This

Gift, among the mightiest known to the Apis, grants fertility to those normally incapable of bearing offspring — including even infertile metis.

System: The Apis touches the subject of her blessing and the player spends three Gnosis points. The subject is cured of any infertility, impotence, or even outright mutilation of the generative organs for the next 24 hours. In the case of women who conceive under the auspices of this Gift, any necessary blessings continue to linger until the child is delivered.

Rite of the Earth’s Womb

Level Four, Accord One of the greatest demonstrations of the Apis’ power, this rite is only ever known to a handful of wereaurochs at any time. Using this ritual, the Apis could cause the Earth — the body of Gaia itself — to carry a baby to term. This ritual was most frequently employed when a grievous injury beyond even the Apis’ ability to heal prevented conception, though dark legends tell of the Apis using it to create children from ‘perfect’ parents who they knew would never breed. At least once, this ritual was used when the mother of a foretold hero was killed. The dead body was carried to a secret spot where the grieved husband helped the Apis to create the child his mate should have borne. A few Apis noted that the rite doesn’t require a male and a female participant, and used this rite to help homosexual couples have children of their own, though each parent must at some point have been able to bear children — those born sterile, including metis Changing Breeds, cannot benefit from this rite.

This ritual takes place in otherwise unspoiled wilder­ ness, and requires a sample of blood or semen from both parents, along with a lock of hair or fur. Neither parent needs to be present or even alive, though the fluids must be less than twelve hours old. The ritemaster sanctifies the area, digs a hole, and buries the mingled bodily fluids and hair along with a lock of his own hair. He must also spend two points of Gnosis, which he cannot regain until the child is born. Over the next month, the ritual site bulges and swells, finally breaking open to reveal a newborn child. If one of the parents was a shapeshifter, the child is inevitably a shapeshifter as well. If both parents were Kinfolk, the child has double the normal chance of being a shapeshifter.

The ritemaster retains a mystic link to the ritual site over the course of the pregnancy, and can sense if anyone with hostile intentions comes within fifty yards.

The werebats were known as the Ears of Gaia (or ironically, Her Voice). They were messengers, but of a very different sort from the Corax. While Corax are natural gossips, spreading information to everyone willing to listen, the Camazotz were secret messengers. Their Gifts of speed, stealth, and heightened percep­ tion made them excellent spies who would keep what they discovered between their allies and Gaia. One of their strengths, as well as one of the major reasons that the Garou feared them, was that it was exceptionally difficult to know if one of the Camazotz was listening to a conversation. Individuals might gather in secret only to learn that as soon as the meeting ended, their enemies knew everything they had said. All that one of the Camazotz needed to observe a scene was for a single tiny bat to hide itself in a corner.

The Camazotz were a highly social Breed who lived in egalitarian swarms of between a dozen and a hundred members. They often lived in caverns alongside their bat Kinfolk. While inclined to secrecy, they attempted to maintain friendly and open relations with other shapeshifters.

The Camazotz were most common in the Southern hemisphere, which partially insulated them from the initial War of Rage. The Garou slaughtered the werebats dwelling in Europe, Asia, and North America, but those who lived in South America remained safe during that first War. Fear of further slaughter, however, kept the remaining Camazotz confined to that continent for the next several thousand years.

Some groups indulged in various forms of blood rituals to enhance their strength and power, but were careful to remain free of the Wyrm’s corruption. Only a few werebats fell prey to Taint, and other Camazotz hunted them mercilessly. When a group of Shadow Lords ac­ companying the Spanish conquistadors to South America encountered the Camazotz in the early 17th century, the werewolves were horrified. Seeing nothing beyond the fact that the Camazotz were shapeshifting bats who used human blood in their rituals, the Shadow Lords assumed the Camazotz were a new type of Wyrm-tainted beast,

and they recruited hundreds of human allies to help them slaughter all of the Camazotz. In the aftermath of this genocide, Bat — the Breed’s totem — went mad and fell to the Wyrm.

Bat, the totem of the Camazotz, was always a strange spirit. His animal children are singular creatures: the only mammals capable of true flight and one of only two land species to navigate by echolocation. Even before his corruption, Bat was a creature of the night and an ill-omened hunter. Even human cultures understand Bat’s nature — European peoples connected bats to witchcraft and the undead, several Northern American tribes saw Bat as a trickster spirit, while Mesoamerican traditions linked bats to the underworld.

In ancient prehistory, before the Weaver’s madness, when the Wyrm was still an embodiment of balance rather than a force of blind destruction, Bat was one of

CAMAZOTZ IN THE MODERN DAY

Any Camazotz who survived the massacre by the Shadow Lord’s did so by remaining hidden in the Deep Umbra. They seek to repopulate their numbers — and return bearing messages from Gaia Herself. The Bat Totem fell to the Wyrm when the Camazotz were destroyed. Perhaps the characters want to redeem and cleanse it, which would prepare a way for the return of the werebats, or maybe Bat’s redemption happened recently, paving the way for the Camazotz’s return. Although any surviving Camazotz are likely to still hate the Garou in general, and Shadow Lords in particular, they also know they can do little against the werewolves’ might, else risk bringing the werewolves’ wrath upon them once more.

the Wyrm’s servants. Bat would search the world for those things ordained to pass away and mark them for removal. When the Wyrm went mad, Bat fled its service. Though Bat proved itself time and again in service to Gaia and against its old master, the spirit would always have a darkness to it that Gaia’s love could never truly cleanse.

Beyond Gaia’s love, Bat’s children gave the spirit the strength to carry on. Bat was one of the most attentive spirit fathers, lavishing gifts and advice upon the Camazotz. Bat knew that the Camazotz were like him, destined to dwell in the dark and mistrusted by the other Changing Breeds. They would undertake missions that their cousins would never understand — and would probably never even be aware of.

When the Garou chased the Camazotz out of the Northern hemisphere during the War of Rage, Bat remained true to Gaia but his dedication began to crack. He taught his children a form of blood magic — the same rituals that would eventually condemn them in the eyes of European Garou — drawn from Bat’s old existence as one of the Wyrm’s servants. They took strength from death, just as the Wyrm had done. Although the rituals were not inherently tainted, they were fundamentally unsafe — they called upon the power of the primordial destroyer, a power that had gone quite mad. Many werebats fell to the Wyrm, but the Camazotz expressed their Rage and their totem’s anger in the zeal with which they hunted their corrupted brothers. Many of them never knew that the blood-rites were the source of that corruption, and that everyone who had taken part in one of the rites was tied to the Wyrm.

While the Camazotz in South America were experimenting with blood magic, the Camazotz of the Eastern hemisphere withdrew from their allies among the Beast Courts. Although they still served the Emerald Mother, the Asian Camazotz became even more insular and secretive. They turned their talents at information gathering to under­ standing their own history. What had driven the Garou, once Gaia’s proudest warriors, to slaughter their cousins? The Changing Breeds had always been a contentious fam­ ily, and while it wasn’t entirely uncommon for disagreement between shapeshifters to break out in violence, it had never before gone as far as genocide

The Camazotz of Australia found an even more wel­ coming home. Spreading the word of the Garou’s war to the continent, they found refuge among the continent’s other Changing Breeds. The Mokolé of Australia had

prepared caerns and

knew of hiding places and good territory, almost as though they knew that the werebats were coming. The Australian Camazotz became so deeply intertwined with Australia’s Changing Breeds that they were willing and able to reach past their own fear and help the Bunyip to adapt to their new home.

As time went on, the Camazotz began to strain their alliances with other Changing Breeds. In Asia, the Camazotz refused to accept that the Hakken and Stargazers were not complicit in the murder of werebats across Europe and North America. By the time that the Spanish Shadow Lords began their genocidal war against the Camazotz in South America, the Asian werebats felt that they had been vindicated. Knowing that the Hak­ ken were descended from Shadow Lords, the Camazotz saw them as guilty by association. Driven and obsessed, they shunned the Beast Courts for tolerating the Garou’s presence. Some of their former allies still whisper that the Camazotz were on the verge of a terrible discovery before Bat’s madness finally claimed them.

The destruction of the South American Camazotz drove Bat over the edge. The Garou claim that the slaughter drove Bat straight into the Wyrm’s arms, but that isn’t strictly true. The spirit’s mind and identity fractured under the pressure of his grief and rage. Bat became two spirits sharing a single essence, one of them still loyal to Gaia, the other a corrupt spirit that had given itself wholly to its original master. The two sides of Bat fought, but they were evenly matched. The Wyrm whispered poison into the ear of one side, but the Gaian side stood resolute. It would take an outside force to tip the balance in favor of one or the other.

As their totem fought with itself, the Camazotz withdrew from the other Changing Breeds entirely. The Stargazers, hearing tales from other Garou, pointed to Bat’s madness and the blood-rites of the South American Camazotz as evidence that the werebats had been corrupt all along. The Camazotz, weary and mistrustful, felt that the Beast Courts would likely believe these lies — made all the more damning by the fact that they were coming true. The Camazotz withdrew from the Beast Courts entirely, gathering what little remained of their people in Australia. Australian Camazotz in turn withdrew from the other Breeds to be with their own kind.

The surviving Camazotz understood Bat’s nature, and knew how much their near extinction weighed on his mind. Even before the death of their South American cousins and the madness of their totem, they had begun a campaign of prayer and ritual to show him their strength and continued vitality. They hoped they could inspire Bat even as their numbers dwindled. Their prayers could have given their totem the strength to avoid the Wyrm’s temptations and reunite his spirit.

Unfortunately, it was not to be. All of Bat’s atten­ tion was focused on his remaining children in Australia. Although the Australian Camazotz remained hidden and safe, Bat saw what was coming — the slaughter of Australia’s Bunyip and the Mokolé and others in the War of Tears — and knew that his children would be next. Years before the Garou landed in Australia, Bat gave up hope and allowed himself to be subsumed into the madness of the Wyrm.

The Camazotz were doomed as soon as their patron turned his back on them. Like Corax, Camazotz were made rather than born; when Bat finally turned to the Wyrm, he warped the spirit pacts that powered their creation ritual. At best, the ritual simply failed. Other times it connected the infant to a Bane. Many of those children died young, exploding in a conflagration of balefire or sending a spiritual beacon to other Banes. A few grew to maturity before the Bane within chose to manifest, creating a powerful fomor.

When the Camazotz saw what had happened to their children, they realized that there would be no next generation. Bat had fallen, and in doing so doomed the Camazotz. The remaining few of a Breed that had sur­ vived war with the Garou, the madness of their patron, and the treachery of their own children, fled into the Umbra, never to be seen again.

A handful of Umbral travellers claim that the Cam­ azotz are not yet dead. Though they have no totem, the last werebats still serve Gaia as spies and messengers throughout the Deep Umbra. They’re said to leave messages in dead-drops, and to give information in ways that the recipient never knows who delivered it. Some Nuwisha and Corax — the most experienced Umbral travellers of all the Changing Breeds — have tried to confirm these rumors. All of them have failed. Though they lived for far longer than many Changing Breeds believe, when their totem fell to the Wyrm the Camazotz became extinct.

The story of the Camazotz is a tragedy of a people doomed by degrees. They struggled against their fate, but at every step, they faced obstacles that they couldn’t overcome. They couldn’t defeat the Garou who drove them out of Europe and North America, and they couldn’t prevent the slaughter in South America. Their totem fell to the Wyrm, dooming their species, and even then, they continued to fight. The last of their kind only fled into the Umbra when it became obvious that nothing short of redeeming Bat could save them.

• Like Corax, Camazotz were created, not born. To become a werebat, infant humans or bats had to undergo a ritual that could only be held in special Umbral caverns.

CAMAZOTZ

There were no Metis Camazotz. Regardless of Breed, all Camazotz began with Rage 1, Gnosis 5, and Willpower 3.

• Because all Camazotz were created via a ritual, werebats have no Auspices.

• Camazotz suffered the same effects from silver that werewolves do. They could also regenerate in the same way as Garou.

• Camazotz could step sideways into the Umbra like the Garou, but had to be in shadow or darkness to do so. They could not step sideways while in bright light without the Gift: Into the Sun.

• Camazotz had especially keen senses. Their dif­ ficulty for all rolls associated with hearing was reduced by –2 in all of their forms. Also, they had sonar in all but their homid form, allowing them to perceive and act normally in total darkness.

• Camazotz could fly in their Crinos and Megachi­ roptera forms (as well as in their Swarm form, if they learned the appropriate Gift).

• Camaztoz in either Crinos or Megachiroptera form were at –2 difficulty to all Athletics rolls, including dodging, while they were flying.

Camazotz could assume four different forms (and a fifth swarm form if they learned the Gift: Thousand Wings Form). Homid form was a normal human being. Their other three base forms were as follows:

• Apterous: The Camazotz near-human form was a slender human with almost skeletally thin arms and legs, enlarged ears, and a slightly distorted-looking face. It lacked wings and couldn’t fly, but could climb excep­ tionally well and could navigate by sonar. All Athletics rolls, including dodging, were at –1 difficulty in this form. Modifiers: Dex +2, App –1, Man –1, Per +2

• Crinos: The Crinos form of a werebat looked somewhat like a bipedal wolf with long legs and arms. While a natural bat’s wings contain their elongated finger bones as structural stabilizers, Crinos Camazotz had clawed hands as well as “wings”: a thin, but strong, membrane stretched between their body and arms, that extend far enough to let them fly. Although not as swift as Corax, werebats were considerably more maneuver­ able. Modifiers: Str +1, Dex +2, Sta +1, App 0, Man –3, Per +3

• Megachiroptera: The animal form of a Camazotz was a large bat around 15 inches long, with a wingspan of 5 feet. Camazotz primarily used this form for both rapid movement and discrete observation. In this form, they enjoyed a –1 difficulty to Stealth rolls when out of bright light. Modifiers: Str –1, Dex +2, App 0, Man 0, Per +3

The Short Flaw was common among Camazotz, and most were also quite slender.

Microchiroptera (3-point Merit, Camazotz only)

This Camazotz was most closely related to the smallest of bats. Instead of transforming into their Megachiroptera form, this werebat naturally transformed into a swarm of bats identical to the one created by the Gift: Thousand Wings Form. Learning that Gift allowed the character with this Merit to take on the Megachiroptera form.

Camazotz begin play with three Level One Gifts from the general Camazotz Gift list.