Rites & Rituals

Most Garou think of the Umbra, the Gaian spirit world, as the only spirit realm that sits close to the physical world. Most Garou are wrong. The Underworld — the Land of the Dead, the Dark Umbra — sits astride the physical realm just as the Umbra does. Within it are trapped the ghosts of countless humans who died unable to let go of their lives and pass on into the cycle of souls, as Gaia intended.

The Underworld is a bleak landscape mirroring all that is decayed or departed in the living world, as the Penumbra is a reflection expressing the world’s spiritual nature. Terrible, unstable portals lead deeper yet into the Underworld, a land of spirit-storms and nightmare mazes where few Garou have ever ventured and from which fewer still have ever returned.

This rite is primarily known and used by the Silent Striders, but a few other tribes and camps make use of it as well (most notably the Black Furies and Uktena).

System

This rite takes five minutes to perform. The ritemaster must sacrifice a living mammal and touch every character to be affected by the rite with at least a fingerprint of its blood. He then draws sigils on the ground nearby with the remaining blood. The player should roll Intelligence + Occult (difficulty equals the local Gauntlet). Success on this roll takes the ritemaster to the Underworld; each

additional success takes one of the other characters marked (if there aren’t enough successes to go around, those with the highest Gnosis are transported first).