[WIP] Hungering Werewolves - An Overhaul

[WinterFlower]

INTRODUCTION

 

I've been largely disappointed that lycanthropy in Skyrim is nothing more than a greater power used once or twice and then forgotten. There is no incentive to use the power in later levels, and there is nothing to remind you of your bestial nature other than insomnia and the occasional comment from NPCs.

 

Yes, there are other mods that overhaul lycanthropy for a much more immersive experience. While they are great, they are exclusively focused on beast form, granting no penalties or bonuses to untransformed werewolves, and quite honestly feel overpowered.

 

This mod attempts to revamp werewolf experience in a different direction - challenging, immersive, rewarding yet unforgiving. If you imagine werewolves as cursed people, constantly hungering for flesh and trying to control the inner beast inside them, you would probably enjoy it, too. :smile:

 

 

 

FEATURE OVERVIEW

• Hunger - five stages with various bonuses and penalties that affect the entire gameplay experience, inside and out of beast form. Hunger increases over time and decreases by feasting on people.
• Enhanced Strength - even in human form you possess supernatural strength, speed, reflexes, sight and scent.
• Taming the Beast - over time, you learn to control your bestial impulses, gaining new perks and abilities, making lycanthropy viable even in the later stages of the game while preserving the challenging experience.
• Weaknesses - your blessing comes at a price. Stay away from silver and wolfsbane.
• Hunt - you are a hunter as much as you're hunted. As soon as an area becomes alert of werewolf attacks, the Silver hand will start roaming and tracking you down.

 

 

GAMEPLAY

 

At its core, Hungering Werewolves is meant to make lycanthropy more rewarding, challenging and punishing, in and out of beast form. All gameplay features are designed keeping this idea in mind.

Meaning if you're looking to be an overpowered Hulk, this isn't the mod for you!

 

 

Hunger

 

You are a predator. A carnivorous beast, feasting on humans and devouring their hearts. Your hunger defines you. It's a constant reminder of the beast within, a beast you can't possibly control, and the longer you try to ignore it, the more it starts overtaking your humanity!

In Skyrim, your hunger is divided in five stages:

 

1. Satiated (90%+). You've just nom-nommed a juicy victim and the wolf-you is calm. With no churning guts to distract you, you can focus better on more mentally intensive tasks like casting spells or planning your moves in combat. That also means at this point you can't transform.

 

2. Hungry (70-89%). It's been a while since you've last eaten and the familiar hunger has now returned. It's still tame enough to be quieted with a large chunk of raw meat, however you may find your spell casting abilities not as effective as normal. It's much easier to instead bash somebody barefist.

- Magicka regeneration drops

- Unarmed damage increases

- You can eat raw meat to keep your hunger low (you cannot become satiated just from meat, as that would prevent you from using your power)

- Your bestial instincts awake, providing a boost to sneak, weapon skills and detection

 

3. Starving (30-69%). Beef and pork can no longer feed you. You need fresh, human meat, and you need it now - so badly you can almost see the scent. Your sanity slow slips away and you find it difficult to even converse normally, let alone use magic. You become brutally efficient in combat and your fingers grow razor sharp claws, able to tear through flesh and armour with ease.

- You gain new dialogue options to scare, subdue, befriend, provoke, bully a discount out of, or attempt to kill an NPC, and are much better at intimidating in general, but your speech drops by 30

- Health no longer regenerates, magic skills drop by 30

- Your predatory instincts peak in full power, resulting in greatly increased sneak and all weapon skills as well as enhanced sense of smell and astonishing reflexes

- Unarmed damage increases further and ignores 50% armour

 

4. Frenzied (1-29%). You literally feel like grabbing somebody, anybody, and ripping their heart out to eat it. Enormous willpower is needed to resist your urges, causing all your skills to suffer. Occasionally your lupine nature will take over your sanity and you will start attacking the nearest thing that moves. The powerful hunger has weakened your constitution and has made you reckless and desperate for a droplet of blood.

- All skills drop to 0

- You cannot use spells

- You cannot interact with NPCs

- Unarmed damage is very strong and ignores armour

- Your survival instincts significantly boost your stamina regeneration and damage resistance

- You may randomly black out and start attacking the nearest NPC

- Your vision gets blurred and the scent of flesh drives you crazy

 

5. Ravenous (0%). Your humanity is no more. You shift into Beast form, faster and stronger than ever, hungering for meat, unable to gain back humanity until you gorge yourself with the flesh of your victims... numerous victims...

- Forced transformation, unable to shift back until you feed

- Enhanced damage and weaknesses

- Unable to howl

 

Victims of Sanies Lupinus will wake up as ravenous werewolves, but following the Companions questline will make your transformation a lot smoother. As a young werewolf, your hunger will progress a lot faster and raw meat will be a lot less effective, but over time you will learn how to control it better. Hunger rates depend on your adrenaline levels (that is, being injured or in combat) and whether you're transformed or not. In addition, most werewolf powers will consume hunger upon use or drain it continuously if toggled on.

 

To decrease hunger level without transforming and feeding, your human form can feast on fresh corpses and even live people, provided their health is sufficiently low. Obviously, if witnessed, not only will you face a bounty, but rumours of your shady nature will certainly reach the Silver hand.

 

 

Transformation

 

When you transform, your sheer size will rip your currently equipped clothes (but not jewellery) and destroy them, and you will also drop any equipped weapons on the ground. Your hunger level will increase immediately upon transformation and progress much faster, but unless you're ravenous you may transform back and forth at will, multiple times per day.

 

Holw of Terror and Howl of the Pack each will increase hunger to balance their power. Scent of Blood may be used for free. A weaker version of it will always be active when you're hungry, both in human and wolf form, but the wolf version is more powerful.

 

Full moon will always force a transformation that perpetuates throughout the night, every night until the full moon sets. Those infected by Sanies Lupinus will gain Beast blood with their first transformation on full moon.

 

 

Powers

 

Even in human form, your beast blood enhances your strength to unmatched levels. You can carry impressive loads and swing huge weapons with ease. You can also sprint almost as fast as a horse and recover your stamina much quicker.

 

Your reflexes are honed to near perfection, allowing you to anticipate and block or dodge enemy attacks.

 

Your predatory nature endows you with remarkable sight and olfaction, allowing you to see much better in the dark and to sense creatures by their scent.

 

Beast form of course makes all those abilities stronger. Using your special abilities, especially combat ones, cause your hunger to increase a lot faster. As a young werewolf your abilities will be weaker and gradually increase and develop as you unlock more and more perks.

 

Eventually you will be able to knock people over like ragdolls, track creatures and beasts with high precision and even rip people apart with your bare hands. All of this power however comes at a price.

 

List of currently used powers (human form):

• Beast form - transform from an innocent-looking person into a big bad wolf. This form can only be used if you're at least a little hungry, and only at night unless you possess the ring of Hircine. However, spending a lot of time starved will eventually allow you to fully master this power and use it at will.
  You can also learn to change back at will if you spend a lot of time without transforming. Otherwise you're doomed to remain in beast form until it wears off... so be careful how much you eat as to not become a feral werewolf.
• Blood rage - for a short time significantly increases your damage and stamina regeneration, but your veins rupture from the tension and you lose some blood. You may feel sluggish and weakened after it expires and suffer slightly lower damage and stamina regeneration for a while. You can only use this power if you are above 50% of your health unless you're frenzied. It *can* kill you, too. Also increases hunger a lot. 3 hours cooldown.
• Survival instinct - as a last-ditch effort, briefly but substantially increases your damage resistance and stamina regeneration. Afterwards you feel completely spent and pass out, losing all your stamina along with a big chunk of hunger. Usable in frenzied state and in starved state when your health is less than 30%. 6 hours cooldown.
• Supernatural reflexes - briefly slows down time, magnitude depending on your experience. Usable when hungry or starved and drains stamina and hunger until toggled off.
• Bestial vigor - available in hungry and starved state. Largely boosts your stamina and health regeneration and lasts until switched off. However the hastened metabolism drains your hunger very fast and makes you vulnerable to poison (esp. wolfsbane).
• Detect scent - detect living and dead creatures around you. Can be toggled on and off at will and doesn't drain hunger. Range increases with hunger and experience (i.e. days spent as a werewolf). Becoming familiar with undead and machines will also allow you to distinguish their scent, too.
• Butchery - if you feed on a lot of victims as human, you will eventually learn to frankenstein flesh, hearts and blood from them for later sustenance. Be careful not to get caught in the act though, or the guards will assume you're a psychotic mass murderer and award you the proper bounty. And you can't blame them.
• Knockout - activates on power attacks if you've eaten or butchered enough people to know their anatomy all too well. Knocks them out cold for a couple seconds.
• Torpor - available after spending a lot of time with very low hunger without transforming. Slows down your metabolism rates, making you extremely weak but removing all accidental transformations and side effects from hunger and slowing its rate down. Doesn't remove werewolf weaknesses and full moon will still transform you.
• Autophagia - you consume your own flesh to restore some hunger and reset all power cooldowns. Inflicts major injuries that are slow to recover, but may save you from desperate situations. Only a very strong-willed werewolf is capable of that.
• The ability to eat people alive as a finishing move or a dialogue option. It's accessible via a hotkey and success rate improves over time and with each successful use.

 

 

Weaknesses

 

Besides the ravaging hunger and the full moon, a werewolf has other powerful enemies, and the social wolf - even more so.

 

By far the most effective way to hurt the werewolf is silver. A minor stab from a silver weapon is enough to trigger fatal allergic response, hurting with the pain of thousand suns and searing your flesh like acid. This weakness extends to your human form and is promptly taken advantage of by the Silver Hand.

 

Even deadlier however, albeit rare, is the poison of wolfsbane. A blade or an arrow coated in it will instantly reverse a werewolf's transformation and temporarily strip her of all her supernatural powers, quite possibly paralysing or even killing her if she's already weakened. People carrying wolfsbane blossoms cannot be eaten and are immune to Howl of Terror, and carrying wolfsbane as a werewolf will hurt you and disable your powers.

- Since wolfsbane doesn't exist in the vanilla game, the plant Deathbell which resembles actual wolfsbane will be renamed and used instead.

- DO NOT EAT WOLFSBANE AS A WEREWOLF.

 

A lot less known weakness is moonstone and weapons made from it (glass). While not as damaging as the others, it carries the enraging effect of the moon and will wear you down and drain your hunger very quickly. Having unrefined moonstone in your inventory will have the same effect.

 

All your weaknesses persist throughout the game and are profoundly abused by the Silver Hand and the more aware adventurers who have faced werewolves before. Should you decide to become a werewolf hunter yourself, you can also use them on werewolf NPCs.

 

 

Werewolf Hunters

 

Have you heard guards sharing their concerns about werewolves howling at night? Seen their frightened little faces? That's right, they are scared, everyone is scared of werewolves... scared enough to attract the attention of vigilante werewolf hunters! They can recognise your hidden nature if you're even a little hungry and they know your weaknesses and will exploit them. By the way, your boo-boo scary howling wolfish tricks most likely won't work on them, so you are on your own.

 

As soon as the Silver Hand folks become aware of your activities, they will start tracking you and appearing in random encounters. Every time you feed on civilian humans or howl, the chance to encounter them in that particular area will increase. It will also increase as you become hungrier and people start recognising something suspicious about you. The chance will decrease if you keep satiated and abstain from hunting people, or if you leave the area for a long time.

 

Encounters will always be leveled and very challenging so you may sometimes find it better to run rather than to try fighting them off. During full moon, Silver Hand members will patrol all areas and be well prepared for you.

 

 

Mod Progress

 

I actually started developing this way back in 2012 but I quit skyrim because of university. Now I have some more free time and nostalgia drove me back to the game, so my development has resumed. I'm still fairly new to the creation kit and am mostly exploring around, but it doesn't seem to difficult to learn.

 

I may still need help to develop this quicker, so if anyone feels generous enough to cooperate, PLEASE feel free to message me!

 

CURRENT PROGRESS:
- Some passive perks and active powers are done. Moon phases done. Disease script more challenging than previously thought, but I'll get there. Testing takes a lot of time because my PC is sloooow.

 

QUESTIONS:
- Is there some quick-loading, low-intensity test area I can use? It would really help me test and bugfix a lot quicker.

- Does illusion's "Frenzy" effect work on player characters? This is vital.

- Can I add randomised dialogue choices? I have five lines that do the same thing, but I want them to appear at random, not the same one every time.

- Can I use "finishing moves" as animations without the special kill camera? Can I use, say, the stomach stab move if the character has no dagger equipped?

- Can I use werewolf animations on a humanoid character?

- How can I track the player's location and assign different variables depending on which Hold the player is located in?

Edited July 11, 2014 by WinterFlower

[StupidDunmer]

Awesome! I am following this topic to check for updates. Your ideas for this mod are ingenious. I had a quick skim-read and agree with the decisions you have made and the features you are willing to add, as well as your criticism against Skyrim's default lycanthropy.

[Mattiewagg]

This is something I would definitely try out. Skyrim's werewolf system has always been rather unappealing.

 

I think the satiated level should be 85%+, simply because 90% seems a bit too high.

 

The hungry level seems a little much. When you get to Hungry, and your magicka skills drop to 0, that would be awful for magicka users. I don't use magicka myself, or cast spells or anything, but I think it should go down to 10 or 15 instead.

 

But it is your mod, so you should do whatever you want with it. It looks promising. :smile:

[Mattiewagg]

For the help with mod progress, I can help you with the variable thing. To access it, you should make it a global. Then, you can use it in scripts by declaring a globalvariable property, and getting it's value through PropertyName.GetValue(), or PropertyName.GetValueInt(). More Global functions can be found on the CK.

 

If you want to make the global deteriorate, you could create a script that does so by setting the global.

 

As for Frenzy, I don't think it can be applied to the character. But I think it's possible. When you become a werewolf in the Companions quest, it turns you into a werewolf and you go off to kill some people. It doesn't seem like the player really gets to control this. But this might just be a cutscene.

 

It seems like it would be difficult, but I might be wrong. I don't usually work with spells - I'm more of a quest designer.

[WinterFlower]

This is something I would definitely try out. Skyrim's werewolf system has always been rather unappealing.

 

I think the satiated level should be 85%+, simply because 90% seems a bit too high.

 

The hungry level seems a little much. When you get to Hungry, and your magicka skills drop to 0, that would be awful for magicka users. I don't use magicka myself, or cast spells or anything, but I think it should go down to 10 or 15 instead.

 

But it is your mod, so you should do whatever you want with it. It looks promising. :smile:

 

I was just reading on integrating SkyUI's menu with mods, so I will make it as much customisable as I can. The bottom line is, it is meant to be punishing and to favour raw power over magic (in the same way as vampirism favours stealth and magic over strength).

Also, if you hunt wild animals and consume their meat, you may avoid becoming hungry at all unless it's full moon, and simply benefit from the stat bonuses. That's not much fun however...

 

 

For the help with mod progress, I can help you with the variable thing. To access it, you should make it a global. Then, you can use it in scripts by declaring a globalvariable property, and getting it's value through PropertyName.GetValue(), or PropertyName.GetValueInt(). More Global functions can be found on the CK.

 

If you want to make the global deteriorate, you could create a script that does so by setting the global.

 

As for Frenzy, I don't think it can be applied to the character. But I think it's possible. When you become a werewolf in the Companions quest, it turns you into a werewolf and you go off to kill some people. It doesn't seem like the player really gets to control this. But this might just be a cutscene.

 

It seems like it would be difficult, but I might be wrong. I don't usually work with spells - I'm more of a quest designer.

 

Thanks for that! And I thought about the alternative, losing player control in a short cutscene where the character attacks the nearest thing. If that's too hard to code, I may just make the character blackout and wake up some distance away, battered and with bounty on her head.

[Mattiewagg]

Yeah. I just had a whole fiasco with the MCM. It turned out to be not nearly as hard a I thought it was :tongue:.

 

I would help if I had the time but I'll be leaving without a computer for about a month soon, so I don't have time to pick up any more projects.

[Mattiewagg]

Yeah. To make it as customizable as possible, you could make a lot of values globals. For example, rather than "set magicka skills to 0 when hungry" it would be "set magicka skills to myglobal", replacing myglobal with your globals name. Then you could use a slider option in an MCM to set the global value, while the default of the global would be 0.

[lofgren]

I created something conceptually similar already, albeit obviously far less complex.

 

http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/32649

 

Let me know if I can be of any help.

 

One piece of feedback: the way you have constructed the stages of hunger, satiated is clearly and by far the best stage to be in, so why would any player even see the second or third or nth stage of hunger? It's not as though food is hard to find in Skyrim, being as every jarl and half the citizenry are happy to point out a bandit den for you to eradicate. Might be good to take a note from the stages of vampire hunger and provide benefits to entice the player to try out the later stages. A bonus to intimidate isn't very useful if your speech is simultaneously dropped to 0 and extra unarmed damage doesn't amount to much unless it actually makes bare-fisted fighting more effective than using a weapon – which seems unlikely.

[Mattiewagg]

I definitely think you should work on the definitions of each hunger stage. There must have been reasons werewolves went feral (those you see trapped in werewolf form) in some cases. Once I'm back at my computer I'll list a few possible improvements to the stages of hunger, though it's completely your choice whether or not to use them. After all, it is your mod. :tongue:

[Mattiewagg]

Sorry doublepost. The actual post is on the next page.