Ghost Council Tribe Preview for W5

[MrornX]

Honestly you could do a WtA reboot that didn't focus on the werewolf aspect that much. Go hard on the eco-terrorist/shaman angle, ramp up the importance of playable Kinfolk, and really bang that 'the Garou are dying' drum.

It would be like making a Star Wars game without playable Jedi, but in the same way it could work. I even personally prefer that side of Werewolf to the raging death monster and tribal meetings side. But of course at that point you might as well call it Kinfolk: the Uprising rather than Werewolf.

You know I was toying around with a similarly radical idea of a werewolf game essentially centred around playing as Ronin who have to figure out what being a werewolf means on the own, without the garou nation since they have heavily diminished presence in my setting to the point they seem like an urban myth or a distant ideal than an actual group.

Also it takes place in project moon's City which is described as Techno Nephandi wet dream.

[TwoDSix]

You know I was toying around with a similarly radical idea of a werewolf game essentially centred around playing as Ronin who have to figure out what being a werewolf means on the own, without the garou nation since they have heavily diminished presence in my setting to the point they seem like an urban myth or a distant ideal than an actual group.

Also it takes place in project moon's City which is described as Techno Nephandi wet dream.

So generally how I tend to portray the Forsaken in Forsaken? My general rule being that Uratha are few in number and you don't generally find out anything until a pack stumbles across you or you've caused enough disturbance.


Of course the idea that Garou have never been interacting directly with Gaia and have to figure things out for themselves as W5 seems to run with is interesting, but I'd much rather run it as being more a game of (Googles as commonwealth name is racist) Telephone along the spirit world until you get something humans can kind of grasp than whatever W5 is going with. Figuring out what being a werewolf means can be fun, but it probably shouldn't be the default (goals of playing the game: work out what the game's actually about ...)

[Ragged Robin]

You know I was toying around with a similarly radical idea of a werewolf game essentially centred around playing as Ronin who have to figure out what being a werewolf means on the own, without the garou nation since they have heavily diminished presence in my setting to the point they seem like an urban myth or a distant ideal than an actual group.

Also it takes place in project moon's City which is described as Techno Nephandi wet dream.

This is quite similar to the thinblood centric v5 and potentially has simular issues.

[11twiggins]

Having multiple modes of play enabled and suggested is fun! M20 empowers you to play a Traditions, Crafts, Technocracy, Orphan or mixed game. V20 empowers you to play Camarilla, Sabbat, TBH, Anarch, clan-specific, mixed, and so on.

W20 has a few modes of play, but they're largely geographical. Garou. A type of Fera. Mixed Fera. Beast Courts. Ahadi. Ancient times. There's options! But having more content to look at a Ronin game, or a mixed game, would be cool. It should just be something which is facilitated without consuming the core of the game.

W5 feels like it's built to be played one specific way - you're a too cool for school pack who work at street level and get a Caern, and mostly do human stuff, with some fights, without ever building anything big or collaborationist as other Garou are bad, and big groups make trouble. Unless changes have been made from the glimpses and hints we got, which is more than possible.

[Damian May]

Another query. If all Tribe members are restricted by the Patrons ban, presumably there is also a ban from your Caern and Pack Patrons....does this mean all beginning Garou essentially start with 3 levels of Chiminage?

[Heavy Arms]

I don't think we have nearly enough information to answer that.

[Nyremne]

Having multiple modes of play enabled and suggested is fun! M20 empowers you to play a Traditions, Crafts, Technocracy, Orphan or mixed game. V20 empowers you to play Camarilla, Sabbat, TBH, Anarch, clan-specific, mixed, and so on.

W20 has a few modes of play, but they're largely geographical. Garou. A type of Fera. Mixed Fera. Beast Courts. Ahadi. Ancient times. There's options! But having more content to look at a Ronin game, or a mixed game, would be cool. It should just be something which is facilitated without consuming the core of the game.

W5 feels like it's built to be played one specific way - you're a too cool for school pack who work at street level and get a Caern, and mostly do human stuff, with some fights, without ever building anything big or collaborationist as other Garou are bad, and big groups make trouble. Unless changes have been made from the glimpses and hints we got, which is more than possible.

W5 follow the trend of 5th edition.

V5 is built around street level anarch play, H5 forbid you from going above a cell of hunters

[Heavy Arms]

While I think everyone understands that's going to be the case, the issue is more how that's going to impact what W5 really looks like compared to WtA's past.

VtM, and even the various types of hunters, have always had play styles that roughly correlate to the power levels of the characters. Relatively young vampires of any Sect largely have similar play styles because what concerns their immediate survive and ability to secure a more viable long term existence is more about the basic kindred condition than organizational dogma. Vampires need to hit certain rungs of power before they can really hold their own in the cutthroat politics of the Camarilla, navigate the complex web of individual personalities of the Anarchs, or be someone that gives orders in the militant Sabbat. Lke-wise, there's always been "cell" level hunters, and if you wanted to move past that you grabbed the books for playing "org" hunters (and whatever the Imbued would count as if they were part of H5).

Werewolf, (and Mage, and Changeling as well) start to decouple that assumption quickly. Even in WtA 1e, the default assumption was more that the PCs would be mobile, as older PCs are the ones that settled down at one Caern to be high ranking Sept officers. PCs would make use of Moon Bridges to travel rapidly and relatively reliably around the world to the kinds of conflicts they were built by the players to get into, while searching for a place to put down roots as they gain Rank and duties along with it. You didn't have to play globetrotting games by any means, but there weren't the barriers stopping young Garou from doing that like there were and are for vampires and hunters.

Adding those roadblocks to keep Garou tied down to one place to keep to that one core supported game play style is going to radically alter what Werewolf in a fashion I think even the "reboot, not continuation" pitch is really going to manage to cover.

[Knightingale]

We already saw some hints with the latest preview in the Finishing Touches section. It's an indication to some degree of what the game's relationship with "being a Garou" is when the questions it suggests you should talk about with your players are this:

One very important thing to bear in mind about your character is how they view being Garou. How do they feel about living through an ongoing Apocalypse? Do they believe it’s the Apocalypse at all, or is that doomer nihilism? Do they know other werewolves, and if so, how do they relate to them? Or is their pack isolated, and does their sense of “Garou culture” begin and end with the pack?

The narrative dial this is going for isn't to suggest different options for what the character's relationship to being a Garou is but rather "How much of Garou-culture/tradition/worldview do you want to include/exclude?".

And the next paragraph with its first sentence sounds like it's going for the same idea:

Do they care a great deal for their tribe and how it affects their sense of self? Or is the Patron Spirit an aloof...

[Ana Mizuki]

No sight of a preview yet, so either there is some art restructuring going on or they decided not to feed the criticism fire more.

[Knightingale]

No sight of a preview yet, so either there is some art restructuring going on or they decided not to feed the criticism fire more.

Either there are no more previews coming or maybe they're waiting for the Renegade-hosted stream (about the WOD) this weekend to reveal more.

[Asmodai]

Either there are no more previews coming or maybe they're waiting for the Renegade-hosted stream (about the WOD) this weekend to reveal more.

Sounds about right.

[ZakRulz]

Does WoD still do their weekly news stream on Twitch?

[Knightingale]

Does WoD still do their weekly news stream on Twitch?

Yep, the new one happens in two hours. The thing is the only time Outstar provided more detailed commentary was when the first couple of pages of the preview had been released. In the next two shows after that, she only very briefly talked about the previews. And then she went on holiday, so her last show was 3 weeks ago.

[Ana Mizuki]

If they are going to delay it due to art concerns, it would be a positive mark on them.