"A banner house is perhaps best imagined as something like a divergent branch of a family tree. It’s still connected to the whole, and has more in common with its cousins than not, but it sports some definite differences too. Organizationally speaking, they fit somewhere beyond a political faction or secret society, but still well short of a full-fledged Great House. Banner houses have long been an informal tradition, born of the desperate time following the departure of the Arcadian sidhe. The Autumn sidhe held the remaining nobility and loyal commoners together as best they could, guiding what was left of the Great Houses through this new world awash in Banality. Many elevated commoner kiths into their ranks, sometimes for the first time in the history of the House, but even with an infusion of new blood, the Houses were too small and too scattered to maintain a coherent hold on Kithain politics. Thus, banner houses were born. "