CHAT: RPGs (was Re: Wargs)
| From: | Ed Heil <edheil@...> |
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| Date: | Tuesday, October 26, 1999, 1:34 |
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I dunno, but I suspect that you might look to White Wolf as your
culprit.
White Wolf is a company that produces _Vampire: The Masquerade,_
_Werewolf: The Apocalypse_, _Changeling: The Dreaming_, and lots of
other games with colons in them.
While long-time roleplaying gamers may find White Wolf games
ill-produced and pretentious, and anyone who knows Latin may be
annoyed by the fact that many of the writers like to drop Latin words
and phrases into the text without having a very firm grasp on what
they mean, these new roleplaying games have reached out past the
traditional "pimply, dresses badly, has no social skills" roleplayer
market into a whole new, lucrative "pallid, dresses in black, takes
self very seriously" roleplayer market.
(This may be a good thing for society as a whole since it may channel
off some of the effort that the latter group would otherwise have put
into bad poetry.)
Just as the unfortunate quirks of Dungeons and Dragons sadly became
defining assumptions of fantasy for people whose only/main exposure to
the genre was through the games, in the 80s (e.g. "elves can see
infrared"), the unfortunate quirks of White Wolf games seem to have
become defining assumptions of horror for people whose only/main
exposure to the genre has been through the games, in the 90s (e.g.
"Vampires are about as common as dentists, and are separated into a
complex web of warring clans, who have representatives in every major
city.")
In any case, it would not surprise me one bit to find out that the
"Wargs" and "Wolfen" of which you speak are part of _Werewolf: The
Apocalypse."
If you want to treat werewolves in modern culture, it might behoove
you to check out this game, if not for its quality, for its influence
on popular conceptions of the werewolf.
(Apologies to both traditional gamers and White Wolfers for the
vicious stereotypes used in the above post. I don't really believe
them; I'm caricaturing.)
-------------------------------------------------
edheil@postmark.net
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Sally Caves wrote:
> Can anyone tell me what a "warg" is in contemporary horror?
> What are the Wolfen? Are they wargs?
>
> I know that vargr in Old Norse is an outlaw (and a wolf), but
> didn't the word "warg," cognate with it, get conscripted for
> some monster in contemporary lit?
>
> I've read that warg was the Middle High German word used to
> describe desecrator of churches and graves, eaters of the dead.
> Were they also werewolves?
>
> How would Teonaht, with its rigid system of compounds, express
> werewolf. It has kohs koklima, "monkey dog," but the construction
> is dog monkey-like. A werewolf was more than just a man wolf-like,
> but there it is:
>
> zev lorfema ... that has a kind of ring to it.
> lorv zefema? a lycanthrope? a manlike wolf.
>
>
>
> Herman Miller:
>
> > I have a conlang spoken by werewolves. Called Thelwik, it's on a separate
> > branch of the Indo-European language family. Werewolves and vampires
> > actually exist in the Kolagian universe, at least in the old version
before
> > I decided to start redesigning it. (Well, "redesigning" isn't quite
> > accurate because it was never really "designed" in the first place; it
just
> > sort of fell together.) But Kolagian werewolves (unlike vampires) aren't
> > generally seen as malevolent beings, and at least one was a heroic
figure.
> >
> > I'm not sure where this language will fit into my new concept of Kolagia;
> > whether shape-changers even exist or not. It could be spoken by a race of
> > anthropomorphic wolf-people, but why then would it be derived from
> > Indo-European roots?
> >
> > --
> > languages of Kolagia--->
+---<http://www.io.com/~hmiller/languages.html>---
> > Thryomanes /"If all Printers were determin'd not to print
any
> > (Herman Miller) / thing till they were sure it would offend no
body,
> > moc.oi @ rellimh <-/ there would be very little printed." -Ben
Franklin