Hey all, I've been trying to brainstorm some more unique Druids for an upcoming campaign, and come up with a few good ones that come from urban areas, rather than the traditional wilderness druids are (rightfully) associated with.
First up is a Moon druid who works as a bodyguard for a wealthy merchant family, using their wildshapes to transform into powerful beasts to scare off or battle anyone who would do their masters harm. As to how they gained their druidic powers: they could be a descendant of a lycanthrope, or have sought out a more comfortable life after surviving off of the land for so long with their circle.
Second is a Shepard druid who nourishes the creatures who live in the sewers and secret tunnels all across a city. They moved to the city after realising they could not stop the encroachment of civilisation on nature, only help the animals who live in a place so unlike their original homes. They create little hideaways for the animals, as well as summoning beasts and fey creatures to show the people of the city what the world truly looks like outside of their stone walls.
Finally, a Stars druid who learnt to use the stars to navigate the paths around and between cities, offering arcane knowledge and power to anyone who can pay for their services. They travelled with a performing circus, who needed a 'mystic' to read people's futures, and bring a touch of magic and mystery to their performances. Having self-taught themselves to read the stars whilst living on the streets of a city, they figured they were the perfect fit.
Share any ideas you guys have for Urban Druids, I'd love to hear them.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
'The Cleverness of mushrooms always surprises me!' - Ivern Bramblefoot.
I think the idea about the "encroachment of civilization" is the key here. An urban druid is not a druid who voluntarily moved from the forest into a town. An urban druid is someone who lived in that forest until the people showed up, cut down all the trees, built houses out of those trees, and built a dam in the river to power their grain mill. I think it was George Lopez who, years ago in his stand up comedy routine said, "We didn't cross the border! The border crossed us!" That's the key here.
So you grew up in that forest, and you remember when this was a beautiful wild place. You remember as a child the sadness and despair in your parent's faces when the people began building houses at the edge of the forest. But you were too young to understand. As you got older, more of the forest disappeared as more of those houses spread, and you began to understand. So your people faced a difficult decision. Either flee and try to find some other forest to live in, or stay and try to win back your land.
Many left. You stayed.
But a simple frontal combat assault on the town would never work. The guards have armor, and they outnumber you, and acts of outright bloodshed on your part would turn the citizenry even further against you. Instead, you opted for a subtler approach. Live among them, make yourself useful, earn their trust - but at the same time spread rumors and stories about the fickle and sometimes malevolent spirits that inhabit these lands. And people begin to notice fires suddenly just going out for no reason... random wind gusts that slam doors and windows open and closed and that blow laundry across the yards... well paved pathways become torn asunder overnight...rooftops randomly burst aflame... sounds of thunder wake people at all hours of the night even in clear weather... and all that is just with CANTRIPS!
Shops suffer as customers keep getting caught by invisible Snares that yank them off their feet and suspend them in midair! Oxen and mules pulling plows in the fields suddenly just stop, and stubbornly refuse to continue. Each night a different resident reports feeling their entire house shake in the night. No one gets hurt, but dishes fall and things break, and the kids wake up screaming and crying. And we're still only on FIRST LEVEL spells!
All the while the people are turning to you to appeal to these restless spirits, and you go through the motions of ritual after ritual, to no avail. You explain that the spirits have inhabited these lands since long before even your people did, and they will not be moved by these townsfolk. Either the town moves, or the spirits get even angrier!
Cyclones of dirt and dust occasionally tear through the market square making a mess and tossing people and goods aside. Random metal objects glow red hot just as someone is about to grab it, and the town doctor has to treat new burn injuries every day. A lush garden of vegetables instantly withers and dies for no apparent reason! Sharp spiky brambles periodically grow all around the main gate to town, scratching and injuring any who try to come or go! And we're still only up to SECOND LEVEL spells!
Eventually someone will figure out that you're not on the town's side, and that you're involved in causing these problems. But by the time they figure that out, you're standing on a rooftop casting Call Lightning and then turning into a hummingbird. For the next ten minutes another townsperson dies every six seconds as the guards are aiming their crossbows at a four inch bird flying 100 feet in the air! And all of this is from just ONE angry druid! Imagine if there were two! Or three! At some point at least some of those townsfolk will start to say, "It's time to cut our losses! We can rebuild somewhere safer! It's not worth losing more people!"
As the margarine commercials used to say... "It's not nice to fool Mother Nature!"
I'm running an autognome circle of stars druid, and that seems like it can easily be urban (it's a construct (not organic) and it's not as plant/animal focused as other druid types). And, you get specialized design, plus herbalism (creates potions and antivenom). So, my character has thieves tools, tinker tools, and the herbalism kit (and navigator's tools through spelljammer his background) and could easily make a living or trade for services in a city. You could just as easily select blacksmith tools. He gets starry form but can still wild shape into animals to get around the city or even use wild companion (a temporary familiar) to scout. A Warforged could easily be urban too (since it's a construct).
The most important element of a druid for me is why are they adventuring or tolerating this diverse group of wanderers they're with at all?
This seems to feed right into the Urban druid idea. One thought is that multi-classing another type could provide interesting backgrounds to help position an urban druid in humanoid settlements.
1. Forest Gnome Druid with one level of Sorcerer/Wild Magic. The Gnome had no idea why his traditional shamanistic practices were producing unexpected results, and after several injuries due to errant spells or effects, they decided to seek more knowledge in the Mage's Guild of a large nearby city. They spend some of their time studying in order to attempt to control their Wild Magic surges, and earn a living producing Potions and Elixers based on their tribal healing tradition. After a while, failing to find enough answers at the Mage's Guild, they decide to start adventuring to learn more ...
2. A Druid of the Moon with one level of Warlock tricked into a pact with Malar after being promised more primal power who has come to settlements to seek out priests of Malar, and understand better this alliegence that has become a burden. They attach to an adventuring band in order to appease the God, who demands blood for the benefits of the pact. The Druid seeks to balance the cruelty of nature's violence with the beauty of the nature's force and guardianship of the Wild lands.
3. A Druid of Spores with one level of Cleric of the Grave that serves as a Preist and Undertaker at the largest cemetery in a city. They value the process of life and death and help to shepherd the many dead into a natural state of Death, while combating evil Undead forces.
Hey all, I've been trying to brainstorm some more unique Druids for an upcoming campaign, and come up with a few good ones that come from urban areas, rather than the traditional wilderness druids are (rightfully) associated with.
First up is a Moon druid who works as a bodyguard for a wealthy merchant family, using their wildshapes to transform into powerful beasts to scare off or battle anyone who would do their masters harm. As to how they gained their druidic powers: they could be a descendant of a lycanthrope, or have sought out a more comfortable life after surviving off of the land for so long with their circle.
Second is a Shepard druid who nourishes the creatures who live in the sewers and secret tunnels all across a city. They moved to the city after realising they could not stop the encroachment of civilisation on nature, only help the animals who live in a place so unlike their original homes. They create little hideaways for the animals, as well as summoning beasts and fey creatures to show the people of the city what the world truly looks like outside of their stone walls.
Finally, a Stars druid who learnt to use the stars to navigate the paths around and between cities, offering arcane knowledge and power to anyone who can pay for their services. They travelled with a performing circus, who needed a 'mystic' to read people's futures, and bring a touch of magic and mystery to their performances. Having self-taught themselves to read the stars whilst living on the streets of a city, they figured they were the perfect fit.
Share any ideas you guys have for Urban Druids, I'd love to hear them.
Your second one kinda sounds like my all-time favourite character, and he's not even a druid (he's a monk)! Why does everyone else seem to assume that characters who live in sewers are always chaotic evil goblins and the like? Some tropes are so much fun to mess with!
A druid acts as the incarnation of their surrounding ecosystem. A city is an ecosystem.
People compare life to living in a big city to life in the jungle in some fiction. I get the competition aspect of both and the sense of being dwarfed by surroundings with multiple levels and types of activity. However, an ecosystem is mostly self-sustaining. City life is largely only possible because of farmers/fishers. Cities don't grow nearly enough food to feed their populations, so their existence is dependent on external sources of food for nutrients. Those nutrients are available because of business systems related to the large scale transport and sale (or government rationing) of foodstuffs. This is why when you watch a good post-apocalyptic zombie TV Show, a lot of stuff seems dysfunctional - it's not just that zombies are everywhere trying to eat people, it's also that the distribution of food from outside the city has stopped. Having money doesn't do you any good when food available is free anyway or rotting because fresh food is not coming in.
There is still an ecosystem in a city. I've spotted foxes, rabbits, groundhogs, squirrels, racoons, chipmunks, oppossum, hawks, 3 banded skink (lizard), various snakes, rats, bats, skunks, feral cats, various birds, etc, and heard owls in cities. There are coyotes in cities too. Plus, many people forage in cities (mushrooms, pawpaws, black walnuts, apples, plums, ginkho nuts, figs, pears, backberries, etc.
I'm going to throwback to the "original" Mario movie, With Bob Hoskins, John Leguizamo, and Dennis Hopper. That city was overrun by mushrooms and fungi and etc. So: Spore Druid.
There is still an ecosystem in a city. I've spotted foxes, rabbits, groundhogs, squirrels, racoons, chipmunks, oppossum, hawks, 3 banded skink (lizard), various snakes, rats, bats, skunks, feral cats, various birds, etc, and heard owls in cities. There are coyotes in cities too. Plus, many people forage in cities (mushrooms, pawpaws, black walnuts, apples, plums, ginkho nuts, figs, pears, backberries, etc.
I never said that there isn't animal and plant life. And yes, some better planned cities certainly have a park or two with lush trees that bear nuts or fruit. However, cities exist to serve as commercial/manufacturing/admin centers. Producing food isn't even a secondary function most of the time. Cities are net food sinks, not food producers. The reason that there is an apparent abundance of raccoons, foxes, rats, and skunks in some cities is because A) it's near an unsettled area like a mountain, forest, or undeveloped river; and B) people in modern First World cities are wasteful - they throw away a lot of edible food, barely rotting food, soiled diapers and bones (and unlike in Third World countries, most humans aren't hungry enough to scavenge most of those scraps). This "refuse" attracts scavengers. However, if all the people left or died, shipments of food would stop coming in, resulting in short term boom for scavengers feeding off the leftover food but followed by a long period wherein the most of the scavengers would either starve or leave for more fruitful scavenging grounds. Eventually, yes, the remaining trees, weeds, and other plants will re-seed the area with help from birds and squirrels. Eventually, the city that is deprived of its human inhabitants will once again become a true ecosystem. See the YT videos about Chernobyl. Once the humans left, a bunch of non-human animals and plants returned to recolonize the area, radiation or no radiation.
The other thing to keep in mind is that real-life cities during much of the Middle Ages did not have public parks the way some modern cities do. Urban design, while not entirely unknown among some civilizations, was generally far more haphazard when the concept existed at all. Sewage problems were frequent because most societies of that time lacked any type of indoor plumbing unless maybe if you were part of a well-healed religious institution or one of the nobles who could afford a fancy house. People had trouble showering or bathing much of the time. In that environment, there were certainly plenty of rats and feral dogs. Squirrels, ducks and rabbits would have quickly been killed for food by the too-often hungry poor. There's a reason that the Black Plague spread so fast and was so deadly in Europe and Northern Africa in the 1300s.
The kind of city with scenic parks, lovers' lanes, fruit and nut trees, well-spaced roads, sewer systems, etc. existed almost exclusively as private grounds for royalty or very wealthy nobles. A few exceptions to this existed, perhaps, but they were by far the exception. The vast majority of people living in cities during the Middle Ages did not enjoy that kind of life. Cities in most D&D modules are far cleaner and orderly than actual medieval cities.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
To post a comment, please login or register a new account.
Hey all, I've been trying to brainstorm some more unique Druids for an upcoming campaign, and come up with a few good ones that come from urban areas, rather than the traditional wilderness druids are (rightfully) associated with.
First up is a Moon druid who works as a bodyguard for a wealthy merchant family, using their wildshapes to transform into powerful beasts to scare off or battle anyone who would do their masters harm. As to how they gained their druidic powers: they could be a descendant of a lycanthrope, or have sought out a more comfortable life after surviving off of the land for so long with their circle.
Second is a Shepard druid who nourishes the creatures who live in the sewers and secret tunnels all across a city. They moved to the city after realising they could not stop the encroachment of civilisation on nature, only help the animals who live in a place so unlike their original homes. They create little hideaways for the animals, as well as summoning beasts and fey creatures to show the people of the city what the world truly looks like outside of their stone walls.
Finally, a Stars druid who learnt to use the stars to navigate the paths around and between cities, offering arcane knowledge and power to anyone who can pay for their services. They travelled with a performing circus, who needed a 'mystic' to read people's futures, and bring a touch of magic and mystery to their performances. Having self-taught themselves to read the stars whilst living on the streets of a city, they figured they were the perfect fit.
Share any ideas you guys have for Urban Druids, I'd love to hear them.
'The Cleverness of mushrooms always surprises me!' - Ivern Bramblefoot.
I'll worldbuild for your DnD games!
Just a D&D enjoyer, check out my fiverr page if you need any worldbuilding done for ya!
I think the idea about the "encroachment of civilization" is the key here. An urban druid is not a druid who voluntarily moved from the forest into a town. An urban druid is someone who lived in that forest until the people showed up, cut down all the trees, built houses out of those trees, and built a dam in the river to power their grain mill. I think it was George Lopez who, years ago in his stand up comedy routine said, "We didn't cross the border! The border crossed us!" That's the key here.
So you grew up in that forest, and you remember when this was a beautiful wild place. You remember as a child the sadness and despair in your parent's faces when the people began building houses at the edge of the forest. But you were too young to understand. As you got older, more of the forest disappeared as more of those houses spread, and you began to understand. So your people faced a difficult decision. Either flee and try to find some other forest to live in, or stay and try to win back your land.
Many left. You stayed.
But a simple frontal combat assault on the town would never work. The guards have armor, and they outnumber you, and acts of outright bloodshed on your part would turn the citizenry even further against you. Instead, you opted for a subtler approach. Live among them, make yourself useful, earn their trust - but at the same time spread rumors and stories about the fickle and sometimes malevolent spirits that inhabit these lands. And people begin to notice fires suddenly just going out for no reason... random wind gusts that slam doors and windows open and closed and that blow laundry across the yards... well paved pathways become torn asunder overnight...rooftops randomly burst aflame... sounds of thunder wake people at all hours of the night even in clear weather... and all that is just with CANTRIPS!
Shops suffer as customers keep getting caught by invisible Snares that yank them off their feet and suspend them in midair! Oxen and mules pulling plows in the fields suddenly just stop, and stubbornly refuse to continue. Each night a different resident reports feeling their entire house shake in the night. No one gets hurt, but dishes fall and things break, and the kids wake up screaming and crying. And we're still only on FIRST LEVEL spells!
All the while the people are turning to you to appeal to these restless spirits, and you go through the motions of ritual after ritual, to no avail. You explain that the spirits have inhabited these lands since long before even your people did, and they will not be moved by these townsfolk. Either the town moves, or the spirits get even angrier!
Cyclones of dirt and dust occasionally tear through the market square making a mess and tossing people and goods aside. Random metal objects glow red hot just as someone is about to grab it, and the town doctor has to treat new burn injuries every day. A lush garden of vegetables instantly withers and dies for no apparent reason! Sharp spiky brambles periodically grow all around the main gate to town, scratching and injuring any who try to come or go! And we're still only up to SECOND LEVEL spells!
Eventually someone will figure out that you're not on the town's side, and that you're involved in causing these problems. But by the time they figure that out, you're standing on a rooftop casting Call Lightning and then turning into a hummingbird. For the next ten minutes another townsperson dies every six seconds as the guards are aiming their crossbows at a four inch bird flying 100 feet in the air! And all of this is from just ONE angry druid! Imagine if there were two! Or three! At some point at least some of those townsfolk will start to say, "It's time to cut our losses! We can rebuild somewhere safer! It's not worth losing more people!"
As the margarine commercials used to say... "It's not nice to fool Mother Nature!"
Anzio Faro. Protector Aasimar light cleric. Lvl 18.
Viktor Gavriil. White dragonborn grave cleric. Lvl 20.
Ikram Sahir ibn-Malik al-Sayyid Ra'ad. Brass dragonborn draconic sorcerer Lvl 9. Fire elemental devil.
Wrangler of cats.
I'm running an autognome circle of stars druid, and that seems like it can easily be urban (it's a construct (not organic) and it's not as plant/animal focused as other druid types). And, you get specialized design, plus herbalism (creates potions and antivenom). So, my character has thieves tools, tinker tools, and the herbalism kit (and navigator's tools through spelljammer his background) and could easily make a living or trade for services in a city. You could just as easily select blacksmith tools. He gets starry form but can still wild shape into animals to get around the city or even use wild companion (a temporary familiar) to scout. A Warforged could easily be urban too (since it's a construct).
Food, Scifi/fantasy, anime, DND 5E and OSR geek.
The most important element of a druid for me is why are they adventuring or tolerating this diverse group of wanderers they're with at all?
This seems to feed right into the Urban druid idea. One thought is that multi-classing another type could provide interesting backgrounds to help position an urban druid in humanoid settlements.
1. Forest Gnome Druid with one level of Sorcerer/Wild Magic. The Gnome had no idea why his traditional shamanistic practices were producing unexpected results, and after several injuries due to errant spells or effects, they decided to seek more knowledge in the Mage's Guild of a large nearby city. They spend some of their time studying in order to attempt to control their Wild Magic surges, and earn a living producing Potions and Elixers based on their tribal healing tradition. After a while, failing to find enough answers at the Mage's Guild, they decide to start adventuring to learn more ...
2. A Druid of the Moon with one level of Warlock tricked into a pact with Malar after being promised more primal power who has come to settlements to seek out priests of Malar, and understand better this alliegence that has become a burden. They attach to an adventuring band in order to appease the God, who demands blood for the benefits of the pact. The Druid seeks to balance the cruelty of nature's violence with the beauty of the nature's force and guardianship of the Wild lands.
3. A Druid of Spores with one level of Cleric of the Grave that serves as a Preist and Undertaker at the largest cemetery in a city. They value the process of life and death and help to shepherd the many dead into a natural state of Death, while combating evil Undead forces.
A druid acts as the incarnation of their surrounding ecosystem. A city is an ecosystem.
Your second one kinda sounds like my all-time favourite character, and he's not even a druid (he's a monk)! Why does everyone else seem to assume that characters who live in sewers are always chaotic evil goblins and the like? Some tropes are so much fun to mess with!
🍅 PM me the word 'tomato' 🍅 Extended Signature Musk Sucks, Quit X!
People compare life to living in a big city to life in the jungle in some fiction. I get the competition aspect of both and the sense of being dwarfed by surroundings with multiple levels and types of activity. However, an ecosystem is mostly self-sustaining. City life is largely only possible because of farmers/fishers. Cities don't grow nearly enough food to feed their populations, so their existence is dependent on external sources of food for nutrients. Those nutrients are available because of business systems related to the large scale transport and sale (or government rationing) of foodstuffs. This is why when you watch a good post-apocalyptic zombie TV Show, a lot of stuff seems dysfunctional - it's not just that zombies are everywhere trying to eat people, it's also that the distribution of food from outside the city has stopped. Having money doesn't do you any good when food available is free anyway or rotting because fresh food is not coming in.
There is still an ecosystem in a city. I've spotted foxes, rabbits, groundhogs, squirrels, racoons, chipmunks, oppossum, hawks, 3 banded skink (lizard), various snakes, rats, bats, skunks, feral cats, various birds, etc, and heard owls in cities. There are coyotes in cities too. Plus, many people forage in cities (mushrooms, pawpaws, black walnuts, apples, plums, ginkho nuts, figs, pears, backberries, etc.
Food, Scifi/fantasy, anime, DND 5E and OSR geek.
In *Honor* of the New Mario movie...
I'm going to throwback to the "original" Mario movie, With Bob Hoskins, John Leguizamo, and Dennis Hopper. That city was overrun by mushrooms and fungi and etc. So: Spore Druid.
Blank
I never said that there isn't animal and plant life. And yes, some better planned cities certainly have a park or two with lush trees that bear nuts or fruit. However, cities exist to serve as commercial/manufacturing/admin centers. Producing food isn't even a secondary function most of the time. Cities are net food sinks, not food producers. The reason that there is an apparent abundance of raccoons, foxes, rats, and skunks in some cities is because A) it's near an unsettled area like a mountain, forest, or undeveloped river; and B) people in modern First World cities are wasteful - they throw away a lot of edible food, barely rotting food, soiled diapers and bones (and unlike in Third World countries, most humans aren't hungry enough to scavenge most of those scraps). This "refuse" attracts scavengers. However, if all the people left or died, shipments of food would stop coming in, resulting in short term boom for scavengers feeding off the leftover food but followed by a long period wherein the most of the scavengers would either starve or leave for more fruitful scavenging grounds. Eventually, yes, the remaining trees, weeds, and other plants will re-seed the area with help from birds and squirrels. Eventually, the city that is deprived of its human inhabitants will once again become a true ecosystem. See the YT videos about Chernobyl. Once the humans left, a bunch of non-human animals and plants returned to recolonize the area, radiation or no radiation.
The other thing to keep in mind is that real-life cities during much of the Middle Ages did not have public parks the way some modern cities do. Urban design, while not entirely unknown among some civilizations, was generally far more haphazard when the concept existed at all. Sewage problems were frequent because most societies of that time lacked any type of indoor plumbing unless maybe if you were part of a well-healed religious institution or one of the nobles who could afford a fancy house. People had trouble showering or bathing much of the time. In that environment, there were certainly plenty of rats and feral dogs. Squirrels, ducks and rabbits would have quickly been killed for food by the too-often hungry poor. There's a reason that the Black Plague spread so fast and was so deadly in Europe and Northern Africa in the 1300s.
The kind of city with scenic parks, lovers' lanes, fruit and nut trees, well-spaced roads, sewer systems, etc. existed almost exclusively as private grounds for royalty or very wealthy nobles. A few exceptions to this existed, perhaps, but they were by far the exception. The vast majority of people living in cities during the Middle Ages did not enjoy that kind of life. Cities in most D&D modules are far cleaner and orderly than actual medieval cities.