Categorizing them as monstrosities feels a bit off to me, somehow, but it’s not clear what other category fits them better. These creatures exist for one purpose and one purpose only: to give flesh to their victims’ fears. Grrrr.) (ETA: Found a fix!)įittingly, I left off at unspeakable horrors, intentionally vague and broadly customizable weirdies that can be dropped into any horror setting-or, even better, in the howling voids between them. I’m hoping that posting a new article clears that up. Fixing the security hole, which was the most important thing, seems to have spawned a glitch in how the first article of text displays on the home page. Also, thanks to the vigilant readers who’ve pointed out the ways this site has acted weird and buggy lately. Sorry for my silence the last couple of weeks-when the kid gets sick, everyone in the house gets sick, and nothing gets done. They have 120 feet of darkvision, making them deadly at night (it’s always struck me as odd that ordinary fifth-edition Dungeons & Dragons werewolves lack any darkvision at all), and they can Change Shape as a bonus action, meaning that if a different form suits the moment better, they can switch mid-combat without losing time. Proficiency in Stealth and expertise in Perception make them outstanding ambush attackers. With exceptional Strength, Dexterity and Constitution, they can play the roles of brute, shock attacker and skirmisher with equal ease. With respect to their combat role, loups-garous (the correct plural, contra the flavor text in Ezmerelda’s Guide to Ravenloft) are uncommonly flexible. Probably the owner of the hole I go down anytime I start looking into etymology.) You could, for example, have a lapin-garou-a “rabbit-werewolf,” or wererabbit. Amusingly, loup means “wolf,” and garou is what’s left of the Old French garulf, a cognate of “werewolf.” So a loup-garou is a “wolf-werewolf.” (In modern French, however, garou is a generalized term referring to any kind of lycanthrope. The loup-garou (the p is silent, so it rhymes with “boogaloo,” in both the singular and the plural) is a werewolf with an extra-intense concentration of lycanthropy. It makes me think of the pantheon of ancient Egypt-which is probably just my brain conflating Osybus with Osiris. You don’t even need to keep the name “Osybus” if you don’t want to, although I think it has a neat ring to it. Take the first three paragraphs of flavor text as written, and make up whatever you want from there. These players have clearly given the matter a lot more thought than I have, and I can find neither compelling evidence that they’re wrong nor a tidy workaround, other than severing Osybus from the Ravenloft story altogether. They also note that it makes little sense that Osybus’s followers now seek to set his former enemy free to ravage the multiverse when it was he who helped imprison Strahd in the first place. Specifically, players argue that they’re incompatible with the storyline of Curse of Strahd, in which the name “Osybus” first appears, and that the flavor text in Ezmerelda’s Guide to Ravenloft, which stipulates that Strahd von Zarovich took an active role in the defeat of Osybus the lich, is inconsistent with both Strahd’s personality and the difference in their respective power levels. Digging into fan theories about the priests of Osybus leads to a lot of complaints that they make no sense and don’t fit into canon lore.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |