Using the Beast Courts
A game where the players portray members of the same sentai provides an excellent opportunity for players to play a diverse group of shapeshifters working towards a common goal. The hengeyokai are far more than just an excuse for a mixed-Breed story. The Beast Courts are part of a culture that is very different from that of the Western Changing Breeds.
Playing in Asia offers a diverse range of settings. In developed nations like Japan or South Korea, the Changing Breeds face many of the same issues as their counterparts in the United States — but must also contend with denser population and less wilderness. Shapeshifters in rapidly industrializing nations like China or Malaysia, or in relatively impoverished and oppressive nations like Indonesia or Myanmar, encounter very different problems. Here, the forces of the Wyrm are easily visible in overcrowded slums and the unsafe factories. In these nations, millions live and work in dire poverty while nobody pays so much as lip service to limiting pollution and efforts at resistance meet with brutal government oppression.
Players and Storytellers who are interested in a more familiar setting might create a Beast Court in one of the large Asian immigrant communities in the United States and Canada. A few hengeyokai accompanied their human kinfolk when they immigrated to these nations, and today many nations have a small but growing number of Beast Courts. A story set in one of these communities offers a chance for the players and characters to experience the difficulties members of a Beast Court face when making contact with the local Changing Breeds.
The Way of Emerald Virtue
Unlike the western Changing Breeds, an individual’s role in her sentai determines her Auspices within the Beast Courts. Traditionalists believe that a sentai should ideally contain a member of each Auspice, but tradition and reality often don’t agree. All members of the Beast Courts earn Renown based on their Auspice, regardless of which Changing Breed they belong to. Even the rare Kumo or western Garou who join the Beast Courts gain Renown in this fashion.
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The Beast Courts
Most western shapeshifters know little about the relatively isolated shapeshifters who make up the Beast Courts of Asia. Known to themselves as hengeyokai, they live in communities that include all manner of local Changing Breeds, including the Garou — an arrangement that baffles and sometimes horrifies western shapeshifters.
As contact between East and West increases, immigrants and visitors from both the Beast Courts and the western world have begun learning more about one another.
History
The Asian Changing Breeds are physically the same as their western counterparts, however, their culture and history is very different.
In the Middle Kingdom, the traditional protectorate of the Beast Courts, Wyrm-tainted creatures called the Kuei-Jin tricked the Changing Breeds into what is now referred to as the War of Shame. The war wiped out the Okuma, Gurahl who took the form of Asian bears, and because of it, the Kumo (Asian werespiders) retreated from the other shapeshifters, eventually giving themselves over to the Wyrm.
The surviving Breeds eventually learned of the Kuei- Jin’s treachery and rallied together against this threat. Since this time, the Changing Breeds have worked together. Surprisingly, this arrangement has been quite successful; it is not uncommon for the hengeyokai to even form packs, or sentai, that include different Breeds. Perhaps even more notably, the normally secretive Nagah actually share information in the Beast Courts of the Emerald Mother, and have been known to join sentai with other shapeshifters.
To outsiders, the politics of the Beast Courts can appear slow and hobbled with layers of ancient tradition. In truth, however, the careful formality defuses conflict between court members with a measure of elegance not found in traditional challenges. As a result, most hengeyokai feel more loyalty to their court than they do to their own Breed of shapeshifter. Individual courts may fight, and even wage war against one another, but their strict rules of behavior ensure that the hengeyokai will never experience the madness of another War of Shame. Because East and Southeast Asia have been densely populated for thousands of years, the hengeyokai live in closer proximity to both their wild Kin and to humanity than elsewhere. As a result the Beast Courts make some accommodations for their population density. The hengeyokai have far more in the way of central organization than any of the western Changing Breeds, which provides a set of strict rules to help them avoid detection. Like an inhuman mirror of the traditional Chinese form of government, the shapeshifters of the Middle Kingdom also have their own complex bureaucracy and offices.
Organization
The basic unit of hengeyokai government is the court. Each Dragon Nest has its own court, and an elaborate network of treaties and alliances bind the many different courts together into a collective amalgamation called the Beast Courts. All of the Changing Breeds are welcome members of all courts — save for the Kumo, whose assumed alliance with the Wyrm forces them to be outsiders. Although westerners find the idea very strange, the Beast Courts’ rules of diplomacy and formality permit Kumo ambassadors to visit most courts as long as they observe proper protocols. A few Kumo even join sentai with other hengeyokai, but such alliances rarely last long.
Each court has four major offices, and most of the larger courts possess a host of lesser offices. The highest ranking office is that of Regent, a judge who is also responsible for peacetime leadership. Directly beneath the Regent are the General, the Seer, and the Historian. A General leads the court in wartime, and is responsible for both leading and training the court’s warriors. Seers are both scholars of, and ambassadors to, spirits and other denizens of the Mirror Lands. Historians keep the court’s oral and written traditions, as well as tracking the various ancient and complex treaties that link different courts.
Each court is divided into a number of sentai: packs of shapeshifters who loyally work together towards a common goal. Almost all of these war parties contain members of two or more Changing Breeds. Just as the hengeyokai recognize five sacred elements, five cardinal directions (one being center), and five phases of the Moon, they believe that the most auspicious number of members for a sentai is five. Some go further, believing it is best for those five to each come from a different Changing Breed. Including more than one Breed in a western pack might be quite unusual, but a sentai containing a Hakken, a Khan, a Nezumi, a Tengu, and a Zhong Lung is not at all uncommon.
Some sentai are created for a single short-term goal, such as defeating a particular group of Bakemono, or securing a newly-discovered Dragon Nest. These “wave” sentai are alliances of convenience — members do not share a totem, and may have little to do with one another except during in the direct pursuit of their goal. Members of wave sentai can come from different courts and, on rare occasions, include Kumo or even shen from outside the Beast Courts. “Mountain” sentai, on the other hand, are as enduring as their name. Established more for bonds of pack and family than to accomplish a specific task, members of mountain sentai always come from the same court, and share a single totem.
HENGEYOKAI LEXICON
Bakemono: A fomor; fomori
Dragon Nest: A caern
Emerald Mother: Gaia
Gai’nan: A ranking court official; “magistrate”
Hakken: Hengeyokai Garou
Kumo: Hengeyokai Ananasi
Mirror Lands: The spirit world
Nezumi: Hengeyokai Ratkin
Okuma: Hengeyokai Gurahl, now extinct
Same-Bito: Hengeyokai Rokea
San Yuan: The Triat
Sentai: A mixed war party or “pack” of hengeyokai. Mountain sentai are permanent groups bonded by a totem; wave sentai are temporary alliances.
Shen: Supernatural beings; vampires, werebeasts,
and the like.
Sunset People: Western shapechangers; the term references the westerners’ fatalism as much as their place of origin.
Tapestry: The Near Umbra
Tengu: Hengeyokai Corax
Yang World: The Deep Umbra
Yin World: The Dark Umbra
Zhong Lung: Hengeyokai Mokolé
The Modern Era
Asia is changing rapidly, and the hengeyokai of the Middle Kingdom must adapt to these changes. In the last 30 years, South Korea has become a modern industrial state, and China has re-invented itself as one of the world’s leading centers for manufacturing. Even formerly bucolic Asian nations are modernizing — and their cities are growing exponentially larger as a result, spreading pollution and corruption at an unprecedented pace. The Beast Court members who make their homes there are thus dealing with a similarly unprecedented spawning of Wyrm-things produced by the same.
Another challenge to the Beast Courts is the ongoing conflict between the Nagah and the Nezumi. The wererats drove the Japanese wereserpents to extinction several centuries ago, and are eager to repeat that feat throughout both China and Korea. While both are still a part of the Beast Courts, tensions are rising. More and more Nezumi are leaving the highly formalized constraints of the Courts to pursue their goals of serpentine annihilation. Likewise, as their safety becomes more and more threatened, more eastern Nagah are following in their western cousin’s footsteps and taking their leave of public life altogether. The ill will between these independent groups sometimes boils over into open violence, but so far relations between the two Breeds within the overall Beast Courts are tense, but not yet uncontrollably violent.
The wealthier and more cosmopolitan regions of China, Japan, and South Korea have attracted outside investment and immigration — and foreign shapeshifters, who bring with them alternatives to the Beast Courts. These new groups, often spearheaded by Changing Breeds from America and Europe, provide a rallying point for a growing number of local shapeshifters who have forsaken the traditions of the hengeyokai and become increasingly westernized. One of the largest groups is lead by a pack of Boli Zousizhe in Hong Kong, who are slowly building an alliance between a number of Changing Breeds that rivals the nearest court of hengeyokai. Perhaps more worryingly, a growing number of Korean Nezumi have made contact with wererats outside of the Beast Courts. As a result, they’ve caught some of the infectious madness that drives the western Ratkin, and are slowly trading centuries of tradition for rage-filled anarchy.
All across East and Southeast Asia, members of the Beast Courts are struggling to find their place in a rapidly transforming world. Some hengeyokai see these new alliances and factions as a threat, and they cling to their traditions while rejecting new or foreign ideas. While they may ignore new shapeshifters, the twin problems of pollution and habitat destruction will not go away, and the additional resources of western shapeshifters may hold the key to dealing with these vital issues. A growing number of wave sentai dedicated to climate reform and green technology now include Changing Breeds from around the world who now call the Middle Kingdom home. Some elders may disapprove, but these new, inclusive sentai
