Editing Werewolf: The Apocalypse (section)

==End of the World as We Know It, Or, the Titular Apocalypse in Action==
Like ''Vampire'', ''Werewolf'' came to a definitive end in the ''Time of Judgement'' books. And, like ''Vampire'', it did so in the Storyteller's choice of many different scenarios. However, while ''Gehenna'' features a number of different playstyles, from wholesome redemption therapy to planet-wrecking, Masquerade-smashing Antediluvian throwdown, most of ''Apocalypse'' is at least fairly combat-heavy, though they remain reasonably distinct from one another in actual plot and themes.

Reasonably.

Some of them do have a few problems with making the characters a big part of the story, but there are frequent sidebars throughout the book to show that it was at least a concern on the writers' minds.

===The Last Battleground===
All the Wyrm's plots in the physical world were ''actually'' attempts to weaken the guardians of the spirit realm by spawning banes and/or to mislead the progressively-minded tribes into trying to fight the disease rather than the symptoms by swatting and Pentex and its ilk. Now, things come full circle, as the stockpiled armies of evil spirits come home to roost, as the three components of the Triatic Wyrm, Beast-of-War, Defiler, and Eater-of-Souls each seek a sacrifice, a monster in body and soul, that embodies the bit of the Triatic Wyrm they're being sacrificed to. Eater-of-Souls already feasted on the dead Antediluvian who rose in the Week of Nightmares, since it was a vampire that ate other vampires that ate human beings, and also Pentex was involved in the missile strike that killed it, [[Fail|meaning the most]] [[HFY]] [[Fail| moment in the ''World of Darkness'' could potentially prove to actually be a plot in another gameline]]. 

From there, the other bits of the Wyrm unleash the primordial super-banes known as Midnight Shadows, hideous centipede-slug-children armed with razor-shadow tentacles and super-hunting powers, to kill all the Nushiwa before they can warn the other shapeshifters. With that done, they start fashioning their corpses into a powerful artifact in the Umbra, then set about sacrificing infamous dominatrix murder-rape machine Zhyzhak of the Black Spiral Dancers (via [[Awesome|letting Jonas Albrecht shrug off his crushed skull long enough to literally drown her in the blood of her victims]]) and the infamous Perfect Metis, who in this scenario ''is'' a super-evil monster by the end, as she's an innocent child found by the Black Spiral Dancers and horrifically corrupted into the worst monster imaginable before being killed. This gives Beast-of-War and Defiler, respectively, similar anchors.

And, well, that's that. The Wyrm explodes into the Penumbra, planning to destroy Gaia at the head of a seemingly-limitless army of banes let by the Black Spiral Dancers, and with a brand-new boss monster called the Nightmaster whipped up to make up for the ''previous'' boss monster getting killed, throwing the physical universe into chaos without actually, you know, having kaiju walk the streets. The head of the Shadow Lords takes over as warchief over all the Garou - pausing only to quietly assassinate the head of the Fianna before his wacky fae-loving Irish ass could ruin everything - and the tribes gear up for an epic final battle across the Umbra, as they try to snap the Wyrm's tethers before it can destroy Gaia outright. In the process, millions of spirits die, turning forests into dead wood, bodies of water into stagnant, unliveable stillness, and air into screaming windstorms full of dust and poison across the physical world... but not all. And the world is less fucked than in a lot of other scenarios.

Now, this doesn't sound like there's a lot of room for the players to get involved, but the book insists that, damn it, they're supposed to be. They're there with Jonas Albrecht and the other named characters during the final battle with Zhyzhik, and hell, if one's a Silver Fang, they might even get the Silver Crown from him as he dies. They try, probably fruitlessly, to save the Perfect Metis in a hopefully-touching character study, and hell, they might even succeed, forcing the Defiler to instead sacrifice all of Pentex. They help or hinder the head of the Shadow Lords as he unites the forces of Gaia to stand against the Wyrm, maybe even taking the job themselves, and they explore whichever of the Spirit Realms they care about for allies, powers, and other stuff to help the war effort, without which the battle is almost certainly lost. The Nightmaster explicitly exists so that they can have a ''personal'' nemesis for this finale, and whichever other personal nemeses they have are supposed to get in there too. And, if they fuck up hard enough, they're given the chance to go out in a blaze of glory despite knowing their position to be literally hopeless. Yeah, it's not perfect and relies on a lot of storyteller fiat, but at least its heart is in the right place.

===A Tribe Falls===
...Yeah, title says it all, huh? 

In this scenario, one of the tribes who hasn't already falls to the Wyrm (or, potentially, the Weaver, if you go by the sidebar), and the Apocalypse involves the Garou fighting some of their own number as the worst impulses of whichever tribe proves the ''true'' final boss. The Stargazers have been exiled/left for the Beast Courts by this point, and don't make an appearance. Obviously, this has like a million variations, assuming you go off the examples in the book rather than the very-exhaustive notes to cook up your own scenario, so Cliff Notes:

* The Black Furies become the '''Widows''' after the Metamorphic Plague that's been ravaging them since the second edition started drives the tribe's leadership to privately decide that, well, since the Wyld is killing them and the Weaver is anathema to their Earth Mother shtick, they've gotta betray everything they hold dear and sell out to the only male cosmic force in the universe to save themselves: the Wyrm. They ''try'' to only treat with the ancient remainders of the Wyrm of Balance, but inevitably they are tricked and led down the path of corruption. From there, they end up trying to destroy all complex infrastructure and civilization to wound the Weaver; unfortunately for them, the Wyrm's got its own plans and intends to use the deaths of millions of innocents to create a rifit within Gaia's body and rip her apart. 
** Alternatively, they revert to their 1e characterization and decide to kill or castrate everything with testicles out of disgust at various wars and atrocities; the scenario proceeds similarly to the above, with the Furies quietly working behind the scenes to genocide mankind while the rest of the Garou try to figure out WTF is up with them.
* The Bone Gnawers have been slowly falling to the Wyrm for years, as it feeds on the resentment of their rabble and taints many, before they murder Mother Larissa and purge the loyalists and reveal themselves as the '''Plague Rats'''. During the Super Bowl, for shame. From there, they subvert both vampires and Glass Walkers to seize modern weapons and armor, even willingly abusing the balance system to create Abominations, then unleash an horrific bio/spirit-engineered disease that decimates mankind, as the other tribes and their own survivors try to unite against attempts to scatter them so that they can pin them down and destroy them.
* Lured into a false sense of security by the false Bunyip they managed to clone, the Children of Gaia try really hard to heal the injured Wyrm and bring the universe into balance in an epic ritual involving most of their tribe... then, as the rule book puts it, someone botches a roll (maybe intentionally), and the Eater-of-Souls appears in the physical world. Knowing that the other Garou will never buy that it was all a horrific accident, or maybe even care, a plurality becomes the '''Reavers''' and throws in their lot with the Wyrm to survive. As a miasmic fog that causes despair and an inability to metabolize anything but human flesh spreads across North America, the other two parts of the Triatic Wyrm launch assaults in Asia and the Middle East, with the Reavers able to prevent Delirium and spread terror in the populace on all fronts. [[What| Then the Reavers, demonstrating what crap villains the Children of Gaia make, might come to their senses and sacrifice their whole tribe (Croatan style) to bind the Eater-of-Souls back in the Deep Umbra]].
* The long-absent Fianna leader returns, fallen to the Wyrm, and unites with the critics of [[Changeling: The Dreaming]] within the tribe to take over in a coup that causes them to become the '''Black Stags'''. They try to sow dissent among the other Garou with their civil war, but fortunately, armies of sleeping warriors stockpiled for the Apocalypse awaken and assault the Wyrm-tainted ones, revealing their true nature. They quickly rampage around the British Isles, looting and burning as they go, then attack the Uktena to try to awaken the ancient banes they're keeping asleep. [[Fail|Unfortunately, this scenario doesn't really have an ending beyond this]], leaving it up to the Storyteller to decide what happens in the end.
* The Get of Fenris stop beating around the bush and fall to <s>Khorne</s> the Wyrm in the most Get of Fenris way possible: upon discovering a massive series of underground tunnels leading to a Wyrm stronghold, the leader beats up anyone who tries to point out this is ''literally'' what happened to the White Howlers until pretty much the whole tribe charges in there and turns into '''the Pure'''. They wait ''juuuust'' long enough to get enough of their own into position around Cairns of peace and healing, before launching a massive ambush assault supported by hordes of Black Spiral Dancers and other Wyrm monsters against them. They launch a massive crusade across Europe, Hitler-style, killing Margrave Konietzko, before the other tribes manage to unite in a counter-crusade against them.
* The Glass Walkers fall because Pentex creates a mighty Corporate Father spirit which purges the leadership, takes over the conglomerate, and initiates a hostile takeover of the most-modern Garou tribe in the most-corporate manner imaginable, with the majority of the tribe (including their totem, Cockroach,) choosing survival over principle and becoming the '''Raiders'''. They go loud to kidnap the Perfect Metis, then force it to walk the Black Spiral, heralding the beginning of the end. It shows up, with Zhyzhak revealed to be impossibly pregnant with its child, and gives a victory to their master, supercharging its master's power and turning all Pentex subsidiaries and employees into a hive mind, with the Perfect Metis itself changing into a living avatar of the Wyrm. The Garou must carve it up piece by piece to strike at the incarnate master.
* The Red Talons, in breaking the Litany and eating human flesh, have infected themselves with a horrible prion disease. They are immune. Their kinfolk (and regular wolves) are not. As the wolf population is quite-literally decimated, and thus leaving them with the impossible (in their eyes) choice of mating with humans to survive or going extinct, they blame humanity for their own mistakes and turn to the Wyrm en-masse for revenge, becoming the '''Predators'''. After [[derp|sending emissaries to all the other tribes to say that they should just get out of the way and let them kill mankind down to about half-a-billion people or so]], they set out to trigger a massive string of volcanic eruptions around the Ring of Fire that should destroy mankind, then go on to unleash Wyrm-spirits bloated with the orgy of destruction and death that results. [[Fail|And the scenario makes stopping them almost impossible]]. God-''damn'' is White Wolf ever kind to the eco-terrorist factions.
* The Shadow Lords fall when their totem, Grandfather Thunder, attempts an epic task Gaia has set before him to ''finally'' let him get a piece of that sweet Earth-mother ass again and make him a Celestine, and they narrowly fail him, letting their plots go to shit in the process. Incensed, he falls to the Wyrm and takes them with him, leading them to... [[derp|not really bother changing their already-ominious name]]. He takes over the Black Spiral Dancers completely by killing old Whippoorwill, then plunges the planet into darkness in which vampires and banes crawl out like cockroaches. As he lashes out at Helios, who he sees as his rival for Gaia's love, the other Garou, who have been uniting in secret, have a chance to strike back when this briefly causes some sunlight to filter in.
* The Silent Striders ''think'' they've found a solution to dealing with two gamelines at once: [[Orpheus|siccing Grandmother on the Wyrm, then cleaning up the survivors]]. Unfortunately, well, they take the first step of falling to the Wyrm first, becoming the '''Hungry Ghosts''' and using their (comparatively) more lucid and organized minds to easily dominate the Black Spiral Dancers. As the Wyrm attacks the [[Wraith: The Oblivion|lands of the dead]] and the Grand Maw starts licking her chops, the other Garou declare war, and the Hungry Ghosts counterattack via the Cairn of the Great Wheel of Ptah. Sutekh also shows his ugly mug, and he may or may not be Grandmother. It ends in blood and mess.
* The Silver Fangs attempt to get their madness and inbred gene-degradation cleared by their patron spirit for ''just'' long enough to fight the end of the world. It ends up making them go off the ''other'' deep end, since he's tampering with Gaia's work, causing them to decide that Gaia's cause is hopeless and they must instead hasten the end as the '''Fiery Crown'''. After slaughtering the Black Spiral Dancers for being too crazy to work with, they attempt to summon a massive asteroid to destroy all life on Earth, while engaging in open war with the Shadow Lords. Hilariously, the book not only jokes about potentially introducing space-werewolves, but sarcastically notes that averting the asteroid strike ''and'' defeating the Fiery Crown leads to "peace and joy to all living things."
* The Uktena are corrupted when the various Maeljin Incarna of the Umbra set out to corrupt all Garou tribes, and all but Lady Aife waste their energy backstabbing each other.  (Hilariously, two of them actually make zero effort to actually proactively corrupt their tribes and instead ''entirely'' focus on fucking over the others, meaning two of the tribes don't even have to worry about it.) However, while they fail utterly, they create such a mess that other tribes can't see what's going on as she taints their ancestor spirits while sapping the strength of the Bane Tenders with her Dream Makers, ''while'' enacting false-flag operations to turn the Wendigo and Uktena against one another. In the end, they give in, and become the '''Snakes''', and the other tribes have barely pulled through the ineffectual but chaotic assault of her peers. From there, it's open supernatural war across the globe, with Lady Aife, of all the goddamn background characters, as the major ringleader and chessmaster of the bad guys. It is surprisingly awesome.
* The Wendigo take matters into their own hands after a violent shoot-out between armed Native American protesters and cops, and decide to take the entirely-reasonable step of taking over a ballistic missile submarine via various gifts and magics and trying to start World War III by nuking a bunch of cities off the map... ''before'' falling to the Wyrm. Then, the other tribes and the U.S. military attack them, and they become the '''Devourers''' as Eater-of-Souls takes revenge on the dead Croatan by corrupting Great Wendigo at his weakest moment. They unite with the Black Spiral Dancers and storm out of the north ahead of a seemingly-endless winter for the final battle, as the world teeters on the brink of nuclear Armageddon and total chaos.

It's not a bad scenario(s), really. It hammers home the idea that [[Rip and tear|the Garou mindset]] isn't necessarily fixing the problems it rages against, and it has a lot of writing on how to handle, say, a PC being in the tribe that falls, even mentioning that the game might be taking place online. But, well... it's also pretty fractured, since it has to cover so many possible outcomes, including factoring in the Black Spiral Dancers' reaction to each outcome, not all of them are created equal (the Fianna one doesn't have a good ending scenario and contradicts itself, at once claiming that the Black Stags and the Black Spiral Dancers can't stand each other, and that they have more support from the Black Spirals than other tribes), and answering the question of how to factor in the players is mostly-confined to the opening rather than listed in each scenario.

Also, well... some tribes are better-suited to the role of villain than others. And some have in-house fans and haters. The Glass Walkers in particular get fucked over in terms of characterization, with even the much-loathed Red Talons getting a more-sympathetic treatment, and the Children of Gaia were ''always'' going to make crap villains.

===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.

===Ragnarok===
Rorg, the Celestine of the asteroid belt formerly known as Torog, concocts a plan with the utterly-flawless logic of a being whose brains have been dashed across a huge swathe of space: if Gaia's an uninhabitable wasteland, then maybe the Wyrm will stop hurting her! So, he flings a massive civilization-ending rock at the Earth. 

From there, wacky things happen. The players can try to avert the strike, by clearing the dangerous spirits off the asteroid so it can be busted with astronaut-planted nukes, but unless the Storyteller isn't ''actually'' doing an Apocalypse game, they either fail or don't succeed hard enough. The asteroid either cracks the moon or just rains unearthly, potentially-radioactive matter across the globe, turning the whole place into a dystopian, post-civilization shithole. As the Garou and other shapeshifters scramble to save whatever they can from the ruins, and while many fall into Harano or, worse, to the Wyrm, the mass death of most of the Earth's population tears open a portal into the spirit world, and the Horde of the Wyrm appears physically upon the Earth to take ownership of all that remains; all the Princes of Malfeas marching beside the Wyrm with all the Fallen Tribes and banes under their banner, with the bulk of their ranks filled with the evil among the human race, because the real monster is man, yadda yadda.

The Mokole reveal that all of this has been before and all of this will be again: that this "Wonderwork" is the death of an old world fueling the birth of a new one. If you have been paying attention, you just realized the FUCKING DINOSAURS were a canon civilization of... weredinosaurs hundreds of millions of years ago, named Dragon Kings. Somebody better make a ''World of Dinosaurs'' book somewhere. Oh wait, the setting is dead...

The Black Furies sacrifice themselves en-masse to blind the Horde, breaking down its ability to command and control, and all the remaining Gaian factions join together with what little remains of the governments and noble among mankind who have not knelt before the Wyrm into the Gaian Hosts. Together, a massive, epic battle is fought across the entire dying world to see what will be made after the dust finally settles. 

If the Wyld wins, then all civilization dies out forever, and the mutilated earth returns to nature as a weakened Gaia slowly heals. The Weaver's ending is the Good Weaver Ending, unlike the gloomy results of the Weaver Ascendant; a world where Gaia is dead and magic and the supernatural are gone forever, but humanity survives and will build a better world not unlike our own. The Wyrm ending is a nightmare of pants-shitting grimdark, where the dark masters of the world torture its diseased corpse forever in an orgy of rape and violence, hate and filth, with the few remaining humans either Mordor-like slaves or forced to work for "wages" of food by some Pentex-successor in exchange for horrible acts. And, well, the "secret ending" leads into something more like ''[[Exalted]]'', or some other post-apocalyptic science-fiction where mankind rebuilds in a "scrapiron age" of heroic fantasy, where the Garou now carry on as they always have, only in something out of ''Thundarr the Barbarian'' or ''Mad Max''.