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Werewolf is a funky, funky game. At its best, it's a potent blend of a dozen different genres, ranging from furry fanfic to magic realism, that come together into a single whole - a deeply spiritual game about living representations of the Earth's fury fighting brutal, bloody battles against the forces of Evil itself, an exploration of what it's like to be half-human and half-animal, half-human and half-spirit. At its worst, it's like an early Image comic book crashing into Captain Planet and then bursting into vaguely spiritual flame.
The Umbra was one of the first supplements ever published for Werewolf, if memory serves me correctly; the original covered the different realms that the Garou could access, but suffered from both vague descriptions and wasted space in the form of two-page illustrations of the realms in question. It was also fairly heavy-handed, wandered into unsubtle satire at times, and had SCAR artwork; in short, it was oh so ripe for revision; hence, this reissue.
Basically, the book is a description of the parts of the Umbra that the Garou, and a number of other Fera - which is, apparently, the much improved term for Changing Breeds and/or Bete - can access. Rather than the wide-open vistas of the Book of Worlds, from the Mage line, the Garou have specific realms that they can access, some of which are Garou-exclusive, ranging from the eternal atrocity exhibition of the aptly named Atrocity Realm to the paranoia and loss of control of Wolfhome.
Unfortunately, these realms really aren't meant for role-playing as much as they are for teaching a heavy-handed moral lesson to the people playing; and it's a lesson that most players aren't going to be interested in hearing. A lot of this is a legacy from the original Umbra book, where these realms were created in the first place - every realm that was in that book shows up here as well. Since a lot of these realms weren't terrifically well-thought out in the first place, the book's caught up trying to improve on an idea that shouldn't have made it into the book in the first place.
The book is far from all bad. The opening chapter gives a lengthy description of the Umbra and how it works, including the concept of spirtiual imprinting - the longer something sits in a spot, and the more people pay attention to it, the stronger a spiritual presence it has.
However, there's one thing within it that drives me completely berserk, and this is it: The idea that certain businesses, certain foods, certain toys that have been corrupted by the Wyrm, and that anybody who eats them will become Wyrm-corrupted. I have never, ever understood the idea behind this, since it basically turns Werewolf from a game of rampaging horror and cosmic spirituality into BloodFang the Get of Fenris Ahroun Fucks Up Christmas Yet Again ("Look, Bloodfang, it may very well be tainted, but that doesn't mean that it's a bad toy - oh? Okay. Why don't we open up another present for Bloodfang to declare tainted? Then we can all go to McDonalds and - oh, no, wait, they're Wyrm-tainted too. Maybe we could just eat grass and play with sticks out in the backyard, assuming that it's okay with Bloodfang the Werewolf Asshole here.")
Sorry; that's been building for a while now. I've never liked that aspect of Werewolf, and while it's about two sentences in a much larger book, I just felt that I should get that out of the way. (And yeah, I know about Subsidiaries, but that seems to be mostly a parody of consumer culture rather than something you're supposed to use in a role-playing game.)
The realms themselves are a very mixed bag. In order:
The Abyss works well as a set piece, as a philosophical idea, but it's pretty much a dead zone insofar as role-playing goes. It's a gigantic hole in the ground, a physical embodiment of the idea of emptiness, with a variety of paths leading down into the darkness; an Iron Path, a Silver Path, and so on. I've seen it before in the Book of Worlds, where it had a great bit of fiction attached to its description - the realm surrounding it is so empty that the only thing that you can smell is your own deodorant. Here, there's a lot of stuff stuck onto the realm in order to make it interesting - Black Spiral Dancers, lost Wraiths, the melodramatically named Shadowmaster - but it tends to reduce the impression that the Abyss eats everything that lingers in its dimension, instead turning it into a spooky hole in the ground that serves as a waypoint for bad guys. The concept of the realm itself works for a brief session of disquiet, but anything longer defeats the idea of the realm.
The Aetherial Realm is the Cliff Notes of the Rage Across the Heavens book - it describes the various places that you can find up there, including some descriptions of the various planetary representations, but it covers a boatload of space in about three pages. The planetary Incarna sound interesting, if too briefly described; and the various Triat realms almost manage to break out of the "lots of craziness / lots of spiders / lots of eeeeeeeeeevil" stereotypes, with what I hope are planet-sized spiders keeping the Weaver realm in order, and asteroids dotted with balefire elementals. There's enough here to convincingly fake an Aetherial visit, but you're going to want Rage Across the Heavens if you want to develop it any further. I don't particularly mind that.
The Arcadia Gateway, in its original incarnation, was a tie-in to Changeling, and as a result, got very little attention from me in the original edition. I strapped myself down and forced myself to read through it; it's the usual land of the fae and the home of the twee stuff, with every European fairy tale making an appearance. I can't criticize this section; I was never a fan of Changeling or the concepts behind it, and so, lacking that understanding, I can't rail on it for being what it is. It is interesting to see how it's changed from the original; the Cold War between the Seelie and the Unseelie has broken down thanks to the disappearance of the Seelie champion, and the Unseelie influence slowly spreads across the land. I think that the section overplays the Unseelie as evil - I like the idea of them as representing the shadow that lends definition to the picture - but then again, I'm not a Changeling fan.
I also question the wisdom of a Seelie fae "demand[ing] a song and dance from a brooding Ahroun, laughing and taunting the poor werewolf until he's fit to rage." Taunting a werewolf, any kind of werewolf, especially an Ahroun, is one of those moves that's guaranteed to introduce you into the wonderful world of recreational vivisection. I feel that I should include the warning so that nobody's Changeling character gets his limbs removed and re-inserted into various facial orifices.
The Atrocity Realm is another example of a concept taken from the original book that probably shouldn't have come over; it's a place where every single atrocity in the world is replayed. In the original, the vague idea was to become one with your guilt by accepting responsibility for what you were seeing, but the effect is just numbing - plus, it's a self-contained spiritual realm, meaning that it doesn't have an effect on the real world. Everything that you're seeing has already passed away, and you're more likely to become numbed and bored with a steady diet of death and torture than you are to learn anything. It's also an extra dose of mutilation and guilt in a game that already has much more than enough. It may be possible for GMs to make something out of this realm, but it doesn't seem like an actual place to play in so much as it seems like a philosophical idea that the characters can visit.
The Battleground isn't subtle; it's every single war ever fought taking place all at once, with the slain either being thrown into the Umbra - if they're PC Garou - or simply reforming if they're spirits within the realm. That's about it. There's a recap of the three armies of the Triat, first seen within Kindred of the East, which ties in neatly to the concept - but I question why this, along with the Atrocity Realm, were included here. (Well, on the other hand, it's good fun to have your characters fighting Roman legionnaires and Vietnam-era soldiers, so I can understand it a little more than the Atrocity realm.)
The CyberRealm is a cyberpunk spiritual realm, although it has to throw in the endless spider/webbing analogy that's become the bane of any good description of the Weaver and its works. I can't say that I'm overwhelmed with it; it's a predatory environment in which everybody is hungry for "juice" - spiritual energy - where you're either massively rich or scrounging around in the gutter for your next hit. It's supposed to be a satire of modern technological society, or so I'm assuming, but it comes off as strident and uninteresting. There's lots of opportunites for whacking technological creatures in the yap with your claws, but it seems an awful shame that they didn't expand it into something more interesting.
Erebus is another example of a realm that sounds interesting, but has absolutely no play value. It's where shapeshifters go when they're done enough evil stuff to justify an extended stay in Hell; in the first Umbra book, the example given was a werewolf who'd become addicted to vampire blood, sacrificing his pack to vampires so that they could try to make at least one Abomination. Here, there's no text piece, but it's pretty clear that you have to go above and beyond simple bastardry to get in. It's a gigantic river of molten silver in which Garou are eternally consumed, regenerating as soon as their skin is burnt away. But that's all that there is to it - I mean, it's a place to send really wicked characters, but it isn't someplace that you're going to casually establish an adventure in. (I also question if the Garou Nation is going to send a criminal here to repent, rather than just killing him - the Apocalypse is right around the corner, and I can't imagine the relatively short-lived Garou getting much use out of a process that can take centuries.)
The Flux Realm is more interesting; it's a place where the Wyld holds sway, perpetually changing everything without bothering to stop to see what it's doing, and where shapeshifters constantly bounce back and forth between their different forms. This realm, above the others, is genuinely fun to work with, especially since you can throw anything at your PCs, watch them deal with it for a few rounds, and then have it fade away or turn into something else - it's a representation of an idea, but it's a good idea, and conveys the utter strangness of the Umbra that I saw in Book of Worlds.
Pangaea, besides being darned hard to spell, is a great example of Werewolf's versatility - it's a primeval realm, complete with dinosaurs, ice floes, wooly mammoths, Tyrannosaurs and the like. The idea here is that everything is stripped down to its primal roots - there are no tribes, just Garou, and the same goes for the other breeds. The setting is like Jurassic Park; adding in Garou, the ultimate predator species, the undisputed kings of a wilderness environment, and you've got one hell of a fun game on your hands. You could work in this place for weeks and just barely touch the edges - I keep envisioning a rope bridge falling, waterfall in the background, as a dark mass of fur and teeth scrambles to reach the end before it's too late. There's human tribes to mess with, an Elder Serpent for adventure hooks, an elephant graveyard composed of the bones of every extinct species, and a pulp feel to the whole thing that'll tie in nicely to Adventure.
The Scar shares the same weakness as the Atrocity Realm and the CyberRealm; it's a parody of the Industrial Revolution, where phantoms work eighty-hour weeks, get sexually harassed, have no 401(k) plans, get hit with whips whenever they slow down - you get the picture. Lots of things to hit in the face, lots of simple satire, and the rather startling admission that the Scar is no longer what it used to be - with the impact of the Industrial Revolution's excesses slowly dying away, the realm is no longer effective as a spiritual engine for the Wyrm, and it's slowly dying away to be replaced with the CyberRealm. Of course, I have to question what the point of the Realm is in the first place. It's way too blunt and obvious for satire. It doesn't seem to have much to do with the real world - why fight the Wyrm on its own home turf, where it can generate as much energy as it wants, when you can go to the real world and exterminate Wyrm creatures that are contesting Garou turf? The book mentions that the Scar may be creeping into the real world, but it doesn't make sense for nine-foot tall combat engines to be trying to improve working conditions - it's like Norma Rae meets The Howling. Weird.
The Summer Country, on the other hand, is Garou heaven, and the book suggests that it's a reward for "players who roleplay their characters' maturation exceedingly well." Which leads me to wonder why they're putting it in here as anything more than two paragraphs towards the back of the book; it's only visited by the best players maybe once. Why not use the space for something more interesting, or more general? Hell, take any section in the Book of Worlds and you'll find more possibility for adventure than in the Summer Country.
Wolfhome is not the counterpoint that I was hoping for. It's a place where all shapeshifters are turned into their primal forms, with their intelligence reduced to the same - in other words, they're now playing Watership Down with dogs instead of rabbits. Of course, the human-spirits here in Wolfhome all loathe animals as if they were personally responsible for the Hindenburg, so the characters are essentially going to be hunted, tortured, mutilated, imprisoned and so forth until they've learned humility. The parody here is of human society's attitudes towards animals, and our treatment of them; but it's a splendid example of the original Werewolf's Plague Dogs inspired misanthropy, where all animals are victims and humans are either sadistic or absent.
But this seems pretty one-sided, even for a nightmare realm; we sentimentalize animals much more than we persecute them, and I keep imagining a Gurahl being slowly suffocated in the beefy arms of Mrs. Fletcher, who has always loved plush bears and who is just delighted to find a real one of her own. ("OH, HAROLD, ISN'T HE JUST THE QOOOOOOOOOTEST THING? LOOK, HIS EYES ARE BULGING OUT! ISN'T HE JUST THE SOFTEST THING IN THE WHOLE WIDE WORLD?") It's also a touch tough to keep heaping on abuse after abuse onto players who expected to be playing creatures who have far more power and freedom than the players do, only to wind up playing sentient dogs who take more abuse than Raven c.s McCracken. There's nothing wrong with playing a game where you're hunted, but Werewolf is about being the hunter, about being the savage beast - it's going to be a pretty sharp reversal for players that aren't ready for it, or who aren't interested in being taught a lesson in humility.
And in the very next section, I find what the book could have been - a series of short descriptions of various realms, enough to give you an idea of what can be done without the endless bulky rules that are appended to the major descriptions of the realms. They're a couple of paragraphs apiece for the Umbral homelands of the tribes - including the Black Spirals, Croatoan and Bunyip tribes - as well as the Mirror, Dream and Null Zones. It seems a more efficient use of the space than the description of the other Realms.
The third chapter describes spirits in more detail, including a detailed breakdown on the names and power levels for each level of spirits - I can tell you now how powerful a Gaffling is in comparison with, say, a Jaggling. (Not as powerful, but pretty close.) There's a lot of sample spirits in here, details of the major Incarna - Stag, Rat, Cockroach, Owl and so forth, along with totems, the bargains that spirits strike and so on. There's a lot of information here, sort of a miniguide to the Spirit World.
The last two chapters detail storytelling tips for Umbral travel and - most helpfully - a list of fetishes for places like the Cyberrealm, information missing from the original Umbra book, various rites and Gifts for Umbral travel and the like.
I think that White Wolf missed an opportunity to do some innovative work. The original Umbra book was a victim of Werewolf's early, early development, and a lot of the realms just didn't work - Erebus, the Battleground, the Atrocity Realm, the Summer Country, Wolfhome strike me as gimmick realms, centering around a single idea that's good for a single session, or for a specific incident, but quickly runs out of steam once it's asked to do more. It'll be a useful resource for Werewolf GMs who want more information on the Umbra, but it doesn't shake off enough of the old material to make its mark as a book on its own - and considering the depth of creativity that the people at White Wolf can come up with, that's a real shame. It's a decent book - and I've noticed once again that Ron Spencer can't seem to do a piece of art that isn't short of stunning - but it feels like a missed opportunity.
-Darren MacLennan
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