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Introduction
Werewolf the Apocalypse is the first Storyteller system game I owned. It's also the first game other than AD&D I owned, and therefore has a very soft spot in my heart. I dropped out of the habit of buying Werewolf books a couple of years ago for two reasons. The first was that I began to feel the quality of material being published was deteriorating. The second was that as a student I had limited funds, and had discovered many other games on which I thought it would be much wiser to spend my money on.
Around the time "The year of ..." books began to be published, I was buying about only a book a year. The last book I bought was Rage Across the Heavens, and after that, I didn't feel it necessary to invest into the Revised line of books. The release of Apocalypse tickled this soft spot on my heart, however, and deciding I had too much dough lying about I decided to grab a good deal of Werewolf books before everything became impossible to find. You could say I went on a slight craze, buying over 10 Revised and 1st Edition books in the last few months. And finally, I found the time to read them.
Some of them, anyway. The first book I will review from this bunch is also the first one I read. Croatan Song is a sourcebook for pre-Columbian North America in the World of Darkness. It details, according to the back cover, the peoples of pre-Columbian North America and their Garou kin and provides extensive information on running Pure Lands chronicles as well as creation rules for Pure Lands Croatan, Wendigo and Uktena. Unfortunately, I can't say I agree with everything the back cover says..
Substance
Legends of the Garou: Renown
This is your standard Werewolf opening fiction. As far as gaming fiction goes, it is only mediocre. That means it's quite boring as fiction in general. What you learn in five pages that could have been used much better elsewhere is that each of the three tribes of the Pure Lands symbolize and embrace an aspect of Renown. It would, of course, have been much more preferable to learn this without suffering the uninspiring fiction, but it's the way all Werewolf books start out, and this one is no exception.
Introduction: Song of the Middle Times
The introduction serves as a good primer for the rest of the mood, describing the mood and theme of a Pure Lands game right off the bat and summarizing what each chapter is about. As usual, we then have a lexicon of Pure Lands Garou terminology. Finally we have a rather extensive Bibliography that, while not looking useful right now, will be of a lot of debate later on.
Chapter One: The Long Walk
The book's first chapter details the Pure Lands Garou's history. It starts out with how and where the three brother tribes were living in the Old World, describes the dream vision they were given by Gaia, and their perilous journey to the Pure Lands, where they settled in different areas. So far so good. Then the book details what each tribe did in their new lands. It's when we are given an account of the Croatan's dealings with the Mound Builders that things get really confusing.
At this point, I have to re-iterate that I'm not very knowledgeable about history regarding the west side of the Atlantic Ocean before 1914. That means, I have absolutely no clue who these Mound Builders are, and the book doesn't really enlighten me either. The Mound Builders are a sun worshipping civilization with a religious fixation on being closer to the sun, but are they part of the Maya, or the Aztec, or the Inca, or another southern native nation? I really still have no clue after reading the Croatan bits twice over. To be honest, I'm not even sure if the Mound Builders are peoples of Mexico and further south who have traveled north, or the Kinfolk the Garou brought with them, or a mix of the two, although the impression I got was the latter. I felt the way things were accounted was very distracting and facts were all over the place, as if the author was brainstorming his way through Croatan history. Not good.
That said, the Uktena and Wendigo history sections, especially the Wendigo, are quite enjoyable and juicy reads with much interesting background information. That's not much of a consolation, however, since the Croatan's conflict with the Mound Builders is definitely the most interesting development of the Pure Lands history since it also serves as a foreshadowing of the Croatan's fall as well. After finishing this chapter, I really wished Mr. Bridges (credited for Croatan in Croatan Song) wasn't involved in this book. This may only be a matter of taste, of course, since I greatly enjoyed the Uktena Tribebook (by Jackie Cassada and Nicky Rea, who are credited for Uktena and Wendigo in Croatan Song) while I didn't care much for the Wendigo Tribebook (by Bill Bridges).
Chapter Two: Whose Hunting Grounds
Here is another near miss.. The second chapter is about the inhabitants of the Pure lands. The first half of this chapter focuses on Garou, describing about a dozen septs and their caerns for each Garou tribe as well as the Umbral image of several different parts of North America. Nothing to complain about here, not only is the information useful but it's also well presented. As far as I'm concerned, this part of the chapter is right on target, giving the reader a good deal of information about where they live, which spirits they interact with, what their septs are like and how they interact with their kinfolk. It's the Kinfolk part that spoils the chapter.
It's a real big disappointment, really. As someone who isn't even remotely knowledgeable about the native peoples of the Americas prior to colonization, I was expecting to find this part of the book to be very useful. It actually starts out well, with information about the Native American tribes, summarizing the obvious: How spiritual they are, why they have no written language or metal tools etc. Good and useful general information I can't disagree with. Just after that, however, we get twenty pages of supposedly nation-specific information about the nations, that in most part repeats again and again, for each nation, that they are spiritual, highly regard the natural balance, how manly and honorable they are and the like. Actually, nation specific information is really sparse in this chapter. You can only read the same thing under so many titles before it gets very, very boring..
Picture this; you are running a Pure Lands chronicle, there are many kinfolk nations in the setting, and the book gives you very little of use in order to differentiate these people from each other. What's even worse is that you get almost no information about the Croatan kinfolk nations because "the haze of prehistory prevents exact identification of the many nations who bred with the Croatan." In other words, the Croatan author was too lazy to make up a few tribe names and say "They were spiritual and honorable people who valued the natural balance highly" for each of them. The extensive Bibliography in the Introduction would probably come in quite handy here in helping you find out specific information about the nations that I still believe should have been in a book that sells itself as having "A detailed overview of the peoples of pre-Columbian North America ..." on its back cover.
Chapter Three: The Hero's Ordeals
This is the storytelling chapter. I have mixed feelings about the content, even though I can't argue with the amount. In twenty pages you get a good deal of advice on how to run Pre-Columbian, Post-Columbian, Old West and Modern Day chronicles, a good deal of plot hooks, NPCs and a small bestiary as well as advice on creating more monstrous villains. The volume and amount of information is satisfactory, but the content leaves a sour taste in some places. While most of what is presented are sound and neat, some chronicle ideas just don't seem to fit or sound forced, such as the idea of adding the other tribes to a Pure Lands game or using shadow realms in order to make use of the game and other things that sound more like, "If you found no use for this book so far, you can always do this! See, we didn't rip you off. What do you mean that's lame?"
I'm nitpicking a bit, here, though. If you bought this book for what the back cover says it is for, there is little in this chapter that would disappoint you. Well done.
Chapter Four: Children of the Middle Times
The last chapter contains system related stuff: New skills, archetypes, gifts, rites, fetishes, totems, etc. Also included are all the rules you need for creating and playing Croatan characters, published for the first time as far as I know. After a brief check of the 2nd Ed. Uktena tribebook I can say the gifts, rites, fetishes and totems in this chapter are not the ones from Uktena and Wendigo tribebooks - you get genuine new goodies for the two tribes you can make use of in all kinds of games. I haven't made use of any of this so far, but if I do, I believe I would probably tone down some gifts, rites and merits, so be warned, some of the new stuff here is quite powerful. The chapter ends with rules for creating kinfolk characters which basically gives you a very basic guide to creating a mortal, then tells you to buy the Kinfolk: Unsung Heroes book (which had been Out of Print even at the time of this book's printing, I believe).
Style
Contrary to many people who dislike the book's cover, I actually think it's quite decent. Don't get me wrong, I'm not a hater of Mr. Ferguson's art. I actually think he does a good job when using color, but his black and white art in this book was a torture to my eyes. I hope he doesn't mind it too much when I say this, but Mr. Ferguson is responsible for the painfully ugly chapter divider full-page art with no relevance to what's going on in the text (as far as I could tell, it's not easy to understand what's going on in the painting..) you have to suffer every once in a while throughout the book. And then there are Mr. Regan's wolves and werewolves that look like street mutts and street mutts on hind legs, which I won't really say more about. The rest of the art ranges from mediocre to good, with nothing really brilliant to speak of.
The book is laid out with the usual Werewolf 2nd Edition fonts and borders, and a fine balance of art and text. I did not find any serious spelling errors in the text. There's a definite problem of tone, however. The authors have shared the work by tribe, not by chapter, and it really shows. There's no unity in neither the tone nor the voice in many chapters. For example, one tribe's history is a long, chaotic summary, the other's history is told by some tribal elder who recounts several short simple tales.
Finally, I have to point out that this is the second time a book I own fell out of its cover after the first reading. The first one was Book of the Weaver (anyone see a pattern?). Considering I could glue the book back onto its cover with Elmer's PVC better than the way I received it, it appears White Wolf have made a habit of gluing these books onto the covers with spittle.
Conclusion
There's useful stuff in this book. There's unfortunately not as much of it as I would have liked. There's also rubbish in it. The rubbish at times gets really annoying. I would advise you to keep your money in your wallet unless you are keen on completing a Werewolf collection, or if you really want to run a Pure Lands chronicle (and if you do, remember that you'll still need to visit the nearest library quite a bit..) I bought it hoping it would be enough by itself to run a Pure Lands game, but sadly I found it to be an inadequate source for me. Still, saying that the substance is sparse would do the book little justice. It just tackles too many things at once and delivers few of them in a very satisfactory way.
I found the book's appearance to be quite below what I've come to expect of the Werewolf line but it manages to look average overall. Falling out of its covers didn't do wonders for my Style rating, however, so I'll rate it as a poor effort.
Substance: 3
Style: 2
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