I guess you could say I'm a dog person. Actually, in my apartment we have three cats - all of whom I adore. I don't really think being a dog person and being a cat person are mutually exclusive. But I've always had a sort of affinity for dogs and wolves. When The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess came out in 2005 (the last Zelda game I really unreservedly loved, to be honest) I remember seeing an interview with one of the developers (maybe Miyamoto, though I can't recall exactly) in which they said that they had Link transform into a Wolf while in the Twilight Realm because wolves are a "heroic" animal.
It's funny how they represent such distinct things. In a lot of fables, nursery rhymes, and such, wolves are the great monster - the Big Bad Wolf. But, at the same time, I think we recognize the dog within them - an animal that has historically been a great ally of humanity.
Wolves also play a big mythological role - not just in religious myth, but also cultural myth, like the story of Romulus and Remus, the brothers who founded Rome and were reputedly raised by a wolf.
The werewolf, I think represents one of the most potent themes in the human imagination - the conflict between civilization and the wild. The werewolf, as a monster, is a human but also a beast. But I think it's telling that werewolves' role in myth and legend is not very consistent. Indeed, I think in modern times a lot of nerdy people have tried to really strictly codify how certain monsters work - vampires burn in sunlight and can only be killed by a wooden stake through the heart or decapitation, or, of course, exposure to sunlight. Werewolves have also gotten that treatment - you become a werewolf if you're bitten by one and survive, and then you always transform on the night of a full moon, and the only way to kill one is a silver bullet (or perhaps a silver weapon of some sort, if you want to tell a story in pre-firearms times).
But these myths aren't so set in stone as you go back into their origins as folklore. In some myths, vampires are actually just werewolves who have died. Becoming a werewolf also might involve drinking rainwater from a wolf's footprint, or wearing a belt of human leather. And on top of that, I think there's even a myth that suggests werewolves are the good guys - that they descend into the underworld to fight demons on behalf of mankind.
As a monster that is also somewhat human, werewolves are a classic creature of Gothic Horror, though they lack a quintessential icon like Dracula is for vampires. I was very excited about the inclusion of the Loup-Garou in Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft (which, incidentally, is literally just the French term for werewolf,) elevating what in the Monster Manual is a measly CR 3 speed bump into a legendary and genuinely hard-to-kill boss-like monster.
But, I was a little disappointed when there was no option among the Gothic Lineages for a werewolf playable race.
Here's the thing: officially, there's a way to be a player-character werewolf in 5th Edition. The rules are in the Monster Manual - if you're bitten by a werewolf, you have to make a saving throw or become a werewolf, which actually mostly has benefits - giving you immunity to physical damage from nonmagic, unsilvered weapons, and also setting your strength to 15 if it wasn't higher already. But it also sets your alignment to chaotic evil and potentially turns your character into an NPC.
There's some logic to this, but I think it's inelegant, and it also doesn't really fulfill the fantasy of playing as a werewolf.
Thus, I honestly think that lycanthropy should actually be handled the way that Gothic Lineages are - one of the keys to those lineages as a concept is that you might be transformed into one mid-campaign. And I think that this would also allow for a more balanced player option - immunity to nonmagical weapon damage is kind of insane to give to a player - other than the acid damage from a tarrasque's swallow, they'd be immune to whatever the thing throws at them.
But there are other options in 5E that approach lycanthropy without being explicit about it.
The first is the Shifter race. With their publication in Monsters of the Multiverse, Shifters are now a setting-agnostic race (still upset the Warforged aren't, but that's neither here nor there). Shifters, much like a lot of Eberron-originating races, are sort of built around making monsters playable. Shifters are animal-like, and can become more animal-like in a similar way to lycanthropes. Still, these are treated as a proper race, rather than the sort of monstrous affliction that lycanthropy is. You could easily re-skin this as a lycanthrope player race, but it would require some creative work.
The next option is the Path of the Beast Barbarian. Again, the issue here is that it's not really explicit - officially, you're just manifesting some beast-like qualities. The Barbarian is a good class to embody the idea of a lycanthrope - Rage as a mechanic ties into the idea of surrendering to one's bestial nature (the fact that you can't cast spells while raging fits with that,) but it ties you to a very specific set of character choices.
Going outside of officially published material, Matt Mercer's Blood Hunter class has a subclass called Order of the Lycan, in which the Blood Hunter has explicitly become a lycanthrope, and the subclass description explains how this replaces the lycanthropy rules in the Monster Manual. While I've been somewhat skeptical of the Blood Hunter as a class (it might be a little over-designed) I do think that this actually captures the idea of a werewolf class better than the Path of the Beast, and even assuages some of my misgivings about subclasses that include generated weapons, thanks to the fact that you effectively get +1, +2, and eventually +3 bonuses to your lycanthropic claws.
While I'd actually be down to try this out as a class and subclass (if any of my DM friends would allow it, which they likely would not) again, this does tie you to a specific set of character choices. Given recent reveals on... well, spoiler alert, I'm eager to see this in action (and hope that this blood hunter has greater longevity than the previous one).
Still, I remain convinced that the best way to handle lycanthropy is to make it a fourth Gothic Lineage. I might even tool around with it and homebrew up one with the goal of matching the general design of the ones out of Van Richten's.
No comments:
Post a Comment