Era of Apocalypse

The Era of Apocalypse, alternately the Age of Apocalypse, is the time period in which the 5th edition of Werewolf: the Apocalypse takes place, beginning when the Wyrm Ascendant began its final push to finish off Gaia and instigated the prophesized Apocalypse.

Overview[]

War. Famine. Pestilence. Death. The world ends not with a bang, as so many thought it would, but with a sonorous, doleful howl.

The world is in its death throes, shuddering in the grip of the Capitalocene era, its oceans acidified, its forests denuded, its climate superheated, its lifeforms plunging into extinction, all to sate that which is insatiable: the avarice of human beings. Autocrats rise to power, funding militaries and police forces that thrive as the people they ostensibly exist to protect languish, sicken, and starve.

To the people of the world, however, life goes on. People have more entertainment choices than ever before; their phones and computers receive a steady flow of data, most of which desensitizes the owners of these devices or offers easy escape. Pundits bloviate from televisions, on streaming services, in angry gatherings — millionaire actors paid by billionaire patrons to stoke everyone’s fury at each other, to tell people whom to hate, whom to blame for their problems. Sports, music, games, luxury on demand. Easy credit. Phantom money. Take out a loan to buy a car to drive to work to pay off the car. Hustle on the side. Acquire. Discard. Relax. Work harder. Invest. Enlist. Declare. The frog doesn’t realize it’s slowly being boiled to death.

Born of material despair, spiritual rot takes hold, serving as a beacon to cruel spirits and tempting a forlorn world into greater catastrophe. Greed is a virtue. Consumption is liberation. War makes us safe. Cruelty to one’s fellows and one’s environment is the pinnacle of achievement. “Normal,” as a human concept, has yielded to an unending series of crises, from the economic to the humanitarian to the ecological to the existential.

Spiritual Signs[]

Apocalypse Fracture — The Apocalypse in the Umbra

To some, the defining characteristic of the Era of Apocalypse is the omnipresence of Gaia's Howl, a faint yet constant presence on the periphery of all Garou's perception, incessantly reminding them of the urgency and direness of their mission.

Not surprisingly, as the shadow of the physical world, the Umbra exhibits the twisted agonies of the physical world in the time of Apocalypse. The same developments afflicting the physical world that the Garou occupy are evident in the Umbra, too, taking on pronounced spiritual resonances. Wounds in the earth weep ceaselessly in the Umbra, tormented spirits of natural features flit about in pained agitation, and sites of resource exploitation appear as corrosively barren or livid and violent.

Tonight, the Umbra itself seems to recoil from the Garou, or perhaps even to repel them. Many Garou speak of their caerns losing connections to the Umbra, or of being personally expelled from the spirit world after entering it. The spiritual boundary known as the Gauntlet has itself become more difficult to cross than it was in the past.

The world-spanning Venae Terrae, which became widely known of and was possibly created around the time of the Era of Apocalypse's onset, is speculated to be a manifestation of Gaia's suffering by a small subset of those aware of it, who admittedly possess an incredibly dim understanding of the Umbra and its inhabitants. So far, no shifter seems to have been made aware of its existence and given the opportunity to provide their thoughts on the matter.^[1]

Effects on the Garou[]

Since the very beginning of the Apocalypse, the Garou and their Nation began to unravel, and though it only recently fell apart, the cracks were already wide and deep long before then.

A common marking point for the start of the Era of Apocalypse is the infamous Last Battle, in which King Jonas Albrecht and his followers ventured into the Umbra to confront the Wyrm and its lieutenants. They encountered their nemeses, Margrave Yuri Konietzko and Tamara Tvarivich, and their combined forces, all sworn to the Wyrm. Albrecht fought the Wyrm’s forces, but when the legendary Black Spiral Dancer Zhyzhak arrived riding the Wyrm itself (though this is likely a post-hoc embellishment from storytellers who heard about the battle secondhand), the Garou went berserk and attacked their King instead. Jonas Albrecht, mortally wounded, managed to use his Silver Crown to kill Zhyzhak, but in doing so, destroyed the crown. Collapsing from his wounds, he managed to escape the Umbra, broken and barely alive. Thus, the Garou Nation and Jonas Albrecht would never reach the same heights they had stood at before, and the Apocalypse was upon the world.^[2]

After that great failure, things continued to go downhill for the Garou Nation. The Cult of Fenris, inflamed by hauglosk, left shortly afterwards to battle the Wyrm how they saw fit. The onset of the Apocalypse also led to Moon Cults gaining a modicum of popularity among several circles as Garou worldwide question whether the old ways of their kind are fit to remain in place in this new age.

The final breakup of the Garou Nation occurred at the last concolation, a grand moot that was supposed to affirm the Nation’s future direction. Instead, it exploded into acrimony, with individual septs and the Stargazers in their entirety leaving rather than attempting to find common ground. Shattered into individual tribes and septs, the memory of the Nation still haunts the Garou to this day.

Timeline of Events speculation[]

Official Werewolf: The Apocalypse material covering events during and surrounding the Era of Apocalypse is typically reticent to provide concrete dates for said events, in order to reflect in-universe fragmented and garbled information, as well as to provide a degree of flexibility for Storytellers designing their setting's recent history. As such, while contextual information can be used to estimate an approximate timeframe for numerous events, there is rarely any kind of 'smoking gun' to prove/disprove such estimates or alternatives to them.

Given that many of the events that kicked off the Era of Apocalypse correspond to events in older editions, it may be safe to assume that it began some time in the early-to-mid 2000s (most likely 2004/2005, the timeframe of Revised edition's Time of Judgment). As such, it is roughly analogous in timeframe to the modern nights of Vampire: the Masquerade, particularly its own 5th edition. However, the exact timeline is left open to individual interpretation, with alternative marking points for its beginning also being offered, such as the Trinity Test in July 1945.^[3]

The usurpation of the Cult of Fenris and their departure from the Garou Nation is known to have occurred well into the Era of Apocalypse but relatively shortly before the Nation's outright collapse, which would place such an event approximately in the mid-to-late 2010s. This estimate is corroborated by the free story The Deepest of Wounds (released on October 1st, 2023), which dates events depicting the tribe's fall to hauglosk to "five or so years" prior to the story's events. Assuming the story takes place in the year of its release (which is generally the case for contemporary World of Darkness material), the tribe's fall/departure would have occurred circa 2018.

Lastly, Shattered Nation (2024) in particular establishes that the fall of the Garou Nation occurred within living memory for many Garou (most prominently Dominique Omar, who was personally present at the final concolation despite having little in the way of seniority as a Garou).^[4] This aligns with the fact that were one to use the departure of the Cult of Fenris (circa 2018, see above) as a lower bound and the fact that the core rulebook (2023) assumes that younger player characters were not present to witness a living Nation as an upper bound, the most likely date for the final concolation and subsequent fall would be circa 2019-2021, more likely on the later side of that range than the earlier.