Everything

Itasca State Park: This 50 square mile park of old growth red pine forests contains the headwaters of the Mississippi River. Established in 1891, it is the second oldest state park after Niagara Falls State Park. There are more than 30 known archaeological and cemetery sites in the park dating back as many as 8,000 years. Unfortunately, the practice at the time of excavating these sites erased the spiritual power of at least three caerns. The only one to have survived — Headwaters Caern — is probably the weakest of the ones the park once had.

• Headwaters Caern: Inhabited by ghosts and Ancestor spirits of the Uktena who once lived here.

Boundary Waters: The Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, referred to by locals as simply “the Boundary Waters,” is a 1,700 square mile wilderness area within the Superior National Forest. It is renowned as a destination for canoeing and fishing and is the most visited wilderness in the United States. It is located in the northeastern part of Minnesota, along the Canadian border. Almost none of the lakes and campsites of the Boundary Waters are

accessible by automobile, a feature that has contributed to the area’s appeal to humans who come here to escape the trappings of modern life. Some of the forests in the Boundary Waters have never been logged, and that has allowed Garou to preserve two of the local caerns — the Misquah Caern and the North Woods Caern.

• Misquah Caern: Located on a steep, rocky hill near the highest point in the Boundary Waters, this caern was once a source of flint for warriors of two Native American tribes who made war long before the coming of Europeans to the area. It is frequented by Spirits of War and earth elementals. Members of several tribes act as caretakers for the caern and maintain its moon bridges.

• North Woods Caern: Hidden deep in a forest un­ touched by logging is a circle of eight small standing stones that mark the boundaries of this caern. The Black Furies currently control it, but they often let Garou of other tribes use the space for rituals in exchange for favors done or services rendered. Owl, Beaver, and Bobcat spirits come to the caern regularly.

Twin Cities Sprawl: Minneapolis and Saint Paul surely have problems the same as any large urban area, most of which do not concern wolves in the slightest. One trend that does is the sudden explosion of the cities’ suburbs that includes lands that wolves are expanding into. There used not to be many of these, and most of them were in a tight circle near the cities. Another circle of suburbs has sprung up around those suburbs, which they call the “outer ring.” Construction on the first developments of a third ring has just begun. Pretty standard Weaver behavior so far, right?

However, according to the Glass Walkers, these new developments are spiritually different from ordinary suburbs. They feel mystically sanitized, as if every spirit that once dwelled there had been driven away or destroyed. The Gauntlet is a nearly impenetrable barrier. Worst of all, movement in the Penumbra reflection of these suburbs is greatly impeded — like walking through deep water. This only seems to affect only spirits that are not related to the Weaver. Kinfolk who spend much time in the area — wolf and human alike — cannot pass their Garou blood to their cubs. Their offspring are born as ordinary humans without exception.

Mountains: The Continental Divide passes through Yellowstone, with approximately one third to its west and two thirds to its east. The Snake River and the Yellowstone River have sources quite near each other but on opposite sides of the divide, so the Snake River flows west into the Pacific Ocean while the Yellowstone River flows south and east until it ultimately empties into the Gulf of Mexico. There are 70 named mountain peaks in Yellowstone Park, and Garou control a few caerns of note in the mountains:

• Snake River Caern: This caern lies between the sources of the Snake and Yellowstone Rivers, on the Con­ tinental Divide exactly between them. The Children of Gaia currently occupy it, although it is open to anyone in need of healing. It is inhabited by Water and Wolf spirits, as well as peaceful earth elementals.

• Eagle Peak Caern: Named because the mountain resembles a spread eagle, this peak is the highest point in the park. The Silver Fangs currently claim this caern over the objections of the Uktena. Eagle and Falcon spirits visit this caern frequently.

• Electric Peak Caern: Electric Peak is the tallest mountain in the Gallatin Range of southern Montana. This caern lies near the top of the mountain, between two arms of rock on the northern face. The Shadow Lords guard it fiercely, and with good reason. The Get of Fenris have already made one attempt to claim it as their own and are unlikely to give up after the first sortie. It is inhabited by Storm spirits that take delight in destroying any electronics that enter their territory.

• Roaring Mountain Caern: Roaring Mountain was named for the numerous fumaroles on the western slope of the peak. These openings in the ground emit steam and were once loud enough to be heard for several miles. The Uktena control the caern located among these fumaroles, although they sometimes grant access to outsiders.

Rivers and Waterfalls: Although fire spirits make their presence known more keenly, water spirits have plenty of places to play among Yellowstone Park’s dozens of waterfalls, many rivers, and deep canyons. As with its mountains, Yellowstone’s waterfalls hold secrets:

• Undine Falls Caern: Between the upper and lower waterfalls is a small, swirling pool. Under the light of the full moon, it sometimes reflects events in far-off places or

even in the past and future. Water spirits called Undines are garrulous and friendly so long as visitors do not at­ tempt to enter the pool. Legends say the river bed hides a secret treasure the Undines are tasked with protecting. The caern is nominally under the control of the Uktena, although a pack made up of three different tribes are its official guardians.

• Tower Fall Caern: The top of this 130 foot water­ fall is flanked by numerous towers of stone created by the erosion of the soft volcanic stone on the upper ledge. This caern itself is located in the pool at the bottom of the falls, but any moon bridge opened here can only be accessed by leaping off the top of the falls from one of the stone towers. However, the range of this caern’s moon bridges is much greater than usual, as it can open moon bridges to caerns up to 3,000 miles away. Get of Fenris lay claim to this caern, which is populated by spirits of Travel and Lunes, as well as water elementals.

• Childhood Dream Falls Caern: This caern is hidden in the woods a few hundred yards from the base of this small waterfall — just close enough for a wolf’s ears to hear the murmuring of the water as it strikes the rocks below. A Ga­ rou who sleeps in Lupus under her auspice

moon at this caern dreams of one of her ancestors and can carry on a short conversation with him, possibly learning Gifts or recovering lost knowledge. On other nights, she may dream of Chimerlings. By day, spirits of Shadow and Forest gather in the caern. The Shadow Lords currently lay claim to this place, but the Wendigo have their eyes on it.

Yellowstone Hot Spot: Yellowstone lies on top of the massive supervolcano that has produced four of the ten most violent volcanic eruptions the world has seen in the last 28 million years. The visions of some seers warn that the next such eruption is coming soon.

The Yellowstone Caldera, the ultimate source of Yel­ lowstone’s impressive geothermal repertoire, lurks beneath Yellowstone Lake. Fire spirits and elementals dominate in the fumaroles, hot springs, and geysers of Yellowstone Park, but they are playful insects compared to the spirit of the caldera. Uktena legends claim one of the few Incarnae left on Earth is imprisoned beneath Yellowstone Lake, in the magma chamber below the great caldera left after the last supereruption. The exact nature of the Yellowstone Spirit is

anybody’s guess, but its province appears

to be the primordial fire

of Gaia herself.

Sierra de la Culebra: This is a mountain range in north­ west Spain and northeastern Portugal, forming a natural border between the two countries. The largest wolf popu­ lation on the Iberian Peninsula lives here, and thousands of human eco-tourists visit the area to watch the wolves. On the Portuguese side, wolf hunting is forbidden, but the Spanish side sells licenses to hunt wolves — ostensibly to fund the upkeep of the park and to prevent overcrowding. These licenses are expensive and largely purchased by rich thrill-seekers who have convinced themselves that hunting with a rifle what Gaia only equipped with teeth is somehow sporting or even dangerous.

The Dingo Fence: This pest-exclusion fence was built in the 1880s to keep the dingoes of the outback out of the relatively fertile southeast part of the continent (where they

had largely been exterminated) and protect the sheep flocks of southern Queensland. At nearly 3,500 miles in length, it is the world’s longest fence and one of the largest human structures in the world — the Great Wall of China of fences. It is six feet high and extends a foot into the ground. The ground for 16 feet to either side of the fence is cleared of vegetation, and much of it is illuminated, which makes wolves approaching it by night easy pickings for a human with a gun, a grudge against dingoes, and too much time on his hands.

While the dingo fence is not impenetrable, it has been very effective at keeping our Kinfolk away from the areas it is meant to guard. Feral camels have knocked down parts of the fence in Southern Australia. Dingo pups squeeze through the fence when they are still small enough to do so, and this allows our Kinfolk to spread that way. However, the farmers and ranchers on the other side of the fence are zealous enemies of dingoes and shoot, trap, and poison them to protect their herds. Plans for restructuring the dingo fence to be taller and electric are in progress.

Mary Kathleen: Mary Kathleen was a mining settle­ ment in the northwestern part of Queensland, Australia — in the Selwyn Range between Mount Isa and Cloncurry. Humans discovered uranium in the area in 1954. The ura­ nium ran out after about thirty years, and the community

has become a ghost town. To all appearances, it looks much the way it did before humans arrived with the exception of a few concrete pads and the radioactive tailing pond.

The tailing pond unleashes the occasional rampag­ ing Bane or campers-turned-fomori, but it is far enough from most population centers that local Garou have little difficulty identifying and eliminating these threats. They have had less luck cleansing the Wyrm taint from the mine site, as their three unsuccessful attempts attest. The Banes of the tailing pond are almost lazy in their assaults on the surrounding countryside, but they are terrible when defending their radioactive lair from Garou.

Also, local governments miss the revenue the mine once generated and point to nearby sites that show promise as uranium mines. One of those is near Battle Mountain, one of the caerns the Garou claimed before the end of the War of Tears. Is this simple human greed or the beginning of a Wyrm plot to corrupt the caern?

• Battle Mountain Caern: This was the site of the last stand of the Kalkadoon, an Aboriginal tribe that revered Battle Mountain as sacred. Once a place of peace and healing, the Kalkadoon’s battle against the invading Europeans changed the spirit of the caern. It is inhabited now by War and Pain spirits, as well as many ghosts from both sides of that battle.

Central Ranges: This dry region of sandy plains and rocky highland lays near the center of Australia. The remote city of Alice Springs is the only large human settlement, and one doesn’t need to go far from it before the wilderness closes in all around. Garou have traditionally shunned this region because it contains so many reminders of the War of Tears. Caerns lie fallow near the Ochre Pits, in the MacDonnell Ranges, at Gosses Bluff, and many other places in the region.

The last Bunyip Kinfolk among the Indigenous Aus­ tralians who live in the area still guard these sacred places. Their truce with servants of the Weaver has prevented humans from disturbing the caerns, and they have even proven they can even hold their own against lesser Banes. However, local Garou point to the recent corruption of the Sad Spring Caern as proof that the Central Ranges cannot hold out against the servants of the Wyrm for much longer.

Dreamtime: The Dreamtime is Australia’s Penumbra. In the Dreamtime, prehistoric and extinct animals live next to Aboriginal spirits. The boundaries between Dream­ time and the physical world have always been weak, and the Dreamtime of the outback has not been reshaped by Weaver and Wyrm the way the densely populated coastal areas have. Before their disappearance, the Bunyip placed powerful wards on the Dreamtime that have preserved the Penumbra of the outback as it looked when they first came to Australia. Moon Paths in the Dreamtime lead to the prehistoric realm of Pangaea and the mystical world of the Legendary Realm.

The Dreamtime of the outback is dangerous even for Garou who know the Umbral realms well. The Bunyip warded or left behind traps in the Penumbra of caerns and many other places once sacred to them. The invading European Garou largely eliminated the coastal wards, but the closer one comes to the center of the continent, the more powerful and dangerous and creative the Bunyip wards become.

Bale Mountains: Located in the southeast part of Ethiopia, this range of mountains is the territory of the largest part of the country’s wolf population. It acts as a sort of lookout point for the Silent Striders of North Africa. Populations of Fera control Harenna Forest to the south of the mountains, and there have been several skirmishes with them even though the War of Rage officially ended long ago. These werewolves also act as guardians of Mount Tullu Demtu, the highest mountain in the range and the location of one of the powerful Ethiopian caerns.

• Tullu Demtu Caern: Bird and War Spirits are com­ mon sights at this caern. The Silent Striders who guard this caern know a special rite unique to this caern called the Rite of Luna’s Eye. With it, a Garou who looks out from the rocky outcroppings of this mountain caern can see impossible distances.

Semien Mountains: This mountain range lies in the northern part of Ethiopia and consists of plateaus separated by valleys and rising to pinnacles. The Semien Mountains are one of the few places in Africa with regular snowfall.

Aral Sea: This body of water shared by Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan is one of the planet’s worst environmental disasters. Once one of the four largest lakes in the world, the Aral Sea has been steadily shrinking since the 1960s after the rivers that fed it were diverted by Soviet irrigation projects. By 2007, it had declined to 10% of its original size, destroying the nation’s fishing industry and altering the local climate. The receding sea has left huge plains covered with salt and toxic chemicals — the results of weapons testing (including the biological weapons facility at the former island of Vozrozhdeniya), industrial projects, pesticides and fertilizer runoff — which are picked up and carried away by the wind as toxic dust and spread to the

surrounding area.

The heavy pollution of the lake and the economic hardships of the local humans have spawned many Wyrm threats. The Red Talons often point to this catastrophe as proof that humans are the enemy of the Garou and are largely responsible for betraying Gaia to the predations of the Wyrm. Some Get of Fenris talk of mounting a campaign to cleanse the Wyrm taint from the dry lakebed, but even the most idealistic Garou realize they can achieve victories much more easily elsewhere in the region.

Bayanaul National Park: This national park in Ka­ zakhstan is one of the few areas in the country that was left largely untouched by the Soviet occupation. While many humans come here on camping trips or to take in the sights of its lakes and remarkable rock formations, the park largely belongs to wolves and Garou. The Baba-Yaga Stone, one of the few remaining caerns in Central Asia, stands in this park, as does the suggestive rock formation known as Masculine Dignity.

• Baba-Yaga Stone: This rock formation resembles a huge human head, complete with a crone’s hooked nose. A path to Erebus appears in the Penumbra near the caern during on the first night of each new moon. The Shadow Lords and Red Talons maintain an uneasy truce, taking turns guarding and making use of the caern for a month at a time. Despite the wisdom aspect of this caern, it attracts a number of trickster spirits and faeries.

• Masculine Dignity: This rock formation looks like a penis standing upright on a cliff. Local humans have long come here for fertility rituals of all kinds. Although it is not a caern, Kinfolk who successfully breed in the stone’s shadow are almost twice as likely to give birth to Garou. Unfortunately for us, it is also one of the main tourist attractions in the park, and its remarkable properties only work by day.

Ala Archa National Park: This national park is locat­ ed in the Tien Shan Mountains of Kyrgyzstan. Although popular with human hikers, campers, and skiers, the park is large enough to support a sizeable wolf population. In centuries past, the Stargazers held sway here, but the Red Talons have since claimed the resources of the area.

The archa, a species of bright, many-colored juniper, is valuable in the making of certain Fetishes and Talens. The Kyrgyz have long believed that the smoke made by burning archa wood chases away evil spirits but that the living tree drains away the life energy of humans who spend too much time near it.

Fann Mountains: This mountain range in Tajikstan boasts hundreds of rivers, lakes, valleys, and mountain peaks. The Shadow Lords keep many human Kinfolk in the villages in the area, and wolf Kinfolk prowl the empty spaces in between. It is rare to see humans and wolves so

at peace as they are in this mountain range, with local humans even being permitted near Lake Moutniy, one of the region’s two caerns. Kidnapping is on the rise, however, with many victims being sent to nearby Afghanistan to work the opium fields or perform other hard labor.

• Lake Moutniy: This small mountain lake is populated by Spirits of Peace, Calm, and Water elementals. Nomadic ancestor spirits often pass through the caern on their way to other destinations.

• Chimtarga Peak Caern: War and Ancestor Spirits guard this caern and discourage anyone — human, Garou, or otherwise — from climbing to its peak. These spirits reward those who overcome its challenges for the first time by replenishing all their Willpower.

Gaplangyr Nature Reserve: This nature reserve on a plateau in northern Turkmenistan was once home to many wolf packs. It lies within 30 miles of Sarygamysh Lake, which sits approximately halfway between the Aral Sea and the Caspian Sea and is not nearly as polluted as either. In 1971, during the Soviet occupation, the Get of Fenris established a base of operations in the area due to its proximity to these Wyrm-tainted bodies of water. They organized several raids on corrupted government operations along the lakes and in the desert. They destroyed a fertilizer company whose product would turn the little arable land in Turkmenistan into poisonous desert, drove supposed natural gas exploration companies away from areas where Banes lay buried, and put a stop to a plot to divert the flow of fresh water from Sarygamysh Lake into poorly constructed aqueducts and irrigation canals.

As the Wyrm sent more minions, the Gaplangyr Garou found themselves on the defensive. They determined they needed to build a caern in order to fortify their position in the nature reserve. They organized a coalition of Shadow Lords and Red Talons to simultaneously attack several targets in near the Caspian and Aral Seas, where Wyrm activity most often originated. They hoped this would hold the enemy’s attention long enough for their Elders to complete the rite.

As the rite began, however, a great fiery hole opened up in the desert fifty miles to the south, at a place called Derweze. The official story goes that Soviet geologists accidentally tapped a vast cavern of natural gas and were forced to set fire to the 230 foot pit in order to prevent catastrophic methane pollution. In truth, a small army of Banes and scores of Black Spiral Dancers swarmed up from the crater in response to the rite. The Get of Fenris guards who served as a last line of defense fought to the last. By the time the Red Talons and Shadow Lords received word of the attack and reached the site of the rite, the Derweze Banes had massacred every werewolf, as well as all wolf and human Kinfolk for a dozen miles in every direction. The

Derweze crater — called “The Door to Hell” by locals — still burns 40 years later and shows no signs of ever being extinguished. Its reflection in the Penumbra is a path to Malfeas. It serves as a grim reminder of the terrible strength of our enemy.