Places

• Any spirits in this realm that haven’t been corrupted by the Wyrm cannot inflict or receive true physical

harm. If a Garou “kills” a spirit here, he’s ejected from the realm. However, a Garou can harm (and be harmed by) material visitors, Banes, and similar creatures. • After each atrocity witnessed, each shapeshifter witness loses a point of temporary Gnosis. After all Gnosis is gone, they each lose one point of temporary Rage. Once Rage and Gnosis are gone, the witness loses Willpower. When all temporary Rage, Gnosis, and Willpower is gone from a shapeshifter witness, that traveler appears to be slain and is ejected from the realm. • Shapeshifters encounter scenes relative to their own sins. A Garou who frenzied and killed innocent victims would witness that scene again, along with similar scenes from the darker aspects of his past. He might even witness others committing similar atrocities. • If a shapeshifter consciously wants to find a particular scene, she can roll Charisma + Enigmas (difficulty 6). • Garou can only leave the realm by “dying” or being ejected for shameful behavior. If the pack doesn’t disclose that shameful behavior at the next moot (and receive punishment for it), the spirits may relate it eventually anyway. Moon Bridges, fetishes, and Gifts are ineffectual means of escape. • Difficulties for all Perception rolls in the Atrocity Realm are reduced by 2. • Garou can use the Sense Wyrm Gift to locate particular types of Banes in the Atrocity Realm. This requires a Perception + Occult roll (difficulty 8.)

This Realm reflects the taint of the Wyrm as few others do outside of Malfeas. Many Theurges believe the psychic residue of countless acts of brutality, torture, and degradation in the physical world created the Atrocity Realm. It is all nightmares given form. Even worse, all the horrific acts the Realm’s emanations recreate reflect real events — from the massacres ordered by dictators to the personal torments of a single battered spouse. As creatures of half spirit, the atrocities perpetrated by shapeshifters stain this Realm even more than those of humans, and Garou who traveled here are often treated to exceptionally vivid scenes of the worst events of the Impergium.

The Realm is a foul-smelling wasteland of corpses and blood. Every step a traveler takes leaves a bloody footprint that quickly fills with wriggling maggots, and swarms of stinging flies assail outsiders like a thousand minute Furies sent to punish the guilty. The few structures are made of human corpses — mummified carcasses of mutilated victims arranged into walls held together with mortar made

Horror Show

If the visitor committed an atrocity with an echo in the Realm, he cannot leave the Atrocity Realm until he takes the role of his victim and dies at his own hands.

Some Garou send members of their septs who have committed heinous crimes to the Atrocity Realm as punishment. The idea is that they will be forced to confront the suffering they caused and hopefully gain wisdom from the experience. They can then return to the sept cleansed of sin and resolved never to inflict such suffering again. Those who cannot face their guilt will be trapped in the Atrocity Realm forever — a punishment as terrible as any Hell humans can conceive. Such forcible presentation of one’s sins sometimes drives the shapeshifter mad with guilt or compels them to shocking acts of self-flagellation. Others throw themselves into Bane pits where they go slowly mad, or they learn the wrong lesson about their deeds and turn to the service of the Wyrm.

Breeding Pits

If Banes arise from the pain and degradation of the innocent, the Atrocity Realm is a perfect breeding ground for them. Countless pits of writhing bodies and a slurry of human bodily fluids serve as spawning beds for Bane larvae. They take many forms, but the most common include maggots with human faces and homunculi made from instruments of violence or torture. Scrags and other Banes guard the pits, protecting the larvae until the strongest are mature enough to cannibalize their weaker siblings and crawl out of the pits. Once free, the Banes seek out a scene within the Realm to fuel their growth further.

Unlike the emanations in the Atrocity Realm, the Banes can leave this place to spread the Realm’s poison elsewhere. Visitors can attack them, although this is probably a bad idea given the sheer number of evil spirits that populate the Realm. If the Atrocity Banes successfully kill a Garou, their victim is mystically reborn in a Bane pit where various Banes torture him until he escapes, is rescued, or goes eternally mad.

The Atrocity Library

An edifice of black stone that resembles a mausoleum the size of a small city stands in one part of the Realm. The Banes tend to avoid this place and will not follow travelers through its entrance. The interior is a massive library of books bound in the flesh of those who committed atrocities worthy of the Realm — one victimizer per book — and the pages similarly consist of the flesh of their victims. The books have no titles or other identifying marks, and sit on the shelves in no logical order. Any literate visitor can read the books without difficulty as though they were written in her native language.

Some books are but a single sheet of macabre paper pressed between the covers. Others are thousands of pages long. Each describes every atrocity the victimizer committed in gruesome but clinical detail. It never uses names, instead referring to the victimizer as “the subject” and the victim as “the object.” Innocent bystanders are simply “a witness” or “witness #3” This makes connecting an atrocity to a specific perpetrator difficult. Theoretically, a reader could identify a person by the specifics of her crime, but in practice atrocities throughout human history have a depressing sameness to them. Torture, abuse, rape, and murder are nothing new to the world, and even serial killers with calling cards have their copycats. Visitors cannot permanently destroy any of the books or remove them from the library.

The Atrocity Library may seem vast and empty, but it has inhabitants. Shapeshifters trapped in the Atrocity Realm often take refuge in it until they can work up the will to face the Realm’s horrors once more. Outsiders sometimes come to the Realm on a specific mission, and the library makes a relatively safe base of operations. Occasionally a mage will come to the library to perform research for their magical arts. These tend to be the worst kind of willworkers, however. While some study sorcerous rituals that entail horrific acts of pain and degradation in order to fight those who performed them, more often they instead hope to reproduce the ritual.

The strangest inhabitants of the library are the Atrocity Librarians. These tall, humanoid creatures have enlarged skulls and huge, black eyes. They can speak and understand any language and are the only ones who can navigate the labyrinth of shelves to locate specific books. They can’t locate a victim or victimizer by name, but they can find the appropriate book if they have at least an ounce of the target’s hair, flesh, or blood. They will not do so unless the patron already has a book or a page in the library. Otherwise, they feign cooperation but never produce the promised materials. If the visitor grows impatient or makes threats, the Librarians drop hints that committing some atrocity against another patron might expedite their search — which is, strictly speaking, absolutely true. As a result, the Atrocity Library sees occasional outbreaks of intense violence between the outsiders who take refuge in it. Those travelers who die at the hands of other outsiders while within the library re-form within it as Atrocity Librarians.