Do your lycanthropes have an origin story?

The first druids who connected with the wild, but lost themselves in the psyche

>straight jacket
Ugh.

A group of five Celtic druids fucked up a ritual in hopes of tapping into the strongest possible powers of their animal totems to protect themselves from invading Greeks. They ended up going ballistic and mauling their fellow tribesmen and Greek alike, those who survived ended up similarly stricken.

There's only four lycan types in the setting: Wolf, Panther, Bear, and Fox. Nothing tended to survive an encounter with the original Eagle to be able to transform later.

Its lost to them as much as some of our past is lost to us.

I have a question also, should werewolves be able to speak in beast mode? if yes should it be vocal or mental?

I liked the origin for them in Fable, something much worse bit a man and thats what he became.

There was a great and powerful wizard in ancient times who's only friend in the world was a wolf. One thing led to another and magical degeneracy happened. Millennia later, there are werewolves, it's a genetic condition that can't be spread. They have two personalities, the man and the beast. The beast isn't necessarily evil and most are domesticated by their human side. With training, both personalities can merge into one that is more powerful than either separately and open them up to sorcery type magic and transformation at will.

Hybrid form yes, beast form no.

They are just descendants of skinchangers tribes who secretly preserved the magical lore of their ancestors.

How would you go about describing that? i reckon it would sound similar to that garbled shit that parrots say

As someone speaking without moving their lips.

For one, werewolves aren't even wolves in my setting. They're some sort of mammalian apex predator hybrid that comes out looking kind of like a wolf do to wolf/bear/hyena traits bleeding through strongly.

Lycanthropy started out as a curse by a coven of witches agianst a witch hunter. The idea was he would become an undying beast forced to kill those he dedicated himself to protecting. Besides from the sheer strength of the curse, what made it unique is it could be passed on to others.

Of course that all went to shit once a few of the victims managed to gain some semblance of control and decided revenge was due. Unfortunately for the witches, the effort they put into making the curse uncurable also made werewolves highly resistant to magic and straight up immune to other curses.

Christ that would be disturbing.

Do baby werewolves transform in the womb?

Lord Sartek the Great Minotaur showed his gloomy brother how he made gnolls, pegasi, gryphons, and so Lord Sinister the Boneless made lycantropes and vampires.

Do the Dorf Fort route. Niggas cursed by gods who can spread their shit through certain means.

>Lord Sinister.
Was King Evil taken?

Listen when your title is "The Boneless" you gotta make up for it somehow.

Duke Very-Rude

Whether God's curse or the Devil's mischief, none can say.

Count Generally-Unpleasant.

Maybe if he had the title "the Spineless". "The Boneless" sounds like some kind of a disgusting, pale, skinless snake god or something.

Humans in my setting are genetic weirdos. If they're in a lot of physical contact with a species, they'll eventually start developing traits of them. The traits get more extreme the more contact is done.
Weres usually come from weirdo hermits or ranchers hanging around animals too much

So a literal corpse god stabbed a dude with a metal bong and transformed him into the first Furry?

(OP)
There was a time, in the old days before the Wall to the East rose and the Jewel of the West shone from the bay, where a family was faced with hunger.
This was not an uncommon thing in the West past the Cremator Desert, as even at its kindest, the West was a wasteland that made life a struggle. The land glutted itself of death and undeath, and in it's most subtle ways drove others into the grave. So it was that a family of three, a Mother, a Daughter, and a Father found themselves hungry.
Determined to save his family, the father went out into the forest, armed with knife and gun. But as he wandered through the woods he had hunted in many times before, he found himself lost. Soon, night fell and he was still stranded, wandering through the empty spaces between the trees, the moon low in the sky. At last he stepped into a clearing, where in the center a figure sat by a fire, covered in wolf-skin.
The figure bid him to sit, so he did. It took a puff from a long, iron pipe, leaning close enough to the light to reveal that under the hides was a flayed corpse, and it asked him what he wished for. He told the corpse that he wished to feed his family and it laughed.
>"If I give you food, you would take it home and they would live for another day. But if I were to teach you how to hunt, they would live forever. What say you?"
The man agreed, and the figure laughed a long, rasping, bloody laugh.
>"My name is Kauvra'Sott, the Red God, and from this day forward you are a hunter in my name."
With that, it stabbed him through the eye with the iron pipe, and as his flesh warped and shifted, bones and blood cracking and swirling beneath his skin, the first werewolf was born.

Yeah, pretty much. Werewolves in setting are less furry dudes and more "horrific beast-spirits bound inside human flesh and furthering the agenda of the most violent of the five gods", but considering what the other gods make in their spare time, it's surprisingly not as nightmarish as it sounds.

I also reposted it with slightly more legible formatting.

Personally I would've made it more thematic. Like, maybe have this god take the form of an injured animal or something, get this dude to hunt it out of desperation and then infect him and his family via consumption, thereby getting two generations of Werewolves or something.

General Grievous

Honestly, the gods are kind of weird, and while that would definitely be more thematically appropriate, the Red God is something that never would allow itself to be hunted. It is a god of predation, of consumption, of hunger and violence. Also by far isn't the end of that guy's particular story.

The man eventually made it home, covered in tattered rags but with a dead buck under his arm. While his injuries knit themselves together in seconds, his eye never healed, a cavernous hold in his skull where the god had pierced him. For a time, life was good. He hunted, his family prospered, and his wife was tactful enough to not mention the strange changes that had afflicted him.

However, soon he found that even after killing game, the desire to hunt remained. No hunt was satisfying. He turned to tracking down greater and greater beasts, stalking out in the woods for days, but still the desire remained. Until the day he found a man wandering his woods.

Silent through the underbrush, he followed the man, blood surging through his veins in excitement. Against the moon he slunk low as the traveler set up camp. And when he could no longer contain himself, he stepped forward into the light of the traveler's campfire and watched his face pale and will shatter.

The traveler ran. The Hunter was faster. And when the traveler lay broken in his jaws, the hunter felt nothing else but rapture.

From that day forward, the Hunter of Beasts became a Hunter of Man. Soon he drew others to himself, those who fought during his hunts, and let them join him. He shared his gift with his wife and daughter, and for one hundred years they hunted and glut on the bounty of man.

One day, when the cities and civilized world crept close enough to visit, the Hunter went into town to scout his new hunting grounds. There, he learned of term "assassin" and the concept of hunting another for compensation. When he returned home, he had a plan, a bestial, manic glint in his eyes.

A drunk guy once tried to stick his dick in a Arch Druid.

There are vocal qualities peculiar to men, and vocal qualities peculiar to beasts; and it is terrible to hear the one when the source should yield the other.

My werewolves are cultists who did your typical magical ritual to an alien hunt themed god involving the drinking of blood ment to free them of their mortality so that they can become one with " the hunt" and ride by his side.

Once they drink the blood they grow to great proportions and pop out of their skin and grow a few too many joints becoming ugly meat monsters. Naturally they get pretty murderous and tend to go around doing murders and things. At this point they aren't werewolves or hunt hounds. Each time they satiate the hunt and kill something their form grows closer to that of a giant proper wolf. If they get enough of them the hunt god will bless them and turn them into one of his hounds. If however they break down and desire a return to humanity they can enter the body of one of their kills and reassume their humanity, albeit in another's skin.

Eventually the hunt calls and they pop out of that body even more grotesque and deformed then before, forever marked as unworthy to be accepted by the hunt god for their attachment to humanity and forever cursed to be a horrific monster trying desperately to steal the lives of others in an attempt to regain their lost human selves but it never lasts.

They aren't legit werewolves, just a barbarian tribe with cannibalistic tendencies that uses wolves pelts as clothes and attack once every full moon due to ritualistic reasons.

Not the same user, but how do people feel about (the more bestial, people-eaty types of) werewolves using human speech to lure people into traps?

They are a curse brought about by angered spirits of nature, someone who has wronged them may suffer a number of punishments, but the curse of the werewolf is the worst. Robbing away a person's humanity, turning them into a raging spirit of the elements with the mind of a beast. It is meant as not just a punishment towards the victim, but also a punishment towards their people as well, for a werewolf is a force of nature, and a plague upon the lands. Thankfully, they are very, very rare.

Yep. Orcs in my setting are a blend of Germanic/Celtic barbarians/pagans and Mongols. The two most sacred animals in Orc religion are the wolf and the boar. I don't have p'orcs (because I fucking hate them) but I like the symbolism between orc and boar. As such, there are only two lycanthropes in my setting: werewolves and wereboars and both are connected to the Orcish religion, originating as curses from their gods.

Humans, orcs, and elves, share some connection to each other (which is why they can breed, though half-elves and half-orcs are often [but not always] sterile) and thus the only non-orc races that can be affected by lycanthropy are elves and humans.

>Do your lycanthropes have an origin story?

There's currently two folktales going around:

-The first one is that DRUIDS (whom can shapeshift into beasts using the pelts or hides of animals draped over them like a hood) would punish people in ancient times by placing a severed animal's head onto the criminals head and then having them go through an incomplete transformation to forever maim them as dysfunctional animal men.... And then the rest of the story goes is that Druids liked doing this so much that eventually these exiles, murderers, etc, grew in large enough numbers to sustain themsleves and now we've got fuckin' lycanthropes muckin' about.

-The second one takes place during caveman times and how it goes is basically: Humans during the stone age once worshiped animals gods, divine beasts based off of marvelous creatures such as horses, wolves, bears, etc.. Well, they did, at least, until they began discovering metal and found out that it could harm ANYTHING and didn't feel the need to worship talking animals anymore. These animal gods, now spiteful, ATE all of their human followers...Only to have their stomachs and throats cut open from the inside out to reveal numerous lycanthropes of all varities having been created by such a gruesome, selfish, act.

Obviously it's any mans guess whether either or none of these are true, but that's what the people will tell ya.

I've combined werewolves and vampires into one thing. The basic premise is they are possessed by the spirit of a tainted spirit of an animal. This is usually done by necromancers who kill dogs and other animals and torture their spirits until they become wraiths that they can send to attack people but one guy got smart and decided to throw a bunch of them into a pot essentially and let them battle it out until the spirits consumed each other leaving only one super powerful one. That one, having the combined spirits of various animals was so driven by bloodlust it became an evil spirit and possessed it's creator turning him into a mindless monster that had various animal features and lusted for blood. Whenever it was killed it would possess the killer and the process would continue until an inquisitor with the willpower to resist the bloodlust was possesed allowing her to keep her sanity but having the beasts power.

Now she can purposefully pass on the beast's blood lust and if you survive the process like she did you retain your full faculties otherwise you become a thrall under her control or the control of whomever passed on the spirit's blood lust.

That said, there is no redemption or moral grey areas. You become absolutely evil as your mind becomes tainted by the spirit's lust for blood and as you age you become more animalistic phsycially.

The original person became this grotesque boar like monster that still dresses like a noblewoman but has razor thin teeth between her tusks that she uses to draw blood and eat the viscera of kills arranged at her table along with her oldest embraced.

Only real lycanthropes in my setting are werewolves; everything else is just shapeshifters (like druids), individuals cursed by the gods because some heresy, or powerful polymorph spells gone wrong.

Werewolves are the chosen clergy of Baulga, wolf-god of vengeance. Once a cleric of Baulga reaches certain power and influence, they will undergo a transformation every time the red moon that orbits the planet goes into full phase (about once a year, marking the Week of Vengeance, when it's rightful in the face of the gods to take revenge on your enemies). This transformation turns the cleric into an avatar of Baulga, and an instrument of divine retribution.
Each transformation is wilder and more terrifying than the previous one, and once a cleric of Baulga transforms for the seventh time, they're permanently turned into werewolves.

Magical Rabies

That's all I got

>Magical Rabies
>That's all I got

That's fine, user.
Magical rabies is fun, I've seen plenty of settings do magical rabies.

Fucking druids, ruining everything

In my setting the original shape changers are the werebears. They were from a very fair and just kind of people that always helped the poor and kept battling the corruption but had not enough food to pass the winter, so his god remakes their shamen as bearmen and gives them the claw so that they may whisper the secret of their form to those who share even a small drop of their blood.

The werewolves started as another human tribe, also great warriors, actually an offshot of the bear dudes, proud and strong, who also battled the corruption, were almost as good as the other guys but were too focused on smiting evil to be kind to other people, so when they ask to be transformed so that they can fuck up abominations better, most spirit animals refuse to help them, since they're already pretty scary and corruption is about to recede from the world anyway. But in their search for power they summon a creature from the deep dark, a marked wolf, and promise to add him to the worship totem if he helps them to change form.

The twist is that the wolf himself warns them, he was cast out of the spirit world for being too violent at times, being expelled by his own pack, and only recently he's calming down, therefore, allying with frenzied dudes is a frikin bad idea all things considered. They shower the wolf with gifts and try to capture him a few times without success until the wolf caves to their request and gives them what they want just so that he can be all chunni again in his corner of the dark dimension.

Predictably the wolf tribe went crazy the next moon, killing and eating their kin and shit, until the bear shamen basically sacrificed themselves to whisper and weave the magic of the claw unto them, until the wolves were crazy no more, and understood all the massacre that was wrought.

A lot of them became even crazier and either offed themselves or became cursed beasts, never to be seen again in human form; some dudes secluded themselves to be all chunni in their corners of the forest, while a few actually achknowledged that they fucked up and vowed to clean themselves from their sin; yet because all of them were fucking proud, they couldn't recognize the sacrifice that the bear tribe did for them. Some even resented those dudes.

Without shamen the bears were only limited to whatever natural talents of vital and natural magic each individual had, so no true druids among them forever, and because they lost the secret of the claw, their conscience would be muddled when they transformed which make them very wary of getting angry or using their powers irresponsibly, while the wolf fags basically retained their curse of lunacy to some extent, and prefered to try and resurrect their tribe with whatever shamans they had left. Sadly or perhaps for the better, those shamans refuse to ask the spirit world for magic because of shame. Finally the crazed wolves became almost as dangerous as the corrupted creatures they were hunting, with a few groups actually falling to corruption and shit.

The rest of the lycanthropes are the fruit of experimentation, magic, lesser nature gods, and even an alchemical experiment gone wrong.

Go home Herbert

Berserkers going too far down the outlaw/animal worship path. Most probably started as hobgoblins, because the race already considers animals as pure beings to be emulated.

You guys want an origin story? I'll give you an origin story(time)!

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Vengeful/angry/hungry beast spirits that can assume the form of humans they've bitten/slain which they then use to infiltrate communities and continue their killing sprees.

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Everyone else is wrong, King Lycan head the king of the gods was gonna come for dinner, so he made his children into a stew, and fed it to the king of the gods. This upset the king of the gods, so he turned Lycan into a man eating wolf as punishment, then convened the gods and decided to extinguish earthly life because humanity had surpassed him in debauchery and wickedness.

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