No Twilight dunks. No Teen Wolf gags. No tired references to any supernatural teen fiction of my bygone youth. Those are the promises I made to myself when I agreed to write about the new Sims 4 Werewolves game pack. And yet I accidentally wound up mating with an alpha werewolf, joining up with the rivals to his pack, and making plans to bite his new toddler.
The fanfic is writing itself and I am powerless to stop it.
Moonwood membership
My Sims 4 Werewolves session started appropriately. I created a young adult werewolf with an undercut, nose rings, the cute new patchwork baggy jeans in the Werewolves game pack, and allowed the randomizer to bestow her the name Margaret Ruff. Folks who have the Pets expansion will recognize the many fur color, pattern, and painting options available to make a rather unique werewolf with the same tools. I still think they look a bit like Jim Carey in a Grinch costume, but they did grow on me.
I expected (wrongly) that I would need to inject a bit of my own drama into werewolf life, so I made Margaret a vegetarian, a kleptomaniac, and set her up with a job as a night shift babysitter. Everything turned tails up very fast. Moonwood Mill’s one affordable starter home is actually pretty cute as default homes go, showing off a bit of rustic cabin flare. I originally thought it odd that it came with neither TV nor computer, until I found out how prone werewolves are, even in human form, to wrecking their appliances at random with accidental superhuman strength. Margaret could barely browse the fridge for a snack without breaking it.
I quickly set aside concerns for Margaret’s property because I couldn’t be bothered with placing her on an eternal sink, stove, and fridge repair routine. Instead, she wandered Moonwood Mill. Frankly, I recommend spending as little time as possible at your own home because Moonwood is stacked with common spaces and community lots. I’ve always felt “eh” about Live Mode, but these areas actually felt worth spending time in.
There’s a library and gym combo in an old warehouse, effectively a community center, where Margaret researched the secrets of werewolf lore. There’s a bar with a secret clubhouse bunker beneath it where she snatched many a wolf nap. There are sewer grates full of secrets that she partially explored.
Most important are the Moonwood Collective pack’s treehouse and the Wildfang trailer, popular hangout spots for their respective members. Margaret needed to get into one of these packs for a little stability: She couldn’t stop breaking her sink and had just three simoleons to her name. Getting sent home from her only job—a twice-weekly babysitting gig—for transforming into werewolf form in a rage certainly hadn’t helped.
Whoops, I WooHooed a werewolf alpha
The Moonwood treehouse is where Margaret got to know Kristopher Volkov, chill alpha male of the Moonwood pack. He seemed like a decent guy, immediately choosing to help calm Maraget’s rising werewolf fury when she showed up. Every werewolf has a fury meter that fills over time, especially under a full moon (every eight days by default), and when it finally maxes out they’ll lose control, transform into a wolf, and go on a rampage around town scaring other Sims or smashing up their own homes.
Kristopher quelled her rage meter and delivered a bit of explanation: the Moonwood Collective wolves are all about mastering their rage and living in harmony with humans, unlike their rivals the Wildfangs who take pride in their wolf strength and see the Collective’s attitude as cowardly. Margaret, vegetarian evangelist, babysitter, and lover of a good cable-knit, seemed like a perfect fit for the chill Collective.
The fanfic is writing itself and I am powerless to stop it.
Kristopher thought so too, because he started inviting himself over to her house. Often. Kristopher was so intent on spending time with Margaret, unbothered by her perpetually leaking sink, that I decided, what the hell, let her flirt with him. That one decision launched a drama worthy of a young adult paperback and now I have no idea how to stop it.
As soon as Margaret flirted with Kristopher I was notified that she’d found her fated mate, the one werewolf she’s meant to be with. I tested the boundaries quickly, finding that she got tense flirting with anyone who isn’t her fatemate. I scoffed. Of course my young adult Sim werewolf was destined to be with the grey-in-his-beard alpha, who was an unknown number of years older than her. Immortality is a high level werewolf skill in the tree, after all.
Though I mock my accidental YA novel setup, I rolled with it. Margaret and Kristopher had a whirlwind courtship the likes of which many Sims have experienced: flirting on the couch until 2am, a first kiss under a waning moon outside the library, and WooHooing in a bush across town.
But Margaret was still a growing wolf. She quickly went from a pup, to runt, to prime wolf. I used her ability points to unlock skills for treasure scavenging, enhanced smell, and night vision, while she gained passive abilities like control over when she entered her wolf form. At each new wolf rank she also gained a trait that I didn’t pick. She started out excitable, gaining more fury while in a playful mood, which was fine.
Then she became prideful of her wolf abilities and also developed “wolf brain” making intellectual pursuits more difficult. Uh oh.
Much as I personally appreciated Kristopher’s werewolf philosophy, I knew Margaret was meant to be a Wildfang. She made quick friends with the Wildfang alpha—conveniently Kristopher’s estranged adopted daughter—and joined the crew. She got a weekly jerky allotment, a werewolf magazine subscription, and the expectation that she’d start spreading her werewolf prowess all over the world.
It didn’t come between her and Kristopher at first, though I was fully intending for her to tell him Wildfangs rule pretty soon, and surely that was not going to go over well. Not two days later, Kristopher called to tell Margaret that he’d adopted a toddler, a little girl named Perry who almost immediately developed a grudge against her. Is Kristopher planning to turn her wolf when she’s old enough? Or should I go behind his back and have Margaret do it herself? This furry family tree got pretzel-shaped in a hurry.
Sims 4 Werewolves may be billed as a Game Pack, not expansion, but the new neighborhood, skill tree, super customizable werewolf form, and the built-in drama of wolf life add way more than I expected to the game. I normally turn my nose up at Live Mode and go back to building my little houses, but I need to find out just how unhinged the next chapter of the Margaret Ruff series gets.
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