Looking at Draw Steel's Werewolf

 I freaking love werewolves.

I mean, I guess I've always been a dog person, but I think the werewolf always spoke to me on a deep, primal level. As a kid, while the monsters I imagined were most prevalent in my home were ghosts (I grew up in a creaky old Victorian house in a suburb of Boston) the one I always feared (even as a kid I knew this to be irrational) enough to pull the sheets over my head at night was a werewolf. Walking around my neighborhood, it was a werewolf I feared jumping out from behind a bush or hedge.

And yet, there's something also kind of compelling about the idea of "being" a werewolf. Gothic horror is all about the dark id beneath our human facades, and its monsters are representations of that id breaking out and manifesting physically, and the werewolf might be the purest distillation of that idea.

Weirdly, there's not (that I'm aware of) any real "iconic" werewolf character like there is for vampires in Dracula. Yes, Lon Chaney played the Wolf Man in the movies, but do you know that character's name without looking it up?

Anyway, I've always loved the idea of playing as a werewolf (the Worgen are among my favorite playable races in World of Warcraft) but I also recognize that they can fall into that problem of: do we want these to be just another fantasy species, or do we want them to represent something truly terrifying and monstrous?

Draw Steel splits the difference, giving us a subclass for Furies that allows you to play out your Were-wolf/bear/rat/crow fantasy, but in the lore, in makes these Stormwights distinct from werewolves.

Generally, I don't like to pump up Draw Steel by putting D&D down - I adore D&D, and frankly expect to continue playing it more often than Draw Steel (though it's very much down to how my friends like Draw Steel if and when I ever actually get them together to try it). But I will say that in this narrow category, I think Draw Steel has the edge:

5E has never* done werewolves right, in my opinion.

The asterisk there is for Ravenloft's Loup-Garou, a CR 13 legendary werewolf (loup-garou is just the French term for werewolf,) but I want to talk about the standard CR 3 version.

But I think 5E's lycanthropes get a little watered-down with all of the different kinds of were-creatures that you can find - werewolves are kind of middle-of-the-pack among them. They can infect a character with lycanthropy via their bite, and in theory you want silver weapons to fight them, but this latter thing is totally circumvented if the party has magic weapons or just has spells. A 1st level character with Fire Bolt has no problem attacking a werewolf.

The infectiousness of their curse is also a little awkward: it takes a 3rd level spell, Remove Curse, to cure someone's lycanthropy if a party member gets bitten, which... ok, sure, a 3rd level spell is not something you'll necessarily have access to in tier 1, but it kind of means that the werewolf is only scary at those lowest levels.

Now, admittedly, the Draw Steel werewolf is also designed for low-level parties. In fact, it's level 1, meaning you could start a campaign with a fight against a werewolf.

But I think it'll be memorable: it's a solo monster.

I think Draw Steel has more exciting "technology" to make boss fights. Solo and Leader monsters have Villain actions - climactic moves they can pull once each per encounter and only one per round. Solo monsters also get two (non-consecutive) turns per round, helping with the action economy issues you run into.

Because of this distinction between monster "ranks" and levels, they can afford to do some interesting things with them: you won't be throwing three werewolves against a 5th level party or anything, and so to ensure that the fight feels substantial, this level 1 monster has 200 Stamina. That means there's basically no way that a party is going to take them down in just one round.

In addition to the additional "solo turn," that they get, they also have a kind of legendary-resistance-style "End Effect," which lets them pay 5 Stamina (take 5 damage) to end an effect that normally requires a saving throw. I think it's an elegant way to honor that the party has imposed some status effect on them, while recognizing that the Director needs a way to get out of it to keep the fight from being trivialized.

Draw Steel monsters also sometimes have bespoke mechanics and conditions, and in this case, we have Accursed Rage. Werewolves' attacks impose a certain amount of rage on a target - though there's an explicit carve-out for Stormwight Furies, whose mastery of their own bestial form grants them immunity to this effect. If you start your turn with 10 Rage, you expend it all and then, before your turn, shift (moving without drawing opportunity attacks) up to your speed toward the nearest creature and make a melee free strike against them, which imposes 1 rage on them. In other words, there's a kind of spreading entropy as rage spreads from player to player.

Now, as a note, if you do have a Stormwight in your party, there's a special rule: even if Stormwights are immune to this rage, when a Fury spends Ferocity for the first time (I think in a battle) the Director gains 1d3 Malice, so it's a minor trade-off.

The werewolf's signature ability, Accursed Bite, can then actually curse someone with lycanthropy, causing them to gain 2 rage at the end of each turn in combat (the rage persisting outside of combat, though only generating when in combat) and requiring a downtime activity to Find a Cure to remove this effect. The bite is a potency effect (and requires the Director to spend malice,) but the potency increases by 1 for the creature each time they are bitten, meaning that a determined werewolf will eventually curse their target if they live long enough to keep biting the target.

Werewolves have two other main action options: Ripping Claws that can hit two targets and cause them to bleed and gain rage, and Berserker Slash, which is a burst ability that can push or slide targets and also inflict rage. They also have a maneuver where they can leap off a wall and make a melee free strike and potentially knock a target prone.

Finally, they have a triggered action that can punish foes who charge or just move at least 2 squares toward them when attacking, potentially knocking the attacker prone right before they make their power roll.

In addition to some malice-spending abilities and villain actions, there are also some general werewolf malice "start of the turn" options (even though we only get the one werewolf stat block here).

Generally speaking, the werewolf has a lot of mobility - numerous abilities allow them to shift and jump. There's also a bit of pushing and sliding - the werewolf has 0 stability at the start of a fight, but the second villain action lets them become a size 2 wolf (I might flavor this as going on all fours and expanding like something out of a nightmare, if only because I don't find the "werewolves who just turn into normal-looking wolves" trope matches my fantasy of what the monster is) and gains stability.

I think this stat block will probably give you a great encounter for classic gothic monster hunt. So, how would I build an adventure around this?

So, while it is a level 1 creature, it's got an EV of 36, meaning that if we're aiming for a standard-difficulty encounter, unless we have a big party, it'd be a little overtuned for a party of less than 6 players. Especially if the players are new to the system, it might be asking a little much to toss them into this fight from the very start.

And yet:

I actually love this as a perfect action prologue/cold-open for a gothic monster-hunting campaign. Werewolves are such perfect, elemental gothic monsters that it wouldn't feel hard to explain why our heroes are going after one.

For our battle arena, I think I want an abandoned house. Maybe it's recently abandoned. Maybe it's abandoned because the werewolf killed everyone there. Or maybe it was the werewolf's house before they allowed the rage to consume them and killed all their loved ones, and now keeps it as their den as a kind of weird self-torture.

The point is, I want this to be a house with creaking hardwood floors, maybe a big landing over a central hall and dusty rooms with relatively thin walls between them. There's some verticality with a grand stairway in that main hall (I might just be describing my own childhood home, but I'm imagining more Victorian interior decor). In its disuse, perhaps rain has soaked in through the roof and there's rot and mold in the house. We probably fight the werewolf at night, but if not, it's at least very cloudy and overcast and perhaps raining.

Hell, maybe there's a big hole in the roof that opens out into this central hall. Deviating from my own childhood home, perhaps that central hall has a marble floor. Or, perhaps we stick to the hardwood floor so that someone hitting that floor with enough force will fall down into the basement.

This werewolf is not a mere victim, not someone who happened to be unluckily bitten and infected. They called upon this power. And maybe, once the dust is settled, once the Wolf of Harrow Hill has been defeated, we might discover our first hint at what fell power unleashed the werewolf's rage.

Perhaps, if we lean into this horror, the lingering effects of the monster's bite haunt our party. They might not fully give in to the howling rage, but perhaps it continues to work its power upon them as they realize that this beast was merely the beginning of their descent into the night.