Beast: The Primordial

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Beast: The Primordial
RPG published by White Wolf / Onyx Path
Rule System	Storytelling System
First Publication	unreleased

The newest game to come out for the New World of Darkness, and probably the one most scorned on /tg/. You are a Beast, a living embodiment of humanity's deepest and darkest fears, driven by an inescapable need to sate your Hunger, a manifestation of fear. You may be driven by the urge to Ruin or Dominate, but you cannot help but Feed. Of course, where a Beast lurks, Heroes inevitably arise, driven to slay the Thing lurking in the Dark...

Sounds awesome, right? A chance to both completely blow off the supernatural wangst that bedevils almost all of the other WoD lines (except Geist: The Sin-Eaters and maybe Demon: The Descent) and revel in being the darkly ambiguous villain protagonist: what could possibly wreck that idea?

Then the preview edition came out, and the problems began to show themselves.

For a start, you don't get any shapeshifting powers at all. That's right, you have a "Beast's soul", but not a Beast's body - even your Avatisms are completely invisible to freaking mundies, even when you're squeezing through a too-tight space, ripping them apart with claws or breathing fire. This fact alone got /tg/ mocking the game as appealing to otherkin -- one of the mercifully rare, but not non-existent branches of the furry fandom that even other furries think are out of their minds.

Next, though the intended flavor of the game was "screw the Heroes, they're really nothing but nutjobs who think they're the Good Guys and insist you're the Bad Guys", the writing of it came off as so sneering and condescending that not only did hordes of people start defending the Heroes (no thanks to that screwy "if you Critical Fail on your Rampage check, you spawn a Hero" rule), but /tg/ began writing Beasts off as otherkin fodder. The "special people with the souls of mythical creatures, picked on and bullied by the normies who just don't understand": that's what /tg/ saw and derided, in a repeat of Changeling: The Dreaming.

But in a surprising show of self-awareness, Onyx Path actually took the time to respond to the criticisms and began an immediate rewrite of the book to address them. While /tg/ is cautiously optimistic at most about how well they'll work to fix everything, early reports from people who got a hold of the rewrite suggest that it'll be a dramatic improvement over the current preview edition. For the moment, it's too early to tell whether the line will manage to carve a niche for itself or become a repeat of Changeling: the Dreaming.