Building Better Monsters | Werewolves

welcome to map crow the rpg art show my name is kyle and today we're building better werewolves let me paint you a picture of words the tracks led deeper into the forest cutting through the brush and thorns but as you follow the trail something changes the gate lengthens the soles and toes stretch claws appear soon the creature seems to have been moving on the balls of its feet then on all fours now massive clawed paws replace humanoid tracks that little bit of flavor text comes to you from today's sponsor d-scribe but more on them a little bit later once again i find myself with a compelling challenge to rethink or reinvent the werewolf to try to bring some extra flavor and gaming material out of a well that has been returned to fruitfully over and over again by designers basically since the beginning of the hobby the werewolf aesthetically is basically unassailable it's look it's trappings it's metaphors it's about as good as it gets with a monster but as far as adapting it into an antagonist for a fantasy role-playing game like dungeons and dragons there are a couple of challenges that i think have been answered somewhat clumsily mechanically there's not much different between fighting a big wolf and fighting a wolf man really the only mechanical differences you're looking at are what weapons can damage it like magical or silvered weapons and of course the curse of the werewolf there is a little story that comes to us from ovid in the metamorphosis the story of king lychaean who was cursed by zeus to become a wolf when he had come into the deserted reaches of his countryside he howled and tried in vain to speak as a result of his own nature his appearance took on a kind of madness and he exercised against the flocks the lust for slaughter to which he had become accustomed he began to take pleasure in blood his clothes became fur and his arms turned into legs he became a wolf but he kept vestiges of his former self king lycaen dared to test the godhood of zeus and was punished by being cursed with the form of a wolf perhaps the lesson here is even a king should fear the gods and if he can't well then he's not really even a king and in fact he's not even a man he's a beast the curse of the werewolf is a metaphor that has been adapted to mean many things sometimes it is a struggle against carnal lust sometimes it is a struggle against alcoholism sometimes it is a punishment for hubris the thought that science could ever defeat the old wisdom and now perhaps you see the challenge perhaps you see our problem so imagine you're playing a ranger character and you're fighting against a werewolf in the woods and it's all epic and then you get bit and you fail a constitution save and now you're a werewolf what's the message of that metaphor how does that change the story what does that mean to your character it's just a bad role in the middle of an encounter there were dozens of bad roles in the middle of that encounter so now your character every once in a while turns into a wolf that's either really really fun for you and therefore not really a curse or kind of sucks because you didn't really want to turn into a wolf every once in a while that's not what you envisioned is that what happened to king like in that we think he just rolled poorly on a constitution save against zeus i don't know and to be fair i do think that there's a lot of juicy tension to be gotten out of the race to go get remove curse cast on you before the next full moon that could be really interesting but it could also be mundane and it could also kind of rob the momentum of whatever kind of story you were trying to tell before the random encounter happened of one thing i am certain though this curse is the thing that we need to solve to judge up the werewolf a little bit but i'm straining the old noodle here i've been too creative for too long and i'm running out of ideas so i'm going to head on over to d-scribe dang this place is awesome must be like over 7 000 scenes of places monsters and spells and the collection just keeps growing think they got maps they got maps this is a beautiful map what the heck man no wonder describe one the 2021 any for best online content this place has everything got you that was actually a clever ad that i embedded seamlessly into the middle of this video but you should really check this place out it's basically like a repository of a bunch of box text that you can just plop into your game at a moment's notice did your players go off script a little bit well just type in something into describe and see if one of these writers has taken a crack at it yet thank you described for sponsoring this video and for my viewers you can visit describe using the link below and then use the promo code mapro at checkout to get 10 off of your first subscription payment all right so back to this curse problem there is a passage written by passanis in descriptions of greece it tells a slightly different story than the one that avid tells in metamorphosis it talks about a certain man in the time of lychaean who changes into a wolf at the sacrifice to zeus but that change is not for life if he stays as a wolf for nine years without eating the flesh of a human then he can return to his human form but if he but if he tastes human flesh he remains a beast forever i think this is a somewhat more fertile ground to build our curse around than spurning the gods let's say that our werewolf was a soldier or assassin of an ancient king he and his elite group of commandos were all transformed into wolves with the warning that they could not eat human flesh while they went to go whatever grim deed the king had commanded them to do and while the form of the wolf had granted these men great powers to triumph over their enemies the hunger for human flesh was too great as wolves the taste of the flesh of their enemies was too tempting and they partook of it and now they roamed the world forever in the form of beasts the captain was changed into the wolf thing that walks and his men into the floating heads of hounds at night the heads hunt for guards bannermen knights those who have sworn their allegiance to a king and should you be bitten by one of these heads the wound will not close for it is the mark of the wolf and it means the wolf thing knows the scent of your blood and is coming for you and when it has found you and devoured your skull up from the stump in your neck will grow the head of a wolf and you will walk as one of them oh that reminds me every once in a while i get comments asking if i would ever do an actual play and while i don't do a regular actual play i did gm a special episode of my podcast splat book and we play through a game of tunnel goons using an adventure that i had designed for my home game and we were joined by the inestimable artistic treasure that is shel khan one of my favorite artists and people in the gaming space so if you wanted to hear me gm check out our podcast splat book in the description below i think this new curse has a couple of positive changes going for it it has a really nice hook that builds out of an ambush at the campfire by some floating wolf heads and maybe each of these wolfheads could be one of the various kind of hound monsters from the monster manual like a bar geese or a death dog or a blink hound imagine a teleporting wolf head that just like won't leave you alone and if it bites you you know that a bigger monster is on the way next so after this initial combat with these floating heads when somebody gets bitten instead of scampering off and looking for a place to remove the curse you are doing what these games are generally meant to do you are preparing to fight a big awesome monster also with all the different kinds of heads the gm has a way to interject a bit of variety into these encounters and you can fight as many of these floating heads as you need to but you only have to kill that one single wolf thing to kind of end the curse as for what this does for your story that you're telling i think this kind of monster would be great to interject into a campaign where your characters have made a vow with a king for instance like if you're a mercenary band working for the royalty then this directly involves your characters this is kind of a shadowy reflection of what your characters might become speaking of shadowy reflections this would also be a great monster to drop into a campaign where someone has an intelligent weapon that is slowly corrupting them or has a warlock pact that is causing them to do less than savory things the other handy feature of this redesigned werewolf is it is proactive it has a plan it has a goal it might be very simple sniff out those who have made vows with the king and eat them but at least that is a pattern that the players can begin to deduce and inquire about if you wanted to play this as an investigation game it also frees you up from some of the weightier traditions like this only happens on a full moon or it's killed by silver weapons if you didn't want to go in that direction in any case i think that will just about do it for this episode thank you so much for watching i've been compiling a list of all the monsters that folks have been requesting in the comments and i think i'm beginning to see some interesting patterns from the requests but it would really help me out if you told me what kinds of monsters you would like to see me cover next and why why do you think that monster needs a little extra mustard on it that would be really interesting to know so until next time my friends watch what you eat

Channel: Map Crow

Views: 32,939

Keywords: drawing, art, ttrpg, rpg, dnd, game design, artist, werewolves, werewolf, wolf man, lycanthropy

Id: B8UrqWr-yRQ

Length: 11min 0sec (660 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 30 2022