The Broad Brook Sept was a Garou Sept that was located west of Northampton, Massachusetts, built around the caern of the same name.
History[]
The Garou of Broad Brook were not the first Garou to settle in the Valley: Native werewolves of what are now called the Hart Warden and Ghost Council tribes guarded the Valley for millennia. Though they lived closely with the Indigenous humans, they also maintained a distinct material culture, including large and elaborate constructions in wood and stone that served as focal points for Garou Rites. European Garou used the presence of these sites and the Litany's command that "the Veil must not be raised" to murder the local Garou, claim their sites, and hide them from humans. Broad Brook's new masters continued to use these sites to survey the Umbra, watch for Kin, and poach promising werewolves from other packs and caerns.
Around the first decade of the 20th century, "Old Man" Malachi Palys, a member of both Broad Brook and the Three Families, brought the two groups together to pool their resources in the fight to maintain the spiritual sanctity of the region.
In the 1960s, the Broad Brook Garou battled a great force of the Wyrm near the town of Hadley. They succeeded, but the lingering Wyrmish power staining the battlefield failed to decay and fade, resulting in an epidemic of twisted dreams across the area. A group of Silver Fang artisans led by Marion Lubasik returned to the battlefield and constructed a series of brick tombs around the spaces where the force fell, containing their essence in lieu of ever being able to dispose of them. This victory was of such magnitude that it made Broad Brook rise to prominence in the regional Garou Nation and, some spiritual scholars theorize, contributed to the establishment of the EPA.
Modern Garou are uncertain as to what exactly the enemy that Broad Brook battled in the 60s actually was. The writings of Chains-the-Lie, a prominent sept member at the time, claimed that it was an avatar of Cockroach shortly after the old Patron Spirit fell to the Wyrm. Less substantiated claims posit that it was an exceptionally powerful Nexus Crawler, or alternately a tendril of Oblivion, a portal to Yomi Wan, or the Black Sun. The lattermost theory is the most likely, specifically that the battle was against the magicians using the Black Sun Labyrinth to their own ends, due to the brick tombs containing minor rifts to and from the Labyrinth.
One of Broad Brook's greatest enemies of the 21st century was the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Plant, an energy facility in the northern boundaries of their territory. Years of fighting, both physically and politically, combined with the efforts of human protestors to get the plant shut down in 2014. Although this aided the material situation of southern Vermont greatly, Broad Brook was unable to destroy the spirit of the facility, the Answering Tiger.
Battle of Graves Farm[]
In early 2019, after years of preparation, Eater-of-Names and the Answering Tiger led a combined force of animal-fomori, other fallen Garou and some human mercenaries in an assault on Broad Brook. The sept and the Three Families confronted the Wyrmish forces at Graves Farm, an otherwise unremarkable wildlife sanctuary about eight miles northwest of Northampton.
Despite wielding formidable authority among the agents of the Wyrm between the two of them, Eater-of-Names' and the Tiger's gathered army of barely a dozen or so would not have been nearly enough to defeat almost thirty Garou plus another twenty-odd humans, many of whom had weapons training and even occult powers. Instead, the Answering Tiger used its powers of illusion and false reality to trap the minds of many of Broad Brook's fighters in a false world where they had already won, while their bodies were struck by an illusion that made their allies look like the soldiers of Eater-of-Names.
In the ensuing chaos, Eater-of-Names himself burned the den in which the wolf-born Garou resided with his balefire, at which point he was mobbed by Knife-Eyes and Katherine Aslanian-Dey. The three fought in crinos form and Eater-of-Names managed to bring down Knife-Eyes before he himself was killed.
In the end, forty-six casualties were confirmed after the fact by Daphne Clear, who came to investigate following the massive jump in unreported disappearances, but the Tiger's control of information and action led to barely more than a cursory examination by the Springfield FBI. Only three members of the Three Families and four members of Broad Brook survived, scattered across the Pioneer Valley. The Answering Tiger moved into the caern, corrupting it and turning it into the heart of its new operation.
STATZ[]
Eater-of-Names had chosen the sept of his old mentor as the target of his ire due to determining the surrounding area to be ideal for keeping himself safe whilst directing the Era of Apocalypse. However, the caern itself was of little use to him. As such, he lobbied the Northampton Expanded Provisional Council to begin constructing the Security Tactics and Training Zone - a full-scale replica of downtown Northampton intended to train police in riot suppression - on the site of the caern using the resources of Huvud Development, hoping to use the grand monument to lies as an elaborate form of chiminage to the Answering Tiger, to which his plots had left him deeply indebted.
The surviving Broad Brook Garou, after five years of regrouping and taking on Eater-of-Names' minions, invaded STATZ in February of 2024. After discovering the rift that had formed between Eater-of-Names and the Answering Tiger and witnessing the Tiger annihilate the Black Spiral Dancer, the pack opted to either let the caern be destroyed - be it through Eater-of-Names' automated mechanism or allowing the Tiger to consume its power - and turn that to their advantage, or to strike at the Tiger directly and unmake it within its own false realities before the damage became irreversible. In the latter instance, STATZ was demolished by the Northampton Expanded Provisional Council at the urging of a large fraction of the town, and the Garou began the long process of rebuilding the barely-alive caern.
Another possible outcome of the conflict, one that required the Answering Tiger to consume the caern, resulted in the creation of the shadow-wolves.
Geography[]
The Broad Brook Sept is named after the Broad Brook itself, a small river that stretches northwest well into Canada. The caern at the heart of the bawn is located at a bend in this brook. An enormous red oak with its bark covered in glyphs stood at the heart of the caern, with wooden paths leading over the mossy ground surrounding it. The caern was also filled with trees that had been grown and shaped carefully over decades, centuries for some, to keep the barrier between worlds thin. Stone idols to the gods loomed over the inhabitants.
The core caern, after falling to the Answering Tiger, was "mazed," by the Bane, preventing anyone and anything not loyal to itself, including humans and non-Wyrmish spirits, from approaching it. Anyone who attempts to do so finds themselves deposited at the edge of the bawn hours after they began to make the trip, with no memory of any of the intervening time. The only known way to overcome this effect is through the Song of the Moonpath, a galliard Gift taught by goose- and whippoorwill- spirits that creates a path through spiritual and physical obstacles.
Separate from the true caern, the Broad Brook bawn also features a cemetery and series of white-cement barrows closer to the village of Williamsburg, which house the sept's dead and serve as a place of communion with their ancestor-spirits, honored or otherwise. These barrows were traditionally looked over by the sept's Silver Fang contingent. The barrows also contain a temple holding the statues of Vahagn and the Falcon-of-Doors with which the Shadow Lords and Silver Fangs could commune with their Patron Spirits.
Spirit Wilds[]
- Turtle was a prominent spirit in the area, despite his temporal children's virtual nonexistence in inland Massachusetts. A friend of the Galestalkers, he taught the tribe Gifts of survival and resilience before failing to defeat a growing Bane in the area in the 2010s, dying a slow death in spite of many Garou's attempts to save in. Tardigrade-spirits have since moved in to feast on the Umbral corpse of this incarnation of the wider spirit, teaching the same Gifts as Turtle in exchange for their tolerated presence.
- Unquomonk is a powerful river-goddess and servant of Pita-Skog who rules over the nearby brook which shares her name. She is free-willed and dangerously intelligent, an ancient spirit of Wisdom and secret magic. She was the lover of the spirit of the Mill River before the latter's flooding in 1874 diverted it, separating the two. She teaches fellow servants of her Patron Gifts of scrying and foresight, in exchange for teaching her to read so that she and her lover may once again communicate over a distance and exchange truly abysmal poetry.
Culture[]
Approximate bounds of the Broad Brook Sept's territory. Location of the caern itself marked with a pin.
The Broad Brook Garou ranged across the entire Connecticut River Valley, centered on their caern just outside Northampton. Broad Brook's borders were porous to the north and west, where human populations were thin, though ending somewhere to the north in the woods of Vermont and to the west on the far side of the Berkshires, a mountainous area separating Massachusetts from New York. To the east, their territory extended to the Quabbin Reservoir near the middle of the state, beyond which Boston Garou claimed the increasingly urban lands of Central and Eastern Massachusetts. To the south, the Broad Brook Garou maintained diplomatic alliances with the packs of Connecticut.
The sept did not officially recognize any long-term packs among its members, the closest equivalent being temporary "mission teams" (a term which saw rather limited use). Packs did exist in a more unofficial capacity, but up until shortly before the sept's destruction, never included both Shadow Lords and Silver Fangs at once. The sole exception to this in the sept's known history was a pack in the 2010s featuring Knife-Eyes (Silver Fang), Elton Dey (Shadow Lord), Katherine Aslanian-Dey (Shadow Lord), Melodie Palys (Silver Fang), and Harmonie Palys (human). The lattermost member also set the precedent of being the first human member of such a pack.
Demographics[]
At its height immediately prior to the Battle of Graves Farm, the Broad Brook Sept claimed almost thirty official members, making it one of the largest septs in New England, even before the fall of the Garou Nation significantly lowered the regional average.
The most common tribe present at the sept was the Silver Fangs, with the Shadow Lords being a close second. This was represented by the caern's twin Guardian Spirits: For the Shadow Lords, the Thunder-servant Stormcat, and for the Silver Fangs, the Falcon of Doors, an aspect of Falcon himself.
Other tribes present at the sept at the time of its destruction were the Bone Gnawers, Hart Wardens, and to a lesser extent the Children of Gaia. It once housed a more sizeable Ghost Council contingent, but had not seen any among its number since the early 20th century. Similarly, the few Glass Walkers in the area tended to avoid the sept, and the Silent Striders never made any permanent ties, for obvious reasons.
Religious Culture[]
As with most septs, the Broad Brook Garou worship their Patron Spirits in a unique and idiosyncratic manner that can be difficult for outsiders to penetrate. Most of the specific aspects of the local patrons are based off of Greek and Armenian mythology that were brought over by the European colonizer Garou, though some individual Garou may still maintain the Indigenous customs of the area.
The caern's barrow-temple once housed the Calendar of Selardi. A physical manifestation of the virtues of the Garou Nation, it gave them the authority to command the spirits of the land. Without it and the sept to guide them, most of the Pioneer Valley's spirits fall silent, grow mad, or swear themselves to Fenris. The Calendar was a polished stone disc, six and a half feet across. Simple and elegant carvings marked out regions of Umbral space, the spirit-kings that ruled the land. Falcon and Spider, the Winds and the Rivers, gods and mighty ancestors. A beautifully carved stone framework in three pieces covered the polished stone, hiding or revealing different markings. Smaller clips and frames of the same polished stone guided the system. It moved like a clock, but not through any normal mechanism: Umbral winds brushed against the massive edifice, causing its wheels to shift and flow around one-another, offering spirit-secrets to those among the Garou who learned to read the glyphs, and asserting Broad Brook's authority to rule its territory.
Major Spirits[]
- Falcon - Horus, who has been worshiped in Egypt since prehistory, who rose again as the herald of a New Age, a spirit of youth to cast down the old Age of Osiris with its cruel divine patriarchs and false science. This aspect of Falcon, resurgent far beyond just Broad Brook in recent centuries, is a separate being to the temporal Horus.
- Helios - Arev
- Luna - Selardi
- Thunder - Vahagn, the straw-thief. In ages long past, Vahagn brought fire to humanity by stealing straw from a greedy king, in a manner similar to Prometheus. As he streaked across the sky to grant his bounty to humans, straw fell out of his basket, forming the Milky Way in the night sky.
Minor Spirits[]
- Horned Serpent - Vishap
- North Wind - Kaikias
- Owl - Simurgh
- Sandaramet - an earth-spirit and god of the underworld.
Sept Members[]
Former[]
- Breaker-of-Wings
- Hiram Fain
- Malachi "Old Man" Palys
- Marion "Chains-the-Lie" Lubasik
- Unnamed Pan-Killer ragabash
As of destruction[]
- Lawrence "Graynail" Pohl
- Harmonie Palys (more so as a de facto honorary member)
- Jane "Holds-the-Dawn" Lucci
- Katherine Aslanian-Dey
- Knife-Eyes
- Martha Mendez