Werewolf: The Forsaken - Blank It

it’s a tense relationship, as the many hunts indulged in by a
significant vampiric presence can attract unwanted human
attention or perhaps feed an unwelcome class of spirit.
Conversely, the pack might have expanded beyond the
town it called its own into the surrounding countryside.
Now the werewolves have to learn to deal with the natural
spirits of those places and get to know the people who live
there. Here more than in the city, ordinary people are going
to notice a change in the local management. They might
not realize exactly what that grizzled band of toughs who
used to run the place were, but they’ll notice pretty damn
quick when they stop turning up and a whole new group of
strangers comes around poking their noses into everything.
Werewolves who are used to patrolling the urban environment
could find keeping track of changes in the countryside
far more challenging.
NEW-TOY SYNDROME
What happens if the players become obsessed with
exploring and pacifying their new territory rather than
keeping an eye on their original lands? That’s an opportunity
for a new plot thread that you’d be foolish to turn
down. Imagine coming back from exploring new territory
to find that a friend or family member is Ridden or, worse,
Claimed — and by a powerful spirit at that? That sort of
plot certainly brings home to the players just how difficult
it is to defend a large territory.
It’s worth taking a moment to think about their
reasons for exploring the new territory with such enthusiasm,
though. Have you made it too easy for them? Don’t
they see any serious threats in their new lands to send
them back home to lick their wounds before trying again?
If so, perhaps you need to adjust the threat level of their
opponents a little bit.
FOUR WEREWOLVES, ONE TRUCK AND
100 DEAD VAMPIRES
Another option for the more powerful group is the
road-trip, which is no mean task for a pack. The characters
are isolating themselves from their territory, many of their
allied spirits and even the neighboring werewolves who, if
not always friendly, actually know who the werewolves are
and might even respect them for their achievements. The
threats they face on the road are likely to be unknown
and unexpected. They’ll have none of the subtle shifts in
a familiar environment that normally indicate that trouble
is coming. They’ll have to rely on their wits and senses
far more than they do “back home.” That’s exactly why
it’s such an attractive prospect for many players. A gain in
territory is a big shift in the chronicle. If you just want to
introduce a touch of variety, then a road-trip story could
be a better option, at least in the short term.
A road-trip is, in essence, a classic quest story. The
characters are either in search of something — information,
a character or an enemy — or are traveling to a particular
location to achieve a task. Some examples include:
SEARCH QUEST S
• Pursuing a fugitive who’s inflicted great damage on
the pack’s territory
• Finding a family member who’s gone missing on a
trip outside the pack’s territory
• A Shadow Realm hunt to find the information
needed to defeat a spirit
• Retrieving a captured fetish from a Pure Tribe
pack’s territory
ACTION QUEST S
• Traveling through other packs’ territories to destroy
the source of repeated Beshilu incursions
• Accompanying a fugitive spirit back to its home, to
help defeat whatever drove it out
• Traveling to the headquarters of a company that’s
trying to set up a strip-mining operation in the pack’s territory
to “persuade” the CEO to change her plans
• Traveling deep into the spirit wilds to find the cause
of a wave of hithim luzak entering the pack’s territory
THE OPPOSITION
From your point of view, these quests give you the
opportunity to set the characters up against threats that
are different from the ones they normally face, including
ghosts, vampires, mages, other werewolves, gangs of hunters,
corporate security and more powerful spirits than are
found in the local Hisil. The more different the opposition
is from those the characters usually face, the better.
Indeed, such journeys provide good opportunities to introduce
the Pure Tribes into the game. These werewolves
can be very different from the ones the characters are
more familiar with and can add a real edge of danger to
the story. A hunt into the spirit wilds is going to bring the
characters into conflict with more powerful spirits than
those they encounter on their home patch, too.
HOMECOMING
The other advantage of a road-trip story or chronicle
is that it allows things to change while the werewolves are
away. The Uratha work to keep their territories in good
order, as they see it. When they’re away from home, things
change. Without the pack to keep a careful eye on things,
all sorts of changes might have occurred. People arrived or
departed; spirits did the same. Subtle incursions by other
werewolves are another possibility, as is an infestation of
Hosts. And what about the people that the pack made
enemies of on the road? What’s to say they won’t come
looking for a little payback? A road trip can invigorate your
chronicle both through being a different story in its own
right and through allowing changes in the pack’s territory.
LIFE ON THE ROAD
There’s no reason you can’t set the whole chronicle on
the road, but that sort of game is going to be very different
from a conventional Werewolf chronicle, since werewolves
are inherently territorial creatures. That territorial impulse
Pushing the Boundaries
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