History TabletopGame / WerewolfTheApocalypse

...except that it is already too late. Your ancestors screwed up too badly. The enemy is too strong. [[WeAREStrugglingTogether You can't stop fighting with your allies]]. And [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin the titular Apocalypse is inevitable]]. Only the heroes of mythic proportions can have any hope of limiting it to merely TheEndOfTheWorldAsWeKnowIt instead of annihilation of all existence. But no matter how dim your chances of victory you must fight on, and therein lies the game.

->''[[{{Film/Trainspotting}} Choose no life. Choose no career. Choose to live at the Caern. Choose a totem. Choose a fucking big klaive, choose breeder banes the size of washing machines, Black Spiral Dancers, weaver spiders and corrupted naturae spirits. Choose no sleep, high rage and mental instability. Choose between dedicating jeans or boots. Choose no friends. Choose challenging a Sept elder for your fucking right to exist. Choose the Umbra and wondering why the fuck you are slogging through arse deep Wyrm toxins on a sunny morning. Choose walking through a Scab looking at brain dead, spirit-stunted homids, fisting fucking junk food into their mouths. Choose being butchered to pieces at the end of it all, giving your last in some miserable Wyrmhole, nothing more than a legend to the selfish, fucked-up, Weaver-ridden spawn replacing the beloved defenders of Gaia. Choose your future. Choose to Rage.]]''

** Werewolves themselves use it as well. Their finest and most legendary weapons are Klaives, essentially silver swords with a spirit of war bound to them. They're mostly used for dealing with the Black Spiral Dancers, but do come out unfortunately often when Garou duel over grave insults or positions of leadership. Certain tribes have other silver weapons, the best-known of them being [[DropTheHammer hammers]] for the Get of Fenris and Labrys (double-headed axes) for the Black Furies, but there's also the african Hakarr, a hunga-munga or throwing iron (well, silver) that is used by Bastet.

** Also zig-zagged in the revised Silver Fang tribebook. A Silver Fang lore-keeper claims that humans are "a dream of Gaia's given life before their time, a premature birth, and so are not fully formed, lacking fur, claws, sharp teeth, or anything with which to thrive in the wild." Ancient humans allegedly crawled out of Gaia's womb while she slept, before she could give them a full array of attributed. Under the Weaver's patronage, however, humans unknowingly created technology spirits and dominated the planet through technology.

-->'''Pavel:''' It is continually amazing to me that the worst foes we ever have to fight are not Wyrmspwan, but rather human beings themselves.

** In a [[DownplayedTrope downplayed]] example the Garou refer to all other werecreatures as "Fera," a term they don't consider insulting but implies that the Garou are uniquely important and the rest can be clumped together under a single heading, something only the Garou believe. The others tend to use the term Changing Breeds" to refer to all werecreatures, including the Garou.

** Ratkin (wererats) want to exterminate most of humanity, werewolves (With Bone Gnawers being slightly more tolerated due to having Rat as their totem), and everyone who objects; and for Ananasi werespiders and Nagah weresnakes "Better Than You" is not only their motto, but their way of life. Such sentiments exist all around, it's just that the non-wolf shifters lack the power to really act on them.

** Werewolves have a wealth of derogatory terms for their enemies and even their own breeds. "Leeches" for vampires is perhaps the most famous. Other shapeshifters, due to the above genocidal wars and FantasicRacism, tend to call Garou "dogs."

* PlanetOfHats: How the Changing Breeds were deliberately made. The Garou are all warriors because Gaia created their entite species to be warriors. The Gurahl are all healers because that's what they were created to be an so on. There is variation, different Garou approach being warriors in different ways (say one being TheBerserker, another being a MagicKnight and a third being a ColdSniper) and nothing says they can't have interests outside of fighting as well but they are all warriors.

** As with most of the Old World of Darkness first editions there was a lot of BeenThereShapedHistory and BeethovenWasAnAlienSpy with many major historical figure or movement being attributed to an appropriate Garou tribe. While this didn't go away entirely the Revised Edition cut way back on this, with most of human history being ''human'' history with the Garou sometimes taking advantage of it but generally focused on their own struggles rather than what the humans were getting up to. Several Revised Tribebooks even have tribal elders warning young werewolves not to get involved with human politics if they can avoid it as it's usually none of their business.

** The Shadow Lords have darkness in their very name, often affect a rather Dark Lord" like image and are known for being secretive, manipulative and power hungry. They have had more than their fair share of selfish would-be tyrants but most of the tribe genuinely sees their manipulations in terms of trying to achieve the best results to save the world. In at least two scenarios in the "Apocalypse" book the Shadow Lords de facto ruler, Margrave Yuri Konietzko, is one of the leaders or ''the'' leader of the Garou in the final battle.

* BlandNameProduct: Pentex's subsidiary companies are often this, O'Tolley's for MacDonald's, Endron for Enron and so on. Amusingly this included Black Dog Game Factory, [[SelfDeprecation a parody of White Wolf itself.]]

The second tabletop roleplaying game in the classic [[TabletopGame/OldWorldOfDarkness World of Darkness]] line and the second or third most popular. First published in 1992, it was initially supposed to exist in the same universe as its predecessor, ''TabletopGame/VampireTheMasquerade'', but their vastly incompatible cosmologies, histories and themes were among major factors that forced authors to make crossovers between the TabletopGame/OldWorldOfDarkness games entirely optional. In the morally-gray area that was the World of Darkness, ''Werewolf'''s protagonist faction (the Garou Nation) was one of the more outright heroic--after all, fighting to save the world from the corrupted personification of entropy is difficult to put a negative spin on. Even so, they are still very often monsters in their own right.

* AdaptationalHeroism: The Red Talons' fanaticism was massively toned down for the 20th Anniversary edition. They're still exclusively Lupus with a hatred of cities, but the "All apes must die!" faction is now a stark minority within the tribe, and one that's considered foolish at best by other Red Talons. This change was necessary because they were by far the least popular of the Tribes, and many storytellers forbade them as player characters because they were all but impossible to integrate into a Homid-centric campaign.

** The Shadow Lords have darkness in their very name, often affect a rather Dark Lord" like image and are known for being secretive, manipulative and power hungry. They have had more than their fair share of selfish would-be tyrants but most of the tribe genuinely sees their manipulations in terms of trying to achieve the best results to save the world. In at least two scenarios in the "Apocalypse" book the Shadow Lords de facto leader, Margrave Yuri Konietzko, is one of or ''the'' leaders of the Garou in the final battle.