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CreditsAuthors: N. Conte, David Hill, Jeremy Kostiew,

Danielle Lauzon, Chris Shaffer, Leath Sheales, Filamena Young, Eric Zawadzki

Developer: Stew WilsonConsulting Developers: Garron Lewis, Ryan OwensEditor: Danny James WalshCreative Director: Rich ThomasArt Direction and Design: Mike ChaneyCover Art: Borja Puig LinaresInterior Art: Borja Puig Linares, Andrew Trabbold,

Chris Bivins, Brian Leblanc, John Cobb, Jeff “El Jeffe’” Holt, Richard Kane Ferguson

Special ThanksJeremy “Rorqual are cool” Kostiew for jumping

in to bring the Kami back in style. Ian “Living Archive” Watson for being the world’s

biggest pack-rat of weird World of Darkness facts.

© 2014 CCP hf. All rights reserved. Reproduction without the written permission of the publisher is expressly forbidden, except for the purposes of reviews, and for blank character sheets, which may be reproduced for personal use only. White Wolf, Vampire, World of Darkness, Vampire the Masquerade, and Mage the Ascension are registered trademarks of CCP hf. All rights reserved. Vampire the Requiem, Werewolf the Apocalypse, Werewolf the Forsaken, Mage the Awakening, Promethean the Created, Changeling the Lost, Hunter the Vigil, Geist the Sin-Eaters, W20, Storyteller System, and Storytelling System are trademarks of CCP hf.

All rights reserved. All characters, names, places and text herein are copyrighted by CCP hf.CCP North America Inc. is a wholly owned subsidiary of CCP hf.

This book uses the supernatural for settings, characters and themes. All mystical and supernatural elements are fiction and intended for entertainment purposes only. This book contains mature content. Reader discre-tion is advised.

Check out the Onyx Path at http://www.theonyxpath.com

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Table of Contents

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Introduction 7Through the Skin 7Exploration 8Senses and the Otherworlds 8Adaptation 9Nothing is Real 10How to Use this Book 10

Chapter One: Penumbra 13The Other Side of the Mirror 13Touching the Spirit World 14

Second Breath 14Domains of the Triat 16

The Wyld Lands 16Weaver’s Webs 17Wastelands of the Wyrm 18Warring Triat 18Traveling the Spirit World 19Meaning Made Manifest 21

Genius Loci 22Blights 22Storytelling Blights 22

Chimares 22Storytelling Chimares 23

Epiphs 23

Expressing Concepts 24What Are They Good For? 24Inhabitants 24

Glens 24Places of Learning 25Places of Denial 25

Hellholes 25Nuclear Repository Hellholes 25Urban Hellholes 26

Trods 27Keys 27Living History 27Party of a Lifetime 28

Webs 28Wage Slaves 28Unexpected Webs 28

Wyldings 29Wylding Spirits 29

Other Layers 29The Periphery of Thought 29The Edge of Darkness 30

Faces in the Mirror 31St. Jacinta’s Medical Center 31Clayton City Park 31Moors Bottling Company Chemical Waste Plant 31Festival Market Town 32Tall Pines Cemetery 32Oak Ridge Library 33

Alsart Oasis 33Primrose Orphanage 33Panacea Pharmaceuticals Office Building 33Lonely Highway 33

Hashima, The Ghost Island 33The Ghost Island 33The Refinery (Blight) 34Tomorrow Brings Opportunity (Chimare) 34Wild Reclamation (Epiph) 34The Woods (Glen) 35

Chapter Two: The Near Umbra 37Near and Far 37

Airts 38Between Realms 38Moonlit Airts 39Moon Bridge 39Moon Path 39

Other Methods 40Spirit Gates 40Owl’s Wings 40Spirit Trains 41Pattern Web 41Domains and the Dream Zone 42Dream Zone 42Malfeas 43

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The Abyss 43Coming and Going 44Descending the Abyss 44Climbing 44Flying 44

The Three Paths 45The Iron Path 45The Gold Path 45The Silver Path 45

Abyssal Denizens 45Spirits 46Nightmaster and the Hive of the Jagged Maw 46

Aetherial Realm 46Space Travel 47The Moon 47The Sun 47The Reaches 48Other Planets 48

Going Deeper 48Arcadia Gateway 48

Seelie and Unseelie 49A Winter’s Tale 51

Atrocity Realm 52Horror Show 53Breeding Pits 53The Atrocity Library 54

Battleground 54The Two Roads 55The Plain of the Apocalypse 57

CyberRealm 57Entry and Exit 58Spider City 58Uptown 58Downtown 59Old Town 59The Pit 60The Computer Web 60

Erebus 61Arrival 61A Landscape of Atonement 61Purification 62The Unforgivable 62

The Changing Breeds 63The Flux Realm 64

Portraying Flux 64The Cocoon 65The Coil 65

The Legendary Realm 66The Kingdoms 66Wylderness 66

The Midnight Land 67The Fimbulwinter 67The Hungry Dust 67The Great Miasma 68

Pangaea 68Entry and Exit 70The Elder Serpent 70The Graveyard of the Lost 70The Savage Tribes 70The Desert Barbarians 71The Thulan 71The Zarak-Ur 71The Mountain People 71

Scar 72Entry and Exit 72The Gnosis Batteries 72The Last Junction 73The Barons of Industry 73Troubled Economy 74

Summer Country 75The Isle of Self 75The Well of Life 75

Cloudtop High 75The Garden of Delight 76Coming and Going 76Now 76

Wolfhome 77The Countryside 78The Town 78Shelters 78The Sewers 79The Zoo 79

The Camps 79Entry and Exit 79

Chapter Three: Worlds Beyond 81Minor Realms 81

Designing Minor Realms 81Example Minor Realms 82Search Engine 82Synesthesia 82

The Homelands 83Black Furies 83

Bone Gnawers 84Children of Gaia 85Fianna 85Get of Fenris 85Glass Walkers 86Red Talons 86Shadow Lords 87Silver Fangs 88Stargazers 88Uktena 88Wendigo 89

The Lost Homelands 89Black Spiral Dancers 89Bunyip 90Croatan 90Silent Striders 90

The Changing Breeds 91Corax 91Nuwisha 91

The Membrane 92Anchorheads 92Crossing the Membrane 92Disconnection in Anchorheads 93New Anchorheads 93Rite of Anchoring the Divide 93

Example Anchorheads 94Dimensional Portal 94River Rapids 94Briar Patch 95

Other Passageways 96The Astral Umbra 96

Denizens 96Conceptual Spirits 96Mages 97Nightmares 97Vampires 97

Travel within the Astral Umbra 97Venturing into the Astral Umbra 98Before Harano 98Lost Theurge 98Astral Assault 99

The Dark Umbra 99Denizens 99Spectres 100Werewolves 100

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Travel within the Dark Umbra 101Venturing into the Dark Umbra 102Stemming the Tide 102Ancestral Rescue 102Spectral Binding 102The Quest 103

The Deep Umbra 103Disconnection 103Denizens 104Celestines 104Triat 104Bunyip 105The Fera 105

Travel within the Deep Umbra 105Venturing into the Deep Umbra 106The Abandoned Post 107The New Celestine 107Trial and Error 107

Chapter Four: Spirits 109The Basic Nature of Spirits 109

Awakening 111Communication 112Dealing with the Triat 113Chiminage 113

Spiritual Ecology 114Broods 114Gafflings 115Jagglings 115Incarnae 116Celestines 117Outside the Cycle: Emanations 117

An Animistic World 117Cockroach Gaffling 118A Garou’s Perspective 119

Dreams-of-the-Horizon, Chi-merling Jaggling 119An Hour Ago 120

The Memory-Broker, a Jaggling of Things Forgotten 120

Things Best Remembered 121Denizens of the Velvet Shadow 121

Banes 121Bioweapon 121Blood Currency 122Consciousness 123Flame Wars 123Reroute 123Obscenity 124Trendy Hat 124Witch Hunt 125

Gaian Spirits 125City Mascot 125City Tree 125Crowdfunding 126Gridlock Beetle 126Meme 127Murica 127Nuntius 128Srador — King of Pets 128The Road Warrior 129

Weaver Spirits 130Bot-Net 130Brand Loyalty 130Consumer Entertainment 131Cultural Appropriation 131Digital Game 131Downtown Train 132Lenocinor 132Old Is New Again 132Pervium 133Polyteron 133Silver Screen 133Skepticism 134Truck Guardian 134

Wyld Spirits 135Anonymous 135Beleben 136Chirurgeon 136Creepypasta 137Farm-to-Table 137GMO 137Made-Me-Do-It Devil 138Stood Ground 138

Superhero 139Urban Art 139You-Only-Live-Once 139

Chapter Five: The Chosen 141Those Selected By Hand 141

Kami and the Wolf 142Created for a Task 143Mother May I? 144A Place of Purity 146It Grows for Gaia 147It Creeps or Crawls, Swims or Flies 148Gaia’s Sanctified 149Do Not Tread 150

Becoming Gaia’s Gifted 150The Geasa 151Kami Creation 151Human Skin 151Animal Hide 152Tree Bark and Topsoil 152

Powers 153The Might of the Immobile 156

Sample Kami 158Agatha Prim 158Plot Hooks 158

Cousin Rabbit 159Plot Hooks 160

Drosera glanduligera 160Plot Hooks 160

The Hive 160Plot Hooks 161

Misha Bush 161Plot Hooks 162

The One-Oh-Oh 162Plot Hooks 163

Opinnartokua 163Plot Hooks 164

Shallowbranch 164Plot Hooks 165

Shrewton Village 165Plot Hooks 165Sam

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IntroductIon 7

Through the SkinYou’re falling asleep. Safe in bed or leaning against

the window of a subway train, or propped up in a chair in your living room watching for whatever it is you need to watch. You’re just about asleep, when your sense of gravity changes. The place you’re in has tilted a bit to the left or right, and your limbs weigh so much that you can’t move them. Even your head is too heavy to lift. Meanwhile your body itself, your core, has no weight whatsoever. Your limbs and head drag behind your body as you feel like you’re floating up and out of where you were sitting or laying before. You have no control over this floating feeling, and you’re now sure you’re a foot up in the air looking first at your ceiling, and then as you drift, down at your unconscious body where it rests. It is your body, you’re sure of it, but you are no longer in it. The objects around you, your night table or the window curtains, glow strangely and other things have vanished. Your wife laying next to you, or the other passengers on the subway train, all gone. It’s just you, floating, surrounded by a luminous landscape. Then you think, ‘this is a lie.’ All at once, you realize that nothing you’re looking at is real and there’s a membrane on reality as you knew it, like a bad

matte painting at the back of a stage play. You feel like, if you could just reach out with your arm and push, you could push right through that skin and go… you don’t know where.

Which is when you wake up. And that’s the closest most people will ever get to

seeing the world beyond our world. We call it an out-of-body experience, or a sleep paralysis, or kanashibari — depending on who you ask and when. In the World of Darkness, this feeling isn’t a confusion of a sleeping mind. In fact, this is a brief glimpse of truth just past our reality. Our world is not the only world, and that otherworld is attached to ours in a way that is perceiv-able and we can transgress if we are sensitive enough and have the ability to do so.

The Garou call it the Umbra. And this world, or worlds, just beyond our own is the subject of this book.

For the werewolf, their childhood is full of sleep paralysis and brief encounters with the world beyond. Helpless glimpses through the skin of reality. From nightmares to daydreams to out of body experiences, the Umbra haunts many young Garou-to-be. Is it any wonder, then, when the First Change comes, the were-wolf become nearly obsessed with discovering, exploring, and pretending to master the Umbra? The first time a

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Garou crosses over it’s like the fulfillment of a promise made to them all through their childhood, and the thrill of that promise fulfilled never really fades.

ExplorationTraditionally and in many cases, Werewolf: The

Apocalypse is horror that is invasive. Something else — many alien things — have crept into our world. This horror has infected not just our lives, but the characters’. We play flesh and blood people who have, in some way, been infested with otherness, the wolf and the spirit world, and all of the strange outsider culture that comes along with. We, as our characters, dread turning that familiar corner to the butcher shop down the street. Not because we know what’s there, but because this time we might find something there that isn’t supposed to be there. And the characters have to survive the encounter with it, yet remain in the real world as we understand it. As we know the world to be, our Werewolf charac-ters must struggle against forces from outside intent on coming in and changing everything we care about. They infect, and they change everything for the worse. This invasion is unwelcome and unnatural and this is what, in many ways, the Werewolf character struggles with.

But it doesn’t always have to be like this for a Were-wolf chronicle. In the Umbra, the opposite is true. The characters are the invaders who only half belong in a world of fluid reflections like quicksilver and liquid mirrors. These are not exclusively stories of invasive horror. Instead, our characters have ventured outside the world as they understand it to explore. Maybe they go unwillingly, or without a full understanding of where they are going. That doesn’t matter, because they will discover the impossible in the Umbra. Possibility is the order of the day and chaos becomes a sort of order. It is the flesh of the character that becomes unnatural, instead of the wolf, and that flesh is a burden. Perhaps if the wolf could simply shed her skin out here, in the deep, and embrace the illogical, impossible otherness of the Um-bra, she would be free and happy. She would be freed of the shackles of knowledge and simply know. She would be free of consciousness and personality and simply be. Or better, she would lose all concept of self and simply become a part of the universe at large.

And rarely, that may be the end result of a long story in the Umbra. The characters seek to explore and understand and know, and as they do, they realize the non-sense of the Umbra is the only kind of sense worth having. It is addictive, being unreal in an unreal place, and maybe this is why humans who go across the gauntlet, in whatever manner they manage it, rarely ever

come back. The Umbra is a place of fright and potential psychological damage, but at least that is natural to it. In this way, it is almost a place of peace compared to the reality our characters are born into.

Senses and the Otherworlds

As the Storyteller, discovery of otherworlds and spirit beings begins with you. To start off you have to describe the Umbra as what it appears to be and how it feels.

Though it doesn’t and shouldn’t end with you, once you’ve set the tone, you must insist on players getting involved in bringing the strange to life.

For now, as the Storyteller, you must concentrate on senses. All of them. And perhaps more of them than the standard five you’re used to from grade school. The Umbra must be a sensual experience, with stimulation coming at the characters from all corners and exciting all of their senses at once. The old rule for writing, or getting started as a writer is that every page of your story should have at least one clear sensory detail. This isn’t bad advice for the Storyteller either, though you must adjust the pacing. Where can you, as the Storyteller, add a touch of sense to every interaction on your end. From Storyteller characters speaking to answering questions the players might ask you, can you include a sensory detail to ground the unreal in the player’s minds and bring the Umbra to throbbing, slick, singing life? You just have to dive head first into it.

This takes practice, but as with many Storytelling techniques you can use shortcuts to assist you in being more sensual at the table. Create yourself a cheat sheet of colors, smells, textures, and adjectives that describe these things. If you bring your characters to a vivid place like an Umbral river of blood, to say that the blood smells coppery says something very different than saying that the river smells acrid or metallic and sweet. But having some lists at hand with evocative words that immediately stimulate your imagination will surely help you stimulate your players. Once you have these lists, the best place to start is to look at your own language and habits. The next time you start to say ‘you see…’ to tell the players what is around their characters, replace ‘see’ with another sense. You smell. You hear. You feel. You swallow.

You can use these sensory details to link import-ant story hooks in your players’ minds as well. If you have introduced them to a very specific and important river goddess, and talk about the smell of orchids on fresh water every time she appears, add her scent to an

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otherwise unrelated scene, and implicate her. ‘You see nothing but dead werewolves in the spiritual re-flection of this cistern, dozens, but the rancid smell of curdled blood blends with fresh water and fresher flowers. Familiar flowers.’ Or perhaps clue them into a major problem when the river goddess appears, but they smell nothing. Or something off. The Umbra, for all its chaos, makes its own sort of sense, and vi-olations of these rules may indicate to the characters something is wrong.

There’s more than sight and smell to work from as well. Consider how your character would feel as their sense of time is confused by the fluid nature of the unreal. What do they do when one of the characters perceives herself as moving just a few sec-onds faster than the others in the time stream. What about their kinetic sense? Most people experience a pit-of-the-stomach sort of fear that comes along with dizzy unstable movement that you can surely take advantage of from time to time.

Just keep a sense of balance in mind. When you have inflicted horrible, stomach churning sensory details to your players for most of a session, break it up the next session with moments of purifying peace. If you want a sweet cake, you add some salt to make the sweet stand out. It’s true in cake, and it’s true in your Storytelling of the Umbra.

AdaptationExploration of the Umbra isn’t for the players

alone and discovery is something the Storyteller may experience as well as they take their characters to the realms beyond. Some of the best moments that can come out of a roleplaying game start out with a player suggesting something the Storyteller hadn’t planned for and the excitement of player and Storyteller alike working out ‘what happens next’ as a result. Because so very little is concrete and real in the Umbra, a thing that is true right now may not be true a breath later. In this way the Storyteller has a great deal of leverage when it comes to letting the players play in their sandbox.

It starts out simply enough. After you’ve filled your players’ minds with sights and sounds and smells that are evocative, you ask them a leading question. “What type of spirit do you see?” “Why is the bridge broken?” “Who came here just before you, and how do you know?” Leading questions like these take some of the creative load off you as the Storyteller and help your players get used to the idea of occasionally taking reins over what could be. Since you’re in the

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Umbra, even a recalcitrant player who wants no agency at all may be tempted if she can’t give a wrong answer. Often, you’ll be surprised with what your players come up with. That’s the idea. In this way stories in the Um-bra are exploratory for you as well. You challenge your Storytelling prowess against your players’ creativity to tell a story of what-if together. Memorizing spirit stats and weapon rule page numbers is all well and good, and has its place, but absolute knowledge of ‘what is true in your campaign’ is as fluid for you as the Storyteller as it is for the characters within your story. Anything is possible.

Sometimes, especially if you can incorporate lead-ing questions into your game style, your players will suggest without being asked. Say yes more often and chase them down the rabbit hole. Let your players tell you the dream she has while in the Astral, and instead of shrugging it off, use it. Wring it free of every drop of story fodder you can and encourage her to bring you free story ideas again next time.

This may be a part of your play style already, and your players may already love taking the reins from time to time. In that case, how much more experimental can you get? Can you draw players into acting as additional Storyteller characters for a particularly powerful moment in only one character’s story? Is this a scene that could benefit from taking the group to a particularly ethereal location in your area and playing there, or even playing the scene out as a live action scenario? What about a scene in the deepest Umbra where nothing quite makes sense, played out by having the players switch characters with each other. No change in who the character is, just who is playing them and the fallout next session when someone did something unforgivable or unexpected or out of their normal behavior. In the Umbra, you can get away with a lot, so this is the time to get experimental. This is the time to try things that would never work as a full time technique with your group.

Nothing is RealThe Umbra moves, grows, shrinks and changes with a

mercurial proficiency we can only pretend to understand. Outside of the Umbra, the characters understand what is real and what isn’t real. As a Storyteller and as players, you can take this to a meta level of understanding. Just because something exists in this book does not mean it all must necessarily exist in your Umbra. Much of this book focuses on strange and unique experiences meant to stand out as examples of the bizarre nature of the worlds beyond. That’s a great deal of uniqueness,

and it might clutter your game’s cosmology. When in doubt, rely on flexibility and consistency. Anything in this book can be true, but that doesn’t mean all things in this book are true at the same time. Or in the same game. So long as all of your players are on board with the same understanding and you remain consistent about what they understand out of character and what you have decided to change from the book in character, pick and choose as you desire. Anything is possible, and truth is what you make it.

How to Use this BookW20: Umbra is a book that empowers Storytellers

and players alike, giving them the tools they need to look at the spirit world with fresh, new eyes. This book lets the players explore the mystery of the unknowable with confidence as it provides the Storytellers and players the tools needed to understand how the Umbra is constructed. In character, the Umbra is a place that is impossible to know and fully comprehend to the human mind, but that doesn’t mean it has to be chaos and frustration for your gaming group.

Chapter One: Penumbra covers the taste, smell, and feel of the Penumbra for what it is. See it for what it appears to be. This chapter will take you through the process of crossing over in detail as well as give you usable, story driven examples of places in the real world affected by the spirits in the Penumbra and how places in the Penumbra are affected by the events in those real world places.

Chapter Two: The Near Umbra explores the Realms in great detail, showing how, or if, they interact with one another, and why a werewolf would visit them. Further, this chapter explains what the Near Umbra is like between the Realms and what it looks and feels like to be in this vast nothing between realities. What does it feel like to move between Realms and how does it work? What is a Moonlit Airt, and what exciting and terrible things can happen when traveling along it?

Chapter Three: Worlds Beyond takes a look at plot hooks and story fodder that will take you through the Realms and into the Anchorheads. What is the Membrane and what happens when you cross it? What is Disconnection and how do werewolves protect them-selves against it? Further, this chapter explores the Deep Umbra — the vast nothing, full of possibility. A place where outsider horror and two fisted pulp science fiction are separated only by chance, what can the characters experience here?

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IntroductIon 11

Chapter Four: Spirits explores the cosmology and metaphysics of spirits. Here you’ll get details on how spirits operate, how they ‘think’ or if they even do. Players and Storytellers alike can draw both story ideas and roleplaying guidelines for dealing with spirits. In addition, find well over fifty new spirits for use in your chronicle. Strange, unique spirits updated to bring new culture to the Umbra and give you ideas of just how much our world affects the next.

Chapter Five: The Chosen asks: who are the real Chosen of Gaia? Is it her warriors, or is it the Kami? Spirit-things created by Gaia to a specific task and filled with her blessings, what are these rare and mysterious entities, and how can you use them in your game? What is their history, and are they really Gaia’s fomori? It also includes several example Kami to pick and choose from to bring directly into your game.

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PENUMBRA 13

Chapter One: Penumbra

Joseph shivered as the wave of cold washed over him. It turned to hot and his muscles tightened. His heart pounded. The world itself shimmered as though caught in rising ribbons of heat. Then all color and sound seemed to drain out of the world. He fought the urge to panic as something unseen pressed in on him.

All at once he passed through and felt like he dropped to the ground, though he’d never left it. The weight vanished and he could breathe again. Too quickly. Breath after breath, he felt like he was hyperventilating. “Can’t breathe,” he choked.

Amari looked back at her cub and grinned. “Easy. You’re just taking your Second Breath, is all. You tasted one when you were born. But that was only half the story. Nice and slow. Deep breaths. Feel that? Feel how clean it is? This is your home, Joseph Star-Treader. This is where you belong.”

He listened to her words, focused on the sound, on her eyes. Joseph’s breath slowed down. His skin tingled with sensations he couldn’t understand. The world around him was different. It looked like the one he’d left, but the trees weren’t in the right places. And the air, it smelled different, tasted different. Lighter somehow.

“Here, we don’t have decades of pollution filling the air. This is the world as Gaia remembers it. Go ahead. Try it out as the wolf.”

Joseph nodded and shifted into his white-pawed Lupus form, muscles knotting and warping, bones reconfiguring themselves, his perspective dropping lower to the ground and yet opening up. He reeled from the impact. He could almost taste the sticky sap oozing from the Penumbral trees. He heard it all, each individu-al leaf rustling in the wind. His paws sank into the warm, moist grass and waves of scent wafted up to his nose, of soil and fresh grass, flowers, animal spirits, all drifting on the wind. He looked up at Amari with his green eyes full of wonder.

She grinned. “Welcome home.”

The Other Side of the Mirror

Just on the other side of perception lies the Penumbra. For Garou, it is a missing piece of the world. They keenly feel its absence while they walk in the land of flesh and blood. Gaia’s children yearn for the spirit world. It is their birthright, one half of their home separated from them by a barrier of spiritual calcification: the Gauntlet. Erected in prehistory by a cosmic force of stasis, the Gauntlet divides the realms of flesh and spirit and would forever keep them apart. The Garou aren’t so easily dissuaded.

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By their dual heritage of flesh and spirit, werewolves walk in both worlds. The Gauntlet makes transition between realms difficult but not impossible. In places where it is thin, such as the rare unspoiled wilds and caerns home to Garou septs, packs cross over frequently. The process is much more taxing in the hearts of smog-choked cities and industrial centers where the Gauntlet is strong. Weaver-spirits cast their webs over the wall between worlds and strengthen the Gauntlet, threatening to completely seal away some regions.

Garou and other Gaian creatures fight this calcification tooth and claw. As the Apocalypse draws nigh, perhaps only by unifying both sides of the world can they prevent the destruction of reality. Certainly the warriors of Gaia grow weaker when cut off from their spiritual halves, just as the world itself does.

Battles for Umbral harmony begin in the Penumbra. It is the closest Umbral realm, a spiritual reflection of the physical world that humans know. All throughout the world it mirrors the material realm with ephemeral reflections. Here, in the Penumbra, things come alive in a way that mundane senses cannot fully appreciate. Creatures of flesh and spirit such as the Garou feel the pulse of the world. It’s like coming home again. Being born again. Every breath is like the first breath of fresh air to a person who has only known the polluted air of a big city. But before a werewolf can revel in the feeling, she must push through the Gauntlet.

Touching the Spirit World

Crossing the Gauntlet into the Penumbra is an ability inherent to all werewolves and most Fera. Many younger Garou go unaware of this ability until taught by a spirit or an older werewolf. Once they are aware of it the act becomes second nature just as much as changing forms, if not always so easily done. Garou spiritualists describe the transition as something like ceasing to move forward in one world and moving laterally into another; accordingly, they call the process “stepping sideways” into the Umbra.

Before she can attempt to step sideways a werewolf must meditate upon a reflective surface. Still pools of water, mirrors, windows, all serve as focuses for the werewolf’s will to reach the other world. Her Gnosis reaches for the Penumbra; this stirring is much like reaching out to part a veil. Many describe the feeling as similar to pushing through a thin sheet of water that leaves one’s skin dry but tingling with the sensation of goosebumps. Others say it feels like pressing bodily into a layer of gelatinous liquid. In both cases the Gauntlet can seem warm (in places of spiritual strength) or cold (where the Gauntlet is thick and oppressive). Some werewolves ascribe a sticky feeling to it like plunging through a great spider web, especially in cities and places of spiritual sterility.

At the moment of transition, a werewolf’s pulse quick-ens. The hair on her neck stands up (or the fur on her whole body if she’s in Lupus form). Her mind races with a feeling like sudden realization. It is a transformation of flesh into spirit, matter into ephemera. With a final surge she is through. The Gauntlet releases her and she stands fully in the Penumbra. That is, if she successfully stepped sideways. It’s not always quite so simple.

On rare occasions a werewolf gets stuck in the Gauntlet. This occurs more frequently in places where the Gauntlet is thickest, and it’s one of the most horrifying feelings a werewolf can experience. For several hours, she feels what the Wyrm must have felt over eons, bound in the Weaver’s web, helpless and pulled between worlds, residing in nei-ther. No matter how hard the werewolf thrashes she cannot tear free of the webs. The harder she pulls, the more they restrict her. Slashing claws avail her not against these spiri-tual bindings. For the duration she is prey, unless another werewolf can pull her free. Those who have experienced this horrifying state recount the visions of madness that assault their minds: Earth roiling in body and spirit, soul-crushing cataclysms, pain and Rage and hatred directed at all reality. A microcosm of the Wyrm’s madness afflicts the trapped werewolf and forever after she understands the enormity of their enemy’s malaise. To imagine Gaia so ensnared just before the Wyrm devours Her or the Weaver chokes the life from Her is enough to incite any Garou to frenzy.

Opposite that feeling of ensnarement is the affirmation a werewolf feels upon reaching the Penumbra. As she settles into ephemeral form, the traveler feels like she is stretching stiff muscles. The world is somehow more real. Scents are sharper, colors are more vibrant. Away from the bustle of Man’s cities the air is clear and fresh, the grass underfoot is warm and spongy, brimming with green vitality. Immersion in the Penumbra heightens every sensation: the thump of paws on dirt, the touch of another’s skin, the warmth of the sun on one’s back. To Garou, the oppressive dullness of human senses fall away when they change form. In the Penumbra her senses come alive yet again, and even the Homid form can see and hear more sharply, taste the changes on the wind.

Sometimes the added awareness brings into sharp focus the corruption eating at the heart of reality. Especially in cities, where infrastructure and government rot from within, the Penumbra reflects that spreading sickness. Wise Garou treasure what few havens they have left in the World of Darkness.

Second BreathA werewolf’s first emergence into the Penumbra marks

an important step toward of the Rite of Passage. Some mystics call this “the Second Breath,” because a werewolf has not truly taken her second breath of the world until she has also

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