Kesrin [Unique Weretiger]

Kesrin reached the jungle realm as a young man in peak condition, strong, sharp-eyed and quick-witted. Years in the misty dread realm have hardened him. The once gentle, laughing face is cruel now, his green eyes burn with an anger always close to violence, and the flowing copper mane of his youth is shorn to a rough crop.

He wears dark clothes loosely copied from eastern shadow-assassins he once met, ideal for moving unseen. He carries no weapons and needs none. He speaks the common tongue of his home world, that of the far eastern lands, and the local language he learned after arriving.

Kesrin nearly always becomes a tiger before a fight, then attacks with front claws (1d4/1d4), a bite (1d12) and rending hind claws (1d4+1/1d4+1), pairing a keen mind with raw power. Weapons that are neither silver nor at least +1 cannot harm him. Caught in human form, he breaks away and retreats to buy time to change.

He treats the transformation itself as a weapon. Against peasants, green guards and other easily frightened foes, he makes sure they watch him change; most face a morale check, and sometimes a fear or horror check as well. Two weretiger bodyguards almost always accompany him.

Kesrin was born among wanderers in a land of forest valleys on another world. His parents were skilled, light-fingered entertainers, and because he knows every trick they used to seem mystical, he has only scorn for the wandering seers and their supposed powers. His father was cruel and meddlesome, delighting in others' misery and making it worse when he could; his mother was frail and timid, long since beaten down by her husband.

As a teenager Kesrin fell for an elegant young woman and hid his family's low station from her. His father followed him into the forest, found the couple embracing, knocked the boy to his knees with a heavy cane, then cursed the girl as a harlot and swung at her. She dodged, leapt, and became a tigress in midair, tearing out his throat and belly in moments. Dazed, Kesrin did not recognize her and stabbed at the beast; she wheeled and clawed him senseless. He woke hours later by a starlit stream, wounds dressed, with a note saying she could never see him again. Used to betrayal, he decided she had only toyed with him.

He went back to the road and cared for his mother, who brightened after her husband's death. She died nine months later, and he mourned her as he never mourned his father. Three months after that, on the anniversary of his father's death, Kesrin first changed into a weretiger. He learned over the following months to take tiger shape at will, but he also changes every year on that anniversary and cannot return to human form until he kills a human, demihuman or humanoid.

His inherited harshness grew calculating, and he craved the order his father's life had lacked. He never shed his cruelty but climbed past his father's mindless brutality. Much later, hunting a fabled treasure in a deep jungle, he found a ruined temple full of tiger mosaics and figurines, felt he had found a true home, and vowed to restore it and live out his days there.

That first night he dreamed of the rakshasa god once worshipped in the temple, who commanded him to destroy the god's traitorous son. Awed, Kesrin swore he would not die until the betrayer was punished. He woke inside the son's own domain, the jungle realm, where the destroyer goddess's priestesses, allies of the traitor who hunt all visitors, razed his temple and drove him into the jungle. He survived, passed himself off among the locals, and for several years has built the Striped Hand, a secret society sworn to end the traitor's reign. By passing lycanthropy to carefully chosen recruits, he has forged a small, potent band united by hatred of the priestesses.