Red Tundra by Mike Pohjola

a story for Werewolf: The Apocalypse. With illustrations by Krzysztof Bieniawski, Gabriel de Goes Figueiredo and Maichol Quinto.

Not only did I manage to snag a copy of this adventure on Free RPG Day 2024, I also had the good luck to have someone run it for me so I could get a better feel for the game! I’ve always loved the World Of Darkness titles, whether giggling over people’s Vampire: The Masquerade stories, getting to actually play in a Changeling: The Dreaming LARP, or watching the brilliant treatment of Mage: The Ascension by Mikaela Sims. It’s just so hard nowadays to find people who want to play anything but D&D. Yes, I know I was super spoiled in being able to play multiple systems twice weekly throughout my mid-twenties to -thirties. And scheduling games nowadays is hard enough without building a learning curve into the process. I just get a little wistful sometimes, wishing I could RP something that isn’t high fantasy, as much fun as that is with my usual gaming circles (and yes, I know I’m lucky in that I have more than zero of those!)

Which is all to say that when the one guy stepped up and offered to run this adventure for me and another forlorn soul at Game Kastle College Park on Free RPG Day, we were overjoyed. Neither of us players were familiar with the game itself but our Storyteller was well prepared, even bringing reusable character sheets then showing us how to use clear tape and whiteboard markers to make our own! While those sheets were copied directly from the Red Tundra booklet, he also had handy player aids on the basic mechanics of W:tA for us, that were super useful when we were making decisions over the course of the game. I’m not sure where he got them from, tho they did look pretty official. I couldn’t find anything like them on the publisher’s website, alas. Perhaps they came in a download packet specific to STs for the event? Regardless, I rather wish Red Tundra was available as a download from Renegade Game Studios too — for free or otherwise — as other publishers do with their Free RPG Day offerings.

To the adventure itself! The players all take on the roles of werewolves, generally known here as Garou, fighting for the planet in their own ways. There are ostensibly six characters to choose from, tho my copy of the adventure was cut wrong and had a duplicate of Ida “Ratbrain” Fong’s sheet instead of Jared Tierney’s (another reason I wish this was available for download.) Aside from that, the production quality of this book is top notch, with heavy paper and beautiful colors and illustrations that go a long way towards justifying the USD12 price tag on the back.

After or while picking your character (depending on how much your ST enjoys surprises,) you learn that you’re part of a pack of Garou returning from all over to your hometown in the Canadian Northwest Territories. Your pack was called The Band — a name undoubtedly chosen for the plethora of punning options, several of which were absolutely used at my table — and was an offshoot of the only other local Garou pack, the Lunabombers. Now that you’re back in town, you learn that a luxury hunting company has started offering their moneyed clientele wolf shoots from helicopters taking off nearby. The Lunabombers, who are about as unhinged as their name suggests, want to put a bloody end to the business. What remains of The Band, otoh, know and fear that the Lunabombers will drag too many of their loved ones into the crosshairs, so must figure out a solution that hopefully defangs both hunters and terrorists before blood rains down on the tundra.

It’s a terrific premise that really has players working both their human and wolf sides as they navigate this treacherous situation. I chose to play Shelley “Moonshadow” Le Borgne, a pro women’s hockey player with a strong sense of the poetic, while the other gamer chose to genderbend Ashley “Fernfur” Greeneyes, who grew up wolf before indiscriminate logging sparked his Rage and turned him into a shapeshifting Garou. We made a great team to take on this issue, and filled the entire four-hour session with both strategizing and needful combat. We had a really good time, in large part due to our well-prepared ST, who led us through the plot and mechanics with panache.

Reading the booklet afterwards, I was struck by just what a great job he did. Which is no shade at all to the adventure! It’s meant to be difficult, and we players certainly felt stymied, but at no point did we feel railroaded or frustrated enough to want to quit, mostly due to his positive direction. A less accomplished ST could easily have made this complicated story have us feeling like we were hitting our heads against a brick wall, instead of merely overcoming the many obstacles on our path to success.

Our ST also filled in a lot of the gaps in the written adventure that reference the core book for further information, ensuring that we novices had loads of fun without being bogged down by details. I’d recommend this story for any mature gaming table so long as the ST has a decent familiarity with the system: it’s definitely not the kind of book a table entirely new to W:tA could easily grok. That said, it served as a wonderful taster for what the WoD has to offer, with complex stories and moral considerations and some truly fun roleplaying and dice chucking (but I’m a huge fan of d10 roll and keep with explosions from way back, so I’m 100% biased there, lol.) It definitely satisfied my desire to play in a modern fantasy/horror game, and I super hope I got to play more!

Red Tundra by Mike Pohjola was published June 22 2024 by Renegade Game Studios.