Why not just make FEED versions of the other lines?
That's a good question.
How are familiar are you with
Feed, exactly? I'm still trying to get a handle on it.
The thing is,
Feed was made with very specific goals in mind. Firstly, to represent vampires as 1) subject to their hunger and 2) torn between human and vampiric natures. Secondly, to allow (under the preceding framework) a group to depicts highly variable vampire strains including emulating specific works of vampire fiction. To that end, the book has chapters dedicated to examining the trends in vampire fiction over the last century or so as well as four sample setting which depict wildly different takes on the vampire genre.
That's why I like it over WW vampire games. It isn't about playing Mark Reign-Hagen's own idiosyncratic take on vampires: it engages with the vampire genre as a whole.
In
Feed, the vampires are an unsubtle addiction metaphor. While the sample settings mix in other metaphors, like lust for power, the allure of evil, or the cycle of violence, the addiction metaphor is intentionally baked into the rules. Much like
Monsterhearts, this "monster as metaphor" formula provides a solid foundation from which the rest of the mechanics can flow organically. Not only that, but the addiction metaphor works very well for emulating most vampire fiction.
Doing the same thing for werewolves, wizards, ghosts, and fairies would require a lot of effort in terms of both researching their sub-genres, finding the best metaphors that fit them, and figuring out how to adapt the formula to fit them. I have contemplated it before and tried posting ideas for it here in the past, but I never got very far.
Feed is able to neatly include both
Vampire: The Masquerade and
Vampire: The Requiem in its milieu. Equivalents for werewolves, wizards, ghosts, and fairies (among others) would need to be able to do the same and more.
A werewolf game would need to be able to be able to represent all those
werewolf archetypes that I mentioned earlier. You can use the
Feed rules to represent vampiric werewolves a la
Nightlife, but here I'll be discussing werewolves as a distinct archetype.
What is the underlying metaphor behind werewolves? What could bridge the gap between all those different portrayals? How could you mix metaphors? Liminality? Abuse? Puberty? Masculinity? Instincts? Something else?
You could represent their traits with a similar dichotomy between lycanthropy and humanity as vampires, but would that be the best way to represent them? If not, then what would be a better way?
What would be their equivalent of hunger? Under what circumstances would they accrue it and how would they remove it? Unlike WW games, this is meant to have more impact on roleplaying than simply recharging your batteries in typical RPG style.
How would werewolf strains be represented? What are the universal criteria that would be used to organize them?
What would the four example settings be? How could they be made more unique from typical examples of the genre?
What would the chapter on trends in werewolf fiction say? What are the trends and what are good tips for representing them in a game?
Even so, there's a niggling in the back of my mind wondering if werewolves are already too similar to vampires or wizards.
It's all very cerebral. And that's just werewolves. I can't begin to imagine the effort required for the rest of them.
Finding a metaphor for wizards is easy. Those are fundamentally about power, represented as magic (which at it most basic is the ability to alter reality in a way that isn't otherwise explainable through causality: the wizard wills something and it happens), regardless of which iteration of
Mage you're talking about. The allure of power, the abuse, the concentration, etc. Some want to use magic for simple personal gain, some simply want to prevent it misuse by others, others have loftier goals of keeping the magic in the hands of a select clientele (for seemingly altruistic or openly selfish reasons) or release it into the world (potentially heedless of the harm it could cause to the unwary), and some have ulterior motives that nobody but themselves is able to understand. But trying to represent them in rules is a whole other can of worms.
Trying to write chapters on trends in fairy fiction will be fun, I imagine. The current trends seems to be to depict them as human, but with big dicks.
If anybody has any advice or suggestions or anything, then feel free to share.