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View Full Version : Werewolf The Apocalypse, any published campaign?



Blas_de_Lezo
2013-11-18, 12:25 PM
Ok, this may sound bizarre. But I want to run a campaign in the Werewolf the Apocalypse setting. But I'm old enough to not have time to write one full campaign.

So, can someone tell me if there is some published campaigns and which ones are the best?

Thank in advance!

SaurOps
2013-11-18, 02:41 PM
Unless you like total gonzo with more than a little bit of pushing your players to the side, avoid anything with Samuel Haight, unless it's The Skinner SAS.

Past Lives was a nice, late-Revised offering, but involves historical settings via spirit-memory journeys, so it might not be what you're looking for.

I forget how Under a Blood Red Moon was. Can't really say.

Rite of Passage is for the real young ones, where, as you might guess, you're a pack of Rank 0 pups undertaking a Rite of Passage.

There are a lot of ideas in Apocalypse, but they've not all been received well, and as you would expect, they're exclusively for playing the end.

Rage Across New York had some clashes with the Seventh Generation, a cult of societal predators that abducted, violated and sacrificed children for power.

The Trinity Hive from Caerns: Places of Power was basically made to be an adventure toolbox, and most of the other Caerns mentioned also generally have hooks, but it may be more time-consuming capitalizing on them.

Edit: Most of the older Rage Across $LOCATION books had canned adventures. They were mostly... there. Also, Rage Across the Amazon has more of Sam.

Black Jester
2013-11-18, 02:51 PM
As far as I know, the vast majority of W:tA adventures and the like were written prior to third edition and suffer from the usual problems of early WoD stuff, namely overused stereotypes and a general lack of quality.

I personally don't think that you need to have a pre-fabricated campaign for Werewolf, however. There are two essential Werewolf stories which work perfectly with a different pattern: You can either develop just the Caern your characters belong to (and you can do that perfectly fine as a collaboration project for all players) and than use the resulting conflicts, the location and so on as a natural source for plots, sprinkled with a few more or less archetypical quests here and there; this sort of "political" game works best when the players are involved and can be expected to complicate the situation from time to time for the whole sake of enjoying a more complex plot. You know, good players.
The other option, which is much simpler is just to eschew the whole caern, cast the PCs as a pack of nomads (preferably road warden bone gnawers, silent striders, Fianna 'rovers and other travelling lowlife folk), send them to various places (which only work as the scenery for one plot, before the pack hits the road again), and have a more episodic style of gaming, sometimes as simple as "pack arrives at small rural town with a secret. Pack identifies secret as monster of the week. Pack slays monster and leaves again. The end.". This works fairly good - you can use an action series style motive for a slightly style over substance game, you have nigh endless resources for various pastiches, and it is usually not that complicated. I ran a campaign like this for several years (based on the eighties that never were) and had a very fun campaign with it without ever spending more time on plotting the whole campaign than on plotting each individual session. Fun fact: you can easily include various plot hooks and cliff hangers for later without having them fully defined or actually knowing what will happen later on; this create uncertainty and uncertainty is actually a good remedy to the dreaded railroading.
Werewolf also makes it very simple - and fun - to use crass anachronistic plot devices completely honest in a modern context and make the game memorable and outstanding through the resulting ambivalence. You can implement so many typical fantasy quests (including a large number of fantasy RPG adventures) into this framework and than adjust it accordingly through plausible reactions in the real world which, unlike the quest at hand really doesn't work according to fairy tale logic. Something like the typical fetch quest "collect the seven shards of the mirror of truth, etc." becomes a very different experience - for once, it might actually become interesting again - if one of the macguffins is confiscated by the customs office and needs to won through defeating the dehumanising horrors of bureacracy...