Endless Enemies The world hasn’t entered Apocalypse of its own volition. Even beyond the ambient greed of humans, numerous entities hostile to werewolves thrive amid the violence, exploitation, and paranoia of the world in decline. The Garou face many foes — some in secret, some in the open — who have pushed it to this precipice, and would push it further. They are varied, resourceful, and lethal, even against the might of the Garou.
Agents of Entropy: Servants of The Wyrm The Wyrm is a metaphysical force benefiting from some of the most brutal and insidious of the Garou’s enemies. Frequently, when Gaia’s champions fight the unjust, they find the lingering traces of the Wyrm’s malignant presence. The Wyrm thrives when its servants and champions — whether cognizant of the Triat or ignorant of it — continue their own efforts to capitalize on the ongoing ruin of the world.
Banes Banes are spirits in service to the Wyrm. Each reflects something of whichever Wyrm-aspect they serve, their form twisted to exult their master and embody their purpose. Although stereotyped as brutish, ugly, and warped, their forms can be as varied as any other spirit’s. Banes are just as likely to engender pity or sympathy as they are to seduce or mercilessly maul. Decay, violence, illness, and hate are just a few of the ideals that have individual Wyrm-spirits associated with them.
Beyond their servitude to the Wyrm, Banes are infinitely varied. Some are inherently malignant, but many spirits turn to distorted aspects of their former purpose, or they are embodiments of destructive concepts, or are simply the spirits that dwell in regions fallen to the Wyrm’s influence. Some Banes are overt and monstrous, but many Banes are subtler and find a spiritual “wound” into which to burrow themselves.
Banes are strongest in the Umbra, where they can use their spiritual powers to serve the Wyrm’s purposes forthrightly or abstractly. To affect the material world they must generally possess humans, animals, or other hosts.
Fomori Fomori are humans or other hosts who have been possessed by a Bane for an extended period. As tragic as they are dangerous, fomori seldom agree to the fate to which their Bane has twisted them, and even fewer would have if they knew what it would entail.
Banes are often the metaphorical foot soldiers of the Apocalypse, rank-and-file servants in thrall to the power of the Wyrm. Many fomori lose their will and sense of self, but the most dangerous, and most unfortunate, know exactly what they have become but either cannot or will not do anything about it. On occasion, though, a powerful individual (in self or possessing spirit) emerges as a unique threat to the Garou.
Prolonged Bane possession warps the body into a mirror of the spirit within. Often this change is subtle, but observable, as with a fomor possessed by a Bane of wrath, who flushes with anger and tension, their features shifting harshly and muscles swelling with potential violence. It might even be all but invisible, as with a fomor who looks as if they’d merely been sleep deprived or even made more attractive by the possession of a Bane of temptation. In desperate times, or when they know they’ve been discovered by Garou, fomori may drop the attempts at subtlety and evince a body-horror bristling with foul weaponry to use against their foes.
Pentex Group Pentex Group is a holding company whose upper echelons are aware of the animistic nature of the world and have aligned themselves with powerful spirits themselves in service to the Wyrm. Through an ever-adapting collection of corporate fronts, the Pentex Group is forever profit-seeking, increasing its wealth through exploitation and then using that wealth to fund further exploitation. In an era when business and economies are more important than people, even if its front companies are caught and punished, the fines or other repercussions are usually less than the profits and can simply be written off as operating costs.
Acting largely through subsidiaries, Pentex Group remains hidden through financial dishonesty and sheltered by technicalities of law. It’s a true multinational, but one that opts not to draw attention to itself and prefers to conceal its own identity wherever possible.
Pentex Group has controlling interests in everything from cosmetics to weapons manufacturing to global energy operations, but each serves the Wyrm’s purposes in its own ways. Although a pack of Garou may well discover any given front operating in their territory, the connections between that arm and Pentex are probably obscured. Pentex Group’s methods are corporate and subtle, thriving in the resignation that modern societies have been bullied into accepting as the way of the world. It lobbies for relaxed environmental regulation, looses mining runoff into rivers and nature preserves, crushes indigenous peoples and local economies in the name of greater profits, sells arms to all who might want them, and fills the air with smog and the ground with poison, all through its portfolio of front companies. Pentex Group proper arms itself with lawyers and cash and the letter of the law just as much, if not more, than it does with mercenaries, Banes, and fomori.
This semblance of rectitude can make Pentex difficult to fight. Many of its activities push the world closer to emissions red lines and critical benchmarks on the graphs of climate scientists. Most of its employees are perfectly normal people, simply trading their hopes in exchange for steady employment and decent pay, yet entirely unaware of the spiritual devil’s bargain the parent company’s holding company has made with cosmological forces.
Dealing with Pentex Group is a war the Garou weren’t made to fight, but one this generation of werewolves will have to learn to wage.
Agents of Stasis: The Weaver Some Garou legends claim that the Weaver went rogue well before the Wyrm’s ascendance, and its attempts to bind the world drove the Wyrm to its present state. In a world leaning increasingly on punitive expressions of “law and order” over justice, and where building something to extract money from a place or even a culture is considered progress, the Weaver’s children are themselves in overdrive, creating a world of glass and networks, rules and jails. Packs devoted to war against the Wyrm wonder if they should heed those legends.
Historically, the Garou have viewed cities as strongholds for the Weaver even more so than of the Wyrm, at least in a broad sense — the Weaver thrives in the concrete-and-steel confines of the cities themselves, while the Wyrm exults in the numerous injustices and toxicities that can be found in the slick alleyways, corporate conference rooms, and windowless manufactories contained therein. Even abstractions like social calcification and the structures that funnel money upward from the people who do the work to the people who own their tools can be analogous to the Weaver. Infinite construction projects; an ongoing cycle of build-up, knock-down “development”; and perpetual suburban sprawl indicate the presence of the Weaver, at least to the Garou way of seeing things.
As well, technology often has some connection to the Weaver, according to Garou perspective. The intransigence of computer logic, any number of binary on-off states, and even the tools used to build other expressions of tech — whether housing tenements or surveillance networks or cryptocurrency “mining” facilities — all suggest the Weaver. And although the Garou aren’t inherently anti-technology, they often take a stance against technology they consider untrustworthy — which is an extremely subjective argument. Can the tool choose the purpose to which it’s put?
As with the Wyrm, the most numerous among the Weaver’s servants are humans, acting indirectly in its purpose. Although not conscious of their patron, their constant development and the calcification of their civilizations further the Weaver’s aims well enough. However, such developments are coincidental — a gradual shift in the way humans live their lives, rather than the choking stasis that the Garou fear. Are the true threats elsewhere?
Monster-Hunters Those daring individuals who actually take up arms or any number of investigative tools don’t generally see the world through the same animistic lens that werewolves do. That they are “servants of the Weaver” at all is more of a threatening convergence of circumstances. For the most part, in seeking to eliminate werewolves, monster-hunters want to return the world to “how it should be”: a nostalgic-imaginary state of stasis on their part.
Worse, the institutional hunters, such as those funded by governments, are often themselves agents of the status quo, intended not only to preserve unjust power structures but also to make sure all the modern world’s injustices keep money and power flowing in the right direction. Can’t have werewolves fucking up the billionaires’ investments — it’s bad for the economy. And what is an economy but a tool, a technology?
At a very high level, there exists an informal alliance of world intelligence agencies that share information, tactics, and specialists, thus enabling one another to hunt things that go bump in the night. And although these hunters don’t (usually…) have the supernatural prowess and spiritual gifts of the Garou’s other enemies, some can call upon technology, skill, and the overwhelming might of the institutions they serve to grant them an edge in their pursuit of monstrous targets. Then again, they may have silver bullets and some way to track werewolves, but they fundamentally don’t understand the Apocalyptic conflict they’ve stepped into.
Weaver Spirits The most numerous of the Weaver’s direct servants belong to its seemingly infinite host of spiderlike spirits, literally weaving order and inflexibility across the Umbra. Among their purported accomplishments are having sewn the Gauntlet into place and weaving an ever-growing spirit-web throughout the Umbra in their attempt to encase reality in stasis. Although largely passive workers, they retaliate violently against attacks on their webs, and their spinning often threatens to calcify elements of the Umbra or the material world.
As Apocalypse unfolds, these spider-spirits have become an escalating problem while they grow more aggressive and construct harmful Umbral defense structures in ever greater numbers. More than at any time in the past, the Umbra reveals the presence of these spider-spirits, and Garou moving through the spiritscape can feel the encroaching threads of the Weaver’s web, even as they hear the dying howls of Gaia.
Agents of Chaos: The Wyld The most unpredictable of the Triatic forces, the Wyld can exist anywhere something changes, breaks through, or emerges anew, from esoteric ideas to metaphysical creation. Provided there’s enough “spiritual illumination” present (see p. 225), the Wyld may represent literal physical metamorphosis or transformation, as with a caterpillar becoming a butterfly, metal becoming molten, or classical plate tectonics. Heady stuff, much of it, to be sure.
Change and creation can take many forms, and it’s unlikely that the Garou have true enmity with the Wyld, except in certain situations. Even in these cases, the “antagonists” associated with the Wyld are often more a matter of circumstance than mortal opposition.
Conflict with situations attributed to the Wyld can be exceedingly difficult for werewolves to come to grips with. How might a Garou pack fight back a flood or hurricane? How does one tear the throat out of an idea? Can a memory be disemboweled? Can one beat creativity into submission?
Even more troubling is the fact that the role of the Wyld seems diminished somehow in the era of an ascendant Wyrm and Weaver. Is creation itself coming to an end beneath the rigidity and decay of the Triatic imbalance? And is Wyld-aspected behavior as erratic and desperate as it is because it knows it’s coming to its (unnatural) end?
Other Werewolves Even as the world smolders, the werewolves’ greatest enemies may be themselves. Tribes that have turned from Gaia’s purpose, or that actively serve the Wyrm, exist among the Garou — the Cult of Fenris and Black Spiral Dancers, respectively — as do those who undertake this Apocalypse war in a different way, such as the Stargazers.
And even among those still loyal to Gaia, great rivalries and grudges ensue, for Garou passions are ever near the surface, and legendarily volatile. A werewolf may meet her death not at the claws of a venomous fomor or in the bowels of a caustic chemical plant, but by losing an overzealous duel of honor to another werewolf, by spirit trickery into disadvantage against a duplicitous ally, or even by betrayal and subsequently being torn to shreds at a moot. Whenever werewolves meet, despite a high likelihood of participants “being on the same side,” camaraderie is far from certain. The possibility of violence always lurks throughout such an encounter.
For more information on the dangers posed by other werewolves, see The Shadow of the Past on p. 35.
Sample Conflicts With all that in mind, what might a Werewolf story concern itself with? What friction might occur in a chronicle? Which disputes might a player’s character experience while playing Werewolf? Some examples follow.
• A toxic mine operates in the pack’s territory, and its security forces are surprisingly competent. The pack has options: Some Garou may favor approaching in the physical world, having scouted an infiltration route, while others may propose a risky ingress via the Umbra (with all the otherworldly dangers that doing so entails). Of course, what’s actually in the mine and its horrifying implications remain to be discovered.
• The players’ pack get word of a Pentex front operating a factory farm with dismal conditions for animals and workers alike. Once there they find that the farm is harvesting something far more sinister than meat and dairy.
• An important agreement with a powerful spirit is nearing the end of its hundred-year duration, but no one knows where the spirit has gone or how the compact might be renewed.
• A tear in the border between the physical world and the Umbra has appeared nearby, and spiritual bleedover is making the local flora and fauna aggressive.
• Renowned werewolves from a more accomplished pack attend a meeting of the tribes and make a case to take the characters’ territory away from them.
• Radical elements among the Garou push for a raid on a nearby human community, hoping that killing them all will discourage exploitative corporate interest in the area.
• The players’ pack has responsibility for a caern in their territory, but a powerful and truculent spirit has no interest in observing the longstanding pacts for its protection with the werewolves.
• A grisly series of killings risks exposing the players’ pack for what they are to the community — it sure looks as if a werewolf has been performing these murders.
• A Garou who has not yet learned of her werewolf nature has been discovered, and a rival pack seeks to force her First Change and have her join them instead of the characters’ pack.
• A pack of corrupt werewolves has been terrorizing one of the disadvantaged parts of town, hoping to drive down property values so an opportunistic real-estate developer can acquire the real estate on the cheap.
• A respected werewolf elder’s remains have been found, and he appears to have been skinned alive; could a powerful werewolf with no tribal allegiance, and new to the area, have skinned the elder and performed a ritual to become a shapechanger?
• A well-funded team of monster-hunters hears of “Lupine activity” in the region and captures an ally of the players’ characters, in hopes of drawing them out.
• One of the pack’s contacts has gone missing, and after ruling out some more obvious culprits, the packmates discovers that the ally has been abducted by vampires — or has even become one.
• The power company has built a new dam upriver, and the spirits are in tumult, with aspects of the Weaver, Wyrm, and Gaia all present and clashing. ■