Rage Against Capitalism: Pentex as a Werewolf Antagonist

If you've ever played a game of Werewolf: The Apocalypse, then you're already passingly familiar with a lot of the game's central themes and antagonists. For those who haven't, you are one of the garou, shape-shifting warriors who have fought on behalf of the Earth Mother Gaia since time immemorial. Once upon a time the three major powers of the world, the Wyld (representing nature), the Weaver (representing order) and the Wyrm (representing destruction) all existed in harmony. But the Weaver attempted to control the Wyrm, and the Wyrm has gone mad, rampaging across the world in an attempt to destroy everything. As Gaia's chosen you are the one who stands against the servants of the Wyrm and attempts to bring back balance... or at least prevent the apocalypse.

It's a really unique game, and perhaps one of my favorite parts of the World of Darkness setting... but there's also no other RPG I've played that has made it clear we all need to work together if we're going to stop capitalism from destroying the world.

Maybe the Red Talons had a few good ideas after all...

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Pentex: Capitalism As Antagonist

There are a lot of themes in Werewolf, but most of them can be boiled down to restoring the balance. Werewolves fight to stop the Wyrm from destroying everything, they struggle to maintain their Rage so it can be used against their foes without harming their loved ones, and they often have to balance between the physical and the spiritual worlds. There's the balance between pride in their actions, and the horror at the things they have to do, and attempting to hang onto themselves and their principles in the face of the yawning void that waits to swallow them up.

Pretty heavy stuff for a game about turning into a giant furry death machine and rolling handfuls of plastic dice.

So where does capitalism come into this?

Since Werewolf takes place in the World of Darkness setting, which is a grim modern fantasy, it was going to have to address capitalism sooner or later. And the game doesn't mince words when it comes to this financial system, either. Because at its core capitalism is about an imbalance of power, the impossibility of infinite growth, and reaping the planet for every penny that can be made. From dumping toxic waste into drinking water, to running child labor camps, to imprisoning people on meaningless offenses and stealing years of their lives just to turn profits, there is basically no corner dark enough that capitalism hasn't tried to turn a profit off of it. And though there are some aspects of the game that let you use the tools of capital to further your goals (the Corporate Wolves camp of the Glass Walkers, spirits like Easy Credit and Almighty Dollar, etc.), even characters who use these tools would be trying to use money, investment, etc., to oppose things like child labor, human trafficking, and environmental destruction rather than profiting off of them.

The game itself personifies the danger of capitalism as Pentex, a conglomeration of corporations that all share interests, and which are connected to each other by board members, mutual profits, love of money, and lack of scruples. And in a game that perfected the Ever Present Threat that can never truly be defeated once and for all in the form of the Wyrm, Pentex is a solid runner-up in terms of a villain. Because you can't kill a single CEO, blow up a particular construction site, or expose any one network of abuses and cover-ups to get rid of what Pentex represents... someone else will just step up tomorrow to try to do it again. The logo will be different, and the stationery has changed, but it's the same empty suits trying to finish the oil pipeline, restart the coal plant, sell you the toxic product, or get you to hand over your money in exchange for a false blessing from a mega pastor.

While a lot of STs are leery about using Pentex in their games, preferring to focus on the purely supernatural threats like vampires, Black Spiral Dancers, fomori, and corrupt spirits, this corporate villain works really well when it comes to defining the shape of the battlefield. Because Pentex is often a purely mortal threat, which can allow players to really cut loose and feel powerful as werewolves... but it also presents a lot of moral challenges to them. Do you use lethal force against the security guards, most of which are just working stiffs who need a job (any job) so they don't wind up on the street? Is the loss of the economic gain to the community created by destroying a dangerous project (coal mine, natural gas pipeline, fracking operation, etc.) going to affect their spirits just as badly as the pollution would affect their bodies? Can your message of balance, community bonds, and living in harmony counter generations of propaganda about how greed is good, money makes the world go round, and it's a dog-eat-dog world?

Though Pentex can (and often does) mix with elements of the supernatural from vampire investors and company officers, to mad scientists trying to mass produce supernatural templates, etc., it often represents a very mortal antagonist that is just as hard to defeat as any monster from myth. And that can often ground your game in ways that are hard to accomplish just fighting banes and fomori all the time.

Though The Written Material Often Falls Short of Reality

For those who haven't come across it, I recently put together my own supplement for STs who want to have their players go up against corporate interests. Evil Incorporated: 10 Pentex Subsidiaries was a particularly challenging piece for me to write because of a problem that I kept running into time and time again.

Namely that any time you end up trying to make some kind of super advanced monstrous version of capitalism, you just end up making something that already exists, or which has happened in the past. And trying to add vampires or Black Spiral Dancers into the mix just feels like you're working in metaphors to soften the blow, rather than letting the villain just be what they are; a stark testament to the atrocities that a lot of humans are willing to commit in the name of profit margins and personal gain.

The introductory story, dramatized over on the Azukail Games YouTube channel, says it all, really.

According to the soft canon, the idea that would become Pentex was born in the Texas oil fields sometime in the 1800s... but for those who are students of history, and are aware of the crimes of the East India Trading Company, Pentex can seem like a Johnny-come-lately. And while Pentex is often supposed to be this cartoonishly evil collection of villains that feel like something out of Captain Planet, is it really so unbelievable that people would poison huge swaths of the population or destroy the planet for money? That's no different than how cigarette companies fought for years to suppress widespread information about their products causing cancer, or how oil companies knew about global warming for decades and kept it wrapped up so they wouldn't lose money. Companies like Tesla and Apple have been accused of using child labor in their products, and the American military has been directed by corporate interests for decades to those familiar with the banana wars.

Hell, in my research for Can Large-Scale Telecommuting Save The Environment?, I found numbers that consistently said remote work increases corporate profits and productivity, increases worker morale, lowers overhead costs, and reduces emissions by millions of tons a year. But corporations are fighting tooth-and-nail to force people to come back to work in the middle of a pandemic, spending more money to be less efficient and to put their workers at-risk while making them more miserable. Why? Because the middle managers were exposed as mostly useless positions when they didn't have tiny fiefdoms of office workers to lord over, and pretend they were an asset to the company, and that loss of face (as well as the potential to cut positions that it turned out weren't necessary) was all it took to start the meat grinder up again.

So if you're going to run Pentex as part of your games, keep all of this in mind. Because it might feel close to home, but at the same time it might provide a unique catharsis that defeating a vampire lord or overcoming a great bane spirit simply won't.

More Werewolf Stuff, Anyone?

If Evil Incorporated is enough to get your mind going, I've got other stuff for an Apocalypse game you might find particularly useful. So if you're itching for shapeshifting stories, check these out too!

- 100 Garou Kinfolk Bundle: With over 1,500 NPCs (100 for each of the base tribes, plus 100 mokole' kin on top of that!) this will ensure that you're never lacking for support characters in your game.

- 100 Stargazer Kinfolk: The encore guide that came out after the bundle was set, this is for all the players and STs alike who want to bring this enigmatic tribe into your game... especially if these mystics intend to oppose what both capital and the state are trying to do to Gaia in their part of the world.

- Deadly Country: 100 NPCs of Central Florida: While a lot of these characters can be swapped around to other parts of the country, one might argue that there are few places in America more primed to be a stronghold of Pentex than Florida.

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