Bestiary

The following Gifts from this book and W20 are appropriate for the Yeren Gift list:

Level One: Balance, Bane Protector, Bestowing the Predator’s Shadow, Eye of the Hunter, Falling Touch, Glass Canyon Predator (as Ways of the Urban Wolf), Gorilla’s Embrace (as Falcon’s Grasp), Monkey Tail (as

the Level Three Gift), Open Seal, Resist Toxin, Trash is Treasure, Sense Wyrm, Venom Claws

Level Two: Between the Cracks, Blissful Ignorance, Distractions, Glib Tongue, Monkey Leap (as the Level One Gift: Hare’s Leap), Odious Aroma, Nimblefeet (as the Level Three Gift: Catfeet), Taking the Forgotten, Wyrm Hide

Level Three: Beautiful Lie, Bloody Feast, Call the Rust, Feast of Essence, Flame Dance (as the Level Two Gift), Gorge (as the Level Four Gift), Intrusion, Spider’s Song (as the Level Two Gift), Spirit of the Fray (as the Level Two Gift)

In addition, the Yeren have started to develop some Gifts unique to themselves.

• Middleman (Level One) — The Yeren can push

on far past the point of exhaustion, taking strength from the activity around him.

System

The player spends a point of Rage or Gnosis. For the remainder of the scene, the Yeren regains a point of the same trait for every two points spent within the wereape’s hearing range. Middleman only keeps the Yeren fighting on dwindling resources and cannot restore his pool above three points. The character chooses whether to focus on Rage or Gnosis when activating the Gift; both aspects may not be used in the same scene.

• Shit Rolls Downhill (Level One) —The Yeren

transfers all blame and negative social consequences for an activity to a chosen victim. The Yeren is praised for success, but the victim will be disciplined for any failure. Any corporate investigation, police enquiry or Garou pack that tries to find the person responsible for the project will discover the victim.

System

The player spends one Gnosis and touches the victim. All non-supernatural enquiries to discover the Yeren’s involvement with an activity will instead find solid evidence of the victim’s responsibility — even if parts of a project succeed the negatives will all point to the victim and obscure the Yeren’s involvement. Anyone using supernatural powers to penetrate this shield add the Yeren’s Gnosis to the difficulty.

• Fistful of Filth (Level Two) — The Yeren flings

steaming gobs of corrosive filth at its enemies. This filth smells like excrement but is produced by the Gift — The Yeren need not supply his own ammunition.

System

The filth is a thrown weapon with traits equivalent to a knife (W20 p. 302). Its corrosive nature continues to inflict 2 levels of lethal damage for a number of turns equal to the Yeren’s Rage. The waste burns through most natural substances including wood and metal; some Yeren have come up with creative uses for this Gift as a result.

• Dressing Down (Level Three) — The Yeren

berates a subordinate for real or imagined failures and steals her self-worth to boost the ape’s confidence.

System

The player rolls Manipulation + Leadership (difficulty 6). Each success transfers one Willpower point from the victim to the Yeren. The Yeren can’t take more Willpower than the victim has and he can’t be targeted more than once per day. This power can only be used on the wereape’s inferiors.

• Artist’s Lament (Level Three) — All creators

instil their work with some part of themselves. The Yeren abuses this link by destroying the creation to harm its maker. This Gift applies to anything invested with time and energy by its creator, such as speeches, software, or corporate presentations.

System

The Yeren destroys the creation and the player rolls Gnosis (difficulty equal to the victim’s Willpower). Each success removes a point of an Attribute or Willpower from the victim for the remainder of the scene (though it can’t reduce the trait to zero). These points return at the end of the scene. The Yeren must know the victim for this Gift to work. The Gift works best on unique items — add 1 to the difficulty for mass-produced or widely-published works.

The horrors spawned from the maddened dreams and loins of the Wyrm know no limits. The enemy’s ranks include wicked spirits, corrupted shapeshifters, possessed and corrupted humans and animals, and even outright monsters.

Then there are the other things, the things that just don’t fit into the big picture. The things the Garou just don’t have a frame of reference to explain. The things that don’t seem to have any origins, and yet are. The things that don’t seem to be part of the war, but whose existence the Garou simply cannot tolerate. The other.

No one knows where the Inquisitors come from or what they’re after. That they have an agenda is clear; they’re no-nonsense creatures, clearly acting with purpose. Inquisitors appear in search of particular bits of information, and are willing to do whatever it takes to acquire it. Nor are they unreasonable beings, or so they insist. They give subjects the opportunity to talk freely, and those victims who answer an Inquisitor’s questions openly and honestly are left puzzled but otherwise unmolested.

Those who try to impede the Inquisitors die painfully.

The Inquisitors reek of the Wyrm, but seem as interested in gathering information on the Corrupter as they are in finding patterns within the madness of the Wyld or plotting out the works of the Weaver. Those few who have compared notes on the Inquisitors suspect they are taking some sort of survey of the strength and deployment of the various forces involved in the Apocalypse, but for what reason? If they are agents of some higher power, then why does that being want the information the Inquisitors gather? Attributes: Strength 6, Dexterity 6, Stamina 6, Charisma 3,

Manipulation 3, Appearance 2, Perception 6, Intelligence 6, Wits 6 Abilities: All save Primal-Urge and Rituals at 4.

Rage

5; Gnosis: 5; Willpower: 10

Powers: Armor (as the spirit Charm; cost: 1 Gnosis),

Control Electrical Systems (as the spirit Charm; cost: 1 Gnosis), Cyber-Senses (as the Glass Walker Gift), Mind Probe* * Mind Probe: Inquisitors may extend a series of thin metallic filaments from their fingertips. They use these probes to pierce the skull of a restrained victim and literally to drain away his knowledge. The Inquisitor spends 1 Gnosis and rolls Wits + Enigmas against a difficulty of the target’s Willpower. Each success removes one year of memories the Inquisitor suspects may contain useful information. This process also lowers the victim’s Intelligence by one dot. The Inquisitor may repeat this process until the results satisfy him, or until he runs out of Gnosis.

For humans, all damage done by Mind Probe is permanent; the brain of a person fully drained appears smooth and unwrinkled — a clearly unnatural state. Garou are able to regenerate most of the damage of this Charm, restoring Intelligence and memories at a rate of one dot and one year’s worth of memories per day of rest and recovery. Even for the Garou, a few minor details are unrecoverable: a childhood friend’s phone number, what the character got for her tenth birthday, that sort of thing.

Image: Inquisitors are flat, matte black humanoid shapes. They have no distinguishing features. They have no faces at all, only vague suggestions of where facial features might be. They come in two varieties — roughly male and almost female — but all have identical cold, inflectionless voices. They tend towards nondescript, conservative clothing. They drive black rental cars when they use any sort of transportation at all.

Background

The Inquisitors are an enigma. Everything about their behavior suggests they are creatures of the Weaver, but they positively reek of Wyrm-taint. Pentex has become especially interested in them after the Inquisitors reduced a number of their agents in Dallas, Boston, and London to drooling husks. Whatever their

agenda might be, they’ve yet to reveal it to anyone, and they don’t answer questions.

Storytelling Notes: The Inquisitors are meant as an unknown threat, and an opportunity for Storytellers to come up with a dire conspiracy of their own choosing.

The abyssal depths of the sea hold mysteries and terror beyond the reckoning of the Garou and beyond the counting of the Rokea. Of all the horrors given up from the sea, the Chulorviah are perhaps the most enigmatic.

Other names for them are Kraken-Born or the abyssal strain; Chulorviah are neither species, nor spirit, nor even disease, though they share the traits of all three. Certainly, they are an infection, but the few Glass Walkers who have autopsied Chulorvian corpses could isolate no biological cause for their condition. Certainly, they are creatures, they live in flesh and expand their numbers by physical reproduction. And certainly, there is a spiritual element to what they are; their elders wield terrible and potent magic, and they know of the Triat, though they seem not to concern themselves with it.

Viewed as an infection, the Chulorviah are peculiar in the extreme. They afflict themselves upon humans, and cephalopods, and really nothing else: there are no whale, shark, or crab Chulorviah. Viewed with spiritual senses, a murky, tattered halo surrounds a Chulorviah, mottled like rotting flesh.

The Chulorviah are clearly intelligent, and carrying out some great and organized plan, but what that might be remains a mystery. They exhibit no particular interest in the doings of the Garou, Pentex, or other elements of the war for Gaia; instead, the Chulorviah quietly infiltrate small seaside communities, corporate offices, and maritime trade routes. In recent years, they have taken a great interest in offshore drilling, working to promote and expand the practice; those few that have fought the Chulorviah conjecture that Kraken’s children seek the unearthing of something lost beneath the bottom of the sea — lost — or deliberately sealed away.

The Chulorviah come in two basic varieties: infected humans and infected cephalopods. Chulorvian cephalopods, known as Petryani, perpetuate the abyssal strain through direct physical injection—piercing flesh with their unnaturally powerful tentacles or beaks. The vector for human infection remains unknown, but appears to be at least somewhat non-physical; some evidence shows it being sexually transmitted, while others have it passed from one person to another by prolonged conversation, or through a long enough period of cohabitation with a Chulorviah.

Regardless of original species, anyone infected simply becomes Chulorviah afterward. Although the

Kraken-Born retain full knowledge of their lives prior to infection, they no longer possess any emotional attachment to those thoughts or memories; their loyalty to the strain is absolute.