I love this question because of how close these two tribes are in W:tE!
The Shadow Lords now lead a faction called the Eastern Concordat. On the surface they haven't changed much, with Konietzko still in charge. What's shifted is a slightly stronger focus on their cultural outlook. That is, we sat down and read the philosophies of cultures along the Steppes and used that to build them out as a believable people and less tied to media-based stereotypes, from the Art of War to Mongolchuud to Hungarian Humanism. What I think is also interesting is their relationship with their odd bedfellows, the Children of Gaia, the Bone Gnawers, and the Black Furies.
To cite W:tE more directly, here is their cultural outlook section from their tribe writeup:
There’s a saying that is universal amongst the Killi: Thunder rules with a fist of iron and a voice of silk. Their tribal reputation is not entirely undeserved. Harsh in his expectations, Grandfather Thunder demands excellence from the Shadow Lords, which is, perhaps, how they have come to be so good at what they do.
Before now, it was easy to let the Silver Fangs take the lead, while they did the real work behind the scenes. In the Age of Heroes, Shadow Lords know better. They know much better. The process of extricating themselves from the long-reaching silver shadow has been a long, arduous one, but they have managed it, step by step. Aligning themselves with the Eastern Concordat, the Shadow Lords drew their line in the sand. “We served, once. No longer.”
Those who call them traitors to the Silver Throne are both right and wrong in different ways, and it is in this twilight that they have always found their strength. Shadow is not darkness absolute, after all, it requires the presence of light to be produced. It is literally true that the tribe has betrayed the Silver Fangs, but they still carry the spirit of the Fangs’ mission. From their point of view, the Silver Fangs betrayed themselves and the entire Garou Nation long ago. After centuries of their rule, the Fangs have fallen into worship of the throne and crown, rather than doing the work that must be done to heal Gaia. No matter how much the Fenrir gnash their teeth and the Skysingers crow about honor, it is a simple fact that they have failed. The throne is riddled with woodworm, the Apocalypse has not been stopped; the king is dead! Long live the king until the crown tarnishes like so much scrap. There is no honor in supplication to a broken vase, and holding it in your arms and saying it still carries water is a fool’s errand. The Shadow Lords have left the Western Concordat, sculpted a new place for Garou to do proper work from within, and they are not going back.
Now, what information they gather is for themselves, and the good of the Eastcons. Their cunning is used to raise their own positions; even the weakest Shadow Lord stands alongside brothers and sisters in arms who understand that not all work can be done in the open. While they stand for themselves, Shadow Lords have not stopped being the pragmatic manipulators that they have always been.
Although it was ultimately a human that put it into words, the Lords have always known one simple fact about the world; It is not possible for power to be exercised without knowledge, and it is impossible for knowledge not to engender power. The knowledge and information that other factions work under informs how they exercise their power, and is a driving reason for why the Western Concordat is doomed. Their knowledge is incomplete and stuck in the past, backs turned to the future and staring into the sun. The Dawn Tribes have a better grasp on how the world works, but are unwilling to be truly ruthless when the times call for it.
It is no mistake that the Eastern Concordat has been formed with tribes that are seeming opposites; the urban Bone Gnawers and the Wyld Black Furies, even the Children of Gaia and the Shadow Lords themselves. By sharing the knowledge and power between these disparate parts, the faction as a whole, and the Shadow Lords in specific, grow in both facets. Detractors may point at the tribe and call them fools, chasing the Silver Fangs’ coat tails and tripping over themselves trying to be like big brother. They are the greatest fools of them all. Each of their allies have been maligned for seeing truths about the world, their knowledges having been subjugated by those who previously sought to rule them. Unicorn’s tribe see the good in humanity that can fight the Wyrm, the Bone Gnawers know the value of those who live between spaces, and the Furies understand vengeance is a driving force regardless of species. By bringing them together in a united front, the truths that can’t be ignored are shouted louder and harsher with a voice of thunder that splits the sky.
To be frank, the Shadow Lords know what they have done. They possess no illusions, although they use many. What’s more, a Shadow Lord worth their salt will not utter an excuse. Instead, Shadow Lords project a powerful indomitable front: these were the devils of the Garou, after all, the blood-clawed assassins to the noble Silver Fangs. This outer shell, of course, is not the truth of the Shadow Lord outlook. The Shadow Lords simply will not allow other Garou to see their regrets and weaknesses, and so their true emotions are kept close.
Shadow Lords do not apologize externally. The Camp of Bat, for example, stands to redeem the fallen Patron of a dead Killi breed— but they do not bow and scrape and beg forgiveness. For a Shadow Lord, to ask forgiveness is to show weakness, and this is unbearable; unforgivable, even. Instead, the Shadow Lord acts. Words are weapons, but deeds are the truth. Fenrir may boast of strength, but to hear a Shadow Lord tell it, even an Ahroun can falter when her wit and soul are put to the test. Why bother bragging, then? Let other Garou snarl and scrabble with impotent words. The Shadow Lords will do what no others can: they will act.
Internally, the Shadow Lords hold secret meetings of those who hold suitable Renown rank; it is only at these meetings that Shadow Lords speak their truths which are hidden from other Tribes.
Shadow Lords all know one thing to be certain: they may be backstabbers and plotters in the eyes of the Garou, but the truth is that only a Shadow Lord is trustworthy in the end.
As for the Stargazers, they've had an admittedly really rough time in the Age of Apocalypse. Chimera and Unicorn are now married. The Stargazers who were instrumental during the Age of Storms in bringing the Storm Eater to its imprisonment in the Storm Umbra faced many deaths back then, and when the Storm Eater returned they rose to the task once more, at great personal cost. They lost their tribal Caern, and their leadership, mortally wounding the tribe on the whole, who had already been suffering from extremely small numbers.
In short, they merged into the Children of Gaia, and transformed the tribe into something much greater than it had been before. This isn't to say that the Stargazers as a culture are gone, indeed, there are many among the Children of Gaia who still consider themselves such and those who consider themselves solely Stargazer will be available to play as a Camp in Book 2.
The influence Chimera has had on the coggies though has been unironically eye-opening. The tribe as it exists now are not the pushovers they once were , and rather consider their expressions of humanity to be intentional and tactical. Admittedly the original TTRPG resources on the coggies have never been flattering across all the editions, and their tribebooks in particular left very little examples of how the peaceful way was a winning strategy for the tribe that has allowed them to endure seemingly for millennia. So, we've had to more or less rewrite the Children of Gaia from the ground up, and firmly rooted in the Hindu Upanishads, in particular, grounding their cultural outlook in Da Da Da:
Children of Gaia Outlook:
The war is going badly. The Nation holds its fracture lines open like wounds it cannot stop touching and the Wyrm knows exactly where they run. The Children of Gaia begin every morning from this assessment and go to work anyway.
What winning requires is what it has always required: the Nation must learn to hold itself together under the pressure it has never successfully held before. That is the front the Children of Gaia work. It has been their work since the Impergium ended. In 1985 it is the critical front, the tribe knows it, the tribe is spread thin across it. Harano finds them here. The practice that defines this tribe fails invisibly when it fails — the gestures may remain correct after the attention behind them goes, but the warmth leaves a word before the word does.
Three disciplines carry a single root through every lineage the merger brought together. Incarna heed restraint, humanity hears bounty, and the Urges fear compassion. A Child of Gaia trains to hold all three simultaneously — arriving already practicing, already giving forward, already extending toward whoever the Nation has decided is not worth the conversation. It is invaluable to their allies, and to certain corners of the Nation, unbearable.
The Eastern Concordat holds the philosophical lineages that first named what Gaia's web is and how it holds. The Children of Gaia belong there by conviction, which is different from belonging there by alliance. The Shadow Lords carry organizational capacity the tribe respects; the respect is returned. Two tribes that have spent centuries holding different things together by different methods now share a table. The seam shows. The seam holds.
The Silver Fangs the tribe regards with the specific tenderness that belongs only to a clean separation — the kind where the meaning behind the leaving matters more than the wound it opened, because the meaning is what both parties need to find their way back to Gaia. The love is real. The Eastern Concordat is where it lives now. The tribe wants what the Silver Fangs were supposed to be to become what they still can be, and holds that want clearly, without requiring anything in return for the holding. Across the rest of the Western Concordat the tribe maintains working relationships built on genuine respect — the Get's devotion to the work, the Black Furies' precision, the Bone Gnawers' accountability — and watches those fracture lines with the same attention it brings to everything else.
The Gaia Network runs thin across the Pacific Northwest — every sept, every rural protectorate, every trail of Stargazer Kin still adrift along the coast — and the tribe tends all of it. Not because any single thread is more important than the others. Because every thread is the Pattern Web, and the Pattern Web is Gaia's body, and someone has to pay attention to Gaia's body.
And alongside the Hatha and the werebears, the Children of Gaia are growing new ones. The shard seed work is what the merger made possible — the Stargazers brought the mystery mastery, the Children of Gaia brought the network, the Hatha brought the healing knowledge — and where those three meet, dormant seeds wake. New caerns take root. Gaia is not dead. The tribe has put their hands in the soil and found her there.
For a cub in Oregon in 1985 some of this already lives in the body. The staying past the point of comfort. The restraint that cost something real. The giving that kept no score. Defiant joy — the deliberate choice toward open when everything says close. The Garou Nation gives the words. The Children of Gaia teach the practice on purpose, under pressure, with the Apocalypse already underway.
Play a Child of Gaia when you want paying attention to be the work itself. When you want the fight that happens before the claws come out, and the composure to see it through when they do. When you want to be the last one holding on — not because you have to be, but because you chose to be, because someone has to, because that choice is the one the Apocalypse cannot survive.
The thread you hold is Gaia's thread. That is how you are.
