Years ago, there was an outbreak of lycanthropy in the kingdom. Nobody knows exactly how or when it started, because the Merchant Guilds tried to cover it up to keep the shipping lanes open. You see the realm was a plutocracy at the time, ruled by the wealthiest Guild houses, and they were worried that a quarantine would be disastrous to their profits.
(Does this sound familiar? Yeah, buckle up. I put all of this together in the summer of 2020.)
So the plague spread unchecked throughout the archipelago for months, and werewolves slaughtered thousands of people. When the Guilds' coverup finally came to light, the people were outraged (to say the least). Seeing an opportunity, the Temple of Dawn threw the full weight of their templars against the werewolves in a dramatic show of power, anxious to prove to the populace that they alone could save the kingdom from "the were-menace," and captured a handful of werewolves in the town square. It worked: the frightened public called for an emergency election, easily voted the Temple of Dawn into power, and ousted the Guilds.
Now in control of the realm, the Temple set about to end the werewolf threat quickly and bloodily. Drumhead trials, witch-hunts, and lynch mobs swept the land, in a two-year long killing season that came to be known as The Purge. Panicked friends and neighbors turned against each other, and entire families were rounded up and imprisoned or executed on little more basis than rumor and public pressure. So while the Temple of Dawn was indeed effective at ending the Lycanthropic Plague, many scholars estimate that The Purge actually killed more citizens than lycanthropy did. Hardest-hit by the Purge were shifters, changelings, druids, and other innocent shape-changers. It's probably not a coincidence that the druidic enclaves--once the dominant religion in the realm--were all wiped out by their Temple of Dawn rivals.
All of this happened about 40 years ago...well within living memory. The Merchant Guilds aren't the ruling class anymore, but they still hold a great deal of influence (and most of the wealth). The Temple hides behind its "we only did what we had to do" philosophy, and the public is content to let the ends justify the means. Surviving druids are slowly rebuilding their enclaves, and still face persecution and suspicion to this day.
). In an attempt to change the lycanthropy virus so that it would give all of the benefits but none of it's drawbacks, some lycanthrope mages accidentally released a lycanthrope plague across the setting. As a result, there were a number of new kinds of lycanthropes from weredeer to werecows running about. 
