Man's Worst Friend

[hardcoremoose]

Hey guys,

It's been a while since I posted anything of my own to this site, but since I'm trying to catch Josh Neff in posts, I figured I'd better generate some content.  :)

Actually, I buried this link in a previous thread, but no one wrote to me telling me how cool it was.  So I decided to plug it again.

Seriously, the game here is unplaytested and unfinished, but I think it's playable.  Nothing special in the way the mechanics work - I stole some stuff from Ron and James and Vincent (and probably from Jared, but it's impossible not to).  But I think there's some good stuff here...take a look if you got a few minutes.

 http://hardcoreroleplaying.homestead.com/lapdogs.html


Thanks,
Scott

[Clinton R. Nixon]

Scott,

As a big werewolf fan (see Urge), I think it's cool as hell. It's perfect. I really like the fact that as a player, your character never actually turns into a wolf during normal play, but by calling on the wolf, you have flashbacks of your nightly excursions. Really interesting way of handling it.

I do have the feeling, though, that Flashbacks will occur amazingly often. Maybe that's what you're looking for. You could lessen their rate of occurance (while still having each player have one each session) by having Bark and Bite dice a different color or something. Anyway, if one of the Bark or Bite dice comes up with the same number as the stat, then you have a flashback, instead of if any die comes up with the same number as the stat.

[hardcoremoose]

My race to catch Josh notwithstanding, I probably shouldn't respond to the very first comment about my game.  But I'm a fan of Urge, and I specifically was hoping to garner a reaction from you Clinton.  Thanks very much for the compliment.

BTW, I just looked at the page again, and boy does it have a lot of typos.  Bear with me guys, my web design skills suck.

Now to Clinton's suggestion...

To be honest, I hadn't really considered the frequency of the flashbacks.  I guess it would vary depending on how often you're rolling, how many dice the GM is awarding, and how high your Bite and Bark scores are.  I want the flashbacks to happen, but I don't want them to overwhelm the game session, which could definitely happen.  Playtesting would bear it out, but different colored dice for Bite and Bark seem like a pretty good idea.

Some more questions for all of you:

- One of my goals with this game was to see if player empowerment within a horror game would deliver a more personal and discomforting experience than a standard horror rpg.  Do you think this game delivers on that?  Or doesn't the idea that your PC is this horrible creature, with you having to describe his horrible activities and deal with them after the fact, seem particularly frightening?

- Do you think the rules for Grief do enough to deliver adversity to the PCs?

Thanks,
Scott

[Mike Holmes]

BTW, I just looked at the page again, and boy does it have a lot of typos.  Bear with me guys, my web design skills suck.

As well as typos, I don't think you mentioned the "lowest die" thing in the resolution section, and I didn't get that until you mentioned it under Grief. At first I thought they were added together. Maybe I just missed it.

Day Job! Did I send you a copy of Geek Season? That's one of the Cards for the Hunting Party.

- One of my goals with this game was to see if player empowerment within a horror game would deliver a more personal and discomforting experience than a standard horror rpg.  Do you think this game delivers on that?  Or doesn't the idea that your PC is this horrible creature, with you having to describe his horrible activities and deal with them after the fact, seem particularly frightening?

Did you see my rules for "The Institute" on the Thousand Setting Project at www.mysticages.com/thousand/ ? I was thinking exactly the same thing. The players make up their own obnoxious visons. At a guess I'd think that both systems will be effective. Why not? Hmmm. Maybe some playtesting.

- Do you think the rules for Grief do enough to deliver adversity to the PCs?

Combined with the flashbacks, I think that this is a great idea. I love the tradeoff between losing bark and bite or accumulating Grief. Propells the game in two directions at once. Very cool. And, yes, I think that the players will have plenty of Grief to make their lives miserable.

Inspirations? Wolf? American Werewolf in London? Making werewolves bad instead of how Werewolf does it?  :-)

Mike

[hardcoremoose]

Hey Mike,

Yeah, the thing with the lowest die rolls should probably be iterated before being re-iterated, eh?  

You didn't send me a copy of Geek Season, but I'd love to see it dammit.  Or does Jared own the exclusive rights now?  I want to see it!

I haven't looked at The Insitute yet, but maybe I should.  What I did with Man's Worst Friend was something I've wanted to do for a long time; since discovering author and director's stance sometime last year, it occurred to me that such things would be perfect for a horror game.  Why let the GM flounder about trying to think of some way to scare the players and consistently miss the mark when you can just ask them "what scares you?"  I know Lumpley's been barking up this tree too, with a game called Quiet (which he has now put on hiatus, much to my chagrin).  We've had some fun discussions about this stuff, and I think it'll work.

Inspiration?  Definitely Wolf and American Werewolf.  Also, a new flick called Ginger Snaps (Clinton, you need to see this if you haven't).  A few books - the Nightwalker, a couple of others.  Games?  I think it was Paul I told about my desire to do something different with werewolves, since I pretty much abhor Werewolf (despite having tried my best to get it to work).  It was Kill Puppies for Satan that got me moving.

Take care,
Scott

[Joe Murphy (Broin)]

Another potentially inspirational story is 'The Curse', a Swamp Thing story written by Alan Moore. It uses lycanthropy as a metaphor for menstruation. Obviously, being Alan Moore, there's more to it than that. Superb.

You could also possibly expand on the source material slightly... ever see http://us.imdb.com/Details?0083336">Wolfen with Albert Finney? It's been a while since I've seen it. I vaguely remember that the story was about various Native American were-things. Crows and wolves. As the NAs had moved to the cities, to work on construction, so they'd brought a little bit of wildness with them. The city was where they hunted. Quite a spooky movie with an urban 70s feel to it.

One question is, why wolves? While I wouldnt want to go the White Wolf route and have were-sharks and bugs and things, I can see potential for slightly different weres that represent slightly different animalistic themes. Cats, for a start. Vicious killers, but elegant with it.

Joe.

[Ron Edwards]

Hey,

Let's not forget The Howling (just the first one, with a screenplay by John Sayles that thankfully abandoned the novel it was to be based on), a fine and unpretentious movie that broke a lot of new ground. I like the solid kick in the nuts it gives to "find yourself" alternative lifestyles, considering that I grew up in and around such things.

Best,
Ron

[Mike Holmes]

One question is, why wolves? While I wouldnt want to go the White Wolf route and have were-sharks and bugs and things, I can see potential for slightly different weres that represent slightly different animalistic themes. Cats, for a start. Vicious killers, but elegant with it.

Why not wolves? More importantly, why clutter the game with other sorts of lycanthropes? What does it really add? It certainly would require reworking the rules (can't really have a Bark stat for a cat; Hiss, maybe?). Remember that the player does not play out his life as a lycanthrope with the exception of flashbacks. I'd imagine that those descriptions would be first person, as in, "I see myself tearing the heads off an innocent couple in the park." No reference to what sort of creature the character has become.

In fact, you could probably just use "Beast" as what the player transforms into, ignoring species entirely. The point is the loss of control as the payment for power. Hence the likening it with the Sorcerer supplement Urge.

Mike

[Mike Holmes]

Moose,

You seem to imply that something happens at full moons (which makes sense, of course), but not what exacty. Do characters refresh their Bark and Bite pools to their original levels, or just get some back? What? And what effect does the lunar cycle have on control, frequency of changes, etc?

Mike

[Clinton R. Nixon]

In fact, you could probably just use "Beast" as what the player transforms into, ignoring species entirely. The point is the loss of control as the payment for power. Hence the likening it with the Sorcerer supplement Urge.

I think you could use MWF with the idea of "Beast" really well - it's much more elegant than having all sorts of lycanthrope stats all over the place. (It's not a bad idea, either - have the beast reflect a primal aspect of the personality of the character. A svelte, manipulative woman might turn into a cat, for example.)

Before I even sent the first version of the text of Urge to Ron, I had an earlier version with crazy complex rules for determining your type of animal spirit - you might be a snake, or a wolf, or a monkey, or whatever else. It was way too much. I think the undefined Beast is a much better idea.

[Mike Holmes]

I forgot to mention, the other argument for having it be the wolf (as ooposed to other things) is simply that actual wolves howl and bark at the full moon. Only canines do that, hence the association with Lunacy, and the lunar cycle.

A little history on the subject. A lot of Myths come from fact. Vampires and Werewolves are partially a product of the phenomenon of Iron Deficiency Porphyria (Sp?). This occurs when a person has a lack of iron in their diet, and odd symptoms occur. In most cases the person suffering gets pale (Iron being carried by hemoglobin in blood, and what makes it red as an oxide; yes, rust), and their gums recede leaving their teeth looking longer (and more fanglike) than normal. The person will crave iron rich substances like red meat, specifically for the blood. In bad cases someone with this problem will go insane. As is suspected in the famous case of King George III of England for instance. So, lets see, insane blood craved pale fanged people, hmmm...

Then there's the Lunar cycle. Women's periods cause them to lose blood, and subsequently iron. So women suffering from such a deficiency would find that symptoms got worse in a cycle that was similar to that of the moon (hence the increased importance of iron supplements for women).

Now factor in lunacy. Lunacy may be a real phenomenon, despite claims to the opposite. Real scientific work shows what it's probably about. It is rarer these days (due to electricity), but still has a factor. Essentially, in a society that does not have the technology to consistently make it light after dark (Medieval society could build fires, but for the most part you went to bed soon after the sun went down) people are used to sleeping in the dark. When the moon is out and very full, the contrast is so high with a normal night that many peole cannot sleep. Howling wolves might not help either. And what does sleep deprivation do after a few nights? Especially if you were already under the effect of an iron deficiency? Yikes.

As I said, in modern society we get used to sleeping with the lights on, so Lunacy happens less often. But police are aware that full moons tend to have more incidents statistically, so it hasn't gone away entirely.

Mike

[hardcoremoose]

Hey guys,

Thanks for the discussion.

Why werewolves?  Really, it's all about the imagery for me.  I love werewolves - they're my all time favorite horror movie monster.  They look cool, no matter how you picture them, and I just flat out like them.  Plus, Mike sussed out some of my motivation without really meaning too - there's a tremendous amount of mythology (historical, scientific, and cinematic) that just has been tapped into.  There's thousands of stories about werewolves hailing from as far back as the dark ages, and I just wanted to create a game that let you tell those kind of stories.

In my opinion, the more generic term "Beast" really is just another name for werewolves. Werewolves stories are all about the proverbial Beast Within (another book and movie with similar themes goes by that title even).  That's what WW missed with the Werewolf game, and what most modern film misses as well - werewolves are vicious SOBs, just these really nasty, primal things.  The Howling got that right, and I wanted to nail that with MWF as well.

Anyway, I think Urge is the definitive game about the Beast.  I specifically set out to create something different than Werewolf and different than Urge (not that I would ever compare the two; Werewolf is way out Urge's league).  Why reinvent the wheel, right?

As far as other sources of inspiration...

The Curse is awesome.  I love the old Swamp Thing stuff, and the American Gothic arc was cool as hell (one of John Constantine's first appearances ever was in that storyline).  Ginger Snaps has exactly the same set-up; it's all about this teenage girl who's experiencing her first period, and the lycanthropy is a metaphor for how alien and strange she feels.  To further push that topic, I wrote a story in college called A Shepherd's Tale, which was a combination of The Curse and The Company of Wolves.  I still have it around, and if anyone wants to read something from when I actually wrote fiction, I might be convinced to send it their way.

Of course, The Howling is one of my all time favorite movies.  It's funny how you compare that film to American Werewolf in London and it seems less dated.  Still, American Werewolf is probably my favorite of the two.

Man, I can talk about this stuff all day.  Oliver Reed in Curse of the Werewolf?  Awesome.  Wolfen?  Had some good stuff in it.  Yada yada yada.

Thanks for letting me ramble.

- Moose

[hardcoremoose]

Now to address Mike's question about what happens at the full moon.

Structurally (and this is not evident in the rules because I haven't written it yet), the game is supposed to take place in between full moons.  In MWF the myths about werewolves are true - the full moon is when all the nasty stuff happens.  Actual game play occurs between those times, with each session (supposedly) dedicated to one lunar cycle.  Your Bark and Bite scores are good for that amount of time, and get re-rolled once a new full moon is experienced.

I'm not sure what happens to accumulated Grief when Bark and Bite are re-rolled; it doesn't really make sense to reset it at zero, since it represents conflict on the story level moreso than any real in-game disadvantage for the character.  I suppose it continues to accumulate, making it more and more difficult for characters to ignore their blatant inhumanity, until eventually they decide to resolve it.  Any thoughts on that?

- Moose

[James V. West]

Sorry I haven't read the game before, Moose. It looks killer (no pun intended).

From what you've told me about it in the past, I think it would be one helluva cool game to play. Narrating your own nastiness is always a fine way to really get in there and own it.

I haven't swallowed the whole game yet, but so far so good.

Btw, my favorite werewolf movie was always "Company of Wolves". I watched it when I was 15 and it scared me/made me go "huh?". So I like it. Of course, it has that fairy-taleishness to it that I love so its no big surprise. Remember the severed head in the bucket of milk? Or the dinner party of ravenous effite werewolves?

[Joe Murphy (Broin)]

Nah, you're right, mr moose, wolves are the way to go.

Urge sounds gorgeous, and I'll buy that and the other mini-supplements just as soon as I get a job. Unemployment is lovely for all the time it gives me, but not so much for the moolah.

But, for MWF, wolves have much more thematic weight behind them. To use the movie examples... werewolves are fairytale monsters in 'Company of Wolves', a metaphor for virility in 'Wolf' and so on. Werecats just get http://us.imdb.com/Details?0105428">'Sleepwalkers', and that really wasn't very good.

And for another fun example of a werewolf story, check out another Alan Moore tale, 'Bayer Lupo, The First Werewolf in Outer Space', collected with other 'Future Shock' short stories from the 2000AD comic in the wonderful 'Thrilling Tales' tp.

Joe.