Full disclosure: I have never played Forsaken though I have been in mixed games with Uratha players. I played Apocalypse over a decade ago; I have read the basics on Forsaken and very much approve. I can give sort of an outsiders opinion here.

I’ve really enjoyed reading through the Forsaken Chronicler’s Guide volumes and I hope White Wolf continues the trend of not only serializing content but being daring enough to really demolish one of their core game lines and encourage the empowered players to play their games in new bizarre ways. The Guides offer optional kits where the concepts involved with Forsaken are tinkered with, deconstructed or right out ripped asunder as in this volume. Each kit runs about a half dozen or so pages so clever storyteller shouldn’t feel intimidated to take their own ideas and make their own kits based on player and storyteller tastes and inspirations.

Volume 4 serves up the strongest salvo first with Chuck Wendig’s The Wild Children. Friends: can you see yourself sitting down at a gaming table knowing nothing of Werewolf: the Forsaken but then your buddy educates by yammering about Pangaea and Father Wolf being murdered and this somehow causing problems and blah, blah. WHATEVER! I thought this was a game with WEREWOLF in the title. When can my character crush some dude’s windpipe like a heart of celery and then work on getting LAID? Then this is the kit for you, chummer.

Take Forsaken and jettison most of the bulk. Bye backstory. Who needs tribes when you have the pack? The Wild Children aren’t even werewolves and don’t change forms, but they have Primal Urge and use it to pop claws and fangs like old-school Masquerade vampires. Unlike vampires their intense hunger comes from a deep wolfish spiritual ferocity. My favorite standout of Volume 1: To Isolate was The Moon’s Curse which featured a werewolf closer to the European origin myths. Here the inspiration is closer to the violent humans who inspired the werewolf myth; Gothic-punk as in the barbarian Goths. The Wild Child has Renown, a few Gifts, Primal Urge and Essence but their Auspices are aligned with their Vice. This means your powerstat is powered by your sins; you’re a complete bastard driven by your darkest urges. One of the illustrations in this kit features a bodacious Frank Frazetta-inspired female having sex with a man who is lies on a bed of corpses. If you think this is AWESOME you need to buy this product. The saving grace of this kit is suggestions on how to run a game like this that truly takes the motto “a game of savage horror” literally and transcend it into pathos rather than an elaborate rape and violence fantasy. Wild Children still have Harmony after all and must police their bestial nature. I personally wouldn’t want to run more than a few sessions since I don’t require something to DIE in the PIT to have a good time; but those few I would play would be EPIC.

All Good Gifts is next, an alternate look at Gifts by Matthew McFarland. As short as it is this is the best constructed of the kits. The ranking system is tossed out and means Uratha attain gifts is altered; they have to be freely given so each Gift is a roleplaying opportunity. While de-ranked they are reclassified under Renown categories so the various Tribes can choose based on their natures. After some storytelling advice it is all capped off by a two-page SAS scene taken from the plot of the opening fiction blurb, which was lovely. I like it. Make your players work for their stats.

The Emergent Beast by Stew Wilson is the most drastic. Most of the rules in the World of Darkness Rulebook and Werewolf: the Forsaken are tossed aside and replaced with a system based on Renown. It might require a lot of work to translate game information into this system, meaning homework as it is just the concept provided with a few examples. But the reward is that it is a simple system that actually Rewards your characters for Acting Like Uratha since the best way to become more powerful is by gaining more Renown. It is a down and dirty system. Sound like fun?

Finally, The Family (also by Wilson) removes the Shadow and all that goes with it, replacing its importance by emphasizing the pack dynamic. There still are tribes but without the Hisil and ol’ Father Wolf they boil down to their archetypal roles. Gaining and earning of trust is extremely important because banishment from your pack would be like being cut off from the Shadow in a straight Forsaken game.

Yeah I’ll go and recommend this volume for the price per possible hours of entertainment and variety of ideas is outstanding. Only thing that bummed me was a lack of supporting materials; a fan-made Emergent Beast character sheet would be really handy for instance but I can see how page count and deadlines precluded it.