Garou glyph for the Atrocity Realm.
The Atrocity Realm, known to mages as the Wasteland, is one of the Near Realms. Banes breed here.
Raised of human pain. Millennia of suffering from all the world's victims have created this Realm, a place where the worst cruelties and tortures have been immortalized. No Garou seeks this place for glory - those that come here do so to learn, no matter how painful the lesson.
This Realm reflects the taint of the Wyrm as few others do outside of Malfeas. Many Theurges believe the psychic residue of countless acts of brutality, torture, and degradation in the physical world created the Atrocity Realm. It is all nightmares given form. Even worse, all the horrific acts the Realm’s emanations recreate reflect real events — from the massacres ordered by dictators to the personal torments of a single battered spouse. As creatures of half spirit, the atrocities perpetrated by shapeshifters stain this Realm even more than those of humans, and Garou who traveled here are often treated to exceptionally vivid scenes of the worst events of the Impergium.
The Realm is a foul-smelling wasteland of corpses and blood. Every step a traveler takes leaves a bloody footprint that quickly fills with wriggling maggots, and swarms of stinging flies assail outsiders like a thousand minute Furies sent to punish the guilty. The few structures are made of human corpses — mummified carcasses of mutilated victims arranged into walls held together with mortar made from the ashes of those burned alive, decorated with the cracked and shattered skulls of those who died at the hands of their abusers. Mountains of corpses divide the Realm into an endless maze, and a fresh scene of atrocity greets travelers around every corner. Screams, moans, and choking sobs emanate from every direction, hinting at the horrors taking place there.
In some ways, the Atrocity Realm resembles the Battlefield, but it lacks the focus on struggle. Every victim in the Atrocity Realm is helpless and undeserving of the suffering visited upon him. Every victimizer is merciless if not downright sadistic. Bane larvae gather around every scene of torment, growing fat on the emotions of the emanations. The scenes in the Atrocity Realm are only reflections of events, however. Visitors who wish to end the suffering and carnage can interfere with a scene or even disrupt events before the atrocity takes place, but this is ultimately futile. Once the travelers leave, the victims and victimizers take their places again and the scene begins once more as if nothing had changed. Some Garou claim a pack can exorcise an atrocity from the Realm by avenging or rectifying the victims’ suffering in the material world — bringing the serial killer to justice, trying the dictator for war crimes, or forcing the abusive parent to acknowledge the wrongness of his actions. However, many believe such undertakings are unwise. They argue that in the time it takes to purge just one scene from the Atrocity Realm dozens more will spring up in its place.
A Garou can fight the Realm more effectively by preventing the horrors from taking place in the first place. Although the ephemera of the Atrocity Realm are emanations like those of any other Realm, visitors can glean important information from the scenes of horror these shadow puppets reproduce. Events appear exactly as they did at the time of the atrocity, making it possible to investigate terrible crimes even if the perpetrator left behind no evidence that could point to her. A witness could also examine objects in the background of a scene. The visitor could study the relic that a victimizer stole from the room where he tortured and killed his victim. She could talk to eyewitnesses to the atrocity in order to learn something they knew about an unrelated topic or even rescue the victim long enough to question him about another event he remembers — if she can distract these shadow players from the horror in progress long enough to conduct such an interview. If an outsider interferes with a scene in this way, however, the Realm incorporates her into it in some way — usually as another of its potential victims.
Horror Show
The Realm harvests every atrocity one sentient being perpetrates upon another, and so it has assembled a virtually infinite palette of horrors. To make matters worse, the Atrocity Realm possesses an inherent awareness of the emotional triggers and psychological vulnerabilities of outsiders who come to it. Those repulsed by eye violence come upon many scenes that involve the stabbing, cutting, or gouging out of eyeballs, for example, and those driven to fury by violence against children can expect to see many atrocities involving the young as victims. Woe to the traveler who has personally committed an atrocity worthy of this Realm, for the Realm will confront him with his actions before he leaves. The Atrocity Realm knows how best to shock its visitors, however. It will never use the same horror often enough to inure the outsider to it, and it almost never presents a personal atrocity except as the climax to a carefully selected string of increasingly upsetting scenes of horror. Getting to the Atrocity Realm is easy and often unintended, since it calls to emotions that fuel its abhorrent scenes. Shapeshifters who dwell on thoughts of rage, violence, or death might find themselves unwittingly entering the Realm, possibly taking the wrong branch of a Moon Path or stumbling through a gateway in another Realm. Such accidental visitors cannot escape by conventional means like Gifts or Moon Bridges. The Realm only releases a traveler who willingly dies at the hands of one of its victimizing emanations. He must take the role of a victim and accept all the agony of the atrocity without offering any resistance. The Atrocity Realm ejects travelers upon their “death,” sending them to another Realm or to the material world.
If the visitor committed an atrocity with an echo in the Realm, he cannot leave the Atrocity Realm until he takes the role of his victim and dies at his own hands. Some Garou send members of their septs who have committed heinous crimes to the Atrocity Realm as punishment. The idea is that they will be forced to confront the suffering they caused and hopefully gain wisdom from the experience. They can then return to the sept cleansed of sin and resolved never to inflict such suffering again. Those who cannot face their guilt will be trapped in the Atrocity Realm forever — a punishment as terrible as any Hell humans can conceive. Such forcible presentation of one’s sins sometimes drives the shapeshifter mad with guilt or compels them to shocking acts of self-flagellation. Others throw themselves into Bane pits where they go slowly mad, or they learn the wrong lesson about their deeds and turn to the service of the Wyrm.
Breeding Pits
If Banes arise from the pain and degradation of the innocent, the Atrocity Realm is a perfect breeding ground for them. Countless pits of writhing bodies and a slurry of human bodily fluids serve as spawning beds for Bane larvae. They take many forms, but the most common include maggots with human faces and homunculi made from instruments of violence or torture. Scrags and other Banes guard the pits, protecting the larvae until the strongest are mature enough to cannibalize their weaker siblings and crawl out of the pits. Once free, the Banes seek out a scene within the Realm to fuel their growth further. Unlike the emanations in the Atrocity Realm, the Banes can leave this place to spread the Realm’s poison elsewhere. Visitors can attack them, although this is prob ably a bad idea given the sheer number of evil spirits that populate the Realm. If the Atrocity Banes successfully kill a Garou, their victim is mystically reborn in a Bane pit where various Banes torture him until he escapes, is rescued, or goes eternally mad.
The Atrocity Library
An edifice of black stone that resembles a mausoleum the size of a small city stands in one part of the Realm. The Banes tend to avoid this place and will not follow travelers through its entrance. The interior is a massive library of books bound in the flesh of those who committed atrocities worthy of the Realm — one victimizer per book — and the pages similarly consist of the flesh of their victims. The books have no titles or other identifying marks, and sit on the shelves in no logical order. Any literate visitor can read the books without difficulty as though they were written in her native language. Some books are but a single sheet of macabre paper pressed between the covers. Others are thousands of pages long. Each describes every atrocity the victimizer committed in gruesome but clinical detail. It never uses names, instead referring to the victimizer as “the subject” and the victim as “the object.” Innocent bystanders are simply “a witness” or “witness #3” This makes connecting an atrocity to a specific perpetrator difficult. Theoretically, a reader could identify a person by the specifics of her crime, but in practice atrocities throughout human history have a depressing sameness to them. Torture, abuse, rape, and murder are nothing new to the world, and even serial killers with calling cards have their copycats.
Visitors cannot permanently destroy any of the books or remove them from the library. The Atrocity Library may seem vast and empty, but it has inhabitants. Shapeshifters trapped in the Atrocity Realm often take refuge in it until they can work up the will to face the Realm’s horrors once more. Outsiders sometimes come to the Realm on a specific mission, and the library makes a relatively safe base of operations. Occasionally a mage will come to the library to perform research for their magical arts. These tend to be the worst kind of willworkers, however. While some study sorcerous rituals that entail horrific acts of pain and degradation in order to fight those who performed them, more often they instead hope to reproduce the ritual.
The strangest inhabitants of the library are the Atrocity Librarians. These tall, humanoid creatures have enlarged skulls and huge, black eyes. They can speak and understand any language and are the only ones who can navigate the labyrinth of shelves to locate specific books. They can’t locate a victim or victimizer by name, but they can find the appropriate book if they have at least an ounce of the target’s hair, flesh, or blood. They will not do so unless the patron already has a book or a page in the library. Otherwise, they feign cooperation but never produce the promised materials. If the visitor grows impatient or makes threats, the Librarians drop hints that committing some atrocity against another patron might expedite their search — which is, strictly speaking, absolutely true. As a result, the Atrocity Library sees occasional outbreaks of intense violence between the outsiders who take refuge in it. Those travelers who die at the hands of other outsiders while within the library re-form within it as Atrocity Librarians.
- The Modern Age
- Laws of the Realm
References[]
- WTA: Umbra: The Velvet Shadow, p. 45-50
- WTA: Umbra Revised, p. 20, 24, 45, 52-54
- WTA/cMET: Mind's Eye Theatre: Book of the Wyrm, p. 47-50
- MTAs: Beyond the Barriers: The Book of Worlds, p. 67-69