Need ideas about making magical werewolves without just adding crystal spikes to regular wolves. in my setting...

How about making werewolves thirst for vampire blood specifically, making them ideal trackers and desperate hunters? I want werewolves to frenzy like sharks when they get a whiff of wounded vampire

That's dangerous. If you bring that up then you have to answer the question of whether vampires also constantly get wrecked by moonlight straight from the moon, and if not, why not. Also maybe starlight, depending on your cosmology.

Maybe they become empowered by eating vampires, but even more fucked up. This can be a cause for turning into a hybrid/chimera in addition to or instead of age

Could be a cool form of spirit possession of normal wolves from a certain society. Their energy expands the form outwards.

Vampirism is usually a supernatural condition, logic takes a backseat there. I guess you could argue that direct sunlight kills them due to some face of God analogy, whereas moonlight isn't as mystically/magically powerful.

Vampires can deal with weak lights in most settings, generally speaking, but I wonder what would happen if you took a weak source of light like moonlight and focused it into a point to increase its intensity. I bet they'd burn just fine from that

maybe all werewolves had this ability but thanks to inbreeding or magical corruption only a select few "fire-moon blessed" can use such incantations. and instead of just shooting out solar energy, maybe their claws and fangs glow and makes them super effective against vamps?

I have to say I'm liking this imagery a lot

You'd burn from something like that too, so I guess it's safe to say so, yes. Though you could just set them on fire at that point lol

Haha, yeah. I can see these wizards rigging at least some werewolves with fire, whether it hurts/kills them or not, just like how the Romans fought Pyrrhus's elephants with panicked flaming pigs

exploding werewolves
i like it

In other words, hell yeah, go for it

You could have a subrace of werewolves that are more like flesh constructs.
>Stick a wolf arm onto a human elbow then pump it full of necromantic energy to for claw arms
>Repeat for desired shape and specialization of wolfman

Could have them need of vampire blood to keep the body parts from rejecting each other creating an innate need for hunting.

what-if.xkcd.com/145/

Exploding isn't the kind of combustion I had in mind, but hey it works. Now I'm imagining werewolves with phoenix-like traits, which meshes your idea interestingly with what I assume was It's concept of the fire moon magic

one of the unforeseen sideaffects of lycanthropy is the thirst for vampire blood. while werewolves hunger for any kind of flesh, vamp blood is like super sky-heroin for them. the problem is that after consuming so many vamps, they mutate into disgustingly fat creatures that drool blood. either the blood wolf is forced into exile or destroyed by its fellow wolves.

I remember reading on an xkcd What-If article that because of optics shit you can't do that with a lens, at least. Something about you can't focus the light to be any hotter than the surface of where you're getting the light from.

Wew lads, most of these ideas are fucking terrible. Chimera's and shit? You're diluting werewolves.

1. Werewolves are solar powered. They hunt at night because that's when Vampires are out. They're associated with the full moon because that's when the most "sunlight" is available - reflected off the moon. It's not as good as sun juice but when you're tangling with an abomination against nature you take what you can get.

2. Vampires aren't affected by moon light because it's too diffused/weakened from Sunlight, but are still known to prefer dark and moonless nights for the same reasons as above

3. Were WOLVES are just the most common types because Wolves are predatory hunter animals, that are also pack animals who are related to dogs. This means they're safer to work with and less likely to turn on and fucking murder their human allies in a fit of animalistic rage

4. Incidentally this is why were-cats are all cunts and werebears just wanna eat fucking berries and salmon

5. Silver diffuses ALL magical energy, this is why it's harmful to were-wolves and vampires alike

6. Werewolves are created by using magic to bind animistic spirits to humans. As discussed above, Wolves are the most reliable and safest, which is why they began to see use once active and intentional creation of were-beasts to fight the undead was done

7. The change to wereform can be initiated at will but is time consuming and painful.

sorta like this but with wolves?

Ah, thanks for mentioning this. Perhaps magic here can bend the rules or the lunar motif can just add mostly symbolic value without BSing this physics constraint despite it all being magic nonsense

Sounds rad to me
I think wizards breeding magical werewolves would be open to diluting the base product

Yah, I was thinking of things looking kind of like Wendigos and shit.

Sure, that's a neat and logical direction to take it. Nice and tragic.

Not literal enough. It HAS to be a bullet. Silver knife won't work. Silver stake won't work. Silver toothpick, nada. Silver arrow, no. Silver shotgun slug, not even then. Has to be a bullet, from a gun. A man portable gun.

Hell yeah can't go wrong with that aesthetic

I mean conceptually.

I like the idea that these werewolves are screwed in the get go. Either they grow too old and mutate into a horrible man/wolf chaospawn or they eat too many vampires and become accursed blood wolves. lycanthropy is hereditary and so there's lots of inbreeding but, they original came from the human clans of the north and so a lot of northern villages have to fend off werewolves from taking there young women and men. They're led by a pack alpha, one huge motherfucker that hasn't devolved into a mutant or a bloodwolf and can still hold off any contender to pack alpha. below him, is the "fire-moon blessed" wolves that hibernate during the day to store solar energy to empower their fangs and claws during the hunt. the fire-moon blessed are priests, midwives and generally advisors.

So... your setting is the World of Darkness?

Make them spontanously grow garlic sprouts all over themselves

Bloodborne mate

that's retarded

The Van Helsing at the end doing the thumbs up makes the movie

Shit, you found my deviantart page.

WOLF VOLTRON

You know MtG has just had a bunch of lovecraftian werewolves, who looked like they were thrown in a blender. Could be an inspiration at least for the visuals.

This

real wolves take care of their elderly, its sweet.

Just what I've been looking for.

Running my guys through a campaign and could use this sort of thing.We need a 4th though, unfortunately.

Old werewolves mutate into a final form when they've hit the apex of their changes. At a certain age the body cant handle the changes anymore and whatever they turn into is permanent, this leaves some patriarchs and matriarchs as horrendously deformed beasts in the vein of pic related or something like a normal looking albeit massive wolf or 'gorilla' style werewolf.

How do you make a creature that can defy all laws of physiology and the laws of conservation of matter by transforming from a 5-6ft man into a 7-8 foot bipedal wolf creature during the light of the moon who can only be killed by silver, Magical?

Give em a tribalistic background.
I remeber there used to be a native american tribe that, when a killing a bear, skinned it and had someone parade in it to make the bearspirits believe it wasn't killed. They would then sing about how the bear tripped and died or died some other idiotic death, so the bearspirits wouldn't become vengeful. That's some cool magical bullshit right there!
Maybe werewolves work like selkies, leaving their skin when human?

common werewolves are half-breeds, only the inbred royal lines have the ability (which ties in with original werewolf folklore)

Native Americans were pulling a Bugs Bunny back before Bugs Bunny was even a thing, apparently.

Make their wolf form like a battleskin that exists already but they have to fasten on maybe?

Mercenaries that were brought in with gold but stripped of their agency by the inherently alien interaction with their wolfskin, turning into obedient dog people even while in human form but require dominance displays to keep in line.

There were these werewolf-like monsters in a show I watch that gain power by scalping worthy foes and turning the scalps into a cloak

Does it have to be strictly wolves ? Otherwise I would suggest more felxible shapeshifters. A wolf form could be the main fighting form.

Otherwise:

They are created to fight vamps so they would be able to do stuff that reflects that.

>night vision
>something with fire
>toxic blood

A reverse Robb Stark

thats how it began, mages created a wolfskin for chosen warriors to aid in battle aganst the vampire hordes. now that werewolves can breed there own kind, wolfskins are pretty rare. Either cursed items burned by local inquisitors or extremely expensive collectibles for corrupt nobles.

So what? Adventure Quest Werepyres? Dracowolf? Dracowerepyre?

How about a ratking analogy? Consuming vampires makes werewolves morphically unstable often fusing with werewolves nearby. Such werekings are often deformed but cause them to drool blood, thus feeding the tribe. They are honored, both for killing a vampire(s) and for their sacrifice in doing so.

I like that, maybe since these werewolves are so omnivorous, some younger werewolves go on fasts before hunting and when they finally smell blood, they're extra cray cray.
not a big player of mtg but, the art is pretty fucking dope
while the forsaken are pretty cool, I think my wolves are basically just rabid animals, most are skinny vicious skinchanger looking guys while the lest corrupted use the power of the sun during hibernation to enchant/power there teeth and claws to rip and tear.
the older more volatile werewolves have poisonous blood and drips from open wounds and corrupt small plant life and causes sickness in mortals