Werewolf: The Forsaken - Blank It

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Appendix I: The Spirit World
THE ESSENCE GAME
Spirits actively recruit for their courts. It’s possible to
bring over a spirit from an entirely different choir or even
category of spirit, by gifting it with Essence with a resonance
appropriate to the recruiting choir. A court of the
Artificial might temporarily recruit a fox-spirit by feeding
it machine-tainted Essence.
If the fox-spirit continues to receive such Essence it
will become a permanent member of that court in a number
of weeks equal to its Resistance, giving its allegiance
to the artificial spirits rather than the natural spirits. Once
the conversion is complete, the spirit will seek out urbanresonance
Essence rather than Essence with the flavor of
the rural landscape. The growing number of urban foxes
hints at just how good some artificial spirits are at this
game, just as the rusting cars and other bits of machinery
found deep in a forest hint at a successful seduction of an
artificial by a natural.
LUNES, HELIONS AND OTHER CELESTIALS
Lunes, Helions and other spirits of the other planets
in the solar system are the wildcards in the games of the
spirits. Their concerns aren’t just of this world, but of their
home celestial bodies. The differences Forsaken can see
between different Lunes and Helions almost certainly
mark the different spiritual choirs of their respective native
areas of the Shadow, but these divisions are all but
incomprehensible from an earthly perspective. Perhaps
the wisest of the Ithaeur know the secrets of the Lunar
and Helion choirs, but they don’t share such wisdom with
lesser werewolves easily.
The same reasoning suggests that the other bodies in
the solar system have their own choirs of spirits. Perhaps
the stranger spirits found wandering the Shadow are
spirits from those choirs, exploring other areas, or even
exiled for some incomprehensible crime. It could just be
that some of Father Wolf’s secrets lie with these strange
spirits, too.
SPIRIT WARFARE
Sometimes the spirits go to war. The legends of the
Uratha tell of great wars between spirits that coincided with
the deaths of entire species in the physical world whose
spiritual descant was wiped out in the spirit world. The
Shadow Realm was a Darwinian place long before Darwin
entered the world. Battles between descants and choirs
can be terrible events, laying waste to whole swathes of
the Shadow and causing wholesale damage in the physical
world too (including earthquakes, extinction, explosions
and fires). Sometimes these wars are no more than local
struggles between spirit courts, as the natural choirs struggle
with the artificial ones or two descants of animal spirits
compete to dominate the spiritual landscape. Regardless,
spirits go to war with one another with surprising ease.
Many spirits don’t fear death as humans and animals do.
As long as their earthly counterpart endures, the spirit
will eventually re-form from the shreds of its ephemera
that survive its dissolution. Spiritual battles don’t end with
corpses littering the battlefield. Instead, the slain combatants
dissolve in manners appropriate to their choir. Spirits
of murder and pain dissolve into showers of blood or bone
that litter the landscape, before slowly fading into ephemera.
Elements explode into points of light, while spirits from
the animal choirs disappear in clouds of fur or feathers.
The artificial choirs scatter the landscape with cogs, gears,
wheels and chips on their dissolution. Only ghosts leave
bodies, and then only briefly as they sink six feet under the
perceptual ground level in the Shadow.
Slowly, the ephemera that made up the spirit’s corpus
finds its way back to the spirit’s physical counterpart, or
to the domain within the Shadow it calls home if it no
longer has a physical counterpart. Once the spirit re-forms
and starts to associate with other members of its choir or
descant, the old rivalries soon resurface, and war breaks
out once more. As a result, spiritual battles rarely solve
anything.
Spirits can, however, make a conscious decision to
destroy an enemy spirit once and for all, not just discorporate
it. This act taints the murderer with a powerful stain
of negative resonance. Such a spirit might have set foot,
talon or wheel on the path to becoming a bane.
BROODS
A brood is a gathering of spirits from different choirs
or descants based on politics. For example, Fenris Wolf,
the great destroyer wolf-spirit totem of the Blood Talons,
calls on certain spirits to assist him and his children.
Spirits of war and metal, wolf-spirits and raven-spirits,
spirits of blood and anger and strength are all part of
Fenris’ brood. All of these spirits share a certain common
ground, although their natures vary. The wolf-spirits
follow out of blood loyalty, while his raven-spirits follow
from desire to feast on the corpses left in his wake. Even
then, only a fraction of all wolf-spirits associate themselves
with Destroyer Wolf. Others might associate themselves
with the broods of other totems, while still others eschew
broods entirely.
Obviously, a spirit brood is rarely well organized, as
there are so few rules governing which spirits may be part
of it. In this, it appears, the spirit world reflects the shifting
politics that humans and werewolves know so well.
SLEEPING SPIRIT S
While the spirits of most birds, animals and fish are
awake from the moment of their birth, most spirits of objects
and plants sleep. They exist, and they have the potential
to become intelligent, but they lie dormant until
something happens to bring them to life. These sleeping
or dormant spirits are visible in the spirit world as faint
shadows of the object they represent, which move around
along with their material world analogue. A number of
things can bring them to life, however, with some serious
consequences for the object that spawned the spirit.
Just as the object affects the spirit, so too does the spirit