I loved Werewolf the Apocalypse when White Wolf decided to change the World of Darkness and reboot things I hesitated. I still have trouble wrapping my mind around what's expected of characters as Forsaken rather than Garou but reading The Rage, I finally stopped trying to fit Forsaken into what I knew about the Apocalypse but actually read them as Forsaken.
The book is divided into three sections, Tribes, Rules and Setting. The setting was interesting, not sure if it's something I'd incorporate into a game but maybe taking portions of the ideas presented to add colour to NPCs would be fun. The rules sections suffers the problems of all attempts to add merits, flaws and gifts to the main rules. Some of them are too powerful and some try to take the place of something that already works. New Gifts I tend to just toss and new merits and flaws often need pretty good reasoning from my players to make their way into the campaign. The first section was the most useful.
The tribal section did a really good job of not only expanding the information on the tribes but of also filling out the roles of werewolves within the tribes. I could come up with ideas for every tribe and auspice available in the game. Before I was having trouble coming up with one character idea as none of the tribes were very appealing to me. If I were starting a new campaign I'd have my players read this section to just help them come up with ideas.
Unfortunately this book didn't answer some basic questions I had about the world. How does a werewolf choose a tribe? Are the tribes represented fairly equally in any given area? Do the tribes come together for grand conferences when a new werewolf is newly changed. Is a werewolf a Ghost Wolf automatically for a time before choosing a tribe or is there a "grace period" while he or she is initiated into the culture?
The book gave me better ideas on how the world worked, but it didn't give me quite what I expected so I'll give it a 3.
