Skip to content

The Howlers

"A handful of rebels and adventurers leave the wild and go to the cities to look for a remedy for the evil which threatens their race."

The outcast Wolfen kin of Cadwallon — a loose pack of exiles, bounty hunters, and the Devastation-touched who have left the wild and drifted to the Free City. Associated with (but not identical to) Krenald the Howler, the cloistered Wolfen Peer of Gamehead. The Howlers are what becomes of Wolfen who can no longer live among their own.

Who They Are

Wolfen society is fracturing under religious and cultural schism. For the youngest, the predatory instinct curdles into the "Spawning of Devastation" — a murderous compulsion that the elders fear and the afflicted flee. A handful of these rebels and adventurers come to the cities seeking a cure, a refuge, or simply prey. In Cadwallon they gather, loosely, as the Howlers.

They are not an organized faction in the way a guild is. They are a mutual-aid network of the exiled — Wolfen who watch each other's backs because no one else will, bound by the shared dread of the Devastation and the shared experience of being too large, too feared, and too wild for the city that tolerates them.

Headquarters

  • The Howling pack house — a lonely, crumbling building on Windswept Hill in the outskirts, between the [[Nomadic Lands]] and Ghieronburg. Quiet, isolated, deliberately far from the crowded districts where a Wolfen cannot live comfortably.
  • Informal dens scattered through the rural fiefs (Gamehead, the [[Nomadic Lands]]) where Wolfen can find space

Notable Members

  • Lyka'i the Freed — once the slave of a rich city merchant; became a warrior, vanished, and returned as a bounty hunter working for the Guild of Goldsmiths. Now rests between missions at the Howling pack house. A Pariah and (per his stat profile) an Incarnate — a genuinely dangerous figure. The closest thing the Howlers have to a public face.
  • Krenald the Howler — the cloistered Peer of Gamehead; spiritually the Howlers' patron, though his exact relationship to the pack is complicated (see his note)
  • Various Devastation-touched exiles, transient and rarely named

What They Do

  • Bounty hunting — Wolfen senses and ferocity make superb trackers; the Goldsmiths and others hire them for difficult retrievals
  • Mutual protection — sheltering newly-arrived exiles before the city eats them
  • The search for a cure — some Howlers are genuinely hunting a remedy for the Spawning of Devastation, through alchemists, grove lore, or Desire-touched means
  • Predation — not all of them resist the instinct. Some hunt in the city. Quietly.

Relations

  • Krenald the Howler / Gamehead — spiritual patron; Gamehead is the most Wolfen-friendly fief
  • Guild of Goldsmiths — employer (via Lyka'i and others) for bounty work
  • Vile-Tis devourers — the dark mirror; the Howlers fear becoming what the devourers already are
  • Hadrax — Krenald's deputy at Gamehead; a Wolfen traditionalist who views the Howlers with mixed pity and wariness
  • The Militia — uneasy; a Devastation-touched Wolfen is everyone's nightmare

The Freed's last job

Lyka'i the Freed takes a Goldsmith bounty that turns out to be a trap — the "target" is bait to draw him to whoever he wronged in his slave years. He needs a league he can trust at his back, and he is not used to trusting anyone.

The Spawning spreads

A young Howler at the Windswept Hill house is losing the fight against the Devastation. The pack wants him cured or contained before he hunts in the city. An alchemist in Petropolis claims a grove-derived treatment exists. The treatment has never been tested. The clock is the next full moon.