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Introduction

I'm a lazy man. This review is hard evidence of the fact that I am indeed, truly, lazy. I have had more than enough time to review this book, since the day I bought it and promised to write a review on it (seeing as there wasn't one on RPGnet) but never got around to it. Well, since you are reading this review, I probably finally got around to finish this review. Rejoice.

Past Lives is one of the many Revised Edition Werewolf sourcebooks I bought when I decided to get back into the game around the time Apocalypse stuff was starting to get mentioned on various websites. As a personal admirer of the Past Lives concept, I figured this book would be a fun read, a good source of information and hopefully a fun chronicle to run. I was wrong on that very last assumption.. This review will discuss in detail all information about the chronicle in the book as it was run by me for my group, so if you do not want spoilers, you do not want to read this review's entirety. Skip to the conclusion.

Substance

Legends of the Garou: The Tale of the Shaking sea

Once again, this is your standard Werewolf opening fiction. It's a quite uninspiring piece of reading that serves as a primer to the chronicle presented in the book, explaining the arch-enemy's origins and nature, boring the reader to death in the process. But, if you ever read a Werewolf sourcebook before, you will probably not have very high expectations from these few pages, so there is no great let down here.

Introduction: Song of the Middle Times

The introduction is something of a brain teaser. It introduces the reader to the concept of time travel as it is used in the chronicle. Essentially, time travel is not possible in the World of Darkness and for the purposes of this chronicle, characters will find themselves in parts of the Dark Umbra where cataclysmic events have created mirrors of these incidents for the players to experience and get invovled in. Since this is not real time travel, they can not alter the course of history in any significant way. While this is, for the developer, a rather smart way of booting the characters back in time for a funky ride, it is, in my opinion, a rather cheap and cheesy way to send the players back in time. Does it work? Yes. Is it cool? No. Read on to find out why.

Time and Tide, Act I: The Rise of the King

This chapter can best be summarized as apocalyptic omens of sorts such as water turning into black goo around the characters, that lead to the characters to figure out that they are destined to be part of a great encounter of some sort, which in turn leads to fate leading them to some seaside location where they have to deal with the Dead Man's Hand team, and finally meet an ancient Wyrm spirit called Solium Submergens (Drowned King, yes I also think it's a very, very funny name for such a supposidly horrible, terrible thing..). The whole act is one huge railroad of events that are justified with the idea of fate and destiny. Well, to each their own, and honestly, even I could accept this much railroading, but for the chronicle to proceed, the characters have to fight and actually lose to Solium Submergens, which pretty much ends up killing all the characters - and that, is just very poor chronicle writing.

Up until this point in the adventure, my players first got highly motivated by the omens, somewhat discouraged by everything in the module pushing them towards an inevitable encounter they did not wish to partake alone, ran them into an encounter with a totally unrelated bunch of villains they did not enjoy fighting, and finally killed them in a battle that took over an hour due to huge dicepools, during which I had to blatantly cheat to keep the arch-monster alive, after which they just said "Enough is enough, if we have to die, I'm stabbing myself in the heart." You can say that we did not kick things off really well.

Anyway, when the characters die, instead of surrendering their souls they end up finding themselves in the Dark Umbra, trekking along a barren dark landscape following the trail of their enemy. At least, they are expected to. And to make sure they do, there is nothing else they can do, so they have to follow the trail of something that caused them hours of frustration and a really cheap death. At this point, it was nearly impossible to interest them with any of the Dark Umbra encounters given in the book, they did not even bother to check these things, and kept walking. The general feeling was "Let's get this over with, I want to play, not go sightseeing on a railroad." And that's exactly what happens, they wander through a perfectly linear path witnessing a couple of rather useless scenes that involve things dead or lost. These scenes add nothing to the chronicle, and really slow it down. There's even a pointless combat encounter with spirits. Eventually, the characters come across an opening through which they fall back to earth..

Time and Tide, Act II: Living History

The characters, as they soon find out, are falling to world in a different era. They are visiting Dacia, 31 BCE, during the reign of the Roman Empire. The chapter ends with discussing how to handle this, telling how the spirits of the players fall into bodies of new hosts (who are in truth their ancestors of yore). In short, the monster they have just been killed by has also been sighted in Dacia, 31 BCE, and now in their ancestors' bodies, they have to fight it again, defeat it, and hitch a ride with it back to their time. This revelation was pretty much the end of our first gaming session because one of the players exclaimed that his character "would rather slit his own wrists than play that combat again."

Which was a shame because this is probably the best act in the chronicle. While it also suffers from some railroading (the players can not leave the area of their fated encounter..) it presents wonderful roleplaying opportunities. But it's also a royal pain in the ass to prepare for by the Storyteller, since he has to stat out and prepare a whole new set of characters with detailed backgrounds as pregens for the players to take on. I prepare pre-gens all the time, so it was no big deal for me, but I know many people will be put off by the idea of preparing these characters, or being forced to play in the body of another character. My group had no qualms about it (we run pregens all the time) so the next time we met, I handed out the new character sheets, and we were on our way.

The chapter starts out by describing the vicinity of the Danube river around which the encounter is fated to happen. The local history, the two human settlements in the region, one Dacian and one Roman, and the werewolf caern that is referred to as a haunted village by the humans, is richly detailed by the book, including stats and writeups for all important characters the players could encounter.

To make it short, the Dacians and the Romans do not like each other much, and can be provoked to fight each other, asked to cooperate and fight against the Wyrm monster along with the players, totally uprooted and decimated or forced to move away in some manner - for the first time, the players have a wide range of options in dealing with the humans that breaks the monotonous railroading feel that doomed the chronicle so far. It also stimulated great roleplaying between the Garou of antique Dacia and the Modern minded garou from the future, who contradicted on many points, suchs as the role of civilization and humans, whether the Garou nation were doing their job well, that the Apocalypse could actually ever arrive - all that the players told the Garou about the future only aggravated their ties to the local Garou and almost had them crucified for blasphemy, when they suggested to a White Howler that his tribe would fall to the Wyrm.

Eventually they learned this Rite of Infinite Pursuit from one of the Garou at the caern (all of whom were summoned here by omens to fight the monster), and evacuate the area, forcing both the Dacians and Romans to flee so they can save innocent humans and protect the veil, fight the monster, win, and tag along with it for a ride back to the future..

Time and Tide, Act III: Witnesses

Only, they don't get there just yet. Instead, they have to make stops at several points in time and occupy other past life hosts' bodies who conveniently happened to be nearby when the White Howlers fell to the Wyrm, the Croatan sacrificed themselves and the Bunyip were destroyed. Now, that's stretching things way too much. Once or twice is fine, but the same pack's ancestors being close to events of such significance four times in history is not fate, it's unbelievable. This is why I only ran the witness encounter whereby they learn how the demise of the White Howlers really took place, and skipped the rest. To make a long story short, the players take part in some sort of desperate endeavor during each of the three events that, while can not stop the tribes from being lost to the Garou, can help with the situation, such as helping rescue White Howler kinfolk from Black Spiral Dancers, joining the Croatan's sacrifice or fight on the Bunyip's behalf in Australia.

Eventually, they return to their time to battle the same monster yet again. By this time, my players, although they enjoyed the Dacia and Scotland stuff, protested loudly and puked. The reasons for this, if not obvious yet, is that fighting this thing takes LONG. You have to defeat it twice in the chronicle just to get things moving (granted, in one of these it is not at full power), and this futility doesn't do wonders for the players' motivation to battle it yet again. It's not exactly a very interesting monster to fight, it has a funny name that makes you laugh, it doesn't ever become a personal enemy to the characters during the whole chronicle. It's a mindless plot element that drives the story, and a boring one at that. Finally, it's defeated and the story ends.

This chronicle has some really interesting ideas going for it, especially when it brings Garou of Dacia and the players' characters together, but as it is written, it's really a poor Werewolf chronicle in many ways. The railroading is inexcusably frustrating, the main enemy is very boring, it's full of pointless combat encounters (such as having to fight a hungry grizzly bear in Dacia for no reason other than to add a bit of combat to a rather social part of the game) and is not fun to run. If I ran this chronicle again, I would run many things differently. I would skip the whole first chapter of railroading and futile combat, and just make this a shared dream of the player characters whereby they travel to the Dark Umbra by the help of their Ancestor Spirits, so the game starts with the interesting Act II. This way, the witness scenes in Act III can be expanded and played in their entirety the way the Dacia act was played, which would have made the story a thousand times more interesting.

Chapter Four: Ancestoral Wisdom

This last 24 page bit contains expanded information on Ancestors and Past Lives. It first describes the idea of Ancestor spirits, how they should be roleplayed and then goes on to discuss how the Ancestors background should be used in the game, clarifying the use of this background as well as offering new ways to use it during the game. A full list of gifts for the lost Garou tribes are given. I believe the White Howler gifts are from Book of the Wyrm, the Croatan gifts are from Croatan Song and the Bunyip gifts are from Rage Across Australia (adapted to Revised edition rules). This is followed by gifts for lost breeds: the Apis (Were-aurochs), the Camazotz (Werebats) and the Grondr (Wereboards). Other than adding to an already cluttered furry universe, they serve little purpose. At least they are lost and you won't see were-cattle wandering in the World of Darkness.

Style

I don't know what you think about Leif Jones' werewolf art, but I think it's very much below average. His characters are unproportionate and cartoony, his werewolves look like street mutts, his banes look like Slimer from Ghostbusters (hell, even his drawings of Solium Submergens look like Slimer.) Jeff Rebner saves the book from looking too awful with some mediocre and a few really good drawings that capture the feel of the chronicle and Werewolf in general much better.

The editing is quite decent, I've come across no blatant editing errors in this book, and its binding held perfectly well despite heavy use between and during game sessions, which was a very welcome change after my copies of Book of the Weaver and Croatan Song fell off their bindings after a single read through. Its layout is the familiar Werewolf layout with the familiar border art, easily distinguishable headers and subheaders, fonts that are easy on the eyes and a sidebar now and then that doesn't really distract from the text. It's what you would expect from an RPG book, with nothing really spectacular about it.

Conclusion

Unless you are a Werewolf completist, or you really like the chronicle ideas, there are many better products in the line you should buy before you spend money for this. The chronicle is poor but salvagable, the lost tribe gifts are found in other more useful books, the lost breed gifts are useless, the information it has on ancestor spirits and past lives is sparse.

Substance: 2

Style: 3

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