Well, phil sort of went full in on being a hippie, and did more than his usual amount of drug trips, while getting lots of Wiccan strange. Man was always a bit crazy, it’s just that like all good crazy artists when he’s not given complete freedom he produces amazing shit. When he’s given complete freedom it just gets strange and crazy.
Hunger is a fun mechanic and previous editions also had rules for trying to avoid drinking too much and killing people (remember, Vitae isn't actually a specific volume of blood, vampires also drain life force along with the blood, a mortal on 1 blood point isn't at 10% blood volume), but it has to be balanced out by both narrative and gameplay needs. In terms of narrative, if vampires have to feed too often it becomes difficult to justify how they go unnoticed in a city, and most cities where VtM stories take place are overcrowded with vamps to begin with. In gameplay terms, if they have to feed every session it bogs down the game (all 3-5 player characters would have to do it) and there are only so many ways the ST can narrate the Ventrue seducing Buxom Blonde #337.
Requiem really nailed the concept that hell is other vampires and this is a society of predators. The city is a gilded cage where you’re stuck for all eternity because travel is dangerous, and why leave where you have power? The Danse Macabre exists because vampires need a reason to wake up every night, to exist beyond just existing to feed. There’s no global war between elders. There’s just you, a shark, stuck in a fish tank of your own creation hoping the lights stay on as you swim to keep swimming. 2e’s detachment points and touchstones for humanity are really brilliant at focusing a character and player to think about the actual ramifications of their condition. The older you get the harder it is to remain attached to humanity. You make your own unending hell.
Oh no, that's not why he wanted it written that way. He's just big mad that NWoD Werewolves aren't hippy warriors anymore like he wanted them to be. He's a pissy grognard who hated that change so much that half of his acid salt stems from that.
Ahhh NWoD. Yeah. Idk I got zero beef with Forsaken. I know some old WtA go 'lalalalala' fingers in ears over it but it's genuinely inoffensive. It's kinda telling the Pure are more interesting, however as a concept...They've got a lot more chef's kiss flavour in my opinion.
Which is what Forsaken did, by the way. The only reason the Uratha as a whole would care for a company dumping toxic waste is that it would attract (literal) toxic spirits to the area. Sure, individual werewolves can still have their own agenda, like a pack who grew up in that area wouldn't like the land dying around them just as a point of principle, spirits or not, but as a whole the Uratha are a lot more politically agnostic than the Garou and it makes for a much more flexible setting.
Werewolf the Forsaken is basically a cop game mixed with border patrol. I’d really like to run or play a game set in the “red zones” of France and Belgium. Areas so devastated by the First World War that it’s unsafe to even walk there most of the time, and people had to be relocated from them permanently. You want nasty spirits? That’s where there has to be some of the nastiest spirits and ghosts possible.
I've read both. Beast is a worse book mainly because a lot of it is repeating the same awful lore over and over again; at least 1/5 of the book is on hammering home how lairs work, how you abuse people in your dreams yadda yadda. It's a lot of words with little impact.
Just playing Werewolf the Apocalypse at all means you have to willfully ignore (or gleefully embrace, like some degenerates do) beastiality simply due to the existence of lupus werewolves. I'm sure (/sneed), that the original idea was simply to bring an alternate point of view to the game, but wolf-born Garou have a lot of unfortunate implications attached to them. Even if they stick with wolf kinfolk, you're talking about a creature with human-like intellect (the First Change ups their cognitive abilities massively) fucking a non-intelligent animal. And if they for some weird reason decide to breed with hominid kinfolk, it's the same issue in reverse: the kinfolk is having sex with someone who may have human form... but is not exactly human in the brain.
Don't worry though: Brucato made it obvious and clear how you can totally fuck rabbits, but more importantly cats. To the point he dedicated paragraphs on it. Especially on how fuckable that cat is. Every single time a cat person is being written you have to know how they want to be fucked.
I like lupus. I'm not a furry or into weird beastiality but there's something interesting about playing such a straightforward not human and adjusting your in game thinking from the usual answers. I've played a Theurge Lupus who was just a blunt motherfucker rocking 4 Int and uncommonly smarter than most homids. He understood human social cues and what to say to get humans to adhere to what he was saying, he just doesn't give a fuck because why should he? That's for other people to worry about that aren't him. It was a challenge to play because his empathy was so limited and that's kind of what I like honestly.
There's a decent Fatal and Friends review for it too. And for Beast and the supplement books for the same. One of which puts a nail in the which is worst between Beasts and Changing Breeds because that book literally has a playable Beasts option which are inferred to be compelled to be rapists.
Ignoring is a strong word, It's more beast the primordial is the rationalizations of an actual irl rapist vs phils pathetic weird fantasies. Goatfucker is nuts but I can give him the benifit of the doubt that (probably) hasnt molested mr tibbles.
Don't take me wrong, I have nothing against lupus handled correctly. I haven't played a lot of Werewolf (just a few con games and two short campaigns), but during that time I played alongside two people who did play lupus characters, one per campaign. They were experienced players (the ST refused to allow newbies to play lupus), and it showed. When I brought up the weird issues that come with the lupus as a concept (the whole spergery I mentioned on my post), they just shrugged and said "yeah, it's weird. Don't think about it". They certainly followed their own advice: their characters steered clear of any sexual references and the players didn't even joke about it. The characters were very interesting to interact with, too, particularly when I was playing a Glass Walker trying to make smalltalk and the worldviews just clashed in the most interesting ways.
I tried to get into Werewolf again early last year and looked for a game online. Unfortunately, all the open groups I could find were pretty much taken over by screeching dangerhairs, idiots wanting to play Gaian gay sparkledogs, or people who think "ha ha my character fucks everything that moves" memes are funny. After the second Bad Dragon link I gave up.
Sometimes when I'm overcome with World of Darkness nostalgia, I ask myself: who could possibly be playing these games nowadays?