Given that D has a thing where he unites the supernatural to fight for what they actually want and the obvious parallels between him and the 40k emperor's inner circle (Kevin maps pretty cleanly onto Malcador), I'm personally betting that one of the 3 Garou will join D in the same way Kevin joined after his packmates bit it (to go back to the 40k parallels, D still needs his Valdor).

Operating under this pretense, which one of the 3 do you think or want to survive and join D? My money is on Jambles in terms of how realistic it is but I do feel like HoH/Matilda would be a lot more interesting if they could justify it.

Edit: I wrote Giles intead of Jambles fuck.

Edit 2: Just remembered Guy is a thing to be the Valdor stand in but uh. Shut up I make the rules.

I’ve been too serious about and kinda disenchanted by looking into werewolf deep lore and if humans/civilization was ever able to be a part of a balanced Gaia so here’s a half crackpot theory, half joke idea to cleanse my pallate about humanity's gaian purpose.

Humans are replacement Lizard Kings. Turns out Gaia actually wants builders, both to save her own skin (the sun’s gonna go red giant on her ass relatively soon) and to expand to other planets and by extension expand her (she wants us to go terraform mars). Whether or not she MADE the Lizard Kings is unknown but she really liked them and after they went kaput she decided “ok we’re doing that again” and started on humans, this time with even bigger ambitions. We were MENT to evolve into Lizard Kings 2.0, except due to the gauntlet being a thing now we were given more of a focus on the weaver and making wonders through the angle of the material world as opposed to the Lizard Kings who were more wyld focused and made wonders via the umbra (not corruption, just like getting the same result but through a different method). Issue is Gaia kinda fucked up on a lot of things and shit started to go sideways. The real kick was with fossil fuels though. Ironically the buried corpses of the lizard kings and their sins of the past were one of many key factors that drove the world down its current path. Gaia was sipping on coffee watching everything play out, saw the first fossil fuel engine in the 19th century, spat out her coffee and went “OH FUCK I FORGET TO GET RID OF THE BONES” before she Peter griffin style death posed and started g mod rag dolling.

(Basically animals were ment to be her home base creations to cultivate every inch of a planet and humans + the fera were her space team. Humans were the all rounders who’d do the baseline fundamental job and the different Fera were meant to be specialists. Humans make space ships and terraformers to locate and go to planets, the corax and Bastet go down and scout it out, the Garou called in to deal with dangers and carve out a secure base of operations, and everyone else comes down and tends to their specialties. They plant life, establish a solar punk vegan gay communist utopia, then eventually send it all over again.)

If I recall the Lizard Kings has their own version of mage avatars as well so works cross splat with them (either an intentional thing to directly emulate the lizard kings or a happy accident that kinda ended up working in her favor because hey now the funny monkeys can do Lizard King shit both from the material world AND the Umbra). Also it would ironically make the void engineers Gaia’s only successful creations which I’m sure with bother every shifter breed except maybe the Moloke to no end.

So I started getting really into Werewolf a few months ago and I’ve kind of been in two minds about it. There are aspects that I adore about the game that are only matched by the aspects I despise about it. And honestly I got so invested in the lore and all the potential stories that I wanted to tell that it genuinely kinda did a number on my stress levels thinking about my paradoxical relationship with it.
And then I remembered the one golden rule of TTRPGs.

I have free will.

I can just make shit up and do whatever the fuck I want.

And so after weeks of stressing and contemplation, here’s a long ass post on the homebrew lore I’ve written up.

Disclaimer:
This is entirely home-brew lore that I’m implementing to fit my tastes as a solo writer and most of my friend’s tastes as players. I am not saying this is the official lore nor am I saying this should be how all werewolf games are structured. If you want to tell a story that focuses on different aspects of werewolf or has different outlooks on the world, more power to you (In fact drop it in the comments so I can get my grubby little mitts all over it). The splatter punk, comically exaggerated darkness aspect of WoD isn’t really my cup of tea, I like to lean into the grounded everyday setting and steer a bit more hopeful meaning this lore will be reflective of that taste. This is only MY world of darkness, not YOUR world of darkness and certainly not THE world of darkness.
I’m writing this lore as being workable on its own. Cross splat integration is definitely possible (and honestly looking back all I really did was merge the changeling and mage universes with werewolf) but for the sake of not bogging this down to “how would the technocracy work in this werewolf homebrew lore” I’ll be talking from the perspective of a no cross splat view.

Disclaimer 2:
Heads up, this is also RIFE with my own politics and I do get preachy at points, mostly because that's kind of what I like about werewolf and something my friend circle are comfortable discussing/getting into arguments over. I’m very much on the left of the political spectrum (gun to my head I’d call myself a socialist). Werewolf to me reads as a game that, even if very flawed, is trying to be very much on the left and so I will be talking about it in that manner.
I like to think the changes I’ve made are mostly grounded in pretty universally agreed political observations (like I feel like most people here would agree with the statement that money in politics is a big issue in today’s world) and still allow for a lot of diversity of thought but I am very much biased here. If you wanna skip my real world political gripes and soap box ramblings about the game and get to the lore itself, head to THE WORLD section.

So without further adieu, let me prepare to burn some rage points, get on my soap box and start yapping.

___

What I like and dislike:

My current problems with Werewolf (Note: not saying that these criticisms are reflective of the writers as people nor even their intentions. This is just me and my brainworm’s issues with the worldbuilding as I see it):

1. Inbuilt Misanthropy: Due to how the fundamental lore of the trait and Gaia are written, humanity in werewolf is framed as essentially an inherent outside force intruding upon nature’s balance and that we need to either deprive ourselves in some very key ways as a species to not unbalance the perfect natural order or just die due to our inherent corruption (and I don’t mean deprive in a consumerist “no more Dubai chocolate and ai slop” way, I mean like modern crop agriculture, medicine, supply lines to get basic necessities to the billions all across the world). I made a larger post about this on the sub a while back but long story, I think this is inaccurate to the game’s real life parallels to climate change and actually hurts real life pro climate sentiment by pitting the improvement of society and people’s lives against climate action in a zero sum dynamic when in reality these two things need each other to happen (we have green energy tech and it’s cheaper than fossil fuels). The dichotomy between a comfortable modern world and an environmentally sustainable world is a false one spread by the capital class in order to make climate action seem like it would hurt you, and to me it feels like cannon werewolf has bought into that psy op.

 

• (Also side rant tangent but werewolf lore frames Peter Thiel anti natalist “stopping over population” as a GOOD thing, the rat kin’s entire purpose was to literally do targeted ethnic cleansing by spreading horrific disease and the game talks about it like it was a perfectly fine system the world ought to return to. Imagine if someone made a disease explicitly to kill as many minorities as possible and worked to collapse their supply lines and logistical structures, no different than what Regan did during the aids crisis and the war on drugs, then told you that it was a good thing. The ratkin’s Gaia designed purpose actually makes me clench my jaw when I think about it for too long because they’re kind of the most concrete example of this glorification of religious purity anti-natalist misanthropy that I find murderously insufferable. Environmentalism that somehow avoids intersectionality.

 

2. “Bumfuck nowhere woods goooood, cities baaaad”: A result of both trying too hard to be punk and of how old the setting is. In its efforts to be against “the man” a lot of older werewolf lore especially reads to me a lot like it’s just axiomatically positioning itself against anything modern and mainstream. Science, technology and cities are presented as only to be interacted for the sake of a mission and less spiritually pure (if not just inherently evil) than rural areas or the untouched wilds. I get that this is in part an intentional choice to portray the biased views of the Garou but you can only do that so many times before it starts to become the actual stance of the game (even though cities are infinitely more climate friendly and socially healthy but that's a whole other angry rant). We’re not going back to agrarian pheasant or tribal native ways of living and that's a GOOD thing. It’s all fun and games doing noble savage shit talking about how “in tune with nature” living like that was until you remember how much real suffering it entailed or just run the logistical numbers and see how criminally inefficient that shit today would be. 

3. Religiosity and Spiritualism: Before you ritualistically murder me for Gaia let me explain. Listen. I get it. Werewolf is kind of fundamentally a game about spiritualism which I get won’t be a big selling point to my antitheist ass. This is probably the point where I lose the most people, even more so than the previous two, but the way the umbra and spirits work bug me in two key ways.

 

• First off, the Umbra and spirits feel too “independent” of the material world for my world building tastes. I feel like there's a lot of lore on how spirits affect the material world but not much the other way around, which combined with things like wyld spirits being basically human but smarter and not inherently spiritual corruptive creates a lopsided view that makes the umbra feel more important/“real” and the material world as something to only pay attention to when it’s causing trouble for the umbra. It also makes it so that spirits kind of override the free will and importance of the material world while emphasizing spiritual purity over all else. If the weaver and wyrm are the sole reason for capitalism + climate change it kind of cleanses the people involved in the spreading and upholding of those institutions of responsibility or nuance because they were ultimately just possessed by these two gods.
• Secondly, the Garou religion being right kind of makes them and the entire game actually have a fundamentalist, borderline fascist reading to them. The Garou as an institution aren’t fighting against climate change and capitalism because they want to stop the mass suffering it will/is causing or to help improve the quality of life for all things on earth, their fighting because their religious ethnic supremacists who are metaphysically more correct than anyone else in all their claims. In fact the logic of the Triat and Gaia present it is so that thinking in and fighting for actual left and humanitarian causes is at best absolutely useless and at worst actively harmful. Ties back into the inbuilt misanthropy but doing and advocating for things because you want to make life as good as it can be for all is literally discouraged by the functions of the universe itself which to me tips the scales from being edgy to being actually anger inducing for me. It’s zero sum racial supremacy and religious fundamentalism wearing an environmentalist and leftist disguise, which considering that at least in my interpretation the Garou were meant to be reflective of leftist activism ends up implying some Fox News level “people are pro environment and leftists because their crazy cultists and want to do great replacement” psy-op bullshit.

My Loves:

1. Fucking HATE Evil: My favorite part by far of the entire game is the theme of simple anger and righteous outrage. In a world so mired with complexity, where evil often acts in labyrinthine methods that involve millions of otherwise innocent and unwilling people, it’s nice to have a game that reminds us that the evil itself and the underlying philosophy of its direct adherents is so comically simple and upfront it’s beyond parody. I love the framing of the corporate billionaire capital class as willingly serving the wyrm because I think it’s reflective of what they actually are like in our world, stupid inhuman fucks who unironically worship death and want to bring that death to all things. Oil CEOs KNOW what they’re doing and are eager to do it, every billionaire and establishment politician KNOWS that the US government is currently controlled by unironic demonic pedophiles and like that it is. That's kinda always been the appeal of rage for me. That the solutions are already here, that we would all have our quality of life directly improved by it, and that the only reason we haven’t done it is because the pedophile cartoon villains with more money that god have decided to instead press the button that gives everyone diarrhea forever and are gaslighting every level of society to make it seem like some deep complex issue. Unabashed, righteous hatred born from informed simplicity.
2. Messy and Unnecessary Garou Infighting (Their just like us Frfr): Despite all my previous complaining about it I actually really like that the Garou are as fractured as they are and how a lot of the underlying logic behind a lot of their orthodoxy clash reveal a disinterest in doing actual good. The problem I have with it is that it’s presented as objectively correct and oftentimes a good thing by the universe, but just as a function of their own society and beliefs it’s something I adore. It’s absolutely RIFE with character conflict and themes, plus I just really relate to it (I’m a socialist who’s been on twitter, I’ve been in leftist fight pit thunder domes and I can say some of the convos I’ve seen/been a part of there could be ported directed into a werewolf storyline. No one hates a lefty like another lefty.) The Garou are like us, so SO close to solving the world’s problems. In the good timeline they would be humanity’s greatest allies, Kin united by the same goal, each covering the other’s weaknesses while bolstering their strengths. But their own obsession with spiritual/ideological purity, refusal to think in systemic ways, compulsive need for hierarchy and small minded infighting have pitted what should have been Gaia’s greatest partners against each other and that dynamic I find very poignant and more interesting than if the Garou had been perfectly rational freedom fighters or even perfectly internally morally consistent.

THE WORLD (AKA the actual homebrew lore changes):

Spirits and the Umbra:

Broad Overview:

Giving spirits and the Umbra as a whole kind of the mage-fae treatment. Spirits are living stories/coalesced perceptions of their material counterparts. Think of the Umbra as a giant mirror being held up to the material world’s cognizant beings and spirits as reflections of parts of the material world (this includes humans but also all other forms of life that have some level of cognition and awareness like animals or even mushrooms and plants to a certain extent contribute to it). That reflection can tell you a lot about the thing it’s reflecting, and it may reveal things around, hidden about the object, or what the object could be, but it is ultimately a kind of illusion that can’t be a replacement for the real thing. I’m giving spirits that treatment. 

• Spirits are NOT the manifestations of physical reality. For example, Helios isn’t literally the sun, it’s the sun as it’s perceived and understood by living beings all across time and space. It is the combination of the ideas of warmth, light, life, energy, every solar deity ever ascribed to and inspired by the sun but not the force behind it. Don’t get me wrong it’s still crazy powerful and has some degree of power over the sun (it can cook basically anyone it wants to a fine fucking crisp, can influence day night cycles and is a death sentence to any vampire that earns it’s direct ire) but it can’t do things like stop the sun from aging and eventually dying out or fling it across the universe. This applies to all spirits, including the Trait which I will get into in the Triat’s section.

No spirit is truly sentient. They’re all philosophical zombies, reflections and walking scripts/ideas who can perfectly mimic sentience but have nothing going on in their “minds” independent of outside observation. Their demeanor, personality, hell even beliefs and memories are to some extent dependent on whatever material being is observing them (You can have a back and forth discussion or argument with them but it’s more you sparring with the general idea itself or a narrative, not another person who you can convince through words). The spirit of a giant red oak tree in the middle of a deforested area with the initials of a human couple carved into it may appear to a Red Talon as viciously anti human and is obsessed with the idea of growing and breeding, but then appear to that human couple as a doting lonely grandfather who adores them and really wants them to have lots of kids for him to be able to take care of. Now of course this is an extreme example but I imagine all spirits have a core narrative/belief they embody that they by their nature will always try and spread on a “subconscious” level. That tree spirit is always going to have the base narrative elements of growth, isolation and love no matter what its memories and personality are unless its material counterpart or the narrative about it to material beings changes. Additionally, how extreme that personality shift is depends on how big and how abstract the spirit is. The spirit of the god Thor has a billion different personalities and aspects each of which can change very dramatically depending on who is observing them because thor is a pure story and thus a lot more subjective, whereas the spirit of the Himalayan mountains only has so many self contradicting narratives you can ascribe to it, plus centuries of humans and animals alike looking at it and going “hm yes. Big rock.” Material beings can recognize traits in themselves and change of their own accord. Spirits can not, they need external force from material beings to change them and I image they would have a monstrously difficult time even recognizing the need for reflection and change in the first place (the spirit of happiness is probably gonna have a real difficult time comprehending what any other emotion outside of happiness is and why those feelings would be needed.) It’s like color. Material beings are an infinitely diverse pallet of different colors and shades that they can pick and choose from. Spirits are like massive blotches of one or two colors. Bigger and more intense than their material counterparts but at the cost of being less “whole” for lack of a better word. They can still affect the material world and killing a spirit does affect it’s material world counterpart but now it’s more of a two way street that requires interacting and caring about both worlds.

Also stealing from Mage and Changeling again but I think that non Fera should naturally be able to at least dabble with the Umbra. In my world it’s fueled by sentience, and so I think it should be more than possible for material beings to graze against, even fuel and summon the umbra without really knowing it. A cook who enters a flow state invisibly summons and imbues his food with spirits of energy and vitality. A writer who pours their heart and soul into a book creates a brand new spirit who embodies that creation and the emotions behind it. A union organizer giving a rousing speech to their peers has that narrative of equality and a better life manifest as a spirit that flows over and around the heads of everyone listening. Hell a bird who sings a love song could allow a spirit of love to poke its head through for just a brief moment. The Garou are better at directly interfacing with the Umbra and material beings can’t step sideways into it but all living things are what fuel it in the first place and influence it very frequently.

• This also lets material beings create spirits and fetishes Ala chimerical objects. The worn down drawing tablet of a young animator with big dreams could become a vibrant wyld fetish, the memory of a lost love if potent enough could create a guardian spirit who protects their lover from umbral threats at the cost of inducing an eternal melancholy and nostalgia for when the two were still together. Not just humans as well, ravens play fetch with wolf cubs using sticks so that stick could also become a fetish. Material beings probably can’t use them in the material world to the same extent as the Garou (maybe the fetish has a very small, subtle effect but unfortunately you can’t will a magic laser sword into your hands) but they probably show up in the Umbra and can be interacted with through it (if the person somehow enters the umbra they could use the fetish to its full extent while there or could gift it to a Garou to be used like a normal fetish). Humans probably do this much more frequently given our high level of sapience and us naturally being builders. I see it as a way to tie normal humans and animals into the fight for Gaia more. A Garou who continues to care about their friend post first change and chooses to put their trust in them could be rewarded by that friend eventually being able to bestow them with a klaive or a spirit companion forged by their memories together. Go stab a bane with literally the power of friendship or have your Garou summon a jojo stand that looks like their buddy from high school to beat the bane to death alongside with.

The Triat:

The trait are the fundamental parts of the entire umbra that are reflected by everything. The spontaneity of existence, the order of existence, and the entropy of non existence (the wyld, weaver, and wyrm respectively). As mentioned above, they are the manifestation of these concepts as they apply to the perception of material beings, not the actual concepts/forces themselves. The wyrm is destruction and entropy within the context of a being’s experience. It is the end of the story, death and decay as experienced by living beings, finality and impermanence we all experience in one way or another in all facets of life (death, the end of an experience, the process of forgetting, sleep, finishing a thought). It is not the actual representation of destruction on a physical, independent of perception material level because that doesn’t actually exist (aside from hypothetical dark matter and maybe black holes matter is never destroyed, only rearranged into a different forms or converted into energy. Destruction on a physical level does not exist.) This goes for the other two parts. The wyld is creation, chaos and spontaneity in the context of the perception. The weaver is order and stability as living things experience it, not literally every single law of physics and the material world. To put it in Warhammer 40k terms the trait are warp gods but not C’tan. 

• As you can probably infer from this change, this also means that Trait did not create the universe. They are the fundamental pillars upholding the Umbra without whom the entire thing would collapse but they are not the origin point for everything.

The trait is also still under the effect of the fractal consensus-esk effect all spirits as a whole are. Will go into it later but the weaver and wyrm because what they are today because of the actions of certain individually powerful people and the complex systems set up in the material world, not the other way around (they strengthen and have become a key part in the spread and continued upholding of these systems but you can’t reduce the blame for capitalism and global warming happening down to “these two gods pulling everyone’s strings.” Capitalism created the mad weaver, not the other way around.)

Balance within the Triat:

Garou orthodoxy tells tales of a perfectly balanced world. That long before humans and the world today the triat were in a perfect equilibrium, balanced and true and that though various events (some say the rise of humans and human civilization, some say the Garou’s own sins like in the war of rage), that balance was interrupted and to save Gaia the world must return to that previous status quo.  

In reality there never was a perfectly balanced world. Even long before us humans and the Garou the world was far from some idyllic spiritual paradise where all was in balance. The eternal, often very cruel arms race that is evolution, the oxygen crisis, the Ancient Lizard Men and their Dragon Kings with their own magi-tech civilization. The trait always has and always will be in constant struggle with each other with many examples in the past of all three threatening the other two at some point. All Gaia can do is flow with the rising and receding tides.

• There is a kind of “balance” in that constant back and forth, stretches of time where the percentages even if not perfectly even were stable enough to be considered a kind of balance (a world that is 40% weaver, 30% wyld, 30% wyrm still falls within the bounds of what is balanced. The exact ratios not being perfectly even is fine. One of the trait can be more present than the others as long as it falls in that workable range)

A healthy, balanced world is actually a lot closer than most Garou think. It doesn’t require the extinction or culling of humans, it doesn’t even require the destruction of complex civilization or advanced technology because those things do not fundamentally entail unbalancing. There are many ways to reach balance and just because the world was balanced one way in the past does not mean it can not be balanced today in another.

• The wyrm’s corruption runs deep and is ever present, yes, but it is also fragile. Spread thinly and has clear, centralized points that if removed would collapse the house of cards it’s built in its entirety.
• The insane aspect of the weaver behind the wyrm defiler and fucking up the world right now isn’t technology and cities, it’s social stagnation and the profit motive which is actually holding BACK technological progress and hurting the “good” parts of the weaver (like 4 different theoretical cures for cancer have been found in the past decade alone but due to the profit motive and entrenched corporate power they’re never going to see the light of day).

The rise of humanity and human civilization increased weaver influence sure but it was still in that workable ideal range and different time periods in different places shifted the ratios (the wyrm was dominant in europe during the black plague, the weaver dominant in the middle east/northern africa during the islamic golden age, and the wyld more dominant in Mongolia all at the same time). In my timeline, it wasn’t until the 17th-18th century that the weaver and wyrm really went off the rails, the weaver going crazy/gaining tunnel vision thanks to the rise of global capitalism and the wyrm as a result being turned into the wyrm defiler through things like pollution, facism, and the downstream suffering of capitalism (not to say they weren’t volitie in the past, just that they snowballed from being bad but locally workable issues to the all consuming existential threat they are now).

Gaia:

There are two essential aspects of Gaia in my home brew lore.

1. Gaia as physical life. Her most base form of existence. As long as something is alive and it wants to continue living, Gaia persists. This aspect of her is the basest animal instinct, she is hunger, dopamine, the orgasam, the drive in cells to divide and plants to grow, the voice inside every living being that screams at them to continue surviving just a bit longer. Basically this version is more or less cannon Gaia with the asterix of her being the coalesced essence of being alive rather than a transcended creator deity (she’s powerful, but at the end of the day she’s still a spirit and subject to the fundamental rules of being a spirit discussed above).
2. The other aspect of her is Gaia as the idea of living. What Gaia fundamentally IS is the drive for life. The opposite of suicidality, the drive in any being to get up in the morning and live because they themselves want to do it. This aspect of Gaia is passion, having personal goals and hobbies you work towards everyday, doing things not out of obligation or reaction but because actively out of eagerness and selfish desire. This part of Gaia is not fed by death marches or acts of sacrifice for her perceived will. You can’t feed the desire for life by vowing to commit suicide in its name. She is fed by artists who wake up and make the art because that's what they want to do, by scientists and mathematicians who are presented with problems they feel a person passion to map out and solve, by the people and animals who hike up mountains just to enjoy the view, by the earnest hunger for each other between lovers, by a personal desire to live. Touching grass essentially.

 

In this respect, typical Garou religious orthodoxy ironically kind of reduces how much a lot of them actually serve/metaphysically feed Gaia. The fight to preserve the ecosystem and living things helps her and is very commendable sure, but if you're only waking up every day to serve this large scale abstract goal you're not really living because you want to are you? Fighting for her defends her, feeding her by living grows her. Both are very much needed, it’s just a lot more common for the former to be done by the Garou than the latter.The glass walker who genuinely fucking loves coding or the Silent Strider who loves listening to writing songs feed her orders of magnitude more than a Get who vows to die a viking-esk death for Gaia or the Red Talon who revolves their life entirely around idealogical purity and bans ever enjoying anything human ever.

Plus, how can you rage when you yourself don’t have a reason to live beyond ideology? How angry can you really get if you yourself have nothing purely personal to live for and thus lose? Who’s more likely to go beast mode and tap into hysterical strength in order to survive, the guy who’s only purpose is to die for a high minded religious goal or the guy who has a wife waiting for him and a wood working passion project he hasn’t yet finished? 

Gaia is also like all spirits not really sapient. Her sheer size however grants her exactly one omnipresent drive/goal she will always pursue no matter incarnation, survive. Gaia’s like a computer, her objective is to continue existing and she has no true axioms or personality beyond this, no belief she will not abandon at the drop of a hat to advance this goal for the least amount of resistance. To illustrate this with an example, Gaia was at first against humans and so she made the rat kin to do routine mass ethnic cleansings. However when we continued to grow and eventually started to do civilization in full swing she quickly realized that it would be easier to simply adapt to a new balance/equilibrium that included human civilization and so she abandoned the rat kin without a second thought. Gaia is not a consistent entity with concrete ideals and morals. She is like water, she follows the currents and will happily switch directions should they pull her that way. Every other personal characteristic or belief that has been attributed to her by the Garou is a result of either plain misunderstanding or their own neuroses and biases coloring what they see, both due to the semi subjective nature of spirits and because you know gazing upon the coalesced essence of survival present in all living things that were and are breaks the brain a little bit. 

Oh btw Gaia’s dead…..but not really. She’s in/on the verge of entering a sort of hibernation because in reality the wyrm/global warming aren’t actually a threat to her fundamental existence. Though it has ruined a lot of her creations and greatly hurt her, life will continue on after climate change. It may at first be a very rudimentary or alien form of life but even the worst case scenarios for man made climate change will still have stuff like microscopic life around and given enough time that life will grow and thus still keep Gaia around (she’s basically guaranteed to always be around in some form until the sun itself starts naturally dying). Sure she’d probably rather avoid the process if she could but she’s perfectly fine with, and indeed may have already decided on giving up on the life that exists today. She will adapt and find a new equilibrium given enough time, and so does not give a personal fuck about wolves, humans, garou or any individual species. She is still needed and must be honored for the world to exist, but she is not to be worshiped or deified. Fight for Gaia because of the greater thing Gaia represents, not because of her personally. 

• If anything I imagine she’s more worried about just dying from old age. We've got like 0.5-1 billion years left before the sun’s natural expansion causes it to become so hot that it makes plant life impossible and about 2-3 billion years before the sun turns into a red giant and engulfs the planet whole. If you want to make my obvious bias towards encouraging the survival and improvement of human society more upfront, maybe she wants advanced human civilization to survive and grow not out of any particular care for us but because we’re kind of the best shot she’s got at stopping this natural end point of her lifespan.

 

The apocalypse:

The apocalypse is already happening at this point but it’s not the cataclysmic end all be all as most Garou think. It’s not some, “the planet goes kaboom” moment or an eternal wyrm/weaver victory. Things will get worse. A lot worse. Billions of humans will die, a majority of species will go extinct, suffering and hard times will be what awaits this generation and the next. But things will still be around after, including a not insignificant number of people alive today. The massive wyrm wave will come crashing down onto the world, collapse the mad weaver’s plans and kill a lot of people, but then recede and Gaia will continue on. Worse for wear but still onward. 

The real fight then is not for some mythical pure state of nature or some removed goddess but for the everyday beings of the world. For protecting and improving the lives of people and animals here and now. For the world that will come after apocalypse, to try and preserve as much as possible while changing the systems that got us here in the first place. What the world needs most are builders and visionaries. It needs people who can see where things are headed and show it to others, work to avert the worst where they can, change the tide of the world, preserve what can be preserved and work to heal the world afterwards.

Are you the best man for this problem? No. Gaia no, you're in like the bottom 3 of all changeling breeds when it comes to this. Hell the humans are doing a better job and they’re doing it half blind with one arm tied behind their back and the other trying to stab them in the face. But you're the only other option we’ve got, and for as much as rage has fucked things up there do still be evil motherfuckers that need a killin'. Get up warrior of Gaia. You've got a job to do.

Garou society:

Gonna end it off with a shorter section. Like I said, I actually quite enjoy the flawed orthodox beliefs the Garou have and how their society is structured, so I’m largely gonna keep it as is while addressing how my changes effect them. (basically minus the following comments assume their beliefs about the universe and culture are the cannon versions).

Q:“How do the Garou feel about the Umbra being a reflection?”

A: I imagine this is something experienced theurges tend to figure out on their own and has been a topic of fierce debate among them for generations now. Some probably don’t think it’s subjective at all and think of it as an objective higher realm like in white wolf cannon. Some probably theorize that it’s ALL entirely subjective and that no two Garou have ever experienced the same thing in it, and some fall in the middle, squabbling about where the line is between subjective and objective. The only ones who know the rules in their totality would be the ones who have done decades of testing and managed to ask that question to entities REALLY high on the totem pole, so more or less either Gaia herself or one of the triatic spirits. Needless to say the number of people who can claim themselves a part of that enlightened few can be counted on one hand and even then they have a difficult time presenting their cases to the other Garou. 

Q: “How do the Garou feel about humans and other material being creating spirits?”

A: They don’t know about it on an organization level/it isn’t common knowledge. The subjective nature of spirits and the umbra as a whole means it’s gonna cater a bit to your own world views and what you want to/are expecting to see. A particularly misanthropic Garou who is fully on board the human genocide boat might just not be able to physcially see anything other than weaver and wyrm spirits in humans and cities unless another Garou who can see it does some magic shenanigans or they have their views challenged beforehand.  A Glasswalker who has no real opinions or connections to animals may have a harder time witnessing animals creating spirits/fetishes. A Garou who is very much into the arts but is bored by the sciences won’t see the spiritual wonders present in an advanced theoretical physics classroom and a Garou who brushes off the arts as pointless dribble won’t be able to see the deluge of spirits that are constantly created by humans in an arts college. Each being has their own perspective of the Umbra and the process of the spirits within, so some Garou know about it and it’s what convinces them humanity should be brought in as full allies, some have observed it only in wolves or monkeys, and some don’t know about it at all.

Extra Tidbits:

There's more to science and cities than the weaver god dammit:

• Science and cities are not only the domain of the weaver or wyrm defiler in my homebrew. The 20th core rule book and Book of the City paint a picture of cities being a suffocating tyrannical structure which I kinda resent as a city gal and a science boy. 
  • Changeling/Mage bit again here but science isn’t just sterile labs and textbooks and authority. Its discovery and problem solving, creativity, imagination and genuinely fucking fascinating (also any magic system that works off repeatable steps with consistent rules like in Werewolf can be understood through the scientific method). Science is a dynamic process of looking at and testing the world, not a rigid system of rules. I still think scientific ideas and areas are probably still mostly repped by the weaver but I think there's more than enough examples to have large parts of the wyld and balanced wyrm present and certainly no reason why scientific areas should somehow be inherently dampening to umbral access or the creation of carens (look me in the eyes and tell me a caren located inside the hadron collider where you enter by activating the machine and get sucked into it wouldn’t be sick as fuuuuuuuck).
  • As for cities, if you allow the wyld to be more than just “nature” I think they would be very much present in cities. The wyld is creativity and energy which cities are chok fucking FULL of. Vast walls of wyld spirits representing impassioned graffiti art, sex and romance spirits clogging up the sky every night, spirits of song and dance and impulsive decisions racing around the city like cars. If you drop the oppositional framing between humans and nature and get creative with what the wyld means I really think cities would have tons of wyld spirits beyond the ones who just represent parks.

What the Garou often see as weaver corruption in cities is either just a more weaver heavy but still workable equilibrium or the downstream fumes of corruption coming not from the city itself but from corporations and capital interests.

“We’re not so different you and I”

• An aspect of werewolf I’m surprised they never really delved into is just how similar wolves and humans are. We’re both highly social creatures with very similar inbuilt pack mentality and we’re both really damn intelligent animals. I feel like the dichotomy set up between the wolf and the human in a Garou could be used as the jumping off point to deconstruct that sense of innate opposition and show just how similar we are to each other (Love thy neighbor and intersectionality and what not.)

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Aaaaaand that about wraps it up. There goes my weekend. Hope you enjoyed my homebrew or at least got a laugh reading what my brainworms have been cooking up for the past two weeks-ish. If you want to take any of this for your own use feel free and if you have any ideas or lore tidbits you want to give me drop it in the comments, I’m still very much open to changing things around and it’s honestly there are some aspects that still don't sit quite right with me (the urge to emphasise dialectical materialism even more is still strong).

If you want to get into angry fist fights over lore or my creative choices here I’m game so long as we keep it good natured. For as inherently political Werewolf as a game is it is still just a game at the end of the day and I understand everyone has their own way of enjoying the hobby. Again this is just my world of darkness, if you want to tell me how I'm a stupid naive commie by showing me your world of darkness I'd be overjoyed to see what you've cooked up.

Relatively new werewolf nerd here. Got into vampire and mage long ago and recently started to really fall in love with werewolf. I adore the parallels to political activism and the themes of rage and how the urban fantasy setting of WoD allows these themes to be really blatant while still having that fantastical aspect to it.

Decided to sit down and fully deep dive into the lore a bit ago to maybe prep a game and kind of ran into some troubling implications from the lore that I was unsure if I’m reading correctly.

If my understanding is correct one of the main points of emerging consensus among at least some of the tribes is that the Weaver is as much of a problem as the Wyrm is in the disruption of the balance of the triat, and this does seem to largely be right as I’ve found lore talking about how the Weaver was the one who indirectly created the Wyrm defiler by trapping it.

With how connected the Weaver is to the concept of human civilization and humans is though it seems to imply that humans in this setting are kind of an inherently destructive force given enough time? 

The last time the world was ever at balance I could find was before the Weaver trapped the Wyrm, AKA long before humans existed and while the timeline is a little contradictory I’ve seen people talk about how the Weaver in it’s plan to take over everything created humans/human civilization for that explicit purpose meaning humans existing is kind of the catalyst for the further unbalancing of the trait and that us being bad for the balance of the trait may literally be a build in feature of our souls.

This all seems to imply that human civilization and the inherent human drive to build things, create large complex societies, and stuff like clean water filters and all of modern medicine is a metaphysically corruptive thing and needs to be contained or destroyed. The existence of the ratkin further seems to imply that Gaia herself agrees with this given that the ratkin’s entire job was to cull humans and prevent human civilization from developing past early agrarian societies (If my sources are correct the rat kins job seems to just have been mass ethnic cleansing/genocide?). 

Am I missing something or misunderstanding the lore here? I get that Gaia and the garou aren’t meant to be unproblematic good guys but if I’m reading this right it seems like the only thing actually wrong about the Impergium was that it wasn’t done by the rat kin and the tone of the game then takes on a very misanthropic “all humans are inherently stupid and selfish and the only way to solve climate change is for us to be put in our place and die because we’re just so evil” angle which to me personally feels politically irresponsible (shifts the blame from the 100 billionaires actually causing climate change onto literally everyone else) and kind of ruins any chance at telling a serious or compelling story.

Edit: I don't have an issue with this being how the Garou and Garou society think, if anything thats more fuel for fun story beats. The thing I'm kinda hung up about is that my current understanding points to this being the viewpoint the setting and game itself is agreeing with.

Edit 2, TLDR/main issue: If I'm understanding the lore correctly, seems like humans the minute we're born are the weaver equivalent to Fomori/Banes, and in order to bring balance to the world (the thing that's suppose to be the game's metaphoric stand in for solving climate change and by extension capitalism) humanity and all human things would need to die.

Are the spirits of the individual trees still alive and thinking? Are they in pain, just kind of chill with it or is there some weird fusion going on? Where's the line of separation between the spirts of the individual trees and the spirt of the dam itself or the spirit of some iron ore and the spirt of a steel lamppost?