Tribe Book:

Bone Gnawers

I haven't seen the original version of the Bone Gnawers tribebook, so I'm only going to discuss what's in the new one. In the world of Werewolf: The Apocalypse, the Bone Gnawers are the lowest of the low... the very name of their tribe comes from the idea that the lowest ranking wolves in a pack always eat last. It's the tribe that picks up all of the outcasts, madmen, and exiles from the other tribes. Any werewolf who doesn't fit in elsewhere can still find a place to stay with a Bone Gnawer tribe.

The book opens with a piece of short fiction describing a Bone Gnawer kinfolk who learns about his true heritage. The only really cool bit is the scene where a gang of angry drunkards beats up an old homeless guy for fun, not realizing that he's a werewolf. It's amusing because the Bone Gnawer doesn't do anything but take it. They beat him up and throw him down a flight of stairs and he just stays in human form and absorbs all of the punishment. He could tear them apart, but he won't... because it's his duty not to.

The Bone Gnawers have a surprisingly large amount of tribal history to wade through. There's nearly 20 pages of the stuff, discussing their ancient origins up through the American Revolution, World War II, and the modern day. The idea behind the chapter is that it's a tribal moot, and a lot of Bone Gnawers have shown up to rant about their history and legacy. It's not just one elder talking; Bone Gnawers are very egalitarian about listening to anyone who's willing to talk. In fact, the elder pretty much gets shouted down by the second speaker, who thinks that the elder's spiel is a load of crap. Age, tradition, ritual and bloodlines are unimportant to Bone Gnawers. They just don't care.

The history is fairly well written and discusses a number of interesting elements. Nothing in too much detail, but there are some nifty tidbits. For instance, during the American Revolution, the Bone Gnawers adopted a new code: the High Ban. This variant on the Ban of Man (don't interfere with purely human events) said that Homid Bone Gnawers who wanted to join the fight could do so, but only by doing so as mortals. The High Ban allows a Homid to interfere with human events but they are required to maintain their human form the whole time (and are thus bereft of their magical regeneration and super-human stats). Should they ever use a magical power (even to save their own life), they are required to withdraw from the conflict immediately and not return. So Bone Gnawers fought alongside the revolutionaries, and when they got shot in the head they fell down and stayed dead. This kind of risk-taking and dedication is a good source of renown for Bone Gnawers.

Setting Details

Chapter Two gets into the modern day setting details. There is some discussion of how Garou become Bone Gnawers; many of them weren't born into the tribe. There is also an important Bone Gnawer concept introduced here: the "rabble." More than any other tribe, the Bone Gnawers have a lot of slackers and loners. These werewolves rarely participate in moots or other gatherings and couldn't care less about tribal politics. They're the dropouts of werewolf society: rarely seen and often bitter. Many are Bone Gnawers pretty much by default; no other tribe would let you ignore them so thoroughly and still claim membership.

The rabble are actually a powerful asset to the Bone Gnawers, though. On the rare occasion that something seriously threatens the Bone Gnawer tribe itself, the rabble will pour forth in all their numbers to protect the last tribe that will accept them. It's hard to motivate them unless there's something serious at stake, but if you can rile them up, there's a heck of a lot of them.

Here we also have a section on famous (and infamous) caerns associated with the Bone Gnawers. There aren't many, and the descriptions are pretty minimal, but it could be useful background material for your campaign. Of particular interest are the rural caerns, mostly run by "Hillfolk" Bone Gnawers. They're isolated, insular and rather primitive, but can be useful allies... or enemies. The infamous Dandelion Hill Sept was little known until 1996, when a small pack of visitors discovered that the locals had secretly abandoned a particular part of the Litany... the bit about not killing and eating humans for fun. Only one of them made it out alive, but once word got out the surrounding tribes and septs swarmed all over Dandelion Hill, wiping out all of the cannibals (yes, werewolves consider eating humans to be cannibalism; presumably they feel the same way about eating wolves, but I've never seen that mentioned) they could catch.

We also get a discussion of how Bone Gnawer politics are conducted and an amusing bit on the four classes that Bone Gnawers divide equipment up into: Stuff, Loot, Junk and Shit and what the differences between them are. A really amusing tidbit is that Bone Gnawers often place such personal importance and high value on their trashy possessions that it can actually have spiritual effects. A piece of crap considered a prized possession for many years may actually turn into a fabulously high quality item if carried into the Umbra.

There's a brief discussion of how the Auspices affect Bone Gnawers. It's all pretty much what you'd expect, just with an urban cast to it. Ragabash tend to be beggars and street swindlers, Theurges tend to be those homeless folk who always seem like they're looking at or talking to something that isn't there, Galliards tend to be street performers, etc. Most Bone Gnawers are Homids, but they aren't always the happiest ones, since werewolves don't regenerate in their natural form. Metis are more accepted by the Bone Gnawers than any other tribe, so there tend to be a lot of them, too. Lupus are rare, but often have it easier surviving in a city than either of the other two. There's also a short discussion on how well interbreeding with dogs works... to summarize, it doesn't, and even Bone Gnawers tend to be revolted by werewolves who try. I found this bit to be really out of place at first, but the more I think about it, the more reasonable it seems to at least mention it. Wolf/dog hybrids are quite possible in real life, and there just aren't any normal wolves for the Lupus to seek out in a big city.

We also have a big section on "Camps." I wish they'd made the heading a little larger or used a different font. It took me awhile to figure out that Camps was a new section, and not just a single entry.

The camps are sort of political groups that Bone Gnawers divide themselves up into. This is one of the most interesting parts of the book and each camp gets about a one-page writeup describing what sort of beliefs they hold and what they do. The Hood, for example, consists of Bone Gnawers who have cast off the Ban of Man in order to do good deeds in the city. They rob from the rich and give it to the poor, protect and feed the homeless, drive off drug dealers, etc. Because this kind of interference breaks with tribal law, they also keep their identities secret. Most Bone Gnawers don't actively support them, but they won't turn them in, either.

The Deserters are another interesting group with a lot of potential. These werewolves abandoned the physical world and went exploring the Umbra for ages, trying to find a way to get somewhere free of the coming Apocalypse. So far they haven't found it, and the Deserters who come back to earth tend to be haunted, spacey types who have difficulty connecting with the physical world anymore. Sometimes they find a section of the Umbra that they don't dare explore alone... so they seek out ordinary werewolves and try to convince them to join the Deserter's quest, at least for awhile.

The others (Rat Finks, Frankweilers, Road Warders, Hillfolk, and the Swarm) are all at least interesting, even if some of them are kind of odd. The Frankweilers, for example, fiercely protect any kind of museum, library or cultural area where the poor and homeless can still learn about art or science.

The next big section discusses how Bone Gnawers see the Litany. Each Garou Law is discussed with a Shadow Lord ranting about how the Bone Gnawers don't fulfill it and a Bone Gnawer replying with his own counter-arguments. After both of their bits, the book discusses how things "really" are, which is generally somewhere between the two viewpoints. It hasn't got much new information, but I suppose it's useful just as setting color; you get to see the kind of prejudice Bone Gnawers are supposed to be subject to from other Garou (of course, in the smattering of Werewolf games I've played in, no one paid any attention to that, but what the hey).

After that we have the traditional listing of the other tribes and changing breeds and what the Bone Gnawers think about them. Nothing too surprising here, although I did like the section on mages, where a Bone Gnawer describes Paradox as the Weaver slapping mages down for getting out of line. The entries are all pretty minimal, generally a paragraph or so, and they're written "in character" as one Bone Gnawer or another talking. A few entries actually list alternate viewpoints, quoting multiple Bone Gnawers with different opinions.

"Fun and Games" is a cute idea. It lists three different "fun things for werewolves to do in the city." The best is probably "Subway Surfing," which does have a cute illustration, too.

Game Mechanics

Chapter 3 starts into the game mechanics. It talks about the various backgrounds available to Bone Gnawers, and offers some discussion of each. There are even some optional rules for acquiring new backgrounds after character creation, if your GM wants to allow it. The tribal gifts somehow aren't as impressive as those in other supplements... probably because they're all oriented around an urban setting. Many of them are mostly utilitarian, but not the sort of thing that most players would take for their character, like The Hungry Hound, which lets a Garou find the nearest free food. Each entry also has rules for using them in Mind's Eye Theatre, if you play the live-action version. Several of them were quite problematic, requiring you to bring along a friend to represent your Gifts' effects in play. The game recommends that anyone running a MET game think seriously before approving them.

Some other Gifts of interest... Smell of Success lets the Garou tell how prosperous someone is and learn related information about them, just by watching them go by. Desperate Strength lets a Bone Gnawer get extra successes on a strength check by taking aggravated damage. The Mark is particularly amusing, since it marks the target with a scent that only werewolves can detect. In the traditional canine way, that is. As the book says, "The mark is subtle; placing it isn't." Good luck using that on a passing vampire without attracting their attention.

Kitchen Chemistry is one that worried me at first, but in retrospect it doesn't look too unbalancing except that it's a level one gift. It lets you brew an explosive using common household chemicals. The bomb does damage equal to your permanent Rage (I'm pretty sure they mean damage dice, rather than straight health levels, but it's not 100% clear). Unfortunately it lacks any rules for what sort of blast radius it has. I'd say that it just uses the regular Werewolf grenade rules, but after a quick skim of the combat section, I'm not sure Werewolf has any. So that one may need some GM adjudication... Bearing in mind that a botched roll causes the bomb to blow up in the Bone Gnawer's face, I'd expect players to blow a Willpower every time they attempt this one.

Hootenanny is another particularly cute one, where a Bone Gnawer (generally a rural hillbilly type, but not always) plays a fast-paced country dance tune to boost the combat skills of all allies in earshot, while worsing the abilities of their foes. The MET rules require you to actually play an instrument or sing while you're using it, which could be... interesting, at least.

Ever seen a homeless street guy carrying on a loud and evocative conversation with thin air? Well, apparently he was a Bone Gnawer using Rant and Rave to send secret messages to another Garou.

So there are a wide assortment of gifts and, surprisingly, none of them struck me as overpowered or unbalanced. The high level gifts are useful without being absurdly powerful. I particularly liked Streets Tell Stories, a level 3 gift which lets you basically "scry pavement." Several of the really high level gifts are strongly oriented around influencing the actions of normal humans and have little or no effect on supernatural creatures. This makes me question their utility in most games, but they'd be very useful in a human-oriented campaign.

Oh, and there's a really useful, um... ability, I guess, listed in a sidebar in the Gifts section. No idea why it's there since it's not a gift, but "The Barking Chain" is a really cute trick that Bone Gnawers use to pass information around town by getting local dogs to bark it for them.

If the Gifts were largely oriented around humans and urban survival, the Rites are even more so. We've got things like the Rite of the Cardboard Palace (makes a cardboard box into a livable dwelling), the Rite of Crash Space (lets people recover Gnosis faster), the Rite of the Shopping Cart (lets it store more than it should), and my personal favorite, the Rite of the Pizza.

The not-so-ancient and not-particularly-sacred Rite of the Pizza involves the arduous task of getting the entire pack to decide on what sort of pizza to order, from where, who pays, and how to divide up the pieces fairly. Once you manage to pull that heroic endeavor off, you've earned some extra dice that members of your pack can use when doing... whatever it was you got them all together to discuss over pizza in the first place.

The example fetishes are a mixed lot. The Lost Keyring is pretty cool, and actually explains some stuff about the old Open Seal gift from the main book that was never actually mentioned there, although it refers to it as though it were. Ivan's Molotov, on other hand, seems kind of useless, since it's basically just a magically-refilling bottle of alcohol that can be used to make Molotov cocktails. A weird (and kind of stupid in my opinion) rule is that if anyone gets hit by more than one of these magical mini-bombs in the same round, none of them do any damage whatsoever. Instead, they just fizzle out. I can see where a source of infinite Molotovs would be useful, but you still have to find empty bottles to fill, so you might as well knock over a liquor store and see if they have anything that would work as-is.

There's even a level 3 fetish that enables you to hitch a ride... I guess a little more reliably than normal (though there aren't any difficulties given for that). The only justification I could see for it is that Bone Gnawers are rarely the clean cut sort of hitchhiker that you'd willingly pick up, so maybe they do need magical aid. The Umbral CB Radio is nifty, but kind of silly in practice since you have to use the old CB lingo to make it work.

Cut to a crowd of wolves gathered around the tribe's eldest Theurge. There is an ancient CB radio sitting on the table, plugged into nothing at all.
"And now, praise Gaia, we shall endeavor to make contact with our brave brethren in the Umbra. Let the spirits bless us as I raise the sacred microphone. Pray that their mission has been successful."
"Breaker, breaker, Lonely-Wolf, this is Big-Daddy, come back?"

The Merits and Flaws are pretty typical, except for a few Merits-that-you'd-expect-to-be-Flaws, like Shame (2 points) or Struggling (1 point). These would be Flaws for normal Garou, but since Bone Gnawers are the lowest of the low, these are actually a step up. Struggling gives you a limited Resources background because you have a day job, and Shame means that your Ancestors background has been tarnished by the unpleasant reputation of one of your ancestors. Since Bone Gnawers are normally prohibited from having either background at all, these are merits. Ratkin Buddies is also cute, and very random. Sometimes your rodent-like buds show up to help you in time of need... and sometimes they show up to drink all of your beer, eat all of your food, and throw up over whatever sort of furniture you actually have.

New Totems

There are some cute Totems, too. There are several variations on the Rat God and a few you'd expect, like Jackal, Mouse, Crow and Hyena. But there are three really novel ones, as well. The first is the American Dream, the metaphysical incarnation of the belief in human equality, democracy, opportunity and justice, particularly in the United States. Since the Garou nations aren't exactly democracies, a lot of them actually scorn the Dream, and oppose those who follow it. One of its cooler benefits is the simple fact that as long as you're in the U.S. of A., you're incapable of getting lost. It's a remarkably optimistic totem spirit, unlike most; the American Dream doesn't accept the inevitability of the Apocalypse, and sees the future as ripe for change, rather than doomed to disaster.

The second is the General Lee. No, it's not a Civil War General totem for Southern Bone Gnawers. It's a car. As the book puts it, "one of the most famous white trash vehicles ever." If you aren't familiar with old American television, it's the orange car from the old Dukes of Hazard television show. In many ways, this totem embodies the kind of car-related obsession that grips so many people. Your pack has to get and maintain a car, and it becomes the symbol of their totem. You can even drive it into the Umbra, so I suggest you install an Umbral CB in the sucker, too.

And the last and most Bone Gnawer-ish... certainly the most "pungent" of the lot... is The Great Trash Heap. The unearthly embodiment of every landfill, ever junkyard and every pile of garbage in the world. It's the physical and psychic dumping ground of the entire civilized world, so it knows just about everything. There's even a Trash Heap related Gift called Dumpster Diving, which enables you to burrow down into a heaping pile of stinking garbage and come up in a different heaping pile of stinking garbage, somewhere else. This is a wonderful Bone Gnawer totem, but good luck convincing non-Bone Gnawers in your pack to accept it as their totem.

In Closing

Finally, we have the typical set of example characters and some famous Bone Gnawers. These are fairly decent, although the art for the Metis Mediator (a scholarly, well-spoken metis who gets illustrated as a slavering savage) seems out of place.

In conclusion, it's a fairly decent supplement. The Gifts and Rites are interesting without being overpowered. In fact, GMs may be more interested in them than their players will be, since few of them are the sort to really excite players. I really did like the Totems, too. The Bone Gnawer philosophy is represented in detail, and its democratic core may make it actually more palatable to modern players than other tribes. Bone Gnawers don't believe in sacred bloodlines and don't care about ritual and tradition except inasmuch as it works. The art is so-so. There weren't any really impressive pieces, but no "what a piece of crap!" pics, either. I've definitely seen better in other White Wolf sourcebooks, though.

There is a good bit of scattered vulgarity. Bone Gnawers don't flinch at cursing, so there are four-letter words here and there, but nothing that really seemed like obscenities just for obscenity's sake. They were all appropriately placed. And if you hate the opening comic books, well... this one didn't have one.

Overall, I give it a 3 for style and a 4 for content.