Product Blurb

Blood's been spilled on these plains by the gallon. The humans, our families, are killing each other. Blue fights Gray, Red tussles with White - And then there's us.

The sun burns pretty hot by day. That's all right. We burn even hotter, down inside. And when the sweet moon shines down by night, there's no fort or camp so strong they can keep us out.

We run on wolf-paws faster than any horse. We're stronger than the buffalo, deadlier than the rattlesnake. We walk the spirit paths between this world and the next. We can't be killed by lead nor flint. We are the favored ones.

There's a storm thundering on the other side of the sunset, and there's something coming to eat it. It'll have to get through us first.

- From the Werewolf: The Wild West Rulebook -

Product Review

Hmmm. Someone appears to have fired a bullet through this one… or maybe, more reasonably, they drilled it before shipping Pretty weird, huh? The first thing that I noticed about this book was the weird ‘bullet’ hole through it, and it’s worn out wooden look. So, what is it? Werewolf: The Apocalypse in the Wild West? Vampires get the Dark Ages and Werewolves get Spaghetti Western? Well in a word, yes. But there’s a little more to it than that.

Werewolf: The Wild West is another setting for Werewolf: The Apocalypse, a game in which werewolves are not the monsters of legend and film, but a race of shape changers committed to saving the Earth from the ravages of a spiritual force called the Wyrm. This Wyrm has zillions of servitors and lesser spirits fighting on its side. Gaia, the Earth-Mother, has only the werewolves, or as they call themselves - Garou.

Think of the Wild Wild West movie with a Werewolf twist. You get all the excitement you saw in the movie and if you thought that was good (or a good idea anyway), then you’ll think this is great! Imagine a greedy Shadow Lord cattle baron. Imagine a sturdy Fianna Cowboy. Imagine a demented Bone Gnawer gold-digger. Or a tribe of Indians aided by a pack of fearsome Wendigo, who could literally blow San Francisco out of existence in a night of Rage.

And… of course, the Iron Riders. The first thing I had to check when I bought the book was if my favourite tribe (the Glass Walkers) from the original Werewolf game actually existed. And they sure did, only under a different name. The Iron Riders brought the dubious progress into the west, the railroads and telegraphs, the Pony Express and the stagecoaches.

Then you have the other supernatural elements. The satanic Sabbat (a.k.a. the Black Sabbath and possibly a tribute by White Wolf to the great British metal-band) roams the southern states and infests Mexico like flies and worms on a rotten corpse. The early technomancers play their games of utopian machines (again, remember Wild Wild West, and imagine it had been done well). Also, the Dreamspeaker shamans aid the Indian resistance, in the face of the cyclopean opposition. The enigmatic Nunnehi Faeries roam the still glamorous parts of the west. And the ghosts… don’t get me started…

As with all ‘creature: the evocative noun’ White Wolf games, Werewolf is set in the World of Darkness, a world that resembles our own and its history very closely, yet is darker, and tainted by the presence of supernatural creatures that consider humans mere cattle or mating folk. This game in particular deals with a darker history of America, and how the West was lost.

Garou, who are supposed to be brethren, spill the blood of each other, instead of slaying the viscous Wyrmspawn. The Fera or Bête (different shape-changers; were-felines for example) also stood their ground against the Wyrm, but were powerless, against the fierce werewolves and their manic blood-spilling Rage.

Now, the Garou Werewolves fight a losing war, where they have killed their only allies, and turned the remaining into unforgiving enemies. Gaia’s chosen also fight among themselves. At leas two of the tribes support the Native American cause, while two of the other tribes support the ‘white-man’. Then you have the Wyrm, and its servitor. One of them is the Storm-Eater, a powerful Wyrm spirit released by the arrival of the Europeans to the ‘pure lands’. This spirit is the Garou’s major enemy in this setting, and it’s never mentioned later because the tribes want to forget the shameful past and what they did at the time.

Another foe the Garou face in the “Wyld West” is the Enlightened Society of the Weeping Moon, a philanthropically minded group that resembles a Free-Masonic Lodge but is backed by the Wyrm. This group does a lot of good for humanity, but they also do everything they can to further the Wyrm’s cause, they also mysteriously disappear after the period.

So, what should your character do? He’s got plenty of enemies and very few allies. Well for a start, he has heaps of lead to use in the form of tiny metal slugs on the bodies of his enemies. Then, there are some cool new gifts and Rites, some of which were lost forever after the period. And, as always, there is Rage (raw werewolf anger to drive them on). As in the present, the Garou of the West have a difficult battle ahead of them, and they are at risk of losing their lives at any moment.

So, if you want to brave the moonless nights of the west, armed with a six-gun and a claw that can rip through a locomotive, if you want to toss your coin against destiny and fate, recklessly jumping into deadly fire-fights, and kill larger-than-life enemies, who seem to be just piling up at an exponential rate, then this is your kind of game. Good luck and be sure to take a lot of Wyrmspawn with you before they make you bite the Mojave Desert dust…

Reviewed by Matías Timm