The Three Families are a trio of families (The Banickis, Palyses and Lubasiks) located mostly in the Pioneer Valley. Historically, they have been longtime human allies of the Broad Brook Sept.
Overview[]
History[]
The Three Families moved to Massachusetts circa the mid-1800s with the first wave of Polish immigrants to the area. Their interactions spawned an entire philosophy that came to define the local Garou, who freely mixed the Lubasiks' Catholic heresies and Palyses' Jewish mysticism with the more traditional spiritual beliefs most Garou are familiar with.
Though they arrived independently, these three families soon realized that they had more in common than the suspicion of their Anglo neighbors. It's not clear whether they uncovered the Garou living among them or whether the werewolves approached the Three Families to propose an alliance as mills and factories spread across the Connecticut River Valley. It is known that in the early 20th century, Malachi Palys, a Silver Fang philodox and ruthless patriarch of the Palys family, helped forge an unlikely alliance. After he met with Broad Brook Garou and representatives of the Lubasik and Banicki families, humans and Garou forged an unlikely alliance: the Garou would protect the Three Families from their own supernatural studies, and the humans would serve as the werewolves' eyes and hands in the human world.
Over the next century, the Three Families intermarried and expanded until, by the 1960s, they were major players in local politics, despite their "unusual religious beliefs." But the Garou/human situation remained tense, especially when one of the last Lubasiks experienced his First Change. Courted by both major tribes, the artisan Marion Lubasik joined the Silver Fangs, which turned many Shadow Lords permanently against the Three Families. When, more than fifty years later, another member of the Three Families (Melodie Palys) also joined the Silver Fangs, that reopened old wounds and triggered an irreconcilable split between the Broad Brook Shadow Lords, on the one hand, and the Silver Fangs and the remains of the Three Families, on the other.
Broad Brook's Silver Fangs believed that the presence of the Three Families gave the local Garou a continuity of tradition and access to human resources that let them thrive in their battle against the Wyrm. By contrast, the equally-common Shadow Lords believed that the Three Families were manipulators, proud beyond their station, who believed that they could dictate terms to Gaia's champions.
After the Battle of Graves Farm, most of the Three Families forsook their support of the Garou, believing the cause to be lost. Few remain in Northampton, and fewer still remember the truth of the Garou.
Duties[]
Often subservient to Broad Brook, members of the Three Families were expected to help out in whatever ways they could: Turning their skills toward granting the Garou new resources, or providing manual labor when needed. Sometimes they were compensated, more often 'making up for humanity's crimes against Gaia (was) its own reward'.
Each of the families were expected to tend to a certain kind of animal, corresponding to shifter-breeds that Garou legend states were exterminated by the werewolves in the War of Rage: Sacred cattle for the Palyses, swine for the Banickis, and bears for the Lubasiks.
Individual Families[]
Banicki[]
The Banicki family was the first of the Three Families to establish themselves in Northampton, predating the Broad Brook Sept itself. They were originally peasant farmers with a strong tradition of wise women and herbalists who escaped desperate rural poverty to slightly less desperate rural life in the Valley, bringing their heavily paganized Christianity with them.
- David Banicki
- Paul Banicki (also a distant relation of the Palyses)
- Violet Smengie (née Banicki)
Palys[]
In addition to supporting Broad Brook via mortal means, the Palys family is also a known Kin-prone lineage, producing many of the sept's commonplace Silver Fangs. The Palyses were once Jewish artisans and scholars originally from Prague who fled across Europe for more than a generation before escaping across the Atlantic to Massachusetts.
Lubasik[]
The Lubasiks were disgraced aristocrats, defrocked priests, and occult aesthetes who escaped their homeland one step ahead of what one Garou called "old-fashioned peasant mobs in the Frankenstein tradition." Their patriarch, Casimir Lubasik, wrote The Order of the Invisible World, a guide to the Valley's spirits so thorough and complete that even Garou came to rely on it.
Members of unknown families[]
- Roscoe Thanh (via marriage)