Information Gifts

The Rage Forsaken Players Guide p. 118-120
Auspice, Lodges & Tribes
Lodge of Wires
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Some forward-thinking werewolves have taken to interrogating information-spirits — not just data-spirits but the far rarer spirits of concept and meaning. Wherever they hide, these werewolves hunt them for their knowledge. So far, only the following Gifts have come to light, and the Uratha who have learned them are not cohesive enough to form a lodge — though if they survive for long it is only a matter of time. Iron Masters and Bone Shadows are the most likely to find a spirit willing to teach Information Gifts, though that is mostly because of those tribes’ natural cunning. Only conceptual spirits of information can teach these Gifts.

Sense the Flow (•)

Information comes in many forms. A lot of the time the flow of information is obvious — information flows between two people in conversation, or from a book to its reader. Sometimes, it’s less obvious, such as a radio transmission or a coded message. This Gift allows the user to perceive the flow of information in an area, and can single out one particular stream. Radio broadcasts look like shining contrails that emit a faint high-pitched whine, while a coded message might make a passage of text smell wrong.

Tongues (••)

This Gift allows a werewolf to extract the information from a source regardless of the form it comes in. This Gift allows him to understand something written or spoken in a foreign language without knowing the language in question, as the Gift extracts the information underlying the words. The Gift then processes that information at a spiritual level into a language that the character understands fluently. Thus, there is no chance for ambiguity or misunderstanding, and the character picks up on hidden meaning with ease.

Babel Effect (•••)

Language is a means of conveying structured information, a means of spreading ideas from one person to another. Language is a remarkably versatile form, and even a mild grasp of a tongue will allow someone to convey a wide range of basic ideas. This Gift shatters that. By crudely reorganizing the information that underlies a conversation, the werewolf can render a group of people entirely unable to understand one another. Without the ability to communicate using anything more than gestures, a group’s cohesion swiftly degrades until there’s nothing left but a lot of people getting in each other’s way. To those affected by the Gift, every other member of the group appears to be suffering from dysphasia.

Steganography (••••)

Language is a carrier for information, a means of encoding thought and meaning — information — in a way that allows one person to transmit information to another person. This Gift allows the werewolf to add a hidden information-spirit to her words, encoding a hidden message or meaning that only someone of her choosing will understand. Anyone else reading or hearing her words will hear what she says, but her chosen recipient will also understand a message just for him. The few werewolves trying to unlock a Lodge of Information often use this Gift to communicate, but that is far from the only use.

Twisted Words (•••••)

All too often, people hear what they want to hear. A speech on a controversial subject such as immigration or gay rights has the potential to warp in listener’s minds until they hear what they expected or wanted to hear. This Gift goes further than that. The werewolf convinces the information-spirits of the speech to change depending on their audience, meaning that different people hear what he wants them to hear, rather than what was actually said. While the new meaning must be on the same subject, it doesn’t have to bear any relation to the original. A group of Klansmen looking to lynch a speaker on race relations will get the impression that the speaker supports their views, even if the speech held a diametrically opposite viewpoint. Victims of this Gift can’t point to anything specific that gave them the impression that they came away with, but they are nonetheless certain about what they heard. This Gift only works for speeches, not written words.