Wolfspell Actual Play - Part 2, Shifting and Peril

Picking up from Part 1 here.

The Wolfspell itself, the process of changing, is a big, key component of the game. I felt like I needed to give sufficient setup, but also, needed to get to it relatively early, so that we could set the tone and move on to the rest of the game.

I am going to admit up front, the progression post-shifting is probably one of my favorite things in the game - But we’ll get to that in a moment.

I think that I've been using a longer voice here and spent awhile lingering over the thematically heavy opening experiences of the game. As the action picks up and the wolves start to encounter more complex problems, I'll probably fall away from further explanation. Actual Play isn't something I've written much of, so there's tinkering to be done. 

As the moon begins to rise, the Pack is gathered around what was once the camp of a giant. They have brought him a dozen goats and casks of mead in order to show they mean no harm - unlike the rest of their clansmen who have hunted them to this last individual. They sought the Giant for magic - Magic to make them into wolves, to defend the clan their new, weak king has made vulnerable, without offending ancient taboos of war on their land. First, they had all sacrificed tokens of their humanity - Jona’s sword, Crow’s breath, the giant snapped to show the frailty of humanity’s arms. Vegeir’s necklace of troll ears, won by the king, torn and faded as all Glory inevitably is. Inwyr’s medicine bag, poured out and ripped to show how fleeting their Wisdom is.

Once the moon crests the bowl of mountain peaks however, that humanity begins to recede. None of them are quite sure when it begins; There’s the anticipation, calculated waiting, and then suddenly the changes are upon them…

Read on below!

The Shifting as presented in the book is a dialog - You as Winter have questions you can ask everyone to prompt them, and they, in turn, can ask you questions about how the transformation feels, smells, tastes, sounds and appears. Two things are here which really make Wolfspell great - A focus on all of the senses, especially as experienced by the characters through the filter of being wolves, and a continuing investment in leading questions, one of the greatest GM tools ever devised.

I decide to take the questions out of order, and much like the way I wanted to loop everyone’s personal belongings into the spell and ask the last one of all three players. I start with Jona.

“What is most painful about the shifting?” Jona’s most intense reflection on the pain is her jaw growing and lengthening, cracking out of her face, the sudden pain and weight all but pulling her off her feet. The rest sense that the shifting isn’t easy, It’s a visceral thing. They know that this is not easy to endure.

Inwyr, the mystic, is asked “What is most familiar about the shifting?” To him, it is a reminder of when he summoned the raven with his blood. Magic, as everyone will now know, is a clarity of the senses, and he recalls the wheeling of the raven above and it’s descent with a crystalline clarity - Magic causes a sharpening of the world around you. Being a wolf is like performing magic, and part of Inwyr is hooked.

The steward, Vegeir, answers “How does the shifting warp your consciousness?” with the observation that suddenly he has trouble thinking of his companions as individuals with names. He tries to imagine them, going through what he is, but in his mind, they are all merely the pack. They are not companions but pieces of a whole, and that feels somehow right.

Each answer informs the others, but then, everyone must find their own answer to the last question: “What dread seeps into your soul during the shifting?”

Jona has given up her sword. With it, some confidence in herself. Can tooth and claw possibly stand up to axes and arrows? She doesn’t know. Her confidence, her surety she can survive a fight, is diminished.

Vegeir snaps back and clings on to the names of his friends. He knows that this is not just him, that his easy thoughts are those of something inhuman, the wolf. He’s worried that once, when the wolf comes to the fore, he won’t know how to get back to the man.

Inwyr, still overwhelmed with the clarity and the sensation of magic, worried that it wouldn’t last. It was not the fear of failure, but a fear of success and giving up these senses that worried him.

This whole sequence, and the way Wolfspell gives it to you, just shines. In many games, players have a very vivid, internal idea of how the game is going, what their characters feel, what might happen in the future, and the power here is that the Shifting dialogue lets you help players get that all out. The idea of magic bringing unnatural clarity to the world became a running theme in the game, even. They make that rich internal world into fiction which affects the rest of the party, and then get to tell you exactly what their character doesn’t want to happen, which is great for generating foreshadowing and telling you what that player is interested in.

Running the last question by all of the players gives everyone skin in the game, and gives them a chance to not just go along with, but contradict each other and tell us about their character, which is great.

As each of the pack come to their senses, there’s a moment of confusion. Each of them stares at the two wolves in front of them and isn’t sure which is which, before something simply clicks in understanding - and they know precisely who each other are.

Wolfspell plays it straight: You are now wolves, and players have autonomy to describe themselves. I think for some groups, this would be a great place to have everyone define something about another player’s wolf and what it says about their wolf’s perception of them, but I stuck to the book on this one.

Vegeir became a smallish, light brown wolf, who smelled like wildflowers and frost. Jona suitably ended up being the largest, dark furred, with a harsh voice, and a scent like the last leg of the chase. Inwyr landed in the middle, a grey wolf with a crowish voice and the scent of carrion in the air.

Wolfspell gives us a primer on wolves, but sticks straight to the things that matter in this game: You are as expressive as if you talked, but when you tell us what your wolf does, make sure we know in plain english what you say it means. Scent markings are like signs, and one of the things you may notice when beholding the world, and carry information. Howls are full of meaning - and when one wolf howls, others feel the urge to as well. Your howl always says something.

Wolfspell turns two wolf behaviors - Wrestling and Grooming - into mechanically necessary, but thematically driven actions.

I say that the wolves feel comfortable. There’s prey nearby (the goats) even though the cave and the scents within give them a sense of danger and awe. The night is early, they aren’t hungry. With things quiet and comfortable, they have some leeway to goof around. I do not remind them of their task.

I ask who is going to start wrestling first and Inwyr’s player speaks up.

Both wolves playing rolled. Jona ended up with Wolf 2, and Inwyr with Wolf 1. Jona describes jumping eagerly into the play, finding it natural, but Inwyr says he plays too rough, and someone gets hurt. I decide it is Jona, who suffers Winter’s Wrath.

Inwyr sizes up Vegeir at first - being the slighter of his potential opponents, but there’s no interest. Then there is too much, and Jona pounces him almost immediately. At first, He is bewildered and gets taken off guard, then lets the wolf come back - A little too hard. Before Jona can jump out of the furball, she’s scraped up.

A wolf who suffers from Winter’s Wrath always has to roll when you face peril. They are isolated, sick, injured or vulnerable. Having someone afflicted means that most of the time, multiple wolves are going to roll and risk being really injured when stakes are high.

By way of apology and to show he’s not really nuts, Inwyr lets his wolfish instinct to groom take over, and Vegeir join in. The pack has a huddle, brushes noses, and lick their wounds - Mechanically, groowing. The entire pack joining also has the benefit of removing Winter’s wrath, and allows Vegeir and Inwyr to gain a point of Fera, leveling out the pack at 1.

This way, we see how Wrestling, Grooming, and Winter’s Wrath all interact.

With that piece of introduction out of the way, I remind the players that they have a task - And all of them shake off their wolfishness long enough to remember that they have a clan to save. The steep cliff face they had to go around before doesn’t seem so daunting as wolves, so they take a closer look.

Beholding the world is for looking around, but results are split into wolfish senses and human intuitions. Vegeir ends up with a Wolf 2 success, and gets a nice description of the scent of rabbits and other game passing down the slope, and the sense (instincts) that this isn’t a tough climb, downhill. He bounds over the edge, and down into the next vale, and the pack is ready to make their way down out of the mountains and back towards their imperiled clan’s lands.

The wolves shuffle through the deep snow, staying near the cliffs to avoid the worst. None of them jockey ahead or fall too far behind, their human minds all thinking just a little too much to allow instincts to settle in, to let a pecking order emerge between them.

They neared the edge of the vale, and sunk into the snow, finding some tunnels from small game. Wolfish hungers making themselves known, the pack spread out to try and find a meal. The player with the highest feral rolls for the pack to hunt, however, everyone was Feral 1, and they decided that Inwyr would lead the hunt.

With a 3 Wolf result, Inwyr has to make a choice and choose only two of the four options. He sates his hunger, and he doesn’t want hunting rabbits to put anyone in a spot. Nobody is suffering from Winter’s wrath, so that leaves the last option - No one else must go without - remaining. Inwyr catches a rabbit, but it’s a bit scrawny and after splitting it with Jona, there isn’t much left for Vegeir.

At the end of the Vale, the pack stops before a much more forbidding cliff face. To go around, their minds realize, would waste precious hours, but after beholding the world, they realize that trees weighed down with snow and loose rocks below would be treacherous to descend among. Nevertheless, they decide to press on and make their way down to the forest.

I tell them straight up that this is Peril. Things could go badly for them and spiral out of control here - Their instincts are blunt about the dangers. I ask them who is most vulnerable - Is it Jona, still shaking off her injuries? Is it Inwyr, overwhelmed by the wolfish senses? Is it Vegeir, distracted by his hunger and the struggle of man and wolf inside? I give them equal reasons it could be any of them to make choosing who is imperiled in this roll a clear player decision.

In the end, Vegeir’s distraction takes precedence. His player rolls, and gets Wolf 1 - A harsh choice, since from there, he can either suffer harm without resolving the situation - Or he can sacrifice himself for the pack. He obviously takes the former option, but when I slide the options for suffering harm over, I see a sudden recognition on the player’s face - This task didn’t just risk harm, it risked *harm*. The fragility of the wolves sinks in around the table, when everyone realizes that their wolves can only suffer harm twice, and even those options take a physical toll. Vegeir’s player opts for Each scar is a lesson learned. He describes what happens and chooses to gain 2 Feral.

Vegeir falls behind, his mind wandering between wolf hunger and human hesitation. He doesn’t see a treacherous patch of loose snow, stumbling in it - And allowing the weighted tree just barely staying upright in the ice to tumble over, slamming down on him and pinning the wolf against the slopes. It cracks the wolf right on the head, tearing one of his ears and filling it with blood, muffling sounds from that side. In the few moments he is pinned, Veeir realizes that he has to focus on the immediate situation, to stop looking ahead, and he lets his wolfish instincts rise to the surface.

The rest of the pack has to go back up and try to free their packmate - But this time, it’s going to put one of them in danger. Vegeir must roll of course, since he was injured and now suffers Winter’s Wrath. Jona decides that she is going to be the one to clamber back up and help. The two of them roll and succeed with aplomb, allowing them to retreat to safety, since they don’t plan on slaying the hillside.

Jona pushes in and with Vegeir’s help, rolls the tree off and sends it crashing down the hillside, shaking loose rocks and snow and leaving a path for the pack to descend. Jona notices the injuries, but there’s nothing to do up here. The wolves scamper down to the edge of the woods below, leaving the forbidding mountain slopes behind.

They look around, and with solid wolf results, find that there is no immediate danger, and that any potential prey has been chased off by the crashing of trees and rocks. Even though the moon is rising high and threatens to vanish behind the mountains soon, they decide to take advantage of the quiet and stop. The pack huddles up and consoles the slightly shaken Vegeir, helping him adjust to his muffled hearing (and shrugging off Winter’s Wrath, if not the scars) before they continue on into the forest, towards home - and the enemy. 

Concluded in part 3