What do werewolves look like in your setting?

I have none. Only permanent body changes, no shifting.

sexy

Is this a Penny Arcade bit?

Horrific monstrosities made of a combination of predatory mammals and human corpses, driven mad by the conflicting existence of each corpse's mind fighting for control of the gestalt entity. The living animal bodies also slowly decay, causing the Werewolf seek out new flesh to consume, its undead metabolism using the influx of fresh flesh to patch up its failing bodies. Also used relatively interchangeably with the term "Wendigo" in common parlance, but specifically Wendigo are what happens when this process occurs with large mammals like bears or moose, while werewolves/lycanthropes are the term for when it occurs in smaller, often pack-based mammals like coyotes and rabbits.

This whole process is brought about by a particular cosmological hiccup that my setting centers itself around, which is that literally every living creature will return from the dead once, no matter the condition of it's corpse or what is in contact with it at the time.

As a fun aside, Vampires are what that same process is called when it happens with things that can fly, like birds or bats.

They look like normal, everyday people who are about to get a lesson in superstitious witchhunting by Medieval Germans

In my setting, the !notGermanic Tribes have groups of warriors who dress in wolf skins, go in hysterical rituals and transform into man wolf beasts. These people are all young men (18-30) led by an older pagan priest, who live deep in the forest (deeper than anyone else) and put themselves into trances while wearing skins and dancing around fires.

Keep in mind that not everyone turns into a wolf, it depends on the skin you wear. If you wear the skin of a fox you'll turn into a man fox, if you wear a bear skin you'll turn into a man bear, if you wear the skin of a boar you'll turn into a man boar. This only applies to large, predatory or omnivorous animals, so no turning into a man snake or a man weasel.

These groups are not uncommon, around 10% of all men have had a skinchanging experience.

Ewoks on steroids.

In my fluff Dire Creatures are magical, legendary creatures that are immortal and tend to their specie like a shepherd. There is only one Dire Creature per specie but in the case of the wolves, there were 2 Dire Wolves named Romm and Remm. Romm was captured by a warlord sorcerer who tortured him with a moonstone wand which warped his mind and turned him into a murderous beast. Remm sneaked into the warlord's lair and rescued his brother in the dead of night, but that night the full moon was out and Romm went crazy and ended up killing Remm. Romm recovered and in his grief refused to wipe the blood from his fangs or claws. Romm returned to the warlord's territory and brought it to ruin. Romm cursed the warlord to be just as powerless before the moon as Romm was made to be and the warlord was the first victim of Lycanthropy, made in the image of Romm. Over time the lycanthropy spread and people took the appearance of the animal that reflected their true nature.

Lycans who know their heritage see the duality of Romm - the power, ferocity, and viciousness given to him but also the powerlessness, lack of control, and danger it represents. Nonetheless all Lycans hate and fear the moon and in Lycan culture its common for Lycans to strike out against cults and religions that venerate the moon.

For some reason, all I can picture with that is that the secret code for werewolves to recognize each other is when a couple of dudes walk up to each other, silent, before one says "Fuck the moon." and the other gives a thumbs up.

Wolf like.

>game 1, standard post-magitech apocalypse stuff
Either like regular humans or oversized wolves

>game 2, lewd stuff
Fluffy ears and tail anime beast people

>There is only one Dire Creature per specie
So what does the dire human do?

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Werewolf the Apocalypse, white-knighting Gaia since 1992.

Homo sapiens sapiens sapiens is a notable hypertech tool user.

oh fug I didn't think of that

If we go by the old 3.5 dire template, the only stats that don't increase are INT and WIS, so I'd be safer to say that dire humans are less Kang, and more pic related. More spikey though.

Vat grown cybernetic super-soldiers with bolted on armour and carrying heavy weapons.

>This whole process is brought about by a particular cosmological hiccup that my setting centers itself around, which is that literally every living creature will return from the dead once, no matter the condition of it's corpse or what is in contact with it at the time.

Fuck the rest of this thread user tell us more of your setting because it sounds fascinating in the best of ways.

>what do werewolves look like in your setting?

Pale men or women with slightly unnaturally long arms, long, black, nails, and the heads of wolves with fur only growing so far as their collar.
They kind of look like shitty movie monster actors who're having an weird exhibitionist episode, but then you see them move around and things quickly devolve from "a little creepy" to "genuinely horrifying" because they're fast and surprisingly coordinated for having such a lanky, miserable, awkward looking body.

I don't do originality for its own sake. Imagine the ones from skyrim or dog soldiers or something.

So my setting is centered around the western half of the main continent where criminals, political dissidents, revolutionaries, and the unlucky are exiled and where the dead rise from their graves due to a mysterious force. On the surface, it's a weird western with zombies, kind of like Deadlands meets Borderlands.

The dead rise however because the universe was created when the single being of creation called ONE killed itself in order to create reality. From its corpse came the five gods, who embodied the five Elements of Death (Blood, Bone, Blight, Blaze, and Brume) and who made up creation. Interestingly enough, the actual nature of the five gods is mostly unknown, though many of the religions of the world unwittingly reference either one or all of them in some manner. However, once they were gone what was left in the sky was a void where ONE had been, a shadow of a god called NONE who took the sleeping form of the moon. NONE's semi-conscious presence combined with the squabblings of the five gods cause the dead in the west (Where NONE's corpse hangs in the sky, still and ignorant of the planet's rotations) to randomly return to life.

There is no indication of when a corpse might return to life, but it will always return to life once in it's existence. Whenever a corpse reanimates, it lacks conscious memory of it's past life, but still has a smattering of residual subconscious memory and muscle memory that give it some of the skills it had in life. A corpse will reanimate no matter the state it is actually in, and there is a large market in corpse-stitching and prosthesis. However the fun stuff starts happening when the body seeking to reanimate is either no longer an actual corpse, or is in contact with another corpse or living body. When a corpse is dust, it's dust or ash, it will still rise as a whirling mass of undead fury, the pain of the fire etched into its phantom form, called Wights.

Cont.

Wights are just the beginning of the varied forms of undeath however. If a corpse is in contact with others, living or dead, it fuses with them as it rises. Mass graves become horrific amalgams of bodies, hundreds of dead screaming in maddened horror as their minds all fight for dominance and struggle to understand their new form. Carrion crows eating the body become drawn into the newborn vampire, who needs fresh flesh and blood to replace the dying meat of it's crows as they mire in rotting flesh. Corpses hung on living trees can fuse into the wood, leading to legends of moving forests slowly dragging themselves across the earth in search of new soil. And if the corpse of the dead is totally destroyed, if there is absolutely nothing left of the body, then the spirit reanimates into the earth itself, creating colossal beasts from the landscape who slowly stalk towards places from their barely-remembered past, seeking answers.
Even the wildlife is not exempt, though often it goes less-noticeably. Still, strange amalgam animals and corpse-trees dot the wilderness and there is many a folk-tale of a child picking up a dead animal on the road, only to be cursed with a strange and impossible affliction.

Ghosts exist too, but are a creation of the fourth god using the element of Blaze to capture snapshots of the mortal soul and project them onto the world. Adherents of the method search for the ultimate prize: Undeath that allows the user to keep their memories, and therefore immortality. The few that have achieved this are true Liches, their souls replicated in cold flame and suffusing a corpse-body of their choosing.

It's actually my new years resolution to finally write this whole thing up into an actual campaign setting guide and homebrew system this year, so hopefully I'll post some more of it on Veeky Forums in the future!

I adore weird awkward looking werewolves, and there's something to be said about pushing the uncanny valley aspect with them.

However significantly less human werewolves are another fun direction to go in.

Just an anthro wolf that lopes around, alternating between four and two legs, slightly bigger and more fit/muscular and tougher than the person normally. Usually pretty vicious.

Boring I guess, but I like the classics and simplicity.

Good luck getting your setting sorted out. I look forward to seeing where you take it.

>he doesn't have wererats