Were

From War Thread

Revision as of 10:13, 2 August 2006

Weres are creatures who have the abilty to change shape. Normally they are no more nor any less vunerable than any other ccreatures to any normal method of dealing injurys...

The difference comes in when they go feral. No were would willingly go feral since in this they are intellect slaved to instinct assuming they keep their intellect, and they might well never come out.. and so they fear it despite the advantages it in theory gives. They regenerate rapidly, healing from nearly any wound. However silver becomes a virulent contact poison in the feral state. And Belladona/Aconite/Monkshood is no less effective than normal.

At the full moon weres are actually at their weakest, and become trapped in a single form. What happened is that those who were not cautious enough went into a feral state, in order to defend themselves. And this is how the legends were born.

Weres in theory can have up to five forms- human, minor breed, half-, -kin, animal But in reality can only have at maximum four which is a rarity in itself.

All weres have a human form. (That's why they're weres....)

Weres almost always have three forms of which the most usual pattern is(human, -kin, animal) Alternates can be found to this distribution.

The next most common group are those weres with two forms. Human and (half, kin or animal)

The rarest is as mentioned the four distribution, which can be any mix including human. but only one or two weres in a generation have it...

Being a were requires both a magical and a genetic component which makes duplicating them impossible. However it can be inherited, though not always...

Triggering weres

Certain weres need to be triggered before the switch. There are the two obvious methods out of legend, moon and infliction.

Moon: If you have a mooncurse which is different to the form you are in you will be forced to change into your moon-curse form, unless you have taken the right dose of deadly nightshade, or had it suppressed when you were young. It is harder to supress as you are older or after the change because you need more of the active element in deadly nightshade to suppress the change.

Infliction: This is not so much inflction as triggering. It requires quite a remarkable set of circumstances but it does happen. The were must be of the same type (A were-ferret could trigger a were-skunk, but not a were-cat). The triggering were must also be feral and have the same mooncurse. This overrides suppression by deadly nightshade

Parental trigger: This in Elled has become the most common method A parent uses a small amount of magic to charge their offsprings blood. This enables the transformation to take place in a controlled way. Not as much magic is need as for infliction though

Technical triggering: If a were is changed out of the shape they have they spring back to their mooncurse form. Not many are missed but some are.

Ironically Jane Stewart triggered herself by using Bastian magic which acted as a combination of infliction and parental triggering.

Feral Risk

The likelyhood of weres going feral in increasing order starting at the least likely

    -human Mooncurse (almost never)
    -most were-mustelids (sister stealing fiance, who said he'd never date a skunk)
    -were-cats
    -were-wolfs
    -were-wolverines (Shadow just has to fall the wrong way)