[Beast]Crossover

Beast: The Primordial

In previous updates, we’ve mentioned Kinship and the fact that the Children feel that the other creatures in the World of Darkness are their little brothers and sisters. That’s brought out some reaction, some of it receptive, some not, and I want to take a little time to talk about my intent in designing the game that way.

Crossover? Are you nuts?

Full disclosure: I love crossing the game lines. Always have. When I ran the classic World of Darkness and I started up a new chronicle, I’d also at least throw some consideration to what the “splats” from the other game lines were doing. If I was running Werewolf, the characters might never see a vampire, but I’d know who the Prince was (if any). If I was running Mage, I’d give a thought to the local Necropolis. When we started working on the new World of Darkness, I’ll state without any shame at all that I really pushed for a modular system whose core mechanics could port between game lines. After all, if a power is resisted by Resolve + Composure, well, everybody has that. Likewise, one of the original design principles of the new World of Darkness was that nothing was “canon.” We could establish a Bishop of Albuquerque in Rage Across the Southwest and then state that Albuquerque has been vampire-free for centuries in World of Darkness: Arizona, but because we weren’t building a huge interconnected world where things had to stay consistent, that was fine. Troupes could pick the version that worked for them.

Now, these principles haven’t been strictly adhered to, but so what. The core idea is still in place – the systems mesh, for the most part, but writers and developers have a bit more freedom to screw with the core assumptions. That allows us to have things like the Ocean of Fragments in Book of the Dead. That allows Mummy to present a view of ghosts that doesn’t quite mesh with much of the rest of the World of Darkness. That allows Arcadia to be different things in different games – or, if I’m the Storyteller, different things in the same game.

It all goes back to something that’s always been true about the World of Darkness and that I’m highlighting in Beast: There are no neat little boxes. The World of Darkness is a big, messy, complicated, weird place, and the Children embrace that. But, like every other character type, they do it from their own paradigm.

Children of the Dark Mother

Specifically, the Children feel that all (well, most) monsters are descended from the same parent they are – that vampires, werewolves, changelings and the rest are all descendants of the Dark Mother. Maybe “cousins” is more appropriate than “siblings,” but who wants to quibble genealogy? The way the Beasts see it, another monster is family, and that entitles them to at least roll up and say hi.

How do other creatures feel about that? It very much depends on the creature. Take werewolves, for example. They know the value of family – they’re divided into family units (pack, tribe, lodge). So if an Eshmaki comes up out of the shadows and approaches a pack of werewolves, do they have some common ground? Or are they immediately going to be suspicious of this shadowy thing, perhaps murderously so?

The mistake that we sometimes make as players and fans (and sometimes even writers and developers) of these games is thinking that any one particular thing “would” happen. The truth is, any number of things can happen, and it’s all down to what this pack is about, which, in turn, is subservient to what this game is about. You – your troupe – is in control of the assumptions that happen at your table. If you want to include a Beast in your Werewolf game, you can. It’s just a good idea to bring all the players on board with that idea, and make sure no one is playing an Uratha who would immediately try to throat the Beast character.

But Are the Beasts Right?

Who cares?

That’s more flip than I mean to be, but seriously, why does it matter? Those kinds of high-concept, heavy spiritual questions don’t get answered. No one in the World of Darkness knows. Lots of them believe, but then people believe things in the real world (sometimes hard enough to fight and kill over them) with less empirical evidence than anyone in the World of Darkness has.

So, are vampires distant cousins of the Begotten? Do the Principle and the God-Machine share some kind of weird common ancestry? Is Changeling-Arcadia the same place as Mage-Arcadia? Some of these questions seem to have “canon” answers, but those answers are only relevant insofar as they inform your World of Darkness (in mine, the answers are “maybe,” “yes,” and “yes”, respectively, but there’s a lot of nuance).

In designing Beast, I wanted to make a game that’s explicitly crossover-friendly. Yes, crossover isn’t for everyone, but the kind of sci-fi feel to Demon wasn’t for everyone, either. Ditto the kind of odd structure to Mummy, the humanity-focus of Promethean, the survivor focus of Changeling… all of the World of Darkness games have their particular focuses, and not all of them (not one of them, really) appeal universally. I’ve been doing this for a long time, though, and I can say with absolute certainty that I am not the only Storyteller out there who likes a little cross-pollination.

So, with that in mind, and in celebration of Werewolf: The Forsaken 2nd Edition now being available in hardcover POD, here’s an excerpt from Beast, in which we talk about crossing it with Werewolf. Enjoy.

Werewolf: The Forsaken

Creatures born of instinct, children of two worlds driven by an instinctual need to hunt, werewolves understand the Bestial mindset all too well. At the same time, they’re largely ill-equipped to understand Beasts themselves: perhaps driven by the concept of Harmony, the Uratha tend to see the world in terms of the dichotomy between “flesh” and “spirit.” While Beasts have a spiritual component to their existence, it’s not the same spirituality as the Shadow. A werewolf pack first encountering a Beast might well mistake her for one of the Claimed — a human overwhelmed and transformed by a spirit from the Shadow — and react accordingly. It’s an easy mistake to make, especially if the Beast is suffering from Hero-imposed weaknesses, which are easy to mistake for spirit bans or banes at first.

Family in the form of the pack is a strong theme running through Werewolf: The Forsaken, and one it shares with Beast. In an Uratha pack, a Beast finds the closest expression of Kinship outside her own kind. While a brood lacks the purity of purpose of the family she knows, a lone Uratha might find solace there. Individual characters in a crossover chronicle can build powerful stories about surrogate families and finding a place of acceptance.

Though they aren’t connected to the Shadow in the same way werewolves are, Beasts cannot help but warp the world on the other side of the Gauntlet by their mere presence. In sating their Hungers, Beasts spawn innumerable spirits: things of greed and destruction, dominance and submission, and fear. Always fear. Just by existing, Beasts create ripples in the Shadow; as their Souls run wild through the Primordial Dream, the nightmares they leave in their wake seem to follow no vector the Uratha understand. A pack’s first encounter with a Beast is likely to be fraught with misunderstanding and violence; just as a Beast’s Lair resembles some strange incursion from the Shadow, a pack’s assault is easy to mistake for the arrival of a band of Heroes — at least until the fur and the claws come out.