minds into a mockery of Gaia’s design, but what happens when a person has already become something other than human? What happens when a Bane tries to possess an already-supernatural beings?
In short: nothing good.
Most Banes simply can’t do it. Supernatural beings tend to have some built-in protection against possession, meaning that only the strongest or most specialized of Banes have a shot at possessing a vampire, mage, or — Gaia forbid — a werewolf. Still, it happens occasionally, and the results can be among the most gruesome things a pack of Garou may ever have to face.
Vampires
Vampires are hard to possess. Perhaps the Curse of Caine is such a potent form of damnation that any lesser affliction has trouble taking root; perhaps it has some- thing to do with vampires already being dead. Whatever the reason, very few Banes can find any purchase in a vampire’s pale and withered soul. Those that do tend to be Banes of blood and madness, and they can make a vampire’s unlife very short and very unpleasant indeed. Detailed below are two examples of the kind of fomori possible when a Bane manages to curl up in the black and empty pit that was once a vampire’s soul.
Bloodworms
The Garou regard vampires as blood-sucking canni- bal corpses, thus obviously making them servants of the Wyrm. Vampires would differ. They have a flowery adage
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— a beast I am lest a beast I become — that describes their fundamental dilemma. Each vampire wages an eternal battle to hold onto some shreds of the person she used to be, lest she become nothing but a mindless animal howling for blood. However, in order to maintain that control, the vampire must do terrible things to appease her cursed nature, things corrosive to maintaining her soul. It’s a poignant and complex struggle, which plays out over a span of centuries or even longer.
Or, it ends quickly and prematurely when a Bane known as a Thirster manages to slip into a vampire’s soul during frenzy.
It’s an excellent partnership at first. The vampire grows more resilient, and her blood seems more powerful and potent. But her self-control starts eroding soon after, and it becomes much easier for the scent of blood to send her into a killing frenzy. The Bane eats another piece of what’s left of the vampire’s soul during each murderous revel, until there’s nothing left but a creeping, blood- thirsty corpse. That’s when the real renovations begin.
Unlike a normal vampire lost to the Beast, there’s still something controlling a Bloodworm — the Bane. A Bloodworm is a cunning, canny predator, using its mutated body and its vampiric Disciplines to seek out the blood of Gaia’s defenders.
Powers: Blood Gorge*, Corpse Hide*. After losing
all Humanity: Darksight, Rat Head, Slobbersnot, Wall Walking.
* Blood Gorge: This power doubles the size of a vampire’s Blood Pool, but causes her to fail all hunger frenzy rolls, and to automatically fail any Humanity rolls she makes.
* Corpse Hide: Corpse Hide allows the vampire to soak damage at a difficulty two lower than normal.
Image: At first, the vampire seems no different than she did before possession. Once the Bane finishes eating her soul, the vampire’s body undergoes radical alteration. Her fangs disappear as the Bane repurposes her tongue into a far more effective blood-drinking tool in the form of a three-foot long, jointed siphon ending in a deadly sharp needle, which folds up in the throat when not in use. The vampire’s skin turns deep red, and glistens with a thin layer of bloody lubrication. Her limbs wither into corpselike sticks, after about six months they fall off entirely. The vampire’s torso elongates into a fleshy sack designed to store blood, while her pupils grow to take up almost the entirety of her eyes. Muscular, rasp-like bands line the underside of the torso, allowing the vampire to move with terrifying speed through muscular contraction, and even to ooze up walls and across ceilings.
Roleplaying Notes: You’re an ambush predator, and don’t have any worries in the world to distract you
from the hunt for blood. The blood is everything, and when you’re warm and sloshing full of it, you’re content to hide and digest. It’s perfect. You can’t remember why you wanted to fight this.
Draugr
Most young Garou are understandably paranoid about vampire bites, but their more seasoned septmates know that it doesn’t work like the movies, and thank Gaia, or else the world would be up to its neck in Leeches. The vampires themselves are well aware of how difficult it is to create more of their kind, and this lets them hunt and kill with impunity.
Then a Rot Walker enters the picture.
Draugr are among the rarest fomori in the world, and this is a very fortunate thing. Rot Walkers normally only possess the dead, and have little interest in vampires. When such a Bane does turn its attention to a vampire, it normally lacks the strength to adapt its normal form of possession from the dead to the undead. However, on those few occasions when it works, the result is a nightmare: for the vampire, for the Masquerade, and for the sept that has to clear out the Draugr and its brood.
Possession by a Rot Walker erases some of the vam- pire’s distinguishing characteristics. On the plus side, it no longer needs to sleep more than a couple of hours during the day, and sunlight inflicts bashing rather than aggravated damage. Less welcome are the fact that its fangs shorten and dull (inflicting lethal rather than ag- gravated damage), and its bite no longer inflicts a hyp- notic euphoria, it just hurts. Nor can the vampire close its own bite wounds. Given that most vampires bite right into a major artery and then seal the wound, a Draugr leaves its victims bleeding out. What makes the Draugr so dangerous though comes after a victim dies of its bite.
They get back up.
A Draugr victim isn’t a vampire, though it’s vampire- like. Twelve hours after death, the corpse reanimates with most of its mind and personality intact, driven by a strange homing instinct to seek out the Draugr. Though the homing instinct remains, everything else fades quickly. The victim’s psyche breaks down in less than six hours, rendering the corpse a shambling cadaver no smarter than a dog, though it can and will follow simple instructions from its maker. The corpse becomes violent when something gets in the way of finding its creator. Twelve hours after reanimation, the corpse develops fangs like the Draugr’s, and it seeks out blood if left unattended. The corpse avoids sunlight at this point, though it will be another 24 hours before sunlight actually harms it in the same way it does the Draugr. A Draugr-thrall never develops Disciplines, and can’t use the Blood Points it consumes for any pur- pose other than to keep itself animate for another day,
a requirement that begins three days after reanimation. The thrall can be destroyed by filling its health track with lethal damage; it doesn’t experience torpor.
Powers: The Rising. Anyone killed by the fomor’s bite rises as a corpse-servant, as detailed above.
Image: The Draugr looks a little more dead than other vampires do. His complexion is waxy and ashen, his eyes dull, his mouth and hands dry. His eyes become dull and corpselike. His thralls look like exactly what they are: ambulatory, hungry cadavers, which look more and more gruesome as they collect incidental wear and tear, which the blood they consume cannot heal. They give urgent moans upon scenting fresh blood.
Roleplaying Notes: You’re not sure why this is happen- ing — it’s hard to feed, now, and when you kill someone, they come back. You don’t have to sleep so much during the day, which at least gives you time to watch over your grow- ing collection of corpse-servants and to think about what to do with them. You know you’ve become a Masquerade breach waiting to happen, but at this rate, you’re going to have enough loyal muscle to get even with all the other vampires in the city before they start calling for your head. Maybe this could be your ticket to becoming Prince….
Werewolves
Can a werewolf become a fomor? Absolutely. It doesn’t happen very often, though. Any Garou who isn’t already deep in the Wyrm’s thrall will feel something amiss as soon as possession begins, and the Garou are uniquely capable of stopping the process (generally by stepping into the Umbra and tearing the offending Bane to shreds). Once in a while, though, it happens, and the resulting fomor is one of the gravest and most personal insults to Gaia and the Garou Nation that a werewolf can conceive of.
Generally, only the youngest of cubs gets possessed. It’s not a fast or simple process where a werewolf is con- cerned (the difficulty of possession is always 9), and even making the attempt is usually enough to set the local sept on the warpath. Most Banes are smart enough to realize it’s not worth the trouble. There are always a few exceptions, though, and there is one particular breed of Bane specializing in possessing werewolves.
The Garou aren’t the only shapeshifters on the block, of course. Curiously, the other Fera do not share a uniform resistance to possession. In general, the deeper a Changing Breed’s link to the Umbra, the more pos- sible possession becomes. Those shapeshifters that can’t naturally step sideways into the Umbra tend to be nearly immune to Bane possession.
Finally, the Black Spiral Dancers vary on the subject of Bane possession. A few of the tribe’s most hardcore Wyrm fanatics see the invitation of a Bane into their
soul as an act of ultimate communion with their Dark Father. The majority of the Spirals, on the other hand, look on the idea of werewolf fomori with revulsion and horror. Fomori are sick jokes, the lowliest of the Wyrm’s minions, disposable chaff fit only for shock troops and servants. For a Black Spiral Dancer to submit himself to that sort of slavery and indignity is repugnant. Most Banes know better than to attempt to possess a Black Spiral Dancer without an invitation first; the Wyrm’s wolves can be creative indeed in exacting retribution.