Tag Archives: Werewolf: The Apocalypse

Can you hear me now?

The one Dragon*Con I attended was 1997. I didn’t intend to LARP there, but some of the Louisville Gaming Mafia was tight with the Liquid Dreams storyteller crew, so I sorta got recruited. “We need more werewolf players,” someone said, and jammed a character packet into my hands before running off to attend to a mass combat or some shit.

I opened the packet and looked at the sheet. Huh. Rank 5 Silent Strider Theurge? I can work with this.

Because werewolf players were so very few and far between, I wound up tying in with Little Sister and her attendant vampires, who collectively formed a long-standing and ridiculously-overpowered Sabbat pack known as the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. The fact that they numbered more than four was irrelevant, as they kept adding apocalypses (my favorite was Grievous Bodily Harm). The fact that I, as a werewolf, should not have been anywhere near these walking atrocities was less than relevant – as a player, I had a choice between hanging out with friends and seeing plot, or being lonely and seeing no plot. Seemed like the appropriate decision at the time.

Because Little Sister was known as a player and her character was equally known as Someone With Whom Not To Be Fucked, no one questioned her or me when she brought me along to a summit of the Sabbat leadership. No one even checked to ensure I was a vampire. I made a couple of mental notes about security lapses.

Then the meet started. It swiftly became clear that the elder vampires had their collective cravats in a knot about an ancient mummy who had arisen and was causing no shortage of pre-apocalyptic problems for them. Huh. Mummy? Something in my character packet, which had been provided without explanation, suddenly became much more relevant.

In the back of the room, I raised a hand. “I know his True Name.”

I am not usually the loud type of player. No one heard me.

Little Sister looked at me sideways. “You what?”

I cleared my throat. “I know his True Name.”

No one paid attention.

Okay, fuckit. I raised my arms above my hand, wrists crooked, in the Mind’s Eye Theatre hand signal for transforming into a war-form. In game, this meant I was shapeshifting into the werewolf Crinos form.

Suddenly, in a room full of elder vampires, this nine-foot-tall avatar of Anubis in full mystic muscular mass murder mode stood up and managed to growl out, “I SAID… I KNOW HIS TRUE NAME.”

Nadia Vasylyk

Game: Werewolf: The Apocalypse (first edition – White Wolf, 1991)

My Experience: Werewolf was on the market by the time I started playing Vampire. I grabbed it as soon as I became aware of it, in the fall of 1993 when I was a freshman at UK. I briefly tried to run it for the guys in my dorm, but I was the only gamer on my floor, so that kinda fell flat. I’ve been in a couple of short-lived campaigns over the years, but I never connected with it as well as I did with VtM. I did do a bit of freelancing for one book during Ethan Skemp’s tenure as line developer.

Nadia Vasylyk, Dangerous Antiquarian

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Before They Let Me Teach Again

I wrote this a couple of years ago to get it out of my head. Occasionally, I consider submitting it to my current employer’s University Honors Program to see if they’ll let me teach it in place of my occasional disaster preparedness seminar. Lightly redacted to remove contact info and other potentially-incriminating items.

Honors Seminar Proposal: Your Parents’ Dark Futures

Primary Instructor

Clayton Oliver, M.S., CEM – Emergency Manager

Will there be any additional instructors for this seminar?

Additional instructors are not anticipated.

Has this seminar been presented before?

No. This proposal is for a pilot delivery.

Do you think this seminary should qualify for International Perspectives or US Diversity Credit?

No.

Please select how you would like to offer the seminar.

Two credits. Two class hours per week. Full semester.

An enrollment cap of 20 is recommended for this pilot delivery.

Please enter your preferred teaching days/times/location for the seminar.

A Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday evening slot is preferred. A weekly two-hour block is necessary due to the extended collaborative/narrative nature of some class activities. My recommended time is 6pm-8pm.

Preferred location is Jischke Honors Building 1151+1155 for student convenience and the ability to “pod” the room’s seating for breakout groups.

Please describe any additional meetings that may occur outside of normal course hours if applicable.

No scheduled meetings are planned at this time. However, students will be expected to convene for group activities outside class time. Students will schedule these group meetings on their own.

Please write a brief description of the seminar that is attractive to students and will be shared on our website.

In the 1980s, the emerging entertainment medium of roleplaying games (RPGs) began to reflect the political and socioeconomic concerns of the day. In this seminar, we’ll analyze four RPGs of that era, each of which postulates a different dystopian near future: Twilight: 2000 (1984, post-World War III survival), Cyberpunk: 2020 (1990, hypercapitalist science fiction), Vampire: The Masquerade (1991, urban decay and power imbalances), and Werewolf: The Apocalypse (1992, political corruption and ecological collapse). Through reading, class discussion, collaborative storytelling, supplemental research, and reaction papers, we’ll examine the fears, assumptions, cultural stereotypes, literary archetypes, and social trends that produced these works and ask ourselves if they remain relevant today. We’ll also analyze the storytelling craft of roleplaying as a means of exploring and expressing identity – our own and that of others.

For the University Honors Committee, please briefly outline the seminar’s readings, topics, assignments, and expectations. Seminars are graded Satisfactory/Fail; what must a student do to pass your seminar?

During this seminar, the class will be divided into four groups of five students, each of which will examine one of the four selected works. A successful student will be able to:

  • Articulate an understanding of the cultural factors that produced the selected work;
  • Discuss the literary archetypes inherent to the work that shape the narratives which players can use the work to construct;
  • Discuss the identities and assumptions inherent in the work’s archetypes and how they are relevant or outmoded in today’s society;
  • Contextualize the work’s postulated dystopian future within the time it was authored and describe how subsequent historical events support or undermine its fictional setting;
  • Articulate the value of roleplaying for self-examination, problem-solving, and empathy.
  • Contrast the work’s original context to the modern era and argue whether or not the work could be reproduced in today’s environment.

Readings

Each student will be assigned one of the four selected works as a primary reading. These are available commercially in PDF format for between $10 and $20 each.

Readings will be synchronized across the semester to examine:

  • Setting – what is the world described in the game? How does it relate to the societal trends and fears of the era in which it was written? How accurate were its predictions?
  • Player characters – what are the implied and explicitly-stated roles of players and their in-game personas? How do these roles and the game’s provided character archetypes facilitate the exploration of identity or the concerns the game raises?
  • Gamemasters – what are the implied and explicitly-stated roles of gamemaster/referees/storytellers? Is their relationship with the players one of collaboration, antagonism, or something in between?
  • Stories – what sorts of stories is the game intended to facilitate?
  • Mechanics – how does the game model its world? What mechanisms does it provide for resolving uncertainty or conflict? Do the rules facilitate the stated storytelling goals?

Actual Play

Most roleplaying games are designed as group experiences, so reading alone will not enable students to examine the full experience. Over the course of the semester, each group will be expected to meet for a minimum of five game sessions, play the game, submit short written response/reflection papers, and be prepared to discuss their experiences in class. I will attempt to arrange groups to ensure that each one contains one experienced gamemaster who is comfortable running the assigned game, with the other four group members as players.

The standard attendance policy for Honors Seminars is that only two absences are allowed unless there is a special circumstance. If you prefer a different attendance policy, please explain.

This attendance policy should work.

Please include a summary of your background to include with the seminar description on our website.

Clayton Oliver is the university’s Emergency Manager. He is a recovering technical writer, having spent twelve years writing documentation no one read for software no one installed. In 2012, he decided to pursue a more frustrating career and entered the emergency management field. Since then, his disaster response experience has included power outages, severe winter weather, derechos, home football games, hazardous materials spills, overly-enthusiastic student celebrations, that one time someone accidentally drilled into a natural gas pocket, and a pandemic that no one wants to hear about any more. He holds a B.A. in English, an M.S. in Emergency Management, and the Certified Emergency Manager credential from the International Association of Emergency Managers. He maintains proficiency in his former craft through performing freelance design work in the roleplaying game industry, posting on the university’s subreddit as [redacted], and writing about himself in the third person.