Hidden Glade represents the secret beauty of Gaia. Even as the Wyrm and Weaver overwhelm the world, Gaia’s beauty survives. Life blooms in blasted warzones, humans include parks in their biggest cities, and small glades and springs escape the notice of developers and despoilers. Among the most precious of Gaia’s hidden redoubts are her caerns, and Hidden Glade’s avatars are more than happy to dwell in such places.

Common Traits: Hidden Glade grants his children an extra dot of Gnosis. Garou blessed by Hidden Glade add one to the number of successes necessary on a Rage roll to succumb to frenzy.

Pack Traits: When Hidden Glade graces a pack with his presence they gain the Territory Gift.

Ban: Hidden Glade’s septs must work tirelessly to found more septs and build more caerns.

You didn’t catch me in the middle of anything important, cub, I can talk.

Yes, I’m aware you are not a child. But you’re here because you have something to learn. I am older than you, although probably not as old as you expected when someone told you to ‘go talk to the Stargazer bivouacking on the far side of the fire pit.’ Were you expecting to snatch a pebble from my hand?

If you’re too young to get the reference, then I have every right to call you ‘cub.’ Now let’s talk. I don’t know how much time we have so let’s get this started.

No, another time wouldn’t be better. I don’t stay in one place long. So let’s see how far we go today because tomorrow I might not be here. I’m not dying, but I tend to travel as the whim takes me.

Someone sent you to me for my perspective, I’d guess. I’m an outsider, you see. Wiser elders understand that some of their number might be... complacent regarding the lessons you have to learn. So they send you to me for an alternate viewpoint. Worst-case scenario, they get to ‘set the record straight’ later.

I’m Shallow-Tracks, Stargazer Galliard and perpetual wanderer. I’m here to learn new and interesting things to pass on to other Garou.

You are here to learn about the city. No, not this city, the City — urban life, with organs of concrete and glass and

steel connected by asphalt veins. That’s mostly metaphorical, but I’ve seen enough different types of cities to question how long it remains a metaphor. Cities are growing and aging and renewing things. They consume and they excrete and they can even die.

The City is the place of the Weaver; her webs cover the buildings and she no more wants them disturbed than a mundane spider wants you to dust the corner where it has been catching flies. When you peek into the Umbra, you can see it in some places. The Weaver’s web is more than just the strands of spirit-stuff connecting a pair of skyscrapers. Cities are made up of people as much as buildings and those people are using Weaver-webs to communicate like they were tin cans with string.

The Internet connects humanity in a way that was unthinkable 20 or even 15 years ago. The net was originally built for sharing research across physical distance and has become a place where most humans get their news, meet each other, and seek out entertainment. Their scientists say that the way our brains store information is changing because of it. We’re becoming worse at remembering and better at indexing. Not to be alarmist, but you know what else generally has streamlined its thought processes to look up what it needs to know?

Pattern-Spiders. They’re the most common of the Weaver’s drone-like spirits. They exist to enforce those frameworks and most of them are parts of a hive-mind feeding off a central database. A Theurge can fill you in on the details of their communication if you want to work out a way to disrupt it..

Sure, the Glass Walkers could probably store every tale their Galliards have ever told on a gizmo small enough to dangle from an earring. Most Garou prefer to tell and sing these tales passing them from muzzle to ear so the actual telling of the tale is an event, something more impressive than just knowing which file name to reference. What would you rather be proud of: being able to speak your ancestors’ deeds from memory with strength and conviction, or having a large library of stories that you’ve never so much as read?

Of course, I doubt that the sept elders sent you to me to get a lesson in how the Internet is a bad thing. Unless they wanted to make sure you heard an opinion from someone who doesn’t take it all for granted, in which case they have proven their wisdom after all. We must consider all possibilities, these days. For instance, there is the likely possibility that it’s not all bad.

Yes, I know I just got a little worked up and went off on a little rant about the dangers of the Internet. But it is still a tool like any other and even a simple sharpened blade carries the Weaver’s touch. The original purpose of the ‘net — sharing valuable information with people not in the room — remains as useful to us as ever. All manner of social networks exist for this purpose.

Sites like Facebook allow humans and Garou to coordinate with each other at unprecedented levels — and for every page dedicated to celebrities or video games there is one where activists and passionate humans are arranging protests to improve the world around them. Twitter allows a pay-as-you-go cell phone to broadcast messages to the world, and Youtube hosts footage to show everyone exactly what happens. Results vary, but that sort of visibility keeps some people in line and inspires others. I’ve seen a lot of good come of these networks in my travels.

The drive to protect one’s territory from invaders and oppressors is powerful, and anything that threatens that drive riles up the people in power. Once upon a time, a man would fight for change in his country by taking up arms against his corrupt leaders. But we have gone far from muskets and cannons; a military on the defensive can mow down resistance like a scythe through wheat. Fighting back against such a force without killing even more innocent people than the tools of oppression is nigh impossible.

We have our claws, our physical strength, and the blessings of the spirits to aid us in these struggles. Those without must rely on communication, diplomacy, and bureaucracy to improve their lot, and it’s heartening to see how well they make up for it. Weaver-tools or not, they use the Internet to coordinate public protests, resist the suppression of information, and get the message out to the world. When the Egyptian government shut down Internet access to stifle

the protestors, people in other countries provided phone numbers for old-fashioned dial-up modems to get messages out. Even the Glass Walkers didn’t see that coming.

This is, as the old saying goes, an interesting time. For as much as people have pushed for progress and even seen substantial levels of success, those who resist such progress have pushed back even harder. The Internet may have given a voice to the people but it has also given a voice to hate-mongers and oppressors who feed the Wyrm to keep their own pockets lined and egos stuffed.

When someone asks if using the Weaver’s tools in service of Gaia is ignoring a bigger problem, a sadly common — and not entirely incorrect — answer is that it’s necessary when those same tools are used in service of the Wyrm. Enemies of progress use the Internet to build armies fueled by hateful hyperbole. The best way to fight back is to strip away their smiling facades. It’s an arms race of information itself and I for one am thankful that it is not our only means of protecting Gaia.

Sometimes it seems that we only have one advantage over the victims of the Weaver’s control and the Wyrm’s corruption. Everyone who fights with us knows that we’re fighting a battle and what that battle is for. A school administrator who cuts art classes for standardized testing doesn’t know he’s helping to build the Weaver’s preferred people. The convenience store manager who accepts an absurd discount to let Kings Distilleries take over more shelf space doesn’t know he’s selling Wyrm-poison. They’re not doing this out of any passion to strip children of creative outlets or sell liquid corruption and they don’t have the dedication that we have when we serve Gaia and strengthen the Wyld.

We should remember the importance of our devotion because it’s a spark of the Wyld within us, but we should also remember that not all of these people need slain in the name of Gaia. It’s important to know, as in all things, how far is too far.

Let me show you an example of the importance of moderation. Let me see your cell phone.

Yes, you’ve seen through my cunning ruse: my point is that I knew you have one. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, as I have one of my own. It’s not one that plays games and identifies a song playing on the radio, but it’s also not one that tracks my movements or broadcasts my personal information.

What I’m getting at is that you can assume almost anyone who doesn’t have a smartphone knows someone who does. The cell phone has become the new pocket watch; ask what time it is and everyone checks their phone. Having the ability to reach out and contact someone at a moment’s notice is useful, especially in the pace of today’s world, but it’s reached a point where most of the humans in any given group have an uplink to the web in their pocket. Few of them question

whether the world has sped up to justify the technology because they’ve become so dependent on it.

This is where we get into moderation. When used for positive ends, the ability to reach dozens if not hundreds of people wherever they are and put them all on a task or share information is an amazing one. But falling into the habit of living your life around the little box in your pocket is little more than an easy way of attaching yourself to a spider silk puppet string. It turns social interaction into a machine. A very efficient machine, perhaps, but who knows what that machine is doing?

In fact, that reminds me of a story...

My most recent visit to Pittsburgh was right after Halloween 2009. This was, oh, five or six weeks after the G-20 Summit. The president picked Pittsburgh specifically because ‘Steel City’ bounced back quickly when the economic prospects of most of the country went right down the spiral. You could do worse for a big economic summit.

My first contact with Pittsburgh’s Garou set the tone for my trip. A Glass Walker calling himself Works-the-Lines with whom I spoke before arriving told me to meet him at a park that, as luck would have it, was only a few blocks from the bus station.

It had been a long time since I was last in an American city. The ‘park’ turned out to be a handful of trees and a fountain on the roof of an underground parking garage. I’m not one to curse cities in general but I had hoped for something more, something that at least aspired to wilderness. The route refreshed my memory of urban life, taking me through a typical city in a microcosm; over the course of only a few blocks I passed by greasy spoon diners, adult bookstores, neighborhood dive bars, and no less than three skyscrapers all in the shadow of the U.S. Steel Tower.

I was standing in this park of which the city is so proud — they claim it as early adoption of the ‘green roofs’ trend — when Works-the-Lines arrived. He worked in the Regional Enterprise Tower, a building with outer walls made entirely of aluminum right next to the park.

So here he was, showing me around the office that contained the large pack that managed the Tin Tower Caern, and–

Of course you can have a caern in a skyscraper! Have you learned nothing? They tend to be rather weak, the ‘bawn’ usually consists of extra floors rented as a buffer zone. Soundproofed meeting rooms ensure that moots don’t cause a problem, but the same can’t be said for revels. Urban caerns perform all of the same functions of a more traditional caern. I’m surprised nobody’s mentioned this to you. For a long time, few tribes outside the Glass Walkers would spend any effort on one, but that’s changed in the last few years.

This is one of the oldest in America — its name originated as mockery from other tribes, but the sept embraced it as a badge of honor. In big cities, you take what you can get and every caern is important. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

He showed me around the office, which was a pretty standard cubicle farm aside from glyphs scratched into the fabric walls of the cubicles and computer casings. We were in his office to get phone numbers of Pittsburgh Garou he thought I should meet when someone poking their head in to say “It happened again” interrupted us. Naturally curious, I asked what ‘it’ was.

Some unknown source was telling groups of humans, via messages on their cell phones, to go up to the roof of the U.S. Steel Tower. Given how many of them followed the instruction the sept suspected just a bit of supernatural coercion involved. It wasn’t overtly sinister because it was just directing them to the roof where nothing at all happened to them. Nothing connected the people involved other than they were downtown when someone messaged the entire group at once. The police assumed it was just some prankster and the sept thought likewise — with the addition that it was likely a supernatural one.

My curiosity inadvertently revived an argument among the pack about theories involving techno-wizards and rogue Pattern-Spiders. I broke it up as politely as I could by asking what the city’s other packs thought. Works-the-Lines told me that they hadn’t checked since everyone knew his pack was taking point and would certainly tell them. After some chitchat I thanked them for their hospitality, took the list of phone numbers, and excused myself to get something to eat with a promise to let them know if anything came to me.

One of them recommended a Pan-Asian restaurant in North Oakland, a neighborhood centered on the Cathedral of Learning. It was a bit of a hike so I made the trip in the Umbra to get a better feel of the spiritual landscape and also to take the Lupus form for speed and insulation against the damp weather. Each city’s Penumbra is different and I highly recommend stepping across for at least a few minutes in any city where you have time to linger. That said, the thickness of the urban Gauntlet means it’s sometimes easier said than done.

I passed through a less-affluent neighborhood with many run-down buildings old enough to have substance in the Umbra. Strands of Weaver-web stretched from structure to structure like phone lines and the whole area bore marks of the city’s identity. The webs resembled steel cable and rust flecked the walls of buildings. The U.S. Steel Tower was a monolith of ominous matte-black steel, looming visibly even when other buildings should be in the way. Newer skyscrapers appeared as translucent facades, like dotted lines indicating where a building would one day be, but the Tower was important enough to Pittsburgh that it was as a tree towering over high grass.