Fanon - Tribebook Bunyip (WIP)

[Boneguard]

I know there has been talk of an official Tribebook in the "work" similar to the White Howler one...but could have been just rumors too. But regardless, I've been working on and off on an idea for a proto-Bunyip origin.

In short, the origin of the tribe was in what Is today's China. They had a different name, and had the Tibetan wolf as kinfolk. External pressure from other tribes and Fera and the War of Shame got them to secretly move South to that Sundaland, using both Southeast Asian dog and, less successfully, dholes (Asian Wild Dog) as a substitute to their wolf kin. From there they eventually made it to Sahul to aborigines and dog kinfolk. Eventually, they moved on to the Thylacine becoming the Bunyip tribe.

So there it is roughly 3 broad phase in their history: a "Chinese" tribe (name TBD), a Southeast Asian secret tribe with none-wolf kinfolk, and "modern" Bunyip as rediscovered by the Garou in Australia. This would make howling dog, dingo, other Southeast Asian dogs (wild and domesticated) as well as Southeast Asia dholes and Tibetan wolf (especially in the Qinghai Province) Bunyip kinfolks.

it's still rough, but I'll try to polish this once I complete my Vampire bloodline

Thoughts? Comments?

[Lian]

The Thylacine thing only really makes sense IF they come in with the earliest Australian people 50k or so years ago. If they have Dingo, dhole, Asian wild dogs etc as kinfolk they have no need to do this at all.

[CeltSPZ]

The Thylacine thing only really makes sense IF they come in with the earliest Australian people 50k or so years ago. If they have Dingo, dhole, Asian wild dogs etc as kinfolk they have no need to do this at all.

Backing up Lian. Shattered Dreams goes out of its way to explain both how hard it is for the Bunyip to be Thylacines, as well as how vital to the tribe it was that they were Thylacine. They spent thousands of years of existence with Dingos ON Australia. To widen their kin to non thylacine eliminates the point of it.

In short....whatever descendants of proto-Bunyip that aren't Thylacines....haven't been real Bunyip kin for a very long time.

[Boneguard]

The Thylacine thing only really makes sense IF they come in with the earliest Australian people 50k or so years ago. If they have Dingo, dhole, Asian wild dogs etc as kinfolk they have no need to do this at all.

Backing up Lian. Shattered Dreams goes out of its way to explain both how hard it is for the Bunyip to be Thylacines, as well as how vital to the tribe it was that they were Thylacine. They spent thousands of years of existence with Dingos ON Australia. To widen their kin to non thylacine eliminates the point of it.

In short....whatever descendants of proto-Bunyip that aren't Thylacines....haven't been real Bunyip kin for a very long time.

After taking a quick gander at Shattered Dreams (I own it, but haven't had the chance to really read it yet), I see your point and it is a fair point. They do present something a bit different from what I remembered from Rage Across Australia and WW: Wild West.

I think though I could easily solve this issue and salvage the overall idea:

When Escaping the other Garou, the proto-Bunyip got seperated in smaller groups. Some were caught and exterminated, one group made their way to Australia and became the Bunyip, and another made it's way to Indochina/Indonesia and went "underground" and bred with local canids to avoid losing the wolf. As they were in hiding they kept their number low, but would have had potentially a number of their kinfolks travelling South (dingo) and East (New Guinea singing dog, kuri/polynesian dog) along humans.

So the model presented by Shattered Dreams remains true, but add an undocumented subtribe carefully hiding in Southeast Asia that would further break down and give the Singing Dog. Considering that none of the Asian Garou (Boli Zouhisze, Stargazer or Hakken) have a strong presence there, it could be possible if the Fera/Beast Court keep them as a well hidden secret.

[CeltSPZ]

Granted, I'm thrilled to see someone doing something with a list tribe that isn't white howler. The other 2 tribe feel like they are forgotten lot

[Lian]

My problem isn't trying to keep to a particular canon, after all this is a fanwork. My point is if the Bunyip had nonthylacine kin, then there's no point to them being Thylacines. The explanation for them being thylacines is based on the fact there were humans there for thousands of years that predates dingos. If they have Dingo, dhole, etc kin then they never need to be thylacine and can in fact ignore this rather questionable bit of canon.

Whether or not this makes them just "dead for tax purposes" like the Nagah, Salubri, Capadocians, the Templars.. etc well that's its own thing too.

[Boneguard]

My problem isn't trying to keep to a particular canon, after all this is a fanwork. My point is if the Bunyip had nonthylacine kin, then there's no point to them being Thylacines. The explanation for them being thylacines is based on the fact there were humans there for thousands of years that predates dingos. If they have Dingo, dhole, etc kin then they never need to be thylacine and can in fact ignore this rather questionable bit of canon.

Whether or not this makes them just "dead for tax purposes" like the Nagah, Salubri, Capadocians, the Templars.. etc well that's its own thing too.

I see your point, and I agree: Having no wolf-kin or canid they were doom so it was either a case of adapt or die...and, with the help of other Fera, they've adapted. So having canid-kin back in Indonesia would make the whole point moot. And I could see this being true for the bulk of the tribe that survived the 1st War of Rage for whom we could stick to canon and they made it to Australia without any wolf-kin or any canid substitute.

However a full retreat is rarely orderly, especially if besieged from several front, so a splinter group, a small minority, mourned by the Bunyip as casualty of was could have survived and adapted in their own way (similar to the Red Talons in Africa and most/all Australian Lupus Garou). They would have a common ancestry with the Bunyip, but would be culturally distinct having diverged from that point on and not bothering to reconnect upon discovery of the Bunyip.

and yeah fanwork doesn't ned to follow canon, but at the same time, it gives me another avenue to explore, so not a bad thing.

[Lian]

I am failing to see the need to keep the Thylacine connection except for the cannon connection. As you are making non Thylacine "lupus" kinfolk an option it seems like an uneccisary complication. I mean generally what is considered acceptable breedstock for Garou is canid pack hunters, with the more solitary species of genus being acceptable as theirown breed(Nuwisha). Thylacines don't have had a pack setup similar and they don't seem to hold a similar cultural cache among the Native Australians so why not drop them? What do you gain from having them?

[Boneguard]

Always liked Thylacine, even as a kid.

Now, dropping the would mean Bunyip came in later to Australia (along human and dog kinfolk). Not necessarily a bad thing either though (but then again timeline is fluid in WoD), and it's something I could work with.

On the other hand, couple options to keep both would be:
- Thylacine shifter are a native Australian Fera (would need to be renamed) and where there when the Bunyip fled it human and dog kinfolk. Bunyip and the Thylacine Fera both get exterminate in the War of Tears.

- First wave of Bunyip came early and were force to adapt, taking Thylacine as kinfolk to save the wolf. A second wave of Bunyip arrived with man and dog kinfolk ages later. The Bunyip became a mix clan. Most were Dingo or Human born, a few were still born from Thylacine kinfolk. This number kept decreasing with each passing generation and were almost unheard of when the Garou Nation arrived.

[Bunyip]

What do you gain from having them?

You demonstrate the lengths the Bunyip had to go to in order to survive. You tie their millennia-long ability to survive with the indigenous people who successfully lived across an often incredibly harsh landscape. You tie the Australian Garou experience with animals that are similar-yet-apart from almost anywhere else.

I’m among the first to agree that 1st ed Werewolf writers probably didn’t have a good grasp of exactly what rabbit hole they were exploring when they decided ‘hey, thylacines look a bit like wolves’. By canon, here we are, and we worked hard to bring it all together in Shattered Dreams.

If I were writing a fan Bunyip tribebook, I’d alter their history rather than their animal. I’d keep them linked with thylacines, adapt their pack structures to resemble those of the marsupials, and declare that they are Australia’s native shapeshifters, and are definitely, 100% Garou, because that’s how Gaia made them, and f*ck any ignorant wolves who think they have a right to refuse the mother’s decree. Gaia works in mysterious ways.

Didn’t stop the other tribes wiping out their marsupial kin, though.

(I love that you are taking a fan tribebook forward. Good work, everyone.)

[Lian]

Always liked Thylacine, even as a kid.

.

IF you think Thylacines are cool own it. I feel though that by giving non Thylacine kin as an option it undermines the idea, especially if you get them have Dingo kin. I guess my question should be what is added by having both Thylacine and Dingo kin?

One of the arguments the foreign Garou made to justify the war of tears was that the Bunyip weren't doing their job, that this place farthest from the wyrm wasn't thriving in ways they foreign Garou thought thing should thrive. That they had bred with "unacceptable" creatures and wasted these perfectly good kin. In the 19th century where countless wolf kin stomping grounds had been wiped from the planet while the Dingo were relatively untouched this was practically a crime especially to the Red Talons.

If the Desire is there to give a backdoor excuse for potential survival, Thylacines sightings have been a thing both on the mainland in Tasmania since its official extinction. Saying the more advanced kinfolk had survived along with a few newly changed to keep them hidden wouldn't be a stretch.

[glamourweaver]

If I were writing a fan Bunyip tribebook, I’d alter their history rather than their animal. I’d keep them linked with thylacines, adapt their pack structures to resemble those of the marsupials, and declare that they are Australia’s native shapeshifters, and are definitely, 100% Garou, because that’s how Gaia made them, and f*ck any ignorant wolves who think they have a right to refuse the mother’s decree. Gaia works in mysterious ways.

In this hypothetical, they were there before the humans?

As for their pack structure: do we know anything about thylacine packs? I assumed very little since we only just figured out that wolf packs in the wild are nothing like ones in captivity, and there haven't been thylacines to apply modern observational strategies and standards to.

[Lian]

In this hypothetical, they were there before the humans?

As for their pack structure: do we know anything about thylacine packs? I assumed very little since we only just figured out that wolf packs in the wild are nothing like ones in captivity, and there haven't been thylacines to apply modern observational strategies and standards to.

My understanding is that the theory is thylacines were solitary hunters. Like Tigers or Jaguars.

[The Cat Came Back]

If I were writing a fan Bunyip tribebook, I’d alter their history rather than their animal. I’d keep them linked with thylacines, adapt their pack structures to resemble those of the marsupials, and declare that they are Australia’s native shapeshifters, and are definitely, 100% Garou, because that’s how Gaia made them, and f*ck any ignorant wolves who think they have a right to refuse the mother’s decree. Gaia works in mysterious ways.

That's the way I would go, too; the big "mess" of the Bunyip is the convoluted explanations and re-revisions of how wolves became thylacines. Well... throw that away; they were never wolves, always thylacines. They are Gaia's Warriors in Australia, in a way similar to what the Ajaba are in Africa, and the Balam in South America. Unlike those two though, they had no contact with Garou, and so had no reason to differentiate themselves FROM Garou when they eventually did contact them; both sides of contact saw a creature proclaiming itself "warrior of Gaia," and took it at face value.

And then cue a century and a half of the Western Garou trying to figure out how Garou could have ever been marsupials. Were they "real" garou? Were they just a remarkably similar fera breed in the form of Nuwisha or Ajaba? Who know, they're dead now.

[Boneguard]

If I were writing a fan Bunyip tribebook, I’d alter their history rather than their animal. I’d keep them linked with thylacines, adapt their pack structures to resemble those of the marsupials, and declare that they are Australia’s native shapeshifters, and are definitely, 100% Garou, because that’s how Gaia made them, and f*ck any ignorant wolves who think they have a right to refuse the mother’s decree. Gaia works in mysterious ways.

That's the way I would go, too; the big "mess" of the Bunyip is the convoluted explanations and re-revisions of how wolves became thylacines. Well... throw that away; they were never wolves, always thylacines. They are Gaia's Warriors in Australia, in a way similar to what the Ajaba are in Africa, and the Balam in South America. Unlike those two though, they had no contact with Garou, and so had no reason to differentiate themselves FROM Garou when they eventually did contact them; both sides of contact saw a creature proclaiming itself "warrior of Gaia," and took it at face value.

I've considered this, Having the Bunyip being a Fera on it's own (let the Nuwisha, Kitsune and the rest) and remove all ties to the Garou. as you both remarked, it solves the whole "Wolf to Thylacine" weirdness/headache. And, although it is not my current plan, who knows?! I may decid to go down that path after all and either leave the Garou at 15 Tribes or create a substitute one.