Werewolves? Oh man, do I know about them...

So my buddy decided to write about Werewolves on his blog and I’ve been looking for a subject to get me back into the habit of writing on here again and figured that Werewolves are as good of a subject as any to inspire some writing. I am somewhat of a fan of them after all. This is mostly a response to his blog post and how I interpret some things differently than him.

My background with dealing with werewolves comes from my gaming background and love of cheesy horror movies. As I’ve mentioned before, Werewolf The Apocalypse is the game I have played the most extensively and have tons of experience with. It is absolutely wonderful and amazing and full of well thought out fluff and NPCs. I miss it and I miss my old gaming group where we played this… sigh…

Okay so, I completely agree that Pathfinder/DnD lycanthropes suck. They suck hard compared to Whitewolf’s and those in most literature/mythology. Hell, arguably Twilight’s wolves are just as “awesome” as the template in the Monster Manual. Instead of unstoppable killing machines, these critters are a slight boost to the base creature and aren’t that good at some of the things their base animal can do. I don’t like that and I hate having to use them as is. Given the chance I would change the template completely.

Let’s start with the same things he did. First we look at the template:

+1 CR, Gains Shapechanger subtype,  Size: unchanged, AC: +2 Natural Armor, DR 10/Silver (Natural), DR 5/Silver (Afflicted), Gains Natural Attacks based on creature when in hybrid and animal forms, gains all natural abilities of the animal when in Hybrid of Animal forms, gains low-light vision, scent, Change Shape (Use Con roll to change between Human, Hybrid, and Animal forms), Curse of Lycanthropy, Lycanthropic Empathy, +2 Wis, -2 Cha, +2 Str and Con (in hybrid and animal forms only), in addition other stats of the lycanthrope in Hybrid or Animal form default to either the animal or base creature’s base stats (whichever is higher).

I don’t mind the two types of lycanthropes existing (Natural and Afflicted) but I do have a problem with them being different in terms of some abilities. I would remove the Afflicted’s reduced damage reduction and leave it at that. I don’t mind the concept of both types of lycanthropes existing (Natural and Afflicted) but I just don’t like the concept of the afflicted’s physiology being weaker.

+2 Natural AC, makes sense.

Damage Reduction. Like my friend, I also think that damage reduction isn’t the best way to deal with this piece of Werewolves and other lycans. They heal insanely fast, can absorb tremendous blows, and keep going no matter how powerful a blow they’re dealt. I might change this to be a DR 5/Silver and Fast Healing 4 or 5/Silver. That puts them in the right category for me. Regeneration works, but I feel that Fast Healing and a DR are more appropriate to what I’ve seen on film and in literature. I only include Silver as the end all be all way around them because they are lycanthropes. That is their weakness, period, end of story. Maybe it can change depending upon the species (not all lycanthrope legends have an allergy to solver, some are allergic to gold or other precious things), but for anything connected in such a way to the moon it must be silver.

Shape Change. I’m a Werewolf The Apocalypse (WTA) veteran. I’m used to werewolves having 5 (yes FIVE) forms. I’m perfectly okay with lycanthropes having 3 forms in this template. The use of the Constitution modifier for controlling the change makes sense to me as well. You are trying to control your body and force it to change itself through the use of the disease that you have inside of your body. You also have to fight through the violent and awful pain that the transformation causes you in order to not stop yourself partway through.

I will happily agree that a Werewolf in Hybrid form needs a set of claw attacks. 1D4 seems too low for a supernatural predator like that though. I also feel that the Bite attack’s 1d6 is also too low. That is, unless there are additional abilities that a werecreature was granted. For a werewolf, maybe instead of just gaining Trip in hybrid form it instead gains 2 Claw attacks (at 1D4 each), a Bite (its normal 1D6), Pounce, Grab (on the Bite attack), and Rake. In animal form you’d only have the abilities of the base animal, so in the case of a wolf you’d have trip in that form.

My experience in WTA leaves me wanting more from my shapeshifters in hybrid form. In that game, someone entering Crinos (their equivalent of Hybrid form) gains approximately 50% of their own height and doubles their Glabro (Near-man form) weight (which is usually already almost double their human form weight and is all muscle). So a 6 foot tall, 180 pound werewolf in human form would turn into a 9 foot tall, ~650-700 pound Crinos. (And this is the low end of the scale!!!). If a character is shapeshifting into a hybrid form known for power or strength (Wolves, great cats, pretty much any large predator) they should be subject to the same effects as an enlarge person spell, making them 1 size category larger with all associated penalties and bonuses. (This would include increasing their claw and bite damage to the next die category)

I do like his changes to STR/CON/DEX modifiers. Those are pretty solid. I’d stick with a +4 STR/CON and a +2 DEX for werewolves in Hybrid form myself. Maybe give them a bonus to Speed and DEX in Animal form. Obviously this should be incorporated with the Enlarge effect in mind.

Being a shapeshifter you are now, you have been cursed with a pure, primal spirit of fury and anger that has incorporated itself into your very being. The legends of werewolves attacking during full moons is spoken of for a reason. In WTA this was explained by Werewolves being easier to anger as the moon got fuller, fueling their supernatural Rage powers and making them more likely to enter into a Frenzy. This was because of their connection to the moon. In DnD you just go into a crazed frenzy with no control during a full moon.

Now, in WTA, you could use your Rage score to gain additional turns, activate powers, or you had to roll it when something that could make you angry did. Kinda like the Hulk, you wouldn’t like them when they are angry. I would like to see something like this implemented with Lycanthropes in PF/DnD. Maybe not quite to the same extent though. Maybe give them a 1/Day use of Barbarian Rage or the Frenzy of the Frenzied Berserker prestige class, but it can only be used in Hybrid form and you could end up entering it involuntarily if you fair a Will save or drop below ¼ HP or something similar. Obviously the difficulty is determined by the phase of the moon.

And re-reading my buddy’s post he’s already mentioned something like that…

Anyways the point is that I want to add something like WTA’s Frenzies that also makes the Werewolf stronger and tougher to kill while taking control away from the base creature. Maybe entering Hybrid form automatically puts them into a State of Barbarian Rage… hmmm…

So there’s a bunch of thought dumping for you to sift through.

A quick update

I'm on vacation for a week. So I'll try to get something ready for next friday...

Some filler

So I never got around to writing something ahead of time this week so this is coming out later than I wanted it to.

Last night I ran the Tomb of Horrors for our regular group, well sort of the regular group. I don't know about anyone else, but I certainly had a blast running the game. It was fun to do some classic dungeon crawling with that wonderfully sadistic module.

They were only able to get as far as the.Colorful Sphere Room and the Evil Temple in the time we had.

Some thoughts on the session itself. Lance had his girlfriend playing for the first time,  which was very nice to see. It has been a long time since I've seen a complete noob at a table and there really isn't anything like that experience.

A few times my lack of practice showed itself when I screwed up a few traps and a couple descriptions. There were a few times where I had to improvise some things and I was probably more generous than I should have been, but overall I think I did okay. I've got a list of what I think I need to improve upon and I'll probably ask around a little for other people's opinions. It's been a few years since I last ran anything and I need some pointers.

Lastly, fuck that stupid complex of secret doors. That's a poorly described section that was boring for all of us. I'll have to try and figure something else out with it.

Starting a What!?!

So I had an awful bit of inspiration the other day. I want to create and publish a true tabletop campaign setting for commercial sale. I have been doing research into how I can do this on the cheap and think I have a pretty good grasp of the budget for such a thing. How that money is going to be raised is a different issue that will be worked out later when we have a product to work with. For now though I want to concentrate on producing the setting.

The first thing to go through my head was that I immediately need to involve Clint, the DM for the Pathfinder Campaign I’m playing in, because he and I have been talking about designing a campaign setting together anyways. We have similar design philosophies when it comes to mechanics and settings and have been bouncing ideas back and forth between each other for various RPG related topics for a while now. This seemed like the perfect opportunity to collaborate on a project with him and give us both a chance to take a step into the industry we both love.

Right now we’re working on figuring out what type of setting we want to create. We both have campaign settings already created that could be published, but I want to create something new with him from the ground up. If we can’t come up with any ideas we will probably flesh out and publish one of our existing settings first. In the meantime I’m going to type out some of my brainstorming and the thought process behind the creation of a setting that I go through when I create something like this.

Normally I’m inspired by something I watch, read, or see and then write down that idea in a margin, notebook, or the back of a piece of paper and come back to it later when I have enough ideas to flesh it out. This is different than normal though. Now I need to do something that will force some inspiration. I’ve been looking at legends, watching some movies, and delving into Wikipedia over the past few days searching for inspiration and I’ve had a few things pop up.

First and foremost though I need to decide what type of unique things will make up this world and what potential systems we will use to create it. This has to be a commercially viable product so we need a hook and we need to apply it to a popular system. I think the best system to use will be Pathfinder. It is popular in the community, we can use the Open Gaming License to link our book to it, and we are both pretty familiar with the system at this point. Clint and I have some issues with the system that we’ve discussed at length before, so we will probably want to alter the system a little to fit our own tastes, maybe a couple of simple, custom systems that are potentially appealing to other people.

Clint and I are also fans of firearms in fantasy settings, magic systems that have built in catastrophic failure systems, and unique/different races. So I’m pretty sure we’ll end up with some type of firearms and a magic system along the lines of each of our magic failure systems from our individual campaign settings (both of which are using a variation of the Taint mechanic). The unique/different races thing will be hashed out more when we’re closer to defining the actual setting itself I think.

So starting from the ground up…

Any world I build I start with a grittier, low magic setting. Typically I think of an Everway style setting. Magic exists, and you might see it in use every day, but it isn’t (always) world shattering stuff and everything comes with a price or potential for failure. So we’ll start off with that type of assumption. We can discuss the potential existence of deities, dragons, and odd-ball races later.

The night I sprung this on Clint the wife and I were watching a Jimmy Stewart movie from the 60’s called Shenandoah. Great movie, depressing as hell, but still great. It’s about a family from Virginia that gets dragged into the Civil War against its will and gets screwed over by both sides and other people. It’s a good look into some of the issues of the day. This immediately inspired me. A good setting should always have some type of brewing or active conflict. It gives you a lot of things to work with. Just like the civil war, there’s got to be a lot going on under the surface so that no side is clearly good or evil.

There was a lot of things going on during the American civil war other than slavery (which despite the arguments to the contrary, it really was mostly about slavery even though the South tried to dress it up as more than that). Both sides in the conflict weren’t doing good things and weren’t necessarily fighting for the right reasons. I won’t get into the specifics here, but both sides were doing bad things and both also had good things. It is a very complex situation and both sides are shades of grey. Sounds like the perfect thing for me to use.

So a big civil war type situation is all well and good, but it needs more. Obviously it requires two sides of a larger and stronger nation. What else can I add though to make it more than just an analogue for exploring the issues of the civil war? Obviously more drama is always a good answer. What if we expand it? What if this civil war is fall out from the collapse of what used to be a larger empire? Like, say the Roman Empire or the United States collapsing into 3 or more chunks. Maybe this former empire broke up into 3 major chunks and a few smaller minor kingdoms/city-states.

What if two of these major chunks didn’t agree on whether or not they were one or two nations? One remnant claims that this other one is part of it and demands taxes, conscripts, and resources while the other claims it is independent. The third chunk is remaining entirely neutral in the matter. To make matters worse, this empire used to be a stabilizing influence across the entire continent and with their collapse and being on the brink of war with itself it has freed up the other powers of the continent to do what they want. Maybe this empire was more of a bully than police, maybe a meaner Roman Empire.

Maybe there’s an “evil” nation starting to amass their own armies to attempt conquests upon their neighbors. Oh, there could be an extremely well-defended city-state somewhere that is considered a Freeport type city with massive monetary influence. Kind of like a Singapore or Tortuga. (I really like these Freeport city ideas for some reason, that might be my politics influencing me.). [after popping in Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust] OH! Dhampier are awesome. Maybe we can use them somewhere, like that “evil” nation!

Wikipedia led me to pre-Columbian Mesoamerican cultures… again… the thought of a Mesoamerican style culture with sacrifices and elaborate ceremonies is always a fun thing to contemplate being an influence upon a Western European style culture.

A viewing of Howl’s Moving Castle made me think about an idea I had long ago for an Arcanatech style setting and a class that a navy buddy of mine helped me design (the Articifer, a base class that was all about making constructs and magic items. Mostly constructs). Might not fit with the low magic/magic with consequences though.

What types of traditional fantasy tropes exist here? What types of ancient secrets are around? Potentials for dungeon crawls? Can we develop an item creation system outside of the normal magic item system, maybe with alchemy, unusual materials and superior craftsmanship instead? What type of geographic landscape are we looking at here? How many traditional races are there and where do they live?

What I’d like to see is about 80-95% human coverage of the continent with the rest split up between the rest of the races, whatever they are. I hate elves so can we make them real jerk-offs? I’d like to see them as xenophobic, racist assholes. It just seems appropriate.

Maybe there’s a place where there’s just a cubic ass-ton of minor kingdoms and city-states that are constantly at war with each other. This could be a great place for a Kingmaker style game to take place. Maybe there are some vast swaths of unclaimed territory on the continent, at least not claimed by any of the important nations. This could be where the remains of a great and ancient magical empire was and the landscape is dotted with magical beast/mutants and ruins that are extremely dangerous to go after. Especially when there are easier ways to make your fortune in the constantly brewing conflicts elsewhere.

There is of course that Mercenary setting that Clint had me help him out with. That was neat. It could be adapted to its own setting outside of Hekinoe but that is pretty well established.

Hmmm… That’s a pretty good list of random things to work with so far. Maybe after I read Clint’s ideas (and he reads these) we’ll be able to hash some more out and start laying down the foundation.