Your Favorite Tribes: Which and Why!?

[MyWifeIsScary]

Well, this looks like a Resurrection.

I like all the tribes. think it's not so much 'least favourite tribe' as much as 'Which tribe do you love to hate?"

Favourites:

1- Get.
You see these tribes? This one goes to 11. I will out-garou your garou. Tribe members are proven family and everyone else can fuck off. Rage ratings lower than 5 need not apply.
2 Bone Gnawers
Capturing the Wyld of the city, class struggle embodyment, Ratkin buddies? Gold (metaphorically, lord knows they don't have any physical gold)
3- Glass Walkers
Money, Cybernetics, power armour, 20mm Autocannons; If I didn't imagine half of them with neon hair dye they'd take No.1

4- Shadow lords
Smart wolf is best wolf. Calculating characters are fun to play.

5- BSD
A film is often carried by the quality of it's villain. BSD's make great villains and there's a lot of room to do what you want with them.



Love to hate:
1-Children of Gaia; Tribe hypocrite. Look at how I love the Get, these guys are the opposite. I hope they never change.
2- Fianna.
World class bullshitters. Really cool bullshit though.

3-BF: Bunch of misandrist TERFs. Really cool gifts and mythology. I hope they never change.
4- Silver fangs:
Greatest of station eh? Well, who am I to argue with you? look at that splendid coat of yours!


I got this far and thought it unfair. I love silent striders but at the same time their lack of a home and the fact they don't play great with others hampers them a bit, Stargazers are pulpy fun but they don't carry the core themes well.. Uktena are cool but they're less-cool shadow lords to me. (In some ways they're more cool, but on the whole they're not as good.)

I think wendigo need work, Red talons could be a lot better (also these two tribes have a few really cool gifts but mostly have mediocrity)

[No One of Consequence]

I like them all for different reasons. The Silent Striders are probably my favorite because I have a private reason for extreme personal bias. I think if asked to pick three others, they'd be the Shadow Lords (because sometimes ruthless pragmatism is a lot of fun), Glass Walkers (because there are certain personally amusing tropes I can do with them that don't work so well with other tribes), and Fianna (there are certain cultural tropes I enjoy playing around with).

[Damian May]

Favourites:

1)Black Furies.

2) Older Brother.

3) Red Talons.

4) Bone Gnawers.

5) CoGs.

Least favs.

1) Silver Fangs.

2) Fianna.

3) Shadow Lords.

[Justycar]

My chosen tribes are:

1 Silent striders: I like the mysterious solitaire wanderers and occultists.

2 Bone gnawers: Playing the underdog, the freemen, the nomad, the highwaymen is appealing.

3 Silver fangs: Fallen nobility, old sagas crippling under anachronic feudalism and propension to harano.

4 Shadow lords: Cunning, astute schemers and políticos.

5 Children of Gaia or Fianna: These tribes are the core of the game, in my opinion. The werewolf as a barbarian mystical shapeshifter and the werewolf as a defender of the nature and the ecology.


I do not like the racial stuff of the tribes, so Wendigo, Fenrir or Fianna have issues for me for this reason, and also all the shapeshifters.

[blailton]

Red Talons, Children of Gaian, Get of Fenris

Least: the native american ones. I think they're boring.

[Sergeant Brother]

In no particular order:

Get of Fenris
I like Vikings and Norse tropes and/or stereotypes. They go great with many werewolf themes, so the GoF may well be the most thematic of the Tribes in my opinion. In many ways, they personify werewolves as a culture of warriors. It will suck if we lose them.

Silver Fangs
I like the fallen nobility aspect of this tribe. The nobility, the madness, the sense of superiority combined with failures and flaws. I find them to be very complex from a role playing perspective.

Black Spiral Dancers
Like the Get of Fenris, the BSD personify certain aspects of werewolves, but it is the dark and no steroid qualities. They are monsters. They are horrifying. They are sick and twisted, removed from mortal society and Garou society alike. They are the dark mirror held up to every werewolf representing the monstrous aspect of their race.

Uktena
If the Get of Fenris personify the berserker warrior aspect of Garou society, then the Uktena represent the mystical aspects of it. They have Native American style spirituality and traditions with less racial baggage than the Wendigo, they are experts of the spirit worlds and mystical knowledge, they have some measure of moral complexity in their dealing with dark spirits.

I’m not sure about a 5th tribe. Maybe Shadow Lords, because I like the fact that they are schemers and manipulators, it makes them a bit different than the rest of the more ideological tribes, or the Fianna because I like Celtic myths, legends, and style.

[Kharnov]

Don't really have much experience with Werewolf, so in a lot of ways this list is probably influenced as much or more by what people have said here on the forums than on actual play-time, but here goes. I can't really sort them into a neat tier-list from favourite to least, so my top five are going to be sorted alphabetically rather than ranked numerically.

Bone Gnawers: My preferred choice for the city-wolves. Pragmatism, solidarity, and class struggle themes? Sounds great to me! Also cool that they are city-wolves without making that their main identity, but rather just an extension of their pragmatism.

Children of Gaia: I like the contrast between the violent nature of the Garou with the conscious choice to embrace peace, inclusiveness, and solidarity as much as possible; gives me a bit of a Paarthurnax vibe. They seem like one of the groups of Garou that are relatively more aware that you can't beat the literal embodiment of destruction and corruption by trying to destroy it with brute force. I've heard their source material is a bit cringe, but my broad-strokes knowledge means that I just get to look at the base concept, which I dig.

Silent Striders: Nomadism and necromancy (like "talking to ghosts" necromancy, not "arise zombie minions!" necromancy), neat stuff IMO! I Also interesting for having a particular cultural/geographic root that remains influential while still being able to move far beyond that and adapt.

Stargazers: Kind of the same as the CoG, I like the fact that they represent Garou consciously working to overcome the downsides of their Rage. I really like them having a more philosophical and inquisitive approach.

Uktena: Magic and mysticism tend to be one of my favourite things, so them being the Tribe that focuses most on the Umbra and Spirits makes them very interesting to me, along with their penchant for trying to uncover occult lore, including sometimes meddling with Things Garou Weren't Meant to Know.


Partly because I wanted to try and stick to a limit of five, and partly because my feelings here are more complicated, I wanted to make special mention regarding the Red Talons. Their mainstream culture and philosophy is not something I'm a fan of, aside from the potential as a Villain (Protagonist), and even then I find the lack of nuance uninteresting. But I actually have a lot of fun with my personal ideas about what I think the Red Talons *should* be as opposed to what they *are*, and the idea that the Tribe as it exists now has effectively "fallen from grace" and forgotten the role they really should be playing in the Garou Nation. So the idea of playing what is a effectively a Drizzt for the Red Talons, the rebel against their asshole culture, is one that I find really intriguing. I think the big flaw with that idea is that their biases are shared by their Tribal Totem, which means that being a Red Talon who rejects their genocidal speciesism would be almost impossible without getting yourself thrown out of the Tribe for failing to gut a human because they looked at a tree the wrong way.

In one sense, my least favourite Tribe is probably the Silver Fangs. Mostly because I've become pretty staunchly anti-aristocracy, so the idea of playing a member of an entire Tribe of them does not interest me especially. But I don't necessarily dislike them as part of the lore, just probably wouldn't want to play them generally.

I'd say the only Tribes I have a particular dislike for are the ones where half or more of their entire identity can be reduced to "[ethnic identiy] werewolves!" So the Fianna, Get of Fenris, and Wendigo. The Tribes themselves are essentially their own ethnic identities, and having them neatly map onto very particular human cultures is uninteresting to me, and kind of lazy. I don't care what IC justifications they have for it, the OOC decisions were made first, and they were lazy and uninteresting decisions IMO.

I think "ethnic identity werewolves" would make more sense as sub-groups within different Tribes that are above and beyond human borders. So, for example, the Get might make an interesting subgroup of the Silver Fangs, Viking werewolves that think their alpha status in the Garou Nation is derived from their strength. Only problem is that making those groups into sub-factions would then make their existing sub-factions either minutely small or non-existent, which would probably bother their fans.

Uktena get a pass both because they have consciously expanded beyond one particular ethnic group to some extent, and because their other themes are ones that really interest me. But I must admit that the way they have opened up specifically to non-European pagan cultures does run afoul of a tendency I've noticed among White Wolf, where groups that specialize in spirits and the Umbra are almost always lumped into non-European ethnicities (see: Dreamspeakers, various non-European changelings having Umbral connections thrown on as the way to make them different).

[Sergeant Brother]

According to my count, here are the current votes for favorite, not counting least favorites.

Bone Gnawers 18
Glass Walkers 18
Silver Fangs 17.5
Shadow Lords 15.5
Get of Fenris 15
Children of Gaia 13.5
Uktena 11.5
Fianna 11.5
Black Furies 8
Red Talons 8
Silent Striders 8
Stargazers 6.5
Wendigo 4
White Howlers 3
Black Spiral Dancers 2

Fera 2

[monteparnas]

I don't think I posted here before and not going to verify now.

My top 5, ordered by Sergeant's current ranking 'cause it's easy:

Bone Gnawers - Love 'em for their better notion of the actual plight and lives of the downtrodden, the majority of human population.

Children of Gaia - Instead of using BS arguments to justify taking sides and simplifying their view of the world, they accept the truth for what it is, that everyone deserves better and no hate is justified. They may not be always able to live to their ideals, but they have the right ones instead of the cool ones.

Black Furies - They're complex, nuanced, inconsistent as a society just as societies really are, they accept that this is normal. On top of that, as much as other tribes say they don't particularly lean to any form of sexism, they're actually the only regular source of female characters at all both in most tables and as known NPCs. They exist isn't the same as they being as common as they should.

Silent Striders - Haunted wanderers that are not white by default and bring ghosts to the game? It's a hard choice between them and the Uktena, but the SS win in the end.

Stargazers - I like their philosophy and mysticism. It is sad that they're so Asian-Coded, I don't mind it being less "culture-locked", but otherwise I love them.

Least interesting:

Red Talons - While I can buy into the argument that they're less "think like wolves" and more "think like humans trying to think like what they think wolves are like", I still see this one as extremely simplistic and unappealing.

[Lashet]

Black spiral dancers - becouse they are the only one, who understood the place of Garou. And they are trying to change ecerything.