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[Saur Ops Specialist]

To make it interesting, have it be from non-BSD sources. After all, if the wolves die, all Garou follow, including the Dancers, and the Dancers are way too self-indulgent and ultimately afraid of dying to leap into those jaws.

[Saur Ops Specialist]

Having "legitimate" reasons to detest metis goes against the themes of the breed. They are put upon because they are the product of a taboo; such treatment has been called out as unjust and unwarranted from the start of the game line, and trying to shift to a stance where this unreasonable prejudice is somehow reasonable undermines the themes of the game....

[Saur Ops Specialist]

The Spirals didn't make a metis fertile. The Perfect Metis was presumably born that way, and Zhyzhak is homid. And also wildly out of character in that scenario.

[Saur Ops Specialist]

Captive wolves play politics to determine hierarchies because their wild-living family-based grouping gets disrupted and leaves unanswered questions of social organization. This would also presumably happen normally among the Garou, given the inability to breed with each other to the effect of starting families, even if they didn't turn into humans.



Correction, the writers thought that it wasn't very wolf-like. The writers were also bound by prejudices from before good research on wolf cognition, though, so we could easily change that given various data points like the...

[Saur Ops Specialist]

Chock full of the 90s. Ow the edge.[/SIZE][/FONT][/COLOR]



What a perfectly fine way to drive even more people away from a game. The challenges are quite enough with the obligatory flaw and social prejudice; you don't need to go in and say that the prejudice is even slightly reasonable on top of that. That's as ham-handed and ill-informed in execution as Shadowrun's social commentary.[/SIZE][/FONT][/COLOR]



V:tM made it so that werewolves killed vampires on sight at least since Hunter's Hunted, which had a very early sketch of a werewolf in it....

[Saur Ops Specialist]

A bad example, since constriction in snakes isn't just brute force choking. It's targeted toward altering the blood pressure and stopping the heart directly, which frilled sharks probably can't do, as their bodies are honed for swimming instead of ambush hunting and abdominally massaging prospective food items to death....

[Saur Ops Specialist]

There is a Japanese Risen dude in WoD: Tokyo; he is not presented as being different than any other kind of Risen, though he's also managed to last an anomalously long time for one due to the connection to a corporate leadership position that he just won't give up. Nothing precludes Jade Kingdom wraiths from following the same procedure to rising in the Skinlands. The Hungry Dead are something else; simply enough, imagine that instead of turning into a ghost, dying caused you to undergo an effect similar to the Embrace. That is the situation for the Hungry Dead.



Cool...

[Saur Ops Specialist]

Most of what the above does can be done with 1e's presentation of rolling too many Rage successes. There's no need to rush to an objectively-presented rollout of Rage being of the Wyrm, with that apparently being known in-universe, with three different types that correspond to the Triatic Wyrms and Breeds, nor with a cosmic punishment for your actions, which is something that is altogether suspiciously absent from W:tA across its entire history. The consequences themselves are the punishment for the actions, and making it like the old Gangrel Clan flaw feels like it would cheapen the significance...

[Saur Ops Specialist]

I don't dig the forced symmetry of "a set of three, directly link everything to the Triat for the sake of complete correspondence!" myself. And if we're rewinding things to 1e, Thrall of the Wyrm, strictly speaking, wouldn't exist, though you might still eat someone if you got too many successes to frenzy. That's functionally identical to chunking them into paste for lupus, though, and we can all do without the super-edgy metis version.

Though, also if we're rewinding things to 1e, successfully hitting someone with a Rage-point powered attack means that you get to keep the...

[Saur Ops Specialist]

Changing Ways and the de-canonization of Shattered Dreams come to mind.



You have a well-researched, statistical study of folklore that supports that 98% claim, I assume. As well as one showing where vampires are strongly associated with the story of Cain and Abel, and why Enochian totally isn't just Klingon for Elizabethan alchemists....

[Saur Ops Specialist]

Iron-y Talons. Red, from rust.

Oddly, one of the Talons' early distinctions was being super into killing vampires; in fact, the 1e writeup mentioned that they have this aim even above that of killing humans. Then the Silent Striders sort of stole that thunder, courtesy of the Setite rivalry and a Gift geared toward keeping blood points on lockdown.

[Saur Ops Specialist]

Ecologically speaking, wolves might have a bigger break in the WoD compared to real life because the WoD explicitly has a lot more undisturbed wilderness, a lot fewer small settlements to break up said undisturbed wilderness, and way more of every human population packed into urban areas. This means that wildlife has more refuges, which means that they have places to go to recover from losses. A byproduct of the intention to produce a gothic atmosphere ended up as a reasonable explanation for why there are more wolves and other wild predators about. The Garou might even have had little to do directly...

[Saur Ops Specialist]

Ferectoi don't have monstrous parents as such, unless you want to say that the humans that breeder bane violated while they were sleeping were somehow to blame for anything. About the only time that one or both of them might be is in the case of Devil Tiger demonologists who willingly go along with it to make minions who are bound to them as surely as the bane, but they're not exactly the most common form of "donor" for that....

[Saur Ops Specialist]

The Wyrm might not be inherently malignant, but banes, as a manifestation of the Wyrm's corruption, are. In the Bastet scheme of things, it's the difference between Cahlash, the Destroyer, and Asura, a malign spiritual force which indulges Cahlash's bruised ego.

[Saur Ops Specialist]

It's a quasi-mechanical setpiece (quasi because the ST is encouraged to handwave mechanical interactions between NPCs) to see if a group of Gaian elders in the worst position imaginable can hold out before help arrives or simply just avoid letting the burden thrust upon them crush them. The ideal outcome for the BSDs that serve as ritemaster is the corruption of the totem and tribe; if the totem dies, it's more of a second best outcome, as it presumably removes a major ally of Gaian Garou from the field and wreaks utter havoc with the tribe's society as a whole.



More...

[Saur Ops Specialist]

Probably more than one. There was one on the Freedom Stone Forums, but it was drowned under a tide of bots....

[Saur Ops Specialist]

2e described the shore cannons of Chiaroscuro as steam-powered, but 1e didn't. In 1e, the only steam cannons presumably were from Autochthonia (the crossbow Charm was described as steam powered, at least, so one could imagine that this sort of thing was well-known on the other side of the seal) and didn't work by burning firedust, since they had access to different, typically more potent, sources of heat....

[Saur Ops Specialist]

2e also had it as a merit for non-Infernals....

[Saur Ops Specialist]

Ah, yes, Gilgamesh, the well-known supplicant to a corpse-eating god, eager to act as its vessel. (*VVVVVV*)...

[Saur Ops Specialist]

Broken Pedestal Dissent: I would say to get Freak Legion over Possessed, as well as giving any other of McFarland's books a miss. His status as author of Black Furies Revised hits with a particularly bitter note of irony....