Bestiary

The “Quick and Dirty Fomori” rules found on page 429 of W20 are useful for generating fomori characters. But what does it mean to play a fomor? What are fomori, from a player’s perspective?

It’s easier to start by establishing what fomori are not — they’re not the X-Men. They’re not misunderstood targets of unwarranted prejudice, sporting badass super-powers. A fomor is a person who has fused, body and soul, with a spirit of pure corruption. Fomori can be complex and even conflicted, but the source of their powers—the Bane within—is a thing of pure and unambiguous evil.

How much impact this has on the fomor varies. Some fomori, such as Freakfeet or Hollow Men, retain the classification of “human” only by the most generous definition of the word. Others retain much of their former personality and code of ethics. Usually, fomori weren’t very nice people before their possession, but that’s not a universal rule, sometimes fomori are just unfortunate. It’s easier for a Bane to curl up and make a home in the soul of the weak-willed or the already-corrupt, but the truth is, a Bane strong enough or lucky enough can infest just about anyone.

From the perspective of the Garou, this makes fomori tragic, but any pity or sympathy for the mutant generally only extends so far as to try to give it a clean, swift death. The Galliards do know tales of Garou packs who worked with fomori — generally possessed Kinfolk — but none of those tales ends well, and all those sung are with shame.

Ultimately, to play a fomor is to play an unfortunate victim of the supernatural world, probably doomed to a short life and an agonizing death. Play it as a blackly funny one-shot splatterpunk romp, or for tragic pathos, depending on the desires of the group. Alternately, fomori can make decent characters for “everything goes” World of Darkness crossover games. If you already have, say, a dhampyr, a ronin Garou, and a Hollow One mage rambling around in a Winnebago, what harm is there in tossing a fomor into the mix?

For those wishing to play fomori, character creation works much the same as Garou, subject to the modifi-cations mentioned above. The Storyteller decides how many powers you can take when making your character, and will hand out new ones at no experience point cost when he decides your inner Bane is asserting itself. Often accompanied with a new, attendant Flaw; because nobody said possession was going to be pleasant.

While the majority of fomori are unique horrors, there are a few commonly recurring “breeds,” either the result of possession by a peculiarly focused type of Bane, or the product of intentional development programs, generally either those of Black Spiral packs, or Pentex’s Project Iliad. What follows are a selection of some of the fomori breeds most commonly encountered by the Garou.