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I have got to stop setting myself up for disappointment like this.

Once again, I get hyped up about a product several months before its release. Once again, I make dozens of frantic phone calls to local Gaming Hutts (tm), tracking the release schedule and plotting which store will have it 30 minutes before the rest of the state. Once again, I plop down my (relatively) hard-earned money for a book sight-unseen, figuring 'even if it's lame, the concept is cool enough to carry it'. Once again I am horribly, tragically, epically wrong.

Up until about a year ago, I'd never played Werewolf: the Apocalypse. I'd had some long-standing Vampire and Mage games that were slowly becoming the stuff of legend among my local gaming underground; I'd had some better-than-pleasant experiences with Wraith and Changeling; but something about being a big slobbery puppy killing Nazis for Greenpeace never really appealed to me. (At this point I should mention that this review assumes of the reader a passing familiarity with the Storyteller system, Werewolf: the Apocalypse, and gaming conventions in general. Lacking these, I can't promise this'll make much sense. Not that I'm promising that to begin with, mind you.)

Then one night, my cronies and I were huddled around a table, stacked high with mostly-empty pizza boxes and discarded Dr. Pepper containers, when we realized we were bored enough to play something none of us had done before. Yes, of course it was Werewolf. What did you think I was going to say, Kobolds Ate My Baby? That's a different review. Anyway, to make an epic story merely long, we played, I loved it, I've been playing ever since. I've picked up the majority of the revised edition books and have been semi-regularly GMing for my group; we've had a good time. So when I heard that White Wolf was doing Werewolf: Dark Ages (not a typo; read on), my interested was, to say the least, piqued.

I never really got into Vampire: Dark Ages. Didn't really appeal to me. The fun of Vampire was in political intrigue and subtle societal machinations; what's the point in doing that in a time period where most people could care less who their liege was, so long as some gruel made it onto the table occasionally? At best, it justified all those wankers who felt the need to carry a greatsword around in late-90's America because of their "old habits", and claimed it wasn't breaking Masquerade because, um, hey, look over there! At worst, it introduced the abominable dual-discipline combo system, which was meaningless twinkery of the worst sort. Any of you Munchkins who disagree with me, step into my arena and we'll have words. I can't promise it'll be pretty.

But all that aside... the idea of werewolves in the dark ages intrigued me. It was a simpler time, Weaver-taint wise, which is good for Gaia, right? And wolves hadn't been hunted to extinction all across the world yet. Hell, the barbaric medieval paradigm that most rulers were into fits neatly into the way a lot of Garou see the world: you're either a liege or a lackey, a countryman or a foreigner, a servant of god or a bastard heathen; predator or prey, friend or foe, of Gaia or of the Wyrm.

And I can't be the only one who thinks that werewolves in chainmail look cool.

Needless to say, I was pretty hyped about the game when it came out. I think we can all safely say that that's no longer the case.

Dark Ages: Werewolf is a supplement for Dark Ages: Vampire (more on that later). It's a hardcover book weighing in at 232 pages. Like all WW books it's well-bound, printed well in easy-to-read two-column format, and contains enough illustrations that art-freaks can get their rocks off without overwhelming the text. I'm not much for artwork; there have been a few times when a picture has inspired me to new heights of creativity in my gaming, but not many. The art in DA:W is about average for the DA gestalt so far; well-done, if a bit high-contrast B&W; too comic-book for some people's tastes, but not to the extent of, say, Exalted. That's probably the last thing I'm going to say about artwork here. Be impressed I mentioned it at all.

Here, for me, is the big sticking point, and I admit it's something I should have known. This is not Werewolf: the Dark Ages. That is to say, it's not a supplement for Werewolf. It's a supplement for Dark Ages: Vampire, which means it repeats a lot of stuff covered in the W:tA main book, but expects it to conform to the world of Vampire. In spite of what the speed-freak who swears his BSD Abomination isn't overpowered will tell you, the World of Darkness is not now, nor was it ever, designed to integrate well together. There's a reason all the books use streamlined stats for antagonists rather than just advising you to buy a different book. Each WoD system was designed with its own flavor in mind, and there are certain inconsistencies that pop up if you try to cram it all in the box at once. During various times over the WW development cycle, this has been emphasized, and no more so than in Werewolf. In Vampire, vampires are creatures of evil, no question; but they still retain their Humanity to some extent (unless you're one of those power-mad Sabbat players, in which case get out of my review). They are dark and tortured, but still capable of minor acts of goodness; Bram Stoker or Anne Rice. In Werewolf, vampires fit more with Laurell K. Hamilton or Nancy A. Collins... they're fodder, nothing more. All of them are evil to the core. If your best friend from high school gets Leeched, it's going to be a very, very sad day when you tear his head from his body and send what's left of his soul swirling into the Abyss, but it's going to happen.

In other words, instead of adapting W:tA, the system and world that I loved, they reprinted a watered-down version of it and crammed it into a setting I was never really thrilled with in the first place. But if that's the worst of it, it's certainly not all... I'd be willing to stack this up to bias on my part (grudgingly) if it were the only bad thing I had to say about the book, but it's not. Read on.

In 47 pages, we’re given a cliffnotes version of the history of the Garou and the ways of Gaia. It turns out that Metis are almost always killed at birth (though apparently if you let them live past that you have to put up with them, and simply discriminate against them economically), and people in the Dark Medieval say "fuck" a lot. It also turns out we get shafted out of 5 of the 15 Tribes.

Yeah, this bugged me. A lot. OK, math lesson: Gaia had 16 followers. The White Howlers were completely lost by 300 AD or so, what with the evil and all. The Bunyip have always been reclusive, plus they never really made that much sense to begin with, so I‘m OK leaving them out. And, according to this book, hundreds of years of Umbral travel has still kept the Uktena and the Red Talons from running into each other. I had a hard time with this one. The Garou are supposed to be a global community, but they didn't know about the three Pure Breeds tribes just 'cause no one in the 'real' world did? Doesn't fly for me. I'd be willing to grit my teeth and write this one off for the sake of playability (and hope the Pure Breeds got a supplement of their own), except that that still leaves us down a tribe. Nowhere in the book will you see mention of the Stargazers.

Now that's just lazy. The Stargazers left the Nation in the present day scenario, and recent supplements have been careful to point out that some lone Stargazers still aid their former brethren. But that's the current timeline. There is no reason to exclude them from a book that takes place 800 years ago. And no reason is given, either... they're just not there. Not mentioned at all. I supposed you could make the argument that they're remote enough from Europe to not matter much (I'd question that argument's historical accuracy, but you could make it)... but then what are the Silent Striders, from Egypt, doing here? I hate to say it, but the only reason I can see for this is a lame attempt to shoehorn in the supplement with whatever was easiest for the writers at the time. It's lazy and it breaks the continuity of the world, and I can't stand it.

Whew. Ok. Gotta calm down, we've got a ways to go.

After a reprint of the Litany that looks like it's been translated by Quakers, we get a breakdown on the state of the world (or rather, Europe) in the year 1230.

Yeah, that's right. 1230. I've been saving this rant; it's a long one.

As a long-time Ars Magica player, I'd question labeling 1230 as "dark ages", but I'm completely willing to let that one slide, if for no other reason than "Werewolf: the Early-ish Middle Ages" would make a silly title. No, my gripe here is that there was nothing interesting going on in 1230, at least not as far as the Garou were concerned.

Think about what a game set it the "true" dark ages could have been. Rome's recently fallen into decay; there's hope that the Weaver's strength will continue to wane. The White Howlers are so recently lost there's still hope they can be reformed... plus they've still got some nasty secrets that no one in the Garou Nation has figured out yet. With the only centers of civilization confined to Constantinople and Arabia, which are constantly warring, there's a huge void in-between the cities to be filled by anyone with the strength to lead. Plus, and this I admit is again personal bias, the Viking raids are in full-swing.

Think about it! Playing a Get of Fenris (sorry, Fenrir) back when that meant something! A raiding party of Norsemen sets out for the northern Anglish and Saxon kingdoms... then some of them break off, veer north across Hadrian's wall, and fight the Spiral Dancers on their home turf! It's an age of epic legend, and perfect for the werewolf setting!

But instead, we get 1230, and "Ragnarok has come for the Vikings". It's as if they were admitting that that would have been a really cool setting, but they're not going with it because 1230 worked better for Vampire, and this is designed to fit in neatly with everything from the Vampire book.

OK, so the "real world" didn't exactly work, but surely there was something interesting going on in the Werewolf timeline in 1230, right? Wrong again. The Fianna and the Fenrir have patched up their epic war (ooh, just missed that one) and everyone's pretty much getting along fine now. Oh, they threw in some malarkey about a "prophecy of the tribes" to justify the timing, but it completely failed to capture my interest, largely because the prophecy is supposed to come directly from Gaia, and yet it too fails to mention the five other tribes that are hanging out backstage, just waiting for someone else to write a book about them.

The chapter ends with one of the gravest insults that has ever been seen in a White Wolf book. The final subsection is entitled "the Umbra", and is exactly 250 words long. The Umbra is a major part of the Garou cosmology, and in the revised mainbook both Natures & Demeanors and Merits & Flaws were eliminated to make room for it. In Dark Ages, it gets 250 words. For those who aren't professional writers, the earlier section on "my bias" was more than 500 words. Yeah, that's bad.

The next 28 pages cover the breeds, auspices, and tribes of the Garou. Here we learn that not only is it a sin to create a metis, a sin to be a metis, and a sin to let a metis live beyond a few minutes, it's actually a sin to be part of a sept that fosters a metis. That's right; not pack, sept. If, for some reason, you don't cleave Fido in twain as soon as you're done with his mommy and his daddy, everyone who pays homage to your caern suffers for it. Now, I never really played Metis before, and I understood that they were usually looked down upon... gotta build up the angst factor, don't you know. But there was always a chance for them to redeem themselves, and the greatest heroes of the Galliard tales were always Metis who overcame their flawed pasts to achieve greatness, not unlike the Ronin of Japanese legend. But no, just to drive the point even further home, the book tells us that "regardless of what deeds a metis performs, though, she will always be a metis, and the best she can hope for as eulogy is for others to mutter, 'She did well, for a metis.' " That emphasis isn't mine, by the way. Seems the authors are really trying to keep people from playing a metis.

Also, we learn here that while being a raised in Lupus society restricts your knowledge of human affairs to some extent, it doesn't keep you from learning how to Ride. Also, Dark Ages Lupus can learn Crafts, though their modern counterparts seem to have forgotten that Skill. Oh well. I'm not even going to ask which wolves you have know to learn Archery or Melee, since they're not forbidden either. It's some consolation that Dark Ages Lupus (logically) can't learn Medicine, but modern wolves apparently still watch enough ER to be able to spend the points on it. I'm not going to ask.

The rest of the chapter's pretty average; it covers the basics of what it is to be a Garou, mechanically speaking. Some of the starting Gifts have changed around a bit from W:tA to fit the timeline, but I'll cover those later. Really, my only gripe here is that it's 28 pages (that's roughly 100 times the amount of space the Umbra gets) that you should already know if you're a Werewolf player in the slightest. I know; this isn't a Werewolf supplement, it's a Dark Ages supplement. But I can't help thinking that's a bad call on their part, so I'm going to point it out as often as possible.

This is 32 pages, and it's the meat of the book for those of us who buy supplements more for rules than for setting. Don't get me wrong; I like setting. It's just that I can come up with my own setting in a pinch, and I'll nix an established setting at the drop of a hat if it doesn't gel with what I see happening. I'm much more loyal to rules. Though not universally so, as this chapter demonstrates.

The chapter starts by introducing Garou-specific Abilities like Primal Urge, and the usual slew of Backgrounds, plus a new one: Hunting Ground. This represents an area that the wolf (or pack) patrols for food; it may be a part of his Sept's bawn, or it may be separate. Points in the background can determine its size or its suitability for sustaining human (and Garou) life. I actually liked this system a bit; if it weren't pretty rare in modern games I'd probably work it in. My only gripe is that it's recommended as an Anchor Background, another system from Dark Ages: Vampire I never really cared for. "Oh, so you mean I need a reason to co-operate with the rest of the players? But if I come up with one I can get Backgrounds above 5?" [Sound of frantic erasing]. "OK, we're the Guild of Deathkillers. We're the most powerful assassins in the land. We have Resources, Allies, Contacts, Mentor, and Domain all at 10. Can we buy a guild Generation pool if we're all Sired by the same guy?"

Then come the Merits & Flaws. Again, I'm going to point out my bias. The Werewolf Player' Guide came out shortly before this book, and I'd read it cover-to-cover by the time I got Dark Ages. I loved all of it; I considered it well worth waiting for. So I was surprised to say the least when I saw that none of the changes from the Guide had made it over to this book.

Some Merits and Flaws have been rewritten slightly, to reflect their effects in the Dark Medieval; this is well and good. There are also a few new traits, like the Callous Flaw (you hate people, have to spend Willpower to help them, can't have Empathy, and won't benefit much from Pack Tactics... why anyone would allow a character to take this flaw is beyond me), and Bad Taste (no, the other kind)... and the return of one of my oldest and most deadly foes, Silver Tolerance.

I danced for joy when I saw this Merit was missing from the Revised Player's Guide (I dance for joy at lots of things, as anyone who's read my review of E-tools can tell you). I'd always considered it to be a broken mechanic. Yes, it's 7 points. No, it doesn't make you immune to silver (exactly). But the fact is, every Werewolf session I've ever run without specifically disallowing this Merit, at least one person's taken it. Usually more. If something's that popular, even with the high cost, I maintain that it's overpowered.

I'm going to veer off for a bit here to elaborate. Silver Tolerance lets you soak silver damage all the time (normally, only Homids or Lupus in breed form can do so), and halves the Gnosis loss for carrying silver weapons. Including klaives. Klaives, the most deadly weapons of the Garou, because it doesn't matter what your Stamina is in Crinos, if you get hit with one of these, you're going down. Now you can keep a spare around for no extra cost, and laugh at people when they threaten you with one. Oh, and remember how hunters used to have the slimmest, tiniest chance of wrecking your day, because they sometimes had silver bullets (sorry, arrows)? Not anymore. I don't consider a hunter, or even a group of them, to be a serious challenge for even a single Garou under most circumstances... but I do like to break them out every so often when my players get cocky, just to remind them what it's like to be mortal. And I'm sorry, I don't buy the authors' claims that commonfolk in the Dark Medieval didn't realize that werewolves could be hurt by silver... that's a pretty longstanding legend, and in an age of superstition it should be more common, not less. Letting players buy their way out of that threat, even for 7 points, is just too much.

I know it probably seems like I'm harping on this, but it really sums up how I feel about Dark Ages as a whole. It's overpowered and under-human. Characters in the World of Darkness have always been a quantum leap above regular humans, but there's always been a chance that a human could get Imbued or stumble across a Relic or catch a vampire in his haven during the day or just get lucky, and that would be enough of a boost for him to almost be even with the supernatural for an instant, before he dropped down to being a lowly 1s-electron (I'm trying to bring physics references back into fashion. Let me know if that works out.). Dark Ages removes that possibility entirely, because not only are you a Vampire/Werewolf/Mage/All3, you've got pooled Backgrounds and dual-Disciplines and Relics that have been 'lost' or 'destroyed' by the time the modern game comes out, and for some reason all of the negatives of the Dark Medieval work against the common folk and give you an edge over them, but none of the things that should be helping them, like superstition and folklore, get taken into account...

OK, enough on my own private crusade. The rest of the chapter covers Rage, Gnosis, the Veil, and Renown, along with Pack Tactics and Werewolf-specific information like the stats for various forms. It's all semi-condensed from the revised mainbook and none of it offended me enough to warrant mention here.

Gifts and Rites get 48 pages here, and for the first time we actually see some different rules from revised Werewolf. See, some of the Gifts from the modern era haven't been invented yet... while it would be cool to see a Homid trying to make use of "Jam Technology" in a culture that's still working out the kinks in the inclined plane would be amusing, it's not exactly sporting. Actually, that raises a good point. The inclined plane is a machine, last time I checked... but it's also just a board on a rock. Does that make it Weaver-corrupted? And what happens when you "jam" that technology, anyway? Do you subvert the laws of gravity? Increase the friction of the board by about a thousand percent? Re-write the equations that govern translating angular momentum into linear momentum?

So there are a few new faces, and some rewrites. For example, the Homid Gift "Master of Fire" allows a character to heal fire damage as bashing, but in Dark Ages it says he treats it as bashing damage, which in my mind means he can still take twice as much of it before it kills him. Could just be funny wording. Also, the longstanding ruling that Vampires with high Humanity don't get picked up with Sense Wyrm is reversed here, which admittedly goes in favor of the "Wyrm is evil" morality I mentioned earlier, but this was actually one bit of ambiguity I liked having. After all, how hard is it to purge the world of vampires if you can unerringly detect them as a starting character? The old way, the only thing you knew for sure was, "this guy's not tainted enough that I see it right away. I should still keep watching him." It’s hard to imagine cities being dens of vampiric depravity when any metis can point them out without looking… maybe if the septs stopped killing them all off at birth the Garou wouldn’t be in the mess they’re in now.

Hrm, let's see... Lupus can smell Caerns now, that's odd, didn't help them find America at all... boy, this type's a lot bigger than in the revised book... and, what's this?

"Man's Skin". Turns a Black Fury into a man. That's supposed to be a good thing? The Furies are all about womyn's rights, grrrl power, whatever... what on earth would make them want to be a man? Yeah, the Dark Medieval was sexist. That's why the Furies are pissed. I can't really see any of them intentionally becoming a man to fix that, even temporarily... and I sure as hell don't think that that gift would come from an ancestor spirit. The way I see it, Pegasus would have your hide if you tried to sneak this one past him... but the Furies get it at first level. "Yeah, we're going to make our world sexist, just like the real world was, even though we're changing other stuff to make it more palatable... but look! It doesn't matter! You can play a boy if you want, too!" Uh, no.

The rest of the chapter's about what you'd expect. The Children of Gaia are even more hippy, and get screwed more on Gifts than before, but that's about it. Well, and the Fianna get confused for White Howlers a couple times (Woad was a Pictish thing, last time I checked... no reason for the 'na to have it).

I admit I went a little far in criticizing the lack of Umbral support earlier. It does get a bit more attention here, though not much. For those still keeping track, this is 20 pages split between the Umbra, Caerns, Septs, Spirits, and Charms. That's a lot to cover, which means a lot gets glossed over.

The Umbra, for instance, still focuses more on what the Umbra can be used for than on what it looks like and how it behaves. What little information is provided is often inconsistent; Umbral cities "seem stale, and everything looks gray and pale?" Uh, no. The whole "nature=Gaia=good" thing works for a bit, but it's not a universal truth. Gaia's will is seen as much in cities as in the wilderness, or you wouldn't have Glass Walkers (no, Warders) or Bone Gnawers. In fact, with two tribes staunchly pro-city and only one dead set against, it's hard to make the argument that all cities are irrevocably bad.

We get some detail on Umbral Realms (one of the least-interesting areas, to me; I've never seen a reason to go there when they're so much happening on earth) and Caern mechanics... like the rest of the book, this is basically the same information (if slightly less) than you'd get from the Werewolf mainbook, and nowhere near the detail you'd find in the Storyteller's or Player's Guides. I know, those are three books compared to this one... but they're already out there, waiting to be used. Why reprint that stuff in the first place, and then only do a half-assed job?

So Vampires are pro-humanity, Mages and Werewolves rarely meet unless it's to argue about who gets a Caern, the Black Spiral Dancers control lepers (?), and for some reason Werewolves have to fight evil pigs. OK. We also get the standard half-column breakdown for each of the other Fera (except the Mokole, for some reason). Moving on.

This is the generic White Wolf chapter on How to Tell a Story and what a Thematic Element is. I'm not sure anyone still reads these; I rarely do. The interesting bit about this particular chapter is that is that it introduces a pre-packaged Dark Ages setting, complete with NPC Garou, antagonists, and story ideas. I'm torn on this one. One the one hand, I've always appreciated that White Wolf books could incorporate story ideas and setting elements without spelling them out... just reading the books gave you a good idea of what it was to be Garou, and how a session should play out. On the other, most people are less familiar with 1230 Europe than they're likely to let on, so any help is probably appreciated. And of course, there are those who could use the push-start, so I could see it being useful. Personally, I would have preferred if the space were used elsewhere (anybody guess where?), but I'm willing to admit this is a Good Thing (tm) for most groups.

The book closes with sample Fetishes and Spirits, mostly Totem Spirits. The Fetishes seem, with the exception of the Klaives, to be less useful than most, but I was never that big on Fetishes to begin with. Nonstandard spirits get a bit more treatment than I was expecting, which I guess makes up for the fact that some Totems didn't seem to make the final cut.

It's difficult for me to rate this. Obviously, I was disappointed, but it's hard for me to say how much of that was my personal view on what would have made a better book, and how much would upset anyone. The rules are all pretty solid, though it will feel like taking a step backwards if you're an experienced W:tA player. The flavor text seems worse than average to me (there are only so many times an "unsuspecting human" can describe a character as "wolf-like" before it seems forced), and even contradicts itself a few times (the opening story tells of a Christian Garou making converts among the Sept, two pages later a sidebar dismisses the very idea of Christian Garou as nonsense); but then, I'm a snob about these things. I think the best test I can give the book is this; even if it wasn't what I was expecting, and takes a different view on the Garou cosmology than I do, it might have won me over. I could have decided that playing a less spiritual wolf in 1230 Europe was more fun than playing an Umbral-saavy Viking in 787 Alba, making a pilgrimage to Asia along the old Silk Road. I didn't. Books have brought me around to their way of thinking before, and this one didn't pull it off. So my final stance is this: if you're a Werewolf player looking for a Werewolf game, steer clear. There's nothing here that isn't better done in one of the three main Werewolf books. If you're a Dark Ages player looking to add Werewolf to your repertoire, I can't really fault you, but I can't promise you'll enjoy it, either. If you’re neither, this isn't the book for you. It is in no way intended as a main book; you need the Dark Ages: Vampire book to play. Since you'd need to get DA:V and DA:W if this is your first excursion, I'd recommend just getting W:tA and the Werewolf Storyteller's Guide, which has a section on playing a dark ages campaign. You'll be getting better books all around, not a lot of mucking with vampires to get in the way, and spending the same amount of money.

Oh, and the character sheet sucks.

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