Loresheets could be Camps or traditions/groups/subsets of Tribes
- Or you may know something about the antagonists
- You may have been a Get of Fenris and once that Tribe has gone off-the-rails you may have left the Tribe
- You may know stuff about the Black Spiral Dancers (who have given themselves over to the Wyrm)
- A lot of Werewolf vs Werewolf conflict in W5 (which fell by the wayside in legacy-editions sometimes)
- Rage-dice analogous to V5 Hunger-dice
- Q7: What did playtests tell you about where you want to take the game?
- Werewolves are volatile creatures of rage
- If systems get too complex, you might lose the feeling of how a werewolf can just explode with rage
- Werewolf most combat-oriented and therefore they should feel powerful
- The base combat-system of H5 is kept but Werewolves have more options in augmenting their power through Gifts and Rites (that are performed by the pack)
- But it shouldn't feel like a min-maxing tactical exercise
- Q8: What are the most fundamental changes to W5 compared to previous editions? (And this is about the two recent blog-posts on world-of-darkness.com)
- Tribe is what you do: For example, Bone Gnawer is gathering secrets, testing taboos is Ghost Council, fight injustice is Black Furies
- Auspice is your moonsign… (the connection got lost there, so the answer couldn't be heard)
- Breed isn't part of the game
- Main-thing is to build Renown (relationship with spirits and other Garou)
- Q9: How do you become a Werewolf?
- Nobody knows, Werewolves just emerge (which is a huge change for W5)
- Part of Pack-duties is to look for "Kin" (people who have potential to become werewolves but don't know that yet)
- There are special abilities for that but you can also look for clues like anger-issues
- But there's no discernible rhyme or reason to this
- Get and Black Spiral Dancers are also looking for Kin
- Packs also compete over Kin
- Kin who never find their mentors or reject Garou can become these rage-filled monsters
- And there's another type of Kin, for example, who somehow managed to get into the Umbra but couldn't find their way back, starve and then turn into a ravenous spirit
- But the First Change can be triggered by a traumatic event, so a Pack might decide to push a Kin into trouble to trigger the change
- There's a subsection in "Being a werewolf" for each Tribe, for example, Red Talons say "Gaia chooses, that's it.", others says "You find your spiritual calling through meditation and individual alignment with particular beliefs."
- Q10: Tribe is not like a Vampire-Clan in that it's forever tied to a character, so how does that work?
- The way Tribe works is another mystery to Garou
- You may feel that it's predetermined, a kind of calling even before the First Change
- For example, you may have this feeling to fight injustice and therefore become a Black Fury
- Or after the First Change, you may have your moment of clarity and then become a Black Fury
- You pledge to a Tribe, it's not innate
- Q11: What about the Umbra?
- That is another mystery to the Garou, they don't know exactly how it works
- It's a shadow-reflection of the world
- But something can only be reflected in the Umbra if people care about it emotionally
- For example, if there's an oil-spill and the animals that are trapped in it are suffering – that's going to be reflected in the Umbra
- Umbra doesn't align with the physical geography of the real world
- Thoughts and emotions are more important
- Umbra isn't hostile to Garou but it's unpredictable
- If a pharma-corporation is poisoning people, then there's a reflection of that in the Umbra
- ST-tool to create a world of metaphor
- Q12: What about the Patron-Spirit?
- You pledge to a Patron-spirit and then inherit the other people who pledged to that spirit and that's what creates the Tribe
- Through the Patron-Spirit the social structure of the Tribe emerges
- The PS grants you Gifts but not the powers themselves but rather access to spirits who align with the PS and those spirits then grant the Gifts
- Like "Oh, you're one of Stag's brood, let me give you this power."
- PS gives a Favor and a Ban
- Favor something that you're good at additionally
- Ban a behavior-code that the Patron-Spirit expects from the Garou
- But the PS of the pack doesn't have to relate to the Tribes (but Justin Achilli & co are still working out how this could work)
- And this pack spirit could then help the entire pack rather than PS only helping individual Garou
- Q13: How do Rites and Gifts work? (But development-wise this is still a work-in-progress)
- Gifts are finite, short-term special abilities (like Disciplines in V5 or Edges in H5)
- Like turn your claws to silver, make yourself difficult to see
- You call on a spirit to do something for you
- Garou are societal people but in W5 the Garou-Nation has been torn apart
- Rites are rituals performed by a gathering of multiple Garou which gives all attendees benefits
- They get easier to do the more people are doing them
- But there's a risk: The more Garou are together the bigger the risk of one of them freaking out and losing themselves to the Rage
- Q14: How does the diversity-consulting work?
- Early on before the outline, they talked to Native American diversity consultaants
- For example, the word "savage" won't appear in W5
- After the book is finished Justin & co it will go to an editor and then to a diversity-consultant who will also proofread it
- The diversity-consultant is not there to say "You can't do this!" but to interrogate what the developers are going for and how best to present that
- Q15: What is the scope of W5? What about places where wolves naturally don't exist?
- W5 assumes majority of Garou are Homid (Human-born), so anywhere where people are, there can be werewolves
- In future supplements particular indigenous animal populations and local cultures that resonate with werewolves may be explored
- There's also another set of antagonists in the corebook, like for example, raven-shifters or spider-shifters
- And in future books things like the Gurahl (the werebears) may be introduced
- Q16: What are the antagonists of W5 like?
- Antagonist-chapter currently 26.5k words
- The antagonist-descriptions are more concise compared to H5
- A lot of spirit-antagonists
- Gaia-spirits can also be antagonists
- Human and animal hosts can be invaded by a spirit and become antagonists
- If it happens in the longterm, they're called Formori, in the short-term it's possession
- Werewolves also antagonists like BSD
- The Get of Fenris used to be a good Tribe but they pursued their own goals and got so lost in it that they split from the Garou-Nation
- They represent Haglust, driven by Rage and are very fanatical in their crusade against the Wyrm (kind of a "If you're not with me, you're against me."-vibe plus rage-induced paranoia)
- Stargazers are also in the antagonist-section but they're more like an enigmatic ally
- Once they were part of the Garou-Nation but lost faith in it and sought alliances with other shapeshifters
- Vampires, mages, changelings, mortals are also represented
- Mortals can become obstacles to saving Gaia like police, soldiers or members of the PMC by being exploiters or agents of state-violence
- Criminals or a priest could become obstacles
- Q17: What is the role/position of vampires in W5?
- They aren't necessarily of the Wyrm anymore but that's because in W5 there's no objective way to determine if something is "Wyrm-tainted", for example.
- Vampires may associate with a company that supports the Wyrm's agenda
- But they aren't inherently antagonistic
- It always has to be decided on a case-by-case basis in W5
- All WOD5E games are just looking at the same core through different lense
All I am going to say this: Man, Get of Fenrir was right to leave if these are the new Werewolfs.
Also, RIP Kinfolk.
And
Maragas said:Fuck, I am actually peeved enough to start talking about the shit way early.
Abominations are gone, Vampire-Werewolf rivalry, gone. Umbral Realms are gone and replaced by things much smaller*, Kinfolk are gone, Breed doesn't matter, you are fighting at the street level and only street level and you will like it, Gnosis? Of course, you can't have Gnosis.
*
How does the Umbra look in W5? What Realms, if any, will we be able to explore in the Core Rules?
There's no concept of Realms, instead each "location" (sic) in the Umbra is its own place, there for a reason (because someone or something cared enough about it to make it so), and might have specific methods to visit.
Well you know what they said at the beginning? They break away from the so-called "legacy" editions. Even though they might as well start a whole new Werewolf title rather than just reusing names.
So everything you know about Werewolves? Dozens of books across the decades? Little of it remains true. Because we can't have nice things anymore.![]()