by Carrie Schutrick

Created on: May 01, 2009

"Blood of the Wolf", for Werewolf: the Forsaken, could easily be subtitled "why it sucks to be a werewolf". Not that Werewolf is winning the "Supernatural creature it sucks most to be" contest over at White Wolf; that honor goes easily to Promethean. But the mythic roots of werewolves usually portray them as being cursed, and White Wolf stayed with that in its game. So there are all sorts of reasons why being a werewolf does not make a character's life any easier, and this book shows every single one of them.

First off, there's the matter of the werewolf body. How it works, what the regeneration ability means, that sort of thing. There are detailed rules for a female werewolf going through pregnancy (hint: Gauru form does not go well with the third trimester), and some ideas on how various drugs interact with werewolf physiology. Being a werewolf isn't an unmitigated benefit either; people tend to notice when you can't touch silver, and there's got to be some fuel to power the regeneration so food costs go up after the Change. Plus, the First Change itself is not what one would call a trauma-free experience.

So that's why it sucks to be a werewolf physically. In Chapter Two we get why it sucks to be a werewolf socially. And wow, it really kind of does. It's not easy to have the instincts of a hierarchical pack animal around humans, and the werewolf temper problem does not help even a little. (There's a lovely list of body language and other non-verbal cues that players and Storytellers can use to indicate various reactions to the werewolf "aura".) Then there's a consideration of the werewolf's forms, and how humans might react to each-sure, it's awfully tempting to run around as a wolf if you need speed and good senses, but what are you going to do when Animal Control turns up? And keep in mind that blood spilled in wolf form will register as perfectly human by the time it gets to a lab...

Chapter Three gives the lowdown on surviving in the wilderness, including non-forest wilderness like desert and tundra. The upshot is that being a werewolf makes it easier but certainly not a cakewalk. There are expansions here on the WoD systems for things like finding food in the forest and dying of thirst.

In the last chapter, the book talks about why it sucks to be related to werewolves, with a nice in-depth discussion of the wolf-blooded. It goes into things like what it's like to have a parent you only see when he comes in late at night covered in blood, and how it affects a kid to know that she might turn into that kind of monster someday herself-or her siblings or children might. That's assuming the werewolves have even bothered to tell their relatives about the whole werewolf thing in the first place, of course. The chapter introduces the concept of making the Wolf-Blooded Merit scalable, from two to five dots, to represent lesser to greater degrees of "werewolf-ness".

"Blood of the Wolf" seems slightly more player- than Storyteller-oriented, with a lot more options for characters and players than games and STs. A ST might want to have it, or at least read it, to keep abreast of what her players are up to, but a player is probably going to get all sorts of interesting ideas out of it. It's certainly worth a Werewolf group as a whole having at least one copy.

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