I was just looking at werewolf lore, and the closing paragraph in the section I just quoted isn’t quite...accurate.
While werewolves were indeed associated with other creatures like witches, vampires, and revenants, they weren’t interchangeable. There are distinctions, especially with the first two. Those could often assume the form and abilities of werewolves, or even occasionally call on them as allies or thralls. They were not werewolves in the strictest sense, any more than a D&D spellcaster using spells to do likewise.
But werewolves proper were not ascribed much in the way of special abilities beyond the shapechange itself and a supernatural resistance to damage. Some might lead a pack of actual wolves.
Not that it needed much in the way of more powers: an oversized, intelligent wolf (or the modern anthropomorphic wolf-man) you can’t kill without special (expensive) materials or actual (outlawed) magic would be terrifying to the most people. That’s before you add in their contagion aspect.
In the strictest sense, qualifiers like witch, werewolf, vampire, etc were not species in pre-modern folklore. They were descriptions of capabilities, capabilities that varied wildly.
A witch, at least in the negative connotation, was someone who used magic to harm the community. They could do so in a variety of ways. If they stole the life force of their victims, then they were also vampires. If they assumed the forms of wolves, then they were also werewolves.
A werewolf, quite literally, refers to anyone who assumed the form of a wolf through some means. A werewolf might be a witch who assumes the form of a wolf, or someone cursed by a witch into the form of a wolf. A dead person could even rise from the grave as a werewolf that preyed on the living.
A vampire is generally a subtler predator compared to werewolves and ogres (in the comparative mythology meaning of any man-eating giant). The symptoms of being victimized by a vampire resembled a sickness, rather than being overtly attacked and killed. A vampire might be a witch who drains the life of their victims, while pretending to be normal otherwise. A vampire might be a malevolent ghost that preys on a village, and must be banished by destroying their grave. A vampire might be a revived corpse that pretends to be normal while secretly preying on victims.
Many vicious cannibal monsters called vampires in modern popular culture may be more accurately called ogres.
There wasn't really anything you could call a werewolf "proper." Their capabilities varied by story and there is no default. Generally, willing werewolves had arbitrary capabilities. Unwilling werewolves are the instance I'm aware of in which the werewolf didn't have any powers beyond the change, and even then they still retained their human mind so they would suffer.
I could not find of the sort of "proper" werewolves you claim. Bisclavret was a rare heroic werewolf, who could only change (requiring the removal or wearing of his clothes) and had no special durability. The only instance of durability I could find was an account from a 19th century book claiming that some shape-shifting witches (no specified species) had a "frozen" spell that protected them from harm, which could only be broken by silver or "elder pith." The idea of silver breaking mystical protection appears in other stories unrelated to werewolves.
Possibly it's because ghosts are, well, dead, not un-dead in a physically active way like Vampires, but dead, sometimes they're depicted as little more than psychic holograms, just re-living some traumatic moment. If there's a point or character development to the ghost in the ghost story, it's typically laying the ghost to rest, which mean, if it's a PC, you don't get to play it anymore. That's an issue.
The other thing about ghosts is that our pop culture concept of them is built on a 19th century fad quasi-religion called Theosophy - spiritualism, mediums, spirit photography, ectoplasm - it's not really rooted in ancient beliefs/organized religion or anything like that.
Popular culture has a few stories in which ghosts play a larger role than merely being laid to rest, like being roommates, paranormal investigators or outright superheroes.
Being Human and
Insidious are some examples I'm aware of. Although there seems to be a general shortage of long-running stories with ghost protagonists.
Yep, and it's oddly nothing much to do with the source material. In myth/legend, werewolves were sorcerers who gained an ability to shapechange through some magical means (or 'deal with the devil' once Chrisianized). Vampires were essentially evil spirits that preyed on families, slowly draining one person at a time - a folk explanation of certain diseases, like tuberculosis.
For whatever reason, pop culture took the Vampire myth and ran with it, making them into these weird super-beings. When the werewolf hit the silver screen they decided to make it a bite-transmitted curse to be more like the very successful Dracula. That's probably why WWGS went with the race-apart animist werewolves with gnosis-super-powers, to bring them up to suff relative to Vampires that had gotten the Brahm Stoker, Hollywood, and Anne Rice upgrades.
Distinguishing werewolves from wizards will always be difficult if you're trying to boost werewolves in terms of power. The fixation on wolves in particular is something I feel needlessly limits the concept. Folklore is full of were-whatevers.
I'm currently writing a treatment of werewolves for D&D, but it can be applied here. Throughout its various editions, D&D has introduced a few different forms of lycanthropy. In 2e,
Van Richten's Guide codified the lycanthropy presented in the rules into heritable lycanthropy, pathologic lycanthropy and maledictive lycanthropy. Ravenloft had a running theme that the monsters didn't have uniform traits to make hunting them less repetitive for players, so in the case of lycanthropes that meant that their creation, their transformation triggers and their vulnerabilities could be quite variable.
Anyway, pathologic lycanthropy was the recognizable form you see all the time in horror movies. Hapless victim is bitten, turns into monster, wakes up without any memory of their actions. Heritable lycanthropy seems to be a variation: heritable lycanthropes carried pathologic lycanthropy but had a hereditary trait that allowed them to control their transformations and retain their memory while transformed. The much rarer maledictive lycanthropy was the result of a curse. Some curses could spread similarly to pathologic lycanthropy. Pathologic and maledictive lycanthropy were potentially curable, but heritable lycanthropy was not.
Subsequent editions introduced various wrinkles. In 3e, the distinction between the different forms of lycanthropy was condensed into natural lycanthropes and afflicted lycanthropes. Natural lycanthropes could inflict the curse of lycanthropy on others to create afflicted lycanthropes, but afflicted lycanthropes could not do the same. Lycanthropy could no longer spread like a contagious disease a la horror movies. I'm not sure why this change was made and I won't hazard a guess, but I think it bears a close resemblance to the concept of alpha and beta werewolves (loosely similar to the concept of a master vampire and servant vampires) present in some werewolf fiction like
Gabriel Knight,
Big Wolf on Campus,
Nature of the Beast and
Teen Wolf (the series). On the same note, starting in this edition vampires were divided into vampires and vampire spawn; the latter could not spread their condition either.
In 4e, lycanthropy was purely hereditary and could not be spread like a disease. Even so, lycanthropes still carried other diseases like filth fever or moon madness.
In 5e, lycanthropy appears to be purely pathological. Lycanthropes constantly struggle against the urges imposed by their affliction, represented by alignment. The only distinction for heritable lycanthropes is that it is harder for them to be cured.
That's pretty much the extent of diversity in terms of pathological lycanthropy. A lot of effort went into coming up with variations on the same theme, so why not give them other superpowers like vampires get? Why couldn't werewolves fly, manipulate minds, control the weather or any of the other stuff ascribed to vampires? Why do authors seem so hesitant to ascribe new superpowers to werewolves?
What I'd most like to see is a pitch that combines at least the same level of diversity
as seen in Dresden Files with the same level of laundry list powers
as seen in World of Darkness. Maybe with heavy influence from
Exalted's Lunars, too. Might have to pitch it myself later when I have more time to type.
Wizards. There are actually so many, and none of them like the now-dominant-in-RPG-circles, D&D wish-grenade. /Many/ of them are really about divination, though. That's what that suffix -mancy actually mean, y'know. Pyromancers, or instance, don't throw fire around, they stare into fires to divine the future - RL practice. Necromancers didn't raise the dead, they talked to dead. &c.
Some, like Sorcerers, Shamans, witches ("warlocks" arguably not really a thing), Goetio, and others would be classes as practicing "Thaumaturgy" - miracle-working or magic with practical results. Then there were philosophers, healers and alchemists who were arguably messing around with real things, rather than magic, just real things they understood very differently than we do, and that people outside their disciplines considered magic. Like, Archimedes would have been considered a magic-user of sorts in his day.
This is tangential, but I wanted to bring back that sort of atmosphere to the fantasy genre. Rather than treating magic like some weird super power apart from nature, I always thought it would make for a great setting to treat magic as the fantasy equivalent of science and technology. Much like what Tolkien did, since he drew from pre-modern conceptions of magic. His world didn't have magic as we conceive it, it had the seen and the unseen. The "lore" studied by his ring-makers, necromancers, wizards and so forth was a science, the same science that Illuvatar used to create the world. Although the use of the term "science" might give the wrong impression, since Tolkien's world conceived of the advancements of science and the advancements of progress as being different things. It's very complicated if you aren't used to it.
