7th Sea is my first and truest love (although I ended up married to nWoD and am currently having an affair with James Young's adaptation of LotFP), and a great majority of my love for that is the sorcery. Tearing screaming holes in reality that bleed at the edges, just so you don't have to walk as far to the shops, drawing on the power of legends and myths to become better at thematically appropriate skills, carving runes into your own flesh to access what would be minor magical effects in any other system. All of them linked to blood and darkness, and ancient pacts (seriously, if you have never looked at 7th Sea I recommend it as a setting if nothing else).
And there is Pyeryem: the magic of shapechanging. You bargain with an animal to use its skin, a spirit skin not a literal skin, but rather a piece of the animal's soul. The bargain is that the animal gets to live as long as you do. So it is relatively easy to bargain with a mouse, or a cat, or some other small and short lived beastie, but it may be harder to convince a whale, or an elephant, or a Dragon to do the same. Generally, you have to help the animal out in some way to earn its respect.
New Class: Skinchanger
Most say the Skinchangers are a myth, something that superstitious peasants believe, or that existed back in the dawn of time. Some say that they are the offspring of witches and the devils they compact with to gain their powers. Some say that there is a secret cult, where if you are willing to debase yourself to their wicked ways and drink a cup of blood from an innocent you will gain the power to take the form of a beast. However in truth Skinchangers are neither born nor trained, they are made.
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| Ancient Greek cunningly disguised as a dog |
Arising in the barbarian tribes far to the north, in a time before time, the art of making new Skinchangers still abides. The Skinchangers do in fact have their own cults, the priests of which have charge of making new Skinchangers. However, the organization is loose, and shadowy. A sect of the cult can consist of one lone Skinchanger, engaging in the sacred arts of taking on other forms upon empty forgotten moors. Usually, the art stays within a family, but since Skinchangers sacrifice a great deal of their fertility in the transformation, not all those initiated into the cult will be Skinchangers. Likewise, if an outside can seek out these hidden cults (unlikely), and become inducted into their mysteries (even more so), they too may become a Skinchanger.
First, the appropriate steps are taken, on a moonless night, to prepare an ancient stone upon which to perform the ceremony. A herbal tincture is swallowed, partly for mystic purposes, and partly to numb the pain somewhat of what comes next. After the rituals are intoned, and the ceremonial woad pigment markings are daubed on the supplicant's naked body, the Skinchanger priest begins the secret art of flaying the supplicant alive. Their skin is removed in one piece and the skinless body is rubbed with a mixture of salt, Rosemary, Statice, and Xiphium. After this process is complete, and more ritual prayers have been chanted, the supplicant's skin is replaced and sewn back on.
For such a violent process very little permanent evidence is left. A small scar a few inches long on the collarbone where the first incision of the flaying was begun, a lasting feeling of discomfort beneath the skin (which fades over time, but does never completely vanish), and of course the newly granted ability to take on other forms.
To gain a new skin you must engage in the arcane practice of blooding. This involves several steps. First, you must kill and skin the animal that you wish to turn into. This must be done with care, as if the skin is not removed as one piece, the ritual will not be effective. When you take the form of the animal you will always take the form of the animal whose skin you stole. For example, if you steal the skin of a horse with a distinctive diamond pattern on its face when you transform into a horse, you will also have that diamond.
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| And be doomed to forever be hit on by Butterscotch Horseman |
After having killed and skinned your chosen animal, you then proceed to coat the inside of the hide with your own blood, mixing it with the blood and viscera attached to the skin (this, again, puts a practical limitation on the size of creature you can practically transform into, as there is only so much blood that a human can safely lose at one point). After this step is completed, the hide must be properly preserved with salt (ideally natron, the salt used in mummification), immersing it entirely for a period of 24 hours. After this process, the skin is preserved, and can be used to transform into that animal.
The process of doing so is remarkably simple: you strip naked and throw the skin over your shoulders in a manner reminiscent of a gross and creepy cape, you then will yourself into the animal's form. The skin then seems to grow and envelop you, bending, crushing, and reshaping your form, the snapping of bones, squishing of tissue, and popping of cartilage all hideously audible. The trasformation takes approximately one round in which you cannot do anything aside from writhe in discomfort.
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| As seen here |
Then, you are an animal, you can do all things an animal could. An owl can fly and see in the dark, a dog can follow a scent, a male platypus can sting. You also mechanically get the stat line of the animal, however retaining your own intelligence and wisdom.There is no difference between an animal and a Shapechanger in animal form, with the exception of something distinctly unsettling about the eyes. Sahpechangers cannot talk in in their animals forms beyond "lassie speech" (unless your animal form was capable of speech in life, in which case you have access to the same range of vocalisations). You remain in your animal form for a number of turns equal to your level, although you can end the effect early with a successful wisdom save (add your level as bonus). In either case, when the effect ends the skin curls back from you, remembering the horrors that you have perpetrated on it, spewing you forth like a newborn from a womb, covered in a thin film of ectoplasmic viscera.
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| Eddie McDowd's real crime was killing that dog to wear its skin |
If you transform into an animal with a greater number of hit points, your hitpoints increase. If you transform into a creature with fewer (a mouse for example), your hitpoints decrease. Your injuries stay with you however. If you are already injured and transform into an animal that has fewer hitpoints than the total damage you have taken, you will die violently as your minor wounds stretch open, vomiting out your organs as your body deforms into the compact shape of the skin. Likewise, if you take damage greater than your base hitpoints whilst in the form of a large bear-like animal (possibly a bear), death will occur when the skin at last vomits you forth and the wounds taken in the larger form appear as great slashes in the flesh of your frail human body.
You can stay in your form beyond this time, at a cost of a point of wisdom per round. Once you transform back into a human, you regain wisdom at a rate of one point per day. If, however, you fall below three wisdom in this manner, you lose yourself to the skin, and forget you were ever human. You become the animal permanently.
Interestingly, you do not suffer from any permanent deformities such as losing an eye or leg whilst in your animal form. Likewise, if your human body is missing one arm, but you don the skin of an animal with a complete set of limbs, you will have all your limbs in animal form. Although, if the animal was already missing a limb when you killed it, the form you have will always be missing a limb. Skinchangers therefore tend to try to kill with blunt weapons, drown their prey, or slash a jugular.
Savvy readers may observe that this method could be used to perfectly imitate a particular human being (humans are just big hairless apes after all), and this is entirely correct. The only difficulties are the limited amount of time in that particular form, the fact that the stolen shape would cease to age, and the fact of killing and skinning them. That aside there are no obvious problems, however older, sager Skinchangers argue against such a practice. They do not give specifics, merely say it would be... unwise.
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| Turing into an animal at a dinner party is considered poor form |
You can make the transformation into an animal for a number of times equal to your level. You also have to physically have the preserved skin, so having a bunch of small animals would be no problem, but it gets harder if you are trying to be a bear, and forget about being a dragon (unless you just live in a cave near a preserved Dragon skin). Other than the aforementioned scar (which is easy enough to explain away, or cover with a tattoo), there is no way to tell a human from a Skinchanger, with the exception that Skinchangers tend to be unwashed animalistic hobos who wear a lot of furs... so not all that different to your average adventurer.
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| Pictured: Average Adventurer |
Rules Malarky
Hit Dice: d6 per level
Experience Track: As Cleric
Saves: As Cleric*
*Unless the animal form has a different save
Special Abilities:
Skinchanging; a number of times per day equal to your level you may transform into an animal whose skin you have previously blooded. You must have the skin on your person. The transformation takes one round, during which you are considered prone. You gain the hitpoints, strength, constitution, dexterity, speed, saves, and other abilities of the animal whilst retaining your mental faculties. You remain in this for for a number of turns
Blooding; you have the ability to prepare the skin of a recently killed animal for the purposes of the Skinchanging mentioned above. The process takes 24 hours, and requires 1 hp of blood to be sacrificed for each of the creature's hd
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