Werewolf: The Apocalypse
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Generally commonly thought of as "Furry Captain Planet," Werewolf: The Apocalypse was one of the flagship games of the Old World of Darkness. It is also, alongside Mage: The Ascension, generally regarded as a good game with good ideas near-fatally hamstrung by its paradoxically-immature obsession with trying to be "mature," "gritty," and "punk."
Pretentious Metaplot
Once upon a time there was Gaia. She created servants to create the Universe. The Wyld was raw creation, the Weaver shaped creation into higher forms of being, and the Wyrm destroyed the leftover bits so the Wyld could keep creating. Only one day, the Weaver got tired of the Wyrm destroying, so it imprisoned the Wyrm. The Wyrm went insane.
So, Gaia creates lots of werecritters to keep the planet in balance: Werebears to heal, weredinos to remember, wereboars to clean up corruption, blahblah. Typical to early WW plot writing, you're first told that only the wolves, the Garou, are the warriors, and they got the idea to lord over everyone else because of that. Later you find out that they were born to be the teachers, and because "Daddy knows best", they tried to rule over everyone else. This went about as well as can be expected, especially when one of the shapechanger races is a dedicated assassin role. In any case, the fight between the shapchangers, the War of Rage, more or less destroyed the werecreatures in terms of their being a direct power over mankind. Though not before they'd already undergone the Impergium, a genocidal "mass culling" of humans so extensive that it instilled the fear of werecritters into mankind's collective memory, which is how they avoided being wiped out completely once they shattered their power fighting each other.
tl;dr: into the future. The Garou have been derping around, while a mix of mutant humans, evil werewoofs, and a giant captain-planetesque megacorp called Pentex have been destroying the world...for the Wyrm of course. Gaia is dying. Are you a bad enough wolf to save her? The race of Garou is fading. Are you smart enough to stop it? Corruption is spreading everywhere. Are you quick enough to staunch the flow?
rtl;fi: It's WW's standard plot of "Your group is losing the war, so whatchu goin' tah do abou' it, bitch?" with otherkin.
Although it has its zealous defenders, Apocalypse is generally the game most commonly held up alongside Mage: The Ascension as one of the games that people actually liked and played that was most hobbled by the flaws of the Old World of Darkness. (Shit like Wraith and Mummy are disqualified by default because no one ever actually played them.) Ascension at least has the "defense" that its bad guys are actually pretty playable, if not more so than the heroes. Apocalypse attracts the not unwarranted complaints that, in trying to make everything as grimdark as possible, there's no real point in playing, as everyone are a bunch of dickheads perpetuating a vicious cycle in a world not worth saving. Later games tried to focus a little more on how things might be made better instead of ranting hatefully about how awful things are now, but it was too little too late, and the gameline eventually died. At least its Time of Judgement scenarios were universally pretty good, which isn't something every gameline in the OWOD can say. Those random aliens or equally random evil cabal of super-Nephandi in Mage anyone?
Characters
Each character can be described fairly quickly with their Breed, Auspice, and Tribe (described below). Each of these has their stereotypes, and even characters that deviate from the norms usually stay fairly similar to what you'd expect.
Werewolves have a Rank, shoehorning a character level system into Whitewolf's entirely point buy experience system. Rank has a lot of mechanical benefits, and can be used as a way to measure the relative strength of a werewolf in the same manner as the generation statistic of a vampire. Rank is a socially earned, in character statistic that comes with bunch of mechanical benefits. You gain reputation in werewolf society through your actions, measured mechanically as Glory, Honor, and Wisdom renown. So now you have four types of exp to keep track of.
Breeds
Breed refers to the natural state of a werewolf. Some Garou are 'normally' in human shape, and others not. Werewolves that are sleeping or unconscious always revert to their breed form. Their breed form is the shape they are born in, and are stuck in while they grow up.
Homid: The result of hot human-werewolf fucking. These are almost always the typical player choice. Homid werewolves grew up as regular members of humanity, because apparently the Garou can't keep track of all their kids, and even if they did, most of them don't turn out to be werewolves. Instead, they wait for the kids to go through their first change, inevitably slaughtering their schoolmates, high school sweetheart, best friends, family, or whomever they happen to be around at the time. Remember, this is White Wolf so letting humans know you exist is like, some huge fucking deal... Unless it's a bunch of ticking timebombs you've left scattered through the world because as a dying race it's your duty to not keep it in your pants.
Later on, they rewrote things so that they are mostly the descendants of Kinfolk families who try to ready them for the job ahead, an improvement so great that they went on to completely drop it for the sequel in the NWOD. Herp.
Metis: When two werewolves love each other very much... they end up pretty much fucked. Garou society forbids werewolves to breed with each other. In some tribes or groups the punishment is a harsh shunning, and in others it can be outright death, with bonus babymurder. The reason is, apparently werewolves are so fucking awesome and perfect, that these children are born horribly deformed because of to much concentrated greatness. These children are born in the half-man, half-wolf, half-knife-factory-inna-tornado warform known as Crinos. Fully grown werewolves in the Crinos shape stand up to ten feet tall, so a baby starts out pretty fucking big. On top of that, they almost always kill their mother as they flip shit and tear their way out of the womb. Lovely.
Metis make good warriors though, as long as the fight isn't in the streets of some human city. Even though they're supposed to be anathema, more and more are being produced as the world heads into the end times. There's even some groups of werewolves locked up in a constant baby-pumping orgy, trying to increase their numbers for the last battle of the apocalypse. Too bad all Metis are infertile mules. Being a metis gives a PC some raw hitting power, but it also gives them a boatload of social disadvantages and at least one horrible deformity. While they aren't necessarily intrinsically evil, so many metis get treated like shit that they end up falling to the Wyrm anyway, a vicious cycle that, hitting a major theme of the gameline, almost none of the garou have learned anything from in thousands of fucking years.
Lupis: Werewolf fucks a regular wolf. It should be noted that the werewolf could easily be one of the Homid breeds, so you can enjoy the great role-playing opportunities present in a horrifyingly detailed bestiality scene. Thanks, White Wolf. Lupis are born as wolves, and live as such until they change. Even then, while they can take human shape and they aren't as dumb as a typical animal, they're still very wolf-like in thought. This breed is a furry's wet dream inside a game that's already a furry's wet dream. Hell, this is actually more than even most furries can take; Lupis basically appeal to "ferals", a tiny niche of furrydom that even other fucking furries think is messed up and wishes would crawl away and die somewhere. There are ways to make it less horrifying (Lupis mating with wolves often point out that, being natural wolves, they should be attracted to wolves rather than humans), but so many writers did so many stupid things with the idea in failed attempts to be "edgy" and "punk" that at least one later writer derisively called Apocalypse "The game of FUCK THIS WOLF OR GAIA WILL DIIIIIIIIIE!!!"
Kinfolk: Most werewolf-human couplings don't actually result in werewolf children, but their human kids are still kinfolk. Kinfolk are basically normal humans who are immune to the werewolves' "delirium" power that makes them hard to remember. Tribes keep them around because having kids with kinfolk is much more likely to produce werewolf children. The full unfortunate implications of this have been milked for all they're worth across countless splats, but here's the gist of it: some kinfolk-garou couples are good matches between people who love each other, despite the tension between the garou lifestyle and living a normal life. Some garou are assholes about the whole deal, believing that sexing up any kinfolk they want whenever they want is their "right," and that kinfolk should be grateful to make babies all their lives. And most of them fall somewhere in-between, with garou family members who try to be good to their kinfolk but fail to keep their Rage in check around the people they love, leading to tragedy all around. Mistreatment of kinfolk has led many to fall to the Wyrm, or to murder their Garou kin to become skinwalkers, Wyrm-tainted abominations with many werewolf powers and a terrible desire for revenge.
Playable kinfolk are basically the game in hardcore mode, since you're essentially a normal person fighting shit that can kill a garou in warform. There's a reason that a lot of Tribes are leery of cavalierly throwing kinfolk into the fray, since they know that many of them, maybe even most of them, will never return.
Lupis kinfolk exist, but fuck you if you want to play one. At least a human kinfolk can carry damn weapons and armor.
Tribes
There are Thirteen Tribes of Garou, each with their own sort of culture and views of the world. There used to be more, but a whole lot of them got ganked by the others.
Black Furies: A tribe of all-women, save for their male Metis and Kinfolk. Think Amazon-style Matriarchy, and add in the proud warrior culture of the Greeks, and dash in some modern feminism for spice. Very attuned to the workings of the Wyld, but the North American camp helped bring about Seneca Falls and get women the vote. Somewhat unfairly seen as a big ol' bunch of butch lesbians, even in their own tribebook. Quote: "Shit, bitch, we're not all dykes." One of the few tribes to have actually seen a little social progress in the last few centuries (I mean, they don't even ritualistically sacrifice their male kids anymore, mostly), but their primary weakness is still a tendency to go off half-cocked at men. The first in a long line of bad, stereotypical ideas to be mostly fixed as the new editions and revisions rolled on: their first draft were a bunch of violent, bitchy dykes on a sacred quest to castrate all men.
Bone Gnawers: The rats of the city. Homeless and destitute, this tribe fights the Wyrm down in the alleys, gutters, and slums. Notable for being excellent spies and assassins within the cities. Covers both extremes of impoverished urban dwellers, from the cool, wise old homeless woman who dispenses sage advice to young runaways to the crazy man living in a box who won't stop stabbing cats while screaming at passerby about the mind-control chemicals Pentex puts into their soda.
Bunyip: The last of the three Lost Tribes to be wiped out, but alphabetically the first. These were the Garou who hailed from Austrailia, and mostly had were-Tasmanian-tiger forms rather than wolf ones. They were the most peaceful and bro-tier of all Tribes in their heyday. Unfortunately, the were-spiders got the Aboriginies to hunt them until they didn't have a viable breeding pool left, before their cousins in the whiter tribes wiped them out to take their land, something everyone now regrets. And not just because their vengeful spirits hunt down any werewolves and werespiders in the Australian spirit world like slasher-movie monsters. That said, they've gotten a little love later on. The Wild West spin-off practically made a tradition out of finding bizarre ways to have Bunyip characters end up in the American wilderness to adventure with the other tribes, and while no experiments have yet been successful, the more technologically-minded Tribes are trying to re-create them via cloning.
Children of Gaia: The only Tribe to have been founded on an act of peace. Their goal is to unite the Garou Nation and prevent infighting, something which is both incredibly logical, given the oncoming end of the world and all, and damn near impossible given the squabbling children running all the other Tribes. Though they do focus on peaceful resolution, they aren't all granola-munching hippies and weak fighters. Mechanically their stats support them being one of the hardest "non-warrior tribes" to kill in Anhous form, and they often act as bodyguards for great peacemakers like Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela. Since they were one of the only tribes to not need lots of stupid stereotypical shit cleaned up for the first big revision, they, naturally, actually get worse in their revised tribebook. Avoid it like the plague.
Croatan: Another of the three Lost Tribes of Garou, the Croatan were very much the middle ground between the Uktena and Wendigo ideologies. They were spiritual followers of the totem "Turtle" and were known to be a stalwart and enduring people with a good measure of wisdom and (like all Tribes) a warrior culture. Unfortunately, the titanic disease-fest that was the Columbian Exchange actually summoned Eater-of-Souls, part of the Triat Wyrm, into the physical world, and every single one of them, from the mightiest werewolf to the lowest kinfolk, selflessly sacrificed themselves, body and soul, to banish it back into the Umbra. This is the origin of the major rift between the Native American Tribes and the white ones, with their native brothers ignoring the fact that the Croatan (history lesson!) had interbred with white settlers in a bid for integration, and the great sacrifice at Roanoke, Virginia involved Europeans too! There might be one left, outside of time, but the tribe as a whole is just gone, souls and all.
Fianna: Very, very old-tyme Irish. A very proud tribe that celebrates their victories the most fervently, and mourns their losses the most keenly. Great storytellers and fighters alike, they are also a bit bigoted and backward from the views of much of the rest of the Garou Nation, about women, minorities, consent laws, sobriety, you get the picture. For example, they are simultaneously the most discriminatory towards their Metis and the most likely to create more of them due to their lax sexual mores. Get along pretty well with Fae, which is unfortunate because of the tonal differences between this one and Changeling: The Dreaming. There was a bunch of truly tasteless stuff tying their history to the Troubles that the W20 crew, in their ongoing quest to purge this poor game of all the bad ideas dragging it down, killed with fire and then apologized for.
Get of Fenris: Essentially Germanic-Viking Werewolves. Abhor weakness and glorify martial prowess above all else. The Get are perceived to be bigoted against women and Metis, though this is untrue; they are only bigoted against those whom they perceive as weak. Mind, they used to be bigoted against those groups because they knee-jerk assumed they were all weak, but they mostly sorted that out after the bloody purge of that group of renegade Get that are literally Nazis. That swastika on their logo? It did represent the superiority of one race over another, just in terms of wolf over man before the Nazis stole it. Much as you'd expect, most of the old bigoted attitudes were in early editions of White Wolf's books. Revised Edition works and forward into W20 have not kept much of the attitude of bigotry, and have down-played the camps that are powerful proponents of it such as the Swords of Heimdall. Because White Wolf isn't so dumb as to not eventually realize when they've been racist twits.
Glass Walkers: Where the Bone Gnawers take the lower parts of cities, the Glass Walkers take the high life. They have an affinity for technology and are the Garou Nation's most prominent force in the business world. All the more-Luddite factions think they're hopelessly corrupted by the Weaver but the Time of Judgement scenario where the Weaver takes center stage as the main villain outright denies it: quite apart from their being careful with that sort of thing, it'd be too obvious. The Tribes' number one source of wolf-gunfighters and warriors who travel to the spirit plane of the Internet to punch out computer viruses and malware. Easily the most optimistic tribe, since they actually believe that time is making them stronger, and they've mostly purged all the crazy transhumanists and stereotypical gangsters.
Red Talons: A tribe of only Wolf-born lupus Garou, as they aren't particularly fond of mankind and believe it is the cause of basically every Wyrm-related problem. Some of them eat people, almost all of them want to exterminate us down to pre-Stone Age levels of population, and all of them are angry jerks about it. So notoriously difficult to work with that they've become a common source of in-Tribe villains for Storytellers and are the most commonly-banned Tribe. Wanting to play one without a really good concept automatically makes you That Guy. It's telling that their Forsaken counterparts, the Predator Kings, actually are straight-up villains.
Shadow Lords: Political masterminds and douche-bags extraordinaire. Their European branch is very Russian, and their Asian branch is very Japanese. Manipulative control freaks, but surprisingly decent to their Kinfolk and generally okay guys once you get to know them. While they chafe a little at the Silver Fangs' leadership, they have agreed to loyally serve them so long as they are fit to rule. It's a pity, then, that the last few of the Fangs' High Kings have been crazy, inbred, incompetent assholes, and the Shadow Lords were considering a coup for a while there. But now the current Silver Fang High King, Jonas Albrecht of House Wyrmfoe, son of Jacob Morningkill, who -was- one of those douchebags, has earned their respect, and only the Lords of the Summit splinter faction is still on about it.
Silent Striders: Travelers and tale-tellers, they were forced from their homelands in Egypt by an ancient and powerful Vampire, who cursed them to never be able to truly rest or settle down with friends and loved ones until they're about to die. They have since become rootless wanderers, but they've learned every trick in the book when it comes to taking shortcuts through the spirit world and they're the recognized authority on Vamp killing. Very disorganized, but their nature makes them ideal messengers, and all that time in the spirit world makes them masters of communicating with ghosts and the dead.
Silver Fangs: The natural hereditary leaders of the Garou Nation. Unfortunately, many have been driven insane by the centuries of inbreeding to keep line "pure" and/or an ancient curse from a powerful demon, depending on your edition. Very proud and stringent followers of tradition, though as the metaplot progressed a new, non-crazy, energetic young king, the aforementioned Jonas Albrecht, started reforming the fuck out of them and bringing the Fangs around to actually do shit. Not a bad last gasp before the end.
Stargazers: Basically Buddhist monks, complete with their own shapeshifting martial art and calm mindset compared to their brethren. By far the most difficult tribe to roleplay, and so light on actual interesting stuff compared to the others that the new edition literally saw them leaving the Garou Nation to join the Beast Courts.
Uktena: Spirits and secrets are their game. One of the two remaining "Pure" Native American-based tribes, though they're (usually) much more reasonable about it than the Wendigo and have been incorporating traditional "indigenous" tribes from all over the world. They practice a dangerous art of trapping wrym-spirits for shits and giggles, and while they play the race card less often than the Wendigo, they're still up in arms about cities all the time.
Wendigo: Anger, ice, and a warrior culture, the Wendigo of the frozen north are the second surviving "Pure" Tribe, and are far less tolerant of the others than the Uktena. Tough, fierce, and masters of ambush tactics, but also given to cultural posturing and playing misery poker with the whiter Tribes, while studiously pretending no Native Americans ever did anything wrong before Columbus. (Originally, they were right, but see above regarding fixing racist shit.) There's this one Time of Judgement scenario where they infiltrate an nuclear submarine through the Umbra and try to kill millions of whites over a cop shooting Native American protesters - before the Wyrm corrupts them!
White Howlers: The former proud ancestral Tribe of Scotland, last both alphabetically and because they are the Lost Tribe that isn't quite lost enough for comfort. During the height of the Garou's power and decadence, the White Howlers discovered the huge and appropriately-ominously-named Black Spiral Labyrinth right smack dab in the heart of their lands. Due to a combination of the Tribes' then-crazy state of competition and backstabbery and their own hubris, they decided to invade the place. Not the best idea in the world. They became the Black Spiral Dancers, evil parodies of Garou twisted and mutated into servants of the Wyrm, Chaos-style, and some of the modern Nation's deadliest adversaries. Responses to one guy wanting to play "the last of the White Howlers" were once met with beast-like shrieks of rage from the development team and in-book rants about its impossibility, but the 20th anniversary edition included an admission that they'd maybe been a little hard on the poor would-be special snowflakes and a little sidebar about how best to do it.
Edition Shift
With the shift from the Old World of Darkness to the New World of Darkness, WtA went out and was replaced by Werewolf: The Forsaken.
Now, edition shifts in general catch a lot of flak, and the NWoD is notorious for the amount it initially took, but WtA fans are particularly belligerent about the creation of Forsaken. Why? In general, two reasons.
Firstly, the fluff. WtF abandoned the bloody-handed green-party morals of its predecessor, changing the fluff from "you are avenging angels of the tormented, dying spirit of the Earth" to "you are the bastard children of the mad goddess of the moon, working to atone for divine patricide by serving as the Border Patrol between Earth and Animistic Hell." Whether the new idea was good is immaterial, because it was so very different from what came before.
Secondly, the crunch - Forsaken are a lot weaker than Garou. Partially this is due to the difference between editions, which nerfed all supernaturals in comparison to how they dominated humans before. However, whereas Garou were the meanest bitches on the block in the OWoD (assuming a mage didn't get the first shot in, because mages will pretty much pub-stomp any other super if they do). There are well-documented stories of lone Garou downing whole coteries of Kindred singlehanded, as the invincible boss in Bloodlines showed. Forsaken are... well, not. They're deadly pack-hunters, but one on one, they're not the nastiest supernatural splats. Mummies and Prometheans are better at tanking damage than Forsaken are, just for starters.
Revival
Werewolf: the Apocalypse has recently seen a revival of sorts, with Onyx Path publishing taking up the task of printing "Werewolf: 20th Anniversary Edition" or "W20," a re-revised edition of Werewolf that ties a lot of the otherwise spread-out information of the earlier editions into one core book. While it does have its supplements, it is far more capable of standing alone than the previous editions. Much of the contradictory nature has been removed from the rules, and minor changes have been made to the mechanics of the game for enhanced game-play. Plus, most of the worst problems of story and setting from old editions have been slowly and systemically excised as new books for it came out. Perhaps paradoxically, if one wants to get into Apocalypse, now might actually be a better time.
In addition, there has also been work done on a new version of the Apocalypse LARP (Formerly "Apocalypse" by Mind's Eye Theater, under the title "Laws of the Wild") This new version is being made by By Night Studios and Onyx Path Publishing publishing with consent from White Wolf, and in LARP "lingo" is usually referred to as "BNS Werewolf." Early play-testing has shown a dramatic shift away from the original stories of the Garou to a semi post-apocalyptic setting wherein many of the Tribes are far different from their original incarnations. ((Source: BNS Werewolf Alpha Slice: Bone Gnawers and Get of Fenris play test.))
In addition to a departure from the original stories, the world (so far) has seen a huge revision in the mechanics, such as an entire restructure of the Gift system (including all new gifts, and the removal of the formerly known ones,) and the Rage system (which as currently proposed, Rage no longer gives Garou the risk of going berserk from anything but direct, extended, unchecked combat... though they have options to take actions or use gifts to reduce their "current" rage, which is now based on a "sliding scale" rather than a permanent number granted to a Garou by their Auspice.) BNS Werewolf has found mixed reviews thus far, but it is expected it will find success, following in the trend set by White Wolf's earlier attempt at a conversion, BNS Masquerade.