So what is a Wayward? It’s one of the lost Creeds. For those who don’t know what a Creed is, it’s a collection of Hunters that share similar outlooks and abilities. Kind of like a Clan, or a Tribe. Yes, it’s a Splatbook in other words.
The Waywards are a little different than other Hunters though. See, to them, this is nothing less than a war for survival. Unlike regular Hunters, it’s a war they’re willing to make sacrifices for. What type? How about blowing up a bus of school children to take out a walking dead? How about burning up a building where a vampire lairs? Yeah, you know, minor things like this.
The book is broken up into six chapters: Chaos Theory, Method to the Madness, Friendly Fire, Aftermath, War Knows No Bounds, The Dogs of War. The bad thing is, the first four chapters are all stories that focus on three different types of Waywards and what the other Hunters on the web think of them.
While it’s great to show case just how dangerous and demented these long wolves are, it’s also tedious to read through. Not because the writing is poor or bad or the violence senseless, but because each character is written out in a different font. Clayton Albert Mayhew Jr has many names and aliases and his story is told through e-mails back and forth on Hunter Net. They think he’s a bad man. We get bits and pieces of his background and hey, in addition to being a Hunter, a rare one at that, he’s also a racist.
Joshua Matthews, known on the net at God45, is a bad man who happens to be an African American. He too is one of the rare breed of Hunter and his story is written up in good old plan typing. Easy to read, easy to follow along. His awakening came at the dinner table when he noticed that there was something ‘wrong’ with his son and killed him, and his wife, who tried to stop him. He’s justifying everything from there as a time to purge, to cleanse the land, to rise up against the evils that all Hunters know exist. Of course, in the book, he admires the work of Clayton because like himself, Clayton takes no prisoners and thinks that the way to go about killing these things isn’t one at a time and isn’t so gentle that they’ll get away if they move into a crowd. It’s an interesting meeting between him and Clatyon though since Clayton is a true to the bone racist.
In another part of the world, Kirsty McCallum, in Scotland, lives a normal life by writing software and working weekends with the army. She encounters the undead on her way home and is never the same. Her tale comes through written notes that are sometimes difficult to read compared to the e-mail back and forth and the cleanly typed letters of Joshua. Kirsty has other problems outside of being one of the Waywards though. Seems that she has multiple personality disorder and that the survivor side of her strives to insure that those things that are ‘wrong’ in the world do die.
With these three as a ground base, the book breaks into creating and playing a dangerous character like this. For the most part, the GM is going to be saved from some real hassle for a few reasons. First, they’re rare. The book suggests that if there are even two in a campaign, including one for the GM, that this may be too many.
The greatest advice comes in determining what insanities that these individuals will possess and how to possibly tone it down so that they can be included in a more traditional game. It talks about the differences between the Avengers and the Waywards, which is an especially important topic as some may be confused. It boils down to the Avengers often trying to make things personal, trying to rationalize why these things must be killed, whereas the Wayward will just go do it without rationalization. It’s just that simple.
In addition to providing new edges for this breed, there are rules for tattoos that the Waywards instinctively know. These runes are different than the ones most hunters know and provide the Wayward with some special abilities. The limit on the number of runes that can be known is Vision. For every point of vision after three, that’s four and up, they get a rune. There are ten to pick from and each one grants a 1 to some type of roll ranging from Melee to Perception.
One of the best all-purpose sections of the book though has got to be on the Fine Art of Improvising. Need to know what home made explosives can do? How about chemical weapons? Nah, you want to know what happens when you smack someone upside the head with a five pound sledgehammer or what happens when the ghoul has you backed against the wall and you pull a Texas Chainsaw Massacre on him doing Strength 5.
The section includes some quick and dirty rules on making, you guessed it, quick and dirty weapons. Need to make a flamethrower real quick? How about a wooden stake? Chemical explosive? It’s covered.
Like previous books, it closes with character, both pregenerated and famous ones. The pregenerated include the Gun Advocate, a hunter who now hunts a different sort of pray, the Corporate Killer, who reminds me of American Psycho, just this time, going after monsters, and the Schoolyard Bully, a youth who now beats up on the monsters that frequent his former school.
Biggest problem with Wayward is that there is just too much fiction. From page one to page sixty-seven, you’re not reading about how to incorporate this new Creed into the game. You’re not reading about some of the methods used to represent them. No, you’re reading fiction. Game fiction, but fiction nonetheless. The different fonts bugged my eyes a little too which made the reading of the book a little slower than I would’ve liked as there were some interesting passages that I wanted to look at but had to rest the old eyes. The fact that the stories are broken up time and time again didn’t help either. Guess they had to do that or it would be a book with three chapters of fiction, one for each character, and some gaming stuff.
The layout is standard fare with two columns broken up by art. Most of the art is quality stuff, especially the full-page spreads that come before each chapter. I did feel that the prelude chapter, which includes about four pages of photographs from a morgue, were completely wasted space.
Hunter Wayward is a tool that is perhaps best served in the hands of the GM to provide something for the Hunters to rally against but in the hands of an intelligent player, it could work in the short term. The size and price ratio is right up there with the book being over one hundred pages for less than fifteen bucks.
If you’re looking to add a spicy meat ball to your Hunter campaign, Wayward will take you there.
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