The Garou are defined by a war that they’ve been fighting since before human history began. They have a legitimate claim to be the greatest warriors on the planet, but that greatness is tinged with desperation. The enemies they face are without number, cannot be reasoned with, and many of them will do anything, however self-destructive, to defeat the Garou. Merely surviving — never mind winning — is a lot to ask. The werewolves’ traditional enemies, the Wyrm and its minions, are so numerous and powerful that any mortal conflict pales in comparison, but they’re far from the only opponents the Garou face. With the Weaver constantly binding reality in its web, the Wyld maddened at being held back by the Weaver, a multitude of other supernatural beings, and, of course, humanity and all of its wants and needs, “Apocalypse” might even be underselling the destructiveness of the conflict.
Generally, problems for werewolves fall into one of two categories: those that can be solved with brute force, and those that will only make matters worse when handled with brute force. The difficulty of distinguishing between the two, and the Garou’s tendency to handle the latter sort with brute force anyway, should be major themes in storylines for the sphere.
Mundane Antagonists
The Garou aren’t complicated when it comes to enemies. If it’s not one of them, it had better keep a respectful distance, or else it’ll feel their claws. It’s an incredibly liberating attitude; the problem is that it as often as not, it ends up turning potential allies into sworn enemies. And, when you’re the dominant species on the planet, and the homids are still trying to figure out things like “flint knapping” and “fire,” that works out okay, at least in the short term — but that isn’t the world the Garou are living in any more, and it hasn’t been for hundreds, arguably thousands, of years. There are endless possibilities for ways mortal society can clash with the werewolves, but we’ve included a few examples below.
Governments
Human governments are usually slow to rouse, and prone to taking the path of least resistance — but if they get the idea that they’re facing some real threat, they’ll defend themselves with as much force as they need to, and resources that might as well be infinite when compared to any single Garou sept, much less a pack. Unfortunately, they’re also prone to doing some pretty awful things — clear-cutting forests, stashing toxic waste in unsafe facilities, exterminating wild wolf populations, and much worse. Storylines that involve thwarting a government’s plans should generally make use of the Garou’s ability to blend in with the populace, strike at an opportune time, and then vanish again to leave human officials trying to figure out what happened — they should not be about assaulting 10 Downing Street with a horde of ravening werewolves. Anything that makes the homids aware that there’s a potentially existential threat out there would be a disaster for the Garou, however great the short-term gains.
Corporations
Most corporations aren’t evil — just greedy, short-sighted, and amoral. With the exception of Pentex and its subsidiaries, the problems they present the Garou stem from those characteristics — for instance, an oil company not properly testing a well casing in order to save a few hundred thousand dollars, only to cause a massive oil spill in the middle of the North Sea. While they aren’t as powerful as governments are — most of them, at least — corporations have the advantage of not having to worry about approval by the general public, just by their shareholders … and as long as they keep making profits, that approval will likely be forthcoming. Oil companies and other environmentally destructive corporations are the traditional corporate antagonists, but there’s also room for careless bureaucrats who aren’t aware of the consequences of what they’re doing, or executives determined to impose their own agenda on the world without concern for who it harms. Sometimes, good-hearted people will even help the Garou against their own employers, if the situation’s bad enough — although it usually doesn’t end well for them.
DNA
Developmental Neogenetics Amalgamated (DNA) is a privately-owned corporation with offices in London. Their advertising and publicly available documents describe them as focused on research into rare genetic diseases, and while this is true — they’ve made significant strides in treating cystic fibrosis — their internal correspondence makes clear that they’ve discovered the existence of the Garou. Of course, they see things in strictly scientific terms; they regard werewolves as suffering from a genetic disease, and are working behind the scenes to find a “cure.” DNA is not backed by Pentex, by the Weaver, or by any known supernatural faction; to all appearances they’re a group of ordinary, well-intentioned humans. Despite their good intentions, though, they can make good antagonists — they regularly hire, or employ, teams of field operatives in attempts to subdue and capture werewolves. Their teams may have experimental drugs provided by DNA that provide immunity to the Delirium, or temporarily inhibit Garou regeneration and shapeshifting abilities; they’re also provided with powerful experimental tranquilizers. DNA operatives are best treated as the victims in a werewolf slasher-horror movie: they’re in way over their heads, and even the special drugs provided by the organization aren’t remotely enough to put them on even terms with the Garou. (Remember, this is England — the operatives probably can’t even be provided with guns, much less anything more powerful.) Another option — because their anti-Delirium drug is still highly unreliable — is for Garou to have to somehow deal with test subjects who are hallucinating or otherwise negatively affected. And, of course, if the PCs end up maiming or killing DNA operatives, they may well suffer some future remorse if and when they learn about DNA’s genuinely good works …
Religions
Although genuine religious faith is on the wane in the World of Darkness, the persecution of werewolves was a real phenomenon here, and the associated mythology has never entirely died out among the higher circles of the Catholic church. Looked at through a religious lens, the Garou are, after all, literal monsters walking the earth — and while a good Gaian werewolf would have nothing to with the things lurid rumor would have one believe, there are certainly those who have. Most religions don’t have anyone with the inner strength — much less the physical power — to confront Garou directly, but they can make themselves a nuisance in many indirect ways, whether because they’ve confused the PCs with maleficent werewolves, or because they regard all werewolves as maleficent.
Humanity Itself
Just the existence of humanity presents problems for the Garou — people need to eat, need a place to sleep, need to be able to keep themselves safe in a dangerous world. And, all too often, they don’t think too hard about the environmental costs of fulfilling those needs — factory farming, oil drilling, or groundwater contamination. The conundrum that faces the werewolves in modern nights is that the humans are now too numerous and too strong to confront directly, and yet there’s far too much history between the two species to make even the idea of working together thinkable. Humans are no match for Garou physically, so they’re best used as the kind of antagonist who can’t just be ripped to shreds to solve the problem — some will certainly be genuinely wicked, yes, but most will just be people acting out of fear, ignorance, and desperation. In the World of Darkness, the average person is even more a victim of the horrors that surround them than the Garou are.
The Wyrm
The Wyrm is one of the three incalculably powerful spirits comprising the Triat. In Garou Theology, the Wyrm’s original purpose was to renew through destruction, obliterating the Weaver’s creations to provide room for new things. Now, though, maddened by the Weaver’s attempts to constrain it, the Wyrm no longer knows any restraint or reason, seeking only to destroy, and destroy, and destroy until nothing is left of creation — not even itself, for its pain and rage can end in no other way.
Black Spiral Dancers
The Black Spirals are both an object lesson in humility to the Garou and a deadly threat as well. They’re a reminder that no matter how brave and honorable the werewolf, claws, fangs, and willpower are no match for a fundamental force of existence. They’re also foul, twisted reflections of Garou, delighting in misery and pain, gleefully defiling Gaia at any opportunity and embracing the dark spirit of the Wyrm with mad abandon. They’ve given in to all the worst impulses imaginable: murder, rape, torture, cannibalism, and all of them carried out with inventive cruelty. Insane though they may be, their plans often have a sort of mad creativity to them, and they can take on any tasks PC Garou might, albeit from the opposite perspective — calling Banes, ensuring the destruction of the environment, and so forth.
The Dancers particularly favor underground lairs, and hence are natural antagonists when exploring Subterranean London. Storylines that make use of them on the surface should take care to keep the conflict out of the public eye — it’s best to set them in derelict buildings, late at night in the darker parts of the city, and other areas where there aren’t likely to be many witnesses or recording devices. Insane though they may be, the Dancers are no more eager to attract the full force of human fears by rampaging through London in broad daylight than any other Garou are.
Black Spiral Dancers (and White Howlers) or their Kinfolk are not permitted as PCs. It is an essential element of the tragedy of the Garou and their struggle that any creature that has once walked the Spiral is forever tainted by it.
Pentex
Corporations are usually indifferent to the suffering and pain they cause. Pentex, on the other hand, actively promotes it, with its unspoken agenda being the spiritual, moral, and environmental corruption of the planet. A multi-national megacorporation, Pentex is itself is tainted by and used as the main tool of the Defiler Wyrm. One of the most powerful and ruthless foes of the Garou, Pentex has near limitless resources — supernatural and mundane — and employs Banes, Black Spiral Dancers, Fomori and worse creatures as a matter of course. Many — perhaps most — low-level employees and managers are unaware of the ultimate goal of Pentex, but their jobs are often designed in such a way that they’re obliged to look the other way when something questionable is going on, as a way to identify those who might be further corrupted. Anything that comes from Pentex or one of its subsidiaries — which, given its global reach and vast business interests, can be almost any product imaginable — will be subtly tainted in some way, and will have been manufactured and developed in the most environmentally damaging way possible.
Fighting against Pentex is much like fighting against any other corporation … except that they’re far more influential and powerful, and with far less moral ambiguity to them. The only question in dealing with a Pentex plot is whether everyone involved with carrying it out is tainted by the Wyrm, or just some of them. Unfortunately, since their influence is so great that even national governments will bend over backward to curry favor with them, great care must be taken in thwarting them — if Pentex has anyone to take revenge on for foiling their plans, they’ll do their best to make an example of them, and usually with the blessing or the active cooperation of any law enforcement in the area.
Fomori
If Black Spiral Dancers are the elite warriors of the Wyrm, fomori are the soldiers of the line. Created when a Bane possesses a human, a fomor slowly gains influence over its host until they are completely fused and inseparable. The process provides them with various powers — mostly toxic, disgusting, or both — along with immunity to the Delirium, even while ensuring that those abilities are used for foul ends. Some fomori are created naturally, especially in areas where the Umbra is thick with Banes and where some sort of spiritual corruption has opened a path for them; many, though, are purposefully created by Pentex to serve as shock troops or special agents in their ongoing war against creation.
Most fomori don’t go in for complex plans — they serve out the purpose they’re made for as pawns of more powerful beings, rather than being the motivating force themselves. They can be simple brute-force minions who can be destroyed without causing too much in the way of guilt, but they can also be subtly destructive undercover agents, hiding among the humans most of the time and only occasionally emerging to do their work. Even the Garou’s supernatural senses can have a difficult time finding a fomor among the millions of people in the greater London area.
Fomori are not permitted as PCs.
The Weaver
In the long-ago dawn of creation, the Weaver’s function was to bring order to the chaos spawned by the Wyld, only for that order to be destroyed again by the Wyrm. Over time, however, the Weaver grew tired of seeing its creations destroyed, and sought to imprison the Wyrm so that it could continue to spin its orderly webs forever. Instead, though, its efforts only drove the Wyrm into maddened rage. Avatars of the Weaver are mostly spider-like or insectoid; it (or she, depending on one’s beliefs) is a force of order, science, and technology. The adopted parent of humanity, it uses its children to bring the world ever closer to the perfect order it desires.
Pattern Spiders
Pattern Spiders are the most basic of the many spider-shaped spirits working for the Weaver. About the size of a basketball, they maintain the Pattern Web, and expand it by calcifying items, spirits, and people, then binding them physically and spiritually into it. Pattern Spiders are not very self aware, preferring to tend to their webs, but if disturbed will attack anyone seeking to disrupt the web — which is generally how they come into conflict with the Garou. Any fight with a Pattern Spider is a race against time; if the fight isn’t over before reinforcements arrive, things can get very dicey indeed. The Weaver’s minions include a number of other similar spirits — Net Spiders, Backdoor Spiders, Orb Weavers, Chaos Monitors, Nano Spiders, Channel Spiders, Guardian Spiders, Strand Spiders, Wolf Spiders, and Rail Spiders, among others — which are all believed to evolve from Pattern Spiders.
Drones
As fomori are to the Wyrm, drones are to the Weaver: people who have been possessed by one of their spirits and then influenced until the human part of them is entirely overwhelmed by the spirit. As creatures of stasis, rather than decay, drones are mostly ageless and have powers that are much less disgusting than is typical for fomori. It sounds like a great deal, except for the part where the drone’s free will is entirely subsumed by the Weaver.
Hard to kill even by Garou standards, they most often appear as antagonists within the context of the Weaver’s actions — working to maintain, repair, or expand the Pattern Web, or to remove some obstacle to its doing so — but, like fomori, they aren’t usually the architects of these plans, and removing them is only a minor setback unless a more permanent solution is found. On occasion, drones may even act in ways that benefit the Garou — when some powerful Wyrm creature is disrupting the Weaver’s designs, for instance — although they do only out of practicality, and may well turn on their erstwhile allies as soon as the larger threat is removed.
As with fomori, PC drones are not permitted.
The Wyld
The third member of the Triat, the Wyld is a force of life, creation, and chaos. It was meant to be a source of possibilities that the Weaver shaped into order, which in turn would be destroyed by the Wyrm, thereby making space for the Wyld to create anew. Neither the Weaver nor the Wyrm hold to their original purpose, though, and so the Wyld gradually weakens more and more, the world spins further and further out of balance, and the Apocalypse draws ever closer.
Gorgons
A gorgon is to the Wyld as the fomori are to the Wyrm and the drones are to the Weaver, a spirit-possessed being now completely in thrall to its creator’s wishes. Unlike the other two, however, the Wyld never creates gorgons from sapient beings, only animals or plants. Source material is contradictory as to whether humans can become gorgons, and we have opted to disallow this (even for NPCs).
The Garou often think of themselves as defenders of the Wyld, and the idea of acting against its agents is an uncomfortable one — anything that weakens the Wyld therefore makes the Weaver and the Wyrm stronger, after all. But the Wyld is a primordial force, and it has no conscience, no morals, and no principles — it acts as it sees a need to act, and, while the results aren’t usually directly harmful to the Garou, Wyld creatures and Wyld spirits can commit horrifying atrocities in their own right. Finding a way to stop the Wyld’s minions from carrying out some particularly dreadful acts, while still correcting whatever imbalance brought them about, would be a worthy challenge for a clever pack.
The Spirit World
As half-spirit, half-mortal creatures, the Garou find themselves dealing with the spirit world more frequently than any of the other spheres. Even the magi, their closest rivals, lack the intuitive understanding of, and ability to deal with, the Otherworlds that the Garou are born with. Nor are spirits exclusively encountered in the Umbra — under the right circumstances, they can manifest in, or use their powers to affect, the material world as well. Indeed, their long-term presence in an area affects both the spiritual and the material worlds whether they do so deliberately or not.
Spirits
The World of Darkness is a place where anything and everything, from concepts to emotions to plants and animals, can have spirits associated with them. Spirits can be capricious, cruel, whimsical, or merry, and sometimes all of those at once. They are fundamentally alien to the human way of thinking, and, while the Garou have a far better understanding of them than almost any human, they have their own agendas and their own desires, and rarely care much about anything beyond their own interests. Any concept that can be conceived, including inspiration, fear, or unbelief, can manifest as a spirit. Some such spirits — fear or anger in particular — can cause problems for the Garou for obvious reasons, but even a spirit of growth or joy that has grown too strong and has nothing to restrain it may lead to potential disaster.
Creating talens and fetishes requires the cooperation — willing or otherwise — of a spirit. The Garou strongly disapprove of forcibly binding spirits for this purpose, and finding a way to convince a reluctant spirit to agree willingly can be a challenge all its own, particularly if it is to be bound indefinitely. Minor spirits may consent in exchange for regular offerings or particularly elaborate care for the item it’s bound into, but spirits strong enough to make a fetish of any significance are likely to demand the completion of a quest that serves their own interests.
Banes
A Bane is just a spirit born of, or corrupted by, the Wyrm — the only difference between it and other spirits being its allegiance. As with other spirits, they come in all kinds and all strengths; they can be relatively harmless, or they can be hideously powerful creatures capable of rending the very fabric of reality. Minor Banes are often those chosen to turn humans (and sometimes animals) into fomori; the more powerful sort can obliterate all traces of their host’s previous personality, or simply materialize without a host — manifesting a twisted version of their spirit form in the real world.
Banes are some of the most devoted servitors of the Wyrm — after all, like other spirits, they’re entirely focused on the thing that they’re associated with, and those things are of necessity things the Wyrm approves of. More than corrupted mortals, more than fomori, more than the Black Spiral Dancers, Banes are willing to do anything, even self-destructive things, in order to push forward their agendas and that of their master. Because of this, and the vast number of possible Banes, they can be used as antagonists in almost any story that involves something of which the Wyrm would approve.
Other Supernaturals
Garou and Fera
The werewolves have long been on the top of the heap, as far as Gaia’s shifters go. Their packs and tribes give them the ability to bring additional force to bear on a problem with an ease that other more solitary Fera simply don’t have. Unfortunately, not every pack or tribe sees the same things as desirable, and when those disagreements are mixed with the high value Garou put on honor and, of course, the simmering bomb that is Rage, simple misunderstandings can become into all-out combat in the blink of an eye. To make matters worse, other Fera can and often do hold simmering animosity towards Garou, a legacy of the War of Rage and the campaign of extermination that the werewolves once fought against many of them.
While “Garou vs. Garou” and “Garou vs. Fera” are classic storyline tropes, please remember that PC factions should not be used as antagonists without approval from staff. This isn’t meant to prevent you from using them, but just to make sure that the stories don’t change the status quo of the tribes in London in any serious way, or place the PCs belonging to the antagonist tribes in an awkward position. As long as other Garou are used more in a “fierce rivals” than a “deadly enemies” context, and treated with the same respect that the PCs would want their tribes treated with if the tables were turned, staff will probably be fine with it.
Wraiths
Wraiths are the spirits of those who died and have come back to the land of the living — sometimes animating corpses to go about fulfilling their own agenda, sometimes materializing as ghostly entities in the material world, sometimes remaining in the Lower Umbra and making a nuisance of themselves from there. For the most part, what they want is simply to achieve their goal and return to the land of the dead, and they’re usually quite single-minded about this. Their goals are usually extremely personal, and the reasoning behind them is often incomprehensible to anyone else; sometimes they want something very simple, other times they want things that are virtually impossible, and there’s no guarantee it’s something the Garou will want to help them accomplish — Pentex execs can leave ghosts too, after all, and shambling corpses are not normally viewed positively by the werewolf community.
TowersMUX does not officially support the Wraith: the Oblivion game line. Storytellers may use it as a source of ideas and material if they wish, but material found therein may not be canonical in our game world.
Hunters
Humans sometimes fight back, and, regrettably, thousands of years of the Impergium have left them with less than positive memories of werewolves in general. Most humans are close to harmless, even if equipped with high-tech weapons and armor, but every so often, one will exhibit strange powers that allow them to present a real threat to the Garou. And, while their goals are in many ways the same as those of the werewolves, they’re predisposed to be hostile to them, often with tragic results. At best, they can sometimes be redirected against mutual enemies, but doing so requires a level of subtlety that not all shapeshifters are capable of.
Hunters can be anything from a couple of scared but persistent ordinary humans armed with improvised weapons, to Pentex-sponsored mercenary groups, to supernaturally-empowered individuals who can give Garou a run for their money. While we do not officially support the Hunter: The Reckoning rules, they can serve as a useful source of ideas for antagonists who fit into this category.
Other Spheres
As stated in Storytelling, PC factions should not be used as antagonists without staff approval. What that means in the context of the Werewolf sphere is that enemy vampires, for instance, should usually be things like a Sabbat pack trying to move into London, or a vampire so far gone to Wassail that they no longer have allegiance to any sect or clan, rather than an upstanding Ventrue pillar of the Camarilla community. As fun as it might be for a werewolf pack to tear the Malkavian Primogen into ribbons, that would oblige the Camarilla PCs to retaliate, and things could get messy very quickly. We just want to try to prevent that kind of escalation as much as possible.
Within these limitations, there’re lots of possibilities. Vampires are, of course, a classic Garou bad guy, and getting rid of a slavering inhuman monster of the night who kills without reason or mercy is both satisfying to the werewolves and something that PC vampires won’t object to (and may even silently approve of.) Pentex is known to count Sabbat vampires among their ranks, who may be involved with, or the mastermind behind, some of their less-overt corporate initiatives. In similar vein, both the Nephandi and the Technocrats are obvious potential antagonists — servants of either the Wyrm or the Weaver, as far as the Garou are concerned (that not all Nephandi serve the Wyrm per se is a theological difference both meaningless and uninteresting to the average werewolf), and advancing their causes whether wittingly or not. And, while it can be a challenge to find a way to have Thallain and Dark-Kin fae intersect in a meaningful way with the Garou, it’s certainly not impossible.
None of the above should be taken as indicating that friendly relations between the spheres exist (c.f. Inter-Sphere Play). Vampires are still foul creatures of the night who cannot bear the light of the sun and subsist on the blood of humans; no sane Garou would want to associate with them, it’s just that some of said blood-drinking abominations are more urgent problems than others. Mages are still humans with strange powers derived from probably questionable sources who are greedy for knowledge and power and suspiciously curious about caerns, but the werewolves don’t want to go to war with the Council of Nine when there are plenty of Technocrats and infernalists that need dealing with. The Fianna may claim to have cooperated productively with the fae in the past, but all that means is that twelve other tribes will eye any changeling, or information that comes from them, with skepticism. Even members of other spheres who have some level of Garou blood are not likely to be welcomed with open arms — if they were really trustworthy, after all, they’d’ve put their abilities at the service of Gaia from the start, not joined some other organization whose priorities are murky at best.
Werewolf is a tragic game in large part because of the unwillingness or inability of the Garou — from the Thirteen Tribes as a whole all the way down to a single individual werewolf — to believe that any way different from their own might just as “right” as theirs is, much less more so. Bear that in mind when creating stories that involve other spheres.