Ashes and Soot
The Lodge of the Firestick is a mostly Australian organization of Uratha who serve Bushfire and are served by him. Their roots lie in the Koori and Murri peoples of the land, and the lodge has existed since the Dreamtime of the ancestors. Outsiders wonder why this lodge isn’t composed mostly of Iron Masters, a very numerous tribe in Australia. The reason is that the Hunters in Darkness preserve wilderness areas, and Bushfire respects their ferocity. Sagrim’s children may join, and many do: they joke that fire was the cutting edge of technology for thousands of years in Oz. But the Meninna are the patron tribe and have saved many outback areas by, paradoxically, burning them. The “valueless” land was then abandoned instead of being settled. Other uses for fire include hunting, trapping deadly spirits and monsters, controlling the Wounds and renewing land.
Lodge members are numerous and meet whenever enough food is available for them to feast and socialize. There may be a few meetings a year or none for a couple of years. In the old days, this meant a communal hunt or gathering Kakadu plums or moth cocoons; nowadays, a hijacked truck of meat pies may suffice. There’s always a fire at meetings, of course, if only to boil a billy for tea. In addition, lodge members almost always have some fire around their persons: a pipe or cigar, a candle, banked embers in a woodstove, even incense will do in a pinch, so to speak. At meetings, the lodge members discuss the state
of territories and especially the needs of the land: places that have been burned, need to be burned or protected from burning (this last includes the deep rainforests of Queensland). Members also exchange information on rain- and fire-spirits, danger and the Wounds of Australia. Some join this lodge merely because doing so is a good way to make connections among other Australian werewolves.
Prerequisites
Occult • Survival ••
Benefits
Thurru will come to his people. Any attempt made by a member of the lodge to make fire or to keep fire (flint and steel, banked ashes, wet twigs in the rain) will succeed. Fire will behave for them (consuming the fuel appointed for it, moving into the proper place, flaring up and dying down) as they expect it to. Indeed, fire seems almost a friend to them, if any spirit can be a friend to a werewolf. The Gift Yimidhirr’s Musket is a large help in this.
Thurru will destroy his lodge’s enemies. Australians know that houses and gum trees explode in bushfires, that crown forests can catch faster than an express train, that fireballs leap over roadways and lakes, that embers long scattered can contain enough glowing red to inundate cities in flame. The spirit of fire won’t blindly charge into battle; the spirit must be summoned as any other would be. However, whether the fire is from spilled petrol, a blazing stand of mallee or a backpack thermite bomb, members of the lodge can count on terrible damage to enemies (and as little to friends as possible) through Thurru’s cooperation. Lodge members gain four bonus dice to any roll made to set a destructive mundane fire or to govern its path (such as by digging a firebreak). They also receive a two-dice bonus to any Gifts used to govern or summon fire (such as Command Flame).
