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Night Horrors: Shunned by the Moon Werewolf Religion Is Weird  A goddess drenched in blood. Thrice-Changed Trinity has seen enlightenment. In her first Change, she transformed physically, killed humans in a mist of blood, felt the silver brand of the Moon upon her. A revelation of blood. In her second Change, she felt the burning touch, screamed with the pain of being freed from the Slaver Queen, was given the mercy of the Fire-Touched to be free of Moon. A revelation of silver. In her third Change, she has found divinity. The Geryo strain remade her, making even greater than Pure. It was a revelation in truth, and now she stands as the bloody queen of a zealot army, building a new doctrine in blood on the flayed skins of her foes. She knows she is on a mission from Rabid Wolf himself, purging Luna's taint from the People forever. Before becoming Distorted, Trinity wasn't anything special - just another hate-filled Fire-Touched. She claims she received the attention of Rabid Wolf for her iron will and her graceful dance, encountering the Firstborn one day in Shadow. As a good Fire-Touched, she hurled herself down in reverance, and Rabid Wolf gave her the truth. Rabid Wolf blessed her with a contagion of grace from its fangs, a contagion blessed by Wolf that would cleanse the Moon's taint. If Trinity had the strength and purity to handle it, she would nurse this contagion in her own meat, her own flesh. If she survived it, Rabid Wolf would make her the high priestess of the new order, with right to judge who could suffer the holy plague and who would die, working Rabid Wolf's will in the world of Flesh. The elders among the Fire-Touched do not believe this story, or at least not entirely. It is likely that Trinity cannot actually remember the truth, given her maddened mind, and has mingled it with her own deluded fantasies. What is certainly true, however, is that Trinity met something in Shadow, and that thing was powerful. Further, she appears to have at least some favor granted by Rabid Wolf, and she certainly did survive her brush with the Geryo strain and become something greater and more terrible. Now, increasing numbers of Pure gather to her banners of flayed skin. They seek redemption, proof of their own strength or a place in the coming world. Trinity infects her followers as both reward and punishment, apparently able to curse the unworthy with wretched mutations and exalt the chosen with terrible new power. They name her the Skinner Queen, singing her praises and telling of the world she will build in Forsaken blood and bone. The Fire-Touched are prone to spawning warlords and charismatic cult leaders, of course. In some ways, Trinity is nothing they haven't seen before and is following the standard playbook. She travels from place to place as head of a nomad pack and a collection of hangers-on and followers. When she stops, she spreads her gospel, recruits and makes alliances with Fire-Touched elders or attacks rivals of the faith as well as any Forsaken she runs into. The main difference is that she is a vector for the Geryo strain. When she stops to give her sermons and hold court, she infects particular werewolves that come before her as the priestess of Rabid Wolf. Some are hated for crimes against the Pure, have terrible and broken reputations; these tend to be desperate for a chance to regain their fortunes, however risky that chance is. Other petitioners are true believers in her cause, willing to risk their own lives for a chance at greatness and "true" purity. A few old, infirm werewolves even come to Trinity in hopes of receiving her 'third Change' and have their bodies restored to their prime of power. When local packs are weak, Trinity just bullies them into giving her supplicants for her infectious ordeal, and where they are strong, she displays the strength of her flayers in battle against the Forsaken to attract new and willing converts. Anyone she infects that dies of the ordeal or suffers useless and pathetic mutations is clearly unworthy in the eyes of Rabid Wolf, while those that can fight off the infection have proven themselves with their will and endurance, cleansing them of any past crimes or tainted honor. Those rare few that not only survive but are wholly remade in the image of Trinity's particular strain are considered blessed avatars of the will of Wolf. Trinity's claim is that the Geryo strain is purely of Wolf's flesh and spirit, and so its warping influence purges its victims of the insidious taint of Moon that was left by her hand in the creation of werewolves. A Distorted that remains strong in mind and body is thus closer to Wolf's pure nature than a normal werewolf. This is obviously a dangerous belief, and Trinity has left no small number of broken, ruined Distorted behind her. Her flock care only for her successes, not her failures, after all. Many Fire-Touched are opposed to Trinity and her beliefs. Unfortunately, her preaching has found fruit among some Predator Kings, too, and a small number have gathered in hopes of earning Trinity's anointed blessing. The Ivory Claws, who are perhaps the tribe with the clearest understanding of the Geryo strain due to their intensive research on all things werewolf biology, remain firmly against Trinity and her cause. They would really prefer to capture her and lock her away in a lab for study and dissection; while Silver Wolf's children see the Distorted as potential weapons or tools, they consider them fundamentally a debased and impure form of werewolf. Trinity has no actual insight into the Geryo or the disease she spreads. She has completely bought into her own bullshit, encouraged by Rabid Wolf's spiritual servants and some Pure totems that have decided to back her. She believes her own existence is one of joy, for she is working to return the werewolf people to purity, to their intended state, and then to purge the world of filth and return the Border Marches to what they should be. Pure and Forsaken alike know the Skinner Queen's title, thanks to her incredible skill at stealing and wielded skins, which her infection has only improved. Flayed skin is her chosen aesthetic for her faith, and her warband is talented at using stolen skins to infiltrate their foes and spread chaos. Her preachers write her gospel on dried skins, and she uses the hides of her favorite kills to make banners for her cause. Some Fire-Touched accuse Trinity of breaking their tribal oath via her taste for stolen faces. Her answer to these elders and tribal leaders is that Rabid Wolf cares about truth that is more than skin-deep. To her less-than-rational mind, wearing a false skin is not lying - it is a test, an opportunity. Certainly, the Thrice-Changed never speaks an intentional lie and completely believes everything she says. She insists that it cannot be her fault, then, that weak-minded foes look at a werewolf wearing someone else's skin and assume they must be the person they resemble. Trinity is an obvious monster. When not hiding her body inside a stolen skin, she stands taller than any normal Gauru form, and she is unable to get rid of the wolf features of that form. Despite her size, she is still lithe and graceful, with a lean if elongated frame and eight terrible arms sprouting from her shoulders that move with the coordination of a dance. Her claws are long, vicious and shockingly precise in flensing skin from her foes. She is marked by cancerous growths along her Distorted form, and all trace of her hold human features are basically gone. She and her followers both wear gold jewels and garments made from flayed skin and leather. She wears nose rings heavily and has thin gold chains between her piercings, which bear prayer-flags praising Pure totems. These decorations are important to Trinity, the key to making her appearance come off as grand and divine rather than twisted and ugly. She doesn't want people to see her and her followers as monsters, but as pure avatars of Wolf, after all. The gear and jewels matter in projecting the correct image of the faith. In person, Trinity is a welcoming, gracious shaman-queen, confident and self-assured. She need not bother with terror or rage, and many Pure are shocked at how pleasant she is to talk to. She genuinely is very happy to meet anyone that supports her cause. She comes off as enthusiastic and cheerful, preaching no creed of misery and self-flagellation but of hope and joy. She really, truly and deeply adores the image of Wolf and Pangaea that she's built up in her own head, and she genuinely thinks she can realize her goals within her lifetime. While she is terrifyingly brutal with failures, rivals or Forsaken, she can suddenly shift to kindness and sympathy with no apparent internal dissonance. She will happily tell you she's here for you, to help you get past your sins, even as she peels your face off to war as a battle-mask against your pack. And she's not lying - she loves converts deeply. When wearing a stolen skin, Trinity enjoys trickery and mischief. She no longer bears the burden of her prophecy and rule and may indulge herself. She gets off on the potential dangers of infiltration and the thrill of planned violence, and rather than focus on efficiency, she works to spread confusion, play at being the fool and convincing her prey to see her as a friend until the time to strike. She adores dangling hints that she's not quite what she seems, and she absolutely loves the look on the face of prey that has realized the truth. She sometimes attempts to infect the most perceptive Forsaken she meets, in the hopes that they will be kindred souls that can share in her divine revelation. She also sometimes skins human victims for fun, wearing their stolen faces out in the herd of humanity with no particular purpose in mind. Trinity's followers really want her to stop doing that, but she's ignoring their concerns entirely. When she heads out as a random human, it is for a night of fun, sometimes picking up men or women for one night stands and sometimes looking for werewolves to provoke and annoy for her own amusement. Trinity especially loves music, as it reminds her of her life before even her first Change, stirring her to move and dance as she once did, long ago. Occasionally she lives fevers and colds in her wake, brewing up diseases with Rabid Wolf's power as a gift even for poor, unenlightened humanity in the clubs and bars she hangs at. To her, this is an act of kindness and charity, a touch of the divine. At all times, Trinity is accompanied by at least two of her Distorted flayers, who survived and were reforged by her disease. They lack her majesty but retain the same strengthened mutations, cancerous overgrowths along their skin and, typically, multiple extra limbs. Like Trinity, their claws are long and terrible, but most of them lack her precision and finesse, being more savage butchers. The flayers are not actually part of her personal pack - they're just fanatic devotees. Presumably they too spend a lot of time hidden in stolen skins when dealing with humans. Those skin-stealing expeditions aren't good for Trinity, however. Her mind is starting to unravel, between the infection and overuse of skin-stealing. On her last big hunt, she briefly went into a fugue state, tearing at her flesh and causing the entire attack to grind to a halt as her followers panicked. The loyalty of her followers has kept her rivals among the Pure from learning about hear attempts to tear her own face off in panic, but the Forsaken they were attacking saw it. Exploiting Trinity's slowly crumbling sense of self might be key to defeating her cult. She also has problems in that cult - given how many Distorted she creates, it shouldn't be surprising that some of them take her teachings and run off to please themselves with them. A rival Distorted has started up his own cult, proclaiming that his massive, flabby growths are the true manifestation of Wolf's intent. Infighting between the two Distorted may soon break out, and if so the new contagion may end up getting destroyed in the fighting...but if so, it'll be at great cost to Trinity's cult as well, as they waste their strength on each other rather than the Forsaken. On the other hand, it's more likely that the conflict will just make both sides produce more and more dangerous, infectious Distorted. Pure Totems tend to be very hands-on in their work, and Trinity's pack totem is directly advising her through all this. It is a festering spirit of disease, and it communicates with her through diseases. Often, messages will come in the form of infected animals biting humans, raising up bloody welts on their skin that take the form of First Tongue words. Trinity hunts these victims down and flays them to read, but a rare few are pampered a kept as sacred slaves, forced to recite the words that form on their skin and praise Trinity until Lunacy burns out their minds or causes them to become Wolf-Bloods. These Wolf-Bloods are considered to be favored by Rabid Wolf, and are treated extremely well in honor of the scars written upon their skin via the pox. Trinity lacks any forms but Gauru at this point, though it no longer suffers from the usual rage associated with it...and the usual regeneration. It retains its superhuman physical abilities, though, and Trinity is also crazy charismatic if you're willing to listen to a ten foot tall wolf monster with eight arms. She can spend Willpower to reactivate her regenerative abilities at the cost of also reactivating the killing rage of Gauru form, but otherwise only regenerates at half normal speed. She is infectious as if she were a Geryo, but only her bite transmits the infection, not her claws or other attacks. She's a pretty potent werewolf, fast and tough and with a lot of Essence, as well as a good selection of Gifts to heal her followers, steal skins, spread disease, scare people, buff her followers by driving them to a fever pitch of madness, sense various things around her and track her prey without being caught. Trinity's also powerful enough have a Ban - she must spend an extended period dancing at least once per day. Typically, she does so as part of her daily prayer rituals to Rabid Wolf. She and her flayers also have a unique ability to very easily skin people. Whenever they deal Lethal damage with their natural weapons, they can reflexively use their Skin Thief Gift to steal a portion of the torn skin and instantly copy the prey's form. This can even be used on werewolves, though it only steals their human form's appearance, not any other abilities or shapes. The Flayers are Trinity's elect, chosen by the Geryo strain. They tend to be chaotically mutated, but their strain shares particular features that reflect Trinity's own mutations. The example statblock is a Predator King that has lost all but his near-man and Gauru forms and regenerates at only half speed, but has a ton of arms (and cancerous growths) and is superhumanly strong and tough. He's not very smart, though. Basically, Trinity's followers tend to be excellent fighters but rely on her for direction and planning. (Which she's honestly not super good at, but she is good at just causing chaos and that's all she really needs.) Flayers also have a Ban - they must always answer to the name of the last skin they wore for at least a day after wearing it. Next time: GM Advice and Campaign Types
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Sep 8, 2019 17:35
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Night Horrors: Shunned by the Moon the wolf must hunt Understanding the importance of hunting to werewolves is the game's key GM advice. Everything werewolves do is filtered through their instinctive hunting urge. Werewolves don't investigate crime scenes - they hunt clues. Werewolves don't fight intruders - they hunt them down. Werewolves don't go shopping - they hunt for what they need at the store. Literally - the game's example of trying to make this mindset clear is a pack going grocery shopping. They decide what they need, research strengths and weaknesses, find prices and locations. They note the pressure points and personalities of vendors, split up and move through the grocery store. If possible they will isolate and work on salespeople to find the ones willing to give a better price. They'll pick the one that demonstrates least resistance and focus in, bargaining until they get what they want. At last, they will depart with their prey (the thing they wanted) in tow, leaving the poor salesperson with a smaller profit and a nagging sense that they barely escaped alive. No matter what, a GM should make the players feel like they are hunting. Werewolves aren't human, and they frame their world in the lens of the hunt. We begin with a series of six campaign pitches. They're meant to give GMs a framework on which to hang their own ideas, so they're a bit bare-bones and focus on themes, goals and what a pack might need to do to 'win' the scenario. Each is meant to be highly portable, able to fit wherever your pack's territory is. First up: Turf Wars. This is your stripped down, basic Werewolf game. Your pack has to defend its territory against all intruders. No werewolf pack is merely entitled to territory - you fight for what is yours. The best packs know the strengths and weaknesses of their territory, understand its needs and ensures they are provided for. Strong territory means strong pack, but strength also means jealousy. Spirits grow tired of sitting in Shadow, eating diluted Essence rather than drinking from the firehose. They wield their Influences to reinforce their own interests and find weaknesses in the Gauntlet where they can slip through. You might allow some limited incursion if you believe that it's the best way to handle spirits, as long as it doesn't damage the territory itself. However, few packs are willing to tolerate a buildup of murder, disease or despair spirits in their borders, no matter how theoretically well-behaved. In Flesh, other werewolves also might envy your success. A smart pack will build alliances and relations with neighbors...but between werewolves, these friendships can only last until someone scents weakness. Ultimately, your pack is the only real group you can trust. At some point, the benefits of trying to seize some of your territory will outweigh the costs. Hell, it's true in reverse - you should understand your neighbors' territories and their strengths and weaknesses if possible. You may need to exert pressure on them to ease them off your own land, or you may want to redirect unwanted intruders away from your territory and onto theirs. A problem for your neighbors can easily replace a problem for you. Sure, you may see this as a betrayal...but other packs may not agree. 'Fair play' is an idea that all packs must decide on their own. Understanding your neighbors' territory also lets you know when something goes horribly wrong - because when your neighbors fall, you understand where their attackers may come for you from next. A Turf Wars campaign works best, we are told, when the GM already has a clear antagonist in mind. The PCs might know about them at the start, such as a greedy real estate developer trying to drive them out with help from corrupt cops or a powerful local spirit demanding they pay tribute, or might not and might need to investigate and identify the problem. For example, they might just know the cops are cracking down on local gangs, including members of their pack, or might only know that a lot of spirits are fleeing across the Gauntlet to avoid some form of spirit persecution and gain some freedom. For enemies from this book, Granny Stitch is called out as a potential enemy for this, or a distraction from their true enemy. The Wasp Hosts also make for a nice, straightforward foe, with their tendency to build a hive and kill a lot of people - some of whom may have been part of your pack. Victory, obviously, comes from hunting and defeating the foe. For a shorter game, this is straightforward enough - isolate the prey, tear away their defenses, go for the kill. Once the prey surrenders or is slain, you win and have defended your territory, rendering it safe until the next big challenge. Hooray! For a longer or more complex game, the initial prey might just be the first part of a larger web of foes. Your real estate developer is dead now, but he answered to a larger conglomerate, and they're not giving up on your land. Why? Well, it could just be frustration, sunk costs and refusal to lose, or it might be that something there is more important than the pack realizes. The death of a spirit tyrant can easily leave a power vacuum that the rest of its court will rush to fill, loving up local resonance and potentially leading to the creation of dangerous magath as spirits seek out non-traditional prey in pursuit of power. The cycle of identify threat -> confront threat -> eliminate threat is the core gameplay loop of a lot of Werewolf games. Give and Take, on the other hand, is Werewolf-as-political game. Werewolves may not be human, but they are raised by humans, and they are cooperative social animals from two sides - wolf and human. They instinctively need a pack, and they are naturally suspicious of those outside their pack. When the hunt needs more than any one pack can give, however, they adapt. No one pack can do everything, and some things need cooperation or at least not getting into each others' way, and this is why protectorates form. They are united for, quite literally, protection - to protect packs from threats or each other, often, as they formalize territory and territorial challenges to avoid constant, tiring vigilance against other packs. They may also form to protect something greater. There are not a lot of things that Forsaken packs will coordinate with each other to protect, but they do exist, and protectorates formed around them tend to develop their own rituals and customs that create a sense of unity or identity even between disparate packs. Whatever the reason is, internal or external, a protectorate always needs careful negotiations to keep the peace. That work can bring fame and Renown to the packs that do it, and scorn to the packs that can't manage it. It also means that there's two different sets of challenges here. The first is based on why the protectorate exists, either to stop enemies or to protect opportunities, and the second is about the balancing act of keeping it around. Underneath all of this is still the need to hunt, and every pack is going to view their duties to the protectorate, if they have any, through that lens. The reason the protectorate exists should be clear and known. If everyone can't agree on the purpose, it's not going to stay together at all. For your pack to be able to do politics, they have to be able to remind everyone of why they're working together in the first place. It won't make them any more willing to take a bad deal, but it can keep them at the negotiating table. The worst dangers may well be from inside the protectorate, however. There's always going to be someone looking to take advantage of everyone else or finding ways to betray the rest. This might mean Bale Hounds eroding things from within or just a pack that doesn't think it's getting a fair deal. It's also important to remember that packs include Wolf-Bloods and humans as well, and even if the werewolves are happy with a deal, their supporters may not be. Human threats are a frequent reason for werewolves to focus on political or indirect approaches. Sure, it's usually easy to kill a given human, but that tends to just unite humans in pursuit of the killer, bringing in more problems for everyone. The Church of Lupus et Fidelis may also notice werewolves revealing themselves, and that's a threat to your will and personal agency thanks to their ability to redirect your hunting. To 'win' in this campaign frame is to keep the protectorate together until it's no longer needed. When the enemy finally arrives, you might lead the combined packs to victory in battle, or you might get everyone to track and hunt the prey through their territories, coordinating searches and pinning them down at last. Maybe you slowly root out the corruption festering away in the protectorate packs and expose the traitors, then lead the hunt to kill them. The key, in all cases, should be the web of alliances the PCs have maintained, the favors they owe and oaths they swear. Your allies might not like each other, may not want to work with everyone, but they stick with it because they value the PCs and their decisions. Next time: Canaries in a Coal Mine, A Mixed Blessing
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Sep 9, 2019 17:29
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Night Horrors: Shunned by the Moon wolf must hunt the Canaries in a Coal Mine has a bit more complex a setup - there a pack that had a territory, defended it well, managed it well...and then they vanished. No one has any idea where they went. The PC pack has been handed the territory by everyone else! They're sure you'll do great. Absolutely certain. And...yeah, it's a set-up, no one actually has your best interests in mind. Until the last pack's disappearance is resolved, however, no one wants anyone powerful to have the territory in case it turns out to contain something really stupidly dangerous that'll gently caress things up for everyone. Better, then, to send in a bunch of young and inexperienced werewolves to investigate and find out what the hell happened. At worst, they can be expendable bait to lure out the monster. Now, your challenges in a Canaries campaign are simple - you have to establish yourselves, deal with the mystery and deal with the territory's resources. The place is wealthy - lots of mundane resources, plenty of Loci, defensible boundaries. You can establish yourselves a claim it, and you're mostly supported in this by the local packs. However, you have to make sure you don't expose weakness to those packs or give them too many answers - because once they have all their answers, they're going to want that territory back. While mystery remains a threat, they're content to watch and wait. Once it's solved, that fight will be coming. Plus, well, there's the mystery itself. If whatever killed the last pack is still there, you're definitely its first new targets. No one really thinks you can take it out, but you might weaken it before it goes after anyone else - that's what the other packs are thinking. If you die without giving any answers...well, there's always inexperienced packs looking for land, right? You may not even have been the first to take the job. The book notes that an idigam such as Anaba'hi might work well for this scenario, requiring skill, patience and wit to uncover and reveal. The last pack clearly got too close to it for comfort and it wiped them out. Perhaps it has kept their bodies hidden in its territory or has warped them into servants it can command now. Whatever the case, victory over this scenario requires solving three main issues, two of which the pack will know about for sure. First, the possibility that whatever vanished the last pack is still present, and second, that the werewolves on the sidelines will be swooping in to take the place once it's been cleared. The third, less obvious problem is upkeep. The territory must be cared for. The last pack established a balance, but without them, things are going to go bad. Each system they set up that fails will cascade into more failures if not stopped. This is basically a horror movie scenario, but with werewolves instead of the Scooby Doo gang. You know something's wrong, but not what, and as you follow the clues, dread will build as threads start to unravel and lead to the truth. Everything will go wrong at once near the end, as the truth is uncovered and must be dealt with, along with the outside packs waiting for just this chance. A Mixed Blessing is a campaign dealing heavily with Luna and spirits and faith. Luna is a fickle deity, their desires sent out in symbolic, heavily metaphorical dreams, when she bothers to tell anyone at all. The Forsaken have faith that the messages brought by the Lunes are true. However, at this point, every Cahalith in the region has been having the same dreams - prophetic visions that have lasted several nights. A new lunar cycle is starting, and Luna will bring new werewolves to her service. They will be known by their Auspices, which will not correspond to the moon phase during their First Change. These wolves are to be gathered together and formed into a pack. There is no detail beyond that. How will the PCs of this Blessed Pack know what Luna wants them to even do? Obviously, being part of a prophesied superpack means your life won't be boring or safe. The cause the PCs are gathered for might be obvious or might not. Even when there is no guidance, though, everyone will be watching them. The other werewolves will watch and judge, as Luna clearly wants them to do. If she wanted the pack to go unnoticed, she wouldn't have shouted about them to everyone nearby. While the PCs have many allies, everyone is very wary about being caught in Luna's madness as well. They'll have no fewer foes trying to stop them, too. The spirit world will be divided on whether to help or harm, and while the Pure may say they ignore the Moon, they're not going to let one of her plans go off without interfering. Why might this be happening? It might be because the Geryo are reappearing - Wolf's first children might be enough to draw Luna's attention, especially the elder horrors like Quattuor or Zahakeryon. They are no tribe's favored prey and come from a time before werewolves even existed, after all. Their existence threatens Luna's order, and...well, honestly, even the Pure Firstborn have little interest in allowing the Geryo to exist and threaten the Shadow, their broods or the sanctity of the hunt. A really big one is the kind of existential threat that could unite Pure and Forsaken at least temporarily. This scenario is a chosen-one story, a heroic journey for the PCs. They are foretold by the stars, given wise counsel by elders, but ultimately they are the only ones that can save the world. Still, it'd be unwise to forget that Luna is the most fickle of spirits, and she is not above using werewolves to amuse herself. The PCs are going to change the world - that much is clear and obvious. When Luna says she's specially marked people for greatness, everyone takes notice. The PCs must discover their purpose and then decide whether to go along with it or not. Yes, the spirit-gods may have set the board and rules, but it's up to the PCs if and how they will play the game set before them. They might oppose Luna's will, or they might not. The most important thing to keep in mind is that, whether it feels like victory or defeat, the PCs' own choices should be paramount. This is prophesy, but it's up to them how to interpret it and how to achieve or oppose it. The PCs should change the world, and should have to live with how they've done so. Next time: Pangaea Reborn, Wolfless
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Sep 9, 2019 18:01
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Night Horrors: Shunned by the Moon must hunt the wolf Pangaea Reborn is a mid-and-post-apocalyptic campaign. The Pure have achieved their ultimate aim. They won. The Gauntlet was torn open, releasing the world of Spirit into the world of Flesh. This is the endgame, though it is not what the Pure expected it to be. The world is shattered. The Gauntlet is gone in almost all of the world, thanks to millions of spirits ripping through it at once. The world is ruled by spiritual Influence now, as the spirits living in an area shape it to their whim and hunger. Boundaries shift jarringly, as antithetical spirits no longer keep to areas seperated by natural physical boundaries and orderly resonance. Nothing will ever be the same again. The physical world isn't completely vanished - the Forsaken managed to hold some stuff together as pockets of resistance, isolated territories where the Gauntlet still stands and Shadow is locked away from Flesh. These are the last bastions of free humanity and those few spirits that oppose the new order. The Forsaken lost - but they have not lost hope. The threat is, uh, the world's dying. The spirits that pushed the Pure to act never really thought much about the consequences of their desires, and the world as it currently exists is not a friendly one towards any number of spirits. Computers spirits, car spirits and other spirits of human-made things are going to have a ton of trouble living without human society, and emotion-spirits of anything but despair or madness are not doing much better. Magath are common threats in this world, as desperate spirits turn to new food sources for lack of appropriate Essence. Spirits that thrive on chaos and change feast on weaker spirits, never stopping to think about how their vast amount of new prey might affect them. The Pure tribes are less cohesive now. The Fire-Touched serve their spirit-masters with the zeal of the brainwashed cultists they are, using that servitude to blind themselves to the world's state. The Ivory Claws are desperately trying to use their bloodline refinements to raise up a new Wolf, but their genepool is dwindling by the day thanks to the deadliness of the new world. The Predator Kings have declared that this world was always their plan, for sure, while avoiding the parts of the new world where even they would have trouble being the apex predators. In this confusion, Luna's Bane the Moon-Shunned may well attempt their long-planned murder of Moon. They would be able to use the carnage to delve into the deepest parts of the Shadow, seeking out Luna's throat to end her forever. Without the Warden Moon's help as the queen of boundaries, it'd be impossible to ever fix the world - so you'd better stop that. Victory in this scenario could be just surviving. Creating an oasis of normalcy in a world of spiritual chaos is a victory, especially maintaining a Gauntlet in an environment pushing to collapse it. Fighting off the inevitable waves of hungry spirits, angry Pure and anything else crawling out of the spirit-ruled world is going to complicate the job, of course. On a grander scale, though, the PCs might aim to fix the world. This could be done, with sufficiently grand quests. The Warden Moon lives, and while Moon is alive, the Lunes help the Forsaken. Moon is probably key to restoring the balance and boundaries, but even with their aid, it will take huge rituals and powerful fetishes to restore the Gauntlet, either spontaneously across the entire world or piecemeal with heavy defense of each gain. In this time, it may even be a good idea to seek alliance with the Spider Hosts, who despise the shattered Gauntlet as much if not more than werewolves, though they have almost certainly suffered heavy losses and will be suspicious of any werewolf approaching them. Wolfless is a game that isn't about the werewolves. A pack is more than its wolves, and in most packs, Wolf-Bloods and humans take on a number of roles that the werewolves are just not suited for. They keep things running in the mundane world, interact with their counterparts in other packs or even just make sure everyone gets their bills paid. For some packs, the werewolves are only called on for a hunt, while others don't even have werewolves. The world is dangerous, and if all of a pack's werewolves die, the rest has to carry on without them as best they can. In this scenario, the PCs are Wolf-Bloods or normal humans who belong to a pack. The humans may or may not know that werewolves are real; if they don't, they still know they're with the pack, even if they can't precisely say why. What they know for sure is that things are out there that want them gone, and there's no one else around to protect them, so they have to do it themselves. Non-werewolves have a lot of problems that werewolves ignore. Keeping the utilities paid is not a glamorous job, but unless a pack lives out in the woods, it's essential. The humans and Wolf-Bloods of a pack tend to notice the pack's more mundane problems well before the werewolves of the pack will. When a reporter notices a spike in crime stats around a pack's territory and comes for a story, it's often these people who deal with the problem - it's quieter when a bunch of humans make a reporter feel happy and give them a non-story than it is when the reporter gets killed by wolves. Talking and/or money make the problem go away easier than terror. In such a game, the werewolves of a pack may actually end up being one of its greatest problems. If the wolves get wind of an issue, everyone knows how they'll handle it: hunt something. Werewolves can be subtle, can misdirect or protect, but all too often they see a problem and decide it is a nail for the one really big hammer in their toolkit: doing a murder. Humans are tough and think they control the world, and the real problem is that once the terror of the hunt is over, once the Lunacy ends and the mental wounds scab, the humans are back. Winning a Wolfless scenario is pretty similar to winning, say, Turf Wars or any of the other scenarios. Keep the territory strong, identify threats, handle and eliminate them. Indeed, a Wolfless game might be a fun alternating thing with your main game, taking on the role of the Wolf-Bloods and humans that handle the issues the werewolves can't or don't. In just about all the past scenarios, there are roles for these folks to do big, important stuff. A pack is everyone in it. We end out with a section on resonance and the important details of the world that a Werewolf GM can easily forget about or be less experienced in handling. Most notably, this is about the sensory and setting details that are key to the hunt, because werewolves hunt a lot. A lot. They use both sides of the Gauntlet for their hunting, and while the geography of Flesh and Shadow are not exact mirrors, they usually match up decently enough that many say that Shadow reflects Flesh. Broadly speaking, the geography of Shadow maps to the important resonances coming from Flesh, but tends to change far less rapidly than humans change the physical world. You can use this for detail stuff. A hospital in Flesh may also be a hospital in Shadow. The hospital may itself be a spirit, luring in smaller spirits of disease, death and life so it can trap them in its door-maw and eat them, or it might be unawakened ephemera - that is to say, just a building full of other spirits in their own predatory ecosystem. It might be a mix of both - big spirits may well allow smaller spirits to live inside them symbiotically if that makes life easier for it. Alternatively, the GM might decide the hospital hasn't been around long enough to be reflected in Shadow. In this case, its shadow reflection is open parkland that has not yet noticed it was bought up by developers. The spirits of youthful enthusiasm and animals still run across the area, but they grow hungrier and hungrier as the flow of resonance from the Flesh fades. They grow sick as the spirits of illness surround and encroach on their territory, drawn in by the new resonances flowing out of the hospital built on those grounds. Resonance and Influence, as a note, need not be the same categories. They are similar, but it can help to see resonance as a broad concept of which Influences are facets. A typical, unremarkable suburban home inhabited by a typical, unremarkable family is likely to have a resonance of 'home' or 'family.' It might include things like 'stasis' or 'love' or 'frustration' as resonances, but you don't need to list all that out because of how broad the meaning of 'home' can be. None of the spirits in the area need to have 'home' as an Influence, though they certainly could. Structural or building spirits might have Influences covering strength, unity or inflexibility. Emotion spirits tend to have Influences pertaining to their specialty emotion, and will try to use these to encourage their preferred mood among the family and fight back other emotional Influence. Electrical elementals or tool spirits may stick to particular locations, guarding their food supply, and will largely ignore all the emotion spirits. While they all have widely differing tastes and natures, they all find 'home' to be a palatable and safe resonance to eat. A number of tables are provided giving examples of what kind of resonances, spirits and physical inhabitants can be found in various areas. These are super useful for a Werewolf GM, because it can be really hard to figure out what common stuff you're going to run into on the fly. These tables cover climate (which you'll run into even in human-controlled areas and which will influence entire regions excepting parts specifically designed to keep the local climate out), natural geographic features (which are more local and tend to be heavily based on nature and local flora and fauna, though not entirely, and ranging in size from 'a pond' to 'a cliff' to 'a swamp'), urban settings (similar to natural features in area of impact but typically more dynamic due to both the speed with which humans change things and the more potent emotional and symbolic resonances; these can range from 'an airport' to 'a park' to 'an office building' to 'a highway' so they vary wildly in size), and zoning regions (well, not quite zoning, but an area humans think of as commercial draws in different kinds of spirits than a gated community, a suburb, or an area everyone knows is rundown or crime-ridden). Human expectation and purpose have a shockingly strong influence on the Shadow. After the tables are brief descriptors of what kind of things might different resonances may contribute to the spiritual feel of an area and how spirits of these concepts want to make people act or feel. There's a similar section on hunting styles, so that you can take the descriptors of Hunter's Aspect and have some idea how an NPC might interpret their actions through the lens of that kind of hunt, along with tables showing common hunting styles by Auspice and Tribe. Less useful, those, but still good for figuring out NPC wolves on the fly. After that, the book is basically over. We've got the Conditions Appendix that is mandatory for every nWoD book (not too big this time, only 2.5 pages) and a one-page quick reference for making Pure characters. The End.
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Sep 9, 2019 21:49
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