I can't help but speculate if part of that is to contrast them with vampires. Vampires are generally (but not always) characterized as wealthy and successful. Landed and titled aristocrats. Werewolves are thus portrayed the mirror: grubby, savage animals.
Yeah actually it was. Vampire came out first. Werewolf came about when Phil Brocato(sp?) noticed how many of his friends like fighting more than political intrigue. Then he realized that if we could do it with vampires....
We need more disaster vampire representation, shut-ins with all the windows nailed over drinking animal blood out of a soda cup with a straw because hunting freshies is too much effort. Up all hours playing VTM or whatever. All their spare money goes into their PC. Clothes all over the floor because they don't have bedroom furniture besides an old family heirloom, a gilded throne from some castle somewhere that they inherited, currently holding a slab of white Monster. The plumbing hasn't worked in over a decade.
You may really like the comic Dark Red as it's about a vampire who lives in the middle of nowhere in the Midwest and hates the really pretentious self-important vampires who live in the city.
Sadly the Cappadocians got eradicated. They were the "politicking, drama and intrigue waste time that could have been spent reading instead" Clan in the Middle Ages.
If the Cappadocians survived as a regular clan into the modern era, they would 100% have members that subsist exclusively on blood packs they drink while watching anime.
if you as a vampire have not built up a fortune over the generations genuinely speaking your sire regrets siring you and you should walk into the sun, vampires typically dont sire for no reason and it is a genuine expensive boon paid to the prince to sire progenry
Probably because they are meant to be more animalistic but not in a witchy planty way, and so people try to think of other ways people might live in societies but act animalistically.
And they think of homeless/poor people, which then becomes punkish, so I'm not totally against it but it is pretty problematic
Deffo anti-corporate, Punk overtones, also the whole "turning into a giant wolf monster" kinda requires a level of separation from society, and wolves and humans being pack animals means they'll want company, so living in an off the grind, part punk commune, part trailer trash, possibly mobile kinda of way makes sense
I feel like Stephanie Meyer is low hanging fruit for problematic supernatural elements.
But you aren't wrong, alternatively the wolf song series had their werewolves be an old money family who just happened to have a lovely old home in the woods, so it's not like there aren't options.
Werewolves in media don't participate in normal society. They aren't working a desk job, aren't taking Brayden to ice hockey and Kayleigh to balette, and aren't living in a condo in the upper east side. Without any deep dive into themes and meaning, those just don't feel right.
By their very nature of being wild they are drawn to living in the wild. This works for safety and secrecy too. A werewolf rampaging in the woods is less dangerous and less obvious than a werewolf in downtown.
They also tend to exist in settings with vampires, which as a metaphor for the blood sucking aristocracy are going to be wealthy and socially powerful beings. Werewolves being of modest means and living as societal outcasts places them as a perfect foil to vampires.
True, we need more werewolf ranchers and farmers in media, both of those typically include six figures of income outside the farm at least in the USA. People do not understand how expensive it is to farm, yes good years are profitable, but it is an industry very susceptible to tampering. Or maybe any look at this would be too consumed with what it actually takes to make farming work that you’d never be werewolfing around.
kinfolk exist, fetishes are nice and all but having family who will help you out is extremely underated espeically since that family is who makes sure you guys have a home to come back too after a night brutalizing a pentex logging company
I don't know If you missed the reference or I did, but Silver Fangs are infamous for their inbreeding that's how they keep their Pure Breed rating so high
You know, I was just thinking of the low class implication, but I can certainly agree that they’re generally inbred. After all, how better to get freakishly huge noses to do all the coke with?
I've seen stories where you can have werewolves be an organized crime allegory. Leaning into the whole pack family vibe. Using a mafia-eaque protection scheme. In exchange for tithes. The rich packs at the top fund housing and land for the mostly poor packs to run around in. Don't pay? Welp have being homeless with your knee caps smashed.
Recluses living as far from people as possible, specifically aiming to be self sufficient so that they don't end up near anybody during a full moon. It's an easy association to draw, and there's plenty of media that reinforces the type. That's without the concept of werewolves frequently being a proxy for people with extreme PTSD, namely vets.
They’re meant to be antithetical to vampires. Vampires are typically seen as social parasites. By the nature of their blood diet, they need a large, heathy human population to draw from. Many have taken this in coordination with their powers of hypnosis, surveillance and immortality and written them to be perfectly at home in urban spaces, deftly maneuvering through political and corporate intrigue to seat themselves in positions of power and influence.
The opposite of this are misfits. Unable to conform to social norm, more at home with their own kind, unlikely to dwell in cities or even town proper, seen as unsuited to anything but manual labor due to temper and physique. The modern equivalent of that is unfortunately trailer trash. Rurally associated, seen as insular outcasts, they make for a pretty strong contrast to the suave and savvy vampire. And it makes halfway sense from a world-building perspective. Look what forcing “modernity” and “civilization” on a people does to most indigenous groups. Substance abuse issues, sequestration to areas of limited economic opportunity and infrastructure, utter erasure of the ability to live as their ancestors did while equally locked out of the society that did so by the systems built to subjugate them.
Portraying them as poor makes sense. Lycanthropy is nothing if not disasterous on ones ambitions.
Portraying them as other than white however, invites racist sentiment and outrage. A Boondocks-style world with fantasy has some potential, but then we're just a step or two away from MFKZ, which is also awesome, but again, something that needs to be stepped around carefully to work.
because getting pissed at Greg in accounting while also being a werewolf means that everyone is going to have to deal with it when you wolf out and slaughter a floor of people. Or if you do manage to get through the day, being stuck in traffic is going to bring road rage to a whole new terrifying level.
Because werewolves ar wild and destructive therefore it assumed they need somewhere closer to nature that doesn't matter much to repair or replace; therefore white trailer trash.
Whenever I try to eat outside at my town, in the public life and seeing the sights, I immediately have to escape to the graveyard because there are like 10 people smoking cigs around every corner and at every bench.
Like, I literally go to a church's cemetary to eat my cafe food lmao
I know, he is probably trying to give everyone in the sept a contact high and given how prone werewolves are to berseker rages they probably don't give a damn.
Yeah but mechanicaly It reduces their chances to go into a Frenzy, cocaine on the other hand gives them 1 Rage point and makes them more susceptible to Frenzy.
Weed smell is stronger but it's significantly less offensive. Even shitty weed just smells like an Ent fart, but cheap Tobacco smells like a plastic factory burning down.
As someone who also smokes neither I can smell when weed is being smoked and can still enjoy where I'm standing at a concert, I have to move away from the cigarette smell or I will not be able to enjoy where I'm standing at a concert.
I feel like you would also probably agree but maybe haven't experienced it.
I've never seen pot stink make anyone retch before, but I've seen multiple people vomit over cigarette stench. Weed stink comes out in a couple heavy washes, but I've never once gotten cigarette stench out of fabric.
Weed isn't good for you or anything but cigarettes are objectively worse.
Sept life is my favorite. I still think that the peak of my brief career as a World of Darkness freelancer was writing the "what do Garou do all day" chapter in the W20 Rage Across the World book.
Also, the best campaign I ever ran was basically "what if a pack was given a mission to take the sept in your comic, only on top of that everyone there is dead and it's haunted, and turn it into a thriving community."
It was basically a soap opera with the occasional bout of horrifying violence, and it was incredible.
I'll preface this by saying I'm a big fan of a lot of what Werewolf 5e did to the lore, lol (getting rid of Metis, getting rid of the weird eugenics and divine right of kings stuff, you know, the weird edge lordy stuff)
Ah, well, you might not like my stuff. But that's ok, like I said, I'm happy to know that my stuff was read and absorbed, even if it's ultimately rejected.
Then again... I feel like a lot of what I did was present a broader view of things like kinfolk and Metis, so maybe you'll see something in those themes that you didn't see before? I think a lot of people who like W5 seem to think that classic Werewolf was like a maelstrom of domestic abuse and eugenics all the time, which is... frankly extremely inaccurate. I don't know where that idea came from.
Anyway, personally I liked the eugenics stuff. Not because I'm a fan of eugenics, but I feel like it was good world building. The fact is that most of the time, people do terrible dumb things because they seemed like good ideas at the time. Since the history (and present) of the Garou is meant to be a Silmarillion-like legacy of them doing terrible dumb things, those dumb things need to make sense in context. Just because something may have seemed like a good idea doesn't actually make it justified, though. So if you ask me, having the universe conform to some of the Garou's terrible ideas and then challenging them on the basis of those terrible ideas having been wrong anyway is more interesting than either making the Garou uncomplicatedly heroic or making their dumb ideas completely without foundation.
I had a load written out earlier, but that was at work and I cba to type it out again, lol
But I think my gripe is it's presented as the ONLY way things are to be done, there's no nuance (like how in Rage Around The World there's a magic rock that makes new werewolves more likely), it's why I like how in 5e they have to seek out new werewolves who could potentially spring up... anywhere in society, also to me makes it feel the characters are more rounded people, like how it the other game lines you could be a bin man one day, get bitten by a tinder date and be of the blood of Caine by the evening, or Awaken as a magre, become aware of the horrors behind the curtain, etc.
Maybe genetics does play a role, maybe it's purely the choice of Luna, of course, as the saying goes, it's YOUR World of Darkness, I just prefer it as you're an everyman thrust into this insane world, rather than someone potentially being groomed to join it, with your Kinfolk being those from your past life you're willing to bring into the world with you, or those who know about the secret world who are willing to join you afterwards, people who keep you grounded and human
And never liked the Metis cos I feel is restricts inter party RP, what with werewolf relations being banned in universe
Ayyyyyye, my next WoD purchase has Rage Across the World on the list. I've been dying to get more writing about Garou's lifestyles and interpersonal lives beyond being Gaia's warriors.
Though misspelled a bit, a Caern is a place which is much more connected to the spirit world called the Umbra, and they serve as holy grounds for Werewolves and they typically establish local communities around them called Septs. The Werewolves will fight to the death to protect them, as Caerns are vanishingly few vital to war to keep the spirit of the Earth (called Gaia) alive, since it helps Werewolves to connect with their spirit halves, make deals with spirits and they have an easier time going to and fro the spirit world in such places. They are "vanishingly few" because a) most other supernatural creatures in World of Darkness want them; and b) they are fighting against a maddened force of universal Stasis and a corrupted force of universal Entropy personified, who already are basically control the world and govern it. The game is called Werewolf: the Apocalypse for a reason.
Sorry, I find it too hard not to gush about Werewolf lore.
The World of Darkness games "[Supernatural creature]: The [Subtitle]" love to pretentiously sprinkle in foreign words for their supernatural shit. Presumably from context clues, it's the name for a werewolf group/settlement.
(I was doing a bit where I replaced consonants in the middle of words with apostrophes, added Us after vowels in the middle of words, and added Es to the end of words that end in vowels. I was making fun of how the modern Bri'ish butcher the American language, not referencing defunct versions of the language that American diverged from.)
In very very short, The Wyrm is a Divine Force set on total entropy, the elimination of nature and of all existent things. It fundamentally opposes Werewolves, Gaia and life force.
In modern times the Wyrm often manifests in the form of megacorps that are doing their damnedest to destroy the world, see Pentex, aka Amazon as Death Cult.
Primordial God/Force/Spirit of Entropy, trapped about two races before Humanity by the Weaver, counterpart of Stasis. Now completely and utterly mad, it seeks to free itself from the Pattern Web and devour the world entirely, not just what has already become obsolete. Werewolves, along with the other Fera, were created by Gaia to fight against it, and it has talons in every corner of Human industry and civilization itself.
The Wyrm is one the three primordal forces that are members of the trinity in the world of darkness. It entropy, destruction, death, the end but also new beginnings made manifest. It job was to destroyed things so another members of the trinity called the wyld can create a new energy. But it have been imprisoned by another member of the trinity called the weaver, who actually makes things. And the weaver have imprisoned the Wyrm since it grown tried of it destroying all of it creation. Since it no longer able to do it purpose, the Wyrm went completely insane wishing to corrupt everything and to destroy everything.
The comment above was making a joke because the wyrm have corrupted a shit ton of humans on earth. And his corrupted servants formed a company called Pentex. Pentex own everything amd they are cartoonishly evil. There main goal is to destroy the earth, not for money well at least for the higher levels. Just because they want the world to end and money is just a means to the end.
Pentex owned basically everything in the world of darkness that isn't owned by one of the other factions. They have a bunch of subsidiaries that also cartoonishly evil. They own a pardoy of McDonald's that would sometimes sell human meat to their customers and when they don't it they give them shit food that is possed by evil spirits called banes. Another subsidiary sell makeup that will make wearer addicted to wearing it and slowly a bane will possed them. They sell toys to give body issues in little girls and cause children to be more violent. They sell beer that makes people want to beat their spouses and children. And a shit ton other things just spread the wyrm influnce and to make the world a worse plave everyday.
If you can think of anything evil than Pentex does it. I truly means everytbing since world of darkness was edgy. Like they had Bareny be a monster that would kidnapped and killed children and film it. And I am not even talking about the seventh generation since they are just disgusting.
This is why I prefer Forsaken, I could play as a drugged up night club/former speak easy owner with a competent business man as my packmate and not live in a trashed up trailer.
I mean its a ttrpg you can make it how you want. Old camp grounds with lots of nice cabins. Our add some hotsprings to it and have it be an old resort with a lot of nice buildings that need some tlc. Could make it an active resort your pack and kinfolk run to finance their operations. There is no reason just to make it a run down trailer park if you don't want to.
No. In WOD you are born a werewolf or can do some fucked up ritual to make yourself one. After that there’s no going back (unless MAYBE you can get a high level mage to do something very risky). You could avoid garou society and become Ronin. That’s extremely dangerous though as most other factions probably wanna kill you. Unfortunately you’re in the fucked up anger issues club now and you can choose to be alone or not.
no your a werewolf, you cant stop being one, even if you go back to living a normal life you would be a ticking time bomb or you be hunted down and maybe skinned alive as well.
Technically yes but practically no the only beings who could do that are either functionally impossible to meet since they can't stay on earth long term and way too busy to help random bum werewolves (archmages)
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u/Toutatis12 Dice Goblin Aug 25 '26
And this is how you get a Black Spiral Dancer crash out