Werealligator [Lycanthrope]

In human form a weregator (as these lycanthropes are usually called) is typically short and exotic-looking, with earthy skin and straight, glossy black hair, though other peoples are represented too. Only an unnervingly toothy grin hints at what it is. Its beast form is an oversized alligator, sometimes 15 feet long or more. The hybrid is ghastly: thick scaly hide, an alligator tail growing from the spine, blunt-nailed stubby fingers and toes, and a grinning alligator head crammed with yellow teeth. Its red-irised eyes catch and reflect light at night.

Weregators speak whatever language is common locally. They may have a tongue of their own, but no one has confirmed it.

Knowing how much stronger its beast is, a weregator in human form avoids fights. If it cannot change, it fights with weapons only until it can escape, favoring cruel tools that look and feel horrific more than they wound deeply: straight razors, barbed or spiked clubs, whips and scourges.

The hybrid bites for 3d4 and lashes its tail for 1d8. In both hybrid and alligator form it swims superbly, and it does its best to attack from the water or drag foes into it. Three times a day, in either of those forms, it can loose a blood-chilling bellow that acts as a fear spell on everyone who hears it; it cannot attack in the round it bellows. Its wounds carry a 2% chance per hit point of damage to infect the victim. Rumor holds that some weregators are fearsome animist shamans.

Only +1 or better magical weapons, or weapons made of or edged with quartz, can harm a weregator, and cold-based spells deal it double damage.

Weregators live alone on the edges of human settlements in swamps and other wet country, getting by on what the land provides or what they steal. Most of the time they are oddly quiet creatures that do little but hunt and sleep.

Sooner or later, though, the warped human mind surfaces. The weregator leaves its marsh, turns on a nearby village, and begins a campaign of horror that sickens even hardened souls, feeding a killing rage it relishes. It picks the most innocent victims, abducting, torturing, murdering, mutilating and finally eating them. Its cunning means the culprit is seldom found. Many sages believe these sprees prove every weregator is insane.

Lairs are bare caves with underwater entrances. Though solitary, weregators often end up lounging together in the sluggish midday heat, never forgetting that they are rivals, particularly for mates, and their unhinged temperaments keep such gatherings tense. Courtship and mating, cold as they are, dominate weregator life. A female guarding her eggs attacks at +2. Hatchlings look like scaly toddlers and are abandoned at once, but they can fend for themselves well enough.

Weregators remain very rare in the misty dread realm. Eblis, moor men, green hags and other evil swamp folk hate them but keep away out of fear, and other lycanthropes that encounter them, werecoons and wererats among them, regard them as dangerously mad and give them a wide berth.

Most of the time a weregator fits its swamp neatly, a pure carnivore ruling the top of the local food chain. Its taste for thinking prey worries few, since outsiders who wander into these marshes are often thought to have earned their end. But when its madness stirs, it can leave a trail of atrocity through some quiet village.