Okay, this is a little bit background for a book that I’ve been kind of nursing along as it stands now.  And by little bit I mean basically the entire history of the world going all the way back into near prehistoric times. It was really just an attempt to hammer out the tone I wanted for the book, an attempt to create a semi solid back-story that I could rely on and draw from as I began seriously sitting down and writing the book. The book itself concerns a war between werewolves and wererats. There’s a faction of werewolves that basically see wererats as ugly and impure, and they want to remove them from the shape-shifter gene pool as a matter of racial pride. Sound familiar to anyone?

It’s a little bit of a jab at…many things actually. Warhammer 40k, World of Darkness, Internet Furry Subculture, the werewolf fandom, and even the PC vs. Console Gamer war at one point. But my intention was never to be overly critical about these things, it’s never much more than a playful critique. It’s very much satire and it’s all in good fun and it’s meant to be entertaining.

I only ask that you read this little ditty to the very end. Because it’s kind of….totally insane. It’s over the top and it’s probably not my best piece of writing.


Some time in the very distant past, practically in Earth’s prehistory even, the world was crawling with supernatural creatures, not necessarily magical, but often times not entirely natural either. Over time these creatures came together to form primitive cultures and societies, often times these Monster Nations where tribal and xenophobic, Earth was in a constant state of war as supernatural army clashed against supernatural army, humanity scurried beneath these warring titans like vermin. The leaders of these early nations grew in power and age until at long last the affairs of their own people became insignificant to them, and in time the nobility of that ancient age became corrupt and decadent. As they themselves grew lazy, fat and drunk on power, the world outside became more savage, more violent. Humanity was at very best target practice, but there where two types of creature considered even lower than humanity. One was the vampire, and the other was the shape shifter. Both owed their low status not to a lack of individual power, but to their lack of any kind of organization, most of the time these beings didn’t group together in numbers larger than ten, hardly a match for a legion of battle hardened warriors. Times changed however, the age old societies created by the greater monsters began to fail, collapsing under the weight of time and corruption.

It is unknown who rebelled first, the shape shifting races  or the blood drinkers, but a small rebellion in what would one day become modern day Cambodia ended in failure, the battle was bloody and the victory costly for the Elves who ruled in that area however, word spread, and some time latter an army of werewolves and vampires united and overthrew the Gold Citadel that stood somewhere in Europe. It was an end of one age and the beginning of another, all over the world, vampires and shape shifters rebelled, and together brought entire nations to their knees. The world was laid out before them, the various species that once ruled and mocked them were now cowering and pleading for mercy beneath their fangs and claws. The slaughter that followed remains unequaled in the history of the Earth, it was genocide on a global scale, entire species driven to extinction by the vengeful legions of the night. If the horror mankind inflicts upon itself has any root outside our own deranged minds, it must have been learned in those dark times.

Time marched on, humanity began to form it’s own countries and nations, but they didn‘t threaten the monsters who preyed on them. Without any rivals, the armies that once brought entire dynasties to their knees disbanded, but the old ties remained. Being more numerous and combat oriented than the vampires, the shape shifters had made up the bulk of the fighting forces, (Note: At the time the vampires both lacked the blood powers they have today and had difficulty reproducing, one vampire turning a human over a period of months, while a single werewolf could and often did infect entire villages by contaminating their water and food supplies with infected blood.) and because left to their own devices shape shifters often lived short and violent lives, only the vampire leaders remained, the shape shifter’s leaders having mostly died on the front lines, as was their way. Because of the lack of older and more experienced shape shifters to challenge them, the vampires took nearly complete control of the night, and thus formed the Black Temple, in mocking parody of human places of worship. Werewolves, werebears, and werecats remained closely tied to the vampires, but were mostly employed as enforcers and shock troops.

This went on for decades, and the shape shifters soon began to chafe under the yoke of what had become oppression, once more war loomed on the horizon, this time humanity was poised to become more than terrified spectators. As the situation became more and more inflamed, the werewolves, who had always been some of the most politically savvy of the races, rallied the other shape shifters to their cause. Only one species ignored the call to arms, and that was the wererats. The wererats had never trusted the other shape shifters, least of all the werewolves, and so were absent as a rebellion gained more and more steam, instead choosing to integrate themselves more and more with the human world. War seemed inevitable, until from the ranks emerged a group of old and powerful werewolves who would come to call themselves the Werewolf Nobility, and would come to be known among their lesser brethren as the Pack Lords. These werewolves proved themselves to be a match for the ruling parties of the vampires, and thus the vampire ancients proposed a truce, which the Nobility accepted.

And then the two groups ordered their underlings to wage war on each other. The truce meetings had been convened in secret, neither side knew that their leaders had in fact made amends and had formed an alliance, and both armies were manipulated into fighting a bloody battle to the death. There are a few reasons why the Ancients and the Pack Lords allowed this to happen, one reason was to avoid the same problem that had led to the downfall of their ancient enemies, there was no need for the new lords of the night to become as lazy and corrupt as the old. And because they where bored, years of peace had followed the rebellion that allowed the Ancients to come to power, and the Pack Lords were eager to learn the art of manipulating the masses. And so it came to pass that thousands of werewolves and vampires met a horrible bloody end in order to weed out the weak and complacent, and to satisfy their bloodthirsty leaders.

The war soon ended, a public truce was called, and the Tribunal was formed. A government of old and powerful monsters that had come together to ensure the continued existence of their races. The other shape shifters expected to share in the werewolves glory, and it would be a lie to say some of the races did not enjoy the spoils of the war and found a place in this new Nation, but it remained clear who had the true power. The Tribunal is made up of three separate councils, the two High Councils and the Single Low Council. The two High Councils consist of the Vampire Ancients forming one and the Pack Lords forming the other, the Low Council is mixed, made up of vampire masters and powerful or rich werewolf nobles. The Low Council is the public face of the Tribunal, as the High Councils prefer to remain discreet, and the membership of the High Councils have remained mostly the same since the Tribunal first formed.

As always, the wererats remained independent, preferring to form their own society and govern themselves. This did not sit well with more than a few council members, but they were willing to let it slide as long as the rodents didn’t get any funny ideas. Years came and went, came and went, and the Tribunal pushed those it governed to become ever more insular, ever more detached from human society. It is not clear just when it was decided that a monster was never allowed to reveal himself or another to a human, but it is known that the current state of affairs was a natural evolution of the political climate at the time, the Tribunal never all at once decided to hide itself from humanity because it had become to dangerous, it was simply a matter convenient.

By the late 1700’s vampires and shape shifter’s had once again begun to grow apart. The bonds that had been forming for so many millennia, forged of blood and war did not break, they probably never will. There is a kinship as old as mankind  between them that might never be broken, but even siblings must go their separate ways, and while the Tribunal was more powerful than ever and only growing in strength, the two strains had begun to forge their own separate cultural identities from each other. The wererats who had been forging their own separate cultural identity since The Rebellion were amused at the irony.  They would not be for much longer. It was decided in 1856 that the problem of internal corruption in the lower classes once more loomed, so the Tribunal decided that the time had come to engineer another war, this one would provide a new challenge, as it would have to be waged silently and without alerting the humans.  This time the enemy was the wererats, the wererat leaders played along with the farce, and as such both factions received a much needed pruning of their respective memberships.

One member of the low council however, took the war very seriously, so seriously that in 1891 when the war ended, she left the Tribunal. Her birth name is unknown, only that she now goes by the name “Mother Luna.� She disappeared for a few years. And in her absence, three things happened. First, the weresnakes left the nation of monsters that they had been a part of since it’s inception, and second, the wererats began their slow decline. The first documented case of a human infected with the wererat pathogen dying rather than turning occurred in New Orleans in 1912, when on the night of the new moon 20 year old Charles Harris swelled up like a balloon and burst, spewing acidic puss everywhere. At first the local wererats thought that it was a practical joke being played, albeit one of poor taste. Then reports started coming in all over the world, no wererat initiate has since exploded in such a manner, but by 1935 a whooping 35 % of all wererat initiates died before or during their first change. Today, that percentage has reached 79%. Sometimes they simply seem to die of a massive infection, other times during the change they expire halfway through the process, a few initiates have had internal organs or bones grow faster than the rest of their body, and other times, a new wererat will change, seem perfectly healthy for a while, and then slip into a coma and die.

In the days before the Purge , extensive research was made into the cause of this, it was believed to be a curse brought on by a human sorcerer of incredible power and skill, but that was never proved. The last thing that set events in motion that would lead to the current situation occurred in 1947, when a flying saucer crashed in the outskirts of Roswell New Mexico. The Tribunal immediately mobilized to seize the wreckage, the human military was the first to react, beating them to the crash sight by fifteen minutes. Needless to say, the Tribunal was not at all thrilled, which is one reason why Area 51 is now a glass crater that the American Government must disguise with holograms. The spaceship remains to this day in a Tribunal storage facility, often visited by scientists who have been “persuaded� by the Tribunal to work for them, one survivor of the crash was taken to a small run down shack somewhere in South America for “interrogation“. No corpse has been found.

While aliens have since been wise enough to steer clear of this planet for fear of having their technology stolen and being tortured to death, The Tribunal has made the craft and it’s technologies their top priorities. Always on the look out to nip potential threats in the bud, The Tribunal has devoted most of their considerable time and resources to building a Planetary Defense System based on technology reverse engineered from the craft. This is a multistage attack and defensive operation meant to protect Earth from anything from alien attacks to distant stars going supernova. Project One was completed in February 1997, and consists of a gigantic Death Ray mounted on the Moon and an adjacent base populated by zombies and other lower forms of undead, who operate the weapon and perform maintenance as well as menial tasks such as human sacrifices to appease the fire spirit that helps power the sky scraper sized cannon. Because of the success of Project One, The Tribunal is preparing to move ahead with Projects Two through Five, which consist of anything from nanobot swarms powered by the souls of lost children that will act as sensor arrays, to massive missile bases being constructed on other planes of existence to provide rapid response techno-mystical counterattacks against giant space monsters.

In 1975, Mother Luna resurfaced with a new werewolf pack, she soon began to attract a number of recruits into this pack, both humans as well as werewolves. At the time Mother Luna’s pack was considered a relatively bizarre yet harmless minor religion which preached of the inherent superiority of wolves and werewolves to all other forms of life. Such cults had sprung up in the past, usually only to be wiped out by human monster hunters or other creatures of the night, as such Mother Luna’s organization was only note worthy in that it was lead by a former member of the Low Council. By 1979 however, the cult began to militarize, Mother Luna’s preaching switched from focusing on the superiority of werewolves to the inferiority of the “vermin races�, of which none were so vile as the wererats. In the summer of 1981, Mother Luna made the statement that the wererats had been cursed by the wolf spirits for their barbarism and heresy, and that the time had come to remove their taint from the beauty that was the shape shifter gene pool. From 1983 to 1990 a wave of violent anti wererat hate crimes took place, The Tribunal, at the time focused on The Earth Defense System and never a big fan of the wererats in the first place, did nothing to curtail the slaughter. In 1991, The Purge took place.

The Purge was a massive, world wide military attack on the entire wererat population of Earth. Autonomous sleeper cells strategically placed in every country on Earth attacked almost at once, wererat dens and nests  were gassed, bombed, and then stormed. Those old and powerful enough to survive the initial attacks were rounded up and executed, usually via burning, the favorite werewolf method of “purgingâ€� the wererats. It stands to this very day as the single largest coordinated military attack in the history of planet earth. The date is celebrated as a holiday by the followers of Mother Luna. The wererat chieftains were in fact anticipating an attack since Mother Luna’s followers began to show interest in acquiring military weaponry, but the sheer scale, speed and zealous ferocity of the attack staggered them and rendered every counter measure put into place moot. It is estimated that the wererats lost 67% percent of their population in a single night, it is entirely likely that even if they manage to win the war, they will simply never recover from the losses and slip into extinction.

Since that night, the entire wererat population has been embroiled in a constant struggle against Mother Luna and her Legion-Packs. So far The Tribunal has been to preoccupied in the Planetary Defense System and internal politics to pay much attention to the genocide going on under their watch, and as long as the war doesn‘t threaten to spill over into the human world then they have no reason to intervene. A number of smaller sub factions have either ignored the plight of the wererats or even aided their hunters. Non Tribunal supernaturals have also turned a blind eye to the wererat cause. Very briefly there was talk within the wererat high command of asking the Illuminati or the Free Masons for aid, and The Vatican was repeatedly asked for aid in the fight, only to be repeatedly denied.  The wererats are truly on their own, battling for their very survival against an enemy that grows in number with each passing of the full moon as more as more werewolves are created to swell Mother Luna’s ranks. In 1998 the Bronze werebear clan pledged the allegiance of thirty of their warriors to the anti wererat crusade and Clan Bone Cracker was rumored to being considering lending their legendary and feared Berserkers to The Cause. A number of  werecats have joined the ranks as well.

Mother Luna’s followers have since broadened their horizons, and a number of “werevermin� have been targeted. Including werehyenas, werecoyotes, wereboars, and even the mysterious weresharks, also of note, trolls and lesser vampire bloodlines have also been targeted and slotted for extermination. Still, the main focus of Mother Luna’s Crusade to end the vermin she apparently feels taint and degrade the entire race is the wererats, who have been pushed to the brink and now teeter at the edge, facing an enemy who doesn’t fight for money or power or land, or even to convert the wererats to their way of thinking but rather fights to exterminate them utterly. Mother Luna has made it clear that she will not rest until the taint has been removed from the werewolf family tree, and how long before that viewpoint extends to her current allies? Or the vampires? Or even humanity itself? Mother Luna is a madwoman gone wild, how much power she even has anymore is a matter of debate and it’s entirely possible that she is now nothing more than a figurehead, her sermons propaganda to feed the werewolf war machine.

And feed it she does, righteous, indignant fury courses through the veins of many young werewolves who even now patrol the sewers and subways, searching for the vile enemy who they were taught from the moment they were dragged, howling and roaring into a processing center to be brain washed by Mother Luna’s hate tainted bile were threats to the purity of the werewolf race by even existing. The largest wererat nest is currently the New York nest. It’s the wererat Mecca, the promised land, often time flooded to knee height with sewage. It boasts fifty wererat “civilians�, seventy warriors, and four wererat Raiding Parties, the wererat military elite. It is also home to a small nest of vampires as well as a very old ogre who acts as both a guardian and a mascot to the rats of New York. And so beneath men’s feet the war wages, the extermination taking place in the shadows of humanities cities. A secret war, a stealthy mass murder.

In October, 2007 Raiding Party Alpha of the Washington Nest managed to secure the activation codes of five thermonuclear warheads.

By the time the codes were changed it was far to late, they had been magically tagged and locked in, so at any time a special magical device can be used to remotely launch them target any location the activator chooses.  The wererats have their backs to the wall, outnumbered, outgunned, and all alone against an enemy that is more numerous and technologically and physically superior to them. If they feel it is in their best interest to do so, they will launch. If they feel that they have nothing more to lose, they’ll launch. If they start to get depressed and suicidal, they’ll launch. And at the rate the war is going, five thermonuclear devices will be fired at strategically placed positions around the globe, almost all of them in or near major cities, in the confusion, mankind will start to fire their own nuclear weapons, utter chaos will reign as bombs drop all over the world. Armageddon, the end of days, a powder keg made by man and lit by monsters. If the wererats are going down, then their leaders will ensure that everyone else is going with them.

The tensions are high, and only mounting. The war has so far been waged in perfect secret, fear of The Tribunal has kept both sides in check, but as their victory draws ever closer the werewolves have gotten sloppy, the idea of vanquishing the abominations making them careless. Both factions have done their best to police themselves and cover up their mistakes, but the werewolves have become lax in their approach. Sometimes their “solutions� (brutally slaughtering the entire family of some poor schmuck who looked down the wrong alley at the wrong time) only cause more problems. The Tribunal may be preoccupied with other projects, or even secretly supportive of their efforts to destroy the defiant wererats, but they have their talons on the pulse of the war, and if they feel that their law is threatened they will not hesitate to kill Mother Luna and her underling in hopes of staggering the entire movement. This is why there are whispers of rebellion the Luna’s ranks, whispers that perhaps the time has come for a regime change.

Meanwhile the vampires, always seeking to make a profit, have been rumored to have developed a new weapon. The exact nature of this weapon is currently unknown, but they’re more than willing to sell it to the highest bidder. Naturally the Legion-Packs of Mother Luna have shown interest, and are currently raising funds to acquire it. Recently, the wererats have caught wind of this, and the very idea of their mortal enemies acquiring yet another weapon has broken down their already shattered morale, the wererats barely have enough money in the coffers to feed themselves and acquire mundane firepower, they could never put a bid in for the mysterious new technology, but the word in the street is it’s a weapon of such potency it could turn the tide of the war in their favor. It’s a slim chance, just the tiniest point of light in the darkness, but the wererats are grabbing at any lifeline they can get. And they’ll go to any lengths to ensure that they get it before the werewolves do.

And thus our story begins…


And that’s as far as I am as far as building the world for this book. None of this is exactly canon yet, it’s really just an exercise, at this point I’m trying to hammer out a definite tone, which has kind of been shifting dramatically every time I rewrite the damn thing. As it stands now, it kind of reads like the bastard child of World of Darkness and Warhammer 40K, and I like that. A lot of stuff is probably going to change, such as Mother Luna’s name. It’s probably going to be changed into something a little less hokey sounding.

I’m kind of fighting the urge to restrain myself, because obviously this world is going to be very over the top, much like Warhammer 40K is. I know a lot of people are going to be turned off by that, and probably a lot of publishers as well, but like I said I think the insane nature of this crapsack world this book will take place in is one of my favorite things about it. You have werewolves in magical power armor with katanas and flamethrowers fighting wererats in stealth suits with baseball bats made out of enchanted dinosaur bones, with all kinds of back ground elements like The Tribunal and impending alien invasion. At that very basic level it’s kind of appealing to the insanity lurking inside us all. And then you have these very personal stories going on with all the characters, the wererat raiding parties who have been tasked with stealing this weapon. There are a lot of interesting werewolf characters, not the least of which is Mother Luna (again, she’s probably going to have her name changed) who I think is probably one of my favorite characters that I’ve ever written.

The final product is probably going to have to be tuned down a lot if I ever want to get it published, but there are a few things that’ll probably remain constant. The mix of magic and technology for instance, is something I’m really excited about portraying. The Tribunal is probably going to remain kind of this big looming super power that’s really presiding over the war. They very much function as referees in the war even though they don't seem to be doing their job all that effectivly. The idea is that if they really wanted to they could step in and stop this almost instantly. They’re an incredibly powerful force, technologically and magically, and the idea is that the wererat’s salvation is just out of reach, still visible in the world they live in, it’s almost taunting them. They’re fighting for their very survival, and so far they’re loosing.

I have a few of the characters worked out. I’ll organize whatever notes I have into a semi presentable series of character bios and post them latter today.

Last edited by Dinobat (2010-02-12 04:34:22)