Werewolf: The Forsaken

New World of Darkness

by Carl Bowen, James Kiley, Matthew McFarland

Full Moon Rising
The world is in shadow. To one side stretches the forest, to the other the city. Your claws are stained with blood. Your senses whisper of prey that runs before you, and of predators who stalk even the likes of you. You hear the howls of your brothers and sisters. Luna rises. Your blood boils. It is time to hunt.

Wolves at the Door
Werewolf: The Forsaken -- the game of bestial violence and supernatural terror -- is the second core setting sourcebook intended for use with White Wolf's new Storytelling System(tm). Werewolves are creatures of original sin, tainted by ancestral crimes and driven to hunt by the shame of being abandoned. This book details what it is to be Forsaken, one of the Tribes of the Moon. Create your own werewolf pack and seek redemption or give in to your savage nature. Hardcover. For use with the World of Darkness Rulebook.

Genres: Role Playing Games, Gaming, Horror, Fantasy, Reference, World Of Darkness, Werewolves

317 pages, Hardcover

First published March 1, 2005

Reviews

[Mark Stone · Rating 4 out of 5]

Once, I was, perhaps, like you. I had never read Werewolf: the Forasken, and I never planned to. I was a Werewolf: the Apocalypse, and somewhere in my heart, I was still grumpy that White Wolf had ended the line in the first place.

Then, on a whim, I started reading about Werewolf: the Forsaken. I posted a thread on rpg.net asking for advice. I read Black Hat Matt's campaign blog and essay. I even read the Wikipedia page on the game. Then, at GenCon, I picked up a copy and started reading it.

Despite twelve hours of gaming a day, I finished it in two days.

I wholeheartedly recommend this game to all fans of Werewolf: the Apocalypse. It captures the spirit of the old game, and goes one further, by being better organized, better written, and truer to the premise of savage horror.

Don't expect Forsaken to be Apocalypse repackaged. Forsaken is a tighter, narrower game, but still full of possibilities. Gone (and mourned, at least by me) is the savage eco-warrior werewolf. In his place is the werewolf who patrols the boundary between the physical and the spiritual. Similarly, gone is the beautiful-and-strange Umbra, replaced by the strange-and-terrble Hisil. Gone is the stern uncompromising warrior for goodness (and Gaia), replaced by a fighter who has to make compromises and pick his targets carefully.

In short, Werewolf: the Forsaken is an excellent game. It won't replace Apocalypse in anyone's heart or library, but it is a fine inheritor of that game's legacy.

[Andre · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dieses Buch ist gut geschrieben und illustriert. Es führt einen in die Welt der Uratha ein und gibt die notwendigen Grundinformationen. Aber die Darstellung der Uratha in ihren Kriegsgestalten ist, gemessen an den Regeln für diese Form, unrealistisch (sie stehen oder sitzen viel zu ruhig da). Bei den angegeben Filmen, Büchern etc., die als mögliche Inspirationen angegeben werden, würde ich jedem empfehlen aufzupassen. Diese Quellen mögen gut sein um Werwölfe zu spielen aber für echtes Wolfsverhalten würde ich andere Bücher empfehlen. Daneben kann es bei diesem Buch leicht dazu kommen, dass man es mit dem Horror übertreibt und das Spiel so zu eintönig wird. Außerdem wird die positive Seite der Leidenschaftlichkeit der Uratha nicht genug gewürdigt und man konzentriert sich zu sehr auf das negative.
Ansonsten ist es ein sehr gutes Buch für ein Spiel voller Horror. Allerdings verlangt es von den Spielern auch genug Fantasie um einen Uratha wirkungsvoll darstellen zu können.

[Ryan · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was given to me by a coworker after he found it at a flea market that he frequents.

This is the core rulebook for the werewolf race as imagined by the broad gothic horror RPG family known as World of Darkness. This particular RPG family is best known for the Vampire: The Masquerade portion of its library, but as far as I've seen the various different groups are aware of each other in-universe and frequently interact, though they're all governed by different rules.

I have, for many years, wanted to read any book from WoD. They seem to be rather difficult to find as the local table top stores in my area never really seemed to have any WoD books, so receiving this the way I did was truly a gift. If one really gets into the world of table top RPGs, they'll notice that certain RPGs dominate the conversation more than others. The World of Darkness family is probably the third most prominent name behind Call of Cthulhu and D&D itself. D&D has, since 3E at least, always been a strong balance of deep, crunchy numbers and exciting roleplaying based in a classic fantasy world. Call of Cthulhu is an elegant system that requires a lot of work up front but then really allows its players to hard focus on immersing themselves in the mystery at hand in various well-realized real world locales from a century or more gone by as the dice rolls come up fairly organically and are easy to reference on the character sheet. WoD is a family of RPGs that I've always thought of as the "theatre kid" or "goth kid" RPG just from what I'd learned about it indirectly over almost two decades of dedication to this hobby. This book proved that assessment extremely well founded. This book was written and published in 2005, and it basically screams it. The history and the culture of werewolves as laid out by this book could easily have been incorporated into one of the Underworld movies, and the outfits and personalities of these characters were things I encountered frequently at the Hot Topic in the local mall, a place I spent of a great deal of time in with my best friend all through the mid-aughts. The book gets absolutely ridiculous though even by its standards. There are a few abilities in the game that involve protecting an area of varying some sizes from the various other threats in this universe, both human and supernatural. Two of these abilities are activated by marking the area that the user wishes to protect with magically empowered urine. That goes well beyond the standard goth/emo hijinks of the day all the way back to the playground where that one odd group of kids kept to themselves in one little corner and pretended to be a group of animals some sort, usually horses, cats or dogs. I have a hard time telling if the writers actually took any of this seriously or had their tongues firmly planted in their cheeks as they put this book together. My two actual complaints with this book are the usual: tons of typos and the visuals. The typos are pretty standard for books from RPG families that aren't D&D and fall roughly in the middle with some of the CoC books I've read to this point but the art is weird. The book's only color seems to be a muddy brown. I've been heavily involved in playing video games all my life, so I'm well aware that it was a trend for games to have a lot of brown in their color palettes in those days, but I didn't think that that would also apply to RPG books. It gets old quickly and makes the more involved pieces of art a little more difficult to decipher. The actual art is all over the place. There are multiple artists involved in this book, and they range in quality from very high end art that would be at home in horror comics of the day to stuff that looks like what the edgy, talented but very raw kids in my high school would doodle in their notebooks during class. This was an absolute blast to read and I will definitely be keeping an eye out for other WoD books.

[Michał Przestrzelski · Rating 1 out of 5]

Ten podręcznik rozczarował mnie już na początku. Założenie konfliktu Odrzuconych z Nieskalanymi jest po prostu głupie. Wojna plemienna, której powód znajduje się w czasach mitologicznych? Słabe. A jeszcze słabsze ze względu no to, że te plemiona, to nie żadne rozszerzone rodziny, tylko frakcje, do których każdy może przystąpić. Najlepszą częścią podręcznika był fragment o świecie duchów, wydaje się, że odgrywałby on dużą rolę w większości historii. Przyznam, że Apokalipsę czytałem na tyle dawno, że nie jestem w stanie porównać systemów, ale chyba i tamten Wilkołak mnie nie porwał – sprawdzę jeszcze piątą edycję. Dodatkowo słabo rozpisane tło fabularne. Taki bezpłciowy system, nie sądzę, żeby druga edycja była w stanie to naprawić.

[R J Royer · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of my favorite books for World of Darkness and I am so sad to be giving it away but I haven't used it in over five years so I am giving it away.

[Max · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have rather mixed feelings about this setting. Some of the stuff is pretty cool, such as werewolves as the police of the spirit world. In fact, the spirit world in general is pretty cool - too bad it gets relegated to an appendix and suffers from a lot of poorly explained mechanics. There are also some cool plot hooks and ideas sprinkled throughout, such as a trio of werewolves who run a bookshop, mentioned in the sample setting in the back of the book. On the other hand, I don't really get why anybody would want to be a werewolf. Their defining thing is their rage, and it's definitely much more of a drawback than an asset. It seems as if they're abusive jerks to all of their loved ones, and have a chance of straight up killing friends and families members if things go wrong. I know that that's sort of the point, since the World of Darkness is a horror setting, but still. Also, a lot of the fluff in the first chapter turned me off. It feels as if there's some important aspect of the legends about the death of Father Wolf missing, because that story never quite coheres. I never got a sense of why the werewolves were justified in killing their sire. Further, going off the short blurbs about the social groups, none of them sounded great - and most of them sounded like idiots. This was rectified a little by the full descriptions, other than the fact that I still don't like the "we're super awesome Alphas" faction. The mechanics seemed to more or less work, albeit they were sometimes poorly explained. I don't know that I care for the way learning Gifts works - you have a power stat like Vampires, which determines certain limits, but you also have to raise another, separate stat to unlock more gifts. Furthermore, most of the gifts just didn't have the coolness factor that a lot of the Vampire ones had. There's no melding with the ground or mesmerizing people into seeing you as whoever they most expect. In the end, I didn't hate Werewolf as much as the setting chapter made me want to, but I also didn't love it. I am interested in checking out the supplement on the Pure Tribes to learn about their side of things, but aside from that, I don't feel the need to dive deep into the setting that I do with Vampire.

[Krzysztof · Rating 2 out of 5]

Well, that was weird... Ok, so the whole ghost setting of the game is interesting, but seems too vague and too complex at the same time, making it just weird and giving me the feeling that I don't really understand how the ghost world works. The Werewolves themselves seem to have been shoehorned into this setting as an afterthought - they just don't make all that much sense within the world. The powers are too specific and too weak in a sense, they just don't seem very useful. The whole game seems to be very combat centered, which I don't think is a good idea, even though they are Werewolves... well, truth be told, I wasn't that optimistic about the book before reading it, so I don't know if its just me or not. A weak 2/5 either way, didn't find it very interesting and can't see myself playing this.

[Colin · Rating 4 out of 5]

The new World of Darkness' werewolves - an interesting new take on the ideas begun in Werewolf: The Apocalypse. Gone, though, is a lot of the memorable cosmology (of Weaver, Wyld, and Wyrm) from the original game, but the new game has a compelling cosmology of its own. There are even some nifty elements that I felt were missing from the fist game (e.g. an explanation for the widespread belief that the bite of a werewolf transmits lycanthropy, if it supposed to be an inborn condition). Anyway, it looks kind of fun . . .

[Wyndeborn · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love this setting, but the book is terribly opaque in certain sections. Anyone who has played knows that Renown and Gifts need some work. This book is otherwise amazing and I would highly recommend it as a roleplaying game supplement (to the World of Darkness core rulebook).

[Gerard Pairó vinardell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sólo lo he jugado una sesión. Tiene muy buena pinta eso sí.