Editing Werewolf: The Apocalypse (section)

===Weaver Ascendant===
In which the writers stop beating around the bush and just make modern life the final boss. 

Yes, in this scenario, the Weaver steps onto the stage as the main villain, with her own never-before-mentioned megacorporation, '''Shinzui Industries''', buying out or taking apart Pentex and preparing to conquer the world and crush all things beneath her oppressive conformity and rigid need for order and calcification. The Machine, the evil and mindless id of the Weaver, has become ascendant, and now everyone's fucked as it sets out to kill every single supernatural creature in the world or convert them into more Drones of the Weaver while the spirit world starts to get harder and harder to visit or influence as the Gauntlet increases everywhere, with the Weaver actively trying to invade each discrete part of the Umbra.

But, as the tattered remains of the Garou gather to assess the damage and figure out what to do next, the Black Spiral Dancers, of all the goddamn villains, show up having made a face turn, with the Perfect Metis at their head. In this scenario, the Perfect Metis is nothing less than the savior of the world, the incarnation of the true Balance Wyrm, and he's got a plan. The Weaver's overreached, he says, and they have one last opportunity to fix all creation by first weakening her with a strikes in the physical world, then launching a suicidal all-out assault on Malfeas to pour their power into the Wyrm and give it a chance to shatter the Weaver's web and fix things for good.

In an epic show of unity, assuming the players are up to it, all the various shapeshifters of the world pool their talents and weaken the Weaver just enough with a mixture of surgical strikes, sabotage, turning other supernaturals onto Shinzui, and just starting some good-ol'-fashioned chaos. Mokole turn into kaiju and rampage across the world, bastets and corax rile people up into riots against the new world order, ratkin and Red Talons bury the hatchet to slaughter tons of humans with plagues and bioterrorism (...yeah), and hell, even the poor gurahl are seen as prime allies in the coming strike on Malfeas. Ananasa tries to make her move to take her mother's place as the new Weaver, and tries to get the party to help her, which is... debatably a good move.

But, in the end, the strike comes, with all the changing breeds charging into the hellish spirit world. Since the Balance Wyrm's freedom would cause them to cease to exist, all the Triat Wyrm and their servants fight to stop them. Fortunately, between the Weaver invading them like every other spirit world, the Anansi undermining them to in the name of her own power grab, and the inevitable problem of the Wyrm factions all backstabbing each other raw, this is not quite the impossible obstacle it seems. Once they get where they need to be, the Garou need to start a massive ritual to free the Wyrm, which requires one thousand successes to go off, must be led by a rank 5 theurge making a Difficulty 10 Wits + Rituals extended test, and ''then'' needs to be fed five thousand permanent gnosis points. And instead inflicts aggravated wounds if it's not being fed enough. 

(The book sarcastically notes that, yes, you're reading those numbers right, and that if it were easy to do people would have already done it. It goes on to clarify that the requirements, while daunting, aren't unmanageable so long as you're under no illusions about getting out of there alive, and it's ''much'' easier if you managed to befriend some were-bears and bring them along.) 

If everything goes tits-up, the ritual fails or doesn't get attempted in the first place, then the Weaver goes on to either fuck up so hard that the spirit world ''and'' the real world get too cut off and everything in both dies, or manages to keep the doorway just open enough to turn both into nightmarish, soulless dystopias devoid of feeling. However, if you ''do'' manage to pull it off, then while everyone's definitely going to die, the Wyrm shatters its prison, tears apart the Pattern Web, and restores the world as it should have been... which unfortunately turns every building and tool in the world into dust, but humanity survives, and will probably build a better future guided by the spirits of the changing breeds. Close on an image of the Wyrm and the Weaver, now healed from her madness, deciding to just settle down and watch. And maybe, it's implied, make a little love. (No, seriously, the fact that the two of them kind of want to fuck each other and always have has been a background element since forever.)

Of all the endings in this book, this one's probably the most popular. It has its problems: even the book acknowledges that Shinzui kind of comes out of nowhere and should show up in some adventures leading up to the End Times so it doesn't feel forced. It focuses a lot on the ''what'' of what's happening rather than on what, exactly, the party should be doing, aside from a few clever ideas here and there and inserting them into scenes from the worldwide war on the Weaver. And, well... it's not ''as'' depressing as some later endings, and the writing ''tries'' to be more-optimistic and less anti-humanist than a lot of other ''Werewolf'' stuff, but it still ends with life sucking for most of humanity, man. Plus, the Black Spiral Dancers making a face turn is a bit much. The Balance Wyrm should probably have just abandoned them to the corrupt forces of the Urge Wyrms, the way the denizens of Malfeas are later.

But, well... it's also an ending that actually addresses the core problems of the ''Werewolf'' cosmology, and it ends with the idea that the Gaia tribes of all stripes can and should always have put aside their differences to work together for the greater good, and on the idea that personal sacrifice to build a better future is more-important than petty grudges or spiteful raging against past wrongs. And the ending is actually pretty beautifully written, in its own way.