OSSR: Breedbook Mokole
Posted: Mon Feb 22, 2016 3:31 pm
Breedbook: Mokole
Shit's Gonna Get Weird, Guys
Seriously. They could have done better covers.
Much like Breedbook Rokea, Breedbook Mokole was printed to shovel crap out into the market for White Wolf's second edition. It was printed in 1999, and has an opening comic instead of the novellas that became common in Revised. In the comic, a garou voiceovers about going to the Amazon on the false pretense of fighting The Dissolver, but really to find a cure for some wyrm-curse that gives him strange memories? I don't know, it seriously doesn't really say what he needs cured. But so he goes to find the Mokole who have him smoke a peace pipe (pretty much) to give him a flashback to Amazonian natives fleeing from conquistadors who want a stone in their possession. The natives are mokole, except the woman leading them who is kin. The comic is much like the Rokea comic, with the exception that the people who get attacked by mokole in beast mode are basic humans who have gold bullets (mokole are linked to the Sun rather than the Moon, and so are weak to Gold), not garou in a dinghy.
Table of Contents
Like many White Wolf books, Mokole does not name their chapters helpful things like "The Setting," "Character Creation," "Magic" and so on, but rather shit like "Sunrise: Dragons in our Midst" with the description "An introduction to the Dragon Breed."
ffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff-
Sunrise: Dragons in our Midst
Introduction
The opening quote for this book about dragon shapeshifters who are primarily associated with South America and Australia in this book, who are Gaia's Cloud Servers (no, seriously), is from The Wonders of the East, which is an Old English prose piece that is basically a bestiary for Asia from when it was still usually called "the Orient."
I'm not saying that a quote from a book about Asia isn't appropriate for a book about dragon-shapeshifters, I'm just saying that I've read this book before and of the two places that I associate with the Mokole, Asia isn't one of them. The asian reptile shifters are the Nagah, which are snakes from India.
Pictured- not the people we're talking about.
Let's fucking face it, White Wolf books are just fucking text templates. The first few pages are a short story, either a novella or a comic, the table of contents follows with prose for chapter titles, and then the intro is fiction that sort of describes what's going on. This intro talks about a guy named Peter who wears Puma sneakers. I don't know why we need to know the fucking brand of shoes he wears, but we do. The totem Dragon basically reached into him and hauled his ass to an airport with packed luggage and put it on a plane without letting him know where the fuck he was going until he was on the fucking plane and, I presume, looked at his ticket to see he was on a plane to Australia to meet a couple mokole. I guess this is a continuation of the comic, since the protagonist werewolf is named Peter in both. He also has the hinted at memory plague, and the narrative goes into telling us that apparently garou and mokole have always been enemies. The garou believed mokole to be extinct until they crossed the ocean and started getting fucked up by jungle dragons.
The mokole characters are named shit like Nyi Feathered-Thunder and Trees Dream, in continuation of Werewolf's tone deaf ethnocentric aping of bad Native American tropes. I have literally no idea whether Australian Aboriginals have names like these, and neither, likely, do you.
Anyway, the fiction that begins the intro ends, much like Chapter 1 of Demon does, by mentioning two things that you will later find out are game concepts, but with no indication of that fact- "Was and Is were one."
The intro then shifts out of story and into straight description to tell you what the mokole are. Thank Fucking Gaia.
But here's why I call Mokole weird fuckers. Garou are werewolves. They are people who turn into wolves and have three intermediate forms that play with the balance of man and wolf in-between. Bastet are werecats, and while there are different tribes that turn into different kinds of cats, they are all werecats, and two members of the same tribe turn into the same kind of cat. Ananasi break this slightly, with a form that combines what would be glabro and crinos, and is customizeable to some extent, but will have broadly the same traits from one to another, and an animal form that is a mass of spiders that can mix types, but ultimately does the same stuff from one member of the breed to another.
Mokole are described as were-dragons, but I've always just called them weresaurians. Their animal forms can be crocodile, alligator or monitor, and while the mokole have something sort of like tribes, called streams, which is really just kind of mokole ethnicity or region of origin, it doesn't dictate which thing is your animal form, just gives you a few choices. Only the Makara of India is restricted to a specific sort of animal form (called Suchid), but it's still "choose a crocodilian native to India" rather than telling you that you specifically turn into a gavial. The crinos-slot form, Archid, is even more different from other breeds, because you fucking build it from traits. And I'll get into specifics when I get to the right chapter, but one mokole might turn into a scaly person with a giant crest, and another might turn into literally Godzilla. You just have to reach rank 3 before you get fire breath. The in-game method by which mokole get their archid form is by dreaming it.
Cool? Undoubtedly. Consistent with the other breeds? Not really.
This is again a place where if White Wolf had better writers, they could have done something really interesting. I mean, mokole are all about being basically biological/spiritual external hard drives for Gaia, and there is some Australia/dreamtime stuff mentioned, but they could have gone all in with it.
Anyway. The book talks about how mokole are strong, yes, but their true purpose is to be Gaia's memory. This is certainly compelling, but it just makes me fucking wish that WW had better writers, again, because the Corax should have been Gaia's spies and her memory, because they could have focused on norse myth and have corax descended from Huninn and Muninn, Odin's ravens. The mokole are primarily creatures of the sun, Helios, and their auspices are sun-based, and yeah, some are born at night. They're mokole ragabash, if I recall correctly.
The mokole are said to be the oldest changing breeds, but take that with a salt lick, because I don't think White Wolf ever actually fucking figured out a time line for Werewolf, and prehistory in the game line is fucking weird. There was a period of time where humans were kept as livestock by werewolves. Humans were made from primates by the Weaver. The time of dinosaurs was the time of the Dragon Kings. One of these days I might sit down with the breedbooks and the core book and figure out the fucking time line, but I'll have to write a suicide note beforehand just in case it kills me.
Probably less complicated than whatever timeline WW thought they had
Mokole don't really have tribes, instead belonging to regional streams that sort of tell you what they may be inclined towards, and what ethnicity of people and types of reptiles a mokole is close to. The rundown in the intro, however, basically tells you two things- 1, there are next to no Caucasian mokole, mokole are mostly aboriginals, Native Americans and Africans, and Asians; and 2, that half of these "streams" count auspice by season, not by the place of the sun in the sky. Because we needed more special snowflakes fucking up internal logic.
Apparently Mokole are the oldest shapeshifters, hailing from the time of the Dragon Kings in prehistory, where humanoid reptiles lived alongside dinosaurs and were Gaia's protectors and priests of the Sun. Then the Great Dying happened, and the mokole died, leaving only kin who were later able to resurrect the race. Never mind the fact that there are hardly any reptiles that lived during the time of the dinosaurs and did not evolve in the last 65 million years. But anyway, then the resurrected mokole had a nap for 60 million years so other changing breeds could pop up.
No mention is made of the Rokea. Mokole, however, really should be allies of the weresharks, because a lot of the same themes are present- distrust of the garou, encroaching market economy, standing against the Wyrm without aid from the mammal changing breeds, being the oldest... I'd love to see a prehistory book for WtA that talks about the rokea, mokole, Ananasi, and maybe nagah. Hell, it could even go into the ancient history of the WoD and talk about the rise of the corax and the mammal fera and what was going on exactly. There are hints of really interesting shit going on in the prehistory of WoD, with dragon kings and insect changers and so on, but there's only hints.
Imagine coming home to this, but no one is waiting on the bed at the end. And you live alone.
Mokole are like most of the changing breeds, ie, animal-raping fucks. There are both homid and "suchid" mokole, and they live as the form they were born to until adolescence, where they go into a trance and dream the ancestral memories of mokole and their personal crinos (called Archid) form. One of the things that needs to be noted is that there are gila monster mokole.
Yeah. Imagine that for a second.
The intro closes with a lexicon that gives us just over a two column page of new terms and tells us that mokole had four forms before the Great Dying, but none have been able to take Drachid since then.
I'll try to get chapter 2 done later tonight, but I have work in about an hour and a half and need to do homework after that.
Shit's Gonna Get Weird, Guys
Seriously. They could have done better covers.
Much like Breedbook Rokea, Breedbook Mokole was printed to shovel crap out into the market for White Wolf's second edition. It was printed in 1999, and has an opening comic instead of the novellas that became common in Revised. In the comic, a garou voiceovers about going to the Amazon on the false pretense of fighting The Dissolver, but really to find a cure for some wyrm-curse that gives him strange memories? I don't know, it seriously doesn't really say what he needs cured. But so he goes to find the Mokole who have him smoke a peace pipe (pretty much) to give him a flashback to Amazonian natives fleeing from conquistadors who want a stone in their possession. The natives are mokole, except the woman leading them who is kin. The comic is much like the Rokea comic, with the exception that the people who get attacked by mokole in beast mode are basic humans who have gold bullets (mokole are linked to the Sun rather than the Moon, and so are weak to Gold), not garou in a dinghy.
Table of Contents
Like many White Wolf books, Mokole does not name their chapters helpful things like "The Setting," "Character Creation," "Magic" and so on, but rather shit like "Sunrise: Dragons in our Midst" with the description "An introduction to the Dragon Breed."
ffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff-
Sunrise: Dragons in our Midst
Introduction
The opening quote for this book about dragon shapeshifters who are primarily associated with South America and Australia in this book, who are Gaia's Cloud Servers (no, seriously), is from The Wonders of the East, which is an Old English prose piece that is basically a bestiary for Asia from when it was still usually called "the Orient."
I'm not saying that a quote from a book about Asia isn't appropriate for a book about dragon-shapeshifters, I'm just saying that I've read this book before and of the two places that I associate with the Mokole, Asia isn't one of them. The asian reptile shifters are the Nagah, which are snakes from India.
Pictured- not the people we're talking about.
Let's fucking face it, White Wolf books are just fucking text templates. The first few pages are a short story, either a novella or a comic, the table of contents follows with prose for chapter titles, and then the intro is fiction that sort of describes what's going on. This intro talks about a guy named Peter who wears Puma sneakers. I don't know why we need to know the fucking brand of shoes he wears, but we do. The totem Dragon basically reached into him and hauled his ass to an airport with packed luggage and put it on a plane without letting him know where the fuck he was going until he was on the fucking plane and, I presume, looked at his ticket to see he was on a plane to Australia to meet a couple mokole. I guess this is a continuation of the comic, since the protagonist werewolf is named Peter in both. He also has the hinted at memory plague, and the narrative goes into telling us that apparently garou and mokole have always been enemies. The garou believed mokole to be extinct until they crossed the ocean and started getting fucked up by jungle dragons.
The mokole characters are named shit like Nyi Feathered-Thunder and Trees Dream, in continuation of Werewolf's tone deaf ethnocentric aping of bad Native American tropes. I have literally no idea whether Australian Aboriginals have names like these, and neither, likely, do you.
Anyway, the fiction that begins the intro ends, much like Chapter 1 of Demon does, by mentioning two things that you will later find out are game concepts, but with no indication of that fact- "Was and Is were one."
The intro then shifts out of story and into straight description to tell you what the mokole are. Thank Fucking Gaia.
But here's why I call Mokole weird fuckers. Garou are werewolves. They are people who turn into wolves and have three intermediate forms that play with the balance of man and wolf in-between. Bastet are werecats, and while there are different tribes that turn into different kinds of cats, they are all werecats, and two members of the same tribe turn into the same kind of cat. Ananasi break this slightly, with a form that combines what would be glabro and crinos, and is customizeable to some extent, but will have broadly the same traits from one to another, and an animal form that is a mass of spiders that can mix types, but ultimately does the same stuff from one member of the breed to another.
Mokole are described as were-dragons, but I've always just called them weresaurians. Their animal forms can be crocodile, alligator or monitor, and while the mokole have something sort of like tribes, called streams, which is really just kind of mokole ethnicity or region of origin, it doesn't dictate which thing is your animal form, just gives you a few choices. Only the Makara of India is restricted to a specific sort of animal form (called Suchid), but it's still "choose a crocodilian native to India" rather than telling you that you specifically turn into a gavial. The crinos-slot form, Archid, is even more different from other breeds, because you fucking build it from traits. And I'll get into specifics when I get to the right chapter, but one mokole might turn into a scaly person with a giant crest, and another might turn into literally Godzilla. You just have to reach rank 3 before you get fire breath. The in-game method by which mokole get their archid form is by dreaming it.
Cool? Undoubtedly. Consistent with the other breeds? Not really.
This is again a place where if White Wolf had better writers, they could have done something really interesting. I mean, mokole are all about being basically biological/spiritual external hard drives for Gaia, and there is some Australia/dreamtime stuff mentioned, but they could have gone all in with it.
Anyway. The book talks about how mokole are strong, yes, but their true purpose is to be Gaia's memory. This is certainly compelling, but it just makes me fucking wish that WW had better writers, again, because the Corax should have been Gaia's spies and her memory, because they could have focused on norse myth and have corax descended from Huninn and Muninn, Odin's ravens. The mokole are primarily creatures of the sun, Helios, and their auspices are sun-based, and yeah, some are born at night. They're mokole ragabash, if I recall correctly.
The mokole are said to be the oldest changing breeds, but take that with a salt lick, because I don't think White Wolf ever actually fucking figured out a time line for Werewolf, and prehistory in the game line is fucking weird. There was a period of time where humans were kept as livestock by werewolves. Humans were made from primates by the Weaver. The time of dinosaurs was the time of the Dragon Kings. One of these days I might sit down with the breedbooks and the core book and figure out the fucking time line, but I'll have to write a suicide note beforehand just in case it kills me.
Probably less complicated than whatever timeline WW thought they had
Mokole don't really have tribes, instead belonging to regional streams that sort of tell you what they may be inclined towards, and what ethnicity of people and types of reptiles a mokole is close to. The rundown in the intro, however, basically tells you two things- 1, there are next to no Caucasian mokole, mokole are mostly aboriginals, Native Americans and Africans, and Asians; and 2, that half of these "streams" count auspice by season, not by the place of the sun in the sky. Because we needed more special snowflakes fucking up internal logic.
Apparently Mokole are the oldest shapeshifters, hailing from the time of the Dragon Kings in prehistory, where humanoid reptiles lived alongside dinosaurs and were Gaia's protectors and priests of the Sun. Then the Great Dying happened, and the mokole died, leaving only kin who were later able to resurrect the race. Never mind the fact that there are hardly any reptiles that lived during the time of the dinosaurs and did not evolve in the last 65 million years. But anyway, then the resurrected mokole had a nap for 60 million years so other changing breeds could pop up.
No mention is made of the Rokea. Mokole, however, really should be allies of the weresharks, because a lot of the same themes are present- distrust of the garou, encroaching market economy, standing against the Wyrm without aid from the mammal changing breeds, being the oldest... I'd love to see a prehistory book for WtA that talks about the rokea, mokole, Ananasi, and maybe nagah. Hell, it could even go into the ancient history of the WoD and talk about the rise of the corax and the mammal fera and what was going on exactly. There are hints of really interesting shit going on in the prehistory of WoD, with dragon kings and insect changers and so on, but there's only hints.
Imagine coming home to this, but no one is waiting on the bed at the end. And you live alone.
Mokole are like most of the changing breeds, ie, animal-raping fucks. There are both homid and "suchid" mokole, and they live as the form they were born to until adolescence, where they go into a trance and dream the ancestral memories of mokole and their personal crinos (called Archid) form. One of the things that needs to be noted is that there are gila monster mokole.
Yeah. Imagine that for a second.
The intro closes with a lexicon that gives us just over a two column page of new terms and tells us that mokole had four forms before the Great Dying, but none have been able to take Drachid since then.
I'll try to get chapter 2 done later tonight, but I have work in about an hour and a half and need to do homework after that.