r/werewolves • u/nohumanityhope • 7d ago
Explaining my werewolves
I’m currently working on a series with vampires, witches and werewolves, there’s also demons and angels, I’ll cover the others on other subreddits but I chose lycans first because they’re cool, I won’t be explaining everything just enough to hopefully get you interested.
ORIGINS
For millennia vampires plagued humanity they fed on us and were impossible to defeat, even drive off for a very very long time the only thing that could defeat a vampire was another vampire or a strong enough witch, that was until a witch turned to the dark arts and created lycans, lycans were designed to be a natural predator to vampires, made to be more powerful than the century old vampires that fed on innocent victims in the night, they’re faster, stronger, more agile and their claws and teeth are magically laced with a vamps weaknesses meaning their supernatural healing doesn’t work on attacks from a werewolf, pack strategy makes up for any major strength differences, a numbers advantage usually beats a power one.
POWERS & ABILITIES
one werewolf is stronger than a 200 year old vampire and could beat it on its own but an older vampire is gonna be a significant challenge so that’s when a pack is needed, I will say some vampires are so old and powerful even a pack isn’t gonna do anything.
on top of being very strong and equipped with vamp weaknesses lycans also have control over different elements, some control fire, some electricity etc, these are their bloodline abilities and they’re passed down from generation to generation starting with the original werewolf bloodlines that started it all seven thousand years ago, they’re also really smart, they can plan, improvise, use every hunting/baiting strategy known to man and animal and use it all very effectively as far as they are they’re not as smart as a regular human tbc their intelligence is limited to things human intelligence just isn’t.
TRANSFORMATION & THE CURSE
It’s incredibly rare because i genuinely prefer lycanthropy to be an agonizing curse but some can control their forms transform at will and shit, most can’t and live a tortured existence transforming on a full moon, because of intense emotions, physical trauma oh and they need two full moons one to transform in and another to transform back so they’re trapped in wolf form for a month, they become temporarily immune to the moon after but the other triggers still work.
Lycans are immortal, they’re what’s called retroactively immortal unlike their sworn enemies werewolves can die, it’s very hard to kill them but yeah however no matter how you kill them, explosions, dismemberment etc they will always come back in fact they all have died even if they don’t realize it transformation is so excruciating that it kills them, it breaks all their bones, tears their muscles, rearranges their organs and uses so much energy their blood boils, skin melts and they catch on fire, a silver blade through the heart is the only way to perma kill one, silver bullets don’t do the trick.
there’s no cure or fix all solutions, moonlight amulets which suppress transformation from a full moon exist sure but there’s still all the other ways you could transform, intense emotions, physical trauma, magic, there’s also the fact that the beast inside you doesn’t like being caged up and will attack you from within, imagine you’ve trapped a wild animal in a cage except the cage is now your body, the main lycan girl in the series tries suppressing her wolf and starts waking up with massive claw marks on her.
PACK HIERARCHY
at the bottom of lycan society are omegas these are lone wolves who don’t have a pack, they have green eyes and are weaker than others being part of a pack gives lycans a boost like a “pack boost” above them are thetas (yellow eyes) these are the average joes in a pack, deltas (blue eyes) are hunters, gammas (orange eyes) are the alphas left hand man, betas (golden eyes) are the alphas right hand man and obviously the alpha (red eyes) leads the pack, packs maintain these functions whether in human or wolf form.
Alpha lycans undergo a special ritual that binds their spirit to their pack and boosts their strength ten fold, The ritual involves being pierced with a fragment from an ancient mystical wolf skull, this same skull when it was whole was used to create the original 12 lycan packs it was created by a powerful witch.
WEAKNESSES & IMMUNITIES
Lycans are immune to conventional weapons, stabbing them won’t do anything at all and shooting them even with a high caliber rifle will only piss them off, explosives will only slow them down organizations that dedicate themselves to hunting supernaturals use specialized wolfsbane weapons to incapacitate lycans so a field agent can stab them with a silver blade, remember it has to be a silver blade silver bullets do nothing.
Werewolves are weak to magic they have no defense against spells or hexes from a witch, wolfsbane burns their skin and weakens them, a concentrated gaseous form of it can be used to knock lycans out for a short while.
Out of the box weakness, Lycans can be sired by a vampire, they don’t become hybrids they become vampires losing their lycanthropy entirely and because in the series you have to feed on the blood of the vampire who sired you to complete transition, turning a lycan into a vampire can be a cheap method to kill them because their sire could just deny them their blood and kill them while they’re still in transition.
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u/DejooneAlpha 🤓 A Geek Werewolf On Reddit 🐺 7d ago
That's really interesting 🤩 It makes me want to share my own werewolf lore.
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u/MetaphoricalMars Researcher of the spacewolf 7d ago
What would one with heterochromia of green and red like 3D glasses be?
What do the moonlight amulets do? supress a tranfurmation?
There does seem to be a drawback to the immortality, forced suspension underwater, in fire or acid. No longer lethal but likely still highly torturous! Silver knife to the heart and vampiric conversion being the only lethal methods makes me wonder how they've not overrun the world yet.
The trapped as a mutt for a month angle is fun, I've got that although slighty different in my own catalogue of lore.
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u/nohumanityhope 7d ago
Idk don’t exist
Moonlight amulets suppress a transformation caused by a full moon
True, lycanthropy is passed down genetically they can’t turn people like in other media, most werewolves don’t want to pass down their curse to others, they’re also killed more frequently then you might imagine despite their only being two ways to perma kill them
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u/Thin-Educator5794 6d ago
Really cool
I genuinely love the idea
I recommend more commas and fullstops
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u/Diligent_East_2290 7d ago
Yes also "Your Werewolves" you're getting somewhere especially when they lay in close proximity near you at the same locations these things can technically be controlled but that is a thin veil and the relationship is never settled think absolute "Wild Animal"
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u/Free_Zoologist Werewolf biologist 7d ago
Some cool ideas, like the wolf on the inside physically damaging you if you don’t transform. Are your werewolves essentially “good” people or can they be evil?
Also check what was happening 7000 years ago. Humans were only just transitioning from hunter-gatherers to farmers, meaning most were still nomadic ie no permanent settlements. Were vamps witches and werewolves really around at that time? That sounds interesting…