W5 auspices and forms

[Knightingale]

The text already says that Auspice is not given to Garou at birth anymore:

Similarly, most Garou believe that Luna, the spirit of the moon and sister to Gaia, grants her favor when one experiences their First Change.

[Ana Mizuki]

The text already says that Auspice is not given to Garou at birth anymore:

Derp, thank you for correcting me ^^''

So, once more we are taking directly from WtF.

As well, the hate for Luna that the Pure have is VERY specific to them. BSDs still have auspice gifts, so they do not reject her.

[Helur]

I'm asking myself if the auspice will give gifts list or if it will be more like H5 Drives. Like, boosting certain skills in certain situations and so on.

[Damian May]

The copying of WtF is getting rather silly,ngl.

But not unexpected considering JAs known and stated bias towards WtF over WtA.

[Knightingale]

I mean, this also highlights how the in-setting explanation is a short bit at the beginning and what Justin Achilli is far more interested in is explaining the whole "what you do, how you do, verbs"-thing he constantly talks about. And he seems to really care about pushing the idea that no choice you make at character-creation puts any limitation on how you portray your character. Nothing gets pre-determined so-to-speak by these choices.

I'm asking myself if the auspice will give gifts list or if it will be more like H5 Drives. Like, boosting certain skills in certain situations and so on.

Yeah, I can imagine it will be like Drive. Like, when you fail with your Rage-dice or something, you have to perform a task/duty associated with your Auspice as a way to recenter yourself or something along those lines.

[BadFurryFanFic]

Yeah, I can imagine it will be like Drive. Like, when you fail with your Rage-dice or something, you have to perform a task/duty associated with your Auspice as a way to recenter yourself or something along those lines.

*...gag...*

[Heavy Arms]

I have to admit, I am a bit surprised that Auspices don't have a Renown linked to them, which quashes a bunch of my previous speculations.

That aside, at the beginning, the blog-post says: "In game terms, if your tribe is what you do, your auspice is how you do it. It’s a different set of verbs, but those verbs reflect your approach" But looking at the verbs chosen for the Tribes and looking at the verbs for the Auspices calling them a "different set" seems a bit of a stretch. That whole verb-thing isn't as informative/representative as Justin Achilli seems to believe in my opinion. Maybe it the choices had been stricter with what verbs were chosen, there could be some value to this but as-is I don't really see any value in it. There's certainly overlap between Auspiece-verbs and Tribe-verbs.

Yeah, the verbs in the new blog make the problems with the previous one worse.

Also... there are other evocative parts of speech. If you use verbs for one, you can use nouns for the other. Mix-and-match verb-noun combos between the two picks also helps reinforce the idea that 11 Tribe x 5 Auspices is far more than 55 options.

Or at least adverbs, which might not be as clean linguistically, but at least help the idea of how Justin wants Tribe and Auspice to relate. "Lead Evenly," v. "Lead Avidly," plays into the idea of what you do, and how you do it, better than adding more verbs to a list.

[ArcaneArts]

https://twitter.com/jachilli/status/1584959020040798208

So, yeah, garou without auspice.

I hate to be so harsh, but boy does that play foul on the metaphysics. The reason the Uratha auspice can be removed is that Luna in that game is not a neutral party offering aid/reflecting Gaia's anger. She is a powerful spirit like any other and her gifts are gifts of agreement. The Pure can wash that away, because auspice is not such an important part of being a werewolf.

But in WtA, auspice is something you have at birth and is part of being a garou as much as your breed is. Luna is a major deity to the garou and the universe, far more powerful than the Forsaken Luna.

The copying of WtF is getting rather silly,ngl.

A minor correction: with clarification from The Sundered World ala Dark Eras* as well as the Second Edition core, Auspices in Forsaken are absolutely part and parcel of the werewolf being, and have to be ritually ripped away from (not washed away) if a werewolf wants to escape the influence of Luna, for all the good that it does them (exacerbating weaknesses in the Uratha condition rather than minimizing them). The Pure cutting out their Auspice is more akin to chopping off a hand.

That said, yeah, it doesn't make sense in the alliances and metaphysics of Apocalypse. Forsaken's Moon is a lot more sus than Apocalypse's Luna.

*[pushes her glasses up her nose and says nasally] Actually, as everyone knows-sorry, I couldn't get over how nerdy my own address is here.

[Knightingale]

Yeah, the verbs in the new blog make the problems with the previous one worse.

Also... there are other evocative parts of speech. If you use verbs for one, you can use nouns for the other. Mix-and-match verb-noun combos between the two picks also helps reinforce the idea that 11 Tribe x 5 Auspices is far more than 55 options.

Or at least adverbs, which might not be as clean linguistically, but at least help the idea of how Justin wants Tribe and Auspice to relate. "Lead Evenly," v. "Lead Avidly," plays into the idea of what you do, and how you do it, better than adding more verbs to a list.

I mean, when Justin Achilli made that tweet months ago about how "Tribes is what you, Auspice is how you do it. The verbs are important.", I didn't think he literally meant he would use only verbs for this association-game. I also imagined something like you describe there. And it also reminded me of the Cypher-System like with Numenera where it's (adjective - character-descriptor) + (noun - character-class) + (phrase - specialization/special power) which results in sentences like "My character is a vengeful warrior that strikes with the might of giants." or something like that. There I can see how grammar is used as an allegory for the character-creation-process.

[Asmodai]

Part of the re-imagination is that the fifth form is now called "Canis" XD...

Considering the language Justin used to use about Werewolves, I don't think he sees much of a difference anyway.

As much as I agree, WoD is STILL set in mostly our world. Unless the dog of WoD5 are HUGE or the wolves tiny, this just reads like a bad case of research failure. Which, given just how on point WtA has been about wolves, is a downgrade.

That's hillarious considering some of the farkups they did. At least they tried to fix it later on. But there's whole games to crib from these days! (letalone google!)

[ArcaneArts]

I mean, when Justin Achilli made that tweet months ago about how "Tribes is what you, Auspice is how you do it. The verbs are important.", I didn't think he literally meant he would use only verbs for this association-game. I also imagined something like you describe there. And it also reminded me of the Cypher-System like with Numenera where it's (adjective - character-descriptor) + (noun - character-class) + (phrase - specialization/special power) which results in sentences like "My character is a vengeful warrior that strikes with the might of giants." or something like that. There I can see how grammar is used as an allegory for the character-creation-process.

I believe the point is that in trying to explain the relationship between Auspice and Tribe, the attempt to compare it to grammatic parts makes it a little skewed.

For two contrasts from over in CHronicles, let's look at Awakening and Forsaken. In Awakening, your Path is your Idiom, it's the how of your magic and it's logical function, while your Order is your Motivation, the why, where, and when you employ your magic towards. That's a fairly neat and even way of laying out character design, with one side describing the ends and the other describing the means.

By contrast, Forsaken is weird to understand in a grammatic sense, since it's primarily nouns all the way down-being really reductive about it*, Rahu and Blood Talons are warriors, Ithaeur and Bone Shadows are witches, Irraka and Hunters in Darkness are assassins, Elodoth and Iron Masters are social manipulators, and the Cahalith and Storm Lords are leaders/warlords. The main reason that works, though, is first) Forsaken doesn't try to use the grammatic explanation, second) the roles are very differently approached when one compares the Auspices and Tribes, and thus if someone doublestacks on those nouns, it's just a fuller archeytpe, and third) the "dualclassing" of Forsaken also let's someone get to play multiple archetypes in one character-if someone wants to get witchy but also be a warrior, they've got the choices between the Ithaeur Blood Talon or Rahu Bone Shadow. Your motivation mostly comes from the unified Forsaken goals and collected interests, and Renown and sacred prey helps to round it out.

With what Justin's been trying to communicate, one assumes it's closer to how Awakening describes the relationship between x-splat and y-splat, with your Tribe being your motivation and battlefront with the Wyrm and your Auspice being how your modus operandi with that war and battlefront, but instead of having coherence, his phrasing makes it sound like a sentence filled with verbs, which is weird.

And the main reason that's worrisome is that it implies that people working on this might have different ideas of how the pieces come together, and can lead to confusing writeups that actually make it harder to figure out a character concept than it needs to be(if writers both understand they're writing verbs, you run the risk of players knowing how they handle problems, but not what problems they're actually solving or why)-and while that's a small thing in and of itself, it's another brick in the wall of a pretty shoddy rollout of a presentation for WtA5E.

*really, really, really reducitve.

[Ana Mizuki]

A minor correction: with clarification from The Sundered World ala Dark Eras* as well as the Second Edition core, Auspices in Forsaken are absolutely part and parcel of the werewolf being, and have to be ritually ripped away from (not washed away) if a werewolf wants to escape the influence of Luna, for all the good that it does them (exacerbating weaknesses in the Uratha condition rather than minimizing them). The Pure cutting out their Auspice is more akin to chopping off a hand.

That said, yeah, it doesn't make sense in the alliances and metaphysics of Apocalypse. Forsaken's Moon is a lot more sus than Apocalypse's Luna.

*[pushes her glasses up her nose and says nasally] Actually, as everyone knows-sorry, I couldn't get over how nerdy my own address is here.

Thank you, what I meant was that auspice -can- be removed at all. I don't think you -can- remove Apocalypse auspices, given even SKIN DANCERS get them.

This also cheapens what makes the Pure stand out. If Fenrir or BSDs remove their auspices, it draws poor comparisons to Pure and vice versa.

It also brings the two games closer and closer, maybe not entirely the same but worryingly close.

[ArcaneArts]

Thank you, what I meant was that auspice -can- be removed at all. I don't think you -can- remove Apocalypse auspices, given even SKIN DANCERS get them.

This also cheapens what makes the Pure stand out. If Fenrir or BSDs remove their auspices, it draws poor comparisons to Pure and vice versa.

It also brings the two games closer and closer, maybe not entirely the same but worryingly close.

Yeah, I just got the nerd itch and had to clarify. Otherwise, yeah, it's an odd choice that doesn't particularly help anything.

[Knightingale]

By contrast, Forsaken is weird to understand in a grammatic sense, since it's primarily nouns all the way down-being really reductive about it*, Rahu and Blood Talons are warriors, Ithaeur and Bone Shadows are witches, Irraka and Hunters in Darkness are assassins, Elodoth and Iron Masters are social manipulators, and the Cahalith and Storm Lords are leaders/warlords.

*really, really, really reducitve.

Considering how H5 presented its Creeds and how the WOD was presented there, what I fear we're going to get is exactly what you describe here - minus all the Forsaken-lore. And it doesn't get replaced with WtA-lore either. It's just straightforward, archetypical presentations that offer very broad frameworks and as much wriggle-room as possible to not "limit" the presentation of the player-character with any choice. At least, that's my current rather pessimistic perspective on where this is going to go.

[Saur Ops Specialist]

"Primordial wolves"... now, I know things worked differently in WoD, but in order to preserve that whole "like the real world, mostly" detail, I think it's still relevant that there have never been wolves anywhere near the size of Hispo. Not even half the bulk of Hispo (which is still larger than the average size of the dire wolf, aka the swole dhole aka this was not actually a wolf).

Part of the re-imagination is that the fifth form is now called "Canis" XD...

Did that get changed back to lupus? I'm not seeing it on the blog post now.