Lycanthrope

Dungeons & Dragons
Fifth Edition
Custom Class

Werewolves, Werebears, Wereravens

Lycanthropy is a concept that my friend Hailer Conway and I both enjoy. The idea of a person being cursed to become an uncontrollable beast, to be seen as a monster and a threat by those that love them, to be afraid of themself. We really love the narrative there.

Dungeons & Dragons Fifth Edition has lycanthropes in it from the start, which can spread their curses to other people. This is very enticing, but it’s difficult to get and the player has very little control in that process, especially since the player loses control of their character when transformed. It ends up a neat device, but not the fun we would like.

Research

We started by looking at other options players had for mimicking lycanthropy, but they each had their own issues.

Path of the Beast Barbarian is a barbarian subclass that seeks to make Rage into something more akin to lycanthropy. It makes a good try, but Rage ends up being too short and easily breakable, whereas we want an experience of extended worry.

Shifter is a species the player can take that lets them be basically half-werewolf from the start. It works pretty well for what it is, but with short transformation times and low impact it really doesn’t feel like the curse we wanted.

D&D Beyond’s Bloodhunter has an Order of the Lycan subclass that seems very good and we almost went with that. It has a lot of the features we like and overall was a solid choice, if it wasn’t for the Bloodhunter class itself. The gameplay seemed to have the player lighting their claws on fire or similar to deal damage, which didn’t quite feel right to us.

Creating Our Own

To make our own custom class for it, we gathered our resources from when we researched and started piecing together the gameplay we wanted out of it. Let’s start with the restrictions we put on ourselves:

  1. We wanted to make this for a campaign level 1-10 first, so we only needed up to Level 10 features for the start.

  2. To lower our scope, we omitted any subclasses.

  3. We wanted it to not do any spellcasting.

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