White Howlers
Tribal Totem
Cave Lion / White Lion
 |
 |
History
Caledonia means "the Hard Place," and while time has rounded its corners, the name suited it perfectly in ancient times. The islands were rugged, riddled with deep straths and glens, strewn with craggy mountains, and bordered all around with hungry, cliff-edged seas. There were forests so thick with trees that the ground stayed dark even in midsummer and rivers so wild they had never been forded. Gaia was strong there, but the Wyrm also coveted the land for its own. It took advantage of the harsh environs and bred out of sight using the primal wonder of the lands as camouflage for its insideous machinations. The Wyrm was strong, cunning and relentless, but so where the White Howlers' ancestors. Humankind was still in its infancy then. Compared to more modern times, their human kin were barely recognizeable as such. They had no intricate language, no sigils, no cities, no towns, and no walls. They carried what possessions they had with them, and left no traces behind, not even burial caerns. The long ago Kin travelled in families, and followed the great wild herds as they migrated. Life was hard for them, and without the aid of the White Howlers, it would have been even harder. Nevertheless, like their wolf kin, they were strong and fierce. They served Gaia and were worthy Kinfolk to their long ago ancestors in every way they were capable of, including fighting the Wyrm at the Howlers' side. There was one foe, however, that the human kin were not capable of standing up to, the Great Winter, the age of ice, the long cold night that seemed it would never end.The Ice Age
The Howlers had different stories why the Great Winter, as they called the Ice Age, happened. Some told of a spirit pact between the tribe and the elemental forces of Winter that went awry, while others claimed that the focus of the tribe on their vagabond Kinfolk families allowed the Wyrm to creep into places beneath the Earth, festering there, and that Gaia used the ice to cleanse herself from the taint and teach her children a lesson. Whatever the case, long before the Great Winter ended, the human kin were all but gone. Those Garou who remained in the ice covered areas eventually lost all of their human kinfolk, as the environs proved too harsh for even the most stalwart of human kin. As a result, for generations upon generations, the ice dwelling northern White Howlers took mates only from their wolf kin, making the Tribe inland inhabitants even more fierce and feral than they had been before. Other White Howlers, desperate to keep the Homid side of the Tribe alive, travelled south and began to take human mates from among the people they encountered along the borderlands of the icy wastes. Unfortuneately, this brought them into conflict not only with the humans themselves, but with the other werewolves of the area, who had long considered said humans as their property. Their first contact was with the children of Stag, who called themselves the Fianna. Their territory was the closest, separated only by hard terrain rather than by ocean. Finding new Garou was not unheard of, as the White Howler Caerns were spread so thinly across a vast wilderness that encountering other Howlers that had never had contact was not unheard of. However, encountering new Garou that did not look like them and did not follow the Tribal totem of Lion was a shock. For hundreds of years, the Howlers warred with the Fianna in the shadow of the encroaching glaciers. The Fianna rallied their dark Fae allies, while the Howlers called upon the strength and wisdom of those who had lived and died before them. The results were devastating. Hundreds died, and both sides painted the other as servants of the Wyrm for their actions. In time, however, the fury for war waned, and both sides learned they had more in common than differences. Realizing the necessity of survival in the face of the Wyrm's remaining minions and the hardship of the Great Winter, both Tribes were forced into an oft uneasy alliance. The glacial encroachment did not end when it covered the island. The thirst of the ever growing ice wall was so great that it drank up the sea that had once divided the Howlers' homeland from foreign shores, leaving a clear pathway to push forward to escape its unyielding approach. Once they crossed the former sea, unfortunately, they found themselves intruding in the territory of others again. Violent barbarians driven by bloodlust, aloof aristocrats as mad as they were noble and their shadowy advisors, an amazon race dedicated to protecting women in the wild, mystics from the far east, warders and hounds in the villages, and watchers in the deep woods. They had learned much from their time with the Fianna, however, and recognized cousins among the outsiders, no matter how different their appearance and ways, and set about allying themselves with them. In time, they came to realize that their duties and laws were akin to their own. While the Great Winter may have driven them from their homeland, they at least had become more than what they had been before, becoming part of the Garou Nation. White Howlers were known throughout the Nation for their howls of healing and war, but the single most important howl in the Tribe's history was the one wherein a young Galliard, Tearlach Talespinner, entranced Helios himself into ending the Great Winter.Tearlach, Helios, and The End to the Great Winter
One season, when winter was crueler and bitterer than ever before, the weak died, the strong grew weak, and it seemed the White Howlers who stayed in Caledonia would be no more. Hungry and fearing for the fate of her loved ones, Tearlach said goodbye to her pack and family, and journeyed as far as she could to the east to make one last effort to save her people and her land. There she entreated Helios, greeting Him with howls of respect when he first crested the horizon. Every morning, the brave Galliard went on to tell a story in which the great and glorious Sun spirit demonstrated his superiority to the other spirits. Every morning, her story was new, and the mighty Celestine was always well pleased with the tale she crafted in his honor. As He went to leave one morning, however, Tearlach warned Him that this would be the last morning that her or her people would be able to sing of Helios' glory and beauty, which was quite the shame as "she had an even better story prepared for tomorrow." Helios, speaking for the first time replied, "perhaps you will survive one more morning and tell it to me tomorrow before you die." The clever Tearlach, feigning weakness, warned him it was not to be and she would be gone by nightfall. This act causes the mighty Celestine of the Sun to pause in his journey across the sky, encouraging her to tell her story now. Wise Tearlach continued to play her part, suggesting that Helios may be punished by the other spirits for wavering in his duty, which only managed to anger and ensnare Him further: "I am no servant to them! If I choose to pause, then I shall do exactly that." Helios remained overhead in the sky until Tearlach once again ended her tale. But it does not end there. Helios agreed the story was the best he had heard, and was glad that she had not died before it was told, then turned to continue his path across the skies. To this, the cunning Tearlach expressed her sorrow that it will be a shame that she would never know if her next tale was better than her last, as she thought it would be. As she hoped, not only did Helios pause again, but moved backwards across the sky until he was directly overhead once more. "Another tale? Better than the last one?" And on it went, the Mighty Helios allowing himself to be convinced to stay just a while longer to hear one more tale. Tearlach told stories until the ice across Caledonia melted away and the grass grew green again. She told stories until the herds returned, and her people could hunt once more. She told stories until she was no long a young woman, but an old crone, bent with age and wrinkled and brown from the Sun's ever-present rays. Only then, when spring had returned to Caledonia and the Great Winter has ended did Tearlach's voice grow still. Without her stories to distract him, Helios remembered his duties and hurried across the skies as if he had never paused. But to this day, every morning as the Celestine creeps up in the east, he pauses just at the horizon hoping to hear her voice once more. With the end of the Great Winter, those of the Tribe who remained in the ice sent out word to all their far-flung cousins around the world. Their message was simply "come home."The Roman Invasion
When the invaders from Rome arrived in Caledonia, the Howlers did not immediately see them as enemies. They had learned their lesson of leaping into conflict from their cousins in the ancient times. While the Howlers were cautious of the newcomers, they were given a chance to prove their intentions. Given a perceived lack of supernatural abilities, the Howlers thought them no threat to their land, their people or their Tribe. But, as the months grew to years, scouts and diplomats gave way to soldiers and armies. As time went on, the Romans' game became clearer. They played our kinsmen against one another. They offered "protection" and those who accepted found themselves "protected" out of their homes, goods, wives and children. They destroyed all that was good and valuable from their lands and culture. Those who refused their protection, they responded to with swift and merciless violence. Unless the Tribe took drastic action, the Romans would irrevocably taint the land, destroy the people, and the White Howlers would fail their sacred duty. The Howlers felt forced to action. The White Howlers gathered in a great council, deciding that they must bring the factions of the Tribe together into one unified force and take the fight to the Roman headquarters in the south. They took every able-bodied garou they could find and as many spirit allies as they could muster to their task. Months passed, and the journey was long and perilous as they encountered many threats along the way: hungry dead, restless ghosts, Wyrm creatures, and tainted spirits. Then, on a night when the moon was full and the mist was heavy, they attacked. The Roman army with strangely few of their Fomori allies stood no chance. Everything within the rampart walls was left decimated; everything built by the hands of the Romans or their Caledonian slaves destroyed. By the time the sun rose over the razed Roman fortress, thousands lay dead and not a soul was left. Their victory howls echoed through the hills as their wolf kin picked up their song, setting the forests ringing with the sounds of their triumph. Their songs of joy, however, were not long lived.The Fall
The first sign that something was not right was the nightmares. However, riding on the swell of their recent victory, only a few of the Howlers paid attention to those warnings and were chided into silence by the rest. Weeks passed, and the signs only grew stronger. The Tribe's theurges were nearly blinded with an onslaught of prophetic vision of death and destruction, corruption and desecration. As they crossed the northern wall, the signs became unmistakeable. Whether in the Umbra or in the mortal land, each day of the journey became frought with danger: wyrm tainted spirits, animals twisted by the claws of the Wyrm, ghosts, ghouls and undead monsters. The further north the Garou travelled, the worse the attacks became, until every night was a siege and every pause to rest an invitation to battle. Along the way, they found many ruinous pits where Wyrm minions had boiled up from beneath the ground and had begun tainting the entire environ around them. The Howlers hurried even faster toward their home Septs with dread heavy around their shoulders. But as each Garou returned home, they found them the same: no Septs remained unharmed, unviolated. Every sacred place lay desecrated with the blood, bile, and tears of the innocent. As the Garou returned, they discovered the grisly remains of Roman raiding parties and learned why the foreigners Fomori allies had been absent the previous battle. Wherever their kinfolk had dwelled, be it wolves in the deep forests or humans hidden behind sturdy walls, only ruin remained. But as they would soon discover, the mutilated corpses would be the lucky ones, as the fates of those who survived would be much crueler. Some became Fomori themselves, bodies and spirits twisted by their corruption and poison. Entire villages turned into cannibalistic war bands. Wolf packs twisted into maraudering hellhounds. Other poison took longer to emerge. Our kin birthed things that were neither kin nor Garou, poisoned claws tearing their way out. Half-spirit monsters strangling their mothers before taking their first breath before slipping into the darkness to find other prey. The Wyrm had taken hold of Caledonia in the most painful way it could: in the spirits, minds and bodies of the Howlers' beloved kinfolk. Their numbers halved and halved until finding a single human or wolf with the blood of their Tribe was like finding a single fish in an endless sea. What followed was a war the likes of which the White Howlers had never imagined waging. They took the few who had remained behind and survived, and the few who underwent the First Change in the days following the Fomori onslaught, and set out heading north. The Romans' minions had struck deep into the heart of their homeland tearing open every dark spot, Bane breeding ground, and every ill too great to cleanse completely. The ground itself wept at its desecration sinking into cavernous maws that consumed entire valleys leaving deep subterranean gashes leading deep underground. Over the weeks, months, and years that followed, the Howlers did what they could to right the wrongs. They hunted the evils back to their lairs, destroying and imprisoning them before moving on to the next in a seemingly endless sea of targets. They moved ever northward, hoping against hope to sweep the land free of the Taint that had infected it. And it was there along the northwestern coast that they tracked the last of the Banes. In a desolate wasteland of jagged rocks and pounding surf where no living thing survived, where only storms and nightmares were born, that it where they found the Great Pit.The Great Pit
The Call
Recognizing that this was more than a matter of their own land and people, the Howlers sent word to all the Tribes of the Garou Nation. Through spirit messenger and Moon bridge, by runner, horse and boat, they used every means possible to entreat the other Tribes to come and aid them in the most sacred of tasks: Combat the Wyrm Wherever it Breeds and Wherever It Dwells. The Litany is clear, the law not just our own, but given from Gaia to every Tribe. Surely the rest would join them, but they were wrong. Their messengers encountered diplomacy in some places. Other audiences offered disbelief, suspicion, or outright hostility. Whether polite demurrals or promises to consider the possibility, the results were the same: a harmony of rejection, and the Nation turned its back as one. The White Howlers would not take the refusal lightly, however. Each of the Auspices gathered seeking the Garou who shared their moon birth. They entreated each in their own way to those who shared in their duties, sending desparate word across the globe. Each Auspice howled out its supplication, and each was ignored. Only missing were the voices of the Galliards who did not lend their voice to the pleas. After the others fell upon deaf ears, they instead howled prophecy out to the other Garou."Listen, you who turn your back on us. Listen and remember our words, though you pretend not to hear them. We will not march to our fate with bowed heads, grim though it may seem. Our hearts are full, for we know we do our duty. We shall dance that blackest of spirals to the heart of the Wyrm and, win or lose; we will meet our fate with our heads held high. Our tale does not end here. Our song will continue."As they expected, there was no reply. This was the last that any Tribe would hear the songs or words from the White Howlers, as on the dawn of the next day only one of the Tribe limped into a nearby Fianna Sept. He warned the others of a Fomori army and died as the last White Howler. When he breathed his last, Lion let out a great roar of pain and anguish, breaking himself in two: a weakened cave lion verging on the edge of Harano and a roar of white that tore into the Umbra, never to be seen again. When the Fianna later went to investigate, all they found was a collapsed barrow and a sea of corpses.
Organization
In ancient times, the White Howlers organized themselves after the clans of their Kinfolk, as a result of the long separation between the Homid Howlers that had left Caledonia during the Great Winter, and the Lupine Howlers that had remained alongside their wolf kin. Being part of the diverse people the Romans referred to as "Picts", some of them lived alongside farmers, some lived as hunters and herders, and others focused on running with wolves. Until the battle of the Pit, which changed them forever.Camps
Camps represent special interests within the Tribe, for the most part. Some camps are badges of honor, epitomizing the tenets of Honor, Glory or Wisdom that the Nation prizes so highly. Others are forbidden, secret sects and societies practicing Gifts and Rites that border on blasphemy taught to them by forgotten and often horrific spirits that hide deep in the Umbra.- The Boderia: Also known as both "the Silent Ones" and "the Deaf Ones," the Boderia served as a direct conduit between the White Howlers and the dead: the ghosts of their ancestors, fallen comrades, and even slain enemies. While all the Tribe shares a sacred duty to give honor to those who have come before them and to ensure that the dead do no harm to the living, the Boderia take this role as their life's calling. They perform rituals that pay homeage to those that have gone before, supervide burials to help the dead return peacefully to the cycle, and when necessary, deal with those who have gone yet not entirely departed from this world. The Boderia do not hide their camp affiliation; in fact doing so is all but impossible, as entering the camp involves a ritual scarification as a symbol of their dedication to this path. Almost all White Howler Septs contained at least one member of this Camp, and because of the Tribe's respect for the Boderia and their duties, communication between Septs often rested upon their shoulders.
- The Mactire: The "Children of the Wild" were some of the most fierce and feral of the White Howlers, its members claim to be descendents of those who never left Caledonia during the Great Winter. To join the Mactire was half spirit quest, half rite of passage. One had to leave all their belongings behind and travel into the wildest depths of Caledonia. Once there, a penitent must track one of the Mactire packs down and convince its leader of their own value. Few ever returned from such a quest, whether from gaining acceptance or dying in the process. While they do not hate humans or homid Garou, the Mactire see it as their sacred duty to protect and promote the needs and best interests of the Tribe's lupus members and wolf kinfolk. Most were lupus, though they also welcomed Metis who were able to prove themselves worthy. These duties often lead the Mactire to travel far flung from the rest of the Tribe, going to protect Caerns or lost holy areas abandoned during the Great Winter, having high hopes that one day the Tribe would be numerous enough to reawaken them and put them back into Gaia's service.
- The Toutates: The "Tribal Protectors" were comprised of loosely woven bands of different packs. It was a point of honor to the White Howlers that every tribe of kinfolk in Caledonia, be it wolf or human, had at least one Toutate pack watching over it. They were less of a cohesive group than the Boderia, one Toutate pack may have had almost nothing in common with another save that they each served as protectors for those to which they were dedicated.
Tribal Culture
The White Howlers were "One People, But Many Faces" as their Kinfolk across Caledonia comprised many different tribes. As those kinfolk tribes migrated to follow the herds and seasons, so too did the White Howlers who protected them, never hiding from them and instead living, working, and even fighting alongside them.Homids
When the ancient human kinfolk fell to starvation and exposure, the Howlers' Homid kinfolk struck out. Leaving their familiar lands behind, they travelled through enemy territory, encountered unfamiliar cultures, and took new kin from the best of them. When the Great Winter ended, these new family members returned to Caledonia with them and began new homid tribes. Each was wholely White Howler, but also carried with them the strengths of their former homelands, and those strengths made us more than we were before.Lupus
During the Great Winter, the human kinfolk were unable to survive on the icefloe that Caledonia had become. Only those who were Lupus born or those who were willing to survive without human contact remained to uphold the White Howlers' sacred duty to their land. For millenia, while most of the Tribe was scattered to the four winds, the wolves endured endless winter and unyielding cold in order to protect their homeland. They grew stronger, wilder, and fiercer. Only the strongest could survive, and for that they are afforded great respect, because they represented a timeless, unbroken chain of connection to the homeland and the Tribe's sacred duty.Metis
Those who break the Litany must be punished for their crimes. On the other hand, the White Howlers watched their neighbors, the Fianna, hold to that tenet so strongly that they would castigate the result of that misdeed along with those who commit it. The Howlers found this punishment of the Metis child foolish, because one does not discard a weapon simply because the material for it was stolen or burn a field because the farmer committed a crime. Any Garou who will obey the Litany and serve Gaia's will should have the chance to do so regardless of their heritage.Political Culture
As the Tribe of "One People, But Many Faces," the various kinfolk tribes each had their own upbringing, laws, and ways of life, but were all united in their cause of protecting the lands of Caledonia.Religious Culture
The many Totems of Lion's Brood had different reactions to the loss of their Tribe and fracturing of their Patron:- Elk: Fears betrayal a second time and very rarely takes Gaian Garou as a Totem.
- Carrion Bird: Followed White Lion into the Umbra. He refuses to speak about what happened, but will still rarely patron Gaian Garou packs.
- Green Dragon: Corrupted and fell to the Wyrm. His ferocity and refusal to back down has turned him into one of the strongest Totems of the Black Spiral Dancers.
- Caern-Rattler: Unknown. Caern-Rattler disappeared after the fall of the Tribe and will not answer any summons.
- Roe Deer: Followed in the foosteps of Cave Lion, entering Griffin's Brood.
- Gallia: Originally an ancient fiery fertility goddess, Gallia was corrupted and fell to the Wyrm, existing now as G'louogh, "The Demon Goddess" or known by some as The Mother of All Banes.
- Kelpie: Followed White Lion and has not been seen since.
A Worse Fate
The rest of the Tribes of the Garou Nation would come to learn that there is a far worse fate than death that awaits them now that the Wyrm has learned not just to destroy, but to corrupt. The White Howlers had not just died in that fateful battle, but had been true to their word: they had danced that blackest of spirals and were repurposed into the Wyrm's own bastard children, the Black Spiral Dancers.Tribal Weakness
Grudge: All other Garou Tribes are at +1 difficulty to Social rolls (except Intimidation) vs the White Howler. If a Garou further proves their grudge true, the White Howler character gains the Flaw: Intolerance to that Garou. (Grudge has no effect on packmates or non-Garou)Backgrounds: No restrictions.
Physical Characteristics
Strong White Howler pure breed maintains itself as a flawless white pelt. They were fond of woad and spiral tattoos to distinguish themselves.
|
Comments