Wereraven Social Merits

Pack (• - •••••, Style)

Prerequisites: Primal Urge • Effect: You are part of a pack. Your Rookery has bonded with the Feral Wolves of the werewolves in that pack, and can find some measure of peace from their presence. Your bond is spiritual and emotional with the others, and may grow over time.
Alphas: If your pack has an alpha, she has a pool of extra dice that she can use to augment any action equal to the total number of dots her packmates have invested in this Merit. Alphas become stronger with a strong pack. This pool is exhausted as dice are used, but the dice pool is refreshed at the next sunset.
Leaving the Pack: The bonds of the pack aren't easily severed. A wereraven must remain away from his pack for at least a full week, never entering their territory or physically encountering packmates within that time. Anytime he succumbs to his Rookery, it will attempt to return to his pack. If the wereraven ends a full moon night without having contacted his old pack, his rating in this Merit decreases by one point, and will drop another point each full moon thereafter until it is gone. These reductions give the werewolf 1 Experience for each such dot eroded. A wereraven may burn a dot of Willpower to also decrease the rating, as well, once a month during the dark of the moon, but this point does not grant an Experience.

• Newly Accepted (•): You're new to the pack. You gain the Packbound Condition with those packmates you have some kind of existing emotional connection with, and are likely to develop it with regards to the others in short order.
• Pack Dynamics (••): You begin to resonate very strongly with your pack. You have the Packbound Condition with all other packmates, regardless of your emotional closeness to them. You also work very well with them, gaining a +1 bonus to any coordinated action with your pack; this bonus also adds to rolls involving Resistance Attributes (Resolve, Stamina, Composure) when defending your pack.
  • Drawback: You are unnerved when you don't know where a member of your pack is, when they are further than fifty miles away or when you haven't seen them in three days or more. Your Pack Dynamics bonus acts as a penalty to all rolls when that member of the pack is in one of those situations.
• Pack Resonance (•••): Your pack resonance increases dramatically. You are usually aware of their rough emotional state, can almost always identify any Mental Conditions they are experiencing, and can hear howls from them at double normal distance. The bonus from Pack Dynamics increases to +2.
• Pack Veteran (••••): Only packs that have been in existence for five or more years can have members with this rating of the Pack Merit, and even then, only those werewolves who've been part of the pack for several years can take it. The bonus from Pack Dynamics increases to +3. The distance at which the wereraven can hear the howls of his packmates extends out to triple normal distance.
• Pack Elder (•••••): Very rare is the wereraven with this level of connection to the pack. Situations where the werewolf would benefit from the Pack Dynamics bonus also gain 9-Agains to those rolls, and a packmate's howl can be heard out to twenty miles. In addition to all of this, however, the wereraven's connection to his packmates becomes a literal spiritual phenomenon - bands of ephemera connect him to his packmates, bands which may be followed via spirits or those with Spirit Sight. The presence of a packmate is spiritually renewing, as well - a pack elder who has zero points of either Willpower or Essence need only come into prolonged physical connection with a packmate for a minute or so in order to regain a single point of either (or both if needed). This phenomenon attracts the attention of spirits to the pack elder. This can be bad, when those spirits are predatory, but it can also be a good thing, as this level of the Pack Merit qualifies the wereraven to purchase the Totem Merit for his pack.