Ask a simple question, get a simple answer: Werewolf 2e Edition

[Isator Levi]

So, do Second Edition Uratha have any option for vertical advancement other than their Auspice Gifts and general Primal Urge?

[espritdecalmar]

So, do Second Edition Uratha have any option for vertical advancement other than their Auspice Gifts and general Primal Urge?

Renown kind of works like this, since every dot grants you a new Gift Facet as well as increasing various dice pools and supernatural power factors.

[Isator Levi]

Renown kind of works like this, since every dot grants you a new Gift Facet as well as increasing various dice pools and supernatural power factors.

That's really only giving some extra heft to powers that the character already has. I'm thinking more about something that indicates options that would not have been available at a less mature stage of power.

[Aurumae]

That's really only giving some extra heft to powers that the character already has. I'm thinking more about something that indicates options that would not have been available at a less mature stage of power.

Werewolf abilities are pretty heavily front-loaded. You can get almost everything right out the gate assuming you have the right Renowns. Even 5 dot Rites just require you to spend large amounts of exp to acquire them.

The only things I can think of that are restricted at character creation would be the Favored Form merit and the Moon Gifts. The only published Moon Gifts are the 5 in the core, but the book makes it clear that there could be more and that a Werewolf could have more than one. An alternate Cahalith Moon Gift was published on the blog during open development, which I have linked below. Acrozatarim has published others on his Patreon.

The Giver of Gifts: 1 [Werewolf: The Forsaken] – Onyx Path Publishing (theonyxpath.com)

There is also the Gift of the Elementals. Each Facet of that Gift (except Glory) gets much more powerful as your Renown increases since it increases your dots of influence over the relevant element.

While it's not exactly what you were asking for, I could see a 4 or 5 dot Fetish as something an experienced, powerful Werewolf could seek out that would not be available to a weaker wolf. Binding a 5-dot Spirit is no mean feat, and while I think the examples in the Core book are generally very lacklustre, the examples listed for what a 4 or 5 dot fetish could do are extremely powerful.

[Isator Levi]

It makes sense enough as their intended design model, just does end up feeling a bit of a pity that there isn't quite something to signify the more experienced werewolf the way one might get with vampires developing an arsenal of custom Devotions or Mastery for mages.

Although I wonder about Gifts... I have a sense from some places that there's an idea of Gift varieties that have significant power and are obscure to Uratha at large, which might come with a qualifier that you'd need to be a big deal in the first place to get the spirits able to imprint them to recognise you. Is there anything to that?

[Aurumae]

Although I wonder about Gifts... I have a sense from some places that there's an idea of Gift varieties that have significant power and are obscure to Uratha at large, which might come with a qualifier that you'd need to be a big deal in the first place to get the spirits able to imprint them to recognise you. Is there anything to that?

This might be the case, but in general Facets in 2e are designed to be about the power level of a 3 dot gift from Werewolf 1e - Chris Allen states this explicitly in the open development blog post I linked above. Rare and powerful abilities that most Werewolves don't know are more likely to be powerful Rites than Gifts. I do wish the core book had had a bit more space to devote to the "other" parts of Werewolf Spirit magic. We have a very good number of Shadow Gifts (and more from Shunned by the Moon), but I feel like Rites, Fetishes, and Wolf Gifts were only given a cursory treatment, and alternate Moon Gifts were not covered at all.

It makes sense enough as their intended design model, just does end up feeling a bit of a pity that there isn't quite something to signify the more experienced werewolf the way one might get with vampires developing an arsenal of custom Devotions or Mastery for mages.

I don't quite agree with this assessment. Due to the way Werewolves pick up additional Facets as they gain Renown, Werewolves with lots of Renown have access to lots of different Facets. The character I'm playing currently has 11 Shadow Gift Facets, 2 Wolf Gift Facets, and 3 dots in his Moon Gift. That's a lot more discrete abilities than a Vampire with similar amounts of exp would be likely to have. No individual Facet is as strong as an entire Discipline like Resilience (for example), but Berserker's Might (the Glory Facet from the Gift of Rage) is similar to Resilience's active effect. As the Vampire invests more dots in it Resilience that Discipline gets stronger. As the Werewolf invests more dots in Glory Berserker's Might gets stronger and so do all his other Glory Facets and he continues picking up new Facets. The end result is that you have a Vampire who is very, very good at one particular thing, and a Werewolf who has many more tools in his toolbox. He's not likely to be able to match the Vampire on pure damage mitigation, but is very likely to have other ways to even the scales.

It's also the case that Werewolves have a tendency to get stronger as a pack as much as they do as individuals, whereas a Vampire's power is all individual. Several Gift Facets synergise extremely well together - for example there are several Gifts that penalise the opponent's initiative. If one of the Pack members has Pack Triumphs Together (the Honor Facet from the Gift of Inspiration) they can double down on this advantage and make it so that the entire pack gets the drop on their prey. If another pack member has Gift of the Screaming Moon from the blog post, or if there is an Irrakka present, these advantages are compounded even further.

[nofather]

Werewolf hasn't really gotten an 'end game' book. There's hints throughout second edition about the 'Bodhisattva predator' werewolf, who seems to be the equivalent of the...well, they don't really have big differences anymore, but about as big a difference from werewolves as werewolves are to hunters (from the Vigil). There are hints of their capabilities in the Devourer template, and some ideas that may indicate some direction they would go in in threads like the following:
http://forum.theonyxpath.com/forum/m...nleashed/page6
Where Lycaon-Ur, a werewolf lodge totem from the core book manages to always maintain 5 Harmony.

But as said, they haven't gotten an 'end game' book like Thousand Years of Night or Imperial Mysteries.

That said, while a werewolf at Primal Urge 1 and one at Primal Urge 10 may have access to some of the same powers (like those in the core) the gap in power tends to be pretty large. You are capable of tracking much easier, regenerating quickly and casually (to the point one doesn't really need to go into gauru to get a 'full heal'). And a lot of that journey to become like Father Wolf is going to get you picking up fetishes and obscure rites or gifts or just weird abilities, like Lycaon-Ur's ability to not be erased from existence and, if he dies, come back.

[Sith_Happens]

If you ask me “Bodhisattva predators” are pretty clearly implied to be the werewolf equivalent of archmages.

[nofather]

If you ask me “Bodhisattva predators” are pretty clearly implied to be the werewolf equivalent of archmages.

While mechanically it does seem like it would be in a similar position, that of a sub-template, since archmages aren't really mages anymore, the comparison would be ironic because a Bodhisattva is literally someone who stays behind on the Earth to save others even though they can 'ascend' while archmages have basically said byebye to the Fallen World and run off to become symbols.

We've heard some basic ideas about what some writers would like out of it but at the very least I think if we ever did end up getting them described they would be suitably different from archmages. Maybe more of a force within the world, but scaled up to deal with larger concepts. Impossible to really say until it's there though.

[Tessie]

I think there's an obvious unfulfilled design space between basic playable splats and evolved non-playable splats, where you advance the template but not to the point where you're no longer playing the same game. Bodhisattva predators are, at least to me, by far the most suitable candidates for that due to a couple of reasons (besides the fact that maybe only one or two of the other games would be suitable for a similar concept): They are already established as an "evolved splat" within the setting, they still play on the same field as their former peers (as opposed to the Ascension War of archmages), and as established in this thread regular werewolves has a lack of vertical advancement, meaning vertically grown Bodhisattva predators would stand out (as they're supposed to do) with relatively small changes which would be much easier to balance within the context of the base game.

[Isator Levi]

While mechanically it does seem like it would be in a similar position, that of a sub-template, since archmages aren't really mages anymore, the comparison would be ironic because a Bodhisattva is literally someone who stays behind on the Earth to save others even though they can 'ascend' while archmages have basically said byebye to the Fallen World and run off to become symbols.

There's an entire group of archmages called Bodhisattvas.