One of my long-time players, Lucy, was a huge Werewolf fan, and so bought me a copy of Werewolf: The Dark Ages. At nearly two-hundred pages, it could have been a stand alone game in and of itself, but is instead presented as a "historical sourcebook". It, like most White Wolf products of the late 1990's, is detailed, character-driven, and includes both varied and excellent artwork.
It was chapter five, however, for which my friend really made such a gift: "How to use vampires in a Werewolf: The Dark Ages game, and vice versa". And with some finagling, we managed to bring her werewolf into our group of vampires with no immediate violence on either side. Indeed, looking back, I thank her even more for bringing some variation and inherent tension to our otherwise straightforward game.
While Lucy was more story-driven than myself, we both loved the mythos of the werewolf. However, unlike zombies and vampires, my understanding of werewolves is almost completely driven by film. Above and beyond all others, stands 1981's The Howling. As a child, I was terrified by the use of shadow and sound even more than the then-famous and groundbreaking transfomative effects. The introductory scene in the pornography theater in particular uses suggestion and mood as well as any Hitchcock film. My wife watched it for the first time recently, and I am excited to note that even now it carries a powerful horrifying effect on otherwise jaded horror fans.
I must thank my father, normally a very down-to-earth blue-collar famer-type, who both introduced and sustained my interest in werebeasts. It was he who, against objections from my mom, allowed me to watch The Howling with him in our cozy log cabin home of my childhood. It was he who made sure we sat together to watch the all too short-lived Werewolf TV series in 1987. And it is my dad, now, who picked the next book for our book club: Anne Rice's new The Wolf Gift. You see, even though I moved six hours away from my dad, we still communicate every Sunday night to talk about our weekly reading. What do we read? Mostly what others would consider classics such as Nostromo, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, and Cakes and Ale. However, over the years, we have also both developed a love for Stephen King, Dan Simmons, and Anne Rice.
Thanks, dad.
Below is an incomplete and barely begun, but heartfelt start to my Appendix W.
An American Werewolf in London (1981)
The Company of Wolves (1984)
Ginger Snaps (2000)
The Howling (1981)
The Company of Wolves (1984)
Ginger Snaps (2000)
The Howling (1981)
Werewolf (TV, 1987)
