Werewolf: The Forsaken - Blank It

290
Appendix II: The Rockies
Rockies. A gruesomely potent idigam, whom the spirits
referred to only as Gurdilag, worked its way through the
Shadow Realm until it wound up in downtown Denver.
The werewolves had never seen its like before, and try as
they might, they couldn’t eradicate it by simple force of
arms. Gurdilag spread things that were either its agents or
sloughed-off aspects of itself into the community from the
vibrant locus that it had claimed as a phylactery. Whenever
a pack of werewolves destroyed one of these agents,
more (and stronger ones at that) replaced the fallen one
immediately — sometimes while the survivors were still
healing the wounds the fallen one had given them.
Gurdilag itself was rarely seen in more than a few
horrifying glimpses of its un-form, but its agents quickly
spread throughout the city, overtaking loci with a hivelike
single-mindedness. Werewolves who stood against
them were either cut down and devoured or, worse,
overtaken spiritually and made fearsome agents of the
idigam themselves. Eventually, the surviving werewolves
were forced to flee Denver altogether, lest they be incorporated
into Gurdilag’s bizarre, incomprehensible design.
They fled their homes, their families and their hard-won
spirit allies in the face of what seemed an unstoppable
onslaught, spreading out into the greater Rockies area
with no plan beyond surviving into the next month,
week, even night. Even a few loci in territories beyond
the boundaries of the city fell before Gurdilag stopped its
expansion and began to concentrate on accomplishing its
alien agenda. Yet despite their every effort, none of the
surviving Uratha who had fled their territories were able
to retake what they had lost. Those who tried the hardest
all died; those who failed and survived all despaired.
To make matters worse, the deaths of Forsaken elders
elsewhere across the country was leading to the so-called
“Brethren War, ” in which up-and-coming werewolves
fought one another for territory and dominance. Local
werewolves in the territories surrounding Denver found
themselves fighting battles in this war on two fronts, as
displaced werewolves from beyond the Rockies closed
in just as those who had been run out of Denver fled
outward. Territory in the Rockies changed hands with
alarming frequency, and more than one fell untended as
weariness and infighting took their toll on Forsaken who
had nothing left to give. As if things weren’t already bad
enough, well-coordinated Pure Tribe packs rushed into
the locals’ territory to capitalize on their hated enemies’
time of weakness. The Forsaken were caught off guard by
the ferocity and organization of the assault, and several
packs were slain, forfeiting even more valuable territory.
The turmoil eventually stabilized into a stalemate,
as it did all across the country as the Brethren War died
down, but it wasn’t a status quo that everyone was willing
to live with. One local Iron Master named Max Roman
had grown sick of Gurdilag’s horrific effects on his
city’s spiritscape, as well as that of the violence between
migrant Uratha displaced from the East as a result of the
Brethren War and the opportunistic assaults of the Pure
Tribes. With half of his pack dead and his confidence
shattered by conflicts with Gurdilag’s agents, and the rest
of his pack slaughtered by his own kind, Roman took to
the road to regain his focus and find his calling in life.
His wandering eventually led him to Chicago where he
experienced an epiphany that rekindled his fighting spirit.
Gathering a new pack around him, he journeyed down
strange and secret roads that, to this day, he will not
discuss.
When he and his packmates returned to the Rockies,
he arranged a moot at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal Wildlife
Refuge. He explained who he was and what he’d been
through for the benefit of those who didn’t know. He then
offered a kernel of hope that Denver and its surrounding
territories could be retaken before the next full moon if
the assembled werewolves were willing to put aside their
differences and work together. His first and most outspoken
opponent to this seemingly untenable idea was a
Storm Lord named Rachel Snow, but even she chose to go
along with him when Roman revealed what it was that his
arduous journey had earned him — namely, the secret of
Gurdilag’s ban. The other werewolves quickly fell in line,
and some were even able to convince stubborn Forsaken
who hadn’t deigned to show up for the moot that what Roman
had in mind was worthwhile.
Before the next full moon, Roman and Snow led as
many werewolves as would follow on a veritable crusade
to purge the idigam’s taint from the territory it had
usurped. Armed with the secret of Gurdilag’s ancient and
long-forgotten ban, they made short work of the alien
entity’s agents all throughout Denver. They liberated loci
more easily than those places had originally been won,
and they freed local spirits whom Gurdilag’s agents had
imprisoned. Eventually, they tracked the diminishing
idigam to its secret lair, choked down the horror of what
they found going on there, and destroyed it. The cost in
lives and sanity was steep, but in the end, Gurdilag was
no more and Denver was free of its malignant influence.
With Denver firmly in their grasp, the survivors
took stock and assessed the damage that had been done.
The Shadow was a disaster area, much of it populated by
hateful, bitter spirits that wanted nothing to do with their
liberators. Many younger Forsaken were overwhelmed by
it all, and some more recent arrivals were even prepared
to write the city off as a lost cause. Yet wiser, or perhaps
more stubborn, werewolves buckled down in the face of
this adversity and took their packs into the worst parts of
the city. They sought out those areas most upset by the
idigam’s activities and committed themselves to restoring
them, if not improving upon them.
Now, in the wake of all that’s happened, the Forsaken
find themselves at the beginning of a new cycle in their
local history. Although much of the damage that Gurdilag
wrought hasn’t yet been repaired, a new era of rejuvenation
and promise lies before them. Urban territories long