Editing Werewolf: The Apocalypse (section)

===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.