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Werewolf: The Apocalypse
Subsidiaries: A Guide to Pentex
A Guide to Pentex details the structure, products, mission statements and innermost goings-on of six of Pentex’s nastiest subdivisions. Whether you like your Wyrm-tainted corporate antagonists awesomely powerful and iFootballuential, like Magadon or Endron, or nasty in a subtle fashion, like King Distilleries, Avalon Toys and Tellus Electronics, we’ve got what you need. Worst of all — dare you visit the dark side of roleplaying at Black Dog Game Studio? It might be more than you can handle.…
128 pages, Paperback
First published February 1, 2000
24 people want to read
About the author
Richard Dansky
111 books83 followersBy day, Richard Dansky works as a professional video game designer and writer for Red Storm/Ubisoft, with credits on games like Splinter Cell: Blacklist. By night, he writes fiction, with his most recent book being the short fiction collection SNOWBIRD GOTHIC. Richard lives in North Carolina with his wife and their inevitable cats, books, and collection of single malt whiskys.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
July 30, 2011
Um, time has proven this book to be a little too close for comfort.
I re-read this Werewolf: The Apocalypse supplement last week as research for a game I'm planning to run, and though I remembered enjoying it upon its release in early 2000, on the whole it's even better than I recalled. Briefly, this sourcebook covers a handful of corrupt and corrupting companies associated with the ultimate evil megacorp: Pentex, a company whose "bottom line" involves inflicting all manner of social, economical, environmental and spiritual disaster upon the world at large.
A few weeks ago, I made a crack about the recent activities of large corporations, their owners, their media mouthpieces, and their political yes-men. "It's almost," I wrote, "like these folks played Werewolf as kids and then decided that they wanted to be Pentex in real life." Companies like BP, Koch Industries, Blackwater Securities (under whatever name it operates this week...), News Corporation and the Kingdom Holding Company conduct business in manners disturbingly similar to Pentex and its subsidiaries. Now, as one of the original White Wolfers myself, I realize that satire was almost literally the name of the game; in the near-dozen years since this book came out, however, the reality has damn near equaled the satire. This alone makes Subsidiaries worthy, if uncomfortable, reading.
Beyond an introduction that lays out the foundation of Pentex and its essential structure, the book involves six chapters, each one covering an evil corporation:
* Endron, a vicious oil-and-energy megacorp (written by Richard Dansky)
* Megadon, a literally sickening health-and-pharmaceutical company (by Clayton Oliver and Will Van Meter)
* King Breweries, a grotesque producer of toxic intoxicants (again, by Dansky)
* Avalon, a toy company bent on corrupting and dispiriting children (by Deena McKinney)
* Tellus, an evil videogame and computer company (by Ethan Skemp, Owen Winkler, Brian Urbanek and Jesse Heinig)
* ...and Black Dog Game Factory, a vicious self-parody of White Wolf itself (by Justin Achilli)
The book's tone vacillates between deadpan revelation and snarky madness. In its most effective entries (Endron, Megadon and King), Subsidiaries reads like a corporate profile written from hell. Dansky's work is by far the strongest material in the book, veering sickeningly close to real-life practices. Achilli's Black Dog entry provides the sourcebook's wildest, most demented ride, and although it's more cartoonish than the three strongest entries, it's both laugh-out-loud hilarious and disquietingly accurate. (I myself wound up parodied in one section of this entry - a section Justin ran past me to make sure I wouldn't be offended; I did think it was funny, but that's partly because his observations were somewhat insightful...) The Megadon chapter is the book's most straightforward entry, and what it lacks in over-the-top satire it makes up for with a disturbing resemblance to reality.
The book's weakest entries both left me wanting more than what I got. Tellus wasn't bad per se, just not up to the level of the other chapters; that said, it reads almost like an early business plan for Rockstar Games, producers of the Grand Theft Auto series and a video/ computer game analog of White Wolf itself. I felt disappointed by the Avalon Toys entry, partly because its format - a combination of flavor fiction and straight-on info - didn't quite work and felt jarring in comparison with the formats of the other entries, and partly because it felt skimpy in comparison. The concept of an evil toy manufacturer has devastating potential for fun... but although the entry made references to dangerous toys like Action Bill and Gooshy-Gooze, it didn't provide nearly enough detail to be usable. Both toys were mentioned in an early edition of Book of the Wyrm, but those entries were also too skimpy yet over-the-top for practical application. Updated info would have been appreciated.
Overall, however, Subsidiaries is a useful and grimly enjoyable sourcebook for one of my all-time favorite RPGs. While the format is inconsistent (I wish editor/ developer Ethan Skemp had mandated the same format for each author) and some entries work better and read better than others, this is one of the stronger books from the Werewolf: The Apocalypse line. Its occasionally chilling accuracy just makes it, in this day and age, that much more worthwhile.
I re-read this Werewolf: The Apocalypse supplement last week as research for a game I'm planning to run, and though I remembered enjoying it upon its release in early 2000, on the whole it's even better than I recalled. Briefly, this sourcebook covers a handful of corrupt and corrupting companies associated with the ultimate evil megacorp: Pentex, a company whose "bottom line" involves inflicting all manner of social, economical, environmental and spiritual disaster upon the world at large.
A few weeks ago, I made a crack about the recent activities of large corporations, their owners, their media mouthpieces, and their political yes-men. "It's almost," I wrote, "like these folks played Werewolf as kids and then decided that they wanted to be Pentex in real life." Companies like BP, Koch Industries, Blackwater Securities (under whatever name it operates this week...), News Corporation and the Kingdom Holding Company conduct business in manners disturbingly similar to Pentex and its subsidiaries. Now, as one of the original White Wolfers myself, I realize that satire was almost literally the name of the game; in the near-dozen years since this book came out, however, the reality has damn near equaled the satire. This alone makes Subsidiaries worthy, if uncomfortable, reading.
Beyond an introduction that lays out the foundation of Pentex and its essential structure, the book involves six chapters, each one covering an evil corporation:
* Endron, a vicious oil-and-energy megacorp (written by Richard Dansky)
* Megadon, a literally sickening health-and-pharmaceutical company (by Clayton Oliver and Will Van Meter)
* King Breweries, a grotesque producer of toxic intoxicants (again, by Dansky)
* Avalon, a toy company bent on corrupting and dispiriting children (by Deena McKinney)
* Tellus, an evil videogame and computer company (by Ethan Skemp, Owen Winkler, Brian Urbanek and Jesse Heinig)
* ...and Black Dog Game Factory, a vicious self-parody of White Wolf itself (by Justin Achilli)
The book's tone vacillates between deadpan revelation and snarky madness. In its most effective entries (Endron, Megadon and King), Subsidiaries reads like a corporate profile written from hell. Dansky's work is by far the strongest material in the book, veering sickeningly close to real-life practices. Achilli's Black Dog entry provides the sourcebook's wildest, most demented ride, and although it's more cartoonish than the three strongest entries, it's both laugh-out-loud hilarious and disquietingly accurate. (I myself wound up parodied in one section of this entry - a section Justin ran past me to make sure I wouldn't be offended; I did think it was funny, but that's partly because his observations were somewhat insightful...) The Megadon chapter is the book's most straightforward entry, and what it lacks in over-the-top satire it makes up for with a disturbing resemblance to reality.
The book's weakest entries both left me wanting more than what I got. Tellus wasn't bad per se, just not up to the level of the other chapters; that said, it reads almost like an early business plan for Rockstar Games, producers of the Grand Theft Auto series and a video/ computer game analog of White Wolf itself. I felt disappointed by the Avalon Toys entry, partly because its format - a combination of flavor fiction and straight-on info - didn't quite work and felt jarring in comparison with the formats of the other entries, and partly because it felt skimpy in comparison. The concept of an evil toy manufacturer has devastating potential for fun... but although the entry made references to dangerous toys like Action Bill and Gooshy-Gooze, it didn't provide nearly enough detail to be usable. Both toys were mentioned in an early edition of Book of the Wyrm, but those entries were also too skimpy yet over-the-top for practical application. Updated info would have been appreciated.
Overall, however, Subsidiaries is a useful and grimly enjoyable sourcebook for one of my all-time favorite RPGs. While the format is inconsistent (I wish editor/ developer Ethan Skemp had mandated the same format for each author) and some entries work better and read better than others, this is one of the stronger books from the Werewolf: The Apocalypse line. Its occasionally chilling accuracy just makes it, in this day and age, that much more worthwhile.
Displaying 1 of 1 review