Everything

One particular sort of Bane, known as a Howling Insanity, specializes in possessing Garou. The Bane still doesn’t have a terribly high rate of success, but Pentex is busy working on a way to standardize the process and make it easier.

The fomori created by Howling Insanities are known as Howling Shamblers, and they’re among the most wretched of the Wyrm’s conscripts. The sheer spiritual poison of the Bane bonded to the Garou’s soul rots the werewolf’s mind and body from the inside out. Derangements blossom soon after possession, even as regeneration-resistant cancers unfurl inside the werewolf’s body. The need to howl becomes a compulsion, and the werewolf’s cry echoes with the voice of the Wyrm. Few Howling Shamblers manage to live more than six months, and there is only the beginning of the horror.

Powers: Howling (as Roar of the Wyrm), Shambling*. * Shambling: When a Howling Shambler dies, it gets up one turn later and finishes whatever it was doing — making dinner, fighting a Pentex First Team, whatever. Once that task is accomplished, the Howling Shambler goes ambling off to find, kill, and eat anything with werewolf blood in it. The reanimated Shambler is nearly unstoppable. Its chopped off limbs keep crawling or rolling along with the rest of the body. Only burning, melting, or smashing it into a raw pulp of meat and gristle will stop it (in game terms, the thing must be killed with fire or acid, or have its health track filled with aggravated damage twice over; even then, the parts keep twitching and flopping until they’re burned).

Image: A living Howling Shambler tends to look like a crazy homeless person: shaking, filthy, mumbling to himself, and bursting out with periodic howls as the tumors and other diseases eat away at his mind. In Crinos, the Shambler’s fur is mangy and falling out, and his body is covered in weeping sores. After reanimation, the fomor looks like a shuffling, hungry corpse, rotting as it shambles toward its next meal.

Roleplaying Notes: You’re so confused now—a few months ago, you were strong and proud, but now everything seems to be going wrong. It’s — AROOO! — it’s hard to concentrate, and you itch and ache all the time. Sometimes your thoughts don’t line up so well.

Sometimes you want to do awful things, like something was whispering in your ear. AROOO! But the wolf’s still alive and well in you, and it wants to hunt and howl.

Mages, for all that they dabble in powers Gaia did not intend for humanity, remain fundamentally human. As such, they’re susceptible to Bane possession, and all the horrors that come with it.

Mages do have a few things going for them. Their souls are particularly powerful and resilient. The difficulty to possess a mage is three higher than it would otherwise be. Once possession begins, many mages are capable of wielding magic to contest the Bane’s efforts directly.

On the other hand, mages who deal with spirits don’t always know what they’re getting into, and some foolish or wicked mystics may actively invite Banes into themselves, believing they will be able to command the spirit, or not understanding the bargain they’re making. Either way, the result is a fomor wielding both the degrading blessings of the Wyrm and the mystic power of an Awakened soul.

In the long run, this isn’t a good thing for anybody other than the Wyrm. A mage fomor retains full access to her magic, and gets new powers, to boot. It seems like a great deal. At least until the mage attempts her next Seeking (a kind of mystic trance in which the mage communes with a portion of her soul in the hopes of achieving greater enlightenment). The mage discovers that her Avatar partially fused with the possessing Bane, covered in weeping sores, rugose scales, or some other outward sign of its corruption. A fomor cannot successfully complete any further Seekings. The Avatar doesn’t even offer enlightenment, but instead tempts the mage deeper and deeper into the sick philosophy of the Wyrm. Rather than Ascension, it speaks of the glory of destruction, the purity of annihilation, and the joy of scourging and defiling an ignorant and malleable reality. “Success” on such a Seeking simply allows the mage to escape with her sanity intact; failure bestows a Derangement and costs the mage a dot of Arete.

Worse, the mage’s corruption spreads out into her magic. Her vulgar magic taints the substance of reality with the Wyrm’s taint, acting as a beacon to Banes, who may glean an extra point or two of Essence from the free-floating, tainted energies. Soon, swarms of Banes constantly follow the mage in the Penumbra. If left unchecked for long enough, it may act as a catalyst to despoil an entire city. Certainly, she’s a severe threat to any place of spiritual power she interacts with.

Excising a Bane from its fomor host with magic is a possible, but difficult, and a fomor mage can’t

perform the exorcism on herself. Even with the Bane removed, the mage is likely to suffer lingering damage to her soul and magic. If she’s lucky, it won’t persist into her next incarnation.

Those few fae remaining on Earth are strangely resilient to the power of the Wyrm. Their faerie souls shrug off the attentions of Banes without the changeling even being aware of the attempt. It is as though they are another order of being, indifferent to the wars of the Triat.