May I ask the rationale of the storytellers in deciding Lore and taint?
Sure. The Triat are powerful forces that underpin everything in the Werewolf setting. What the Triat actually
is isn't necessarily entirely clear - they're spirits, kind of, but also beyond even the greatest Celestines. They might be greater than Gaia, or part of Gaia, or on the same scale as Gaia but different. They each operate with a purity of purpose and a "worldview," if it can even be called that, which is (at the end of the day) beyond mortal comprehension.
Almost anyone can get the broad strokes of what they do and what they're about. Those who encounter Triatic spirit minions often (as many Garou do) can begin to learn what the common ones are, what they do, how they do it, and how to deal with them. It seems reasonable that low-to-middling levels of Triatic Lore would be reasonably "safe" and known by Garou - they need this information to do their jobs effectively.
The fourth and fifth dots of these Lores go beyond that sort of working knowledge. At these levels, the Garou must really undertake the exercise of trying to comprehend these incomprehensible entities in earnest. The Garou's ongoing inquiries are less frequently concerned with the
what and
how of the Triat, and more concerned with the
why. These higher levels and more than simply "monster Lore;" they represent an attempt to synchronize one's own thought patterns and understanding of the world with outlooks that are fundamentally alien to Garou experience. Ideas, thoughts, and beliefs have power in the World of Darkness - this is a fundamental conceptual and thematic underpinning of several genres, including Werewolf, Mage, and Changeling. Learning the fourth and fifth dots of Triatic Lore, at least in my opinion, forces a werewolf to really confront and break down some of the dogmatic and conceptual "barriers" in their own minds that have been placed there by their culture and their subconscious.
"Taint" is not just some sort of goo that gets on you when you physically rub against or spend time around powerfully-aligned Triatic entities or forces. "Taint" is spiritual, an influence on a Garou's very being, and learning these high levels of Triatic Lore may fundamentally alter the way a Garou regards their own place in the cosmos. At the end of the day, the Triat are
ideas, and Taint represents the hold that those ideas have over the Tainted individual. The strong-willed and careful can separate what they understand about the Triat from what they understand about themselves, but as one immerses oneself in a monolithic philosophy that has
some kind of actual singular willful intelligence behind it, one risks unwittingly (or perhaps willingly) trading some small part of themselves for a tiny piece of that thing. This is compounded by the fact that gaining the highest levels of Triatic Lore almost certainly involves spending time in dedicated thought and study in places like Flux, The Cyber Realm, or Malfeas, or else opening one's mind to direct spiritual conduits of knowledge about the Triat, as one might if one made a deal with a knowledge-spirit or similar.
That said, in the end, I recognize that this is a call I'm making about genre, and not some kind of irrefutable fact that I can point to in a published source. I think that Derangements are not necessarily an unreasonable way to model a similar effect, but I am choosing not to go that route in this chronicle. I don't necessarily like the way Derangements are handled by White Wolf roleplaying games; there is an uncomfortable sort of simplification of serious pathologies and weird statements about mental health that get made when one starts handing out Derangements as a "cost" or, even worse, a "punishment." Real traumatic events can definitely cause mental illness and I'm not suggesting we ignore that, but I've seen a fair number of OWbN sheets with four or more Derangements and those Derangements are too-often either not roleplayed or roleplayed in ways that are, at best, grossly insensitive to the realities of living with mental illness. I'm not opposed to characters gaining Derangements, but I think that such cases need always be accompanied by a serious discussion between ST's and players about what that Derangement means for the character and how it can be portrayed in a meaningful manner. There's a reason you all haven't fought Malkavians throwing around
Total Insanity or similar Dementation effects during my time as HST; frankly, it's because I find that corner of genre to be particularly problematic in the way that it tries to deal with themes of mental illness. I'm fine with RAtC characters having Derangements (you may note that new Silver Fang characters at RAtC tend to get a lot of scrutiny during character creation, and that isn't
just because we need to make sure their heritage is sufficiently documented) and I'm fine with characters gaining Derangements in play, but I am really profoundly uninterested in
mandating Derangements under most circumstances. There are other options - the Nightmares Flaw, for example - for acknowledging the effects of trauma on a character's mind.
Taint isn't...trauma, exactly. It's a fundamental change in a character's spiritual nature. Such changes might be traumatic, but they also might not be. I should also end by noting that the "levels" of Triatic Taint gained from these Lores aren't intended to render characters unplayable or unable to enter caerns. They are intended to flag the Garou as someone to be watched, and someone who may have looked a bit too far into certain Abysses that looked back also into them. We're committed to working with you and with other Staffs to make sure your character can participate in our game and also travel without being denied access to caerns.
Is that helpful?
Also, Anna, if you have previously attempted to learn a Triatic Lore of Level 3 or below (with Staff approval) and then abandoned the effort to avoid Taint under the old rules, you may buy the level you were trying to buy now with no risk of Taint.
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