Stargazers
One of the 13 remaining Garou tribes in Werewolf: The Apocalypse, the Stargazers are notable for drawing much more heavily on eastern influences than the other tribes, and for being way calmer and less prone to going full rage.
Their tribal culture leans pretty heavily into Buddhist thought and practices, with a lot of emphasis being placed on the importance of knowledge, enlightenment, and a sense of inner peace; their central dogma as a tribe (life is one giant circle of death and rebirth that you can escape via achieving not!Nirvana) is essentially the Buddhist concept of Samsara with the serial numbers filed off and the central values reworked to fit the whole "fighting against Evil" theme of the gameline. Despite this, they are still very much Garou and are always willing to go full Rip and Tear against the Wyrm/Weaver and their minions, or anyone else that might threaten the tribe.
After the Week of Nightmares (having been reduced to about 500 members total and lost most of their major Caerns) they basically said "Screw this, we're off!" and left to join the Beast Courts in Asia, though a large number of more "traditionalist" (i.e.: "We're Garou and should act like it, not like some namby-pamby Buddhists!") Stargazers decided to stay behind and integrate with the Nation outright.
They're also infamous among players for two major reasons: the first being that they're a colossal pain in the ass to roleplay properly, since you're running a stereotypical ascetic hermit that has problems interacting with other Garou, to the point where only the Red Talons (who refuse to learn the concept of time and want to exterminate all humans) are generally held to beat them in terms of sheer difficulty to roleplay; this is not helped by their fluff being out-of-focus next to the the more "mainstream" tribes in most official publications.
The second and by far the biggest would be that they're pure Munchkin bait, with many a Storyteller's worst nightmare being the words "Lupus Stargazer Ahroun". This combination gives the character heavy starting boosts to Willpower (Stargazer), Gnosis (Lupus), and Rage (Ahroun), but reduces to the character to a one-note combat bunny (this combination is even specifically locked to three specific Gift lists in the rules, all of which are related to combat) that's a nightmare to roleplay (being a literally bestial hermit with testosterone poisoning) and will be totally fucked when it's time to use skills outside the "eatface" subset. Needless to say, they're a weapon of choice for any min-maxing That Guy in a combat-heavy campaign.
They have a surprisingly large number of camps, listed below:
- The Heavenly Successors Of The Demon-Eater: Buddhist Werewolf Vampire Hunters. They specialise in hunting down and destroying leeches of the Wyrm and Kuei-jin.
- The Inner Path: A secret society that want the Stargazers to be the Alphas of the Garou Nation because they consider themselves to be spiritually advanced. Like the Shadow Lords, they do a lot of shadowy work and frequently deal with the Nation's malcontents and radicals; unlike the Shadow Lords, they aren't content with playing second fiddle to the Silver Fangs.
- The Klaital Puk: A faction that worships a Garou they see as the reincarnation of the Stargazers' founder, seeking omens and suchlike to locate their successor when the current one dies. They lost much of their influence after the Week of Nightmares, as their boss bit it and their successor hasn't been located since.
- The Sacred Thread: The teachers and priests. Focus on spreading knowledge and ensuring the spiritual health of humankind, so that the Wyrm can't get a foothold on them. Pretty much the wise hermit mentor archetype.
- Trance Runners: The messengers and gofers. They have a meditative art they use during physical exercise, which enhances their physical prowess and lets them move from Caern to Caern (along with the vital secrets, fetishes, etc. they carry) super-fast.
- The World Tree: The stereotypical Buddhists. Very focused on reaching enlightenment, which results in them taking a lot of visits into the Umbra and talking with just about anyone (Fera, humans, spirits...) to try and find answers to life's big questions.
- The Zephyr: Martial artists who specialize in their special shapeshifting martial art, Kailindo. Very prone to wandering around, joining other packs, then leaving when their visions and wanderlust call once more.
There are also three factions they don't really like to mention, as they're considered to be dangerous, bonkers, or some combination of the two.
- Ana-gamin: The more extreme version of The World Tree, in that they want to permanently sever the connections of all Stargazers to the living world and have them roam the Umbra, so that they can find answers to life's big questions quicker.
- The Metastatic Birth: The doomsday preppers and survivors, who think that the Wyrm's imprisonment is more like a metamorphosis, and that it will inevitably break free to completely remake the world. They advocate preparing for the inevitable apocalypse and letting the Wyrm complete its "transformation", before surviving in whatever world may result, as a sharp contrast to literally every other Garou tribe and camp's attitudes.
- Ouroboroans: Stargazers that want to free the Wyrm of Balance from the Weaver's webs by any means necessary. Spend a lot of time hitting concentrations of the Weaver's power and trying to find ways into Malfeas itself, the latter of which is... debatably sane, to say the least, given what happened to those poor bastards in the White Howlers.
