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Werewolf: The Apocalypse
Werewolf: The Wild West : A Storytelling Game of Historical Horror
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287 pages, Hardcover
First published May 1, 1997
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51 people want to read
About the author
Richard Dansky
110 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 - 3 of 3 reviews
August 21, 2019
Overall, Werewolf: the Wild West has a lot of missed opportunities and a few strange choices made, but is generally a solid book, despite these flaws.
First, the good: the opening fiction is excellent. It has a very strong Canterbury Tales vibe to it, and I was a bit disappointed that after the opening the characters in it were never mentioned again, when they would have been great running examples. Another nice thing was that it actually mentioned the Native Tribes working with Dreamspeaker Kinfolk! This actually tries (though doesn't super-well) to address one of my running criticisms of Werewolf. The other truly excellent thing is Storm-Eater/The Storm Umbra, creating a unique environment for gameplay.
Now, the bad: there's a LOT of Noble Savage in this book. A painful amount. The claim that the Weaver and Wyrm were basically absent from pre-Colombian America is bad. For one, Cahokia, the Incas and Aztecs, the Iroquois Confederation (not pre-Colombian, but more-or-less pre-contact), the Dine, and others all existed and were complex societies, indicating the Weaver (hell, Teotihuacan was one of the largest cities on the planet) and as for the Wyrm, you have all sorts of awful things going on. They even mention a "web of power" that bound Storm-Eater, which screams Weaver (and could tie into the cosmology). Another bad point on this is that there was no direct mention of the Trail of Tears, somehow!
Other than that, my complaints are mostly minor: grammatical and layout errors exist, some aspects of Werewolf cosmology make no sense, etc.
First, the good: the opening fiction is excellent. It has a very strong Canterbury Tales vibe to it, and I was a bit disappointed that after the opening the characters in it were never mentioned again, when they would have been great running examples. Another nice thing was that it actually mentioned the Native Tribes working with Dreamspeaker Kinfolk! This actually tries (though doesn't super-well) to address one of my running criticisms of Werewolf. The other truly excellent thing is Storm-Eater/The Storm Umbra, creating a unique environment for gameplay.
Now, the bad: there's a LOT of Noble Savage in this book. A painful amount. The claim that the Weaver and Wyrm were basically absent from pre-Colombian America is bad. For one, Cahokia, the Incas and Aztecs, the Iroquois Confederation (not pre-Colombian, but more-or-less pre-contact), the Dine, and others all existed and were complex societies, indicating the Weaver (hell, Teotihuacan was one of the largest cities on the planet) and as for the Wyrm, you have all sorts of awful things going on. They even mention a "web of power" that bound Storm-Eater, which screams Weaver (and could tie into the cosmology). Another bad point on this is that there was no direct mention of the Trail of Tears, somehow!
Other than that, my complaints are mostly minor: grammatical and layout errors exist, some aspects of Werewolf cosmology make no sense, etc.
September 19, 2020
Part of the Holy Trinity of White Wolf games (Vampire: The Dark Ages, Werewolf: The Wild West, Mage: The Sorcerer’s Crusade), the historical games were always some of the best in the industry. Werewolf: WW is unfortunately highly underrated and never sold well back in the late 90’s. This is an amazing game though. It does not pull any punches with regards to how terrible the settlers were to the western frontier and its overall theme is that the West wasn’t won, it was lost.
October 25, 2016
Back in Middle School, this was the first rpg I ever learned to run as a game master. I just re-discovered the old book last night and flipped through it, realizing its still a pretty solid and original system.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews