The more I read of Werewolf: The Forsaken, the more I like it. It’s just flexible as all hell – you can run a generational game in a small valley, or remake Wolfen, or delve into Unknown Armies territory in the backstreets of Detroit, or just play it for the combat value. Instead of cleaving narrowly to a particular adventure type, it offers room for expansion – it feels together. Predators expands it a little further, detailing spirits and going into more detail about the Ridden. Somebody on the rpg.net forums, wiser than I, called it the “missing part of the corebook”, and I’m very much inclined to agree.

The core book went into some detail about the spirit world and what it was like, but it was vague – it was more about impressions of the spirit world, rather than specific details. (For those of you who don’t know: A regimented, Darwinian struggle between spirits in a shadowy, Silent-Hill-esque world.) I believe that it had a single spirit listed, just as an example of what they were like, which was enough to give GMs an idea of how to create spirits, but didn’t really go into more detail than that.

Predators essentially lays out the blueprint for what spirits are like, broken down by category – tool-spirits, bird-spirits, plant-spirits and so forth. It’s here that the book makes itself invaluable. Instead of describing spirits in vague terms, the book goes into specific, concrete detail about what a spirit’s like – where it typically spawns, what they look like and how the GM can use them in a game. Each spirit also gets a flavor quote – which doesn’t seem like it’d be that useful, but actually goes miles in terms of defining what the spirit is like. For instance:

Raccoon: For me? I want…It is dirty! No, I want; do not take back! I will clean!

Subway: You must pay before you ride. Give me a token worthy of me.

Machine-Gun: Gun control means hitting the target.

Begging and fastidious, imperious and demanding, cold and chilly – the personality of each spirit gets summarized in a nutshell. You don’t have to guess at a spirit’s motives anymore – look at some quotes from Predator, attach some human characteristics to the spirit and you can run the spirit for your group. All the traffic light ever says is “Stop!” and “Go!”, but that’s all that it needs to say. The GM advice is also pretty useful – in other words, it’s all focused on why the players might have contact with the spirit, rather than how it fits into some abstract scheme that’s of interest only to the authors of the book.

It’s also worth noting that the book covers the entire range of spirits, from high to low - besides natural and artificial spirits, we also get the Celestial spirits (sun and moon, including lunes), conceptual spirits (apathy, war, dreams) and the bastard hybrid Magath. The Magath get some nice writeups, including a dump-truck/pain spirit who wanders the spirit highways, destroying car-spirits to siphon off their pain, and a dog/information spirit that haunts a library.

We get to find out how data-spirits work, and how book and computer spirits prey upon them. By that example, we can extrapolate to everything else. We also get stats for Ghost Children, the spirit-children of two werewolves, who have some pretty nasty stats and a ban that demands that they must revenge themselves upon their parents. That’s story hooks on the hoof, there. The chapter also includes some new spirit-powers, ranging from the generic but useful (Mechanical Possession, Speed, Emotional Aura, Telekinesis) to the specific (Dessicate, Fearstruck, Final Strike, Clasp).

I do wish that this particular section of the book was longer, just to see some other examples of how spirits can be made – for instance, what about undersea creatures? Or some more conceptual spirits – if you sealed up a room for fifty years, could it generate a spirit just from sheer entropy?

There’s a couple of clinkers in there, though. The playground spirit is particularly irritating – while it may seem innocent and sweet on the surface, it’s actually tainted by tortured and abused children, attracts pedophiles and child molestors, and spreads experiences of neglect, depression and aggression to all who approach.

To which I’d like to say: it’s a fucking PLAYGROUND. The old World of Darkness used to use child abuse, child pornography, child abuse, snuff movies and so forth on such a regular basis that I kept wondering if they’d just create an abbreviation and use that – like, “What’s up with the Yozis? Childabusemurderpornoslay! ‘Cause they’re EVIL!” Or, even better, add it into villain profiles as a trait. (Come to think of it, a history of child abuse was pretty much mandatory during the mid-90’s, just ‘cause it lent depth to characters that were otherwise weak-ass weak, PC or otherwise. It’s lazy, lazy writing, and I’m really hoping that we don’t see it resurfacing in the World of Darkness.)

The next chapter deals with the Ridden – spirits who jump into people’s bodies and ride them around. One of the best parts of the book is that it points out that Ridden can fill just about any need in a horror game, ranging from spooky Innsmouth folk (possessed by fish spirits) to cannibal hillbillies (gluttony spirits) to animals that are too smart for their own good (possessed by a spirit of their own species) to Swamp Thing (plant spirit in a human body) to any shapeshifter that you want as a villain. All that you have to do is to stick the appropriate spirit into the body, do a little chargen and you’re set.

It’s that flexibility – that ability to create a new race without having to create a splatbook, the ability to use what you’ve already been given rather than having to buy something new – that makes the new World of Darkness so damned good. The possibilities are just endless. They’re especially good for games with regular humans, just because the Ridden are so versatile. Imagine, say, a military game, where part of the force is suddenly jumped by war spirits. They’re lighting each other up with live ammunition, jumping from body to body (like the Koleris of Tribe 8), nobody knows what’s going on and it’s ten hours until morning – and your military characters are right in the thick of it. Can they stop them before they reach the nearby town? What about the local werewolf pack?

The chapter doesn’t have the same highlights as the one preceding – and I’d like to keep this review kinda short – but it does have pretty comprehensive information on the Ridden, including examples of what it’s like to be Urged, Ridden and Claimed. Each example also makes for a pretty decent story hook. There’s some additional systems added in, including a new trait to represent how close the spirit is to taking over the host, and a bunch of new powers for possessed people to use.

There’s some sample Ridden included. Fortunately, they’re not just claw-fodder. Some of them are potentially beneficial, like the Protective Animal; others fill human needs, like the Nemesis; others are just flat-out interesting, like the Feral. (To quote the book: “Damn you, dogs! I want to hunt as flesh, too!”) There’s three pages of descriptions of different kinds of spirits and how their possession would affect a human being. Cat spirits, for instance, might spend their time trying to overcome natural human night-blindness, or might spend hours trying to shape useless fingernails0 into claws. There’s no statistics, but it’s excellent detail for a GM to use.

The chapter closes with a short adventure, but it’s a major letdown when compared to the rest of the chapter. Essentially, an occultist type has found a spooky book, has a small cult and is going to kidnap a newly changed werewolf with the intention of sacrificing him. That’s about it. His cultists are potentially spirit-possessed, but they’re pretty dull – an old guy, a thug, a woman and a computer nerd. The adventure admits that it’s pretty straightforward; I’d say that it’s startlingly pedestrian compared to what it could have done. Maybe a new author got a shot at writing an adventure, I don’t know.

The chapter on the Swarms follow – the Azlu (were-spiders) and Beshilu (were-rats). I’d like to take this opportunity to deliver the punchline that I’ve been writing this review for: Specifically, the Gedidoff factor. It’s what you’ll gradually grow to experience as you read through various details of spiders climbing into people’s brains, through their noses, plunging enormous fangs into vulnerable flesh and so forth. Every little skin tic will suddenly become a wolf spider, intent on replicating the feats that it’s been reading about over your shoulder. The Gedidioff factor is how fast you slap at that tic, meanwhile shrieking “Get it off! Get itoff! Getitoff getitoff gedidoff gedifoffgedidoffgedidoff!” Have somebody clock your RPM’s while you’re at it.

The Swarms chapter isn’t quite that bad, but it gets up there. The core Werewolf book lays down most of the information that you need to know about the Azlu and the Beshilu; what this section does is flesh out them out a little more – how they breed, their cycle of growth, how they take over human beings and so forth. The Azlu life cycle is described, for instance: A small spider-spirit possess a spider, kills and eat other Azlu-spiders, eventually takes over a host and becomes a spider-human hybrid, and dissolves back into a tiny spider when it’s killed. Given how rarely the Azlu can generate new spider-shards – as described in the Egglayer merit -, and given how Darwinian the struggle is, I can’t imagine how they sustain their numbers. In fact, I think that it’d end with only one Azlu left on the face of the planet. Maybe I’m missing something in the book, but I don’t know.

There’s a lot of new powers, but the only really cool one is the Hivemother power, which allows the Azlu to carry a swarm of spiders in its host form, sending them out at will and so forth. I’m actually disappointed – it seems like there’d be a lot of cool powers that you could create, but most of them replicate the abilities of werewolves (crossing over, seeing spirits) or just account for spider-like body forms (multiple arms, spinnerets, scorpion tail, extra eyes).

One other thing: I dislike the fact that the stronger Azlu form dissolve into a swarm of spiders whenever you kill them, making it very difficult to permanently kill an Azlu spirit. If a group’s worked for a long time in order to kill a particularly noxious Azlu foe, it’s not going to make them happy to find out that they’ve done nothing but reduce it in power down to a tiny spider. Sure, it has to start over again, but that’s not the same as being dead. (I also think that werewolves would start getting really careful about using gasoline and fire in order to kill the spider swarms whenever an Azlu died, in order to prevent just such an occurrence.) If they’ve put in the time, give them their reward – the death of a hated foe.

The Beshilu get similar writeups, but they don’t have the same arachnophobic thrill as the Azlu. Having a spider in your brain seems much worse than having a rat in your stomach. Maybe it’s because I’ve never had unpleasant experiences with rats, I don’t know. It’s pretty much a mirror of the Azlu chapter, complete with examples of how Beshilu set about possessing people; even the powers share the useful-but-dull roles that the Azlu have. Just like the Azlu, the Beshilu break up into dozens of rats when they’re killed, thereby frustating the fuck out of your group and making them question why they bothered killing the Beshilu in the first place. Just like the Azlu, small Beshilu spirits eat each other until one becomes large enough to take over a human. They’re both Swarm-Hosts, so it’s not surprising that they share similarities – and it’s explained why both the Azlu and the Beshilu figured out the swarm trick when no other spirits have – but I wish that the authors had put more effort into differentiating the two types of swarm. (It is cool that the rats use cancers and plagues in order to soften up their hosts, and that some Beshilu become “Plague-Seers” – but I miss the crazy imagination of the original Ratkin book.)

There is some effort made at introducing new types of Swarm-Hosts – snakes, locusts and ravens. The writeups are fairly cursory, enough to give you an idea of what they’re like but they don’t have stat writeups beyond a single Swarm-Host. I can understand locusts, and the idea of a man bursting into a swarm of ravens was done quite well in Myth II: Soulblighter, but I can’t really see why ravens and snakes would be swarm spirits. Specifically, because they don’t swarm. Garter snakes swarm up for warmth in the winter, but ravens don’t really flock – to the best of my knowledge, they seem to keep to themselves. (Spider are solitary hunters too, and never swarm, but nothing gives you the creepy-crawlies like a few hundred of them unexpectedly pouring out of somebody’s mouth.) They feel like an artificial attempt to expand an idea that was fine the way that it was. I’m honestly disappointed in the chapter. It’s workmanlike, but it could have been a lot more than it was.

The book closes out with the Things That Should Not Be – primeval spirits from the dawn of time. They’re more concepts that should have gone away rather than Great Old Ones; potent, but not invincible. There’s some really neat stuff going on in here – the Breath, for instance, is a semi-sentient toxic cloud that’s either the vengeance of Gaia or the combined half-ghosts of everybody who’s ever been buried in the Earth; or the Flesh, a creature with the ability to imitate everything but without the ability to have a shape of its own.The authors of the book had the wisdom to make them more than just “the Thing shows up, all the werewolves die, the end”; rather, the various Things can raise the dead, or are limited to one particular area, or can be detected by various means. Excellent, excellent stuff.

The artwork is pretty good. Without the artist’s signatures on them, I can’t really pick out individual artists – goddammit – but there’s no real clinkers in the book. Wish to Christ that White Wolf could start IDing their artists, though; it’d be nice to credit specific people. (Tell you what: The Chapter I splash page is particularly stunning.) The fiction is…not so good. The opening fiction seems awkwardly written, doesn’t really have a point, and has a pain spirit who seems more like a sentient being than the force of nautre that it is in the book. The Chapter II break has a spirit host who repeats the Gourmet Villain cliché – you know, “Ah, flesh tastes so much better when it’s shot through with pain and fear and horror and blood and murderdeathkill.” You see this in bad horror movies all the time; it just doesn’t work. At the same time, the Chapter IV break is just tense and scary enough to convey the horror of the Things That Should Not Be. Go figure.

Overall, though, the book’s very useful to anybody who’s running Werewolf: The Forsaken, and just as useful to somebody who has Werewolf and wants to run a normal horror game. Put it this way: I can’t imagine running Werewolf: The Forsaken without it.

-Darren MacLennan