Wereraccoon [Ravenloft]

Human-shaped werecoons look like rough hollow-dwellers: hermits, hillbillies or runaways, with patched clothes, frizzed hair and rotting teeth, and those are their better traits. The animal shape is a big, burly raccoon, large but believable. The hybrid is a hunched brute in a gray-brown, black-masked pelt with a bushy ringed tail and an oversized raccoon head that snarls spitefully through eerily human eyes. In every form they are crusted with mud and old food. They speak the main local language, have none of their own, and seldom learn others.

Werecoons fight in hybrid shape, mixing 3-6 point bites with weapon attacks: clubs, quarterstaves, hunting knives, hatchets and wood axes. Firearms are their true love, and they gain +2 to hit with any blasting-powder weapon. A family nearly always owns one snaplock musket, rarely more than two, and unlike everything else they own, the guns are kept spotless because the werecoons know how frightening they are.

They stalk and watch victims with real patience, but once the ambush starts they abandon tactics for a wild storm of claws and buckshot. A losing fight sends them scurrying off in raccoon shape. They are hurt only by +1 magic or by slate, a stone that makes only crude weapons. Each point of damage they deal carries a 2% chance of lycanthropy.

About 10% now carry a magical rabies, and the sick are driven from home into the wilderness. They show bloodshot, exhausted eyes, dull manners and foam or slime at the mouth, and stay dazed until provoked. Then they go berserk, making two attacks each round with +2 to hit, at the cost of a 2-point AC penalty. Anyone wounded by one risks lycanthropy as usual and must also save vs. spell or contract the rabies, which acts as a fatal cause disease. After a week the victim starts going mad: a madness check is required weekly, effects accumulate, and each week after the first check adds a further cumulative -1. Cure disease will not help, but heal, remove curse and comparable strong magic will.

Werecoons settle in misty valleys, remote hollows and steaming bogs in warm temperate lands such as the bayou domain or a valley village's backcountry. They live apart from people yet shun wild lairs, choosing ordinary country cabins and shanties with drooping porches and leaning chimneys. Litters hold one to four pups, which mature within a few years and usually raise their own families nearby, so clans are tight, inbred, insular and dangerous.

Humanity matters to them only as a stray amusement. Lost or prying travelers in their woods are ambushed, tortured with grisly imagination and finally eaten. They hate other races, and especially rival lycanthropes in their territory: weregators, werebats, werepossums and above all werewolves.

Fish and wild fruit are their staples, with the flesh of thinking beings a prized treat. Unlike most lycanthropes they do not hide among humans as parasites; they are simply nasty, shadowy forest dwellers who keep to themselves and never tolerate strangers.