Inept Wizard

Contracting the Curse

Lycanthropy cannot be caught from a werecreature in a fight. It is laid deliberately, by someone who meant to lay it. The cause may be the working of a spiteful relative or spouse, a stolen garment or pelt put on, the judgement of a saint upon a family line, a bargain whose terms were not fully read, or inheritance from a parent who carried it.

Severity

The curse has a severity die: d4, d6, d8, d10, d12, or d20. The smaller the die, the more often the change comes.

If a player takes the curse as a defining feature of her character, she chooses the severity die. If the GM lays the curse in play — as a complication, as a challenge to be overcome, or as a consequence of what a character has done — the GM chooses it.

The die cannot be changed.

The Change

At the start of each Long Rest, a cursed character rolls a severity die. On a 1, the transformation begins.

While transformed, the character cannot take a Long Rest, or sleep, and an elf cannot enter trance. The night’s rest is lost.

The transformation lasts 8 hours. When it ends, the character returns to her original shape with the Weakened condition and the Hit Points, Spell Points, and other parameters as they were before the change.

If the werecreature is reduced to 0 Hit Points, it does not revert to its original shape. It remains a beast while Unconscious, and while dying. Only death returns it to its own shape — which means a party that kills a werecreature watches a person appear on the ground in front of it.

What Carries Over

The body comes from the creature. The mind comes from the character.

Skills follow the same rule. A skill that uses Strength, Dexterity, or Constitution uses the creature’s ability and the creature’s training, and your own Skill Ranks in it do not apply. A skill that uses Intelligence, Wisdom, or Charisma keeps your Skill Ranks and Knacks. A scholar remains a scholar as a bear; an acrobat does not remain an acrobat.

Saving throws work the same way. You keep your Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma saving throws, their Knacks and your Save Bonus, while Strength, Constitution, and Dexterity saving throws come from the werecreature’s stat block.

Attacks are the creature’s own. Use the attack bonus printed in its entry. Your Skill Ranks and Knacks in weapons do not apply, and neither does anything else you have learned about fighting.

Nothing else carries over. Your racial traits, your feats, and every other feature your character has are unavailable while transformed. So are any effects those features were sustaining.

Damage from a natural creature’s weapon scales with your character level, as shown on the Natural Weapon Damage table. The ability modifier is added once, regardless of how many dice are rolled.

What You Lose

You cannot speak. You cannot use hands. You cannot use weapons, tools, or items of any kind; you cannot wear or benefit from armour; and you cannot cast spells or use any feature that requires speech, gesture, or a component.

Your equipment does not travel with you. It falls where you stood, and stays there. A character who changes in a public street will wake naked, some hours later, wherever the beast finished, and the sword will be wherever somebody carried it.

You understand every language you understood before, but you cannot speak.

Traits of the Curse

A few curses leave a mark that has nothing to do with the shape. These traits are carried by the cursed character at all times, in either form, waking or transformed, and they remain until the curse is lifted.

Playing It

Write out a second character sheet for the werecreature form and keep it with the first. Update it whenever the character gains a level or an Ability Score Improvement.

The curse is worth playing only if the player wants to play it. Its interest is not that the character becomes dangerous — several of these forms are nearly harmless — but that the character is entirely herself and cannot say so. Or it is just about the liberty of roaming the forest in a beast form.

Ending the Curse

Remove Curse and comparable magic do not lift lycanthropy. They can suppress it: a successful casting prevents the next change that would come, and no more than that.

Ending it for good is not a spell and should not have a fixed price. In the old stories the curse breaks when someone who matters looks at the beast and recognises the person inside it, and then acts on what she has seen — a king who calls off the hunt, a priest who hears a confession from something that cannot speak, a spouse who returns what she took. A GM should decide what that is for a given character, and it should be difficult, and it should involve somebody.