Werewolf: The Forsaken - Blank It

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Chapter IV: Storytelling and Antagonists
his family. Too much exposure to the truth of a werewolf’s
life risks driving the loved one into Lunacy or, worse, into
harm’s way at a crucial time, falling under the deadly claws
of a Raging werewolf. The players should both keenly look
forward to having their characters wear the Gauru form
and dread it a little. Will this be the time that the dice
fall against them? Will this be the time that one of their
characters loses control and hurts those around them? The
characters should never be entirely comfortable with their
new existence as werewolves. Wiser, older tribemates may
mentor them for a short time, before forsaking them. After
that, they’re left to fend for themselves with only their
packmates, the occasional wandering tribal representative
and their hostile neighbors for guidance through word or
example. For inherently social creatures, it’s a curiously
isolated existence: never able to fully expose themselves to
the local people, and never able to fully trust any werewolves
except their packmates.
Part of the horror of the game is that, for all their
power, being a werewolf is a horrific thing to be. It’s horror
at its most personal.
OTHER WEREWOLVES
Like mundane wolves, werewolves are territorial
creatures. Nearby werewolf packs aren’t friends and neighbors
— they’re potential rivals, always eyeing the pack’s
territory as a potential annex to their own. Werewolves
can’t afford to kick back and take a break. If they do, their
rivals will take it as a sign of weakness and start probing
the pack’s strength.
The deeper horror of this is that eventually the pack
will fall. No matter how strong the characters become,
age and illness will take their toll and the other Uratha
will sense their weakness. A werewolf might survive all
manner of battles with spirits, Ridden and other creatures,
only to finally meet her end under the teeth and claws of
one of her own kind. Werewolf stories don’t often have a
“happily ever after” at the end. They end with a final, desperate
doomed struggle for life. You can easily drive this
home to even the youngest and most cocky of packs by
having that fate befall another local pack, ones that ruled
the whole area only a few years before.
Other werewolves of the Tribes of Luna are frequently
best used as constant rivals, rather than major antagonists
in a chronicle. The constant tension between packs might
boil over into actual warfare occasionally, but packs of
werewolves usually exist as part of an extended political
web based on power and status. Any disruption to the
status quo should come about through the pack’s actions
or failure. If the werewolves have been soundly trounced
in combat more than once, word will spread through gossip-loving
spirits or rival packs’ spies and that failure soon
assessed as possible weakness and grounds for an attempt
to claim territory. Should the pack decide to invade another
pack’s territory, even for “good” reasons, like chasing
down a Ridden, they should pay the price for their actions.
Crossing into another pack’s territory is a sure way to
start a bloody fight, even if ordinarily the two packs might
consider themselves allies.
The Pure Tribes
The Pure are no less werewolves than the Forsaken.
In their own eyes, they are the paragon of the Uratha,
and the Forsaken are tainted heretics who must be torn
from the face of the world. They are untouched by the
blessing of auspice, but draw on the power of great totems
who may, if the rumors are true, keep them in thrall.
They outnumber the Forsaken in most areas of the world.
Most werewolves know a little about the Pure — only
the most negligent mentor would fail to warn her charge
about them — but few know much about them. What are
their gatherings like? What sacrifices do they make to the
great beasts they worship? The Forsaken don’t know. The
Pure never come into a pack’s territory to talk theology or
philosophy. They come to hunt, and to kill.
Many horror stories, particularly those based on
psychopaths, play on the alien thought process and cultural
values that can lurk behind the eyes of someone who looks
perfectly normal. The Pure Tribes play that role in Werewolf.
They look like other werewolves and even act like
them, but their values and outlook on the world are utterly
different. The characters suddenly find that all the techniques
they’ve developed for dealing with other werewolves
have no use here. They should be faced with the horror of
finding themselves ignorant and endangered in the midst
of apparent familiarity. The Pure are to the Forsaken what
werewolves are to other humans; they are a frightening
predator with the power of a beast, the intelligence of a
human, and the combined cruelty of both. The Pure also
represent the fear of a superior force — they outnumber the
Forsaken, and it takes great cunning and skill to survive a
full-bore assault by a pack or two of the Pure Tribes.
SPIRIT S
At the heart of Forsaken myth lies a sense of responsibility
for the dangerous threat of the Shadow. Most
spirits that are native residents of the characters’ territory
can gradually become somewhat familiar, at least in the
sense of becoming easier to predict. They may not be easy
to empathize with — and the spirits won’t empathize with
the werewolves at all — but as the characters deal with
those spirits that they permit to stay in their territory, they
come to understand how the spirits react. They can begin
to see what it is that a spirit might want that drives it to
reach its fingers across the Gauntlet. Lesser spirits might
even be frightened of the werewolves. Actions in the
physical world can breed powerful spirits that are serious
threats to the pack, however. These entities typically don’t
draw attention to themselves at first, preferring instead to
lie low in their own corner of the Hisil, drawing strength
from the actions that feed them. By the time the Uratha
find one of these things, it might have grown strong
enough to be a serious challenge to the pack. And in such
cases, the natural resentment many spirits harbor toward