Modern homids, raised on superhero comic and films, sometimes refer to their regenerative powers as a healing factor. This is broadly inaccurate. A Garou’s healing capabilities go beyond a mere acceleration of the natural healing process. A Garou’s wounds don’t usually scab over or form scar tissue. Slashes pull themselves shut and smooth over. Mangled flesh straightens itself, re-aligns severed blood vessels, and re-knits torn muscle. It’s true regeneration of damaged or destroyed tissue, restoring the body to its undamaged state.
Regeneration hurts, and many Garou describe the process as feeling like being wounded in reverse. A regenerating injury feels like the wound is full of angry, red-hot hornets—the sensation is too intense for the word “itching” to do it justice. Nor is the heat-sensation imaginary, as the temperature of a regenerating injury spikes enough to throw off steam outdoors in the winter. Most Garou learn to trust that crawling, hot-needles feeling—it lets them know exactly what’s damaged, and the intensity of the sensation provides a good indication of how close the wound is to healed. Some septs even train young Garou in recognizing and understanding their regenerative powers through rites of injury, until they can immediately tell the difference between a simple laceration, a bruise, a torn muscle, and a broken bone by the way their body feels while repairing the damage. This is also important preparation for working rites, as many rites feature bloodletting and self-mutilation as a means of achieving a trance state or showing the practitioner’s dedication to Luna.
Most wounds leave no visible trace in the wake of regeneration. A close-range shotgun blast rips apart the back of a tanned Caucasian werewolf’s arm, down to the bone. An observer sees dangling tatters of flesh still attached to his arm quickly drawn back into the wound and incorporate into the new muscle-structure that weaves itself around the exposed bones. Within a few moments, new skin creeps out across the completed musculature, and the healing is complete; but there’s nothing “new” about that skin. Rather than being shiny and pink, its tan matches the rest of the werewolf’s arm. Indeed, a moment after the skin finishes spreading into place, it sprouts hair.
A Garou’s flesh is mystically “awake” in a manner somewhat comparable to a fetish. It knows what state it’s “supposed” to be in, and mystically returns itself to that form. This regeneration is part of the werewolf’s living nature, and discriminates between cosmetic grooming and actual damage. A ripped-off nail will quickly regrow, but werewolves have no problem trimming their nails with clippers. Singed-off hair restores itself in moments, but there’s no danger of rending the Veil if a werewolf visits a barber.
More invasive body modification is a bit trickier, but entirely possible, and indeed often a mainstay of Garou culture. Warriors pierce themselves or take deliberate scars as marks of glorious acts, or to mark important milestones in their lives. It takes a deliberate act of will to voluntarily suppress the body’s regenerative powers during painful cosmetic alterations such as accepting new piercings, scarification, or tattooing (in game terms, a werewolf who gets a piercing or tattoo without silver implements must roll Willpower at variable difficulty: 5 for a pierced ear, 8 for a large tattoo), although some werewolves use silver implements to remove any uncertainty from the equation. Afterwards, the werewolf’s body recognizes any alterations as part of the body’s proper pattern, and will restore tattoos, scars, and other modifications during regeneration.
Incorruptible Flesh
Aside from repairing gross physical damage to the werewolf’s body, regeneration also grants the Garou an incredible resistance to poisons and disease. This extends to human pharmaceuticals. While some urban Garou consider human medicines worth the risk, the clear majority see all modern medicines as marked by the Wyrm or Weaver. Hard-line septs even forbid their Kinfolk from receiving vaccinations. To these werewolves, it’s worth the possibility of an outbreak to ensure that a Garou child is born without taint.
It takes a lot to get a werewolf sick, and even then, they tend to bounce back within eight to twenty-four hours. Only the fiercest of non-supernatural illnesses, such as Ebola, can seriously hamper a werewolf, and even then, their regenerative gifts will eventually dispose of the illness. The greatest problem werewolves face from disease is the possibility of being an asymptomatic carrier during the period when their bodies are suppressing symptoms but have not yet eliminated the sickness. In the past, smallpox was the greatest threat the Garou faced in this respect. The Galliards still tell cautionary tales of mighty warriors who rose victorious from the field of battle, their pelts dripping with the foul ichor and viscera of the Wyrm’s plague-raddled minions, only to decimate their own Kinfolk by returning home before their body could fully purge the sickness. In the modern day, HIV is the carrier-disease that most worries the Garou. It can take a werewolf’s body up to a month to uproot and purge that tenacious ailment, during which time she’s fully capable of passing it on.
Poisons are another matter. Taken on their own, a werewolf’s regenerative power will eliminate even the deadliest poisons within a matter of minutes. This doesn’t mean werewolves have nothing to fear from poison, though; the Wyrm’s minions have long used poison in conjunction with more traditional attacks to distract and overwhelm Garou regenerative powers.
Narcotics deserve special mention. Natural entheogens, such as psilocybin, ayahuasca, and peyote — can be spiritually awakened to affect werewolves outside their breed forms. These form important parts of many rites, mirroring their use in human spirituality. Indeed, some Garou historians believe that humans began using hallucinogens in their rituals because of Kinfolk trying to work rites of their own. Outside of her breed form, her body shrugs off alcohol and other recreational drugs before she even feels them. A werewolf in Glabro can slam back enough moonshine to leave any human being blind or dead without ever feeling more than the slightest buzz.
Moreover, werewolves are physically immune to addiction. A junkie who undergoes the First Change awakens to find that her physical cravings are simply gone, with no agonizing withdrawal symptoms or detox period. Psychological addiction is another matter; regeneration does nothing to alleviate stress, misery, or the hardships of life from which a werewolf might seek respite in chemical oblivion. Most often, the victims are packless werewolves trying to dull their need to belong, though other Garou turn to drugs in the misguided hopes of staving off Harano.
This tends to grant homids to best of all worlds: they can go out on the town to celebrate, or drown their sorrows in drink or drugs, but sober up in moments by switching to another form should trouble arise. Lupus tend to have greater difficulties, since few bars will serve a wolf, and metis have no non-regenerating form at all. Since many rites involve the ingestion of mood or mind-altering substances such as peyote, tobacco, or alcohol, many Theurges know minor rites to awaken the spiritual nature of certain substances, allowing the one who deliberately imbibes the awakened drugs to feel their full effects.
Most Kinfolk and others in-the-know understand that homids and lupus don’t regenerate when in their birth-skin. This isn’t strictly true, they do regenerate, just much slower than in other forms. A human injured to death’s doorstep may take months of intensive care in a hospital before they can walk again, and may very well never be as hale as they were before suffering such catastrophic damage. By contrast, a Garou doused in gasoline and set alight, should she survive, will be back to the peak of health after a week of bed-rest. Even without ever leaving her breed form, she’ll recover from gunshot wounds over a long weekend. As with other forms of regeneration, itching and burning sensations are her constant companion through this convalescent period. This is also the way a werewolf’s body repairs aggravated damage, slowly working through the bane of silver; or piecing back together a body seared by flames or shocked by massive, full-body trauma.
Garou Healing Mechanics
A Garou regenerates her worst bashing or lethal health level every turn. Homid- and lupus-breed Garou can regenerate a health level each day while in their natural forms if they are in critical condition, but doing so doesn’t let them do much more than sleep. If they’re conscious and moving around in their breed form, they heal as humans do. Metis are blessed with full regeneration in every form.
Garou cannot regenerate aggravated damage with anything like the same speed. A character heals one health level of aggravated damage each day, as long as she spends her time resting in a form that normally regenerates.
During combat a Garou heals one level of bashing or lethal automatically at the end of the round. This healing comes into effect before status effects, such as being unconscious, come into effect.
Remaining Active
A critically injured werewolf can channel her Rage to save her life. It’s a risky proposition — if it succeeds, the werewolf is thrown into a wild frenzy. It’s sometimes the only way for a character to save her life, though. To remain active, the player rolls his character’spermanent Rage (difficulty 8). Each success heals one health level of any kind of damage. No matter how much damage is healed, the character enters a berserk frenzy.
A character can only channel her Rage in this way once per scene. If she’s reduced to Incapacitated more than once in a single fight, she takes the worst effects of the damage.
Although her Rage can remove an awful lot of damage, supercharging a werewolf’s incredible regeneration comes with some side effects. A werewolf gains a Battle Scar whenever she successfully remains active.
Human (Kin) Injury
Normal humans take damage from much the same things that werewolves do, but humans are much less resilient. Garou can attempt to soak any injury not caused by silver, but humans can only soak bashing damage. What Garou heal in seconds can take weeks for a human to heal.
Bashing Damage
Humans heal bashing damage fairly quickly. They only require medical treatment when Mauled or worse. Those injuries heal naturally by themselves. Bashing damage beyond Wounded has consequences — a human can suffer degraded vision or hearing as a result of concussion, or excruciating pain from broken ribs and internal bruising.
Medical care can negate these effects, and is necessary for a human to make a full recovery.
Health Level Recovery Time
Bruised to Wounded One Hour
Mauled Three Hours
Crippled Six Hours
Incapacitated 12 Hours
If a mortal reaches Incapacitated from bashing damage, he falls unconscious but does not die. Instead, any further damage upgrades his least-severe bashing health level to lethal. Healing from that damage is handled as for lethal damage. In this way, a human can be beaten to death.
Lethal Damage
Lethal damage is exactly that. Any lethal wound worse than Injured requires medical treatment before it will heal. If such a wound goes untreated, the human suffers another level of lethal damage each day as wounds re-open or become infected. A human who reaches Incapacitated through lethal damage is at death’s door; if he takes one more health level of any sort, he dies.
A human at Mauled or higher from lethal damage may simply rest and recover his health after getting patched up. A human at Crippled or Incapacitated, however, needs constant medical attention for the time listed below in order for any healing to take place.
Health Level Recovery Time
Bruised One day
Hurt Three days
Injured One Week
Wounded One month
Mauled Two months
Crippled Three months
Incapacitated Five months
A normal human must heal one health level at a time. That is, she must rest for the full amount of time for her worst health level before she can begin healing the next one. For example, a human who has reached Injured from lethal damage must rest for one week to heal the Injured level, then three days to heal the Hurt level and an additional day to heal the Bruised level. Aggravated damage heals as if it were lethal for humans. The only significant difference is that aggravated damage is harder to heal through supernatural means.