#uratha

[theexaltedbride]

(Image is not mine. Taken from the Werewolf The Forsaken book "Signs of the Moon". )

I don't know what it is about this image but it manages to be so wonderfully bittersweet within a dark setting. Werewolf dad watching out for his kids and making sure they are okay. Still trying to be a part of his family's life even while fulfilling the duties of the Uratha.

It might be inconsequential to most people, but it's one of the things in Chronicles of Darkness that keeps coming to mind and is one of the glimmers of light that show the setting is worth fighting for.

[nastylilchangeling]

Rival Pack for my Werewolves! I rolled dice to determine these people and this is what the dice gave me.

Valerie // Silent-Strides: Hunter-in-Darkness Elodoth (half-moon): the "Pack Mom". Will kick Derek to death ; 80s hair but is going grey ; Early pioneer of Nail-Claws ; In sales.

Zach // Mauled-A-Pack-Alone: Hunter-in-Darkness Elodoth (half-moon): "Nirvana's #1 Fan, Maybe". Proud of his 2 chin hairs ; Won a fight at school ; Freshie ; Val's son ; Thinks Milton is cool.

Beth // Ragged-Tears: Bone Shadow Cahalith (gibbous moon): "The Hippie". Still chubby as a wolf ; Pagan ; Doesn't need the glasses anymore (wears them anyway to avoid suspicion) ; Embroiders her own overalls. Her totem spirit is a sunflower. (We all love Beth.)

Milton // Snagged-By-The-Dust: Blood Talon Ithaeur (crescent moon): "I'm Not A Fuckin' Vamp!". Brother to Miles ; Older but smaller ; General failboy ; Has a walkman ; Horror fan ; Goth/Industrial/Metal fan.

Miles // Locks-Jaws: Blood Talon Rahu (full moon): "My Bro's A Fuckin' Vamp!". Brother to Milton ; Younger but larger ; Bouncer/security for clubs/venues ; Loves to mosh ; War-movies fan ; Punk/Rock/Metal fan.

Ernest // Drags-Below-Ground: Iron Master Irraka (new moon): the "Pack Uncle". On the local HOA board ; Court recorder ; Had to drop out of law school due to being a werewolf ; Can't get a gf for the life of him ; Secondary income for the pack.

[redratt]

So I've been working on some rough lodge concepts. My ultimate goal is to publish them on the storytellers vault, because honestly I dont know how long it will be until we get more Forsaken 2e lodge content lol.

Here are the lodge concepts -- I also have rough drafts for the Lodge of Doors and Lodge of the Hook Hand, but I'm less certain about getting into those as those are like "official" named in book Lodges.

If any of these spring out to you, let me know in the comments or tags! I want to focus down one Lodge and have it refined and written by January.

[reikiajakoiranruohoja]

W5 critical: Absence is not inclusivity

Critical of Werewolf the Apocalypse 5th edition, please don't read if you like the edition.

Few weeks ago, I saw a post stating that the removal of the cultural ties from (almost) all of the tribes is a good thing, because it means anyone can now be a member of any tribe.

What this mentality misses, however, is that the absence of culture is not the same as being inclusive. Sure, everyone can be anything, but from my experience, that freedom does not result in actual diverse depiction. After all, we have data that you can be as diverse as you want in your character creation options, most players will still make a white brown-haired cismale character.

In the same vein, all of the released adventures for W5 have been set in the US. Even though anyone can be anything, we have fallen back to treating the US as the default setting. Paradox is a Swedish company and Sweden has plenty of stories that fit WtA. This is no longer the case of a US company writing for a US audience.

What is worse, now that there are no specific tribes from Turtle Island, they don't have to be included in the stories set on their own lands. Instead, all characters can be white and the ST doesn't have to consider how the native people of the land see the white characters.

Even though the Legacy books often fell on their face when it came to depicting anything not a WASP American, the presence of cultural ties had a purpose.

Garou are creatures of community, they are people who band together not out of desperation or survival but because they like to have people around them. Unlike Vampire the Masquerade, Werewolf the Apocalypse is about honesty. Garou want friends, they want allies and a family without ulterior motives.

What this means is that each tribe was not just a group selected by a specific patron. They were communities of shifter and kin who all shared a culture and had for generations. A tribe is a garou's support network, their source of history and so on.

Of course, Werewolf the Forsaken's tribes aren't culturally tied. But the difference between the W5 tribes and those of The Moon is that there are only 8 or so base tribes and even then three of those are the 'bad guys'. The tribes in Forsaken are archetypes, werewolves of similar goals. But the game has always made a point that there are cultural differences depending on the country and there are plenty of lodges that are local to a specific area.

In W5, you have 11 tribes that were originally built to have ties to certain culture or broad concepts. Now, with most of the context removed, there are multiple tribes in W5 that could be cut and the setting would not change.

More than that, the tribes of W5 (aside from Cult of Fenris for some reason) are alone. Even the Uratha in Forsaken need to have contact with their potential tribe to join one, but in W5 the tribe patrons simply choose a fitting garou with no input from others of the tribe. This loneliness is further shown in how little thought is dedicated to a pack having a patron. Unlike every other WtA book, W5 does not come with a list of patrons. Instead the book, in a sidebar, recommends picking a tribal patron among the tribes of the pack. With an added mention to do contrition to other patrons who did not get picked. Even then, each PC is still expected to follow their tribal patron's ban on top of their pack patron's.

Meanwhile, in Legacy, the ties to various real life cultures give direction and community to the garou. When the pack chooses a patron, that patron is often not from any tribal brood. The pack, in Legacy, is important.

In W5, community, pack, family and all that are not only gone but also treated as the source of the garou's evils. Better be alone, better be without roots, it says.

No person is an island, yet that is what W5 wants things to be.

[n-e-moe]

Werewolf: the Forsaken Post

※ I've been ingesting lot of Werewolf: the Forsaken material lately, and I cannot properly express the stupid little grin that paints my face when I read a single paragraph from any of the books. Don't get it twisted I perfectly understand and respect the darker unpinning themes of the gameline, BUT COME ON, it's furies the board game!

You play as the Uratha (Special werewolf word for werewolf) nine-foot giant dog people who's root spiritual ancestors were a BIG FUCKOFF WOLF and THE LITERAL ACTUAL MOON, the latter of which compels you via generational trauma of murdering your wolf dad: to eat, rip, and tear rogue spirits in order to protect the line between the realm of the flesh, and the world of the spirit.

It takes itself entirely seriously, and it's utterly dirt-brain stupid and I friggin' love it!

※The characters depicted above are a couple of personalities I've created inspired by the setting. A Irraka (New-Moon werewolf) who understandably doesn't jive well with the wanton murder an ageless moon deity demands of her and rebels by being generally lazy & irresponsible, and a Wolf-Blooded (Not a werewolf, but close) caretaker who works on the periphery tending to forsaken who struggle after their change.

I have a few more cooking in the crock-pot and I'll show them off when they're ready.

—Till then, thanks for reading.

[awakenedsalamander]

I really need to go through all the Dark Eras supplements sometime, because I was reading the Sundered World again and damn, what a cool way of recontextualizing the setting.

I especially love the Awakening content, because of course I do— the notion that even Sleepers in the Neolithic Era have some vague, instinctive memory of the Time Before is fascinating— but I also find the Forsaken stuff quite cool.

To see the Uratha in their prime and see that they were kind of horrifying at the time, and also potentially play out how the patricide of Father Wolf created the Forsaken as we know them, even through tragedy…

Man, it’s good stuff for a nerd like me.

[huntunderironskies]

What’s your opinion on the Bale Hounds, Soulless Wolf, and the Maeljin?

Extremely good antagonists, best used as part of a variety pack of threats to the pack and usually being the penultimate or final one. I usually see tons of Wounded spirits or the manifestation of Maeljin servitors as being a warning sign that a territory is heading towards total ecological collapse and an issue that the pack needs to deal with now. They're rarely the problem in and of itself but a symptom that is going to make everything significantly worse.

All that said I think they can be kind of tough to do right. No werewolf is ontologically evil from birth in 2e since the unihar got thankfully written out of existence, and writing characters who are unforgivably nasty but you can still see how they ended up where they are is an art form that's difficult to do. On some level I think Maeljin are easier to handle just because their mentality can be handwaved as entirely alien, much like other spirits. They're driven to do horrible things and live out the anti-virtues of Exposure, Consumption, Disharmony, Invasion, and Destruction in the same way cordyceps have to infect ant brains. Horrible as it is, it's just how they are. A lot of times I'll just have Bale Hounds as werewolves who picked the easy way out. Doing what's right, especially as a werewolf, is hard. When most of the things you do are monster-y, completely embracing that is easy to do. They're still people at the end of the day. They had hopes and dreams and loved ones at some point. They might still.

(Though, those probably don't last for long. When the Maeljin want the world in ruin, it's best to make sure that their soldiers doing just that don't have things they want to save. So whatever those things worth fighting for might be, they either need to be twisted to serve the Maeljin or destroyed.)

Soulless Wolf is a fun one, though. In the mythology used in Wilmington and a few other cities in the South, Soulless Wolf is a Firstborn who traded away their Ab, Ba, Ka, Ren, and Sheut* to the five main members of the Maeljin, each one having one fifth of Soulless Wolf, which effectively wrote them out of the physical world. This made them more of an anti-identity than a real Firstborn. Their general concept of existence is still around but they aren't. So they do and don't exist at the same time metaphysically. Soulless Wolf is definitely not their real name and whatever their real name was can never be recalled or recovered because it doesn't exist. Whether or not this makes them an Abyssal entity is ambiguous but I'd settle more on the fact that they just really, really strongly resemble an Abyssal being.

*important footnote, the Uratha don't use those exact names but it's effectively what they mean, I just really like Mummy

[paragonrobits]

genuine question to the Slasher fans or people who understand the rules implications; in general, how outmatched would Slashers of the variant sub-types be against a single, relatively inexperienced werewolf/Uratha?

i have some vague character ideas but i want to see how this would usually go

[franticbindings]

I played in a Mage the Awakening chronicle with lots of GMs working in the same setting (LA) and I can't help but dwell on the ways the setting stuff was set up to support the Free Council leader who had a praxis related to spirits being Pokemon.

There was a place that had a connection to the Primal Wild and so it was a natural verge/powerful locus where spirits could cross over freely from the Shadow. This Mage had turned it into a Pokemon gift shop and was feeding spirits essence to turn them into Pokemon based magath and encouraging normal humans to come and interact with them.

What gets me is the extent to which this would be viewed as an unspeakable desecration by some uratha and how much they would want to kill her over this. There is no way that legendary irraka hunters in darkness aren't showing up on the reg to throw a bucket of dice + 8 again trying to turn her head into mist with klaive sniper rifles. Unfortunately it's not impossible a Master of Life could survive this, probably.

It does not escape me that it would be very difficult for uratha to actually maintain such a site in the middle of a huge city - keeping people away, controlling the flow of spirits, etc. would be a huge problem.

[enddaysengine]

Masked Emotions

Wrote this last year when my sister's dog passed. Shared it with my patrons then, sharing it with you all now. 

Masked Emotions Amelia Carver never asked to be special. She would have been fine with a happy but quiet life with a woman who loved dogs and an adopted kid. They could have settled down, she’d eventually get her Ph.D. and publish a few ecology papers, and together they would have been family.

Mother Luna, in her cruelty, does not care for her children’s wants.

Amelia’s First Change was traumatic, but she is at least grateful she didn’t hurt anyone. The Hillside Pack, a group made of Hunters in Darkness and Bone Shadows, approached her shortly after, hoping their environmental approach to the Hunt would draw Amelia into the fold. Instead, she was horrified to learn that other werewolves were not only out there but also at war with each other. She wanted nothing to do with it and chose to remain a Ghost Wolf.

Before leaving, the Pack warned Amelia of the Pure and advised her to have a pack of her own, even if they weren’t Uratha. Amelia, unwilling to risk spreading her curse (or understanding its nature for that matter), adopted a dog from the local shelter. Murphy wasn’t a puppy, but he was still spry and joyful. They were a pack together for three years, and Murphy helped Amelia open up to humanity. Then Amelia woke up and Murphy didn’t.

It wasn’t foul play, uncontrolled rage, or spiritual vendetta, but sheer bad luck. A blood clot where it shouldn’t have been. There was nothing Amelia could do, no foe to fight, no prey to tear to pieces. She was heartbroken at losing her boy. It was then that Grim Mask came to her.

Grim is a Stone Face, a spirit of repressed sorrow that feeds on buried emotions. It offered to help Amelia hide her emotions so she wouldn’t have to deal with the world’s awkward questions and pitying eyes. To Amelia, it seemed like a good bargain, but she didn’t understand that Grim Mask had no intention of allowing her to resolve her hidden despair. The Grim Mask, for its part, knows that it is taking advantage of Amelia’s suffering but does not understand why humans consider that wrong. In its mind, it is a predator seeking food and has generously traded for it. Of course, it is going to ensure Amelia stays raw and distraught internally; that’s what makes the Essence it needs. Such is the way of the Shadow.

Amelia, Grief-Ridden

Auspice: Rahu Tribe: Ghost Wolf Blood: Monster Bone: Lone Wolf Touchstones: none (Flesh), Grim Mask (Spirit) Attributes: Intelligence 3 Wits 3 Resolve 2 Strength 2 (3/5/4/2) Dexterity 2 (2/3/4/4) Stamina 3 (4/5/4/4) Presence 3 Manipulation 2 (1/2/1/1) Composure 1 Skills: Academics 2, Computers 2, Investigation 2, Medicine 1, Politics 1, Occult 1, Science (Ecology) 2; Athletics 1 (Sprinting), Brawl 1, Drive 1, Survival 1; Animal Ken (Dogs) 2, Expression 1, Intimidation 1, Persuasion 1, Socialize 2, Streetwise 1 Merits: Area of Expertise (Ecology), Barfly, Fleet of Foot 3, Inspiring, Status (University) 1 Primal Urge: 1 Willpower: 3 Harmony: 5 Size: 5 (6/7/6/4) Health: 9 (11/13/12/9) Initiative: +3 (3/4/5/5) Defence: 3 (3/4/4/4) Speed: 12 (13/16/19/17) Renown: Honour 1, Purity 1 Gifts: Full Moon, Hunting (Honour), Strength (Honour, Purity) Rites: Sacred Hunt Active Conditions: Open (Grief), Urged (Grim Mask), Shaken

Note: Amelia’s stats are appropriate for a player character made in character creation with 0 extra Experiences.

Stone Faces are spirits of grief, although they do not look the part. The Spirits commonly possess an incorporeal humanoid form with three heads. Each face wears a grinning stone mask with trails of water erosion weeping down from its eye holes. As they grow stronger, the spirits grow additional heads and limbs. The Uthsa-Damin can take other forms - replacing stone with tragedy-comedy masks, appearing as multi-headed mannequins, or even as sentient text messages showing only positive emojis. No matter what form they take, Stone Faces always present ossified, unchanging happiness. In reality, these spirits are born of and feed upon anguish. They represent the compartmentalized, hidden emotional pain people try to hide from the world. Stone Faces thrive in the modern world, where your brand is everything and society frowns on being open with your pain. They trap the herd in feelings of hidden misery, content in knowing that their larders will hide among the smiling flock.

Stone Faces (Smiling Grief, Uthsu-Damin)

Rank 1 Grief Spirit Power 2 Finesse 2 Resistance 3 Willpower: 5 Initiative: +5 Defence: 3 Speed: 11 Size: 4 Corpus: 7 Influences: Grief 1 Numina: Dement, Hidden Face, Innocuous Manifestations: Twilight Form, Fetter Ban: Let no one see your true face. Bane: A moment of pure joy.

New Numen - Hidden Face: By spending two Essence, the spirit can disguise a character’s emotions. Any mundane attempts to discern the target’s emotional state or any related Conditions instead interprets an emotion and/or Condition of the spirit's choice.

[sarahcarapace]

How does this werewolf the forsaken/apocalypse crossover work?

Pretty easily!

The way I'm running it is by using the WtF ruleset and Tribes but using the WtA triat and antagonists and overall setting (largly drawing from 2nd and revised edition lore as I own a bunch of those books)

Dread powers work great as Fomori and Bane abilities and we use the Pure gifts and Merits for our Black Spiral dancers along with a few homebrewed rites and merits to adapt the Uratha to better take the place of the Garou

[paleo-punk]

My sweet boi Alex again, and his crush, the cute and overworked doctor Duke. Alex finally got Duke to freakin SLEEP (he'd been up for 48 hours straight stressing about stuff) so here they are having a quiet moment together while Duke snoozes.

[we-are-ghost-wolf]

Gauru and Honor by Mirko Failoni

[redratt]

Time to ramble about my Bone Shadows.

Or rather like. The main two.

Gretchen is an Irraka Bone Shadow, who experienced her first change when she was down in Missouri looking for birds while trying to complete research for her Doctoral Degree in Ornithology. While there, she met May, a local who offered to help show her around. Thing is, May is an Iron Master and Gretchen would have been easy prey for the hunt. Would have, except Gretchen, who was lost Wolf-Blood, experienced her first change when May attacked her. The two fought, with Gretchen eventually losing, mostly due to lack of experience.

In her pack, Gretchen is... borderline the leader, which is something that most folks meeting her wouldn't expect. She isn't the most smooth of people, but she has ambitious aims and in step with her wife, May, is one half of a dedicated duo intent on keeping their territory on lockdown.

What's really worth noting about Gretchen, though, is that she's a member of the Lodge of Doors. Her mentor there, a grizzled man by the name of Old Cutter, is a guy in her city who owns a rifle store. It's highly likely that if Gretchen weren't an Irraka, she would not have been able to track Old Cutter down and prove he was a member of the lodge, but the natural stealth of her auspice proved a major help. Upon introducing herself, Gretchen was allowed in as she passed the initial test of "prove we exist".

While most people overlook her because of her demeanor and apparent nervousness, Gretchen is one of the more menacing pack members, and she takes her duty very seriously.

The second, Erszebet, is a bit more off the wall, because she was born to the Predator Kings. That she is a Rahu, however, makes it clear that she was never scoured of her auspice. In fact, Erszebet was essentially believed to be useless in her youth, but she witnessed the brutality of the Predator Kings and took it to heart. When she was given to a pack leader as a mate, Erszebet managed to get away -- because the stress of the situation forced the first change out of her. She left the old leader with many deep scars and raged into a nearby campground, killing four people; when she woke up, she was naked and soaked with blood in the alley behind a club... two cities away from her origin point.

In her years as a Ghost Wolf, Erszebet did many, MANY rough jobs. She broke kneecaps and killed as needed -- and she doesn't know it, but one of the people who approached her was a Bale Hound, testing her for later use. After an incident involving a woman's runaway husband and Erszebet's baseball bat, she was dragged into a meeting, bound in silver-twined rope.

It is highly likely she would have been killed. However, it immediately became clear that she truly knew nothing of Uratha life. As such, she was taken in and allowed to adapt-- which led to her joining the Bone Shadows due to her curiosity about... well. The Hisil.

Erszebet is an unconventional Bone Shadow, which is likely why she wound up in the Lodge of the Throatcutter, a Lodge for Bone Shadows that pride themselves on being "rougher" than their kin. As her initiation, she had to hunt and kill a spirit stronger than she was.

Four hours later, Erszebet received her tattoo of admittance.

@sharkrad08222222

[reikiajakoiranruohoja]

So you like both forsaken and Apocalypse

what makes you drawn to both of them?

besides werewolves

For apocalypse, the setting, the lore, the ability to play non-human characters (crinos born and lupus.) I also like the environmental message as it is always topical and often playing out something that CAN just fight an aspect of corruption can be good catharsis. For Forsaken, the way it in the 2nd edition stands as its own thing. The uratha are hunters who can have multi species packs and breed with one another. They are opposed by those hating them and they have to make deals where they can.

[canary-prince]

Barney Stintson: Deviant, Accidental, Cephalist. Main power is superhuman attribute manipulation and presence, along with pheromones and memory thief. He does have regular contact with other New York Deviants (Victoria is one and Ted doesn't know) and tries to help them as much as he can.

Lily Aldrin: Mastigos Silver Ladder (or Obirmos but I like my hellions more than my angels soooo). Primarily focuses on mind magic to soothe her kindergarteners, check that their parents are fit to raise them, and grease the wheels of her art deals. Her spaces magic is devoted to storing all of her stuff sufficiently and make their New York apartment more accommodating of Marshall's size.

Marshall Erikson: Wolf-blooded, never had his first change. Two tells: A Wolf's Meat and Piercing Eyes. Meaning he heals like a changed wolf and sees spirits but can't shift and doesn't suffer the silver bane. His whole family are Uratha or Wolfblooded and "what" Marvin and Daisy become remains to be seen.

Ted Mosby: Changeling, Fairest, Artist, Spring Court with Autumn Goodwill. Ted is not a healer Spring. No, Ted is an ambassador, a socialite, and sometimes a spy. He was king for one season and no one is keen to try it again. He built palaces in Arcadia and can't shake the urge in the Ash.

Robin Scherbotsky: Werewolf, Cahalith, Iron Master. Former Pure tribe; her father is a Predator King and her mother is Wolf-blooded. She serves her protectorate (which Marshall was denied entry to based on his mage wife) by keeping supernatural news off the air and sniffing up leads weeks ahead of the others.