As many readers know, for the past year and change I've been working with High Level Games on a project I call simply 100 Kinfolk. The idea was to take the core Gaian garou tribes in
Werewolf: The Apocalypse (plus the Black Spiral Dancers as a bonus), and to create a short, simple list of 100 kinfolk per tribe. That way STs would have ready-made lists of allies who could do everything from provide cover fire, to help hacking into the enemy data base, and players could read through the list to find inspiration for their character's background, family, friends, etc.
And, as I said last July in
100 Kinfolk: A Werewolf The Apocalypse Project, one of the goals of this project was to provide support for aspects that are often sorely lacking in a lot of classic World of Darkness projects; diversity, acceptance, and characters who have support systems, driving goals, and healthy coping mechanisms... for the most part, anyway.
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| This is still Werewolf, after all. |
I started getting excited recently, because several of the installments in this collection have been passing Copper status, and they've been seeing some surges in popularity. They're also getting generally positive reviews. However, in one of the reviews I saw something that I want to address, because I feel that the individual who left the following block of text in their review on the 100 Fianna Kinfolk seems to have completely missed the forest for the trees.
"A solid suplement, very useful among many others. It gives STs a
chance to focus on a story rather than NPCs. But it has 3 major flaws:
-Many of those kinfolks have been wrongly assigned as male or female
at birth. As far as I know it doesn't happen so often. And in these
books (the same flaw can be found in other books from this series) you
can find at least one character like this. The same is for LGBT
Kinfolks. I have nothing against homosexuals, but they are no more than
3% of world's population (according to Google and Wikipedia) so putting
at least one in every book is a little too much for me.
-It appears that many of those characters were created by copy/paste
method. Their bios and sometimes names are similar in different books.
-Many of them also have brothers and sisters (sometimes a few of them)
who undergone their First Change. If I remember correctly Garou are a
dying species so it shouldn't happen so often. Of course, if a ST follow
the rules to the core it can be assumed that parents of those kinfolks
were pure breeded (high Pure Breed Background).Many of them also have
gnostic talent or gifts, a rare thing among Kinfolks.
Neverthless it is a very good position to have (ST can easily modify
those characters to correct those flaws).
- If I had to point a flaw that
cannot be easily corrected I will say that the characters are too
"clean". No skinhead/racist among Get of Fenris kinfolks? For me almost
impossible (p. ex. in "Rage across New York" there was a skinhead
Fenrir)."
The second part is up to personal preference, as the commenter said. However, I feel that the first and third comments are telling, so I want to take today's entry to talk about them.
World Population Doesn't Matter
Let's take this commenter at their word, and say that roughly 3% of the global population is trans. The number is probably higher for a variety of reasons (lack of awareness and education, social pressures not to come out, punishment for those who don't hide that part of their identity, etc.), but let's say for the purposes of this thought experiment that number is accurate.
Kinfolk come from all over the world. They're found in every population round the world. They are a global force. So if that number is accurate, then you would expect roughly 3% of the characters represented here to be trans, wouldn't you? That translates to at least 3 characters per 100 kin (though I'm sure a discussion could be had regarding the Red Talons, if someone wanted to make that point). So the argument sort of falls down on its face from that angle.
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| You know what I didn't see a lot of demand for, though? |
Something that wasn't brought up was that I have far more redheads than the world population might demand. At roughly 2% (far less than trans people by a wide margin), there should only be about two of them per collection according to World Atlas. Not only that, but roughly 18% of the world's population lives in China, and another 3% or so are ethnic Chinese people who live outside of China's borders. Yet I haven't had a single person argue that I grossly underrepresented that particular demographic in this project.
Of course, if you take the percentage of trans people we're using, and multiple it times the billions of people who live on earth, that will give you numbers that are far larger than you'd think. There's roughly 8 billion people in the world, and that means if we accept the numbers (which as I said are likely low-balled), that's still about 160 million trans people around the world. Even if only one half of one percent of them are kinfolk, that's still 800,000 people.
With that said, though, the numbers are completely irrelevant. Because the point of the project, as I stated, was not to accurately represent world populations based on global percentages. The goal was to do my part to give people who are often excluded some kind of seat at the table as part of the writing.
Pushing Back on The Edge
Let's be real here... the World of Darkness was formed in large part from the edginess of the 90s. A lot of the subjects it's covered have been taboo, distressing, or outright awful... it's a horror game. That's what a good horror game is supposed to do.
However, the 90s also saw another unique change in horror; black people started surviving their movies, instead of being the first to meet the business end of a machete.
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| And that's without mentioning the impact of absolute legends like this one. |
Over the past two decades and change, horror has been reinventing itself. It's stepping away from reinforcing status quos, and is changing the faces of many of its monsters. It's asking deeper questions about who gets to be a protagonist, and whose lives are valuable. The deeper questions that, in the best horror, are always lurking just below the blood, guts, and gratuitous nudity.
And those are the questions I want to encourage players who pick up these guides to ask in their games.
At the same time, though, I want players who have often been excluded (or worse turned into nothing more than monster bait for being different) to have characters who say unequivocally that they belong here. So that means there are kinfolk who are gay, trans, and from a wide variety of ethnicities, religions, cultures, etc. Because all too often that hasn't been the case in the games I've seen run and played. Even in werewolf, which is as global as settings get in the World of Darkness, there seems to always be someone keeping the gates and saying that X, Y, or Z character concept would never be accepted in kinfolk society.
Of course, if the individual who left the comment had waited till the series was over, he would have found that harder, grittier, more problematic concepts he mentioned are, in fact, part of this project. The white power Get of Fenris, the Red Talon who wants to wash the forests clean in man's blood, the Black Fury who brutalizes men for being weak, and the Fianna who lets their passions drive them to fits of brutality when they drink to much, or hear no one too many times... I have a place for all of them.
Those are the characters who fall, and will only be taken in by the Black Spiral Dancers collection.
The Appeal of Transformative Fiction
Werewolves, at their core, are creatures of transformation. They wear different faces, different skins, and they are more complex than what they may appear to be. If you don't get why that would appeal to LGBT players, and particularly trans players, just roll the thought around in your head for a while. It's okay, I'll wait.
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| Don't rush. Take your time. |
And for those who are thinking about raising the specter of acceptance by their own kind, the commenter did bring up a good point; the garou are dying. Slowly but surely they're dying. That means they can't afford to let their communities fall apart over minor disagreements. And, if you read between the lines, kinfolk communities are meant to be supportive and cooperative. They are the backbone of the fight against the Wyrm, and many of them maintain ancient traditions all their own.
Every part of the LGBTQ acronym (including the letters not seen here) has been around as long as humanity. From the very gay warriors of Sparta and Athens, to the two-spirits of many Native American tribes, archaeologists have found mountains of evidence that queer folk have been a part of every society and every civilization probably all the way back to the days of the caves. Which means that, by the canon of Werewolf, they've been around just as long as the tribes have. And rather than disregarding that, you get a lot more mileage out of asking how this element adds to the stories you can tell, and the elements you can draw on.
Without Light, What's The Point of Darkness?
Something else I mentioned in my previous post, but which I feel it needs to be reiterated, is that light is a necessary element for a horror game to function. And the World of Darkness is, without question, a horror setting. I went to college in Gary, Indiana, and I've seen with my own eyes the crumbling streets, crooked alleys, and rising smoke that inspired both the setting, and the site of one of the biggest hives in the Werewolf setting... stuff can get
bleak between these pages.
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| Many PCs and character sheets has this world devoured over the years. |
But if a setting is all darkness all the time, you have no contrast. Without contrast, there is nothing to generate horror. Horror isn't just violence, bloodshed, trauma, and scars... it is knowing what came before. A shattered mirror or a destroyed painting has no weight on its own; you need to know what it was for the destruction (and the story of that destruction) to have a meaningful impact on you.
That is why the kinfolk I present are so "nice" and "clean" as I was accused of; they're meant to be your allies in this fight. They are going to be people you come to depend on, to care about, and who are going to be placed in danger. They may be friends, lovers, family members, or other close NPCs who are tied your backstory. Their lives and their sanity being on the line means nothing if you don't care about them. And if your werewolf loses control and wounds or murders them while in a frenzy, but the kinfolk was an antisocial jerk that no one liked or wanted to work with, players are going to end up with a, "world's better off without him," feeling.
You don't want that. You want them wracked with guilt, burning for vengeance, or raking themselves over the coals for not protecting them like they were supposed to. You want them to feel a wound they can't regenerate, because that is the core of where the drama comes in werewolf. It's a lost cause that refuses to give up, and where the garou are (often literally) their own worst enemies.
Looking To Get Your Copies?
If you made it through all of that and want to take a more detailed look at the kinfolk project, I've provided my affiliate links below! If you do get a copy, please leave a review, and help spread the word. The Black Spiral Dancers are currently being written (will update the links when they're complete), and if the demand gets loud enough I may revisit this project to include Stargazers, Fera, and other aspects of the Werewolf sphere.
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