The White Wolf novel I'm (sort of) working on · 4:30am Jul 19th, 2014
A couple of years ago, I found out White Wolf was accepting unsolicited book proposals. I've had a White Wolf novel churning in my head almost since White Wolf was popular, and I think I have to write the damn thing just to get it out of my head. It might be too dark for them, though.
It's set in northern Pennsylvania or southern New York, that big empty space between the East Coast and the Midwest. Empty of humans, that is. For the Garou, it’s a kind of cosmopolitan hub, a crossroads where members of all tribes rub shoulders, and control the small towns nearby well enough to cover up the recurrent fallout from that rubbing. As the biggest wild place in the eastern US, its central sept and caern has a high status among the Garou; its elders are seen as being more pure, having a more direct line to Gaia.
One might expect that agents of the Wyrm would have a low profile in the Alleganies, but they’re quite active despite their small numbers, and the region has continual low-grade conflict. The Garou elders could crush the Wyrm’s forces in the region at any time, if they really wanted to. But then they would merely be administrators of a large forest, with minimal, civilian powers, not dictatorial warlords wreathed in glory and holding the power of life and death over their inferiors. So they have an informal, mutually-beneficial detente with their enemies. They fight periodic battles planned more for their dramatic than strategic potential, in which the highest-ranking warriors on each side are miraculously never seriously hurt.
Slow Thinker, our main character, is a Lupus Silent Strider philodox, with years and skills well beyond his rank of Cliath. Always relied on in battle, yet always fails his Fostern challenges. He was so impressed by the power of humans, and the story they told him that it came from their use of human language, controlled by logic, that he believed them. By the time he realized that it was just a new kind of dominance game, it was too late. In a sept where power went to those who were best able to twist words and pervert logic, his inability to see what he was supposed to see rather than what was in front of his eyes led to him becoming a pariah, an omega, scorned as the half-moon fool.
Language is a theme. This connects with my posts on modernist literary theory, which is odd, since I didn’t know anything about modernism when I developed the story. The Red Talons scorn language, and are powerless; the others treat them as overgrown children with sharp teeth. The sept elders see language, reason, and beliefs as tools of power. And the agents of the Wyrm see them as so hopelessly corrupted that they must be broken free from entirely. (The Black Spiral Dancers are more sympathetic characters than the members of Slow’s sept.)
Slow Thinker is my inverted Don Quixote, the one sane person who sees windmills instead of monsters, but think that he, the stupid lupus, must be the crazy one. As Slow is my Don Quixote, he has his inverted Sancho Panza, a sometimes-helpful mage barely tolerated by the sept. Let’s call him Alfred. Where Sancho Panzo was the voice of reason and pragmatism to Don Quixote, Alfred is the voice of crazy pragmatism, the companion who admires Slow’s belief in truth and virtue but thinks the world can't accommodate that. Where Sancho took Don Quixote seriously, Alfred often pokes fun at Slow, making bitter jokes that he thinks are too subtle for the lupus to catch.
The viewpoint character--let’s call him Keith--is a homid cub brought into the sept, and dumped into Slow’s lap because raising cubs is a shit job that no one above him wants to be bothered with. Slow’s strongest opinion about humans is that there are too many of them, and his opinion of homids is that they are humans. (Slow is not the viewpoint character because one of the on-going tropes is that he always says what he means, but this is often so different from what is expected that everyone, including the reader, misunderstands and dismisses it as stupidity. This is reflected in the dual meaning of his name; everyone else sees only the connotation of stupidity, while its true meaning is that he takes time to think instead of rushing to judgement.)
After Keith survives Slow’s initial instruction, Slow grows attached enough to the cub that he decides to set him on the path to success in the sept. Slow must teach Keith how to survive the sept, because he is more likely to die at the claws of its hypocritical zealots that those of the Black Spiral Dancers. But he must also teach Keith to become a hypocrite himself, to fit in, to see monsters instead of windmills, and not to be anything like Slow.
The fourth key player is Slow’s own brother, Forrester, who is obsessed with proving himself to Slow, which means, to him, defeating him. He has adopted human ways completely and successfully, and invented a homid past for himself; his lupus heritage is his darkest secret. His obsession has led him to the Alleghenies, where he intends to prove to Slow that he succeeded where Slow has failed, in understanding the human conception of power and then mastering it. (The story inverts the werewolf mythos; the wolf stands roughly for what the human side traditionally stands for, and the human side is the powerful, unstable side.)
That means upsetting the comfortable local political arrangements. Also, destroying the world. Slow would have to be impressed by that. And Forrester never really liked it anyway.
Slow can’t convince the Sept of the danger of Forrester’s plans. So he sets off into the city that mystifies and frightens him, with one snarky weakling mage and one naive cub, to save the world. His second-biggest problem is that political in-fighting in his own Sept keeps interfering with his mission. His biggest problem is that he isn’t sure the world should be saved.
One of the reasons why I've avoided playing Werewolf is that in studying their setting, I came to the conclusion that the Black Spiral Dancers were correct, sane, and acting rationally. This created an instant uncrossable gulf between my viewpoint and the viewpoint that any characters I played would be expected to have.
The Wyrm really did go insane because of the Weaver, after all. Freeing it would only probably destroy the world. Whether it destroyed the world or not, it wouldn't destroy reality, and the World 2.0 to follow would have a chance at avoiding the insanity endemic to the World of Darkness. Not a great chance, but it's a crapsack setting. Any chance is better than no chance.
2298781 You could have ran a Werewolf / Call of Cthulhu crossover, slowly driving your characters mad as they realized everything they believed was wrong!
In my head-canon, that's what happened, and we are the result.
Ah White Wolf. That takes me back...
Been sometime since I played Vampire the Masquerade. And after a while, White Wolf just got too damn bleak.
I could rock Malkavians back then though.
Not that posting here helps much, but I'd buy it.
2298859 Too... bleak?
I don't think I understand.
2298863 It does help!
2298859
How can White Wolf get too bleak?
2298859
It isn't as bad as the 40k universe, which gave us the Grim Darkness of the future, and thus, GrimDark.
2298932
In the grimdark future of the grimdark grimdark, there is only grimdark.
2298896
It is, admittedly somewhat impressive that a universe whose selling point is it's darkness, that it would get to be too much.
2298878
How to explain...how much of the concept of happiness and/or hope do you understand?
2299040 Happiness and hope are what you might catch when you don't have enough bleakness.
2299045
Now here is the tricky part.
Some folks consider them good things. Insanity I know, but there you have it.
I've taken the train through that area and it really is beautiful country. Sounds like a good story! I never had a chance to play Werewolf during its cultural prime, which only seems like a shame until I remember that it's a grim world scrabbling at the edge of self-annihilation. Then I don't regret it too much.
By the by, are there multiple regional spellings? Because I've always seen "Alleghenies," with an "h."
Oh, wow, that really sounds interesting. I don't follow it nearly well enough because I know, basically, nothing about Werewolf. I have working knowledge of Vampire, a smattering of Mage, and that's about it. I never touched the other WoD games, new or old. Couldn't get the players for 'em.
But still, I'm intrigued. And your unutterable bleakness is quite at home in WoD.
2298932
Well, yeah, but in 40k it rises to such amazing levels it always struck me as risible. It's too dark to take seriously.
2299045
And this, ladies and gentlemen, is what I deal with when pre-reading. It's a miracle I've managed to retain my sanitCELESTIA HELP ME THE WALL IS MADE OF RAW FLESH OH HELP ME HELP Mno, wait, that's just a shadow.
There will be a scene in a run-down Tiki bar, right? With Piña Coladas?
(Because Lee Ho Fook's would be just too obvious)
2298932 it also gave rainbow bob a dating crossover story, for what it's worth.
Oh my god it's 1999 all over again and everything is amazing.
I hope you write this, because I would read the hell out of it. :D I actually remember all the lingo despite not having touched WoD in over a decade!
2299229 I was puzzled by that. You're right; I checked the spelling of Allegany state park, but the Allegheny mountains are different.
2299246
You know, I never thought of treating WH40k it that way. Playing it for laughs because it's just too much...
2299511
Well it is, isn't it? It's just so painfully earnest and bombastic, you can't help but want to make fun of it. It writes itself.
"Um, excuse me, mister?"
"I AM KHARN THE BETRAYER!"
"Are you? That's what your mother calls you, is it?"
"BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOOD SK—"
"Yes, yes, look, I'm just looking for a way out of this sodding universe where everyone just shouts all the time so if you could just—please stop doing that."
"WHY WONT YOU DIE?!?"
"Never got the knack for it. Look, if you don't want to help me I'll just ask these chaps over here. Hello, yes you with the fetching golden skulls, look—"
"HALT HERETIC SCUM! DIE IN THE NAME OF THE EMPEROR!"
"...of course. *sigh*"
2299511
This is a constant criticism leveled at Games Workshop- 40k started as a pastiche of 80 satirical dystopias- think Möbius and Judge Dredd and then gradually became angsty after the fact.
Then it became just space marines.
If/when you do publish it, please tell us, for I for one would buy it
I've never heard of White Wolf before now, and so I pretty much don't understand anything anyone is saying here haha xD You guys and your crazy...whatever-they-are games.
For what it's worth though...what are you waiting for BH? Go write it! It won't do it itself. While most of the jargon went over my head, the elements I did understand certainly looked like they had the markings of a good story. And I mean that.
So get to it!
2299511
I have maintained for a long time that people who take 40k dead serious are missing the point.
I think the disconnect is actually an aspect of the cultural differences between Britain and the US. Games Workshop is a British company, and 40k is written (or was originally) in this essentially deadpan absurdist style where things get played straight as straight can be, and then we follow that straight line far into the land of the ridiculous. The US doesn't seem to produce this kind of comedy natively; we import it from Britain. Monty Python, Fry & Laurie, Blackadder, Douglas Adams, Tom Holt, Terry Pratchett (particularly in his earlier incarnations), on and on.
One of the recurring American stereotypes I have run into when speaking with Brits, Aussies, Kiwis, and various European continentals, is that the Americans they've run into are so earnest--they take everything seriously unless very explicitly (or, it seems to the non-American to be overly explicit) shown that that something is a joke. In a more general sense, they imply that American Comedy Signposts are these big flashing neon things that take pains to make sure they cannot be missed. So, Americans who haven't had an education in this style of humour see 40k, and they don't see any of the Comedy Signposts they're used to. They thus see it as something to be taken seriously--and since they can see that other people are enjoying it, it must be okay to do so.
Now, I've never been a 40k player--I've only ever had friends who play, so I'm operating firmly in the realm of outsider pontificating from his overstuffed armchair. However, it seems like the turn into taking itself seriously is something that's been happening as the setting becomes more popular in the US, and as folks from the US have more influence and input on the design and writing. So that's interesting, I suppose.
2299744
Given the popularity of the Colbert Report, The Daily Show, ect. which use exactly this sort of humor, not to mention things like Borat, I think it is pretty clear that it is not, in fact, the case. In fact, according to Wikipedia, the Americans invented the word deadpan.
Of course, it may just be without the obvious comedy signposts, the foreigners just kind of assume that the Americans are being serious. We have lots of hilarious jokes that they just don't get, like our alliance with the United Kingdom and the NSA.
There are some references in 40k that Americans are unlikely to get (we're unfamiliar with soccer hooliganism, for instance) but on the whole I do think Americans are very much aware of this sort of thing.
Heck, I'm pretty sure we came up with the sniper joke.
I think the main problem is that there is a major trend going on right, which has been going on since, oh, the 1980s, of making everything more dark and gritty and "realistic", which has infected all sorts of entertainment, including Warhammer 40,000.
Some of it is a farce - some of the stuff in 40k has to be a joke simply because it is impossible to take it seriously - but I think a lot of it is written in seriousness. Some of it is probably just them trying to top themselves too, I think, like by making everyone more and more awful over time.
2299859
The Colbert Report and the Daily Show are much, much more thoroughly signposted. As much as I love Colbert, his delivery is pretty heavy-handed in pointing out that it is satire through placement of pauses, rhythm and emphasis. The punchlines are very carefully set off from the rest of the monologues, and his tone of voice and delivery is a broadly cartooned version of the conservative pundits he's lampooning. Compare that with this Australian classic about the front falling off. Tone of voice and delivery are relatively faithful imitations of an interviewer and a politician. Punchlines just go by without any off-set. No laugh breaks. The only sign post that this is a piece of comedy is that what the senator is saying is absurd, and it is made to feel more absurd by the normalcy of every other part of it.
My 'case study' that made me start looking at this as a cultural difference is a community on the internet I joined about
tentwelve (good lord) years ago. There was a subgroup where part of how we entertained ourselves was a sort of self-parody--taking ourselves too seriously to be taken seriously, exaggerating space opera tropes, having people blown out the airlock for doing the coffee wrong, claiming random information was top secret, and pretending to be up to something and never actually being up to anything. Not coincidentally, we had a lot of fans of Paranoia in the group.We had a lot of fun with it, and most people had fun with us, but there was always a small segment that really, really disliked us. The thing I realized, a few years further down the line, is that without fail, every single Brit, Aussie, or Kiwi who joined the community eventually ended up in our subgroup, even if they weren't particularly interested in science fiction. The Americans (such as myself) in the subgroup also all had quite a bit of familiarity with British comedy staples (interestingly, almost all of the Americans got our start on Monty Python and the Holy Grail. I think there's something about the execution of that film that makes it work particularly well as a bridge). Meanwhile, every person, without exceptions, who was really rubbed the wrong way by our sense of humor was American.
There is a real difference between the 'default' senses of humor on either side of the Atlantic, and it's not just orthographic. It's certainly not any kind of vast gulf of permanent misunderstanding--it's just large enough to be noticeable, and for people to trip over sometimes.
The Darker and Grittier tide of the 80s and 90s definitely helped push people into taking 40k seriously, and 40k into taking itself seriously, though. I, personally, don't know how anyone can look at the lore for orks and conclude that 40k is not supposed to be an item of parody, but people do.
2300036
As opposed to... what, exactly? I've seen Monty Python; even when they're not in front of a live studio audience, they pause noticably. In fact, the majority of comedy seems to use this method; there are exceptions (if you look at Robin Williams when he's on a roll, he DOESN'T stop, though he is obviously being very silly) but as a general rule, regardless of locale, it seems like I see these. Top Gear does it. Monty Python does it. Mitchell and Webb do it. Yes Minister does it. Red Dwarf does it.
It is a part of general comedic delivery as far as I can tell, at least in the English-speaking world.
I don't think the idea that American comedy is any more signposted is actually all that accurate; I mean, let's face it, there are people who think Colbert is a conservative (or at least, there used to be people who believed such), and the Onion and the Weekly World News regularly have people fall for their articles.
But that's a fairly unusual example from what I've seen; most things aren't like that. And it isn't as if the US doesn't have things like this; the Onion (and its News Network) pretty much entirely relies on such things, and when you watch things like, say, the segments of the Colbert Report and the Daily Show which aren't filmed live, they tend to be more like that.
Maybe, but on the other hand, I don't think most people in the UK get the Daily Mail either.
Well, the Orks are obviously the comic relief of the universe. Because in a universe full of people murdering people for reasons of xenophobia, religious fanaticism, on behalf of a brutal dictatorship, because they want to eradicate all life from the galaxy, or sheer lunacy, humor comes in people who kill people for fun.
Indeed, they removed the space dwarves precisely because they were too silly.
That's not to say that there isn't some black humor that pervades the universe - because there certainly is - but I think that's more because most other kinds of humor don't really work there very well, rather than because the whole universe is a parody.
2300178
Man, it took like 30 seconds for that comment to get a downvote.
Someone must read the Daily Mail.
2300036
Daniel Dennet had a paper about humor being the human brain rewarding itself for doing debuging.
You get a rush of good feelings any time you notice an obvious flaw in your logic e.g. watching a cartoon of a man whose reading a newspaper stepping on a banana peel and being completely unaffected is funny to people with certain assumtions about cartoon logic whereas the opposite is funny to people from a background where a man reading a newspaper is seen as sign of formidability.
That said it's obviouse why different cultures have different sort of humor- like british high brow comedy that focuses on the difference between whats being said and what is actually meant due to manners or things like academic context. If you grew up with syndicated television broadcasts where everything can be taken at face value unless otherwise stated this is at best cryptic- someone could actually be serious about interviewinga A Man with Three Buttocks , there're more inain things on right now.
Interesting, the character that led me to choose my nick here was a Silent Strider Lupus (though Ragabash, not Philodox) that, during his adventures, became a linguist and translator specialized in dead languages (being able to meet very old spirits, even if not from his own tribe, has its perks
). Yeah, that does mean I put experience points in something that does not affect combat 
2300036
Wait, doesn't this makes politics into comedy by default?
)
(Unfortunately, though
2300290
That's definitely one way to deal with it without despairing.
I would read the buck out of that book.
I played a lot of oWoD back in the 90's and Werewolf was always my favorite. Mostly because of how literally it could be played: the werewolves have a clear idea of who's right and who's wrong, and really no justification beyond "what side you're on."
So without getting super-deep, you could go on crazy adventures and kill bad guys and loot the dungeon...
Or you could look down the rabbit hole, and see how far it goes. (protip: it goes really far) And frankly, I can't think of a much better guide for that trip than you, Bad Horse.
(I always felt that the societies of the other groups didn't make much sense, as vampires and mages would be loners who rarely interact with each other and changelings... just didn't add up)
Ah, here it is: I kept looking for it under "Jack Black" but no, it's even more incredible than that.
This is, I think, the most astonishing cover of a Warren Zevon song ever. Give it a listen. I will be answerable in the event:
3dm3.com/video/images/up3_01.jpg
Should I tell everybody what movie that's from or should I just go screw myself?