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I'm beginning to notice a trend in the way that White Wolf is developing its lines for the World of Darkness. The core books are pretty bland, covering all of the bases but providing none of the spark that the original corebooks had – none of the stuff that made you sit up and go “Holy crap! That's awesome!”
This is a damned shame, because it requires you to buy the core system, the core book for the line, and then one of the supplements before you get to the fun part. And Hunting Grounds: The Rockies is definitely a contender for what I would consider “the fun part”.
Essentially, Hunting Grounds takes the various abstract concepts introduced in the corebook and puts them into an actual context. You ever wondered what the spiritual struggle for a city looks like? Denver is undergoing exactly that kind of struggle. You ever wondered what an extended family of werewolves looks like? Bingo. You want to see how the various werewolf packs play off each other in terms of politics? It's in here. You want to see exactly how werewolves act like spiritual police to the spirits that they've been assigned to corral? Hunting Grounds explains it all. I love this freakin' book.
On top of that, there's a shitload of other cool ideas that weren't mentioned in the corebook. Case in point: even after all of this time, there's still dinosaur spirits hanging around the spiritual wilds of Denver, although they've survived for so long that they're more a collection of sharp teeth and claws than an actual spirit representative of Denver. There's warped parodies of werewolves left over from a confrontation from a Great Old One-like spirit that was destroyed some time ago. There's too much interesting stuff to list, really. It's the kind of thing where you just have to buy the book.
Anyways. The opening fiction details the Black Moon Extreme pack as they hunt vampires – and they do about as well as you'd expect a pack with the word “extreme” in their names to do. The fiction seems honestly out of place – more tuned to the cartoon rock and roll of Werewolf: The Apocalypse, rather than the subtle, understated horror of the new World of Darkness. I mention this specifically because there's a fight between a werewolf on a motorcycle and an all-black Hummer on a crowded road, which seems somewhat contrary to the spirit of the game. It's a little clumsily written – for instance, the villains talk a little too much while they're fighting, and an evil spirit seems to be reading from the playbook for Smarmy Fanfic Villains, but it's not bad. I would have preferred something more directly about the mountains, personally, but that's just me. The chapters breaks do an excellent job of portraying this kind of thing – both the traditional horror roots of werewolves, as in an excerpt from the 18th century man being chased by werewolves, and in the modern day, as in a description of the aftermath of a hunt.
Much of the book is taken up with the various packs that occupy the Denver area. Werewolf books in the past – from the Apocalypse line – has usually avoided detailing a lot of the local werewolves, instead focusing on the various threats that the werewolves could take on. The structure of this book borrows a page out of Vampire's playbook, by detailing the local power structure and then offering new werewolf packs ample space to move in and interact with them. And since werewolves don't infight nearly as often as vampires do, there's options provided for each pack that allows the GM to use them as adversaries or as allies, complete with a story hook for each possibility, which is really nicely done.
The packs themselves range from the interesting to the fairly bland. For instance, there's a group of survivalist werewolves – the Red Knives – who have their own compound up in the Rockies, and whose members have names like “Phantom” and “Ranger” and “Snap”. They're fairly undifferentiated, but they've got a small cult of humans back at their compound who are fully aware of the existence of werewolves – a fascinating idea that seems to merit more explanation than it actually gets. As a werewolf pack, they're kind of bland, but imagine the fun that you could have throwing ordinary humans up against them. (They finally made it to the survivalist's compound, after facing four hours of werewolf attacks – but hey, why do they all have evenly spaced claw marks on their arms?) The Scar Angels are a werewolf bike gang, but with the sole exception of Smoke, the group's “face man” and travelling salesmen, they pretty much look like the picture that you get in your head when you hear the words “werewolf bike gang.”
But there are other packs who are more interesting. The Pickering family is a family of Bone Shadow werewolves who seem to embody the ancestral curse aspect of lycanthropy – two sons have already died before seeing their 21st birthdays, and the third is only six months away and terrified. The rest of the family have their own agendas, but all of them wind up in the family crypt, the site of the pack's locus. The Shadow of Smoke and Fire lost one of its members to an attack by the Pure, and is walking wounded until somebody – either the Pure or the PC's – intervene. Black Moon Extreme is a rock band whose members are vampire-hunting werewolves, but the book makes them work. (Part of that is that a lot of the other werewolf packs think that they're kinda goofy too.)
There are also a lot of packs dedicated to one of the central plot points of the book – Max Roman's attempt to create a true werewolf nation, as opposed to scattered packs with no central organization. Gurdilag provided a major incentive for werewolves to cooperate, and allowed Max to wield a lot of political power, but now that the central threat is gone, many of the werewolves who joined Max – including a legendary werewolf – see Max's vision as contrary to the basic idea of what werewolves are supposed to be like. Some of the multi-tribal packs are beginning to fragment as they question if Roman's plan is going anywhere at all. At the same time, the Pure werewolves somehow figured out how to coordinate a major attack on Denver in the past, so the choice of whether the werewolves will act as a nation or as separate packs may not be as academic as it sounds. The PCs, if they play their cards right, could be the founders of the Forsaken werewolf nation.
The next chapter describes Denver and its environs, and it's here that we really get the good stuff. Denver's recently been freed from the spiritual domination of Gurdilag, but the resulting power vacuum and absence of hierarchy has basically laid everything to waste. Spirits who would otherwise fill specific needs have been forced to find new ways to survive, merging with their fellow spirits for protection and creating monstrosities in the bargain. The spiritual dogfight that's occurring in Denver is spelled out in remarkably clear terms:
...spirits up and down the hierarchy are jostling for position and influence over their neighbors, making alliances and consuming those weaker than themselves. Spirits of buildings fight one another over who will become the spirit of the block, the winner then vies with other blocks to become the spirit of the neighborhood – at which point new building-spirits fight over who will fill the vacant position of spirit of the block.
The core book may have given general examples of how spirits interact with each other, but this makes it nice and specific – providing an actual illustration of how it clicks together.
The chapter's basically packed with stuff like this. Everything is happy, happy, happy in Boulder – the cat spirits don't even kill the mouse spirits, but just give “friendly chase” - thanks to a happiness spirit who's grown far too powerful for the good of the neighborhood. The spirits of semi-trucks dominate the road, eating whatever happens onto the highways that's too weak to defend itself. An immense bear-spirit just woke up from its long sleep underneath Devil's Tower. Cannibal spirits, still riding their high from the Donner Party, possess humans and get them to doing what cannibal spirits do best. There are areas where the Gauntlet between worlds gets thin, and spirits slip across without really knowing it. Predator Kings still dominate the back country, still spoiling for a fight against their Forsaken cousins. The Forsaken themselves are essentially acting like more Machiavellian UN peacekeepers – they're just trying to keep everything glued together until the power structure solidifies, and if they need to whack some unruly spirits to do that, so be it. You could create an entire campaign just involving the political battles to rebuild the spiritual architecture of any place in the area.
The next chapter develops this theory a little more. We find out more about what the Pure are like – nothing that'll replace the inevitable sourcebook on them, but enough to give a GM an idea of how to play them. We get two sample packs – Howl to Mock the Dead, which ripped up the Shadows of Smoke and Fire, and the Guardians of Mountain Pass, responsible for...well, guarding the mountain pass that winds through the Rocky Mountains. We also get the Bale Hounds described, but they feel rather dramatically out of place. Their black and white morality seem rather radically out of joint in comparison to the much grayer world around them, and the suggested activities for Bale Hounds – using a human sex club for worship of the dark Lust spirit, in particular – brings me right back to the Saturday-morning-cartoon feel that Apocalypse frequently had.
But there's salvation a few paragraphs later. The Su'ur are werewolves who were radically warped by Gurdilag, usually resulting from when Gurdilag took a spirit and mashed it up against the werewolf without really thinking the result through. The resulting tragic hybrids make much better rivals for Werewolf: The Forsaken than the Bale Hounds do, as they're not entirely at fault for their condition – but they have to be killed. (Not that their new powers make that easy.) There's even a guy who's able to borrow the skills and powers of the werewolves that he eats, which shades into the Skin Changers of the early years of Werewolf: The Apocalypse. While the spirit responsible for creating the Su'ur in the Denver area has been – supposedly – destroyed, it's easy enough to say that all of the idigam who are returning to Earth from their long sleep are starting to pull the same trick.
The book closes with storytelling tips, including a recap of the various roles that the various werewolf tribes play within the Denver area and a general fleshing out of the main themes of the book. There's also a short adventure – well, let me rephrase: There's a new pack described whose new totem is actually a corrupted spirit masquerading as a catamount – a mountain lion – which is slowly corrupting them. The story involves them investigating the weird afflictions affecting regional loci, then meet up with a dying Pureborn werewolf who fingers the affected pack as the ones responsible. The characters then track down the affected pack and whack their totem.
That's it.
Yeah, I thought that it was kinda brief too.
The book's shotgunned through with adventure hooks, some of which just seem sort of redundant – for instance, Boulder's happiness spirit has an adventure hook where a werewolf escapes from the spirit's clutches, and asks for the help of the PCs in rescuing the rest of the pack. That's okay, but God, imagine the fun that you could have introducing the werewolves to an environment where happiness is mandatory. (I insert a brief pause to let everybody add in “citizen”, then smile as if they've done something clever.) Remember that one Treehouse of Horror episode where Bart had crazy mental powers? (“Happy thoughts, happy thoughts....man, I'm getting mighty tired of this. POP! Ruff ruff. Bow wow.”) That, except in the World of Darkness.
The artwork in the book really varies. The packs are all illustrated by the same artist, and they're almost completely indistinguishable from each other – they're all a bunch of muscular guys scowling off into space, drawn in the same angular style and nearly indistinguishable from each other. I swear, some of them look they've been Xeroxed, then given a new hairstyle and turned at a slight angle. Not good stuff. The rest of the art isn't bad, but there's no particular standouts.
One more thing: The book recommends Moon Dance as a good novel to get the feel of a Werewolf campaign. Having bought the book on their recommendation, I can safely say that your enjoyment of the book will be hampered depending on how much you like crap. If you don't like crap, then you may have to give the book a miss. You can check my Amazon review for more details, if you're so inclined.
Insofar as I can tell, Hunting Grounds basically follows through on the promise made by the original game, expanding and explaining what the game's actually supposed to be about. It's almost a must-buy for anybody who's got Werewolf: The Forsaken, and it's almost a shame that a lot of the coolness in this book isn't present in the core book.
-Darren MacLennan
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