The Triple King (more commonly encountered in one of his three aspects, the Vernal King, Summer King and Harvest King) is a powerful and ambitious spirit formerly in control of the town of Ashfield.
Biography[]
The Triple King is a jaggling originating in several pagan beliefs from Poland and the Czech Republic, immigrants from which 'transplanted' him into the Pioneer Valley in the 1920s. Harvest gods of his ilk are tangentially associated with the Weaver, and the Triple King's particular strain are rare in the New World due to the area being the domain of the unfriendly Corn Maidens.
It thrived in its new home of Ashfield by feeding off of Gertrude Ware, who was a distant relation of the Palys bloodline and therefore harbored some distant and esoteric connection to the Garou and their spiritual potency. The Triple King fed on Gertrude until she was completely spiritually burnt out, then became dormant.
In 2019, Melodie Palys, a distant and indirect descendant of Gertrude Ware, fled to Ashfield after the destruction of her home sept. The Triple King enthralled her with his powers of mental influence and restarted his cult to feed off of her, now using Gertrude's direct (and fully human) descendant Elijah Ware as his high priest. This renewed cycle only ended in 2022, when a pack consisting mostly of other Broad Brook survivors rescued Melodie moments before she was meant to be sacrificed.
Abilities[]
The Triple King's most prominent ability is his power of wide-scale mental influence: He is capable of regressing entire communities into simplified stereotypes of the region: Antiquated caricatures of 'countryside life' forced upon thousands of people at a time. He used these powers to transform Ashfield into a portrait of Americana life in order to heighten the power granted to him by being the god of such a quaint, "Wicker Man/Midsommar/Dunwich Horror-esque" town. In addition, he forced upon the town's inhabitants a compulsion to enact his chosen rituals in order to siphon the spiritual energy both from their worship and from his enthralled Garou.
If the player manages to apprehend the Triple King and bind his pumpkin-tabernacle to a local shrine of Simurgh, his phantasms manage to cover all of Northampton, but cowed by the ever-watchful eyes of the spirit under which he is placed, he uses these powers exclusively to mystically shield the activity of the Garou from local human authorities. The potential wrath of the far more powerful and wide-reaching Corn Maidens also forbid him from teaching Gifts.
Worship[]
The Triple King's Ashfield followers enacted three rituals at three different times of the year: The vernal equinox, the summer solstice, and the autumnal equinox, one for each of the Triple King's three aspects. Only the minutiae of the three different rituals are unique; all three are mostly the same. Each ritual takes the form of a "symbolic narrative", similar to a Legendary Rite, in which a nameless hero slays a dragon in return for a "golden flower" (The Triple King's sacred tabernacle) and the hand of the Flower Maiden (the Triple King's prey) in marriage. The Triple King specifically gains power from the subversion of this ritual via the hero's actor being killed, as the ritual as-is would bind him to his tabernacle instead.