This massive, double-headed hammer is as tall as a were-wolf in Dalu form and carved entirely from very rough stone.
Bane of Power cannot be lifted by anyone with less than Strength of 6 and certainly cannot be wielded.
Once a werewolf attunes to the hammer, for her it becomes a manageable weapon a damage rating of four bashing damage. She can feel energy in its long haft, and hate. Bane of Power gives her the subtle urge to attack certain targets over others, though it may take some time before she understands why.
Once activated for the scene, the hammer doubles its damage rating against creatures with a supernatural power statistic, such as Blood Potency, Primal Urge, Gnosis or another.
Bane of Power has a final, less-known purpose: it destroys sources of power as well. When the Bane of Power kills one of the creatures it is designed to harm within a fount of power, such as a locus, the flow of power diminishes to nothing. It becomes a normal place. The spirit bound within this weapon is affined with some sort of flame, but is otherwise a mystery.
The spirit sometimes speaks to the weapon’s bearer.
Action: Reflexive
r eunion
Enough is enough. For years — centuries — the Tribes of the Moon have suffered the Pure Tribe’s
hate and vitriol. Many saw the Pure as just another trial for the Uratha, Forsaken, forgiven, but still
doomed to live a life without peace.
No more. Since the Brethren Wars of the 1990s, the Forsaken have seen increasing numbers
of attacks by the Pure. The Pure seem even more eager and more energetic, and they are much
more willing to kill. They seem to have forgotten one thing about the werewolves they consider prey: don’t back a wounded wolf into a corner.
So, the Pure’s attacks continue to increase in aggression and frequency.
The North American Forsaken, angry and tired, rise up as a body to face down their long-time enemy. Finally roused to serious action, a large coalition of packs gathers together to hunt and kill as many of the damned Pure Tribe packs as they can. War is come between the brothers again, and
this time it won’t end until one of them whimpers in the corner.
This is a war on the scale of the original Brethren Wars, perhaps even larger. There may be as many as 50 packs fighting with
the Forsaken. Roaming the continent from northern Mexico to southern Canada,
their intent is to sniff out and destroy as many Pure packs as possible. The hunters don’t run as one enormous pack. That would be too obvious, and too destructive to the landscape and to their spirit of cooperation. Instead, they run in groups of three or four packs, They leave their own territories behind, true, but they leave the best guardians they can and hope that when they return, they’ll have a better world.
The Forsaken’s strategy for this war — roam and kill those Pure they find — gives the Forsaken one major advantage. They have no home ground to gar-rison, no territory to perpetually defend. They forage for food and Essence on the move, leaving as little trace as possible while wiping out the Fire-Touched, Ivory Claws and Predator Kings on their path. This gives them the benefit of having the simple goal, easy to understand but difficult to counter.
Of course, it poses immediate difficulties. On the march, the Forsaken have only as much as they can carry. When they need food, water or especially Essence, their familiar hunts and loci are far behind them. The Sacred Hunt ritual becomes exceptionally useful and fairly common. As many packs as possible
use it to replenish their Essence reserves when the army has a day to rest.
Werewolves also use any loci owned by the Pure they kill to recover Essence. Some Forsaken make the attempt to drain the locus dry, since there is no one around to guard against spirit incursion. Thankfully, the army keeps on the move. It is less likely to wear out its welcome in an area (by angering the spirit population, over-hunting or buying/stealing too much from the local stores), because it never rests for long.
Allies are not much use. They’re probably just out of touch, unless they’re reachable by phone.
Some werewolves have devoted Retainers, often in the form of wolf-blooded family. These might come on the march with them (as “support personnel”), or they offer long-distance support. It can’t hurt to have someone at home with a computer checking your routes online.
All of this means that some Merits are of sig-nificantly limited utility. Territory-based Merits and some others become much less desirable when a char-acter won’t be anywhere near home for most of the chronicle. Allies, Contacts, local Fame, Status and potentially Retainer (if he doesn’t come with you) all become less useful.
Players are encouraged to take these Merits any-way. This is an energetic war story for characters who have left their homes behind. They are on foreign soil, in territories they know others claim and they are in constant danger. And they’re doing it all for home. Everything makes more sense, fits better, if the characters have something that they clearly couldn’t bring with them. They miss their home, their weekly bull sessions with the guys in the bar, that sort of thing. It lends the characters depth.
Character background doesn’t need to be a waste of Merit dots. In play, each “local” Merit becomes a memory or an inspiration — one of the reasons the character is fighting. Mechanically, once per local Merit per story, the player can create or use a scene that resonates with that Merit for the character. The character gains a benefit similar to what he might have gotten at home, or a bonus to a single roll equal to the dots in the Merit.
Example: Haley’s character, Granite Stu, is looking for signs of the Ivory Claws in Starr Valley, Nevada, and wants to look up some county records. With Contacts (City Hall), Haley knows that Stu could find what he needs back home. She comes up with the following idea, which the Storyteller approves: Frustrated with the search, Granite Stu sits on the steps of the courthouse
and mopes, missing good ol’ home. He looks so down that one of the county clerks, on a smoke break, decides to say hi. With an appropriate roll, Granite Stu might be able to find out what he wants to know.
This scenario kicks off when the players’ char-acters decide they’ve had enough with the Pure Tribes. The characters just suffered an attack, losing a packmate, and it’s time to put an end to it. Their home was an area ferociously fought over during the Brethren Wars, and everyone who lives there remem-bers them in some fashion.
Attacking the characters’ pack at the beginning is a good way to start the war off on a personal note.
You shouldn’t pick one of the player’s characters for a fated death, of course — the casualty is a Storyteller character. To make the doomed personality more real to the players, connect them to him. Let them define him.
Each player could give a few details of how her character interacts with the Storyteller character, personal likes or dislikes about him and so on. The players might fill out his character sheet together for some detail. Then, you kill him. Don’t surprise the players with this — just see if they want to run through the exercise. If they go all the way, give them the option to draw on their dead comrade for motiva-tion. When a character has reason to remember the packmate, such as a pet peeve that he’s no longer around to aggravate or a situation in which he would have excelled, the character may regain one point of Willpower.
It isn’t necessary to attack the players’ pack off the bat. If they come up with a long-term pack con-cept that makes perfect sense but doesn’t have room for a soon-to-be-murdered packmate, no problem.
The Pure can kill an ally of theirs, disfigure their territory or even inflict this crime on another pack instead — as long as the characters are still ready to rise up in anger.
The players’ characters should all have reason to remember the Brethren War. They might have lived through it, in which case they are probably more experienced werewolves and potential candidates for alpha pack. It’s possible they were around back then, but survived only by being small game and looking smaller. Or the characters’ pack inherited their territory because of the trouble in the ’90s. The land they have now was vacant because of Brethren War casualties, or the characters have taken on the responsibility for a territory that belonged to their onetime mentors.
Reunion All the characters should feel strongly about
retaliation against the Pure Tribes. Murdering a com-rade is a good place to start, but it’s easy to find ad-ditional motivation. Those hate-mongers have been persecuting the Forsaken for centuries, and this time they stepped out of line! They tore up my territory with their damned little war 10 years ago, and it’s time to take it out of their hides! Heck, there might even be some They killed my parents! in there, because that wouldn’t be too surprising either.
Once a raid, murder or other last straw triggers the war, the characters (and players) get to start it off with a bang. A whole bunch of the People gather together, most of them are mad as hell, and a couple of them know where some local Pure packs hunker down. And that’s it. Rage being Rage, that’s 20 or so werewolves running off and howling for blood. You may even want to jumpstart the game by starting moments before the first fight. Get the players’ blood moving — the first chapter in this game becomes tearing the Pure some new ones and then getting all the werewolves back together to gloat about it afterward.
This first victory should be all ups. Werewolf:
The Forsaken is a game about depth of fury, the meaning of the hunt and being a monster that rides the wave of her self-control — but the first night of this chronicle is about the high and the satisfaction that Rage and the hunt provide. And it’s about get-ting back at anyone who thinks he’s better than you, from bullies in middle school to the suck-up in the office. This is for you, Don.
Remember that checks for Harmony degenera-tion give a lot of color to a game. How the Storyteller decides that a given human’s death is “needless,” and thus a sin, affects the decisions players make. The session’s theme is jubilation and pride, not suffering regret. Today: no Harmony checks. Not one. The day is too grand for morals.
After the first, bloody victory, enabled in great part by 2-or-3/1 advantages, the participating were-wolves gather. There is a lot of self-congratulation over the exhilarating annihilation of the Pure packs.
Then talk moves on to doing more. If we can wipe the floor with our local packs in one night, imagine what we could do elsewhere! Pure Tribes are a prob-lem everywhere. With just a little help (ours), other Forsaken could rid themselves of this plague just as well! The idea spreads like wildfire, packs get their accounts in order and very soon they head off along
roughly parallel paths to seek and destroy the Pure across the country.
existing ChroniCles
While it can often be best to start a chron-icle like this with all-new characters, fully aware that the game isn’t going to be the standard territory-centric game of Werewolf, it’s not necessary. As long as all the players are interested in bringing their old characters into a war story, having history can be a great boon to the game.
With old Pure rivals in the area to get obliterated with the war’s advent, the players can feel the same exhilaration as the characters, especially if the Pure have been recurring opponents.
Having played a series of chapters based around the characters’ home territory, the play-ers will have a much clearer idea of what their characters will miss and think back to while on the march.
Although the standard scenario
recommends jumping straight into the war and the action, you can also start this game more slowly. Letting the players and their characters settle into and explore their territory gives them a chance to really build those connections instead of imagining them for their characters.
It also makes it easier to purchase local-effect Merits at character creation.
With the werewolves on the road, the red-blood-ed packs begin to solidify into a war party. And war isn’t easy or simple. Set the second chapter around choosing an alpha pack to lead the war. For players who love a good social game, the entire game session can focus on the politics and physical competitions involved with claiming the prize of leadership, but it needs a backdrop.
This minor crusade is clearly a venture with little forethought behind it. So, one reasonable set piece for the “elections” is for the war effort, yet leader-less, to marshal its resources now that it is away from home. What happens when the first couple of werewolves start running low on Essence and don’t know where to find a locus? Where’s the food com-ing from, how do all the packs stay in touch and did some werewolves just remember that they abandoned paying jobs for the thrill and glory of the hunt?
The challenge to become alpha pack might even center around it. Designed challenges could be
to provision as many packs as possible with as little human fuss as possible, or to locate the best useable loci. It might not even be official. If one pack ends up organizing everything far better than everyone else could, the other werewolves might just concede the honor.
Some packs and players enjoy a good, rousing fight a bit more than the basics of sustenance. In that case, you can skip the whole mess about figuring out how to keep the war moving (or, better, push it back a session or two to make it one of the alpha pack’s first problems). Instead, the excited werewolves rush on toward their next conquest even as they bicker and worry at each other over which pack gets to be alpha. The challenge merges with the hunt.
Split into groups of two or three packs, each hunting party strives to kill more Pure over the course of a set period of time — probably a week, to give them a chance to hunt and fight at least two Pure packs. The victorious group’s packs become the contenders for the final honor, to be decided in some other manner. Mock battle, perhaps, or some other form of trial. Play up the interaction between packs for the characters’ groups, to help the players decide if they’re interested in being alpha or if they would rather have less responsibility for the overall war.
Did the players’ characters become alpha pack?
This is something of a turning point for this war game, and it should be a question answered at least in part by the players themselves. Which aspects of war are they more interested in playing? Do they want to see the trials of generals, having to deal with the soldiers, the logistics, the minutiae and being held responsible for failure? Or the journey of soldiers, fighting the war, following the alpha pack’s directions and being unaware of the entire plan?
One focuses on the larger aspects of the engage-ment — for the alpha pack, individual battles are notes in the symphony of the war. Battles are no more important than the effort required to keep the army supplied with food and Essence. The other focuses on smaller aspects. For soldiers (a term here used loosely), the battle is the greatest conflict. It is why they are there, to serve the war and fight when necessary. Abundance or scarcity of food and Es-sence affect the tone of the game — the characters might be forced to raid a home to eat or teach a local, uncooperative pack a lesson to get some Essence
— but they never have to make official decisions on the matter.
But both have very personal aspects. George Washington wrote home to Martha just as the revo-lutionaries wrote home to their wives and families.
On the subject, soldiers’ letters home are excellent inspirational material for most war games, this one in particular. Many of them have been collected in books or can be read online, especially from the American Civil War.
Also, the second session is a good place to begin slowly reintroducing the Harmony sin of killing another werewolf. Make no more than one roll per character for the entire night, not one per kill. The war has been on for a little while now, and the origi-nal high is wearing off.
Once there is an alpha pack, the army on the move needs to find a spirit patron for the war. This can easily be the subject of the third chapter. Involve the players’ characters, if they are not the alpha pack, by giving them the responsibility to negotiate with the interested spirits. The characters might be the wise choice, or it might be an indication that there are no skilled spirit emissaries among the packs at war. Or the war leader just doesn’t know what to do with your pack.
In this session, explore some of the ramifica-tions of 50 (or so) werewolves rising up and going off to inflict some real damage. One of the results most evident in the plot will be the dozen spirits of varying Rank and Influence that have been following the Forsaken’s trail through the spirit wilds. One is a spirit of vengeance that perked up its figurative ears during the first night’s slaughter and has been watch-ing ever since; as a boon, the spirit offers effective means to greater violence. Another is a river-spirit;
the blessings it would provide do not relate to battle, but its ban would prevent them from soiling riv-ers with blood. At least its unknown purpose is not
the blessings it would provide do not relate to battle, but its ban would prevent them from soiling riv-ers with blood. At least its unknown purpose is not