Bestiary

While not the mightiest or cleverest of the Wyrm’s children, the Banes known as Rot Walkers are among the most disturbing. They are spirits of decay: not of death, but of the corruption that follows, not of endings, but of unresolved conclusions left to fester. They are the Wyrm’s promise for the future, a world inescapable even in final dissolution: a world where there is no afterlife for valiant heroes, but only an eternity of shuffling footsteps and putrid meat.

Rage

5, Gnosis 4, Willpower 7, Essence 16

* Carrion Walk: This Charm is similar to Possession, but can only be used upon a corpse. Any corpse will do: a dead Pentex employee, a road kill raccoon, a slaughtered steer, and — on one horribly memorable occasion — a freshly deceased elephant can all host a Rot Walker. The cadaver must still have some flesh on its frame (so no possessed dinosaur skeletons), and it cannot already be possessed or animated by other means (putting vampires off-limits). A corpse animated by Carrion Walk uses the traits it had when alive, rather than the controlling Bane’s spirit traits, but uses the Bane’s Essence instead of a health track.

Carrion Walk puts a tremendous strain on the corpse being possessed; the necrotic energies of the Bane rapidly accelerate the process of decay, so that most possessed shells become flyblown horrors in short order. Few cadavers manage to last for more than a week before devolving into an immobile stew of bones and pulpy meat.

* Lightning in the Meat: This Charm allows the Rot Walker to spend one Essence per day to re-animate the brain of a corpse possessed with Carrion Walk. There must be a brain present for this to work. While the body’s soul has long since moved on to whatever awaits beyond the veil of death, a residue of memories and personality still dwell in the wrinkles of the mind, and it is this shadow of the deceased that the Rot Walker resurrects, up until the body falls apart. The revived persona knows nothing of the possessing Bane, and may even believe itself alive at first. It is likely to try to head back to familiar surroundings, such as the house where its grieving family awaits. Some Rot Walkers resume control at this point; others prefer to simply let the lightning continue to drive the meat, watching the corpse and its loved ones go through the agony of decay, dissolution, and a second and final demise.

Image: A Rot Walker in the Umbra looks like a collection of rotting corpse-parts from a variety of different animals, bound together with gut and sinew. One might be a crude centaur made of the rotting lower parts of a

horse, topped by a decaying human torso and a half-flayed cattle skull; another could be a dead hound, creeping along on a multitude of mismatched and rotting arms and legs.

Background

The Silent Striders were the first tribe to encounter Rot Walkers. When they speak of these Banes at all, they say that they were once lesser spirits of death that watched over the moment when spirit and corpse separated. Curious, they listened at cracks between their domain and the Low Umbra of the dead; whatever whispers came through to them changed them forever, filling their eyes with darkness and their forms with decay. Now they are harbingers of the world beyond the Apocalypse, a soulless land of ugly, senseless destruction; and of meat silently rotting beneath a red and wounded sun.

Storytelling Notes: Rot Walkers are opportunists, taking whatever corpse seems most interesting to them at any given moment, but they take especial joy in presenting the Garou with evidence of their handiwork. If a werewolf loses control and kills an innocent in the grip of Frenzy, a Rot Walker will ensure she meets her victim again, she may even go so far as to restore the victim’s control of the corpse, so she can ask the werewolf why she had to die. Rot Walkers also enjoy dragging dead Kinfolk out of their graves.

Uktena Theurges have catalogued the existence of a similar, weaker Bane known as a Meat Puppet, which animates only the remains of the young, such as dead children and drowned kittens. Meat Puppets possess Carrion Walk, but not Lightning in the Meat.