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TITANS RISING goes live on Kickstarter in a week.
I'm taking a half day at work cause I'm nervous about my first time writing on a book that's getting crowd funded. I may or may not have already had the thought of getting done ink therapy to calm my nerves when it launches.
Help us fund the development of Titans Rising as well as a print run of Titans Rising and Titanomachy to send to backers and stores!
Have you played SCION ?
By White Wolf (1st edition) / Onyx Path Publishing (2nd edition)
Playing humans blessed by or born from the Gods who can eventually ascend to join their ranks. Urban fantasy, but 2e noticeably lacks a masquerade - the fantasy elements are known to the World’s population.
In a world much like ours but not, Priests of a temple of Ra go out for coffee, as followers of Dionysius post pictures of their wine offerings on social media as kids take turns pretending to be Baron Samedi and Quetzalcoatl during recess. The gods of the old world still preside and watch over their people, seeking their worship and answering their prayers but an ancient foe has escaped from their prison. The Titans, the primordial beings of destruction and chaos have returned. The Gods cannot come down to The World and fight back against the evil Titans that plague their followers, less they be victims of fate, changing their legends and fates forever, instead they call out to their descendants. You, a Scion of the gods. You may of been born between your divine parent and a mortal, maybe you were chosen by that god, maybe the god created and bestowed life to you, or perhaps you are the human reincarnation of a forgotten god. As a Scion, you take your divine parent’s place and restore order to The World while also building your own legend, developing divine powers, gaining followers and earning a place in your pantheon. You grow and learn from your humble Origin, to becoming a Hero to mortals, then being recognized as a Demigod and finally achieving the godhead and becoming a God. Can you fight back against the Titans and fate?
Have you played ?
Yes I have played it
No but I've read it
No but I've heard of it
Never heard of it
@theresattrpgforthat
Listen... listen game designers.... I can't keep recommending the same seven games about being dragons every time. The only new game I can add to this list is Warrenguard, and that's about dragon riding, not being dragons.
The hunger is out there. The desire is out there. Go forth and make a big-ass dragon game!!!!!!!
There is definitely a game for that!
Scion: Dragon.
Scion is an urban fantasy game without a masquerade keeping everything hidden from the normies. People know that Gods and Heroes walk the earth still, that walking down the wrong alley can get you jumped by ogres, and that if you’re (un)lucky, Thor will follow you on Nymphstagram.
The Gods and Titans continue to fight the Titanomachy, although these days it’s more of a Cold War. In the middle are the Dragons, who feel wronged by both side. The Dragons of old sat on hordes of gold (and many still do), but these days Dragons wealth comes from their vaults of secret information. They and they Heirs act as freelance spies and information brokers, working for whoever hires them while advancing their own agendas.
Draconic Heirs are roughly the same power as divine Heroes and start off as mostly human, but they become more and more Dragon-like over time. By the time Heroes ascend to the ranks of Demigods or Gods, Heirs are full-on scaled beasts running espionage networks of their own.
For the love of all that is holy STOP making 1s take away successes in your dice pool system it fucks the probability math and makes your pool unstable in a "can't figure out appropriate success" way not in a cool fun way PLEASE get rid of this World of Darkness brain rot it's not good there either
And unless the rest of your rules are really fucking simple don't change the number you're looking for on the die. Just don't. It's extra overhead and you'll need to do more math to make it impactful.
This post is still not about Baldur's Gate 3.
Loving the group of people who don't realize this is a dig at newer ttrpg systems stealing outdated tech.
when people complain abotu the Mean Indie TTRPG Fans telling them to play another game it's like. idk. imagine that lemonade is the most popular drink and there were people who drink lemonade every day and say 'hmm i hate the lemony taste of this, and its cloudy colour' but they kept just chugging gallons of it and other people who went online to say 'hey how can i make my lemonade taste like chocolate and also be brown and thick' and then some people said 'maybe some of you should be drinking other beverages' and then people who genuinely liked lemonade because of the lemony taste were like 'lol lmao the elitist beverage drinkers think we're tricking ourselves into liking lemonade' . like no buddy this isnt about you
Emergency Commissions Needed to Get Unburied From Student Loans!
I was homeless a lot of last year and needed to put my loan that, for whatever reason, the company either wasn't required to do the payment pause or just wasn't doing it for me, into a deferment or forbearance because there was no other option. It's since come time to start making payments and while I would have been able to make my normal-sized payment even if it would have been tight financially, that's not what happened. Because the mail here frequently has mix-ups and sends mail to the wrong houses, I never received the notice that payments were restarting, or the first past-due notice. I finally received the second past-due notice, and now I'm pretty screwed. The total due is now nearly an entire magnitude more than my normal payment. I can't work. I'm "self-employed" doing freelance writing and art, but I haven't gotten a major contract in a long time. My PTSD and general health is bad enough I can barely leave the house to do essential but infrequent tasks, let alone get a job outside the house. I'm working on being able to leave the house more to be able to get a day job but I'm not anywhere near that place yet. So for now, I need to ask for some emergency donations and/or commissions. I can do writing commissions - short stories (particularly horror) at 15 cent/word and also digital art commissions with examples and pricing here: https://imgur.com/a/2zRVNtq I'd need half up front to reserve a commission slot and so I can buy time with this past-due amount so they don't start taking legal action. If you aren't interested in a commission and would just like to donate, my cashapp is $bekandrewttrpg Please reblog to spread the word, I have until August 1st to get the past-due amount!
Current Progress $50/694
Still trying to get back in good standing. It is Very Late and I'm trying to figure out what options I have (for hardship deferment or forbearance etc) but in the meantime, still could use help.
Roll 20 Fails
I've failed 4 Intelligence rolls in this Call of Cthulu one shot.
[alt text Screen shot from Roll 20 showing my character, Rajbir, failed an Intelligence check by rolling 100 over 80.]
I still have nightmares.
A bill intending to legalise and codify same-sex marriage into Navajo Nation law has been introduced by lawmakers.
While at this moment this measure can be considered symbolic (the policy it repeals was rendered unenforceable by the Supreme Court in 2015, just like for the rest of the US), it assures that if Obergefell is overturned, and same-sex marriage policy localizes, the Navajo Nation will still uphold marriage equality*
*there could end up being a fight with Arizona state government in that scenario, as tribal sovereignty vs state authority is constantly fought on an issue by issue basis.
To Wong Foo Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar (1995)
Dir. Beeban Kidron
This was such a formative movie
This shit was revolutionary for the mid-90s. Among other things it helped me understand that transgender and cross-dressing were completely separate things.
To this day, I am in awe of the fact that Patrick Swayze not only campaigned hard to get the audition, not only auditioned in dress and makeup, but spent most of the day leading up to the audition walking around LA in dress and makeup.
This was a man who could sing, dance, act, ride a horse, fight, and walk in heels, he had nothing to prove to anyone, and he is MISSED.
Okay, I’m not done feeling about this.
If you’re younger, you may not know Patrick Swayze; he was Taken From Us in 2009. But Patrick Swayze was an icon of masculinity. Men were willing to watch romantic movies because Patrick Swayze was in them.
Patrick Swayze was fucking beefcake.
And this man didn’t just agree to do a movie where the only time he’s not actually in drag is the first three minutes, which involve stepping out of the shower, doing make up, and getting Dressed. He has ONE LINE that is delivered in a man’s voice, and it’s not during those three minutes.
And if you watch those three minutes, you see a stark difference between his portrayal of Miss Vida Bohéme and Wesley Snipes as Noxeema Jackson. (I am not criticizing Snipes’ performance. They were different roles.) Noxeema was a comedy character. Chi-Chi was a comedy character. But Miss Vida Bohéme was a dramatic role, played by a dramatic powerhouse.
When Vida sits down in front of the mirror, she sees a man. And she doesn’t like it.
Then she puts her hair up, and her face lights up.
“Ready or not,” she says. “Here comes Mama.”
And while Noxeema is having fun with her transformation (at one point breaking into a giggling fit after putting on pantyhose), Vida is simply taking pleasure in bringing out her true self. And when she’s done, she sees this:
And you can FEEL her pride.
All of this from an actor who, up to this point, walked on to the screen and dripped testosterone.
the fact that some of you history-ignorant children in the notes are trying to shit on groundbreaking historical queer cinema because it doesn’t meet 2021 standards is infuriating. sit down, shut the fuck up, and listen to the elders in the room for fucking once
This. If you have never lived in a world where queerness was universally pathologized and criminalized to the point that even IMAGINING a world where it wasn’t constituted a radical and potentially dangerous act, you don’t have any business judging those of us who have for how we survived it and how we found (or still find) comfort in the few imperfect representations we got.
You don’t have to like it. You probably aren’t capable of “getting” it. And to be honest, I don’t want you to! I am glad that young queer people will never know exactly what it was like “back then.” But what you also will not do is refuse to learn your own history and then shit on everything that came before you, because like it or not what came before you is the reason you will never have to get what it was like back then.
On Wesley Snipes’s role Noxeema and John Leguizamo as Chi-Chi Rodriguez.
“I grew up in the ‘70s and even within the street culture, there was a lot of flamboyancy,” Snipes told TODAY of his perception of drag before filming. “Pimps wore the same furs as theprostitutes wore.
“Some of the great musicians of the world, like Parliament-Funkadelic, were very androgynous. So it wasn’t really new for me to see men dressed as women or men dressed as drag queens.”
Snipes attended the famed LaGuardia High School of Performing Arts and then State University of New York at Purchase. He wasn’t a dance major, but most of his friends were. “That exposed me to the world of glam, vogue, drag, transgender and gay people, LGBTQ… but it wasn’t in fashion those days. But it existed and I was around it.”
Not only did “Priscilla, Queen of the Desert” pave the way for “To Wong Foo,” so did films like the 1968 documentary “The Queen” and “Paris Is Burning,” the 1990 doc that chronicled ball culture of New York and the various Black and queer communities involved in it.
Even though he was known for his action roles, Snipes’ portrayal of Noxeema wasn’t the first time he played a drag queen. In 1986, he made his Broadway debut in the play “Execution of Justice,” playing Sister Boom Boom, a real-life AIDS activist and drag nun who acted as the show’s voice of conscience. Snipes pointed out, “Sister Boom Boom did not have Noxeema’s makeup kit.”
On whether he got any pushback for stepping into Noxeema’s pumps, he said, “Not so much professionally but the streets weren’t feeling it, and there were certain community circles. The martial arts community… they were not feeling it at all.”
“In fact, when the movie came out and they would come down the street, I would see them in Brooklyn sometimes, they started listing all my movies. I noticed they would always skip that one. I would correct them, ‘Now you don’t got the full count!’”
Lesser-known than his co-stars at the time, Lequizamo didn’t really anticipate becoming a transgender icon, but he did know that they were working on something special when they started filming.
“Drag didn’t really exist in movies,” Lequizamo, who was nominated for a Golden Globe for his portrayal, told TODAY. “There were straight men pretending to be women to get out of trouble or into trouble but this was not that. I was trying to make Chi-Chi a real life trans character and Patty and Wesley were trying to be real drag queens.” Never fully articulated in the film, Chi-Chi Rodriguez has always been perceived as transgender, something that ending up making an indelible mark on LGBTQ people in the late ‘90s as trans representation in media was limited.
“Chi-Chi was a trans icon, but she also showed us that gay men and trans women can both perform and work in drag side by side, and that those relationships are symbiotic,” Cayne explained.
“It was a powerful thing. I get lots of fan mail from LGBTQ teens telling me how my character helped them come out to their parents,” Leguizamo said. “They didn’t feel like they were seen, so that was a beautiful gift from the movie.”
Lequizamo also articulates that if “To Wong Foo” were cast today, a trans actor should be cast in his role. (And that just may happen, since Beane is developing a musical for Broadway.) “Anybody can play anything, but the playing field is not fair that way,” he said. “Not everybody is allowed to play everything. So until we get to that place, it is important for trans actors to get a chance to act which they don’t. In the project I’m doing, I’m making sure that the person playing trans is a trans person so we can make it legit, make it real. That just needs to be done right now.”
Source: How Hollywood heartthrobs and Steven Spielberg helped make a drag queen cult classic
a monumental film in the library of queer history.
it was formative for modern society, too.
there are a lot of action fans out there who learned from their idols that respect doesn’t cost a damn thing to give. i know plenty of people who aren’t queer saw trans women and drag queens presented as people to them for the first time in wong fu. suddenly, strange and foreign queer identities that had only been presented to them as jokes if they’d even heard of them, seemed a little more relatable, and very human.
we’re all just people.
snipes, swayze, and leguizamo were willing to play people a lot of their fans didn’t respect yet or didn’t even know how to respect and demand they figure it the fuck out.
This is a HUGE reblog but I watched this as a little girl on cable TV and I’m so glad I did. GO WATCH THIS AS SOON AS YOU CAN
I’d love it if To Wong Foo was inescapably broadcast once a year, like A Christmas Story.
For every terf that sends me anon hate, I just reblog this post again.
again i want to say that non-queer and non-trans actors (although first of all, it is not up to you or me to write that identity for or over people we have never met and do not owe it to us) are fucking important. A lot of these actors have taken career hits. They’ve taken hits for the queer community because they could stand to take hits that we could not.
and i am so fucking grateful for these people and i’m grateful when we can do re-makes, but never forget that we are able to do those because others took shots that were intended for us. and that we have taken shots in the past.
and nobody owes you their identity. It is utterly insane to ask actors to disclose their sexuality or gender to play a character on the screen. it is utterly important to cast queer and trans people and to have that representation. these thoughts can and do coexist.
A little on Sister Boom Boom, the very real Sister of Perpetual Indulgence who Snipes portrayed on stage.
Werewolf: the Apocalypse 5th Edition and the Anti-Indigeneity in the Gaming Industry
reosted with permission from J.F. Sambrano
Dagot’ee!
Shii J.F. Sambrano gonsēē. My nations are Chiricahua Apache (Ndeh) through my maternal grandmother and Cora Indian (Náayarite) through my maternal grandfather. I am a mixed race Indigenous person, and through my father my heritage is English and Scottish. I am currently residing and doing work in my community on the lands of Lummi Nation. I use both gender non-binary and masculine pronouns, but prefer the former. I have several published works in the TTRPG industry, and am probably most known for my contributions to Mage: the Ascension 20th Edition, Werewolf: the Apocalypse 20th Edition, and the Transformers Roleplaying Game, as well as being part of the Essence 20 development team. Further, I also work in higher education at an Indian college, both advising and teaching Indigenous students across the United States. My passion is education, and I believe that we all learn through play, and that TTRPGs are a valuable source of learning, especially on personal, cultural, and social levels. This has always been what has drawn me to TTRPGs since I started playing M.E.R.P. with my brother in 1996 (and before that HeroQuest), through to my “graduation” into more story-driven games such as those presented in the Storyteller System, until now, where I author and produce my own roleplaying games.
I was also part of the First Team (in-joke intentional) hired by White Wolf Studios/Paradox Interactive via Hunters Entertainment to develop and author Werewolf: the Apocalypse 5th Edition. After several months of work, Paradox Interactive chose to go in another direction in early 2021 (I believe it was either March or April) and in fall of that year, it was announced that Werewolf would instead be taken in house, with Justin Achilli as the Brand Creative Lead and primary author of the book. Going forward I will be describing my experience while I worked with Paradox Interactive, primarily through Karim Muammar, White Wolf’s Brand Editor, as well as the developmental editor for Werewolf. Although I worked in a team, both with hired authors and in-house representatives at Hunters Entertainment, I will not be speaking for the experience of others, except when specifically noting unanimous consensuses, and specific interactions (which will go unnamed) that are particularly relevant. My hope is that by highlighting some of the anti-Indigenous attitudes that are central to the foundational members and leaders of the White Wolf brand, that I can provide opportunities for growth and healing within the World of Darkness TTRPG community, but also in the broader gaming community, where these behaviors and attitudes are rampant. I also want the community to have a better understanding of what this experience is like internally, and the challenges that Indigenous creators, as well as other marginalized creators, are met with when they try to make positive change within nerd and geek communities clinging to inherited white supremacist values, even if they don’t realize they are doing so.
What I do not want to be doing in this article is creating fuel for edition wars. I believe that both legacy and Werewolf 5th are rife with anti-Indigenous attitudes, and appalling amounts of appropriation. Both versions deserve criticism, I am not defending one over the other, I am only sharing what my experience was like working on the 5th edition of the book. Further, please understand that I was originally going to wait until I had read the final copy of the book, because I wanted to know how much of my work was used (based on previews I already know some was, just not the extent) and whether or not they decided to credit me for that work, and how I was going to be credited. My belief is that I likely will not be, but I am genuinely uncertain. Knowing how they handled that would have reframed how I addressed this. But more importantly, I want it to be very clear that even before Paradox ultimately pulled the plug on the Hunters team, I was preparing to exit working on the project based on the experience I will describe below. Not only did I find it frustrating, and personally disparaging, but I ultimately decided I was uncomfortable with my name being attached to the product based on the direction they wanted to go. So while I wanted to know whether or not I would be credited, because it would teach me something about their internal practices, I do not want or need the credit.
Finally, the reason that I decided to speak about this now instead of after having a chance to inspect the final product, was because my personal experience dealing with anti-Indigeneity coming from Paradox was just that: personal. But since then I have witnessed a throughline of hateful and xenophobic attitudes wielded against Indigenous people across the globe, and we do not deserve this treatment. I was outraged over the events that led to the segregation of the Latin American fanbase, which culminated from bottom-up criticism about how poorly their people and countries were being defined through World of Darkness products, and ended up with the firing of their Latin American Brand Ambassador, Alessa Torres, because she chose to stand with her community in those criticisms. I was further appalled when the likeness of Tāme Wairere Iti was shoehorned into the Werewolf book, a blatant example of cultural theft: not only in stealing the literal physical identity of an Indigenous person, but also his sacred tā moko. When Paradox Interactive issued an apology for this, it felt incredibly hollow to me in the wake of these events, the hateful attitudes I had personally witnessed coming from the top.
Whether from North America, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, or Peru, or across the globe in New Zealand, not only do Indigenous people deserve better treatment from such a major company, but their Indigenous and Latino fanbases, who have twisted and worked themselves through difficult representation for decades at this point, deserve better. Apologies are not enough, especially when they come with next to no real change.
Werewolf: the Apocalypse in Context
At the time that White Wolf Publishing began to produce its World of Darkness line, the TTRPG industry was dominated by white men, both as producers, developers, and authors, as well as the main characters in their settings. White Wolf's World of Darkness made an impact at the time, by defying these Eurocentric, patriarchal presentations, first by defaulting to feminine pronouns throughout Vampire: the Masquerade, and then by focusing on Indigenous representation and values in Werewolf: the Apocalypse, and as a young Indigenous nerd, it had a positive impact on me, as I know it has on some other Indigenous people who became fans of the World of Darkness at the time. This was because before opening the pages of Werewolf: the Apocalypse, I had never seen heroes that I could play who looked like me and my culture. It was off, and often offensive, but it was my first experience in which I could directly play a hero who shared my heritage--and I also had more than one option through two different Tribes to do so. This might sound a little like I was cheering for table scraps, but again, at the time, table scraps was more than I had ever seen before.
Werewolf: the Apocalypse 1st Edition was originally published in 1992 via then White Wolf Publishing (not to be confused with Paradox Interactive's White Wolf). From its inception, the premise was interwoven with what its then-authors believed to be Indigenous praxis and representation. Like many pop-culture presentations of Indigeneity from this time period (see Fern Gully, Dances With Wolves, Disney’s Pocahontas, or in TTRPGs, the NAN from Shadowrun) it was rife with problematic and even offensive stereotyping. The most obvious examples thereof are within the two "Pure Tribes" Uktena, and W****** who I will henceforth refer to as Older and Younger Brother. However, Indigenous inspiration was at the core of the game's spiritual premise as well, where animism and "Totems" are central to the setting and gameplay. The way these concepts are presented is trivializing and dehumanizing, but it is important to acknowledge that the appropriation present in Werewolf: the Apocalypse goes a lot deeper than the two Brother Tribes (even the term "Tribe" was meant to invoke a vision of Indigeneity compared to the previous setting in the line's use of "Clan"). Additionally, there is art throughout every generation of these gaming books that represents humans, wolves, and human-wolf hybrid forms wearing Indigenous regalia, including sacred items such as headdresses, or engaged in sacred rituals such as the Sun Dance. The list of problematic representations goes deep, and my examples only scratch the surface, but it is also important for me to note the positive impact that this had, particularly in the 90's.
Even though the primary contributors to these narratives were non-Indigenous authors, or in one case, a Pretendian, and another, a culturally disconnected author, by the time the Revised (or Third Edition) era of the books came around, White Wolf Publishing was actively engaged in cultural consultation. While I do not believe cultural consultation makes a big difference on its own, it matters that the attempt was made, to a degree: while these efforts fall short of what needs to be seen in cultural representation, this was still ahead of most other gaming companies at this time.
Hired by Hunters Entertainment
In February of 2020 I was approached by one of the co-owners of Hunters Entertainment to be one of the primary authors for Werewolf: 5th Edition due to my work on other World of Darkness projects, and let's be honest, because I was capable of bringing a much needed Indigenous perspective to a gameline that was rooted in Indigeneity and rotting with appropriation and racist stereotypes. I was overall receptive to the invitation, largely because I was very passionate about the World of Darkness setting overall, and Werewolf in particular, due to the impact that 90's representation had on me when I was a younger gamer. I also felt hopeful that with a really hard rewrite of Indigenous aspects of the game that I could shift a lot of really painful aspects of the game into something that was a net positive for Indigenous representation. I will tell you now, more than anything, I was excited to rewrite the Younger Brother Tribe, because when separated from racist authors, their message is very empowering and real to my lived experience.
That said, I did not agree to join the project without first asking for reassurances. I said that I was not willing to write negative Native stereotypes. I would not use appropriative language, or generally engage in appropriative writing (which meant at minimum that the names of the Pure Tribes would need to change), and most importantly, that I would not not engage in writing that contributed to erasure. While the person who recruited me to work on the project was eager to work with me, he acknowledged that he was not sure he could get everything I wanted to see approved, but also promised to fight for everything I suggested as hard as he could. Additionally, he shared with me that the original setting pitch for W5 involved all of Younger Brother being slaughtered en masse in a massacre. I made it clear that this was exactly the kind of thing that I would not write. I cannot remember if this was something he suggested to be changed before or after I was invited onto the project, but with some pushback it was changed. However, I point this out because I want you, the reader, to understand how eager Paradox Interactive was to start with mass genocide and erasure as a foundation to the setting. All that said, I cannot stress enough that I have had nothing but positive experiences with Hunters Entertainment, and none of the following concerns fall upon them.
The Sword of Heimdall
The first encounter the Hunters Entertainment team as a whole had with problematic guidelines for the W5 draft was the direction that Paradox Interactive wanted to go with the Sword of Heimdall. At the time, the suggestions from Paradox and Karim Muammar were that the Sword of Heimdall was going to represent the new major villain of the Werewolf setting, and that they were to also represent the far-right, fascist direction that Werewolf society so often turned toward. They were meant to be representative of how far the new concept of Hauglosk could take entire communities. However, the Sword of Heimdall was discussed interchangeably with the Get of Fenris as a whole, and more than once Muammar seemed to suggest that every member of this Tribe was guilty of the same attitudes espoused in previous editions from the Sword of Heimdall. Now let's not beat around the bush: the Sword of Heimdall are literal Nazis. They believe directly in white supremacy and don't shy from it. They wanted to cleanse impure elements from the Get of Fenris, including BIPOC people, other non-white ethnicities, women, neurodivergent Garou, and other disabled Garou.
The writing team found this approach problematic for several reasons. The first, and most obvious, was that the direction seemed to want to turn one of the most popular Tribes into a horrific stereotype of its most abhorrent faction. Whether or not Muammar’s goal was to turn them into villains, we could not imagine a world where fans of previous editions would get their hands on this book, and not look for a way to play one of their previous favorite groups, thus creating the issue of making a guide to playing Nazi. Even beyond that, it’s not as if historically there were not players who used the tools of the setting to play Black Spiral Dancers, why wouldn’t this draw people who actually wanted to role-play through these toxic, harmful politics? Further, and while this is less important, it left a bad taste in my mouth, the justification for this major shift in Werewolf lore seemed to change over each pass. At first, Muammar suggested that all Fenrir were Nazis/SoH. Then, when he was provided with evidence that it was a small faction that was eliminated in the early 2000’s, he started to shift toward the idea that we should not follow the lore. Finally, when every single member of the writer’s team flatly refused to provide what would essentially be “a player’s guide to being a Nazi werewolf” the writing was on the wall about the end of our involvement with this product. More than once, he suggested that we were cowardly social justice warriors for being unwilling to work with this concept, even though there were several attempts to write a heroic version of the Fenrir that were focused on undoing these ills of the past.
Indigenous Erasure in Werewolf: 5th Edition
While the entire Hunters Entertainment writing team was handling the major, glaring issue of Paradox’s fervor to include a major Nazi element in Werewolf, I was personally dealing with the problematic approach to the Indigenous issues in the setting. The largest problem, for me, was in addressing Younger Brother’s issues, the history of non-Indigenous writers creating horrifically racist stereotypes, and what was valuable in the Tribal identity that should be saved and recentered. However, my attempts to do so were thwarted with every approach. I rewrote this Tribe four times, and offered three different versions of it to try to earn approval for a final write-up, but each time there was a lot of negativity directed towards my attempts and all them boiled down to this: Muammar felt that having two Tribes (both Younger and Older Brother) representing the “Indigenous population” was too many, and wanted them to only be focused on Older Brother, and that Younger Brother’s connection to a central, Indigenous identity, was undesirable because “other sources wrote them as having Siberian and European connections” and that future writing on this Tribe would require a lot of sensitivity…suggesting that one, Muammar wasn’t interested in doing the work to handle that level of sensitivity, and further, that he wasn’t interested in including me in future work, since I was involved with doing that at the time.
I want to take a moment to remind you that the work that was put into recovering Younger Brother started with “Let’s Kill Them Off” and at this point, through a combination of convincing and pleading, had been walked back to “They can live, but now they’re not connected to being Indigenous anymore” which is just representative genocide of a different variety. “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.” It was also explicitly something I said I would not write about going into this project. Ultimately, my efforts did not get much further than this, with some specific exceptions I will cite below.
Karim Muammar’s Anti-Indigenous Positions
Muammar consistently and repeatedly communicated to the team in ways that were condescending and dismissive of our collective accomplishments and capabilities, but from my perspective, no one suffered as much significant derision as I did while discussing the changes I wanted to make to Younger and Older Brother in order to make their representation empowering and exciting.
In the pulled quote from the previous paragraph, I want to point out to you that Muammar, who had the title of Lead Editor on this project, refused to capitalize Native American. Further, he would often redline my work with edits to decapitalize my own uses of Native American, as well as the word Indigenous when referring to Indigenous peoples. While there are plenty of people who might want to argue about this, I will point out that both the AP style guide as well as the Chicago style guide (the one which I am most familiar with in my academic historical work) both call for Indigenous to be capitalized when referring to a people. Further, I challenge anyone to defend the consistent decapitalization of Native American. More importantly, the reason that these are standards in respected style guides, is because the English language has been used historically to oppress and erase ethnic identities, including Indigenous identities. By transforming adjectives into proper nouns, we are declaring that Indigenous and Native aren’t descriptors that can be applied to animals, plants, and soil, but real lived identities and culture groups.
When I was explaining to the Paradox team (which was mostly just Muammar) why it was important to change the names of these two Tribes from the appropriative (and offensive) ones used in the past, Muammar pushed back by defending the previously used Younger Brother name, even after reading my extensive research and explanation about how this would harm Indigenous communities and fans.
While doing so, he also decided that it was appropriate to refer to this entirely Native American tribe by the word “savages” a slur that has been specifically used to dehumanize Native Americans, and then mocked my rewrite that focused on presenting them as stewards of the land using Indigenous methodologies and praxes, instead of the “savage” racist stereotypes they were presented as in previous editions. Further, as in the above quote, even after it was communicated that the use of this term was problematic, he kept doubling-down to use it to refer to the Tribe.
Even though I worked hard to redefine Younger Brother through Indigenous theory, such as place-based theory, relational theory, and communal theory, Muammar either refused to recognize this work, dismissing it as simple, or else simply could not understand the importance of these changes. Either way, the choice is that he didn’t want them to change, or couldn’t comprehend why the change was important because of how entrenched in white supremacist thinking he is. Further, after the massive effort that I put forward to attempt to educate him and the rest of the Paradox team on these issues, the insistence on using offensive terms and belittling my work felt intentional. So let’s talk about the work I did that was above and beyond my job description: free cultural consulting work.
“Sensitivity” and Consultation
I have seen several misunderstandings of my role working on this project going around, so I want to make something very clear. I was hired to work on this project as an author, and nothing else. I was not ever hired to be a cultural consultant. I do not do cultural consulting work. While I feel that there are many creators and companies who hire cultural consultants with the best intentions in mind, their responses often fall short of what is needed, as no one is ever obligated to actually follow the advice of cultural consultants. Further, I think there are also many companies who choose to hire cultural consultants only to say “we did this minimal step, and that is enough” in order to ward off naysayers.
However, anyone who hires me gets some level of cultural consulting for free, because it comes out in my writing–in both what I won’t write and what I choose to center my writing around. In the case of Werewolf 5th Edition, however, it was far more involved than this. I came with a plethora of “I will not write X” because I knew the setting was so problematic. A short list of my demands besides not being willing to write Indigenous erasure, was that we needed to change the names of the Pure Tribes (and the term Pure Tribe itself), we needed to change the word Totem to Patron, and also the Patrons of the Pure Tribes. We needed to move away from the term Metis for obvious reasons, and we needed to move away from the term Skin Dancers. I also specifically noted that there was a lot of cultural theft happening from the beginning of Werewolf until now that I wanted to address. The only way these issues were going to be addressed was to convince Paradox they were actual issues on the level of PR concerns, because nothing else was likely going to be considered. So in order to achieve this, I put in weeks worth of research, writing, and meetings with top level administrators with Hunters Entertainment so that they could bring this information to Paradox. I never documented my hours, but I would guess that I did approximately 80-100 hours of what I could only describe as cultural consultation work for free that was outside the contract work I was hired for. Let’s be clear: I did this willingly because I was passionate about the positive changes I wanted to see in this product, because I believed that Werewolf’s historic ills could be turned toward non-toxic representation.
Besides my actual words, such as naming the Ghost Council, and arguably the name Gale Stalkers came from a combination of names I pitched to Paradox after Winter’s Teeth was denied, and several sentences and paragraphs that I have seen so far that appear so close to what I originally wrote that you could imagine they were just edited versions, my largest contribution toward the final version of Werewolf: 5th Edition was this work. The only reason the offensive, appropriated names were changed were because of hours of my work to convince them it needed to happen. The reason that the Gale Stalkers aren’t just dead and gone: again, I pushed against this. The reason that Skin Dancers, Totem, and Metis will not appear as canonical titles? I pushed against their unwillingness to alter these things (see Karim’s defense of Wen**** Tribe name above).
Further, and this is the biggest reason I decided to write this article before seeing the final version of the book, I want to mention that I was also included in discussions with Hunters Entertainment to potentially be part of the art direction team, especially to oversee depictions of Indigenous characters, regalia, and art, to ensure that it would be represented either respectfully or not at all. I decided I needed to speak as soon as possible after the artistic portrayal of Tāme Iti appeared in the Glass Walkers preview without his permission. There are many arguments surrounding this issue and I am not going to address everything, but ultimately, I can tell you that had I remained as part of the art direction team, and saw that, I would have questioned it immediately. Even if I didn’t recognize Tāme Iti immediately, I would have asked what the source was on the depiction of moko in that piece, because I am aware that this is a sacred form of art–and I had already discussed wanting to make sure things like Crinos in headdresses didn’t appear in the book (as had often happened in previous editions, particularly on a certain white-skinned character whose name rhymes with Steals-the-Past).
As time working on this project went on, and I went through rounds and rounds of trying to convince Muammar and Paradox that it was important to not steal Indigenous identities, art, and stories, and that a greater effort needed to be put in powerful and empowering Indigenous representation, and I constantly ran into refusals and criticisms that were clearly hateful toward Indigenous identities and peoples, not to mention the push to represent Nazism as a major part of the game setting, I grew increasingly frustrated and restless with feeling like I was trying to work on a challenging project while also defending my right to exist as the person I am at every turn. Eventually I turned to another Indigenous TTRPG and game creator to ask for advice, and after a long and difficult discussion, I came to the conclusion that I was going to talk to the Hunters administration team and tell them that if Muammar kept using slurs and other anti-Indigenous language and attitudes, I was going to need to step off of this project, because it was harmful to me on a personal level. In furtherance of this point, I have been avoiding doing any contract work at all where I can tell that I am wanted for my specific cultural perspective ever since, because this situation was so harrowing for me.
Unfortunately, before I could have this conversation, after one final draft of Younger Brother and Bone Gnawers (which had its own issues, but that is not the point of this discussion), before we received any other specific feedback, the Hunters Entertainment administrators announced to the writing team that Paradox had decided to take the book in-house, and would no longer need our services.
The main point I would like to leave you with, besides these few specific quotes (out of dozens and dozens) that Muammar made that were anti-Indigenous, is that there is often a big call to have more BIPOC voices in various entertainment industries, so that both our stories, perspectives, and unique views on how the universe and life works, can be included; so that an industry that is historically, harmfully Eurocentric, might turn toward new, healthier, and inclusive directions. And I agree with this call for change, but I implore you to consider the conditions that BIPOC creators often have to work under: doing cultural/identity work and consultation for free as part of being present, being subject to vicious refusals of our experiences and perspectives, and straight-up having slurs lodged against our work. I want to see these changes in the industries we love, including the gaming industry, but currently the people who are in charge, who have the most power, are severely hostile to our work and our perspectives. This is why, for example, works like Coyote & Crow were done with an almost entirely Indigenous group of creators, and led by Indigenous creators, because trying to work for and with this ugly, hateful, and xenophobic group of people is so often exhausting, both mentally and spiritually, and because no good changes end up being made.
I am glad the harmful, appropriative terms were removed from the setting. I am glad I was part of the fight to make that real. I am not so glad that I was treated with hostility and racism by Muammar for the effort and love I put into this work, and I am not so glad that I will certainly be reviled by one of the two communities I did this work for–the gaming community, and certainly the people in power in this industry–and I am also not so glad that I didn’t have the opportunity to properly acknowledge how much of Werewolf’s base themes and setting are twisted and tied-up in Indigenous appropriation without giving the proper acknowledgments.
More than anything, I hope that this story will help you, the fans, realize that there is a lot of darkness in these communities, and they won’t change unless you hold their feet to the fire.
Ánaagodzįįhł
J.F. Sambrano
James is one of my nearest and dearest. Please read the whole thing, especially if you're in the ttrpg space.
Werewolf the Apocalypse was why I got into writing games. But it wasn’t because it was inspiring and empowering. It was because I got angry. At one point in my life, when gaming was much whiter, some part of me felt...complacently content with what I was give. In a world with no rep, seeing a game that used my nations stories and saying that not only the things that made teenage me angry were real, but I had the right to be angry about them meant a lot. But as I got older. All the little barbs, all the little microaggressions and racist allowances started weighing on me. How much was I willing to endure just to feel like I was included at the table? How much was I willing to push aside, ignore, or apologize for just so I could show people something as personal as my people’s stories, cultures, and language was something worth celebrating and had power? Turns out I found that line. And that was last edition when they used my people’s languages to push anti-trans and ableist bullshit.( My nation, who the word Uktena is stolen from, traditionally has more that two genders btw.) I was so angry that something that once felt so personal had been twisted on me. I was mad because one of the few nerd spaces I didn’t have to justify being in native felt like it was taken away from me. I was furious they would use something so sacred to hurt others. I spent that night counting up all the other little ways this game had not only been used to hurt no only me, but the people that cared about. It was seeing them using my friends nations and cultures to belittle our shared struggles. The smug dismissive cynicism it painted people outside of the comfortable and white.The many times the nazis they set out the table for gleefully used the slurs and cryptoslurs the game smugly supplied against me. Suddenly feeling like I got to sit at the table didn’t feel like nearly enough. It felt poisoned. So I did what they game preached. I got mad and I did something with it. I got tired of waiting for someone to make that space and said fuck it I can do it myself and do it better. I ain’t surprised they haven’t learned lesson. A lot of those same people still work there. Disappointed? Wistful? Sure. But I know I deserve better. And I am more than capable of making my own spaces. And if my games even make someone feels that same way werewolf makes me, I hope they do the same. Please listen to James’ words. Cultural consultant work is mentally and spiritually draining. Often it’s not about making the work better and more welcoming, too much of the writer’s ego shoved into it for that. It’s about a rubber stamp and setting up someone to be a scapegoat to their own community. Often, when someone refuses to let themselves, the get blacklisted. Please consider what speaking up about a bad actor or work environment means.
I will never have the ability to know where I came from. It is gone. It has been taken from me utterly. My father doesn't know. He never will. Many members of my family have been sold.
When I write a Younger Brother character, I channel this rage: I do my research, and then I put in my own rage. What I don't do is try to talk over people who are involved in these nations, who have not lost their history. How could I? How could anyone?
Well, apparently this piece of shit can.
Since I've read this over several times, I've been hit hard in the chest with a lot of feelings--but nothing feels so infuriating as knowing that there was never any real attempt to do anything from the higher-ups as Paradox, and that James was pushed this far, and that Sahoni was. That so many people have tried to explain these things. But the whole "kill off Younger Brother" -- god. It sunk into me deeper than I expected, and I have nothing else to say that hasn't been said here. Fuck Paradox. God, the -- the bit about the Get, though. That... I know the Get are contentious, but to hear that people had to dig in their heels and STOP the active nazi portrayal? That people had to defend the Get as being not ACTUALLY fucking Nazis, that they're not all the Swords, that the Swords were fucking killed? To have that ignored, to have all of this ignored and twisted. Hate it. This wasn't explained well but I don't really... know how to formulate these thoughts, because it's all rage, all that cold, bitter anger.
J.F. Sambrano is an indigenous author and historian behind numerous rpg books, including a number of Werewolf: the Apocalypse official supplements. He was a part of the original Hunters team that worked on the initial framing of Werewolf 5th edition. James is going public, accusing Karim Muammar, "Chief" Editor of PDX, of anti-indigenous practices and promoting genocide within the writing team, and bullying him off the project. It is incredibly important that people see the truth of what's going on behind the scenes of Werewolf: the Apocalypse 5th edition with your own eyes. Please read and spread this everywhere you can.
I'm getting ready to share this on social media and some forums, but since a few people have been asking me in this community, I thought I'd start here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/werewolf-5th-and-86463964?utm_medium=clipboard_copy&utm_source=copyLink&utm_campaign=postshare_creator&utm_content=join_link
Oops I Bought Another TTRPG
One important thing that you should do as a queer person is to find another queer person whose brain works just like yours (romantically or not) and then adopt a cat together and then finally steal that fucking Pikachu and make it big
life goals
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Hello friends!
One of my dear TTRPG-writing comrades needs a little financial help. He isn't on Tumblr to the best of my knowledge, so I'm posting for him. If you have a little extra to throw his way, especially if you've enjoyed Scion 2e, consider doing so, please. :) Padre is a fantastic writer & everybody's favorite queer priest, and I adore him.
Build-a-Veteran v1.0, for creation of higher-ranking Garou
Hello friends! I thought I would share this tool I made to provide another method to generate higher-ranking werewolf characters (in addition to the ones from Werewolf Storytellers Handbook Revised and Rage Across the World W20).
Build-a-Veteran v1.0
It's a trait-distribution model (more similar to the WSHR method than the RAtW one) based on average trait levels I derived from cataloging all 672 statted werewolf characters I could find across the gameline's history. In that regard it can produce Garou that wouldn't look out-of-place in a sourcebook.
Hopefully it can be a useful alternative for making NPCs or even PCs for a chronicle of yours if you find the WSHR version to be a little muddled or the RAtW one to be a bit overwhelming!
It also has a system I devised for determining rite levels known for such a character. That may be of use to you even if you like one of the other systems, because neither addresses that in a practical way to my knowledge. The following is a spreadsheet that streamlines the process.
Rite Calculator
I'm planning on refining these further (especially the spreadsheet, which well betrays that it has been through several iterations without starting over) so if you have any suggestions, please let me know.
I may or may not have a spreadsheet for ranking up my Silent Strider Ragabash based on OP’s work.
Patrons of the Sonoran Desert - Every region of the world possesses its own unique plants and animals, and they connect to spirits in the Um
Check out this new release by one of my friends, @zakrulz ! It's a supplement for 20th Anniversary ed Werewolf: the Apocalypse with both 7 new Patrons and 4 Patrons updated from older editions, for a total of 13.
