Well, as some people who read my rants know (and of course the ones who responded to my forum thread regarding it), the character I am playing in my wife’s campaign got infected with lycanthropy, a weretiger to be specific.
While it may be very cool to suddenly be able to tear through one’s opponents, ignore quite a bit of physical damage, etc etc, it was rather disruptive of the campaign at the time. I went from a ECL4 to an ECL 13 in a very short time. After a few days of pondering, I decided to retire the character and decide later what I would do with my character.
Would that I have had access to the Curse of the Moon supplement by Sean K Reynolds at the time, I might have gone a very different direction. I bought and downloaded the pdf from RPGNow, and you now have a little understanding of where was at as I mentally as I read through it.
What this book does
Essentially what I got from this book was a different way of looking at lycanthropes than prior editions. D20 is in general very modular, lycanthropes in D&D 3.5 not so much though. Curse of the Moon (CotM) takes a very old D&D concept (lycanthropes) and give them a bit of logic and thoughtfulness as to how the game mechanics work and how they could work better.
CotM is written very thoughtfully in a straightforward manner that highlights Sean’s writing strengths. Reading through it I often got the feeling of being in the presence of someone with an indepth knowledge of both the subject matter and the game mechanics providing a scholarly discourse of the meaning behind each aspect of lycanthropy and what meaning, if any, it would have on your game. I enjoy this writing style, and it kept me going through the entire book in one sitting (I had originally decided to read it in multiple increments as time permitted).
Knowledge Check (Lycanthropy): Natural 20!
Sean goes through and analyzes lycanthropy from quite a few different angles, including folklore, D&D, raw game mechanics, and ultimately comes to the conclusion that lycanthropes as listed in your trusted Monster Manual (or here) aren’t necessarily the best solution to the problem of describing, in game terms, these creatures of legend.
Whats wrong with lycanthropes? Well from personal experience it seemed a tad bit wrong that our group wakes up in the middle of the night by being attacked by a were tiger and I’m CR4, but by the time I’m done I’m CR13!?! Ok, several people pointed out I could use the Savage Species rules (or the online WotC classes) but it doesn’t really change that “as written” my character became insanely unbalanced. Furthermore, my artificer would be incredibly weakened by taking levels in a weretiger class, compared to a fighter that could probably benefit from being forced to take X number of levels in the weretiger racial class.
Of course there are other reasons described too, such as the majority of lycanthropes in a game world being unable to be clerics or druids of the lycanthrope deities, the fact that damage reduction (10/silver or whatnot) doesn’t protect against magical damage (thus not protecting lycanthropes very much from the spellcasters), the inequalities of high level adjustments for spellcasters, and so on to name a few.
The book is a good combination of crunch and information, with most of the beginning of the book being dedicated to explanations of how lycanthropy works; how the rules relates to folkore, and usually a variant rule or two that could better serve the intended purpose of providing game mechanics to explain how lycanthropy works. Sidenotes abound, some standard rules for easy reference, others just informational blurbs (many fun to read!).
One of the blurbs I particularly appreciated, referring to a story I had forgotten, What Good is a Glass Dagger, by Larry Niven. While I had read it in an Isaac Asimov compilation, I had forgotten about it until reminded by Sean in one of the side blurbs. Read if it you can, I thought some of the concepts in the novel were very entertaining. ^_^
By the time you’re done with CotM, you’ll definitely have a good understanding of lycanthropy, regardless of whether you choose to institute any of the variant rules.