Tales from the First Days

The Silver Record:
When the first Garou howled the tales of their bravery into the night skies, it was begun. It was carefully preserved by the wisest Galliards throughout time, who added the stories of the greatest Garou. It has grown into more than a book, but into a collection of epics that preserves the history of the Garou Nation itself. It is the Silver Record.

Some time ago, before human beings recorded the rise and fall of empires and civilizations and called it all “history,” werewolves held dominance over the natural world. Created by Gaia to be the world’s protectors, they passed along their gifts to their children. Some chose to mate with humanity, favoring their intelligence and adaptability. Others chose to take mates from wolves, embracing their pack mentality and tenacity. The Garou acted as a check on the growth of the human population, but protected humanity as well. They tried to teach humanity to live in harmony with the world, and to find balance. What happened, then, to make humanity so…wrong?

The Impergium:

Every tribe of werewolves has its own explanation for that, but what they do agree on is that the Garou became extremely aggressive in policing humanity. This time, called the Impergium, was one of violence and terror. Humanity became terrified of the wilderness and of wolves in particular; that horror follows them even today, much to the Garou’s chagrin. Humans gathered together in settlements to keep each other safe at night. Those settlements became farming communities, and then cities. And all along the way, the Garou would steal into the communities and take the weakest (or the most brazen, or the least reverent — the criteria for who died under the moon were never set in stone).

Some werewolves tell this story a little differently. They claim that gathering into settlements wasn’t humanity’s idea at all. It was the werewolves who pushed them into these groups — these herds — to keep a better eye on their breeding stock. Humanity developed agriculture and, eventually, cities as a response to this — but if not for the Garou, they might still be a nomadic species.

The stories of the Garou are an oral tradition, part history and part legend, so the “truth” remains unclear. However it happened, once humanity realized that they could build walls and keep the werewolves out, the Garou stepped up their Impergium. Unfortunately, humanity was not the only species to suffer under the fangs of the werewolves.

The War of Rage:

Werewolves are not the only type of shapeshifter in the world. Gaia bestowed this gift on many animals, and to each of these Fera she granted a special task. The Garou were to be the world’s protectors. The wereravens watched over everything, learning all they could. The wereboars rooted out corruption and poison before it had a chance to take hold. The werecoyotes played elaborate pranks and forced all of the other shapeshifters to question what they knew. Somewhere along the way, the werewolves either decided they could handle all of the other Fera’s duties or they simply lost control of their Rage.

They went to war, hunting down and killing the wererats and werebats, the werecrocodiles and the werebears, sending the weresharks swimming away from the coasts and the wereravens flying to places that the Garou couldn’t reach. The werewolves managed to wipe out a few species entirely, and so reduced the numbers of most of the others that, in these End Times, most Garou only know them as legends. The werewolves won the War of Rage, but it may have cost them everything. If the other Fera were alive now, if they had remained intact and able to perform their tasks, the Wyrm would never have gained the foothold it has on the world. But the Garou were ill-suited to the tasks that the Fera performed, and while they were busy “winning” the War of Rage, humanity was finding its own voice and strength.

The Concord:
No modern werewolf knows how it was that humanity learned the secret of silver, but they know the result all too well. Some time ago, toward the end of the War of Rage, humanity learned a way to strike desperately back out at the night. Were people helped along on this path by other supernatural forces? Did Gaia grant them intelligence and will they hadn’t heretofore possessed? Again, no one knows, and it doesn’t much matter. Somehow, humanity gained not only the courage to fight the Garou but the means to do it. Still damaged from the War of Rage and fractious in any event, the Garou fell back, and a great and momentous argument began.

Some werewolves felt that humanity was, if not justified, then at least understandable in its anger. After all, the Garou had been killing them with impunity for centuries. Perhaps the Garou should approach humanity with more compassion, and teach them, in turn, to respect Gaia. Other werewolves snarled that humanity had grievously overstepped its bounds and deserved to be slaughtered wholesale. Many werewolves howled for some kind of retribution, just to show humanity its place. The ethos of many of the modern tribes can be found in
each tribe’s attitudes toward the end of the Impergium.

The werewolves fought for months, but eventually reached an agreement called the Concord. They would leave humanity to its own devices, retreat from an overt presence in the world of men and try to guide and check them from the shadows. They would not kill with impunity, but instead maintain their own society separate from that of humanity. They would continue to take mates from the strongest, brightest and best humans, but never again attempt to guide the course of human destiny. The civilization of werewolves thus formed is known as the Western Concordiat, and as it came into focus, the Impergium ended. Werewolves faded into the collective unconscious of mankind.

They never faded entirely, though. Humanity remembers the Garou, even if it doesn’t really believe in them. No person is born without an instinctive fear of the night and the monsters that lurk in it. The human mind is programmed to see shapes in shadows and to hear howling in the wind… and this isn’t just a trick of genetics. Werewolves pounded that fear into humankind through centuries of predation. Only now, as the wolf population dwindles and the last remaining areas of virgin land in the world are found, exploited and plundered, do the Garou realize the enormity of their errors.

Wars Fought and Wars Lost:
Humanity spread out from its settlements like weeds across a prairie, and the Garou watched. They fought the Wyrm, when necessary, but for many years the Wyrm and the Weaver were comparatively occasional threats. Werewolves wound up fighting each other more often than anything the Destroyer could cough up. Septs fought for prime hunting grounds, powerful caerns, or simply the glory of combat. Tribe made war on tribe, just as humans formed nations to war on other nations. Slowly but surely, werewolves came to identify with human cultures. This only gave their inter-sept or -tribe warfare a bit of direction. The history of the Garou is a rich tapestry of mighty heroes and tragic mistakes. Many of the legends that humanity still tells have analogs in werewolf tradition.

Which is “true?” Was Beowulf a mighty warrior that fought a monster, or a Silver Fang who bested a Wyrm-creature? Did Elijah call up she-bears to murder the children who mocked him in the name of God, or was he an undead monstrosity eventually laid low by the Silent Striders? Each of the tribes of the Peopl has legends that paint them as virtuous, brave and
forthright. Likewise, the tribes tell stories about each other that paint rival tribes in a less flattering light.

The Garou do agree on a few historical moments of note, however.

The Rise of Cities:

If there was a moment in the whole of human history in which the Garou could have soundly established themselves as the dominant species, it was probably the moment when humans constructed shelters near each other and decided to stay in one place. Agriculture, roads, trade, and eventually bureaucracy, overpopulation, begging, and all of the other things that come from city life can arguably be traced to that moment. Historians among the Garou are fond of saying that the Weaver won the day the first human built a road.

The Garou’s oral history stretches back to the earliest cities; they tell stories of Babylon, Uruk and (later) Rome. They recount legends about how Pattern Spiders grew in a few short years from minor servants of order and construction to mad, bloated creatures bent on turning everything around them into stone and law. Worse, ancient tales from these cities make very clear that the Weaver wasn’t the only creature growing powerful off humanity’s decision to build nests.

Vampires love population density; it makes their predations easier and gives them camouflage. Spirits that had simply never existed before could feast indefinitely on the feelings and events of a city — and that included Banes. If the Garou had risen up and leveled every human settlement, would that have saved the world? Modern Garou sometimes wax poetic about this unspoiled paradise in which humanity never left its hunter-gatherer roots. The Glass Walkers don’t usually bother responding to this fantasy when lupus Garou say it, but they are fond of reminding homids that without civilization, there would be none of the comforts that they themselves found so pleasing before Gaia called them to service.

Furthermore, the Garou bred with the citizens of Babylon. The Silver Fangs boast several families that trace their lineage back to Rome, and the Silent Striders (though it’s a sore subject) claim royal Egyptian blood. Werewolves have never had a problem taking mates from the strongest, smartest, and best of humanity —and in the early days of civilization, those people were the ones building the cities. Even if the Red Talons urged utter destruction (which they probably did), the situation just wasn’t that simple.

The Fall of White Howlers:

The White Howlers were a tribe of Garou renowned for sending their cubs into the deepest Wyrm-pits to combat the evil therein. Brave, steadfast, and not entirely cautious, the Howlers claimed tribal territory in what is now Scotland. Their Kinfolk were the Picts, the native peoples of that region. Over the years, their habit of sending young Garou to fight in the blackest pits of the Wyrm took its toll. While their tribal power was dwindling, their human Kinfolk were losing influence in their homeland. Eventually, in the 1st century, the White Howlers as a whole descended into the worst parts of the Umbra, supposedly to kill the Wyrm by striking at its heart.

The White Howlers never returned. What emerged instead was a tribe of broken, mad, tumor-ridden, and utterly vicious werewolves. That tribe was the Black Spiral Dancers,  and they would go on to become the steadfast servants of the Wyrm and the Garou’s most hated foes.

The People tell stories about the White Howlers in modern times, but no living werewolf has ever met one, nor do present-day Garou have any real sense of what the tribe stood for or how it conducted its rituals. Still, the Garou romanticize the Howlers’ bravery and fortitude, because they don’t wish to admit that taking the fight to the Wyrm is not just a suicide mission. It’s a recruitment opportunity for the enemy.

The Fall of the Croatan:

The Croatan were once a tribe of Garou, standing beside the Uktena and the Wendigo as the self-described “Pure Tribes.” Honorable and steadfast, they protected their people from the threat of disease and invasion as best they could when the white men came to the Americas. While they might have been able to survive as their brother tribes did, they chose to make a stand against one of the manifestations of the Wyrm — the Eater-of-Souls.

This creature drew enough power from the starvation and disease rampant in the New World to breach the Gauntlet and enter the physical world. On the Roanoke colony on the Carolina coast, the Croatan sacrificed itself as a whole to protect the homelands from this monster. The tribe vanished overnight, but unlike the White Howlers, the Croatan were not corrupted or pressed into service. Why and how this came to pass is fodder for a thousand songs of the Garou, but the result was plain: The Croatan were gone, with only a few carvings remaining to mark their passing. In modern times, the name “Croatan” is spoken with great reverence, especially among the Wendigo and Uktena. Although the Croatan’s destruction is tragic, it still gives the Garou hope. After all, if Eater-of-Souls could be killed, maybe the Wyrm itself could fall, even if it took the lives of every Garou to do the job.

The War of Tears:

The continent of Australia did not fare well with contact from other lands, least of all with regards to its native peoples. As Europeans were introducing foreign, invasive species to Australia and irreparably altering its ecosystem, the Garou discovered the native lycanthropes — the Bunyip. This tribe of Garou drew its lupine Kinfolk rom the thylacines, or Tasmanian wolves. Smaller than other werewolves, they had served as the protectors of Australia’s Umbra (which they called the “Dreamtime”) for as long as they could remember.

But much like their human cousins, the foreign Garou made some horrible mistakes. The Black Spiral Dancers manipulated them into declaring a hunt on the Bunyip, and the European werewolves, more numerous and, pound for pound, stronger, chased them down and slaughtered them. It was only after the last Bunyip was dead that the Dancers revealed their role in this War of Tears, and in the destruction of another of the tribes.

The Industrial Revolution:
As humanity deepened their reliance on mechanization and industry, the Weaver’s webs grew stronger. Factories and workhouses were common targets for packs looking for glory, but they were often deathtraps. Powerful Weaver-spirits spun webs of iron around whole districts, and every worker served as their eyes and ears. The Wyrm wasn’t far behind, as the misery and poverty of the unfortunate laborers — to say nothing of the greed and selfishness of the overseers — fueled the appetites of Banes and other servants of the Corrupter. In the Industrial Age, the Garou faced foes that they could not kill. The enemy wasn’t a monster or a spirit; it was a movement and a growing feeling of apathy between people.

The Wild West:
Australia, of course, wasn’t the only continent to see invaders, both human and Garou. Europeans spread across North America like a swarm of cockroaches, claiming whatever territory they pleased and ousting the natives. And as much as the werewolves like to think they are above human philosophy and its expansionist concerns, the Get, the Fianna, the Shadow Lords, the Silver Fangs, and the Glass Walkers (at that point, called the Iron Riders) were right there beside their human Kinfolk. They fought the native Garou, pushing them out of their septs and away from the caerns and claiming the places of power that the Pure Tribes had claimed for centuries.

The lawless West was a battleground for decades. Native American and European Garou faced off against each other, against human hunters who knew the truth about the howls in the night, against vampires following their mortal herds, and, of course, against Wyrm-creatures only too happy to exploit the carnage and fear. Without consistent order or government, the supernatural had little to check its violence.

Of course, civilization, or at least industry, eventually came to the west. The Garou managed to carve out parcels of territory for their septs, but over time, more and more of these areas have been overtaken, stripped, and paved. That said, not all of the participants in the Wild West are dead and gone. Spirits, vampires, and other creatures blessed with unnaturally long lifespans might well remember the Garou that prowled the roads of Dodge, Tombstone, and Oklahoma City, and the descendants of those werewolves might prove ample targets for their revenge.