Ok....apparently we are going full Forsaken.

[Knightingale]

To go off-topic a bit, and I know this is a rework and I know the tribes can be changed, but some of the renown types given to the tribes are hilariously off. At times it seems like the W5 staff could really use the forsaken Purity and Cunning renown as well.

To wit;

Bone Gnawers as a tribe of honour. Out of all the tribes, this is the one that LEAST respects honour. If we go by the pre-W5 tribe, they should be Glory. Black Furies should be wisdom, as they are as much a mystery tribe as a war one and the Children of Gaia should be a tribe of honour as they are technically a leadership tribe.

Red Talons should be glory and Shadow Lords honour, as well.

While the others could fulfil the renown roles, the Bone Gnawer renown being honour is just baffling. They are a tribe of dregs who focus on things others throw away. While I understand making away with the homeless angle, the name Bone Gnawers still says 'we are not that high and mighty.'

Looking at it, if the Get are considered to be a Glory Tribe in that W5-list then there's 4 of each. The thinking probably was that there need to be 4 tribes of Wisdom, 4 tribes of Honor and there's 3 tribes of Glory because the Get are fallen.

But as to how the particular Renown-choices are fitting... Yeah, no idea. Like with the Shadow Lords, for example: The verbs are "Envision, Plan, Scheme, Intimidate". That doesn't scream "Glory" to me even when you look at this without the context of previous editions.

[AnubisXy]

While the others could fulfil the renown roles, the Bone Gnawer renown being honour is just baffling. They are a tribe of dregs who focus on things others throw away. While I understand making away with the homeless angle, the name Bone Gnawers still says 'we are not that high and mighty.'

Yeah, that made me raise an eyebrow. The Bone Gnawers were, traditionally, the Tribe least interested in Honor. They were basically the shit-shovelers of the Garou Nation. Obviously if people don't shovel shit, eventually everyone will be stuck living on a mountain of shit, so it's an important job and you absolutely need people to shovel that shit. But shoveling shit has never been viewed as an honorable job. The Bone Gnawers were always more interested in results than honor. It feels like Glory would fit them much better.

So in 5th edition, either the Bone Gnawers are undergoing a massive change from earlier editions to explain why they're now focused on gaining Honor, or the concept of what is "Honorable" is getting changed. And who knows? Maybe in 5th edition we'll see Silver Fangs challenging Bone Gnawers for the "honor" of dumpster diving for half eaten hamburgers behind O'Tolley's.

[Heavy Arms]

I mean, if it's a reimagining that's liberally taking from Forsaken anyway...

They probably should have expanded the number of Renown traits. WtA did that long before Forsaken with the Fera anyway. Forsaken's five Renown categories (that also lines up nicely to the Auspices which as far as we know are still the original five), would mean two or three per Tribe (and three per Tribe to cover the Get, Stargazers, the White Howlers or whatever the new version of what became the BSDs is, and another for the a long lost Tribe that was killed by their fellow Garou means an even split around).

More Renown traits also makes it easier to differentiate the Tribes when they don't have ethnic/geographic ties. To go back to my own example, if the Ghost Council is Wisdom, and the Silent Striders are Cunning, then you've already created some needed space between them that helps contextualize the verb picks better.

It's possible they really built the new systems around three in some load-bearing way, but I doubt it.

[Ana Mizuki]

Yeah, that made me raise an eyebrow. The Bone Gnawers were, traditionally, the Tribe least interested in Honor. They were basically the shit-shovelers of the Garou Nation. Obviously if people don't shovel shit, eventually everyone will be stuck living on a mountain of shit, so it's an important job and you absolutely need people to shovel that shit. But shoveling shit has never been viewed as an honorable job. The Bone Gnawers were always more interested in results than honor. It feels like Glory would fit them much better.

So in 5th edition, either the Bone Gnawers are undergoing a massive change from earlier editions to explain why they're now focused on gaining Honor, or the concept of what is "Honorable" is getting changed. And who knows? Maybe in 5th edition we'll see Silver Fangs challenging Bone Gnawers for the "honor" of dumpster diving for half eaten hamburgers behind O'Tolley's.

In all honesty? There are two options to make this work;

1) Take Purity and Cunning Renown from Forsaken, make Gnawers a Cunning tribe.

2) Change the name from Bone Gnawers to a more neutral one.

[Knightingale]

How about it's Bone Gnawers as a Honor Tribe because as followers of the Rat, they sneak around, prize survival-skills, they're interested in exposing secrets and so it's Honor because it's about keeping Garou honest...? Something like that. I could picture something along those lines with the idea being that W5 isn't just erasing any references to ethnicities and cultures, it's actively trying to make each Tribe general and broad interpretations of what sort of actions one could associate with the Patron Spirit in question. And any other specificity from the past one would associate with these Tribes gets thrown out.

[MrNatas]

Given the Tweets by Justin I'm really curious why there are these tribes at all. It just seems like it some kind of mandate or rule that was like "This is WoD Werewolf, so you have to have these tribes in here in order to attract legacy players." However, it doesn't really do anything to sell me that it would be anything close to legacy and in fact tells me the opposite.

I feel like instead of the Tribal Patron Spirits the highest Garou unit should have been the Protectorate which has their Patron Spirit that has its Favor/Ban then within the Protectorate you have the different Septs that have their own cultures and ideas. That would really tie things to a geographical region but honestly you can do something more interesting with that for powers sets.

Idea (Assuming that they are going with the gift line from WtF): You get one Gift from Tribe, one Gift from Renown, and one Gift from Auspice. Each one of would have 2-3 to choose from to play up different styles of play. Depending on the Protectorate you live in, you take on the Favor/Ban of that Spirit and with its help protect that region. Your homebase would be a sept within that and you'd deal with the politics of the sept.

To me that seems like the way you'd handle this. But I'm just armchair dev-ing now.

[Saur Ops Specialist]

Technically Cunning was in W:tA before it was in W:tF, just as the Renown trait of various Fera rather than Garou. Garou could take Cunning spirit patrons, but would take a hit to their reputation for it, because Garou Nation gonna Garou Nation.

With the opportunity to re-integrate the disparate pieces of W:tA, you could have Cunning be the "poison Renown" of the Garou Nation - it gets you recognized as somebody, but somebody that anyone not a Cunning tribe is raised to not like. They would get tapped for the dirty work, so in addition to Bone Gnawers, you would also probably find the Shadow Lords there, with the contrast being that the latter tries to present a too-dignified front on what they're doing. The Glass Walkers would probably be one, too.

As for the Fifth category, definitely don't use Purity, because that's a concept that makes more sense to measure in W:tF, where it won't get mixed up with concepts like universal corruption. If you were to take a page from another Fera, perhaps Succor as an attempt by the CoGs to lead by example in a manner inspired by the Gurahl? I'd change the Furies back into that category, too. You can leave the straight-up killing and reveling in it to the Fianna.

As for the Auspice and Renown breakdown, it's Ragabash with Cunning (of course), Theurge with Wisdom, Philodox with Honor, Galliard with Succor, and Ahroun with Glory. You could reverse the last two, but that might make the Garou Nation dangerously close to getting its act together...

[adambeyoncelowe]

Technically Cunning was in W:tA before it was in W:tF, just as the Renown trait of various Fera rather than Garou. Garou could take Cunning spirit patrons, but would take a hit to their reputation for it, because Garou Nation gonna Garou Nation.

With the opportunity to re-integrate the disparate pieces of W:tA, you could have Cunning be the "poison Renown" of the Garou Nation - it gets you recognized as somebody, but somebody that anyone not a Cunning tribe is raised to not like. They would get tapped for the dirty work, so in addition to Bone Gnawers, you would also probably find the Shadow Lords there, with the contrast being that the latter tries to present a too-dignified front on what they're doing. The Glass Walkers would probably be one, too.

As for the Fifth category, definitely don't use Purity, because that's a concept that makes more sense to measure in W:tF, where it won't get mixed up with concepts like universal corruption. If you were to take a page from another Fera, perhaps Succor as an attempt by the CoGs to lead by example in a manner inspired by the Gurahl? I'd change the Furies back into that category, too. You can leave the straight-up killing and reveling in it to the Fianna.

As for the Auspice and Renown breakdown, it's Ragabash with Cunning (of course), Theurge with Wisdom, Philodox with Honor, Galliard with Succor, and Ahroun with Glory. You could reverse the last two, but that might make the Garou Nation dangerously close to getting its act together...

I already prefer this model. Cunning and Succour work, and would offer more interesting categories for some of the Tribes to inhabit.

[Ana Mizuki]

I think a massive reason why this feels so janky, is that they are using Forsaken's methods without really implementing why Forsaken did what it did.

For one, Forsaken only had 5 tribes (7 if you include the Pure), most of them mash-ups of the WtA ones. Each tribe represented one form of renown, with only the Pure overlapping with the Forsaken. Because each tribe was planned to be representing that renown, they were naturally written to support that.

The WtA tribes were, obviously, not meant to stand for any one type of renown. The streamlined nature of NWoD was completely its own thing, most likely to combat the cumbersomeness of oWoD.

Currently, we have 11 tribes and only 3 types of renown. Not only that, but each type of renown is intentionally broad as every tribe and auspice has to make use of it somehow. W5 is putting the WtA tribes into the Forsaken model without grasping the function of that model. WtA tribes are, even if you remove ethnicities, more cultural to Forsaken's ideological. The Forsaken tribes can mould and shift from place to place, while the WtA tribes generally resemble one another no matter where they are.

If you want to have the WtA tribes be tied to a single renown type like in Forsaken, you would either need to borrow from the Fera OR only have 3 mash-up tribes.

Better option would be to not use -renown- as the definer, but something else. Such as types of spirits.

[ArcaneArts]

I think a massive reason why this feels so janky, is that they are using Forsaken's methods without really implementing why Forsaken did what it did.

For one, Forsaken only had 5 tribes (7 if you include the Pure), most of them mash-ups of the WtA ones. Each tribe represented one form of renown, with only the Pure overlapping with the Forsaken. Because each tribe was planned to be representing that renown, they were naturally written to support that.

The WtA tribes were, obviously, not meant to stand for any one type of renown. The streamlined nature of NWoD was completely its own thing, most likely to combat the cumbersomeness of oWoD.

Currently, we have 11 tribes and only 3 types of renown. Not only that, but each type of renown is intentionally broad as every tribe and auspice has to make use of it somehow. W5 is putting the WtA tribes into the Forsaken model without grasping the function of that model. WtA tribes are, even if you remove ethnicities, more cultural to Forsaken's ideological. The Forsaken tribes can mould and shift from place to place, while the WtA tribes generally resemble one another no matter where they are.

If you want to have the WtA tribes be tied to a single renown type like in Forsaken, you would either need to borrow from the Fera OR only have 3 mash-up tribes.

Better option would be to not use -renown- as the definer, but something else. Such as types of spirits.

8, since the Pure are the alliance between the Fire-Touched, Ivory Claws, and Predator Kings, but yeah. Densely layered, compacted, and detailed organizations doesn't lend well to poorly implemented archetypalism.

[Heavy Arms]

So.... apparently Rank is also gone in W5, with just Renown operating as a tracker of social position....

It seems to me that Justin might really want to get around to posting a lot more stuff that highlights how W5 is going to be true to the WtA "core themes" so people that want WtA can understand how W5 is still going to deliver WtA, instead of just constantly dripping out stuff that Forsaken did that's going to be how W5 does things.

[Knightingale]

And with high Renown being described as a "double-edged sword" in the blog-post, it wouldn't surprise me that "high Renown=bad Garou" somehow is also some kind of artificial problem the same way hunter-organizations in H5 were simply bad and no good player-character would be a part of them (and any hunter who is a part of an organization isn't a true hunter). And Garou-society in W5 is somehow only good when it isn't dealing with hierarchies. Obviously, that's all just speculation but considering how H5 portrayed hunter-organizations in H5 and how much the book seemed to care about that compared to other things...

[Heavy Arms]

Well, WtA has always had a class-conflict aspect where the Athro and Elders are supposed to have become out-of-touch, hidebound, and otherwise stuck in their ways, leading the younger and fresher Garou fighting on terms they know are sub-optimal at best, but the only way to gain the authority to change anything is to struggle your way up the Ranks through the same process that calcified the existing top of the hierarchy's thinking.

One of the differences between VtM and WtA though, was that Garou are much shorter lived, so the PCs could expect to actually get into positions of power in a "realistic" fashion and then confront the system they played to get there to see how they'd handle things once on top with minimal time before the war or politics finally get you. That's the part of the game that seems more at risk if they push the high Renown = punishment more than reward angle too hard.

[Saur Ops Specialist]

Hopefully Justin isn't planning on having ancestor-spirits fill in for untouchable elder kindred...

Rank being gone means that Garou and Fera will also have to find their kitschy Self-Control substitute elsewhere, as in addition to setting the bar on the Gifts you could learn without some extreme shenanigans, it also kept you from exploding in rage quite so often.

Given how Pure Breed got treated in crossover with V:tM, I'm quite frankly afraid to even ask about it.

[Knightingale]

Right, but there's a conflict to explore. One of the main-issues of H5 is that there's no conflict to explore. It's very explicit about how hunter-organizations and everybody who works for them are compromised. And if that isn't the case for somebody who works for them... then the first priority automatically becomes to stop working for them and join a street-level hunter-cell. There's no conflict here. It's pretty black-and-white. And it's never explained well why the book takes this hard stance against hunter-organizations where just being a member of them is somehow a sin already.

And considering how many answers from Justin about W5 are just about him abandoning yet another element of old WtA, in light of how H5 approached hunter-organizations... what does Justin Achilli think is the big sin of Garou-society...?