The Triat are everywhere, of course — the fact that they have a presence in London is not in itself anything remarkable. Rather, this page is here to provide a short summary of how each of the three manifests itself in London, where they’re strong, where they’re weak, and how they might fit into potential storylines.

The Weaver

London is the Weaver’s city. Not her only city, of course; all cities belong to the Weaver in one way or another. But if any city could be said to truly belong to her, it would be this one; a place of science and industry since the dawn of both, a stronghold of the Technocracy for as long as it’s existed and, indeed, the place where it became the Technocracy to begin with. Almost the whole of central London is overrun with her webs, frozen into a calcified nightmare vision of what the whole world might look like if she has her way. Even the parts that have been corrupted by the Wyrm are more some horrifying blend of the foul, toxic, orderly, and regimented than they are the Wyrm’s possession alone. Traveling just a single block is an adventure of avoiding the omnipresent Pattern Spiders and other urban spirits, with even the Glass Walkers hard pressed to travel safely.

The city’s parks and meadows and green places, few as they are in the districts close to its heart, are hemmed in by constantly encroaching stasis, kept free only through ceaseless, exhausting effort. Only in the very outermost boroughs is there anything like a natural balance, and even there, the Weaver is by no small distance the strongest of the Triat in all but a handful of places. Her strength has only grown in the past few decades and there’s little hope of the situation reversing in the short term — perhaps ever.

The Wyld

The Wyld is not completely extinct in the greater London area, but it’s deeply unhealthy. Only the smallest and most innocuous of creatures still live freely and untamed in and around the endless maze of buildings and streets and tunnels, and even those have been warped by the environment around them in ways that would frighten their still-wild cousins. Wyld spirits found anywhere in and around central London are more likely than not to be mad, more of a danger to the Garou than they are potential allies. More than once, the werewolves have been forced to destroy some of these ever-scarcer spirits simply to avoid being destroyed by them in turn.

The centers of the largest parks in the city still have a bit of Wyld to them, but with the Weaver strengthening all the time, it’s a constant struggle merely to avoid losing ground. One has to go far beyond even the outer boroughs to find a truly untrammeled place — the far reaches of Dartmoor, or Yorkshire, the coast of Suffolk, or out into Northumberland — and even those may not remain wild forever. The deeper parts of Subterranean London, especially those that are not man-made or that have been abandoned for centuries, are also almost as likely to be places of the Wyld as places of the Wyrm … but finding one such can be a dangerous proposition.

The Wyrm

It is a paradox of London — one of many — that a city where the Weaver is so strong is also the place where Pentex has chosen to make its headquarters. That isn’t an accident; it’s at least in part a reflection of the fact that many of the minions of the Wyrm who are still capable of rational thought believe that their ultimate triumph will come by means of the Weaver’s unwitting efforts. The more orderly the world becomes, the easier it is for all the many identical things to be corrupted, and the more regimented the universe is, the more vulnerable it becomes to those who stand far up in its hierarchy. Let the Weaver make the universe ready — they’ll take over from there.

Yet that’s not all there is, either. London is also a city of great physical and spiritual corruption in its own right. In the material world, the coal-fueled factories that darkened the sky are gone — demolished, shut down, or brought up to modern standards — but in the Umbrascape they’re still a common sight, and the foul black smoke contaminates everything it touches, keeping a numberless horde of Pattern Spiders busy attempting — without success — to keep pace. The arrogance that led generations of Britons to believe that they knew best, and that their “civilized” society made their rule over the rest of the world not only profitable but righteous, also led far too many of them to believe that anything they did, no matter how foul, was justified by the benefits to the world as a whole. Far too many of the spirits — some of them Banes, but by no means all — that were cultivated during that time still linger in the city, always on the lookout for someone new to persuade of their own total righteousness. There’s no shortage of candidates.

Although there are few districts in London without some hints of the Wyrm present, their strength is greatest in the East End and the other old manufacturing neighborhoods; around Whitehall, the old headquarters of the Civil Service; and around Pentex corporate headquarters in the City of London proper.