Black Spiral Dancer Kinfolk
Jan. 2nd, 2005 05:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dunmurderinFirst Appearance: Here! This is something I've been working on for a while about playing BSD kinfolk. I first got the BSD kin bug back when I was playing my character Finlay on Dark Metal. Ahhh, Mesa Verde, those were some good times. Good, *good* times...
-----
Black Spiral Dancer Kinfolk:
Why be loyal to the Dancers, you ask? I'll answer that with a question of my own: why're you loyal to your shifters?
You really think the Dancers are that much different from the Silver Fangs or the Get of Fenris? Not by a long shot, pal. C'mon, think about it for a couple. Which would you rather be? A female BSD kinfolk or a male Black Fury kinfolk? Which one do you think gets treated better? If you said Black Fury, you'd be dead wrong. Hell, at least I know my cousins want me around.
What's that? You say I'm just being kept around for breeding purposes? Hel-LO! Pick up the clue phone already! That's what ALL kinfolk are for! The Garou can't hump each other, (well, they CAN and they DO, but at least on your side of the fence everybody gets so whiny when it happens I'm surprised any of them can even think about sex, buncha repressed dumbasses if you ask me) so they hump us. I'm supposed to have a problem with this? *snorts* Sorry, but some of us really do like having sex with 'em. Dunno 'bout you guys, but our boys are hung and at least we don't have to listen to 'em prattle on about loving us, or some BS like that.
Hmmm? No hon, they don't give a good goddamn about you. You're breeding stock and expendable cannon fodder. Why do you think they use you guys to try and spy us out? How many Garou are you helping to feed? And how many of them pay you back? Or even do the dishes? Uh-huh, that's what I thought. You feed them, you shelter them, you blow your money on their security and you're supposed to be what? Grateful? Screw that. My cousins at least show me how to screw the system so I can get a few more food stamps every month, and some of 'em even pass me some cash when they make a good score.
Ohh, wait, wait, let me guess! This is where you're going to try and tell me that Dancers are the big bad wolves who want to destroy the world and everything in it. Sorry, knew that one already. Your point? From where I'm sitting, your cousins are the ones who're working on bringing about the world's destruction.
Or didn't you stop to think that if you remove balance from the world everything's going to go straight to hell? Right now, it's just a question of which side does it first. If we win, we get eternal rewards with the Wyrm. If you guys win...what? Gaia gives them some doggie treats and a pat on the head and you end up still doing the same old scutwork you’re doing now. Do you really think your glory happy cousins are going to share the credit with you? *phhht* Dreamers...
And don't try to give me that "Dancers are evil 'cause they killed my parents/children/lover/siblings/family/pet dog/the milkman" shit. Do you have ANY idea how many of MY kinfolk have fallen to the Gaians? And not just our shifters, either. Do you REALLY think your war parties make any kind of distinction between kinfolk who're fighting and kinfolk who're running away? If you do, my *GOD* are you one deluded, naive little shithead. I've heard stories about Gaian raids on Hives that made My Lai sound like a fuckin' tea party. I've SEEN 'good' Garou so far gone in Rage and self-righteousness that they've slammed Dancer kinfolk children...and by children I mean toddlers against trees, howling with joy because they took another 'victim of the Wyrm' out of this world. Yeah, some victims, all they did was get born to the wrong parents. Those're some big tough planet-savers you got there, my friend. Makin' the world safe from two-year olds with the wrong DNA....
Now, let me guess…we've covered being sex toys, we've covered being used, we've covered the whole raving monster bit, so what's left? Oh YEAH! Now's the part where you try and tell me I'm deluded or too afraid to speak out against my kin... News flash, dumbass, I'm no more afraid of mine than you are of yours. Hell, at least I can admit that my cousins scare the shit out of me, especially when they're getting their mad on. Who wouldn't be afraid of some eight-foot tall motherfucker who can snap your neck like a goddamn twig? Or rip your head off like a kid popping the top off a dandelion? Do some of our guys (and gals, you think Black Furies are bitches? Try messing with a BSD when she's on the rag...*SCARY*) do it for the hell of it? Sometimes, sure. Every family's got a few assholes in it, we're just running a higher number than some. But you know what? We're a lot more self-policing than your guys are. We *HAVE* to be. What's the quote? "An armed society is a polite society?" That's us my friend. Our shifters are only 10% of the total Garou population; if they start running around offing kinfolk just because one of them looked at them funny, they're rapidly going to run out of kinfolk...or they're going to find out what anyone who's been in the military can already tell you: friendly fire, isn't.
Hmmm? Oh you think we just sit back and TAKE the abuse? HELL NO! Well, some of us do, either because they're too weak to fight back or because they like it, but Garou are *harder* to kill than normal folks, not *impossible* to kill. Not to brag, but I've offed a couple...less than polite Dancers myself. Ohhh, *now* you're lookin' interested...whatsa matter honey? Got some fuzzy ridin' your ass? Figuratively or literally? Maybe both? Hey...what d'you think your folk'd do if they found out you offed one of the shifters, huh? My guys, hell, half the time they figure anybody stupid enough to get whacked by a kinfolk was a dumbass to begin with. Oh sure, they'll slap you around some but that's just 'cause they don't want everybody getting the idea that snuffing a Dancer is okay. Somehow, I gotta feeling your guys'd do something a whole lot worse than break your arm or black your eyes...and they probably wouldn't drive you to the hospital afterwards.
And as for being deluded...do I look deluded? Do I look brainwashed? Huh? What about the cubs and kin that the Dancers kidnap? Y'know, I got a historical analogy for you there: the Indians used to take European settlers hostage, usually women and children, but sometimes men too.. 'Course, the Europeans used to take Indians hostage too. The Indians adopted their captives into their tribes, made them part of the family, taught them their ways and gave them a chance to prove themselves. The Europeans, well, they enslaved the Indians they took in, told them not to speak their language anymore, not to practice their customs, to stop being so damn not-White. When the times would come for prisoner exchanges, the Indians would return home to their people singing and happy, while the Europeans would fight and scratch to stay with the “savages” who’d taken them in, to stay where they were truly happy. Those kinfolk and cubs we take, they get the chance to join us, to become part of something special. They get the chance to become part of our fight and if they agree to join, they become one of us, no different than the ones who were born into our society. Now, I've seen kin and Dancers who were either stolen or defected to the Gaian side and who escaped to come back to us. You know why they come back? Because no matter what they do among your oh-so-enlightened and wonderful Gaia-blessed people, they'll never be anything more than some 'Wyrm-tainted bastard' who has to work ten times harder than the next asshole to prove themselves worthy of being in your people's esteemed company. Ever notice that not many 'captives' escape? Ever think maybe they stay with us because they're *happy* here? 'Course not, I mean, nobody could be happy with the *bad* guys, right? Sheesh, quit livin' in the '80's ok? There *are* no bad guys or good guys, only variations of grey.
*Sighs* I'm tired...look, it boils down to this: we're loyal to the Dancers for the same reasons you're loyal to your shifters: they're family. Yeah, that ugly green motherfucker that ripped through your Caern and killed your sister is a monster to you, but to me, he's my baby brother. I diapered him, I fed him, I fought him for the TV remote and helped him with his homework and held his hand when he got shots at the doctors....hell, I STILL hold his hand when he gets shots at the doctors...and I was happier than a pig in shit when he Changed for the first time. I love my brother, I love my cousins, I love my motherfuckin' tribe, warts and all. I'm happy with my place in it and I wouldn't change places with my brother for all the money in the world. Can you say the same thing?
*Long pause*
Yeah, I didn't think you could...
Catch you at the end of the world, hope you wise up by then...
# # #
The common picture of the Black Spiral Dancer Kinfolk is one of a broken and highly delusional soul who takes a backseat to his or her shifter kinfolk, suffering unheard of abuse and degradation at their hands. Like most stereotypes, this one has its basis in fact. Many Dancer Kin live along the fringes of normal human society, abused and ignored by both their shifter kin and the rest of the world by turns.
But for every three Dancer kin living in pathetic squalor in a trailer park or homeless shelter, there is one who holds down a regular job somewhere, be it at a garage or a factory (not always run by Pentex or a Pentex subsidiary). Dancer kin can be found working in almost any profession. They can be the guys working road construction on Interstate 69 or that intense young woman working as a secretary at the local high school or even, in a few cases, your family doctor.
The Black Spiral Dancers tend to be somewhat more reliant on their functional kinfolk than other tribes. Partly this is because of the propensity for BSDs to breed with each other. The tribe is currently fifty percent metis and is in serious risk of breeding itself into sterility. Breeding with unstable kin, leads to unstable and potentially useless Dancers. Shock troops are all well and good, but Shifters who can do little but dribble and scream are a waste of resources. Taking good care of the kinfolk who can pass for normal among the humans is one way to try and insure that those kin will remain loyal and willing to breed homid and lupus Dancers.
Building that loyalty isn’t as difficult as one might think. The Dancers have many tools at their disposal: money, drugs, sex, power, name the vice and chances are the Dancers can provide it. Fear can also be a powerful motivator, one the Dancers aren’t above using when necessary. In addition, since Dancer kinfolk come from the same genetic cesspool as their shifter cousins, many choose to stick closer to home for more filial reasons. After all, home is where they understand you and the average BSD kinfolk has more in common with his or her shifter relations than they do with the Joneses next door.
Black Spiral Dancer Families:
“What was I thinking when I said "I do"? I'd already had sex with her; I didn't need that again!” - Al Bundy
Okay, so maybe the average Black Spiral Dancer household has more in common with Ted Bundy than with Al, but in either case Dancer households tend to be dysfunctional, sometimes spectacularly so. Dancers and their kin can be found in all walks of life, from rural dirt farmers to the jetsetters who summer at Martha’s Vinyard.
The most common stereotype for Dancer families is that of a highly inbred group of hillbillies who refer to each other as "Sister Mom" and "Uncle Dad", but inbreeding doesn't just occur among the poor and ignorant. For centuries, the rich and powerful have inbred to the point where mental illness was seen as a sign of nobility. History is littered with examples of noble lines that used incest to preserve the power of the royal family. Heck, at the time of World War I, the heads of the royal family of England, Germany and Russia were cousins to one another.
New Skills:
Passing: The whole neighborhood was in shock. Workers digging a new sewer line had found the first of the bodies and bones were still being pulled out of the hole. At first, they'd thought they'd stumbled on a Native American burial ground, but dental records for one of the skulls matched a young man who'd gone missing the year before. The owners of the home, a young married couple who'd lived there for five years, had been taken away in a squad car, leaving their neighbors shaking their heads in bemusement. "They'd seemed so nice," was the common refrain.
Passing measures your ability to fit in amongst "mundane" society. The higher your passing skill, the more easily you fit in amongst your schoolmates, co-workers and the general mass of humanity. Passing makes it easier for you to go along and get along. You still suffer from the delusions and social aberrations common to your people, but you're able to maintain a pleasant, normal façade when necessary, allowing you to hide in plain sight.
Level 0 (No dots in Passing): There is something strange about you that causes people to notice you. Maybe not to suspect you of any wrongdoing, but you unnerve them. Not necessarily because you are dangerous, though you probably are, but because you feel wrong, somehow.
Level 1: You still unnerve people. Your classmates avoid you, except when they might deign to beat you up (unless they've learned not to do this). You have few friends outside your immediate family and even within your family, people avoid you.
Level 2: You've managed to find a few outcasts outside your immediate family who tolerate you, mainly because you're just as much of an outsider as they are. Within this small social circle, you may have some small measure of popularity. Or perhaps notoriety, depending on how much you've used and abused this trust over the years. You can generally always find another sucker though.
Level 3: For all intents and purposes, you come across as baseline normal with a few quirks. You don't make any waves, you're not too good, not too bad. You're probably in danger of slipping through the cracks, but you don't mind. It's cozy there.
Level 4: You're normal to slightly above average. You're smart enough to know that you need to keep what the Family does hidden from outsiders and you're pretty good at figuring out how to explain away the few odd things about you (tattoos, sudden brusies, unexplained absences from work, etc.). The Family is very proud of you.
Level 5: Even your own tribe has trouble believing you're one of them. You're so squeaky-clean it's hard to believe you're real. Ever considered a career in politics?
Specializations: Above level four, characters can take a specialization in any subculture (Corporate, Industrial, Military, High School, Ghetto, Suburbia, etc).
Who has this skill?: While this skill was developed with BSDs in mind, it can apply to any group within the WOD, especially those who come into contact with the Mortal World most often: Ghouls, Bystanders, Gaian Kinfolk, etc.
New Derrangement:
Stockholm Syndrome:
In 1973, the “Sveriges Kreditbank” in Stockholm, Sweden was robbed by Jan-Erik Olsson, an escaped convict. In the process of the robbery, Olsson took four bank employees hostage and held them for 131 hours (about five and a half days). In later interviews, Olsson’s hostages expressed sympathy for their captors and fear of those who were working to free them. This seemingly aberrant behavior has been found in other hostage situations and was dubbed the “Stockholm Syndrome” after the Kreditbank incident.
While Stockholm syndrome is most commonly associated with hostage situations, the phenomena can be seen in battered spouses, Holocaust survivors, and members of religious cults. In each case, people seek to protect themselves from abuse by identifying with their abuser. Stockholm Syndrome arises in situations where the following conditions are met:
* A person threatens to kill another and is perceived as having the capability to do so.
* The other cannot escape, so her or his life depends on the threatening person.
* The threatened person is isolated from outsiders so that the only other perspective available to her or him is that of the threatening person.
* The threatening person is perceived as showing some degree of kindness to the one being threatened. (WHBW)
Among Black Spiral Dancers, Stockholm Syndrome is not so much a mental aberration as it is a survival mechanism. By identifying with their tribe as a whole or even simply with individual members of the tribe and/or family, the kinfolk tries to stave off abuse and bad treatment. This merit gives the kin in question -2 to difficulty in social interactions with Black Spiral Dancers and +2 to difficulty in social interactions with Gaian Garou (or anyone who seeks to convince the kinfolk that they need to leave the BSDs).
It’s worth noting that the Stockholm syndrome can work in reverse, with the hostage taker showing sympathy for the hostage. This may help to explain why Black Spiral Dancer kinfolk can not only survive but also thrive in conditions that would destroy lesser mortals.
New Merits and Flaws:
Most of the Merits/Flaws in Kinfolk: Unsung Heroes also apply to BSD kinfolk (and vice versa). I would suggest avoiding those Flaws, such as Sterile, that would most likely cause a kinfolk to be culled from the herd. BSDs do not tolerate failure.
Fertile: 4 point Merit: You are fertile. If you're female, you conceive children with a ridiculous ease, even while on various intrusive forms of birth control (Depo, the Pill, etc). Your pregnancies tend to be easy, with few complications. If you're male, you tend to knock girls up even if you're not trying (you've probably got a string of babymommas out there). Being fertile does not mean that your children are more likely to be Shifters, just that you are more likely to have children. But, the more children you have, the better your chances according to the Law of Large Numbers. You are also less likely to be allowed to roam far from your Family, particularly if female.
Tourettes: 2-4 point Flaw: You have Tourette's Syndrome. At its most mild, you have a tendency to twitch and occasionally suffer from vocal twitches (coprolalia, the uncontrolled swearing commonly associated with Tourettes is actually quite rare; most vocal twitches are blurted phrases or everyday words). At it's mildest, you occasionally twitch or blurt out non sequitors, occasionally to the annoyance of those around you. At it's worst (4 point flaw) you have a tendency to blurt out things without thinking, even things you know should be kept secret. This condition worsens under stress. With the 2 point version of this Flaw, add one to the difficulty of Subterfuge rolls under stress. With the four point version, add 2 to the difficulty of any Subterfuge rolls made under stress.
BSD Kinfolk Fellowships:
Highland Heritage Preservation Society: A group of Dancer kinfolk of Scottish descent, mostly members of the American middle and upper middle class who gather to help preserve the heritage of their Highland ancestors. Most of these individuals are fifth and sixth generation Scottish-Americans whose ideas about Highland culture come mainly from romanticized versions of Scottish history. The society sponsors trips to the Old Country, where modern descendents of the Highland Dancers look upon their American cousins with curiosity, amusement and disdain (sometimes all at once). A more important function is the maintenance of genealogical records for many of the larger BSD kin families.
Wolfdog Enthusiasts of America: Founded by Cathleen Finlay in 1982, this group works toward the admirable goal of educating the public about wolves and wolf-dog hybrids. The breeders and kennels in this group claim to be working toward stronger, more intelligent crossbreeds and, by all accounts, they appear to be succeeding. A more sinister aspect of the group is the breeding of lupus kin and shifters for the Dancer tribe. True Dancer lupus are treated well by their kin, but captured Gaian lupus are usually bred to death in these Dancer sponsored puppy mills.
Manual Labor Protection Society: This group lobbies Congress in favor of ‘the blue collar workers who made this great nation what it is today.” Claiming to represent the jobs of workers in industries such as logging, coal mining, and other environmentally unfriendly industries, this group lobbies to try and keep environmental standards looser, with the stated benefit of protecting workers’ jobs.
Free Speech!: This group lobbies in favor of broadening the tenants of the First Amendment. The stated idea is to ‘break down the boundaries of language and make all speech free with the idea of broadening the discourse of the nation.’ In actuality, by seeking do away with things like legal penalties for sexual harassment, hate speech, and ratings systems for TV, movies, books and video games, the group is trying to speed the desensitization of America, using its own values against it.
Society To Investigate Claims of the Paranormal: A (publicly) skeptical organization bent on debunking such things as ghosts, UFOs, the Bible Code, Nostradamus and those silly ‘Wolf-Man’ stories that occasionally pop up in the news. This group exists because its founders realized that the easiest way to hide within modern society is to convince people that what they saw wasn’t really what they saw. People want simple and safe explanations and the modern tendency to rely on science rather than the supernatural is a godsend to the workers of SICP. This group is still small, since many Dancers look on them and their supposed skepticism with great suspicion.
In many cases, Black Spiral Dancer Kinfolk don’t form their own fellowships, but join existing fringe groups. Go to your local gun show, UFO contactee meeting or Star Trek convention and chances are good that BSD kin (and sometimes BSDs themselves) are meeting in full view of the ‘normal’ populace, blending in to the insanity around them, like wolves in freaks’ clothing. They hide easily, since most ‘mundanes’ laugh at their strange beliefs, thinking that what they’re hearing is simply the words of a fantasy-prone individual. Black Spiral Kin can also be found among the membership of groups such as the NRA, NOW, NAMBLA, the Black Panthers, the KKK, the SCA, ACT-UP, Scientology and others (sometimes simultaneously). In most cases, when Dancer kin do join a ‘mainstream’ organization they move quickly to the fringes, seeking other rabble-rousers and outcasts to hook up with. They tend to form splinter groups, breaking off from the main body of the organization, sometimes without bothering to take a new name. Dancer Kin tend to be among the worst examples of whatever group they are a part of, whether it’s a conservative “family rights” group or a Star Trek fan club. The fact that many of the groups they belong to work against each other only helps add to the confusion and chaos that the Dancers as a tribe seek to create.
Sample BSD Family: The Finlays:
The Finlays are one of the oldest Black Spiral Dancer families still in existence in the 21st century. Family lore has it that they can trace their roots, through an uninterrupted matrilineal line, back to the earliest days of the Black Spiral Dancers and before. Even before the Fall, the Finlays (a sept of what would become Clan Farquharson) had a reputation for violence, cunning and madness. They were among the first of the White Howlers to breech Malfeas as a test of their bravery and cunning. As a result, they were also among the first to fall. Though, to hear the Finlays tell it, even now, they didn’t so much fall as embrace the truth that the Father had brought them.
For most of the clan’s history, the Finlays lived in the highlands of Scotland, fighting off Gaian attacks, rival clans and the British government (and occasionally branches within their own family when things got too quiet). It wasn’t until the mid-1700s that Finlays began to spread out from the Highlands, first to cities like London, then to America and Australia as both colonists and transportees.
Finlays first arrived in the American Colonies shortly before the American Revolution. Some stayed in eastern cities, particularly in the North, while others settled in the South or moved west past the mountains. Some of these, generally single young men, interbred with local Indian populations. Others were slaughtered by Uktena and Wendigo kin, sensing the Wyrmtaint within the family.
With the exceptions of a few mountain men and solitary trappers, the Finlays tended to stick to the fringes of more civilized areas. Like many of their fellow Scots and Irish settlers, they flocked to the Appalachian mountains, where they settled in isolated hollows and kept themselves to themselves. Once there, they fell back into their old Highland ways, inbreeding with each other and fighting any outside influence that came too close.
Several branches of the family moved to the North during the Depression years and again during World War Two when many Appalachian men and women went to work in factories in Indiana and Illinois.
Currently, the American Finlays outnumber their Scottish cousins.
Note: More on this section; it's pretty shaky as it is right now
# # #
Links:
Women Helping Battered Women: Stockholm Syndrome. http://homepages.together.net/~whbw/WHBWstockholm.html
The Peace Encyclopedia: Stockholm Syndrome:
http://www.yahoodi.com/peace/stockholm.html
Clan Farquharson: http://www.tartans.com/clans/Farquharson/farquharson.html
-----
Black Spiral Dancer Kinfolk:
Why be loyal to the Dancers, you ask? I'll answer that with a question of my own: why're you loyal to your shifters?
You really think the Dancers are that much different from the Silver Fangs or the Get of Fenris? Not by a long shot, pal. C'mon, think about it for a couple. Which would you rather be? A female BSD kinfolk or a male Black Fury kinfolk? Which one do you think gets treated better? If you said Black Fury, you'd be dead wrong. Hell, at least I know my cousins want me around.
What's that? You say I'm just being kept around for breeding purposes? Hel-LO! Pick up the clue phone already! That's what ALL kinfolk are for! The Garou can't hump each other, (well, they CAN and they DO, but at least on your side of the fence everybody gets so whiny when it happens I'm surprised any of them can even think about sex, buncha repressed dumbasses if you ask me) so they hump us. I'm supposed to have a problem with this? *snorts* Sorry, but some of us really do like having sex with 'em. Dunno 'bout you guys, but our boys are hung and at least we don't have to listen to 'em prattle on about loving us, or some BS like that.
Hmmm? No hon, they don't give a good goddamn about you. You're breeding stock and expendable cannon fodder. Why do you think they use you guys to try and spy us out? How many Garou are you helping to feed? And how many of them pay you back? Or even do the dishes? Uh-huh, that's what I thought. You feed them, you shelter them, you blow your money on their security and you're supposed to be what? Grateful? Screw that. My cousins at least show me how to screw the system so I can get a few more food stamps every month, and some of 'em even pass me some cash when they make a good score.
Ohh, wait, wait, let me guess! This is where you're going to try and tell me that Dancers are the big bad wolves who want to destroy the world and everything in it. Sorry, knew that one already. Your point? From where I'm sitting, your cousins are the ones who're working on bringing about the world's destruction.
Or didn't you stop to think that if you remove balance from the world everything's going to go straight to hell? Right now, it's just a question of which side does it first. If we win, we get eternal rewards with the Wyrm. If you guys win...what? Gaia gives them some doggie treats and a pat on the head and you end up still doing the same old scutwork you’re doing now. Do you really think your glory happy cousins are going to share the credit with you? *phhht* Dreamers...
And don't try to give me that "Dancers are evil 'cause they killed my parents/children/lover/siblings/family/pet dog/the milkman" shit. Do you have ANY idea how many of MY kinfolk have fallen to the Gaians? And not just our shifters, either. Do you REALLY think your war parties make any kind of distinction between kinfolk who're fighting and kinfolk who're running away? If you do, my *GOD* are you one deluded, naive little shithead. I've heard stories about Gaian raids on Hives that made My Lai sound like a fuckin' tea party. I've SEEN 'good' Garou so far gone in Rage and self-righteousness that they've slammed Dancer kinfolk children...and by children I mean toddlers against trees, howling with joy because they took another 'victim of the Wyrm' out of this world. Yeah, some victims, all they did was get born to the wrong parents. Those're some big tough planet-savers you got there, my friend. Makin' the world safe from two-year olds with the wrong DNA....
Now, let me guess…we've covered being sex toys, we've covered being used, we've covered the whole raving monster bit, so what's left? Oh YEAH! Now's the part where you try and tell me I'm deluded or too afraid to speak out against my kin... News flash, dumbass, I'm no more afraid of mine than you are of yours. Hell, at least I can admit that my cousins scare the shit out of me, especially when they're getting their mad on. Who wouldn't be afraid of some eight-foot tall motherfucker who can snap your neck like a goddamn twig? Or rip your head off like a kid popping the top off a dandelion? Do some of our guys (and gals, you think Black Furies are bitches? Try messing with a BSD when she's on the rag...*SCARY*) do it for the hell of it? Sometimes, sure. Every family's got a few assholes in it, we're just running a higher number than some. But you know what? We're a lot more self-policing than your guys are. We *HAVE* to be. What's the quote? "An armed society is a polite society?" That's us my friend. Our shifters are only 10% of the total Garou population; if they start running around offing kinfolk just because one of them looked at them funny, they're rapidly going to run out of kinfolk...or they're going to find out what anyone who's been in the military can already tell you: friendly fire, isn't.
Hmmm? Oh you think we just sit back and TAKE the abuse? HELL NO! Well, some of us do, either because they're too weak to fight back or because they like it, but Garou are *harder* to kill than normal folks, not *impossible* to kill. Not to brag, but I've offed a couple...less than polite Dancers myself. Ohhh, *now* you're lookin' interested...whatsa matter honey? Got some fuzzy ridin' your ass? Figuratively or literally? Maybe both? Hey...what d'you think your folk'd do if they found out you offed one of the shifters, huh? My guys, hell, half the time they figure anybody stupid enough to get whacked by a kinfolk was a dumbass to begin with. Oh sure, they'll slap you around some but that's just 'cause they don't want everybody getting the idea that snuffing a Dancer is okay. Somehow, I gotta feeling your guys'd do something a whole lot worse than break your arm or black your eyes...and they probably wouldn't drive you to the hospital afterwards.
And as for being deluded...do I look deluded? Do I look brainwashed? Huh? What about the cubs and kin that the Dancers kidnap? Y'know, I got a historical analogy for you there: the Indians used to take European settlers hostage, usually women and children, but sometimes men too.. 'Course, the Europeans used to take Indians hostage too. The Indians adopted their captives into their tribes, made them part of the family, taught them their ways and gave them a chance to prove themselves. The Europeans, well, they enslaved the Indians they took in, told them not to speak their language anymore, not to practice their customs, to stop being so damn not-White. When the times would come for prisoner exchanges, the Indians would return home to their people singing and happy, while the Europeans would fight and scratch to stay with the “savages” who’d taken them in, to stay where they were truly happy. Those kinfolk and cubs we take, they get the chance to join us, to become part of something special. They get the chance to become part of our fight and if they agree to join, they become one of us, no different than the ones who were born into our society. Now, I've seen kin and Dancers who were either stolen or defected to the Gaian side and who escaped to come back to us. You know why they come back? Because no matter what they do among your oh-so-enlightened and wonderful Gaia-blessed people, they'll never be anything more than some 'Wyrm-tainted bastard' who has to work ten times harder than the next asshole to prove themselves worthy of being in your people's esteemed company. Ever notice that not many 'captives' escape? Ever think maybe they stay with us because they're *happy* here? 'Course not, I mean, nobody could be happy with the *bad* guys, right? Sheesh, quit livin' in the '80's ok? There *are* no bad guys or good guys, only variations of grey.
*Sighs* I'm tired...look, it boils down to this: we're loyal to the Dancers for the same reasons you're loyal to your shifters: they're family. Yeah, that ugly green motherfucker that ripped through your Caern and killed your sister is a monster to you, but to me, he's my baby brother. I diapered him, I fed him, I fought him for the TV remote and helped him with his homework and held his hand when he got shots at the doctors....hell, I STILL hold his hand when he gets shots at the doctors...and I was happier than a pig in shit when he Changed for the first time. I love my brother, I love my cousins, I love my motherfuckin' tribe, warts and all. I'm happy with my place in it and I wouldn't change places with my brother for all the money in the world. Can you say the same thing?
*Long pause*
Yeah, I didn't think you could...
Catch you at the end of the world, hope you wise up by then...
# # #
The common picture of the Black Spiral Dancer Kinfolk is one of a broken and highly delusional soul who takes a backseat to his or her shifter kinfolk, suffering unheard of abuse and degradation at their hands. Like most stereotypes, this one has its basis in fact. Many Dancer Kin live along the fringes of normal human society, abused and ignored by both their shifter kin and the rest of the world by turns.
But for every three Dancer kin living in pathetic squalor in a trailer park or homeless shelter, there is one who holds down a regular job somewhere, be it at a garage or a factory (not always run by Pentex or a Pentex subsidiary). Dancer kin can be found working in almost any profession. They can be the guys working road construction on Interstate 69 or that intense young woman working as a secretary at the local high school or even, in a few cases, your family doctor.
The Black Spiral Dancers tend to be somewhat more reliant on their functional kinfolk than other tribes. Partly this is because of the propensity for BSDs to breed with each other. The tribe is currently fifty percent metis and is in serious risk of breeding itself into sterility. Breeding with unstable kin, leads to unstable and potentially useless Dancers. Shock troops are all well and good, but Shifters who can do little but dribble and scream are a waste of resources. Taking good care of the kinfolk who can pass for normal among the humans is one way to try and insure that those kin will remain loyal and willing to breed homid and lupus Dancers.
Building that loyalty isn’t as difficult as one might think. The Dancers have many tools at their disposal: money, drugs, sex, power, name the vice and chances are the Dancers can provide it. Fear can also be a powerful motivator, one the Dancers aren’t above using when necessary. In addition, since Dancer kinfolk come from the same genetic cesspool as their shifter cousins, many choose to stick closer to home for more filial reasons. After all, home is where they understand you and the average BSD kinfolk has more in common with his or her shifter relations than they do with the Joneses next door.
Black Spiral Dancer Families:
“What was I thinking when I said "I do"? I'd already had sex with her; I didn't need that again!” - Al Bundy
Okay, so maybe the average Black Spiral Dancer household has more in common with Ted Bundy than with Al, but in either case Dancer households tend to be dysfunctional, sometimes spectacularly so. Dancers and their kin can be found in all walks of life, from rural dirt farmers to the jetsetters who summer at Martha’s Vinyard.
The most common stereotype for Dancer families is that of a highly inbred group of hillbillies who refer to each other as "Sister Mom" and "Uncle Dad", but inbreeding doesn't just occur among the poor and ignorant. For centuries, the rich and powerful have inbred to the point where mental illness was seen as a sign of nobility. History is littered with examples of noble lines that used incest to preserve the power of the royal family. Heck, at the time of World War I, the heads of the royal family of England, Germany and Russia were cousins to one another.
New Skills:
Passing: The whole neighborhood was in shock. Workers digging a new sewer line had found the first of the bodies and bones were still being pulled out of the hole. At first, they'd thought they'd stumbled on a Native American burial ground, but dental records for one of the skulls matched a young man who'd gone missing the year before. The owners of the home, a young married couple who'd lived there for five years, had been taken away in a squad car, leaving their neighbors shaking their heads in bemusement. "They'd seemed so nice," was the common refrain.
Passing measures your ability to fit in amongst "mundane" society. The higher your passing skill, the more easily you fit in amongst your schoolmates, co-workers and the general mass of humanity. Passing makes it easier for you to go along and get along. You still suffer from the delusions and social aberrations common to your people, but you're able to maintain a pleasant, normal façade when necessary, allowing you to hide in plain sight.
Level 0 (No dots in Passing): There is something strange about you that causes people to notice you. Maybe not to suspect you of any wrongdoing, but you unnerve them. Not necessarily because you are dangerous, though you probably are, but because you feel wrong, somehow.
Level 1: You still unnerve people. Your classmates avoid you, except when they might deign to beat you up (unless they've learned not to do this). You have few friends outside your immediate family and even within your family, people avoid you.
Level 2: You've managed to find a few outcasts outside your immediate family who tolerate you, mainly because you're just as much of an outsider as they are. Within this small social circle, you may have some small measure of popularity. Or perhaps notoriety, depending on how much you've used and abused this trust over the years. You can generally always find another sucker though.
Level 3: For all intents and purposes, you come across as baseline normal with a few quirks. You don't make any waves, you're not too good, not too bad. You're probably in danger of slipping through the cracks, but you don't mind. It's cozy there.
Level 4: You're normal to slightly above average. You're smart enough to know that you need to keep what the Family does hidden from outsiders and you're pretty good at figuring out how to explain away the few odd things about you (tattoos, sudden brusies, unexplained absences from work, etc.). The Family is very proud of you.
Level 5: Even your own tribe has trouble believing you're one of them. You're so squeaky-clean it's hard to believe you're real. Ever considered a career in politics?
Specializations: Above level four, characters can take a specialization in any subculture (Corporate, Industrial, Military, High School, Ghetto, Suburbia, etc).
Who has this skill?: While this skill was developed with BSDs in mind, it can apply to any group within the WOD, especially those who come into contact with the Mortal World most often: Ghouls, Bystanders, Gaian Kinfolk, etc.
New Derrangement:
Stockholm Syndrome:
In 1973, the “Sveriges Kreditbank” in Stockholm, Sweden was robbed by Jan-Erik Olsson, an escaped convict. In the process of the robbery, Olsson took four bank employees hostage and held them for 131 hours (about five and a half days). In later interviews, Olsson’s hostages expressed sympathy for their captors and fear of those who were working to free them. This seemingly aberrant behavior has been found in other hostage situations and was dubbed the “Stockholm Syndrome” after the Kreditbank incident.
While Stockholm syndrome is most commonly associated with hostage situations, the phenomena can be seen in battered spouses, Holocaust survivors, and members of religious cults. In each case, people seek to protect themselves from abuse by identifying with their abuser. Stockholm Syndrome arises in situations where the following conditions are met:
* A person threatens to kill another and is perceived as having the capability to do so.
* The other cannot escape, so her or his life depends on the threatening person.
* The threatened person is isolated from outsiders so that the only other perspective available to her or him is that of the threatening person.
* The threatening person is perceived as showing some degree of kindness to the one being threatened. (WHBW)
Among Black Spiral Dancers, Stockholm Syndrome is not so much a mental aberration as it is a survival mechanism. By identifying with their tribe as a whole or even simply with individual members of the tribe and/or family, the kinfolk tries to stave off abuse and bad treatment. This merit gives the kin in question -2 to difficulty in social interactions with Black Spiral Dancers and +2 to difficulty in social interactions with Gaian Garou (or anyone who seeks to convince the kinfolk that they need to leave the BSDs).
It’s worth noting that the Stockholm syndrome can work in reverse, with the hostage taker showing sympathy for the hostage. This may help to explain why Black Spiral Dancer kinfolk can not only survive but also thrive in conditions that would destroy lesser mortals.
New Merits and Flaws:
Most of the Merits/Flaws in Kinfolk: Unsung Heroes also apply to BSD kinfolk (and vice versa). I would suggest avoiding those Flaws, such as Sterile, that would most likely cause a kinfolk to be culled from the herd. BSDs do not tolerate failure.
Fertile: 4 point Merit: You are fertile. If you're female, you conceive children with a ridiculous ease, even while on various intrusive forms of birth control (Depo, the Pill, etc). Your pregnancies tend to be easy, with few complications. If you're male, you tend to knock girls up even if you're not trying (you've probably got a string of babymommas out there). Being fertile does not mean that your children are more likely to be Shifters, just that you are more likely to have children. But, the more children you have, the better your chances according to the Law of Large Numbers. You are also less likely to be allowed to roam far from your Family, particularly if female.
Tourettes: 2-4 point Flaw: You have Tourette's Syndrome. At its most mild, you have a tendency to twitch and occasionally suffer from vocal twitches (coprolalia, the uncontrolled swearing commonly associated with Tourettes is actually quite rare; most vocal twitches are blurted phrases or everyday words). At it's mildest, you occasionally twitch or blurt out non sequitors, occasionally to the annoyance of those around you. At it's worst (4 point flaw) you have a tendency to blurt out things without thinking, even things you know should be kept secret. This condition worsens under stress. With the 2 point version of this Flaw, add one to the difficulty of Subterfuge rolls under stress. With the four point version, add 2 to the difficulty of any Subterfuge rolls made under stress.
BSD Kinfolk Fellowships:
Highland Heritage Preservation Society: A group of Dancer kinfolk of Scottish descent, mostly members of the American middle and upper middle class who gather to help preserve the heritage of their Highland ancestors. Most of these individuals are fifth and sixth generation Scottish-Americans whose ideas about Highland culture come mainly from romanticized versions of Scottish history. The society sponsors trips to the Old Country, where modern descendents of the Highland Dancers look upon their American cousins with curiosity, amusement and disdain (sometimes all at once). A more important function is the maintenance of genealogical records for many of the larger BSD kin families.
Wolfdog Enthusiasts of America: Founded by Cathleen Finlay in 1982, this group works toward the admirable goal of educating the public about wolves and wolf-dog hybrids. The breeders and kennels in this group claim to be working toward stronger, more intelligent crossbreeds and, by all accounts, they appear to be succeeding. A more sinister aspect of the group is the breeding of lupus kin and shifters for the Dancer tribe. True Dancer lupus are treated well by their kin, but captured Gaian lupus are usually bred to death in these Dancer sponsored puppy mills.
Manual Labor Protection Society: This group lobbies Congress in favor of ‘the blue collar workers who made this great nation what it is today.” Claiming to represent the jobs of workers in industries such as logging, coal mining, and other environmentally unfriendly industries, this group lobbies to try and keep environmental standards looser, with the stated benefit of protecting workers’ jobs.
Free Speech!: This group lobbies in favor of broadening the tenants of the First Amendment. The stated idea is to ‘break down the boundaries of language and make all speech free with the idea of broadening the discourse of the nation.’ In actuality, by seeking do away with things like legal penalties for sexual harassment, hate speech, and ratings systems for TV, movies, books and video games, the group is trying to speed the desensitization of America, using its own values against it.
Society To Investigate Claims of the Paranormal: A (publicly) skeptical organization bent on debunking such things as ghosts, UFOs, the Bible Code, Nostradamus and those silly ‘Wolf-Man’ stories that occasionally pop up in the news. This group exists because its founders realized that the easiest way to hide within modern society is to convince people that what they saw wasn’t really what they saw. People want simple and safe explanations and the modern tendency to rely on science rather than the supernatural is a godsend to the workers of SICP. This group is still small, since many Dancers look on them and their supposed skepticism with great suspicion.
In many cases, Black Spiral Dancer Kinfolk don’t form their own fellowships, but join existing fringe groups. Go to your local gun show, UFO contactee meeting or Star Trek convention and chances are good that BSD kin (and sometimes BSDs themselves) are meeting in full view of the ‘normal’ populace, blending in to the insanity around them, like wolves in freaks’ clothing. They hide easily, since most ‘mundanes’ laugh at their strange beliefs, thinking that what they’re hearing is simply the words of a fantasy-prone individual. Black Spiral Kin can also be found among the membership of groups such as the NRA, NOW, NAMBLA, the Black Panthers, the KKK, the SCA, ACT-UP, Scientology and others (sometimes simultaneously). In most cases, when Dancer kin do join a ‘mainstream’ organization they move quickly to the fringes, seeking other rabble-rousers and outcasts to hook up with. They tend to form splinter groups, breaking off from the main body of the organization, sometimes without bothering to take a new name. Dancer Kin tend to be among the worst examples of whatever group they are a part of, whether it’s a conservative “family rights” group or a Star Trek fan club. The fact that many of the groups they belong to work against each other only helps add to the confusion and chaos that the Dancers as a tribe seek to create.
Sample BSD Family: The Finlays:
The Finlays are one of the oldest Black Spiral Dancer families still in existence in the 21st century. Family lore has it that they can trace their roots, through an uninterrupted matrilineal line, back to the earliest days of the Black Spiral Dancers and before. Even before the Fall, the Finlays (a sept of what would become Clan Farquharson) had a reputation for violence, cunning and madness. They were among the first of the White Howlers to breech Malfeas as a test of their bravery and cunning. As a result, they were also among the first to fall. Though, to hear the Finlays tell it, even now, they didn’t so much fall as embrace the truth that the Father had brought them.
For most of the clan’s history, the Finlays lived in the highlands of Scotland, fighting off Gaian attacks, rival clans and the British government (and occasionally branches within their own family when things got too quiet). It wasn’t until the mid-1700s that Finlays began to spread out from the Highlands, first to cities like London, then to America and Australia as both colonists and transportees.
Finlays first arrived in the American Colonies shortly before the American Revolution. Some stayed in eastern cities, particularly in the North, while others settled in the South or moved west past the mountains. Some of these, generally single young men, interbred with local Indian populations. Others were slaughtered by Uktena and Wendigo kin, sensing the Wyrmtaint within the family.
With the exceptions of a few mountain men and solitary trappers, the Finlays tended to stick to the fringes of more civilized areas. Like many of their fellow Scots and Irish settlers, they flocked to the Appalachian mountains, where they settled in isolated hollows and kept themselves to themselves. Once there, they fell back into their old Highland ways, inbreeding with each other and fighting any outside influence that came too close.
Several branches of the family moved to the North during the Depression years and again during World War Two when many Appalachian men and women went to work in factories in Indiana and Illinois.
Currently, the American Finlays outnumber their Scottish cousins.
Note: More on this section; it's pretty shaky as it is right now
# # #
Links:
Women Helping Battered Women: Stockholm Syndrome. http://homepages.together.net/~whbw/WHBWstockholm.html
The Peace Encyclopedia: Stockholm Syndrome:
http://www.yahoodi.com/peace/stockholm.html
Clan Farquharson: http://www.tartans.com/clans/Farquharson/farquharson.html
