There's kind of a canon of movie monsters. Universal put out a bunch of horror movies in the 1930s that have sort of come to define a kind of pantheon of horror movie icons. Because they've been such fixtures for so long, most aren't really even scary, exactly, anymore, but are so recognizable that Universal tried in recent years to make their own shared cinematic universe in the style of the MCU based on them.
While the real canon of these may or may not be agreed upon, I think the following list could work pretty well: Dracula, Frankenstein's Monster, the Wolf Man, the Mummy, the Invisible Man, the Creature from the Black Lagoon, and the Phantom of the Opera. (Perhaps it's only because of the period I was born, but the Phantom of the Opera has always been more associated for me with the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical for me.)
Among these archetypes, I feel like vampires like Dracula and werewolves like the Wolf Man are the most broadly popular monster "types" of the classic horror genre. (Frankenstein might be the most iconic though, thanks to the insanely iconic make-up they put on Boris Karloff.) Mummies can be fun, but I think they tend to fall into more of an adventure-horror style, and the others are a little too specific (though a Black-Lagoon-inspired story did win Best Picture at the Oscars for 2017, thanks to Guillermo del Toro, who I think loves monsters the way a toddler loves Winnie the Pooh.)
Anyway, I love werewolves, conceptually, but I think they don't seem to get quite as much love as vampires. I think a big part of that is that vampires (depending on the style/type you go for) still look more or less like people, and so it's both an easier make-up job and also easier for movies and such to make them relatable - which might explain why there are so many subversions where they aren't actually murderous monsters, but are just misunderstood and different.
Of course, another issue with werewolves is that one of the most common elements of the werewolf myth leaves them only really remarkable one to three nights out of a month. I think most werewolf stories are more about the horror of becoming a werewolf than being hunted by one - the idea is more about losing control over the rational and empathetic human being one is and giving in to the violent tendencies of a beast.
What I find interesting about both werewolves and vampires is that there's a broadly-accepted set of "rules" that we, culturally, have agreed on for how they work, even if the ancient folklore behind them is by no means consistent. Vampires are destroyed by sunlight or a wooden stake to the heart, and repelled by a cross (or, in less Christo-centric versions of the story, any religious symbol or even just something the bearer has faith in,) burned by holy water, and often can't cross running water or enter a house if they aren't invited in. Also, they seem to be repelled by garlic (the origin of this part of the folklore actually traces back to a broader idea that vampires are sort of OCD about counting things they see, which could include the cloves in a head of garlic or grains of sand that are spilled. This is actually why Count von Count from Sesame Street works on multiple levels!)
Werewolves have similar "rules." If you get bitten by a werewolf, you become one the following month. When the full moon rises, you transform into a wolf-like beast, and you totally lose your human mind and become a ravenous killing machine, often waking up in strange places because you don't remember what you did while transformed. Probably the most iconic aspect of the werewolf folklore is that you can only be killed with a silver bullet - to the extent that "silver bullet" is now means "the guaranteed way you can deal with this problem." I always remember hearing things like wounds inflicted by a werewolf never healed and there might be something about how killing the "original" werewolf is the only way you can cure someone (which I guess implies there are multiple, independent strains from separate "originals.")
In D&D, there are many variants on "were" creatures. While it's actually a bit of a misnomer that they all use the term lycanthropy (which literally means "wolf"-"human-ness") we've still got a whole bunch of types, like Wererats, wereboars, weretigers, werebears, and wereravens.
This last type is found in the Ravenloft campaign setting, and is actually the inspiration for this post.
In Candlekeep Mysteries, there's an adventure called Book of the Raven. I'll be frank - I don't think it's good, despite coming from lead narrative designer Chris Perkins. It's got a lot of interesting elements that don't really add up to anything, and it's not clear why the players would go to the adventure location, much less stay there.
But, it does provide a new statblock for Wereravens. Wereravens were previously established in Curse of Strahd, but I believe had a different statblock. The Candlekeep Mysteries version changes what is perhaps one of the two really core aspects of the lycanthrope stat blocks - the manner in which silver weapons are made relevant.
In the Monster Manual, lycanthropes are immune to bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing damage from nonmagical attacks that aren't silvered. In other words, if you want to kill a werewolf and you're not a spellcaster, you need either a magical or silver weapon to do so, because your attacks aren't doing anything otherwise.
In Candlekeep Mysteries, however, this immunity is removed. Instead, the Wereravens are granted a regeneration ability - they recover 10 HP each turn, but this is turned off if they take damage from a spell or a silvered weapon.
Let's look at the implications:
If you are a fighter or other physical-damage-dealing character, you cannot kill one of these things on your own without a silvered weapon. The regeneration prevents them from dying if they will regenerate (similar to how trolls work,) and magical weapons no longer bypass this defense. The good news, though, is that if you do have some source of magic damage, like from a spellcaster in your party, you still damage the target. So even if your normal steel sword wouldn't do anything to an old-school lycanthrope, as long as your cleric hits it with a sacred flame before its next turn, you're still contributing to the take-down.
It's an interesting trade-off. I think that, overall, this is probably a better balance because it lets low-level martial characters feel like they're contributing to the fight even before they can get any fancy weapons. And I also like that it encourages you to discover actual silver weapons if you want to take a lycanthrope down... without the aid of a spellcaster.
And I think it's that one caveat that I find just a little frustrating.
You can't really "silver" magic, and for that reason I can understand just making all spells work on them. But that also feels, well, a little cheap.
Werewolves are only CR 3, compared to a vampire, which is CR 13. Hell, even the less-powerful vampire spawn are CR 5, and the lowest-CR vampire that's not specific to a published adventure, Ravnica's Mind Drinker vampire, is CR 4 (which I think is insane - Mind-Drinkers should be, like, CR 16 legendary monsters, not half the CR of Ravnica's Blood-Drinkers. I might be biased toward House Dimir, but still: psychic vampires, right?)
And I get that they work best as monsters to face in the very early levels - before you're tricked out with fancy magic gear, when a single werewolf can be a horrible menace to some small village.
But I hope that Van Richten's will give us some souped up werewolves. I suspect that the Candlekeep Mysteries' wereraven might be a preview of things to come with lycanthrope design. But let's talk about how I'd approach it:
First off, I like the regeneration thing rather than the damage immunities. Not only does it let a physical-damage-dealer feel like they're contributing even if they don't have a special weapon, but it also feels more in keeping with the lore - werewolves don't have impenetrable hides, it's just that they seem to shrug off stabs and slashes from weapons that aren't silver.
I also love that magic weapons no longer work to overcome this: a werewolf should be a difficult problem to solve. By the time players are level 6 or so, a werewolf might as well not have any immunities given that there's a clear expectation that players will have magic weapons (and classes that focus on unarmed attacks have magic attacks by that level.) But if we want werewolves to be a bigger threat that can continue to be scary past level 5, this works better for it.
In terms of CR, I'd just buff them - give them more health, maybe higher natural armor, and buff their attacks (possibly with a strength buff and more multiattacks, though I could also imagine adding poison or necrotic damage to their strikes, maybe even with a "lowers your max HP if you fail a con save" feature to get that "werewolf wounds don't heal properly" effect.)
Now, let's also visit that regeneration effect:
If we want werewolves to really command your players' respect, we need to make it harder to turn off their regen than simply tossing a Firebolt at it. We could just remove the ability for spells to stop their regeneration entirely (though we always run into Chill Touch, which is actually crazy-OP against anything that relies on regeneration to be scary,) but that feels like overcompensation.
For one thing, the Druid staple Moonbeam feels like it's designed specifically to fight lycanthropes. So it seems like that ought to work against them.
It might be that they could have some Rakshasa-like limited damage immunity, or rather, a stipulation in their regeneration ability that means only certain spells will interrupt it.
It would be a bit unwieldy for the statblock to specifically name-check Moonbeam, but one could base it on spell level. Moonbeam's a 2nd level spell, which means that if you limited spells' ability to stop the regeneration to 2nd level or higher, a level 1 or 2 party will only ever be able to fight a werewolf using silvered weapons. That sounds... actually pretty fair. (Well, they might also have a character who can cast Chill Touch, which, again, is crazy OP against vampires, trolls, and anything else that regenerates health.)
You could, of course, also limit it to damage types. I could imagine saying that only silvered weapons or spells that deal radiant or necrotic damage could interrupt the regeneration effect. This actually favors clerics and paladins, who have a bit more access to radiant damage than other classes (and I think clerics might have slightly higher access to necrotic, though that's less limited) which actually works out, given that werewolves are classic monsters that you could imagine a religious order dedicating themselves to fighting.
The whole point to the silver bullet thing with a werewolf is to put the protagonist in a situation where they can't kill the damn thing. As I was writing about earlier, D&D characters by nature are going to try to fight the monsters, but something as iconic as a werewolf should be more than just a random thing you find and immediately kill. As soon as anyone gets the faintest whiff of a werewolf being in the area, the adventure should be a search for the tool to kill it (aka silver) in a race against the rising full moon.
Then, the party can go full-on Geralt of Rivia and attack the monster fully prepared for it (or, in Geralt's fashion, might just knock the werewolf out and then uncover the fact that the person who hired him actually just wanted the werewolf dead because he's their older brother who's poised to inherit the family fortune and... you get the idea.)
D&D is already full of monsters, and what WotC has said about Van Richten's Guide is that it will have a fair number of altered stat blocks to give more of a horror edge to the existing monsters. I think werewolves (and I guess lycanthropes in general, though werewolves are the classic ones) a well-deserved glow-up.
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