The opening fiction to the Pack's section is the story of a guy who's about to throw a half-dead dog that lost him a bet in a dog fight into a dumpster, then getting ambushed by
The intro writeup apparently writes the dog breeds as having "To Serve and Protect" etched in their veins at the same time that they threaten to castrate people for neutering and spaying dogs, and calling legislation to ban breeding of dogs for dogfighting "draconian."
wait a minute what
Moving on. Hyenas are also lumped into the Pack despite being a distinct evolutionary line closer to cats than dogs, due to
The book also addresses the mildly interesting question of why ancient shapeshifters can sometimes turn into dog breeds codified less than a hundred years ago. Naturally for the WoD, it says "Fucked if we know, make up the reason yourself." Normally I enjoy this, because I love making my own cosmology, but in this book it's pretty damn lazy about it. It brings up the question in a sidebar solely to say "Do it yourself."
The Pack are all intensely social and crave a distinct hierarchy in their lives. They also surround themselves with animal and human kin to act as Omegas to them. There's also the problem of them dealing with prey-animal shifters and the possibility/probability that they'll try to hunt and eat them, even if they're friends. Also, they hate the Bastet because hurr cats and dogs. It's not like I have three cats and a dog and they're all bros or anything.
The book also mentions that some Pack may end up as breeders for dog fighting, despite the opening fiction, a discussion of Pack Heart-Rippers in a few paragraphs, and entire tone of the book being violently and diametrically opposed to this. The paragraph that mentions this does not paint them in a negative light for doing so. This fucking book.
quote:
Stereotypes
Man: Loyalty should bind both ways.
Mages: Big dogs looking for bigger bones, digging up everyone else's yard.
Vampires: Just as Alphas without a pack, they suck the life out of everything they touch.
Werewolves: Truly a breed apart, for all the best and worst that this implies.
The Maerans are the first of the three types of Pack, the domesticated breeds. Yes, all of them. Yes, that means that this
and this
have the exact same statistical representation. The book explains this by having tinier dog breeds explode to preposterous size in Primal form, most shifters are from old, large breeds, and saying that there's no Chihuahua shifters (and that it's probably for the best.)
Maerans are basically stereotypes of dogs writ large: loyal, protective, hate being alone, don't do well with cats, go berserk around intruders, etc et-
quote:
That canine blood manifests through a "pedigree" — as the breed of dog a person becomes. This pedigree reveals a deep connection between the shapechanging human and the dog-shape he attains. While Maerans don’t usually arise from bestial couplings between humans and dogs (though there are rumors to that effect...), this connection does appear to follow family lines.
CAN WE GO ONE FUCKING UPDATE WITHOUT ALLUDING TO, OR OUTRIGHT MENTIONING, BESTIALITY!?
Ahem.
Mechanically, the Maerans are Werewolf Lite, with approximately the same spread with the numbers lowered.
Next are the Riantes, the hyenas. Riantes are scavengers who prefer to live alone with their enclaves of fellow hyenas, kin, and Riantes. They're all sorts of crawling in my skin about being outcasts, "[hiding] their bitterness in caustic laughter and [burying] their tears in scorn and disdain for what they cannot have." Most Riantes are poor or barely making ends meet, which might have something to do with the fact they only show up in the more strife-filled areas of Africa and the Middle East. Hyenas also are deeply tied with witchcraft and the rumor of a hyena-man can get lynch mobs a-frenzying. The book also mentions the misconception/myth that hyenas can change sexes, though thankfully shooting it down and not expounding on why that exists.
Warning: disturbing biology lesson ahoy! It's because female spotted hyenas have a seven inch clitoris that looks like the male penis, and they give birth through it, often creating fatal tearing or leading to a suffocated newborn. This is due to the female hyena being stuffed with male hormones to pass onto her male children so they have as many babies as possible to pass on her genes, which kinda backfires sometimes as the babies are so aggressive they attack each other from the moment they pop out of their mom's dong. Evolution is a hilariously cruel thing. Oh yeah, and the hyena greeting ritual involves sniffing and licking their wangs/pseudowangs. Both genders get erections on command to show submission and greet another hyena higher on the social ladder.
Once you've stopped trying to scrub that image out of your brain, you can be as thankful as I am that the writers stopped short of giving a mechanical way to make furries with dickginas playable.
Anyway, the backgrounds say that African Riantes tend to treat both genders equally while the Indian breeds have females be dominant, which is flat-out wrong, as spotted hyenas (rather apparently now) are overwhelmingly matriarchal.
Mechanically, the Riantes are actually kind of an interesting alternative to Werewolves: slightly smaller but equally as tough, with the animal form being far tougher and slightly slower.
The Vargr are the discount bin werewolves. Their writeup:
.
No, seriously, that's pretty much the whole thing. They have no idea
why they exist or why other werewolves exist and why Father Wolf doesn't
favor them. They have no warform at all, just a huge-ass Dire Wolf form
that has its stats only barely differentiated from the Werewolf
version. They're also mostly (uuuuuuuugh) lone wolves.The final breed, from Other Species, is the Warrigal. They're Australian aborigine stereotypes who turn into dingo-men. That's about it.
You may have noticed that there wasn't any art this time. This is because both art pieces in this chapter were
.http://i.imgur.com/ORBUA.png
http://i.imgur.com/d1ekV.png
I would bet a large amount of money that the artist drew those penises with meticulous detail and then smudged them in Photoshop so it would be publishable. Judging from a later piece in the book, I'm probably not wrong.
Next time: the Royal Apes. Oh Jesus.
SIDE NOTE:
As a note, there's actually an interesting belief in some areas of Ethiopia involving hyenas being the guardians of King Solomon's gold mines...and also that these hyenas will assault your village, tear it apart and eat your fucking children unless someone keeps them fed. Sometimes, these people who keep the hyenas fed (who are socially discriminated against; this is a dirty but necessary job) are believed to be able to turn into hyenas as well.
They say you can tell the royal hyenas by the gold earrings they wear.
Naturally, this belief is far more interesting than anything this book puts forward. This is pretty common. (Also: if you think only dogs and wolves have alphas? No. Wererabbits have alphas, too. Everyone has fucking alphas, even though that's not even how wolves work.)
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