What They Don't Tell You About Lycanthropy - D&D

i apologize for not releasing a video in a while got coveted at the worst time so that delayed everything i'm also still a bit sick so again i apologize for my different voice but anyhow now the most basic definition of lycanthropy is a humanoid that can turn into an animal very very simple so technically speaking a druid that can turn into a bird is a lycanthrope a polymorphing wizard is also technically a lycanthrope the term itself is in fact very misleading in dnd specifically and subsequently in the forgotten realms lacking trope does have a more purposeful meaning and that is a person that is afflicted by the lycanthropic curse so these would be the werewolves the werebears the word tigers and even stuff like were sharks but the term lack and troop is constructed of two words lichen which comes from the word lycos which means wolf and throat which comes from the word anthropos which means a man so the word technically should only refer to werewolves if you break down the foundation of the wording now the actual word that one should use is therianthrope since therios means animal but i suppose it doesn't quite have that nice ring to it in any case today we're talking about where beasts where they come from what they do how to cure them anything and everything that the 5th edition monster manual did not tell you but first i am sponsoring my own video i wanted to let you guys know that i have in fact created my very own lac intro class for 5th edition see the like intro player option that exists on the monster manual it's absolutely terrible it's just broken and kind of unusable there's a reason why dm's are not out there making players lacking tropes in fact it is so broken that the monster manual recommends the dms literally take the character away from the player if they ever transform into a lacking rope so see i have created a series called monster classes where i create full classes from level 1 to level 20 based on monsters and here i have the lycanthrope and you can have this by clicking the button right here under the video it'll take you to the shop where i have all of the pdfs the lag and trip can enter into a visual transformation at level 1 where you gain a bunch of temporary hit points and your transformation will last for as long as you have those hit points see transforming gives you access to your subclass features currently we have the werewolf the wear rat and the wear bear subclasses the werewolf can see when enemies have less than half hp these creatures are considered wounded to you and the werewolf becomes a lot more powerful when fighting those wounded creatures my favorite ability is the bloodlust feature where when a creature becomes wounded near you you can spin a reaction to move towards it and then attack it it's so cool to see the werewolves just like sip and sapping throughout the battlefield the werebear is fairly tanky it gets more powerful the more times it gets hit and also gets more powerful the more times it hits once you level up you automatically give disadvantage on enemies that attack allies within five feet of you making enemies basically attack you instead which of course helps you because the more you get hit the more powerful you become it's a really fun sub class and then lastly we have the wear rat this guy is meant to be fast and agile relying on its main feature backstab to deal damage if the wear rat attacks with advantage then it deals extra damage and of course it attacks poisoned creatures with advantage so as a wear radger constantly trying to wind up enemies to get that backstab damage but the coolest thing about the wear rat is that wearats are deceased creatures they're just filled with nasty viruses and you can use those diseases against your enemies you start the game with three diseases and you get more as you level and you can inflict your diseases on enemies but the coolest part is that you can literally collect more diseases as you play through your adventures so for example if the adventure ever subjects you to a disease and you're of course immune to it but you can store it within your body permanently and then you can use it against your enemies by spending your resources i've been getting a lot of really good feedback on these monster classes and i am so happy that you guys are enjoying them i'm using the feedback to improve them to add stuff that you guys want me to add and to rebalance some of the stuff that you guys think is too strong we will be updating these classes over time and when we do i'll be sending you guys all emails with the updated pdfs with all of the changes in there so you don't have to worry about it thank you guys so much for the support please keep sending me your feedback on the comments below actually please write me the stuff that you want to see in them the stuff that you think is so strong it'll help me out tremendously to make these classes the best that they can be and of course i'll be updating them as soon as i can and sending them your way click the link below and check them out thank you guys so much we will talk further about the like intro class at the end of the video but for now let's keep going with the video before we go deep here's the 5th edition entry for the lycanthropes in the monster manual let's check it out it says in its natural humanoid form a creature cursed by lycanthropy appears as its normal self over time however many liken troops acquire features suggestive of their animal form in that animal form a lycanthrope resembles a powerful version of a normal animal in close inspection its eyes show a faint spark of a natural intelligence and might glow red in the dark okay so a person that acquires the curse can transform into a powerful version of a normal animal pretty straightforward and here it says that evil liken tropes hide among normal folk waiting until nightfall to spread terror and bloodshed especially under the full moon good light controves just become reclusive and live along in the wilderness the curse of lycanthropy a humanoid creature can be afflicted with the curse of black entropy after being wounded by a lycanthrope or if one or both of its parents are alike in tropes a remove curse spell can rid an afflicted liken trope of the curse but a naturally born legend trope can only be freed of the curse with a wish spell okay so so far we have it quite easy if you get the curse you only need to cast remove curse and you're good now in here it says that a like intro can either resist the curse or embrace it if you resist you retain your alignment and personality while in humanoid form you basically do this by avoiding your transformations for as long as you can that is until the full moon rises at which point you transform into your beast form or into a horrible hybrid form that combines animal and humanoid traits see it's interesting that the first mention of the hybrid form actually comes specifically when talking about the full moon rising before they only mentioned that you could transform into a more powerful version of a normal beast that's interesting but now going forward it says that if you're not aware that you're a lycanthrope yet then you might not remember the events of the transformation seeing those memories as hazy dreams now down here we get another jab at the concept of a hybrid form saying that over time you can master your transformations to the point where you could transform into your beast form or hybrid form at will but then lastly it does mention that most liken tropes that embrace their visual natures do end up becoming evil now on to the next page we get a bunch of options here for the different kinds of legend tropes we've got the werebear were bore we're rat where tiger and of course the werewolf now this video is not meant to cover them we are strictly focused on the concept of liken tropes in general however we have made a video on where rats specifically so if you want to watch it it's right here for you now the abilities that transforming gives you are entirely dependent on the type of animal that you're shifting into of course but they all have resistance to physical damage unless that damage comes from silver or magical weapons now we don't know the reason as to why silver is particularly good against like in tropes but it's there now that is the entry for legend troops and overall i would say it's pretty good it's hard to complain honestly we got the basics for what the curse is and how it affects creatures but now let's talk about what the 5th edition monster manual did not tell you about lycanthropes the first thing that i want to go over is the actual curse itself and how it works see the monster manual didn't mention this which is interesting to say the least but lycanthropy actually starts as a disease when a lycanthrope attacks you with any of its natural weapons or if you get any of its bodily fluids in you then you contract the disease the disease can only be cured within the first three days of infection and the cure spell has to be fairly powerful for it to remove it we're not just talking about a simple lesser restoration here fellas we're talking something more akin to a greater restoration the lore mentions that the healer needs to be very very powerful like a 12th level healer for them to be able to accomplish this now there is a non-magical way to fight the disease and that is of course the fabled herb belladonna so belladonna which is also known as wolfbane or the deadly nightshade is a very poisonous herb that when consumed weakens you physically living you in a state of death like sleep it turns out that if you consume a fresh batch of belladonna during this three day period after contracting lycanthropy there is a 25 chance that you will get yourself cured of it it's a low chance granted but it doesn't require magic just the herb it will leave you unconscious for two or three days since it is of course a poison that you're ingesting but with a chance of healing you now failure to cure the disease for those three days means that you're now afflicted with the curse of lycanthropy but this curse cannot simply be cured with a remove curse spell as the monster manual alluded to you can but it's not that easy now you as a person will not even notice that you have the curse you will simply live out your life as you've always done so until the next full moon see it is a common misconception that as far as liken tropes are concerned only the one full moon is what matters but that is not true it is in fact three different nights the night before the full moon the night of the full moon and then the night after the full moon an infected lycanthrope will transform without a choice on all of those three nights so it is once a month but three nights in a row now just how the monster manual told you if you do not know that you're afflicted then you simply black out during those three nights remembering what you did only through hazy dreams now these nights are very important if you seek to cure the curse because it is in fact only during these three nights in which a remove curse will work on you that is right you can only cure a lacking troop during a full moon while they are a mindless beast the lag and trope must be subdued first whether by himself before the transformation or by the healer and its group during the full moon the healer will apply its remove curse onto the liken troop and then and this is important the lycanthrope must succeed on a saving throw to fight off the curse if the saving throw fails then the remove curse also fails now this is how it's done in the forgotten realms which is the world that i typically cover however i did wanted to make a special exception this time and also talk a bit about ravenloft because it is it is a classic if you're dealing with vampires and werewolves then ravenloft is sort of like the go-to for this so in here in order to cure a person of like entropy you have to defeat what you call the primogenitor the source of the curse this is a necessary step that cannot be avoided and of course requires a big hunt the primogenitor will almost always be a true lycanthrope meaning a person that was born a lycanthrope true liken tropes spend their existence infecting people with the curse and those that they infect will of course go on to infect others and those that they in fact will go and infect more creating a chain effect if you get infected you have to go through the process of following the chain of infections until you find the very first lycanthrope on the chain and defeat him if you do not do this then it doesn't matter what you do all attempts to cure the disease all attempts to cure the curse will fail and the thing is you have to absolutely be certain that you have killed the primogenitor because you can only attempt the cure at lycanthropy once and if that cure attempt fails you will be a lacking trope for the rest of your life now provided that you have killed the primogenitor then you are supposed to redeem yourself spiritually for all the murder and chaos that you have done you might take a religion or pay a penance but you must do some kind of penitence for what you have committed see effectively you need to purify your soul because a dark soul will always fall into the temptation of bloodlust and fail at the cure when you have done that and then the actual curing process can begin you need to get yourself tied up and you need the help of a healer you activate your transformation on purpose but you must fight the urge to slaughter the cleric will cast a first level spell called ceremony on you specifically the atonement version provided that you did enough penance before this then it will succeed so what it does is the spell forcefully changes your alignment to your original alignment before you start transforming allowing you full mental access to your body and forcing the visual transformation to abruptly end however forceful detransformation is excruciatingly painful and you have to endure the pain without moving an inch that's part of it the curse is only lifted if you endure the pain without moving then the cleric has to do a lesser restoration on you to cure the disease afflicting your body and then finally a removal courage to dismantle the magical esoteric effects that are still hanging about you provided that you did everything properly then finally you will be freed from lycanthropy but if you messed up even once then the curse will be on you forever and you may never attempt this again okay so now that we have talked about the curse let's talk about lycanthropes as a people so you'll be surprised to know that even though your cursed lycanthrope flash regenerates very quickly against wounds it doesn't actually increase your life expectancy so your height your weight and normal physical features will remain relatively the same even after you have become afflicted with this curse at least at the beginning if you're infected with lycanthropy then after a few decades of having the affliction uh you will definitely start to see some changes like for example if you're a werebearer then you will start growing lots of hair around your body if you are a werewolf then your fingers will become longer you know stuff like that but generally speaking you as a person will stay roughly the same this doesn't make you live longer now what's interesting too is that when a lycanthrope transforms their animal form shares the same age as their real form so for example an old guy liking trope changing into a wolf will show as a really really old wolf now we don't really know exactly where lycanthropy came from but the lore does state a couple of really interesting ideas quote lycanthropy appears to have been a plague on faerun since its earlier days some say that malar the beast lord created the first lycanthropes from barbaric human tribes thousands of years ago in order to infuse the race with the feral cunning and strength of the predatory animals that they admired others believed that lycanthropy was a gift of the goddess saloon to human children orphaned in the dangerous wilds a blessing to help them survive from these ancient humans old lyntropic bloodlines have descended through the ages few in number but scattered throughout all the wilderness of faerun end quote so from these old lineages you have what we call true lycanthropes and then infected like in tropes so true lycanthropes are like in tropes because they were born as liken tropes they don't really have a curse or a disease they are just the way they are you can't really cure them out of like entropy in the same way as you cannot cure a dwarf from being a dwarf it is just in their dna now true like intros however can infect normal people and turn them into lycanthropes these we call infected lycotropes and there are strong functional differences between the two true like intros can change whenever they want into their animal and hybrid forms and they are not at all affected by the full moon they retain their personalities throughout the transformations and generally consider the process of shifting a very pleasurable experience in infected lycanthropes however struggle between their real form and their animal form typically losing a big part of themselves in the transformation process most often than not they cannot transform at will and become fully feral and monstrous during the full moons to them their transformations are painful and traumatizing see the shifting of their muscles and bones while they transform they actually feel that and it hurts them for these guys anything can trigger an involuntary transformation from the scent of blood to physical damage from combat to even the sound of a wolf howling in the distance psychologically speaking true lycanthropes love being the way they are whereas infected lycanthropes despise it and wish to find cures now if both of your parents were liking tropes then you're guaranteed to be a true lacking trope yourself but if your parents were both infected like in tropes on the other hand then you have only a 50 chance of being a true light control so this way you can indeed create true lycanthropes from infected lycanthropes that would be by reproducing but now things do get a bit interesting once you have a true lycanthrope creating babies with either infected lycanthropes or normal unaffected people because a true lycanthrope will always share its natural like entropic blood with its babies but when mixed with humanoids that do not have that blood it actually dilutes it so what you get are offspring that are indeed true like intros but sort of less so maybe if you are a first generation mixed blood then there's not really going to be that much of a difference for you but if this process of mixing the bloods continues on for many generations eventually you lose so much of that true natural like entropic blood that you end up what we call a shifter a shifter is basically uh if you guys have seen that new barbarian path of the beast class from tasha's that's basically a shifter you're a person that has this like tinge of animal in you that can come out randomly depending on the circumstance but you typically cannot fully manifest it in its true form only in little batches in the case this is what happens to most of the lycotropic bloodlines from the old days in the forgotten realms it is typically now very rare to see big communities of true lycanthropes anymore and there's really never been like a city of liken tropes or anything huge like that most of them just always have stuck to themselves now the most common types of lycotropes are where bats were bears were bores where cats wear crocodiles where rats wear sharks where tigers wear wolves and then the special kind of liken trope that is only seen on elves called the lithari the lithari are good aligned werewolves that do not have a hybrid form they're kind of like if you played the original dragon age if you remember that beautiful white wolf that was the uh the leader of the werewolf pack that's the idea of a lithari but only elves can be that now some of the rare liken tropes that you can find in the forgotten realms include where bisons wear dogs where dolphins wear leopards wear owls and wear panthers i also need to make a very important distinction that the monster manual didn't really touch on but it's very important so a werewolf is a humanoid that can turn into a wolf but a wolf wear is the opposite it is a wolf that can turn into a humanoid these are not as common but but they are a thing the most popular of course being the jackal wares from the monster manual see a werewolf is a therianthrope like we mentioned at the beginning of the video while a wolf wear would be an antherion which translates to man animal rather than animal man now the interesting thing is that the weaknesses are actually different between the two the monster manual actually [ __ ] up on this so therian tropes like the werewolves are weak to silver but antherions like the wolf wares are weak to cold iron so the jackal wears from the monster manual should have been weak to cold iron instead of silver as the monster manual here shows though to be fair the reason they didn't put that in is probably because cold iron didn't really make it into fifth edition as a concept so honestly it makes sense now lacking tropes in general being vulnerable to silver is one of those big mysteries because we have never been like told explicitly why that is and the lore suggests that it is because silver is tied to the moon and like in tropes at least the infected ones are weak to the moon it does make sense and other sources of lore do confirm that silver does indeed have connections to the magic of the moon but yeah we have never been told like blanketly that that's why i should however point out that different variations of lycanthropes do have different vulnerabilities it is not that all lycanthropes are weak to silver some are weak to gold and copper whereas others are weak to bronze obsidian and even wood this is something that was expanded dramatically in ravenloft in here werewolves were ravens and were badgers maintained their silver vulnerability but others differed greatly for example whereabouts were vulnerable to silver but only piercing silver weapons were bears were actually weak to cold iron where boars were weak to wood weapons like wooden spears where crocodiles were weak to flint weapons flint weapons wear foxes to bone weapons wear jackals to copper and wear tigers to obsidian each lion troop also had a chemical weakness like for example weird tigers were weak to ginseng whereas where crocodiles were weak to mandrakes now anyways the monster manual did at least mention that there was indeed a difference between the true natural lycanthropes and infected lycotropes but they actually forgot to mention altogether the existence of the third variety induced lycanthropes see these guys are a bit tricky because they come from an entirely different source magic see the world of those in dragons is a very complicated world where many interesting things can happen when you involve magic a god can create a like intro from scratch if it really wanted to a hag could curse you with her own proprietary blend of like entropy or you could equip a magic item that momentarily gives you the ability to change shapes into that of animals these all we would call induced lycanthropes so in the lore we actually have a spell that can turn people into lacking troops it is a six level transmutation spell called curse of lycanthropy if you curse a person with this spell they contract the lycotropic curse which as always manifest on the full moons forcing the character to transform into a lagging troop during those three consecutive nights you do get to reroll your saving throw each time you do transform and you cannot infect other people with the curse but it is nonetheless really powerful and really cool actually the coolest part is that the component for the spell is a vial of blood and so how it works is the lycanthrope takes on the animal form of the animal from which you got the blood from as a component so if you have the blood of a dolphin as the spell component then the target will transform into a weird dolphin during the full moons it's so cool but the last thing i do want to mention for this video is that becoming a like intro doesn't necessarily make you into the type of evil creature that would prevent you or them from interacting with others in a good or meaningful capacity i don't want to focus too much on alignment because i feel like that would be a whole video in and out of itself but i did want to at least sort of touch on what exactly does turning into a lycanthrope do to your brain see each animal carries with it its own baggage but many of them are supposed to make you evil what this actually means is that you succumb to a form of bloodlust when you transform in practice what this does to you is it makes you enjoy and crave killing things now this doesn't have to be played as a murder hobo in the same way as a barbarian who rages it's not like literally insane yeah he's angry and does want to hit things until those things die but that doesn't make the barbarian want to necessarily strike children or pregnant ladies a very similar thing actually applies to the werewolf so a lacking trope that doesn't know that they are a lycanthrope does blank out during those transformations and that guy will definitely do some really heinous evil [ __ ] while he's out the lore in fact does state that the first targets that those legend tropes choose are those that the host has a lot of feelings towards whether those feelings are positive or negative so you will basically hunt down those that you love or those that you hate and there's really not that much that you can do about it but when you do realize that you are a lichen troop and you get a hold of yourself your alignment is then supposed to change to that of the animal so again in the case of the werewolf that would be evil so you would turn evil but that doesn't mean that you have to do what you were doing before you know like killing your loved ones and whatnot no now you can control what you were doing with the understanding that you love to kill things but those things that you are killing can be great things to kill like monsters or bandits or villains a werewolf that feels the bloodlust and enjoys the murdering of things can still live a relatively normal life as an adventurer providing that you are pushing that bloodlust towards the right targets which you most certainly can do this brings me to the lycanthrope class that i have made you don't have to be a murder hobo if you want to play a like intro all you have to do is fix that bloodlust directly towards your enemies in whatever campaign you're playing now the lagging drop class that i have created for you guys is based on infected liken tropes which means your transformation is not perfect and you can roughly transform when you want but it comes with a lot of caveats first the transforming is a prolonged process that requires a fair amount of meditation it's not something that you can do immediately and this is important because being forcefully detransformed is excruciatingly painful to you and frankly deals a lot of damage this typically happens when you lose all of your temporary hit points which is meant to represent you becoming too overwhelmed to keep your transformation see i designed the class so that transforming gives you temporary hit points and that you maintain your transformation for as long as those temporary hit points last the reason was that the lycontropic curse sort of makes your skin regenerate from damage like if you stab a liken trope with a normal weapon the skin is just going to fix itself really fast this is why liken drops are meant to be basically immune to physical damage unless that damage is magical or from a silver weapon and as such conceptually temporary hit points are perfect because you will get hit multiple times but your real hp will always stay normal this sort of represents your cursed skin fixing all the wounds that you're taking it's like you're not taking real damage and then if your temporary hit points do reach zero you're forcefully kicked out of your transformation and then well then you will suffer for it now as an infected lycanthrope when you transform you lose a part of yourself you effectively become a monster and the way that i represented this in the class is that when you transform you get a minus 10 to your intelligence and a minus 10 to your charisma now what this means for you is that you basically become a feral beast now i have tables in here in the class that lets you know what this means to you so if you're left with one or two intelligence for example you basically attack whatever you can see you become literally a monster so intelligence in this regard is about your ability to understand the world as a lycanthrope the higher your intelligence score the more that you will be able to reason like a normal person so you need high intelligence in order to wield weapons or tools as a liken troop or be able to attune to magic items charisma represents how animalistic you behave so it's like whether you eat raw flesh instead of cooking it is whether you can speak or not or whether you feel emotions like empathy so the lycan drug class as a whole puts a lot of value not just into putting all of your stats on stuff like strength and constitution but it also helps you not feel like you have to and you don't have to worry about constitution as much as the other classes because your class relies on temporary hit points to work not on normal hp you also get a lot of attribute increases as you level just like the fighter and the rogue does which does let you get more stats so as a player you actually want to spread out your stats a lot more than normal so that you can get even more value from your character when you use your visual transformation especially so when the full moon rises when the full moon is up you're forcefully transformed but this transformation doesn't just reduce your intelligence in charisma by 10 no it drops it by -15 you become a lot more powerful to be fair as a lycan lycanthrope during the full moon but you're also much more at risk of losing your humanity and becoming a monster that attacks innocence everything on sight please i beg you check out my monster classes i put a lot of effort into them all written by me the lycanthrope and all of the others have lore in them so that you know what you're doing when you play the class and i have tables in there for you to better help you make your character for the like intro for example i have a big table here to help you figure out how you got your lycanthropy with tons of really cool backstory ideas i have another table here to help you represent your bestiality because i mean you have to remember your animal traits carry over to your humanoid form you're supposed to act sort of like feral and different so i have a bunch of options in here for you to get inspired so yeah we got tons of stuff in here and i have tables like those and lore for all of the monster classes the lagging trope is on monster classes too and we have in there also the dragon and the ogre on this pdf are both fantastic classes as well on monster classes one the first one i made we have the diva the succubus and the ghost one day i will talk about the ghost that's one of my favorite classes i would like to personally thank my patreon supporters barry maskan 5v magic shop morgan johnson rusty rayne duck feeder the great codini omega scales terry colb benjamin bosters falken951 or doryx abim kurshap thomas hunt solas rider lost crusader stalia trev909 stephen trevor hess the living guild pack describe the wizards vault herbert johnson james the perverted shoddycast jesse feliciano lucas cyrek naktor ashura baruch john harley john the wicket shane and sam skinner sir ignatius thunderblade warren smith elisa kestrel crazy three flame black 200 merton games falcon scientist hanson games richard sawyer map wrath master of secrets and guy bromance for supporting me on patreon at the 25 level if you would like to support me as well then please head on over to patreon.comrex to support all right guys thank you so much for watching thank you so much for being here and i will see you all next time sorry about my voice again i'm this coveted man is just screwing me over i can't even speak properly half the time if you guys could only see how many takes something a video like this uh takes me with this like voice of mine right now it's terrible but anyways i'll see you all next time

Channel: MrRhexx

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Id: cGNYxqqo69A

Length: 31min 1sec (1861 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 18 2022