OSSR: Breed Book: Rokea

[Mechalich]

I got bored, so I felt like doing this. Also because sharks, which are awesome.

Breed Book: Rokea
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES


they made a bunch of these, I think cover art wasn't in the budget

Music: The Theme from Jaws (duh)

Warning: this review is coming from a sober, but highly biased perspective. I like sharks, a lot. I collect shark teeth. I bought this ninety dollar textbook with my own money to educate myself. I don't even really play werewolf, but I've read this book through like four times. So yeah, I'm more invested than the average player would be in this particular product.

So, background. The year is 2001. White-Wolf is spewing out sourcebooks at a rapid clip to move product and fill up their brand new revised edition. In the content of Werewolf this meant producing a line of books about all of the other Changing Breeds that originally were barely mentioned but gradually began to drastically alter the Werewolf game starting with the Bastet book in 1997. Rokea was the 8th of the so-called Breed Books and the last fully independent one (the Kitsune got lumped into a giant word-salad about East Asian beast courts for book 9). That makes it among WW's most obscure supplements, and one of the more formulaic, since this was round 8 there was an established policy for how to do these things. Which means that many of the problems with this book are also problems with other Breed Books.

This book has a very small production group. There’s one author: Matthew McFarland, who went on to write a whole lot of other stuff for White-Wolf but isn’t credited on the wiki for this because the book is that obscure. Ethan Skemp is credited as developer. Skemp, interestingly, is one of the authors of WOD: Blood-Dimmed Tides, the only other WW book dealing with the part of the planet covered by water in a significant way - which actually implies some level of planning involved in making this. Aileen E. Miles is credited with essentially all other duties. So this is basically the opposite of shovelware, but I doubt anyone else at WW even bothered to talk to McFarland and Skemp about this and they produced whatever the hell they wanted.


the other oWoD book about the ocean, it's terrible

Anyway the book itself is a 141 page softcover with the typical bland breed book cover design. That’s a thick softcover that will still require the basic werewolf rules to play.

Opening Comic

Breed Books don't have opening fiction, they have opening comics. This is pretty much a universal upgrade. The Rokea comic involves some werewolves on a boat looking for the rokea only one of them gets mind-controlled by some weird worm-thing (which is totally not obvious at first and makes the whole thing extremely confusing), picks a fight with the Rokea and then the weresharks absolutely curb-stomp the wolfmen.

That's actually pretty good for an opening. Hooks were probably the thing WW did best, and this one establishes two pretty darned important things. One, that the Rokea are pretty clueless when it comes to the whole convoluted supernatural mess of the WoD, two, that they are sufficiently badass that it might not matter. 'Able to swallow a werewolf whole' - which is a thing that happens in the comic, is an appealing description.

The comic has some fairly decent art, IMO. The sharks look sleek and dangerous in their shark and were forms and this compares well to the wolves, who actually look kind of bothersomely fuzzy by comparison. In particular, the opening full-page shot on page one really triggers the ‘yes we took the most badass oceanic predators and needlessly turned them in even-more badass were-monsters simply because our inner 9-year old wanted to’ vibe that is pretty much the only reason to explain why Rokea even exists.

My inner nine-year old’s reaction to ‘Were+Shark’ is Fuck Yeah! But your mileage may vary.


thematically, the artists understood where this book's appeal resides

Getting to the actual beginning of the book, there’s a table of contents on page 11 and the introduction starts on page 12, but at least the contents uses that number. There’s an introduction, then five numbered chapters, and one appendix, which is really more like its own chapter and it would have made way more sense to just number the chapters 1-7. The chapters have nonsensical titles: Chapter One is ‘The Long Swim’ while Chapter Three is ‘Breach’ but the ToC does have subtitles that tell you what the chapters are about in actual plain language, so it works if you squint.

Introduction

Having begun with a context-free comic this book jumps into a completely context-free introduction. This book absolutely assumes you knew what you were getting into beforehand. Considering this is Changing Breed Book #8, that's not an unfair assumption. In fact I doubt WW really even wanted to produce this book at all and asked around the office until they found someone who liked sharks enough to actually write the darned thing.

This chapter opens with a quote about the love of monsters by, of all people, E.O. Wilson. Okay, yes that's a giant of modern biology speaking, but Wilson is world-famous as a myrmecologist - the study of ants. You know what doesn't live in the ocean? Ants, or in fact insects of any kind. Would it have been too hard to find a quote by anyone working with something that swims? Points for trying. Minus points for fucking it up.

What is supposedly the introduction opens with a piece of third-person fiction. And not in special text or white print or anything, but just in the line printing like its the most normal thing in the world. This book was made at the height of WW's in-world narration phase. This is frankly incredibly annoying, because it makes everything longer than it needs to be, more convoluted than it needs to be, and far more subject to interpretation than plain language.

This bit of fiction is about some guy named Mateo fighting a Rokea named Guards-the-Shoals (Rokea names are funny descriptor things, you could play a cute guessing game called Rokea or Exalted? regarding the names) and ultimately reveals that Mateo is a rokea too, only supposedly there aren’t any human born Rokea. It stops there for the moment, but it will be back. Notably, Guards-the-Shoals is only talking to Mateo at all, as opposed to trying to eat him, because Mateo has a silver-loaded shotgun pointed at his head. This is taking 'unreliable narrator' to the point of lunacy.

The next bit, thankfully in plain text, explains that the weresharks are sharks that reason, and that they are ancient. It repeats the common myth that sharks are an ancient lineage and that they have been unchanged since before the dinosaurs (not actually true, but only a modest and somewhat forgivable exaggeration).


this is Cladoselache, a common and widespread Paleozoic shark, unchanged it is not

It then very quickly (super fast by WW standards, like in a handful of short paragraphs) highlights a bunch of things about the Rokea – they see survival as their mission, they just want to be left alone, the whole race got nuked back in the fifties and lost half their population – which ties them into the whole ‘dying race’ theme of WtA – and that they are currently fighting a civil war over going on land.

There's a brief 'how to use this book' section which is basically a more complete table of contents and should have been placed in the actual table of contents. Then they have a list of references that are now mostly amusing and outdated, but they at least tried to include internet links in 2001 so that's something.

And then the stupid shows up. The introduction proceeds to list a glossary of some 30 terms that are all new to this book. Seriously, this is absolutely in the 'blood from a stone' phase of RPG product development for Werewolf and this book - which is practically the definition of obscure niche - proceeds to try and reinvent the wheel. Hilariously some of these terms are simply Rokea-isms for common, everyday things like Undersea. It's the sea floor. That's all it means. But no, they couldn't have just called the sea floor the sea floor. That would be too easy. This entire book is positively infected with term bloat.


when fighting aquatic term bloat, please think of the pufferfish

Next chapter covers the Rokea creation myth and view of the world.

[Mechalich]

Chapter One: The Long Swim

Supposedly this chapter starts on page 18, but that page simply contains a full page shot of a wereshark fighting Vikings or something. The actual chapter begins with a quote by the author of The Shark Almanac, so at least it’s on point this time.

So this chapter begins with in-character narration by Guards-the-Shoals who, again, is telling this while lying on the floor with a silver-loaded shotgun pointed at his head. Not only is he unreliable and pissed, this chapter later reveals it’s not like he’s any kind of lore-keeper either. So we’re learning the Rokea creation myth from the equivalent of Joe the Plumber.


probably not a good go-to source for the secret history of the world

And then things get really weird, really, really fast. This is one of the most obscure oWoD books ever produced. It's the least important of the changing breed books about one of the most poorly defined supernatural groups in the world of darkness. They've already established that the Rokea as a whole don't even have any properly human-born members.

So, I expect those who have been following WW OSSRs will not be surprised at this point when they discover that this book completely re-invents the mythological wheel. The Rokea see, are born from Sea (pun most definitely intended). And they deal with a world influenced by her competing daughters Kun, C’et, and Qyrl. Now, it becomes clear pretty fucking fast that this is all equivalent of Gaia, the Wyld, the Weaver, and the Wyrm. But no, White-Wolf couldn’t possibly have a race that is older than the werewolves and could have taught them mythology use the same blasted terminology, they have to come up with a completely new set of names and metaphysics. Worse, they won’t even come out and say that these are just aquatic terms for the same beings. No, it turns out Kun, C’et, and Qyrl are their own individuals, not direct equivalents to the Wyld et al. Because the cosmology wasn’t cluttered enough as is.

This is so monumentally stupid and counterproductive to running the Rokea in Werewolf in any way at all that you just have to throw up your hands here. Really McFarland, you decided to use the Rokea book as an oppurtunity to rewrite the entire Werewolf cosmology and create an entirly alternative oceanic system? This is an incredible point of evidence in the 'no one at White Wold bothered to talk to each other about different projects department' since anyone with half a brain would have shot this down in about two milliseconds.


it really isn't that hard to spot obvious incompatabilities

And it gets worse. The Rokea use their own mythological terms for the most basic of things like land (Unsea), the Sun (the Wound), and Oversea (the sky). Not only does this make the whole creation myth hard to follow, because you have to constantly translate Guards-the-Shoals' Rokea-isms into words that make actual sense, it also turns out to be completely incompatible with any of the werewolf creation myths or an actual scientific understanding of the world (sorry, but no, the Sun is not a wound in the sky and silver is not medicine that is applied to try and heal it). So, they take a sub-group in werewolf and give them a totally different frame of reference from everyone else in the world of darkness.

This complete remaking of the WoDs history goes on for ten pretty much useless pages, accompanied by a brief aside about possible Rokea kinfolk in Hawaii and about how in the Far East some of the Rokea joined the beast courts and – inevitably – behave completely differently from other Rokea meaning this whole massive book isn’t very useful for playing them in the one nominally supported cross-breed section of the setting. Because god-forbid you write a book about weresharks and make it so people could actually play them. This is an ongoing problem - it was like McFarland had some sort of deep-seated objection to the very idea of anyone having fun while playing a rampaging shark monster.

Like, if you were a kid who watched cartoons in the 90s and thought Street Sharks was even slightly cool WW hates you and refuses to let you have fun with the thing they created that looks almost exactly the same.


Rokea has deep-seated implicit objections to this for some absurd reason

Eventually this history gets around to relating relatively modern events, specifically the use of nuclear bombs. See, in WoD, nukes do bad things to the spiritual environment. Normally this doesn’t mean much, but we actually dropped a lot of nukes into the ocean, and this really drove the Rokea into a panic. This is actually a pretty decent hook – I mean the development and use of nuclear weapons is probably the only thing that humans could do that would really bother a race that practically functions in geologic time.


the Rokea are pretty cheesed off about this. That's pretty fucking justified

So in 1955 a whole bunch of Rokea gathered to think about doing something about the nukes problem. Only someone pulled a mean conspiracy move on them and arranged to have a nuke dropped on the meeting, killing half the global population.

So crisis time. And the Rokea react, and some of them, amazingly, decide that maybe they should actually use their shapechanging abilities and go on to land and try to figure this out. So far, so good, the dying race plotline actually works for a race of shark men because well – sharks are actually dying out in the modern world. This is a real biological crisis - with massive declines in populations across pretty much all major species. Ecological devestation is pretty important in werewolf as a whole, and with the Rokea White Wolf lucked into a perfectly tailored issue to exploit for the weresharks. They were aware of it too, the book has plenty of references to finning and shark overfishing and so forth. So there's your general motivating plot: enterprising Rokea goes on to land and tries to figure out how to stop all the sharks from dying. Perfect excuse to actually let a rokea join a werewolf campaign.


modern shark populations are not doing so hot

Of course, it takes White-Wolf less than a page to totally fuck it up. They introduce something called the Betweener War, where Rokea who go onto land are outcaste and other Rokea hunt them down and try to kill them. No real reason is given for why this is happening at all except that some hypothetical elder Rokea claims its a betrayal of principles. Because it makes total sense for a race that believes in swimming freely and considers survival the highest goal of all to slaughter each other over where they chose to wander around. The Betweener War is unbearably dumb. It exists only to make going on to land something that sucks for people playing Rokea. This is possibly the most blatant fiat move to up the level of crapsuck in the WoD I’ve ever encountered. Which is fucking saying something.


I imagine an angry great white devouring the Rokea book every time I have to think about the Betweener War

Next up, Rokea lifestyle

[Mechalich]

Chapter Two: Sunlit Waters

So, in this chapter Mateo gets the hell out of dodge and a different Rokea named Bleeds-Night takes over narration. Bleeds-Night is at least part of the wise and secret keeping Darkwater group. This chapter is all about life as a Rokea, which, of course, doesn’t resemble the standard werebeast set up at all, because reasons.

So Rokea are immortal – Highlander style. The only way one dies is if someone kills one. You’d think that would mean they wouldn’t have a numbers problem, but they breed slowly. Bleeds-Night tosses out a historical figure of 3-4 per century, which is hilarious math-wrong.

No, seriously, this begs to be unpacked further. If there are only 4 Rokea born a century and that’s the replacement rate - which it needs to be because the Rokea think population decline is a big bag problem - and there are say, 10000 rokea (and this book says they are supposed to be more numerous than the Garou, so that’s a low-end estimate), then it takes 2500 centuries, or 250,000 years, for the Rokea population to turn over. That means the Median Rokea is 125,000 years old and was born into a world predating modern humans entirely.


the average Rokea recalls when the world map looked like this

Obviously this makes the Rokea not work at all, because you aren't playing as a tens of thousands of years old shark monstrosity who thinks agriculture is a newish fad. What is also does is completely obliterate the WoD in its entirety because it is now filled with thousands of hundred thousand year old eldritch shark gods who are probably powerful enough to bite the Wyrm in half. As amusing as I personally find Fenris-shark the world-eater devouring the entire WoD, it shows that no one was paying attention to the implications of anything in this book (it does allow one to troll power arguments about the WoD though, million-year old rokea beats Caine FTW).


somewhere on the low end of the Rokea elder power scale

Moving on, we get a bit about Rokea reproduction. Thankfully, there’s no Metis rokea. Yeah, they just wrote that whole mess straight out. Instead, all the rokea are born as sharks, and they reproduce by mating with other sharks, with none of the kinfolk mess that other changers have. Additionally, since the book stresses that Rokea are far more ‘intelligent sharks that can change shape’ rather than were-people it’s a lot less squicky than the related werewolf material. Heck, the book strongly implies that the average rokea – meaning the one you aren’t playing – might go their whole life without ever bothering to assume human form. Yes intelligent sharks who mate with other, not-intelligent, sharks is still weird, but it elides many of the problems with the whole Werewolf reproductive mess.

Of course there’s a whole digression about how this is the end-times and that Mateo is the first homid rokea and that’s really weird and it’s going to change everything. Whatever, he's not you and you're not likely to ever meet him and it only really matters if you want it too.

There’s a bit about auspices: rokea have three and they don’t have clans so no five man band issues. These are brightwater, dimwater, and darkwater. The brightwaters fight, the darkwaters are seers, and the dimwaters do everything else. This is actually refreshingly simple. Rokea law is also equally simple though it’s awfully short on things for you to do as a character, but again that shouldn’t matter because sharks are in crisis and the oceans are polluted so you already have an overriding character motive.

And then they take the glorious simplicity of ‘you are a shark monster, figure out the problems threatening your species and then bite their heads off’ and replace it with this whole absurd Betweener War thing, which essentially means playing a rokea in a mixed party is a recipe for disaster - because the storyteler is obligated to have other rokea attack it - and that any serious attempt to fix the problems imperiling the rokea as a whole means murdering you way through a whole bunch of other rokea because we can’t have nice things. Fuck the Betweener War, it totally ruins the Rokea and any contribution they could make to the WoD in a positive and fun way.


somehow WW made it so that trying to fix this involves deathmatches with other weresharks

Next up is a bit about remora and how sharks use them as little messengers – which is actually a mildly creative bit of biology and remains useful because rokea live in the ocean and having magical messenger spirits matters in a place where there are no phones. The rokea organize into slews, which are simple and lack pack politics. A brief world survey follows about where rokea live – all of the oceans, duh – and what they think of other supernaturals which is mostly that they haven’t got a clue.

Like pretty much everyone else, Rokea have five forms – with the difference being that their base form is already that of a deadly oceanic apex predator, and that their giant shark form is useful at sea while their crinos form is more useful on land. These have a bunch of made up latinized terms as names, and a simpler set of rokea names (standing jaws, fighting jaws) because having only one name for something would be too easy.


everybody gets five forms

Overall Rokea society as presented is about what you'd expect from a bunch of intelligent oceanic apex predators who don't really have an particular reason to have a society in the first place. That's fine, because you weren't going to run an all Rokea game in the first place and sharks and the oceans have enough real world problems for them to fight without generating internal political issues. If not for the Betweener War they'd be perfectly positioned to show up periodically like Aquaman in your Fera Justice League and do Aquaman shit.


situational to be sure, but you could do worse than filling that niche

Instead they're burdened with massive stupid, highly lethal baggage that makes them almost impossible to use. The very idea of a non-society fighting a brutal civil war over an arbitrary distinction about where each individual chooses to go...I just don't understand where that decision came from.

[Mechalich]

Chapter 3: Breach

This chapter is about character creation. The chapter starts out by trying to make the Rokea playable even though it stresses the idea of an all-Rokea game while downplaying crossovers – despite that anyone with two braincells would recognize that the rokea are most useful in crossovers or perhaps as a visitor character for when the main group needs to go to the ocean for some reason!

Considering that the Rokea only have three auspices and lack clans entirely (there’s a bit in here about giving different bonuses to different shark species, but it’s a purely statistical tweak with no fluff) their ability to engage in traditional WoD social dynamics is severely curtailed. So this is a totally backwards way of going about things.

Heck, I ran an entirely underwater game with rokea characters and it was still way easier to have all the PCs be technocrats than to try and run a rokea game. I’m not sure if anyone in the history of gaming has ever actually run such a campaign.


probably gets more out of the Rokea book than the actual Rokea do

Anyway the rokea have two breeds, but you’re really only supposed to play as the shark born one, which makes you are a sea-going badass but means you have to deal with all sorts of fish-out-of-water problems on land. Again, since you have to go onto land to solve problems like nuclear testing or Pentex overfishing campaigns, that’s a great hook for a rokea character, except that the other rokea kill you if you try god-damnit!

Character creation is pretty standard but rokea get some cool shark abilities – like electrosensory perception and the ability to talk using electrical signals underwater – and have some funky limitations like having poor vision while in crinos on land. They did at least put some thought into the shark stuff, McFarland did at least research into shark biology in a limited way (I suspect he just read the Shark Almanac cover to cover, but in 2001 that was probably the best popular text available). Most of this stuff is
so orthogonal to anything normal it’s impossible to tell if it’s balanced or not - who knows whether or not dealing damage to people who hit you barehanded while in crinos is meaningful. The big lmiitation is that Rokea cna only enter the Umbra in Grottoes (Cairns) but since the undersea umbra is suppssed to be really hostile and there's no rules on what's there it doesn't matter that much. In an all rokea campaign no of this would matter, but since a rokea character is almost certainly in a mixed group balance is probably important. Of course I doubt anybody playtested any of this, not even to WW standards.

They managed to restrain themselves to a single new ability: seafaring, and a single new background, remora. Not bad for moving the entire game to an aquatic environment.


the little fish is a remora. In this game its a magical messenger buddy

The next part of this chapter is a listing of gifts, from page 65 to 77. There’s a lot of these, though a pretty significant percentage duplicate existing werewolf gifts and are referenced accordingly. The balance of these gifts are all over the place, with typical white-wolf inconsistency. Many of them are at least thematically appropriate for sharks. Want to spit teeth at people? There’s a gift for that. Eat garbage like a tiger shark? There’s one for that too.


usable as projectile weapons

There’s a brief listing of rites after the gifts, most of these are fairly pointless and you wouldn’t bother to learn them, but I suppose they give options to a storyteller in an all rokea game – which you aren’t playing, but whatever. There’s also a list of aquatic totems and fetishes, most of which could have probably been summarized as ‘as the werewolf totem X only underwater.’ They aren’t balanced at all – Crab gives a small bonus to certain abilities, Manta lets you play with extra willpower points – but they exist.

There’s a new list of merits and flaws, most of which are stupid, including one that turns you into an uncontrollable rape-machine while on land. I forgot to mention earlier that Rokea on land are consumed by a constant urge to mate for no reason at all. This is so stupid I refuse to even discuss it further.


I'm just going to post an image of the gloriously maiming-friendly jaws of the cookieecutter shark instead, because that eases my rage

The chapter ends with some new combat maneuvers for underwater and rules for rokea renown.

Most of this stuff is fairly anodyne and basic. It would all work fine if they had left off the stupid bullshit social conflicts and rape-inducement that exist only to make things awful and just left it as a bunch of wereshark monsters. Apex predators on land for the first time trying to deal with various issues and the fact that they can't simply eat anything that offends them is problematic enough if played straight. There was no need to make it worse.

[Mechalich]

Chapter Four: Secrets of the Deep

This chapter opens with a Lovecraft quote, though from 'The Colour out of Space' for some reason. It also has a warning that its meant for storytellers only. It was 2001, I thought gaming companies had figured out that sort of thing didn't work a while earlier.


what, I wasn't good enough for the lovecraft quote?

And now we get the bit about how the undersea triat isn’t the same as the normal Wyld, Weaver, Wyrm one, because making the cosmology make no sense for no good reason at all must be done at every possible opportunity. Also there’s a whole bit about the ‘Kraken’ which is a Lovecraftian horror with an unpronounceable name that was also referenced in Blood-Dimmed Tides, but they don’t provide any rules or examples of these things or how they differ from normal Wyrm – sorry Qyrl – beasts in any way.


apparently I don't work for the Wyrm or Qyrl, but some kind of other entity. I am confused on this point

There’s a multi-pathway bit about how to deal with the ‘first homid rokea’ thing that they introduced in the beginning but instead of say, providing an adventure to address this, they created three fiat scenarios for the GM to choose from instead as setup, making everything even less coherent than it already was.


you shouldn't put Fiat in the ocean

Despite encouraging an all-rokea campaign model in the last chapter, this chapter flat out admits that such campaigns are likely to degenerate into a monster-of-the-week scenario pretty fast and their methods for trying to avoid it are unconvincing. Of course they are, we’re talking about a society of predators who don’t have hands in a wide open environment with nothing to interact with. Perhaps if they had offered up an undersea threat beyond that of random fomori and unexplainable lovecraftian whatevers there might be more to work with.

There’s a few, but nowhere near enough, sample beasties and spirits, and then a bunch of incredibly dumb adventure prompts, none of which deal with any of the central rokea problems (pollution and humans killing all the sharks). The whole book manages to avoid mentioning Pentex at all, even though you’d think Hallahan Fishing would figure pretty prominently in the array of Rokea villains. Seriously, would it have killed them to generate an organization of shark-finning pirates (which actually a thing that kind of exists in the real world) for the Rokea to face rip?


there is no sample plot about trying to stop this from happening

The rest of the chapter is occupied with a sample adventure that takes up almost thirty pages (which is over 20% of the whole book) – though a bunch of this is character stat blocks. There are six sample Rokea, which is actually alot better than some Fera got when it came to statted NPCs, but a bunch of space is wasted stating out sample Garou. The funny thing about this adventure - they've spent the whole book trying to stress Rokea-only campaigns, and yet this adventure is primarily focused on meeting up with and figuring out a way to make a bunch of Rokea and Garou work together in the face of a nasty mind-controlling beastie. They couldn't even manage to make their own sample match their stated intentions.


the basking shark admits to the bait-and-switch, which is more than can be said for this book

the next bit will wrap this up

[OgreBattle]

Do guy sharks have dongs, or just fish holes

[Mechalich]

Chapter Five: The School

This chapter opens with a spectacularly badass picture of a crinos rokea who’s gone full scarred pirate (he’s got fucking bling!). The art in this book makes a pretty good argument for playing a primordial face-eating death machine. Those guys understood the inherent visceral appeal that certain people get when you take the word 'shark' and add 'were' as a prefix. It's such a shame the text doesn’t.


I don't know what's going on here, but it looks pretty awesome

Anyway this chapter presents a quintet of sample characters in the standard white-wolf format familiar from all splatbooks. Most are boring, though the ‘death to the finning boats’ samurai shark-man is an example of a character with a playable agenda and an actual source of angst. There’s a bunch of completely unstated ‘notables’ to follow, with no way to gauge their power level. Nor is any real attempt made to deal with the idea that rokean elders are tens of thousands of years old. They can't even claim it as an oversight, since they wrote up Mizuchi - the Rokea who founded the Same-Bito subgroup that's part of the beast courts and he's easily got several millenia behind him. Something regarding the capabilities, or at least the status of some of the ancient immortals who be helpful. MacFarland just seems to have completely forgotten about them, even though these are explicitly the oldest non-spirit beings in the oWoD. I'm not surprised that a WW product couldn't resist the tempatation to produce a bunch of big-dick NPCs, I am surprised that they just kind of handwaved them into being and then ignored everything about them.

Appendix

This section opens with a quote from Peter Benchley about how he feels bad for writing Jaws. Dude, we forgive you, but it doesn’t have anything to do with the game. Then again, neither does anything in this appendix. These four pages are a brief and fairly accurate primer on shark biology and behavior. It cribs from The Shark Almanac pretty hard (I've read that one), but as a source for the layman that’s fine. It might actually be the best four pages in the whole book.

Conclusion

And that's all there is. For the most part Rokea is a decidedly unpretentious book about playing a shark monster. It's about playing a badass predator with a human-level intellect and the ability to shapeshift into human and car-smashing crinos forms. Given that real world shark populations are in crisis for a variety of causes, the whole thing comes with built in motives for your characters to do stuff - which is essentially fighting Wyrm manifestations as the world's toothiest planeteers.


this is a viable archetype for a rokea character

The problem is White Wolf totally failed to simply leave it there and quit while they were ahead. Sure the existing framework for the Rokea is limited, but that's okay. Very few people want to play them. Those who do are highly motivated people like me capable of coming up with their own stuff. Instead, McFarland took a giant dump on the whole thing by creating the Betweener War and making the weresharks fight each other like every other supernatural group in the WoD, only they didn't bother to provide even a semblance of a logical reason. They added all the cosmology bullshit too, even though no one could possibly care about it and all it does is raise unnecessary barriers to playing Rokea.

The thing is, the Rokea are salvageable. The Betweener War has no reason to exist and pretending that it doesn't changes nothing about them. Same with the stupid on-land mating urge thing. Get rid of that and there's nothing about the mechanics that suggests rokea will be especially under or overpowered if they hang with werewolves or bastet or whatever. They actually have the advantage compared to some of the other 'Changing Breeds' in that they don't carry around a bunch of reflexive werewolf hate or have any serious issues with any of the others.

It is patently ridiculous that White-Wolf failed to realize any of this and set out to deliberately make the Rokea harder to play at every stage of the book. It's incredibly frustrating. Sharks are cool, and by 2001 people had figured this out. Shark Week was a thing, shark conservation was starting to gear up, Street Sharks had happened. Weresharks are obviously niche but it's an appealing niche.

All they needed to do was stat up the niche in a moderately interesting way and let motivated people do the rest. Instead they took a huge dump on the idea of having a fun time by playing as a shape-changing shark monster. Considering that I would be totally down with playing in a game as a shark monster, I really, really hate that design decision.


sharks are indeed awesome, Rokea are not

Essentially this is the oWoD in a nutshell. A cool idea - in this case Weresharks - surrounded by a whole bunch of impenetrable lore, saddled to a weak mechanical system, burdened with a number of terrible soul-crushing fluff issues that make it impossible to play in a fun way, and completely unable to put together a sample game that actually uses the material as written.

[Mechalich]

Do guy sharks have dongs, or just fish holes

Male sharks have intermittent organs called 'Claspers' which are modified pelvic fins. Shark mating is complex - and by human standards qualifies as very kinky - and different shark species have vastly different reproductive methods (running the gamut from basic eggs all the way to placental support).

[Koumei]

When in human form, do they just function as plain old humans or do they still have poor eyesight or electrical senses or whatever? I mean, assuming they're not being murdered by their own kin for taking human form and walking on land. Do they even have enough human knowledge to speak a language and wear clothes, or do you just get these wild-eyed naked men running out of the ocean and babbling at you (and then being killed by their own kind)?

[Nebuchadnezzar]

No squamus-bom wereshark may begin play with an Appearance rating greater than 2. Also, unless the player spends freebie points on the Linguistics Ability (and gives a good reason why her character would understand a human language), the Rokea can only communicate through the Sending—which is useless in Homid form

[Silent Wayfarer]

How badass are elder Rokea anyway?

[Mechalich]

Yeah, the various limitations on taking points in human knowledges makes it kind of weird. The book is fairly sparse on how the Betweener War even manages to happen since the Rokea don't have a lot of good ways to track each other on land and probably have to depend on gifts and spirit allies to do so.

The base assumption is that they function as ugly and clueless (and at least initially naked) humans in homid form. Still, since even the book assumes most rokea have decades of practice, learning to mimic human norms through long-term observation is something they can do. Also they can use the Sending - their electrosensory communication - while on land in Crinos form, which means they can shout orders at people even if they won't understand the responses.

Also, the Betweener War is a 'final nights' practice and didn't exist prior to them all getting nuked in the 1950s, so many rokea occasionally wandered around on the coast and may have picked up languages in the past.

How badass are elder Rokea anyway?

It's totally unclear, but think about it like this. Assuming you manage to reach rank 5 and acquire the ability to take rank 5 gifts you are going to be really, really hard for anything to kill. There's a level 5 gift that allows you to become an 80 ft long shark monster that gets +5 to all physical stats above and beyond their existing giant shark stat boost, so you can take on just about anything short of a nuclear blast. If you accumulate XP at a rate of one a year (and Rokea don't go into torpor, they're still swimming around doing shit), you slowly start to maximize everything and learn every gift and rite in the book.

The game has no mechanism to deal with infinite XP accumulation by the Fera in the same way that Vampire and Mage do because it assumes you grow old and die, but that just doesn't apply to the Rokea. So who knows.

[Prak]

So, background. The year is 2001. White-Wolf is spewing out sourcebooks at a rapid clip to move product and fill up their brand new revised edition. In the content of Werewolf this meant producing a line of books about all of the other Changing Breeds that originally were barely mentioned but gradually began to drastically alter the Werewolf game starting with the Bastet book in 1997. Rokea was the 8th of the so-called Breed Books and the last fully independent one (the Kitsune got lumped into a giant word-salad about East Asian beast courts for book 9).

This is slightly backwards. The Breed Books are 2nd edition pre-revised. Rokea (and Nagah) happened to be printed a year after the Revised book, but the comics thing was a 2nd edition pre-revised thing. Revised books had "Legends of the Garou," look at the Tribebooks, which had comics in 2nd Ed, and "Legends of the Garou" in Revised.

Revised had a single, hardback book about the Fera, The Player's Guide to the Changing Breeds, which also had a "Legends of the Garou" opening fiction. Which also happened to give Ajaba (Werehyenas) their own section, despite technically being Bastet.

the other oWoD book about the ocean, it's terrible

I gotta say, it looks awesome.

Hilariously some of these terms are simply Rokea-isms for common, everyday things like Undersea. It's the sea floor. That's all it means. But no, they couldn't have just called the sea floor the sea floor. That would be too easy. This entire book is positively infected with term bloat.

Yeah, the two things that make the Rokea the least accessible as a splat are the "Our race is smaller than the turn of the century wild cheetah population" and the fact that there is next to no transparency of terminology between it and Werewolf, which occasionally is because the Rokea myth isn't quite the same as the Werewolf myth.

[Mechalich]

I gotta say, it looks awesome.

Unfortunately its both way too short - at 128 pages - to treat the subject properly and spends most of its focus on Wraith and Changeling material, which are games you do not care about. The Mage material is based on a pre-Guide to the Technocracy understanding of the void Engineers and is therefore pretty much unplayable. the rules for the vaguely Lovecraftian Chulorviah make little sense (these are referenced in Rokea as Kraken and also in Mage The Infinite Tapestry, using different rules each time) and don't fit anybody's cosmology.

Ultimately any book that tries to provide material for five different game lines and rules for mortals in one product is going to fall on its face.

[Username17]

It's weird to me how thoroughly the Rokea dispense with wereshark folklore from the Pacifi Islanders, considering how much more closely it maps to WoD changing breed shit than other shapeshifters do. Nanaue is a wereshark because his mother had sex with the shapeshifting shark god. Seen through a certain lens, that could just be humans fucking weresharks giving new generations of weresharks. Like how lycanthropy inexplicably works for all the other shifter types in oWoD.

The Rokea could have pretty much followed the normal White Wolf shifter script to a T, dog rape and all, and be pretty true to Pacific Islander mythos. Everything they did with these assholes made them less folkloric.

-Username17

[hyzmarca]

Obviously this makes the Rokea not work at all, because you aren't playing as a tens of thousands of years old shark monstrosity who thinks agriculture is a newish fad.

Why not? That sounds pretty cool.

And now we get the bit about how the undersea triat isn’t the same as the normal Wyld, Weaver, Wyrm one, because making the cosmology make no sense for no good reason at all must be done at every possible opportunity.

Well, that makes it easier for Storytellers to declare that the Triat isn't real in the first place, and was always just a stupid myth used by werewolves to justify themselves. Which is a perfectly viable thing to declare. Having the great cosmological truth be ambiguous isn't exactly a bad thing.

[Ancient History]

There was also, technically, Wolves of the Sea, the DA Vampire book about Vikings. But the less said about that and its runic blood magic, the better.

[Username17]

Mechalich, as someone who cares an awful lot more about weresharks and actual sharks than I do, I'm interested in what you think the core ability concept of a wereshark should be. From where I'm standing, hulking out into a giant man shark is absolutely mandatory, as is the ability to breathe water and air. But everything else, and I do mean everything else seems to be completely negotiable.

Even transforming into a big actual shark seems rather pointless. A shark form just swims around in the water and kills things. But the man-shark form can swim and it can kill things. The street shark form is already better at swimming and murdering while swimming than any of the other characters are going to be by kind of a lot. So what does the shark form bring to the table? The five forms thing that the Rokea did is completely incomprehensible. When would you ever use all of those forms?

In Hawaiian lore, Kauhuhu sends storms and Nanaue has a shark mouth that vicissitudes around his body while he is in human form. In Chinese lore, the Jiaoren transform from monstrous shark warriors into sexy ladies who can conjure silk and pearls. The Fijian god Dakuwanga is a sharkman who controls tides and also has protection magic.

But I'm curious as to what you think a wereshark should be doing in an RPG.

-Username17

[codeGlaze]

I just imagined that Rokea were hunted after re-entering the water.
Otherwise becoming a Rokean landwalker bountyhunter who hunts on land would make you a bounty target. Creating an infinite loop toward extinction.

Unless the hunters are given special permission, which is even more stupid.

Both scenarios could also work as being strictly limited to a small subset of Rokea who are in a cult based around the seer or shaman you mentioned earlier.

At least waiting for oceanic reentry allows for turning landwalkers into pariahs.

This also presumes some kind of cultural structure either way... Which really doesn't jive with the write up. It almost seems like it was added last minute to try and offer in-fighting opportunities.

[hyzmarca]

Even transforming into a big actual shark seems rather pointless. A shark form just swims around in the water and kills things. But the man-shark form can swim and it can kill things. The street shark form is already better at swimming and murdering while swimming than any of the other characters are going to be by kind of a lot. So what does the shark form bring to the table? The five forms thing that the Rokea did is completely incomprehensible. When would you ever use all of those forms?

Now, you wouldn't use that form in most games. But come on. Wereshark is for boarding ships and eating the crew. Giant shark is for biting ships in half. These are two very different levels of combat. Your street shark form is not suited to getting into a fight with a shark-shaped artifially intelligent nuclear submarine. Or a regular nuclear submarine, for that matter.

Plus, Sydney Shark is a very different game from Street Sharks: The RPG.

[Prak]

It's weird to me how thoroughly the Rokea dispense with wereshark folklore from the Pacifi Islanders, considering how much more closely it maps to WoD changing breed shit than other shapeshifters do. Nanaue is a wereshark because his mother had sex with the shapeshifting shark god. Seen through a certain lens, that could just be humans fucking weresharks giving new generations of weresharks. Like how lycanthropy inexplicably works for all the other shifter types in oWoD.

Well. That certainly puts a new feeling on one of the more popular graphic tee brands from my childhood.

I'm not the only one who remembers this shit, right?

Also, I was thinking about how to excise the dogrape thing from a WtA hack, and thought about taking the Corax model and applying it to all changing breeds.

See, the Corax (and Ratkin) had different reproduction models than other changing breeds, because no one fantasizes about fucking ravens (or rats), and even if they do, it's rather hard. So Corax have a thing called a "spirit egg" that was never really expanded on, or even given the vaguest of description, beyond a term and being something that a Corax makes with a partner of the opposite sex, which is then attached to a human child or a raven egg to "hatch" within them around the age of sexual maturity. (Ratkin just infect humans or rats with a plague to create new Ratkin).

That seems like a much less skeezy way to explain where new shapeshifters come from.

And now we get the bit about how the undersea triat isn’t the same as the normal Wyld, Weaver, Wyrm one, because making the cosmology make no sense for no good reason at all must be done at every possible opportunity.

Well, that makes it easier for Storytellers to declare that the Triat isn't real in the first place, and was always just a stupid myth used by werewolves to justify themselves. Which is a perfectly viable thing to declare. Having the great cosmological truth be ambiguous isn't exactly a bad thing.

I mean, that is admittedly the thing that came to my mind about what the fuck to do with it when I was reading this last night...

[hyzmarca]

Question: Do Rokean cause Delerium, or could they just walk around New York in Crinos form using Sending to order pizza and shit?.

[Prak]

Sadly, they do.

On the other hand, I'd totally say that retail and food industry workers in World of Darkness have willpower 7+ due to the increased shit they've seen. The fast food industry already sees 4-5 workers murdered a month in the real world, so imagine how much rape, murder and robbery minimum wage workers see in the World of Grimdark.

So I could see a crinos rokea running around ordering fast food from hardened teenagers with PTSD.

[hyzmarca]

Sadly, they do.

On the other hand, I'd totally say that retail and food industry workers in World of Darkness have willpower 7+ due to the increased shit they've seen. The fast food industry already sees 4-5 workers murdered a month in the real world, so imagine how much rape, murder and robbery minimum wage workers see in the World of Grimdark.

So I could see a crinos rokea running around ordering fast food from hardened teenagers with PTSD.

Crinos only causes Partial Delerium, which gives a +2 bonus to the target's willpower for the purpose of determining reaction. 4 is the sweet spot where they'll just be polite and do whatever the giant shark-man asks. 7 is actually worse. 7 is an automatic "I'm going to quit my job and dedicate my entire life to hunting down and killing that Wereshark", no matter what the Rokea actually does. 8, though is " I see scarier shit on the subway every morning."

[Prak]

Ah, yeah. I was in class, so I wasn't paying close attention to the entry.