Choose Your Ground

Open Development, Werewolf: The Forsaken

I promised Hunting Grounds last week, and I’d be remiss to break that promise. Let’s get on with it!

Hunting Grounds are a chance to take a look through a werewolf’s eyes at specific parts of the world. Each one takes a location and uses it to present not just a place or an idea, but a combination of the two. As a designer, they’re ways to show off different themes present in the game, and different modes they could run in. One area might have a pack of Wolf-Blooded and humans alone, set out to prove that they’re just as good at the Siskur-Dah as werewolves. Another shows a truce between Forsaken and Pure, a third shows what happens when tribe is just another label rather than a core part of a character’s philosophy. A fourth has a large Lodge of Ghost Wolves who would be a tribe.

As we did in Blood & Smoke, the Idigam Chronicle is going arond the world. Last I checked, we have two locations in the USA, three in Europe, one in the Middle East, one in Japan, and one in Australia. I’m really glad that we’ve managed to get such a broad range into the book, especially because the writers have significantly more experience of the areas involved than “looked it up on Wikipedia.”

On a strictly prosaic level, Hunting Grounds are a straight-up start of a game. Want to run a story involving tense relations between a powerful union of Uratha, a demented spirit-goddess, and an idigam? Set the story in Bristol. Want a story about werewolves that eschew tribal differences and hunt humans walking the Shadow? Set it in Tokyo. They’re an instant starting point, each one poised at a great spot for the characters to leap in and change things. And if none of them grab you, they’re still in the book as inspiration for what you might do yourself. Pick a place that interests you and some part of Werewolf that you want to explore, and go nuts. Try to get a feel for the place. Go on Google Maps and do some street-view tours so you can get a sense of how a given place is like what you expect, and how it isn’t — Florida houses aren’t renowned for their deep and spacious basements, after all. Ask on our forums for interesting local flavour, but keep it at just flavour. You’re trying to convey the sense of a place, so you don’t need to get bogged down in specific details.

Just remember, whatever events you come up around the werewolf population only holds until the characters get involved. They may not change the world on a daily basis, but they will change the small part of it they live in. They might make an alliance with the Three River Pack or really piss off the Few Against Many. How will that change their relationship with the other packs around them? If they anger or kill the spirit of a river, then every pack close to the river will want to know why — or maybe the spirit was a complete tool and those packs were helping out.

Here’s a draft of one of the Hunting Grounds, set around the MacDonnell Ranges in Australia, so you can see what I’m getting at.

Speaking of getting a sense of location, I don’t think anyone does it finer than George Gershwin. While the Rhapsody in Blue is supposedly about all of the USA, so much of it acts as a musical description of New York City specifically. This recording of a performance by the London Symphony Orchestra is one of the best. The André Previn touch certainly doesn’t hurt.

I don’t know what to talk about in two weeks’ time, so as promised I’m opening the floor. Ask me a question (ideally about the Idigam Chronicle) and I’ll answer it. Alternatively, you can suggest a post topic for the future. I’ll go through them all when I start the next Forsaken Friday and there we go. I will be weighting popular questions/topics. Here’s how this will work:

Check to see if your topic/question or something similar is already suggested.

If not , leave a comment with your suggestion in bold — if you’re not sure how to do that, copy-paste this in to the comments: <strong> Question goes here </strong>

, leave a comment with your suggestion in bold — if you’re not sure how to do that, copy-paste this in to the comments: <strong> Question goes here </strong> If so, reply to that comment with something along the lines of “+1”, “I’d like to see this”, “I’ll buy you a pint if you answer this one”, or similar.

I may not answer some questions even though they’re really popular. That might be because I don’t know myself, I can’t talk about the answer, or one of myriad other reasons. But I’m not going to shoot down a good suggestion. If we get questions rather than topics, I’ll try to answer two or three at a time, deal?