One of my most recent discoveries on Youtube is MONSTRUM, a channel wholly devoted in tracing back the origins of monsters and analysing their transformation by and impact on modern pop culture.
Anyways, while watching two videos on WERWOLVES (and another, equally interesting video on Werehyenas – a shapeshifter I never heard about before (although I suspect that Werehyenas are present in a certain RPG I’ll get to soon) – a short pictured popped up in the vid:
The cover of the tabletop RPG „Werewolf: The Apocalypse“ – the original one by White Wolf with the cut-out claw marks, maybe one of the most iconic RPG books of all times, production-wise (also opening up with a COMIC, which was and is totally friggin AWESOME).
And even though I was WAY more into Vampire: The Masquerade at the time (for which I even did some artwork for some German books an did a partial re-write of the dreadful Berlin by Night; actually my first writing gig in the rolplaying industry (unless Galactic Underground 3 for SSDC’s Battlelords of the Twenty-Third Century came before that, I don’t remember) I actually played that game for some time, too (my character being Anubisseth, a lupus-born Silent Strider (so, basically, a feral Mekhet 😉 (shoutout to Vampire: The Requiem, the better of the two Vampire RPGs by White Wolf, and I will gladly die on this hill!). <— another brillant but incomprehensibly endless sentence from AAS, thank you.
Short interlude: My GM back then was Olaf Florian (who played Vampire LARP at my group, but was WAY more into Werewolf and Mage) who gave me a BRILLANT solo-session as a kind of introductory story session. In that session, I started out as a young African Wolf who was drawn away from the African wilderness and into the realm of the humans (so: settled areas of Egypt). I came in with no concept of how to actually play a wolf (even after almost every Elfquest comic in the years prior, in which „wolf thinking“ played a huge part) – but Olaf did an INCREDIBLE job of „feeding“ me the surroundings in wolf senses only – esp. smell and hearing, thus really easing me into „wolf thinking“ in no time at all (and not only the natural, RL senses, but the „awakened“ senses of a Werwolf as well).
Olaf, if you read this: WELL DONE AND THANK YOU!
Back to the topic: While reminiscing about my rather short ventures into Werewolf: The Apocalypse I couldn’t help but think of what it meant to play TTRPGs back then, how I came into roleplaying at all, what drew me away from The Dark Eye and Dungeons and Dragons into other RPGs and, eventually, Shadowrun.
Living in the Eighties, envisioning a dark future based off of „Eighties Tech Projections“ had a big allure to me (this may be grammatically wrong but I couldn’t find the right form in my short online search) – but if I imagine me being a teenager in 2025 I’m not sure if Shadowrun or even Cyberpunk in general would have that big an impact on me.
What I actually WOULD love to play as a teenager in the 2020s is (spoiler) WEREWOLF: THE APOCALYPSE, a game about actually being empowered to DO something against all the major an minor SHIT that is happening all around me: fighting against corporate greed and even INTENTIONAL pollution of the Pentex Corporation, fighting tooth and claw against corrupted humans (esp. political minions of Pentex and its ilk (a.k.a. Pentex pawns like „The Orange Man“ and „The Kekius“) and spirits and actually, FINALLY being able to NOT feel help- and hopeless in the face of … ALL OF THIS.
Heck, I (maybe) would tattoo „WHEN WILL YOU RAGE“ over my dead black heart in no time and either join or found a grassroots eco-guerilla movement eventually.
What do you think? Is WERWEOLF: THE APOCALYPSE the TTRPG of this time?
[Note: I am only talking about the original game. In the NEw World of Darkness, there was also a Werewolf game that I picked up and read, but it left out everything that made WtA alluring to me. I am dimly aware that there are new iterations of WtA, but since I haven’t read any of them I can’t comment on them (Never played the Werewolf video game, too BTW)).
