Werewolf: The Forsaken - Blank It

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Chapter II: Character
You’re sitting in traffic on your way home after being
fired for putting your boss in the hospital. The fact that you’d
discovered his embezzling has kept him from pressing charges,
but that’s all it’s done. In fact, someone else higher up is covering
for him, so he won’t even be prosecuted. Now you’re stuck
here, slinking home in this godawful traffic, and the people
ahead of you won’t go already.
You glance to your left, looking for an opening in that lane,
when the driver of the car next to you catches your eye. He’s singing
maniacally along with the radio, and his eyes are bulging and
bloodshot. But stranger still is the fact that something is glowing
deep inside his chest. It looks like a snake made of fire, and it’s
coiled around his heart, radiating a smoldering menace. You’ve
never seen anything like it, yet it’s somehow familiar. Before you
can figure it out, the other driver stomps on his accelerator and
slams into the car in front of him. Airbags are deployed all around
as safety glass showers the area and smoke rises.
What do you do?
STORYTELLER ADVICE
Just as there is no single, quintessential Werewolf story,
there is no single, formulaic way to run a prelude for your
characters. All that’s truly important is that you hash out
not only who each character is as a person, but who he is
(or becomes) as a werewolf. While saying that is all well and
good, the following are some choices that can guide you in
running your preludes and making them suit your tastes.
First, decide whether you simply want to narrate the
prelude or run it interactively with your players. Simply
narrating the prelude can be the most efficient way to
set up a story if the player has played the character in a
previous story. If you and the player both have a good
idea of who the character is and how he’ll act, you might
not need the polish of an interactive prelude. If you’ve
designed nothing but a simple, one-session story that isn’t
about depth or drama, a couple of sentences might be
all you need to set the scene. Should any of your players
be inexperienced with either the Werewolf setting
or roleplaying in general, an interactive prelude acts as a
starter course in how the game and the mechanics work.
(A prelude can also help you iron out any nervous kinks
in your style if this is your first time as Storyteller.)
After you decide that, the next question is whether
to run a prelude for each character individually or run a
single prelude for the entire pack. The pack dynamic is the
most important social consideration in a Werewolf game,
and it’s the one over which the players have the most total
control. Putting all the characters together is a particularly
expedient and effective way to get the story off to a running
start. Such an introduction might show the characters
being drawn together as a pack, then questing into the
Shadow Realm to win a pack totem. Such exciting events
make for wonderful stories over a handful of actual game
sessions, but if you have an even more fantastic story in
mind and don’t want to waste time getting to it, you can
relegate the formative details to a group prelude. Should
you do so, be sure to discuss with the players how the
pack formed, how long it’s been together, who the alpha
is, what its basic social dynamic is, what its totem spirit
is like (as well as how powerful it is), what its territory
consists of and how it defends that territory.
If you’d rather run more in-depth preludes with each
player individually, that’s equally valid, but you have a
different set of concerns. Don’t look so much at what the
character’s duties as a werewolf are, but at what kind of person
he is based on his experiences. Is he passionate about
some cause that affects his territory (such as the plight of
the homeless or the pollution of a vital river)? Go over the
events of the first time the character was exposed to the
problem and his reaction to it. Does he have a violently
rebellious reaction to authority figures? Portray a scene
from the character’s teen years, when his werewolf nature
moved to the fore and his unknowing parents reacted to his
behavior with overprotective strictness. Does the character
have a true love whose trust gives him strength? Walk the
player through a scene in which the lover first discovered
the character’s secret (or the first time the character lied to
protect his true love from the truth).
Don’t rush the player through this process or force
him to make snap judgments. Give him time to think
about what his character (not he himself) would do in
such a situation, and discuss his answer if you don’t feel
it reflects what’s on his character sheet. It’s always best to
work out any potential disagreements of this nature during
the prelude, when a player can be most easily coached
and/or dots can still be rearranged to accommodate the
player’s style of play.
After you’ve decided how to structure your preludes, all
that’s left is to pick representative scenes and decide with
your players how the characters react. No list of formative
events could account for all the ways in which your players
could make characters, or for all the ways you could structure
a Werewolf story, but the following are some guidelines
that help. Most werewolves go through experiences such
as these (in some way) in their lives, and how they handle
them informs the kind of people they become.
• Mundane Drama: Every werewolf lives the first
part of his life among humans, believing that he’s one of
them. As he comes closer to his First Change, however,
the others around him react subconsciously to the difference
between him and them. He might be ostracized by
his peers at school, divorced or thrown out of his parents’
home for defiant, unruly behavior. Go over how the Rage
builds in him and what he does to control (or vent) it.
• First Animistic Exposure: As the First Change
nears, spirits pay more attention, and prospective werewolves
even catch them at it. When that happens, a character’s
worldview changes radically, teaching him something
that no one else seems to know. If the character in question
is one of the “lucky” ones, go over how he handles it when
he peels back that corner of the veil of mystery and finds
intelligent but alien things staring back at him.