[UA] Lycanthropes

[Nick Wedig]

>I like the idea of some lunatic trying to become a wolf. 

Me too.

> He'd dress up in a 
>wolfskin, run around killing and eating people (something that a real wolf 
>would rarely, if ever do), 

There are, if I recall, no reliably recorded incidents of wolves attacking people unless it was cornered or attacked first by the people (or both).  Most of the bad publicity wolves gets comes from farmers who don't like their sheep getting eaten.

>howl at the moon...you know the type.  An actual 
>lycanthrope, in the psychological sense.  Much to his amazement, one fine 
>night he ascends as "the Wolf".  

I don't like the idea of this being specifically "The Wolf".  Both confines the archetype to certain cultures (ones with wolves nearby, so alot but not all) and all other archetypes are human centered.  I'd make it something less species specific (maybe call it the Lycanthrope, in a more general sense than specifically wolf, or the Beast Man).  Similar but not perhaps the same as the Savage, it's about giving up human attributes for brute power.  I'm not sure.  Maybe I'd just use the Savage anyway.

>Still not a real wolf, but fitting 
>precisely into people's idea of a how a wolf *should* behave.
>
>His godwalkers would be able to assume the physical and mental 
>characteristics of a wolf, so long as they continue to act like the 
>Hollywood ideal of the Big Bad Wolf.  Knowledge of how a real wolf lives and 
>behaves would do them more harm than good.
>
>This doesn't fit too well with the other shapeshifters -- ravens, bears, 
>what have you -- but those could just as easily be stories about adepts from 
>now-dead schools.  

I see it being similar for other animals, though not the same.  Taking the misinformation about other animals as truth as opposed to what is true.  (owls, symbolic of intelligence and learning, are actually quite stupid birds, or so I heard somewhere).  Maybe the current IC member's ascended in Wolf guise, so that seems a more obvious choice, but that's more an aesthetic bit of the archetype than essential, in my head anyway.

Mr. Teapot
ascending as the salamander

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