Escalation in Verbrek

[Hogan Van Monsterband]

So, last session, my players found themselves in Verbrek, in a town that was living in fear of a local werewolf pack (which, from what I understand, is about 90% of the country). They chased off the pack and killed about half of them, but real life intervened so we had to call it there. My question is, what happens now? The logical thing to do is for the pack to go 'screw this, this is Verbrek, humans don't get to stand up to us,' enlist some other local werewolves, come back and kill everybody, but that seems a bit obvious, so I'd like to go in a different direction. Other elements I've introduced in previous sessions about this town are that it's close to a grove sacred to the Wolf God (there's actually a magic axe floating around, which can be used to cut down the undead treant rooted in the centre of the grove in question) and the ghost of a member of the Blessed Army of Ezra, murdered by werewolves 50 years before, who stands guard on the road into town as penance for his failure and tries to get people to run away.

[Manofevil]

Well, if you want to mix it up a little, you might include things thatg actually happen to wolf packs in the wild. The most effective hunting predator in the northern hemisphere is the wolf pack. They can bring down pretty much anything and have few natural enemies. One of those enemies is the grizzley bear. If a big bear comes down from the mountain and helps himself to something the wolves just killed and are in the process of eating, there 's really very little that the wolves can do about it, besides wait for the bear to eat it's fill, that is. Another issue they face is other wolf packs. If a strong wolf pack with good hunting territory begins to lose members, say to disease or something like that, a weaker wolf pack will catch scent of this and thy to move in on the first pack's territory, forcing that pack to defend said territory. It usually doesn't take more than a few deaths on one side or the other for the issue to be decided. Now it sounds like your pack here lost quite a few members, so the rival pack next door might well ask themselves 'What do we need them for?'

[Rotipher of the FoS]

A logical form of payback would be to have the werewolves leave a note on the carcass of a villager's slaughtered cow, demanding that one human from every family in the village be sent out of town, without weapons, on consecutive nights to be hunted down and eaten by the pack. If the villagers fail to comply, an unstoppable horde of hundreds of werewolves, to be recruited from miles around, will wipe out the entire settlement, right down to the infants and house pets.

To save the village, the PCs must volunteer one of their number to take the place of the first quarry, who can keep ahead of the pursuers and lure the pack into an ambush by the other heroes. If the heroes can exterminate the local pack, there won't be anyone left to summon the neighboring packs, and by the time any other werewolves discover the pack's territory has been left vacant, any evidence of collusion between the villagers and the adventurers will be long gone.

[ScS of the Fraternity]

That's a good one, Rotipher.

The threat is classic bully psychology: They've been beat, but they can pretend that it doesn't matter.

I like Manofevil's idea as well. Werewolves might not like humans, but they surely hate other werewolf packs. Human are food, whereas other werewolves cost them food. What's more, apart from pesky adventurers, other werewolves are a much bigger threat.
The beaten pack will be in a hard place. Lost members can be replaced, but loss of position in the pecking order could be fatal.

One might liken the situation to a werewolf mafia, with Alfred Timothy as the godfather. The beaten pack could easily go directly to Alfred and his Wolf God cult, and get all the aid they need, possibly even keep their territory. But then the beaten pack would be in Alfred's debt, and that could be far worse.