Werewolf: The Forsaken - Blank It

lucky to have one. Instead, streets just tend to take on
the qualities of what occurs on them. A road that’s principally
a commuter street is all but featureless, haunted
by car-spirits. A shopping street is likely to be inhabited
by spirits of greed and envy, while a street known for
its hookers and drug dealers is a magnet for spirits that
thrive on negative thoughts and emotions.
The way people view a street affects its spiritual
appearance, too. One that people consider dangerous
is darker, narrower and longer in the Hisil, replete with
deep shadows that could hide dangers real and imaginary.
A boulevard that people consider an exciting, desirable
place to be is bigger than life, full of bright lights
and relentless colors.
It takes considerable effort to change the overall
tenor of a street by making alterations in its spiritual
reflection, though some changes bleed through quickly to
a limited degree. For instance, if werewolves heap piles of
spirit wreckage in the reflection of an intersection, creating
a massive spirit roadblock, traffic might slow around
that intersection until the shadow blockade is removed.
SPECIAL PLACES
Each city has its special places, the ones
that have a reputation for good or ill, reinforced
by the repetition of the actions that caused its
reputations in either thought or deed. There’s
Speaker’s Corner in London, known for its
oratory, Ramblas in Barcelona, known for its
trading, and Ground Zero in New York City.
The special nature of these places is reinforced
by the prevalence of appropriate spirits within
the area in question, helping them maintain
their reputations. Yet, if you delve into the
history of a city, many of these places had
radically different uses or reputations in the
past. London’s Speaker’s Corner can be found
adjacent to Marble Arch, which was known as
Tyburn, a hanging-ground for criminals, only
a few centuries before. Its reflection in the
spirit wilds is a mixture of the two. Werewolves
quickly learn that knowing the history of a place
is as important to understanding its spiritual
reflection as knowing what occurs there today.
THE RURAL SCENE
The further you move from the cities, the more the
spirit landscape comes to look like the physical landscape
it represents. Humanity’s ability to dream, fantasize,
imagine and otherwise distort its perceptions of the world
has an equally distorting effect on the spirit world. In the
country, where the actions of animals have far more sway
over the Shadow, the spirit landscape is more subtly
affected. Animals view things with a primitive clarity,
making the spirit wilds in such areas cleaner and simpler,
but no less brutally dangerous. The chains of predation
rely on strength, unchanged by manipulations and deceit.
Spirits perish because a stronger spirit entered the area
and chose to initiate conflict. As in the city, the strong
thrive, the weak pass away.
The distortion of the physical remains, but the
twists in the reflection are subtler in the wild places.
Mountains rise higher to the sky and cast longer shadows.
A river might churn with almost treacherous speed
or sprawl, lazy and stagnant, in its polluted bed. Individual
plants and trees appear only in places where their
spirits have been awakened (see p. 271). Those plants
whose spirits lie dormant might not appear at all, or they
might appear as faint shadows of themselves or even as
nuts or seeds hidden in the ground. It’s possible to stand
in the heart of a spiirt forest, with shadows of branches
and leaves choking out the sun without a single solid
tree spirit within sight. But if an awakened spirit of oak
or willow is nearby, it watches. It can even speak in the
First Tongue if it chooses, the better to play the careful
dance of spirit politics or catch an unwary spirit or
traveler in its branches and roots.
The Shadow also holds the memories of things that
have passed. A mountain might still appear whole in the
Hisil where it has been worn away or quarried into nothing
in the physical world. An island long since sunk into
the depths of the sea might be above water level in the
spirit wilds. An impression of a forest, complete with the
spirits of long-dead trees, lingers in the Shadow where
people and cars live in the physical world. The reasons
for these anachronisms are many and varied. Some were
once so beloved in the past that they gained enough
spiritual coherence to survive their physical destruction.
Others linger in myths, legends or stories, granting them
an extended life in the Shadow. Some merely have spirits
that have been successful enough to resist the changes
on the Shadow Realm wrought by the changes in the
material world. For some of these places, none of these
explanations hold true. Perhaps they’re the legacy of a
past age of the Earth, whose importance is unknowable
to the inhabitants of today’s Earth yet was so strong that
it’s survived the changing ages of the world. Perhaps
these places represent strongholds of the Incarnae and
greater spirits in the spirit wilds. Regardless, the existence
of such a place within a pack’s territory, or even
nearby, is a sure sign of strange spirits and an unpredictable
life in the Shadow Realm.
TRAVEL
Travel within the spirit world is much like travel
within the physical world, with a day’s travel taking you
generally as far as a day’s physical travel. Walking a mile
in the spirit wilds will take you to the same place, more or
less, in the physical world — though there might not be a
The Other World
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