Pyramid Pick
Ratkin, by Brian Campbell
Mokole, by Jim Comer
Published by White Wolf
136 pages for Mokole, 144 pages For Ratkin; $19.95 each
I really hate these books. Not that they're bad. Oh, no. If they were badly done, it would be easy. You could just look at them and go "Well, these suck."
Unfortunately, that's not the case. These books are actually very well done, and make the lycanthropic races they cover interesting. Which means the next time I decide I want to get a Werewolf game started, I'll once again have to deal with players asking, "Can I play an X (Bastet, Mokole, Ratkin, etc)?" and I'll have to say no. But I won't be able to say, "No, these character types are too briefly gone into in the Player's Guide to be run or GM'd properly."
Now I'll have to say, "No, you haven't bribed me sufficiently to be allowed to play an unusual character." I hate being honest.
Anyway, Mokole and Ratkin are the latest Breedbooks for Werewolf: The Apocalypse. The Breedbooks have succeeded in being very good sourcebooks and very good reads, even if the characters they describe are supposed to be rare as hen's teeth.
Ratkin does a great job of expanding the world of the Ratkin. For those unfamiliar with the Werewolf paradigm, each were-race has a duty bestowed upon them by Gaia, the Earth Mother. The duty of the Ratkin (for the terribly slow at home, Ratkin are wererats) is revealed to be population control. Human population control, in case you were wondering. How do they do it? Famine . . .
This article originally appeared in the second volume of Pyramid. See the current Pyramid website for more information.
Article publication date: February 18, 2000
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