Pluses: a much cleaner system allowing for more intuitive character creation and play. Minuses: background material that effectively nails werewolves' feet to a small location. And a world where everything is hostile, begging the question of why the Forsaken even continue to exist. ( )

This is the main source book for White Wolfs RPG Werewolf the Forsaken. It expands the base rule book World of Darkness to include the Forsaken, a race of werewolves that try to keep the physical and spiritual world in balance.

Overall, a fairly interesting book and game mechanics. It is a lot more dark and 'hopeless' than the game it replaced "Werewolf the Apocalypse", but it is well written and very well thought out and put together. If you like playing the supernatural and want to try out having a killing machine inside that can override your better instincts or jump to the fore when you're in trouble this is the game for you. ( )

After the pleasant surprise that was Vampire: The Requiem, I had high hopes for Werewolf: The Forsaken, White Wolf's loup-garou entry for the new edition of the World of Darkness game. But while this Werewolf has laudable improvements to the nuts-and-bolts of shapeshifting, raging, and pack politics, I find myself disappointed that the underlying assumptions haven't changed enough.

The Forsaken's werewolves are fallen guardians, avenging spirits trapped in mutable flesh. They take out their aggression on malign spirits who overstep their bounds in the real world, thus protecting humans who nevertheless fear and reject them. The wyrm-weaver-wyld vs. Gaia tension of the previous edition is gone, but unlike the deletion of the Camarilla/Sabbat/Antediluvian metaplot from Vampire, this move hasn't made the format of the game feel freer to me-- just less urgent.

I think my complaint against Werewolf has always been that where vampires are made, werewolves are born, thus nudging campaigns quite strongly in one direction. What would a Werewolf game have looked like without the complication of the real world/spirit world duality? If lycanthropy were a curse one suffered, rather than received? Making the spirit-guardian werewolves merely one option out of many would have been a welcome change. ( )