Before we talk about the IC role of Kinfolk, a brief OOC warning: playing Kinfolk characters is challenging, and is not necessarily the best introduction to Werewolf as a sphere. Yes, you get to be part of the world of the Garou, but in a distinctly limited way. You may find it difficult to get involved with some of the things that werewolf characters take for granted, and you’ll certainly lack some of the capabilities they have. Garou have a wide range of attitudes toward Kin, and while those attitudes are mostly positive — in general — they may not necessarily be respectful, and they’re almost certainly not going to include treating your character as an equal. That can be OK; the unequal relationship between Garou and Kinfolk, and how both sides handle it, is often a lot of fun to roleplay. But please be aware that it is an unequal relationship, and be sure you’re comfortable with that, before you decide to apply for a Kinfolk character. You might find that a Garou character who’s new to werewolf life offers more of what you want in play instead.

What Kinfolk Do

London — especially central London — is an incredibly busy, crowded, mechanized, and electronicized city that operates under some of the most intensive surveillance in the world. If you were designing an environment from the ground up to frustrate and anger the average Garou, it’s not entirely clear what you’d do differently. And frustrated and angry Garou are a recipe for trouble, often very loud trouble, which is bad news for everyone — the Garou, anyone who happens to be standing nearby, and anything breakable that happens to be nearby. Buildings, for instance.

So it’s for very good reasons that Garou living in the city depend on Kinfolk support even more than is usual. Every interaction with the world of the homids is a potentially risky one. Kinfolk are there to serve as buffers — they can run down to the corner to get sandwiches, deal with bureaucracies, deliver messages, and any of the multitude of other everyday tasks that are just regular annoyances to them, but could easily drive a high-Rage Garou into a frenzy. The idea that when you’re responsible for almost all of someone’s interactions with the homid world you actually have a great deal of power over them is one that’s not spoken out loud much but that is tacitly understood by all parties.

The Kinfolk in and around Hillingdon are much more in line with the traditional ideas — they serve more or less the same basic function, that of buffering between homids and Garou, but there’s a great deal less buffering required when it comes to werewolves who live in and around a forest, rather than in one of the world’s largest cities. They’re much more likely to be keeping a house somewhere near the forest, working a job that involves the forest, or otherwise creating a support infrastructure for the Garou rather than handling things for them directly. Kin who move from one sept to the other sometimes experience a bit of culture shock, with the Londoners surprised by how much more independence they have in Hillingdon, and the Hillingdon Kin surprised by how much more integral a part of the sept’s operations they are in London.