Drinkers of the Well

Tribe

Simnah Hestunadar

Danu-Ur, Creator Wolf, walks the world once more. Perhaps she never left it. Perhaps she never existed before now at all. The reality of her presence is itself dream-like, something to make one question one’s own perceptions of what is and what is not. In her wake gather the Simnah Hestunadar, her Drinkers of the Well — a newborn tribe of Uratha, an impossibility rendered a truth.

Some say the Drinkers of the Well formed these past few years, forged from nothing, from Ghost Wolves, in the fiery crucible of Iraq. Certainly, the new tribe seems to have the greatest concentration of its numbers in the Middle East—but already, its reach extends far beyond that region. New Drinkers emerge across the world, in places where no Iraq-initiated Simnah has yet walked. In some places, they seem to have been there already, before Danu-Ur’s supposed renewal. At least one centuries-old Lodge was attuned to her all along, suddenly swept up into the new-forged tribe.

Who are these Drinkers of the Well? They are not a rag-rag collection of Ghost Wolves, no; they are as devoted and dedicated as the adherents of any other tribe, albeit mostly still finding their feet in their nascent great cult. The Drinkers believe their goddess to be one of renewal and inspiration, of creativity and thought. They are the wolves who howl at the moon and stir sensation in the minds of those who hear. They are the new growth after fire has burned all to ash; they are the turning of the seasons that grinds dead flesh to mulch and from it brings fresh and fertile possibility. They are something dreamlike, something intangible—beasts of madness, wolves of the mind’s darkest and brightest recesses, representatives of the creative part of the world in balance to Fenris-Ur’s symbolic destruction.

Their name spurs other Uratha to ask from what well it is they drink, and what meaning this conveys. The Drinkers say thus: They drink from the well of creation, from Danu-Ur’s fountain of possibility, from the ocean of the mind, and thus are filled with that contemplative, immaterial power. The world is broken. Old cycles creak and crumble. Flaws cannot be fixed through simple destruction—the sundered paths of old must be replaced with new ways, ways that learn from what came before and make something altogether better. To drink from the well is to take potential into oneself, and become a vessel to turn that potentiality into a greater reality.

The Drinkers are, of course, Uratha. The Wolf Must Hunt. The Drinkers look upon the world and see a ruin, a wreck, a scrapheap that might yet be salvaged and forged anew. Their sacred prey, then, relates to how they might achieve that, and what obstacles to it stand in their way—and it is here that perhaps the most striking feature of the Drinkers of the Well should be addressed.

The Drinkers of the Well are neither Forsaken nor Pure—or rather, they contain both within their ranks. This surely cannot last, but the tribe of the Drinkers is still not set, still not a hardened scar in reality, and so both factions may yet shape its future. As a symbol of potential, the Drinkers currently contain all such possibilities, and while there is a great deal of friction within its ranks between the Anshega and the Urdaga who have pledged allegiance, their patron obliges them to work together to some extent. This is complicated all the more by the relationship between Destroyer, Creator, and Rabid—a tangled mess that leaves both Forsaken and Pure suspicious of the new tribe, but also eager to cultivate alliance with it.

As the rival factions seek to draw Creator Wolf to either the Forsaken or the Pure, the nature of the tribe’s spiritual link adapts itself to her petitioners. As a result, the sacred prey of the Drinkers of the Well also remains in flux, unfixed, more than one thing at once. The tribe hunts those who would warp or break the world, who would hold it in stasis or change it without understanding. So too does it hunt the idigam; or, rather, it holds the idigam as the most dangerous and worthy prey, inasmuch as the Tribe members understand the nature of these ever-changing entities. The Drinkers do not lie to themselves that they can simply hunt the idigam like any other prey. They know the power and rarity of these horrors. Still, in the Moon-Banished and Earth-Bound they see the greatest of lessons—how change, unfettered, is simply madness, and how stasis, once bound into Coalesced form, is its own kind of trap.

A few of the Drinkers, those who were once Ghost Wolves and who believe that an unaligned path is the best way forward, push for the tribe to remain as neither Forsaken nor Pure—a cult apart, a faction unto itself. They don’t want the Drinkers to be Ghost Wolves, but think that the feuding werewolves that have dominated Uratha life for so many millennia have proven themselves incapable of fixing the world or finding a solution to the problems that have plagued them since the Sundering. It must be a new tribe, a new People, who bring a fresh approach unfettered by the grudges and old thinking of the past. It must be the Drinkers of the Well, and they must drink their fill of the font of inspiration and renewal and be unafraid to embrace whatever answers they find beyond the boundaries of the mind and sanity.

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The Firstborn

Creator Wolf is the Firstborn patron of the Drinkers of the Well—if she is indeed Firstborn. The stories of old are garbled, contradictory, confused. Indeed, the present reality is just as incomprehensible. Creator Wolf seems to have the power of a true Firstborn, but has not gathered it over time; she has simply appeared. She sees a world full of problems to be addressed, of cracks to be mended, and broken engines to be remade anew. She is a tide of change, but not of chaos, ever unsatisfied with the faults all around and endeavouring to improve and refine. Her siblings, both confused and yet at the same time entirely familiar with her existence, see her as calculating, perhaps even cold, focused with a machine-like intensity on the systems of reality and the endless potential that springs from within it; but they cannot deny her creativity, her raw passion for ingenuity with solutions.

• Danu-Ur was reborn in Basra, Iraq, when Fenris-Ur realized that he had long lost his sister-reflection, the Creation to his Destruction, and sought to clear a den into which she might be reborn. But that doesn’t make any sense—for Fenris-Ur, the Destroyer, surely could not have enacted such a moment of recreation, and Danu-Ur could surely not have simply willed herself into existence. Could she?

• Creator Wolf is Rabid Wolf. Rabid Wolf was once Creator Wolf, possessed of pure clarity of thought but always sought yet more, and drank so deep of the well of knowledge that exists beyond the border of reality; this broke her mind, turning her into a being of fractured but intense truth juxtaposed with the corruption of her spiritual power. So Creator Wolf fell. But that doesn’t make any sense—for here is Creator Wolf, and Rabid Wolf as well, and the two both exist at once. They do indeed seem to be the same entity, yet as if split from two realities, or as if reality itself has been split to allow both to exist at once—broken and whole, a pair of warped mirrors.

• This story is true. Creator Wolf never existed until now. The world is changing, though. You think Urfarah, a fundamental pillar of creation, could just keel over without creation adapting, healing, or trying to fix itself? The Forsaken have done good work over the past few millennia, and slowly corrected the heavy weight of the world to a stable form. Now’s the time for the relaunch, the reboot, capable of supporting the metaphysical mass of the system’s repair mechanism. That’s Creator Wolf. She never existed in Urfarah’s time, but the Great Predator knew she’d be needed one day, and she’s as much his daughter as any other Firstborn. Whoever wins the battle for her soul among the Drinkers, they’re the ones who’ll shape whether it’s Pure or Forsaken ideology that dominates the era to come.

June 3rd, 2024

The Prey

The Drinkers’ pursuit of the idigam matches well with the Forsaken paradigm of the hunt, albeit simultaneously rather askew from it. The idigam are each singular, matchless foes—most Uratha never encounter one, and so a keen sense of their handiwork and learning the lessons needed to hunt them has perhaps only a limited allure to the Forsaken heart. That said, the idigam are undeniably a great threat, and plenty of Uratha who have lost a great deal to the newly returned Moon-Banished are heeding the call of a new tribe that promises, above all else, a devoted focus on dealing with the problem these chaotic entities represent.

By comparison, the Drinkers’ wider hunt for those who change the world or hold it in stasis in ways the tribe deems inappropriate or sacrilegious resonates more with the Pure approach. It is a broad-reaching definition of prey that gives the individual werewolf a great deal of leeway to define targets as they see fit rather than as to their fundamental nature—open, perhaps, to abuse and hypocrisy, and if anything truly threatens the nascent Drinkers of the Well it is the possibility they crumble from within due to a crisis of faith. The Drinkers try to focus on bigger-picture prey, the werewolves or humans who are the reason that city can never pull itself out of urban decay or the meddling occultists whose sorcery has rotted the very fabric of reality.

Drinkers often focus on a rather more personal kind of prey as well—symbolic or metaphorical ambitions to be relentlessly pursued. The Drinkers of the Well claim to want to build a better world, and that means actually building something. Some are engineers or architects or simply labourers and crafters, determined to create perfect physical works that will serve as another cobble in the road to the future. Others delve deep into whatever intellectual or artistic pursuits they obsess over, pushing boundaries back as far as they will go and then carrying on regardless of the impossibility. In the course of this work, some Drinkers of the Well encounter what they see as a deeper truth of Danu-Ur’s clarity; visions of great machines behind the skin of existence, immense systems that have ground along their endless paths since the birth of the world, and false seemings lying over circuitry that dictates the laws of the Flesh. The Drinkers take these strange phenomena as prey too, seeking to unpick the mystery of this silent engine in the hope that it can be understood and its faulty workings laid bare and repaired.

June 3rd, 2024

Idividuals

Nicknames: Demiurges (academic), Dreamers (casual), Drunkards/Addled (insulting), Makers (slang)

Concepts: Engineer blessed by Danu-Ur’s sight, architect seeking perfection, drug-fuelled visionary, Ghost Wolf happy to have finally found acceptance, climate change activist turned werewolf, revolutionary firebrand, freshly-converted zealot, healer seeking to mend old wounds

Gifts: Inspiration, Shaping, Thought.

Tribal Renown: Either Purity or Wisdom (each tribe member chooses one).

June 3rd, 2024

Sacred Hunt

The Drinker of the Well Sacred Hunt grants your character the ability to diminish the prey’s influence over the world, denying them the 10-again quality on all dice pools to either change or hold in stasis their own nature or that of their surroundings. This applies as much to the efforts of the prey to build a barricade in their home as to that of an occultist warping the fundamentals of physics in an area. It never applies to the shapeshifting abilities of a werewolf—that is inherently and naturally within the Uratha’s nature, the perfect blend of change and continuity.

Additionally, the Drinker of the Well Sacred Hunt grants your character the ability to identify any Essence Shaping in her presence which stems from the prey, whether individuals affected by an Essence Shaping power or a lingering aura or corruption created by an idigam; she does not necessarily know the specific power in question, but does know it is the work of an idigam, and can tell whether the idigam is currently Coalesced or Formless.

June 3rd, 2024

Hunter’s Aspect

Pure members of the Drinkers of the Well can place the Reverie Condition as a Hunter’s Aspect. The victim is caught with a sense of her own impermanence, dissociated from her physicality as if the world around her was dreamlike and distant. She will attempt to avoid using any physical objects, from driving a car to opening a door to picking up a weapon, and must spend a point of Willpower to be able to make use of a particular interaction or tool for the Condition’s duration.

New Merit: Unfettered Ingenuity (••)

Prerequisites: Drinker of the Well

Effect: Once per session when faced with an immediate conundrum, puzzle, or material problem that she thinks needs fixing in a creative and constructive way, your character can gain the Inspired condition for that task, or can apply it to another character she can spend at least one turn communicating with. She can also roll her Wits + Crafts to gather tools in short order, acquiring what she needs from the environment or area and adapting it to her purpose through ingenuity and determination. If not used by the end of the scene, the Inspired condition fades. Neither she nor any other target gain any beats from the Inspired condition given via this merit.

Drawback: Your character also gains the Obsession condition towards solving the problem until the Inspired condition ends. She does not gain any beats from the Obsession condition.

New Merit: Danu-Ur’s Blood (••)

Prerequisites: Wolf-Blooded

Effect: The Wolf-Blooded of Danu’s line can see the fine workings of machinery and systems, and the hairline faults that run through them. By spending a scene observing a machine or a social system, such as the bureaucracy of an organization or the hierarchy of a gang, the Wolf-Blooded can identify the component most damaged or likely to break, whether literally or metaphorically—such as rebellious team members, bearings that will soon cause a catastrophic cascade of failures, or even in one notable incident a Wolf-Blooded astronomer who identified a small meteorite bearing a gaggle of void spirits aboard it which would pass through a momentary chink in the Warden Moon’s vigil.

New Rite: Paint the Well’s Ink (Pack Rite •••••)

Though it draws upon newly-forged laws of the Shadow that surround Creator Wolf’s emergence, this rite is somehow much older—long practiced by strange and heretical Lodges of visionaries and oracles.

This rite is only taught to Drinkers of the Well.

Symbols: Potential, mirrors, renewal, water

Action: Extended (5 successes; each roll represents 1 minute)

Success: During the ritual, the ritemaster paints the recipients’ skin with surreal patterns of hallucinogenic and toxic inks. At the culmination, all participants in the rite gain the ability to see through any sort of illusion, phantasm, or other mystical deception, and gain the ability to perceive any sort of supernatural ability being used in their presence, even if it would not normally be visible to them. This does not protect human members of the pack from other effects of witnessing supernatural powers that would affect them, like breaking points or Lunacy. The ritual lasts until the next sunrise, after which the recipients suffer the moderate Sick Tilt should they enter any combat during the next day until the sun sets once more.

June 3rd, 2024

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