Minion March - Pathological Packmates

[Malus]

Those would be the Secrets of said Lodge.

[Doctor Crimson]

Those would be the Secrets of said Lodge.

Yes, that goes without saying, rites and tools used by lodges would be closely guarded. What I was asking is how big are these repositories? Would older lodges have large number of rites and fetish stretching back to their founding while recently founded ones be limited to a smaller selection?

I ask because reading up on the Lodge of Garm in "The Pack", there was no mention of the rite used on Good Dog.

[nofather]

I ask because reading up on the Lodge of Garm in "The Pack", there was no mention of the rite used on Good Dog.

Yeah Chris (Acrozatarim) explained that in this post. 'Note that the Secrets Of section was a potential replacement for the story hooks for Lodges in The Pack; I came up with the idea for the Secrets Of late in development and we discussed whether to put them in, but Stew reasonably enough didn't want to change things up (though he did like them). I have full Secrets write-ups for each of the five Lodges in The Pack; some of it crosses over with what went into the story hooks, but some of it is entirely new stuff. It generally covers particularly weird shit, things that make the cult more cultic or more blasphemous to Uratha mainstream, hidden elements, etc etc.'

As for whether all lodges have strange rites or methods of making fetishes, it does seem like the kind of thing they do. Obviously not all lodges are going to be as spiritually capable, especially since some may be small, but it's fitting with the themes they bring to the table.

[21C Hermit]

So I was wondering around the White Wolf Wikia, and notice a few things. Specifically, that the favored Maeltinet servant of Maastraac, Master of Envy, is named the Artist of Spirals, whose skin is covered in scars and symbols. So that’s whom the unnamed Bale Hound was serving...

[nofather]

It does enjoy ruining people's lives. Maastraac and the Artist of Spirals are detailed in Lore of the Forsaken.

[ArcaneArts]

Re-reading Good Boy.

God, that Garmir pack were a bunch of fuckwits. I get mad when I think about it.

[Acrozatarim]

Pathological Packmates - The Silversmith

“It’s often associated with purity, you know—symbolic purity, that is. Innocence, pure hearts, good souls, that sort of thing. Repels evil. Makes you wonder, doesn’t it? I mean, that your kind’s skin crawls and flesh shudders when you touch it. You done anything that the innocent should fear?”

She’s always loved the lustre of silver. It’s not greed that drives her, though; she feels no particular lust for riches and wealth, except inasmuch as money is a tool with which she can acquire more of her beloved metal. To the Silversmith, silver is itself the end and the goal—a pristine, pure metal, and one not only capable of being wrought into such beautiful works as to leave the human heart aflutter. She’s learned well enough that silver’s shine reflects a deeper, symbolic truth—that the stories and folklore are all true. Silver protects. The Silversmith trusts utterly in her precious metal, more than anything else in the world, more even than her new packmates.

But silver tarnishes.

The Silversmith does not have a healthy relationship with anything or anyone, let alone silver itself. She’s an addict, buttressing her psychological frailties with her faith in silver as a warding talisman that will protect her from the dark. Her need for the stuff is so deep as to have become physical; her mind has sunk into the grip of delusions to deep that she believes she needs to merge herself with silver to keep her soul from the beasts in the night. She’s long since plunged into the world of extreme body modification; no cost on the solidity of her flesh is too great if it brings her closer to her argent apotheosis.

Argent Artisan
The Silversmith is a twofold asset. Firstly, and certainly the most obvious benefit she brings to the pack, she’s a capable metalsmith. Her focus is primarily on precious metals, particularly silver, but she has the talent and crafting expertise to plan, oversee, and execute significant projects that the pack might have need of. Weaponry, traps, security, and the preparation of fine vessels for the Fetish rite all lie within her capability. While her own workshop is relatively modest, a pack that can outfit the Silversmith with better facilities will reap the benefits.

Many werewolves will focus on silver in particular. The use of silver weapons is in breach of the usual cultural mores of the Forsaken—and it’s usually a significant escalation of a conflict between Uratha, as it drives those wounded to the uncontrollable fury of Death Rage. Still, many will be happy to have such armaments to hand, either to intimidate opponents or for use in extreme circumstances. Still, for a werewolf to work silver into something genuinely dangerous is a considerably riskier task than just bending a bit of silver wire into the shape of some jewellery. Workshops are dangerous places—and a splinter of flying silver could be enough to trigger Kuruth. The Silversmith, then, gives the pack a talented craftswoman who understands the kinds of foe she’s up against, but won’t erupt into an uncontrolled killing machine if something goes awry.

The second way in which the Silversmith is of value to a pack is as a more direct form of threat. Most rival werewolves are likely to assume a human’s threat comes in the form of silver weaponry, if they think such prey to be worth considering as dangerous at all. It’s certainly true that silver is the reason the Silversmith should be feared—but the considerable modifications she’s made to herself have had some unexpected effects.

Description
The Silversmith is a middle-aged woman, lean and nimble, with some very striking features. The most obvious is her skin colour—she’s quite literally blue-grey in hue, the result of regularly drinking inadvisable levels of colloidal silver. She’s punctured with piercings, all of them silver—ears, tongue, brow, and elsewhere around her body—but those’re just the rather tame beginning; through extreme body modification, the Silversmith has embedded a large number of silver objects in and through herself. Silver studs poke through her skin down her forearms and haunches; she’s carefully manufactured and threaded a gauze of silver microstrands under her skin in several places. Of course, none of this is healthy; tarnished silver has stained her grey skin more intensely around the piercings and implants, and dangerous levels of silver particles flow through her bloodstream, not to mention the infections and complications she’s suffered from the surgery. No reputable body artist will touch the Silversmith with a ten foot pole, so she has to resort to unlicensed and black market outfits instead.

And that’s just for the cosmetic modifications, saying nothing of the weapons. The Silversmith’s fingernails gleam sharply. She’s always kept her teeth in good condition – but the incisors are now silver replacements. Among the internal implants are little tokens marked with whatever occult symbols of purity and warding she’s been able to find, particularly those with even the slightest association with silver itself.

Until her silver obsession suppurated to such extremes, the Silversmith was wealthy enough from her trade. She’s squandered much of it now, of course, but she still keeps to the trappings of the middle class; she prefers reasonably expensive clothes and accessories, though of course they do little to detract from her utterly outré appearance. She’s usually pleasant enough, with at least a veneer of self-control and a sardonic manner that juxtaposes oddly against the bizarre nature of her behaviour. The Silversmith gets increasing jittery and nervous when expecting manifestations of the supernatural, including the appearance of hostile werewolves—but she channels that nervous energy into anger, even rage, fuelled by her fear towards excessive bravado in the face of nightmares.

Secrets
Most werewolves who know of the Silversmith assume she started down this path after witnessing the brutal slaughter of several of her friends who were—unknown to her—actually Uratha themselves. This is certainly part of the story—the sight of the quivering, shifting flesh of the Pure attackers, watching her own friends’ skin and meat split and change shape not as victims but in retaliation, and the soul-shuddering grasp of Lunacy on her soul. The Silversmith managed to retain some memory of what she saw, but her mind was left rent open and vulnerable to the predation of spirits in the aftermath; the following days were a daze of police questioning, ghastly whispers at the edge of her perception, and monstrous faces in reflections that seemed to melt and run like wax when she dared look directly at them.

The Silversmith always knew something of the creatures of the night, though. Her parents were hunters. They died, of course, and left their daughter alone in the world at a young age. She remembers the glimmering silver trinkets they used to gird themselves with, the silver necklace they gave her to keep her safe when they were away. As a younger woman, she took a fair few off-the-books jobs, selling silver armaments and talismans to desperate hunters who needed a source that wouldn’t ask any difficult questions. She herself did not possess any true occult knowledge; the talismans she made used symbols and ceremonies imparted to her by customers, and she has no idea if they possessed real power. Still, she kept that necklace from her childhood, and hoped she was at least doing something to help protect those with the will to fight back.

It isn’t the fact that she and her friends were attacked by werewolves that broke her and thrust her into this obsessive need for silver, this fearful addiction to the metal in the belief that it will somehow protect her. It’s the fact that she saw her own friends were werewolves. The Silversmith still feels conflicted. She loved her friends, and wants revenge. She’s seen that the Uratha are, perhaps, not everything she once heard terrified whispers of. She’s sought out a pack to join, to learn more, to orchestrate her retaliation against the Pure, to see this through. At the same time, though, she can’t help but feel that the Forsaken remain a danger, even as she is irresistibly drawn towards them. Perhaps the addiction to silver is as much to build a wall as to forge a weapon. If she’s dripping with the stuff, it’ll keep her Forsaken packmates at a distance, stop her getting too close, stop her seeing them as friends or even lovers. One day, after all, once she’s had her revenge on the Pure, she’ll need to decide whether to deal with these monsters closer at home—wolves she’s run with, and learned all the weaknesses and foibles of.

Rumours
There’s this woman, sometimes sells jewellery down at the pop-up market. If you want an example of why the whole colloidal silver health craze is bullshit, she’s it. She’s corpse-grey from drinking so much, and in terrible health. Every time I see her, I’m surprised she’s managed to crawl back out the grave again.

The Silversmith is dying. She’s tough, yes, but her body can’t cope with what she’s forced into it. Rejection of the implants, infection, and organs struggling to deal with the toxicity of the sheer amount of silver in her are all taking their cruel toll. The Silversmith knows this full well, and is quite aware that drinking colloidal silver does her health no good. Knowing that the clock is ticking just stirs her to more vigorous activity. She eagerly incites her pack to strike against the Pure, and will even seek out ways to stir the pot and cause conflict to flare up.

[REDACTED UNTIL DEVIANT COMES OUT]

[REDACTED]

I can tell by the look in your eyes you’ve seen… something. Yeah, and now you want to know how to protect yourself. Listen. There’s a witch-woman who operates out the back of 76th. You go to her, you buy one of her silver trinkets, or a knife with a good edge of silver to it, and you thank her and pay her and you never, ever, give her backchat and don’t even think about trying to rob her. One of the local gangbangers tried that once. They had to try and put the pieces together like a puzzle afterwards. They never did find his head.

The Silversmith continues to sell silver items to hunters and to those who have stumbled onto the fringe of the occult underworld, though she carefully vets both customers and her own pack’s activities to both make sure she’s not arming someone who will attack her Uratha, and to make sure her Uratha aren’t taking actions that will generate such hunters in the first place. She’s fiercely critical of any such activities on her pack’s part that involve the harming or murder of humans; she understands that there are some times it can’t be helped, but her attempt to act as a moral compass here isn’t just to protect people. It’s to test the werewolves themselves so that, once she’s had her vengeance, she’ll know whether her own pack need to be dealt with to. In the meantime, she benefits from the werewolves’ protection in her dealings.

Story Hooks

• The Silversmith’s friends are dead, and she now seeks to join a pack. She’s not just going to throw herself into the grasp of the first pack she comes across, though; she needs to know they’re like her friends, who despite betraying her by turning out to be monsters, were good people inasmuch as she knew them. She’ll not just try and watch the pack when she encounters it, but she might actively engineer incidents that’ll test their basic morality and response to situations to see whether they’re irredeemable monsters like the Pure, or more like her friends.

• The Silversmith wants silver. She’s also intrigued by the silver weaponry used by some Uratha as it is. She’ll question packmates relentlessly about the cultural and symbolic aspects of any such weapons—when they’re acceptable, when they aren’t, if they have any special qualities—and is intrigued by the notion of Luna and the bane the spirit laid upon the Uratha. Ultimately, though, she’ll want to get her hands on such items, particularly fetishes, so that she can study them further.

• Chaos erupts in the street; the Silversmith accidentally scratched a customer during a transaction with her silver fingernails, and he turned out to be a werewolf. The Silversmith is still alive, but the rampaging Uratha has left a trail that needs to be covered up, not to mention the question of who he is and why he’s buying silver weaponry. The Silversmith, for her part, is only a little phased; instead, she’s keen to manufacture silver nail extensions that the pack’s other humans could use, both to help detect werewolves and to make rival Uratha less likely to fuck with them in the first place.

The Silversmith
Vice: Vengeful
Virtue: Resolute

Int 3 Wits 3 Res 4 Str 2 Dex 3 Sta 1 Pre 2 Man 3 Com 4
Academics 3, Athletics 1, Brawl (Fingernails) 1, Crafts 4 (Silver), Empathy 1, Firearms 2, Investigation 1, Medicine 2, Occult 2, Persuasion 2, Science 3, Stealth 2, Streetwise 2, Subterfuge 1, Weaponry (Silver) 1

Merits: Area of Expertise (Crafts – Silver), Contacts (Hunters) 1, Resources 3, Safe Place 2, Striking Looks 1

Health 6 Willpower 8
Defence 4 Speed 10 Initiative 7

Argent Girding: Whether a result of the sheer amount of silver concentrated in her body, the bizarre collection of occult sigils and talismans she wears and has buried in her own flesh, or something stranger yet, the Silversmith possesses some level of occult protection. If she succeeds at a roll against Lunacy, she is completely unaffected by it. She also possess the equivalent of Primal Urge 2 for the purpose of calculating any resistance to supernatural capabilities. However, the Silversmith always counts as Open to spirits of silver, pain, and death.

Crafting Expertise: If the Silversmith aids a pack member in a Crafts roll, the pack-mate gains the 9-again quality on that roll.

Flesh of Silver: The Silversmith is so saturated with silver, and her body filled with enough silver implants and piercings, that a werewolf who inflicts damage on the Silversmith with their bite suffers 1 point of aggravated damage from silver.

Silver Panoply: the Silversmith’s unarmed attacks made with Brawl count as being silver in origin. Storytellers can assume she possesses silver ammunition for any firearms she carries, and any weapons are made with enough silver to count as silver weapons. She is fully capable of creating and carrying improvised explosives that make extensive use of silver shrapnel. Due to the Silversmith’s crafting expertise, she does not suffer the improvised weapon penalties for her silver armaments.

[Primordial newcomer]

just gonna say I got on this thread and read Good Dog. that is a sad story (a shell shocked dog man, throw him a bone please!)

now the silversmith, what. A. BADASS

EDIT: nice deviant tease by the way, she did seem a bit more (less) than human. as another question, will the spiral harbinger and good dog get secrets and rumors? I don't really mind if they don't, just wondering