The druid is a devotee of the natural world. A worshiper of the wilds and an envoy to the environment, the druid serves as a mediator between people and the land in which they live, much as a cleric serves as a mediator between people and the gods under which they live.
- Druids weave a very primal divine magic, and many of their supernatural abilities are bestowed on them from the land itself.
- Druids are fairly weak in combat, wearing light armor and wielding fairly weak weapons.
- Druids have a keen knowledge of nature. They can identify plants, animals, and potable water, and know enough to pass through even heavily overgrown areas without leaving a trace.
- Druids are knowledgeable about the fey, familiar as they are with the wilds in which the fey are often found. Druids thus have a resistance to their charms and deceptions. They also learn the languages of the fey, in addition to their own secret tongue.
- Druids can change shape into any common wild animal, such as bears or boars or frogs or birds. These forms are often ill-suited for fighting, but are useful as camouflage, or to scout.
- Druids are protected against the elements, suffering less from fire, lightning, and cold.
- Druids may befriend, find, control, and call various animals, insects, and plants, whom they can communicate with.
- Druids can use the environment around them, including the weather, to help them in combat, or in exploration, calling up storms and manipulating plant life. They can also shape the natural world, growing plants, altering stone, or transforming creatures and items.
- Druids learn to manipulate the elements, calling fire, and summoning elementals.
Iconic Druid Abilities
Wilderness Lore
Druids are an ally and companion to wild creatures: wild animals, plant creatures, supernatural spirits, fey creatures, and other beings of the wilderness. They are sociable with these creatures, and these creatures bear a druid none of the hostility or aggressiveness they feel toward most other people. The also have an uncanny ability to identify creatures and plant-life, finding even trackless wilderness something they can find food for a multitude in — they are familiar with the terrain of even an exotic land.
Natural Magic
Druids are part of the natural world, and so animals, plants, fey spirits, natural terrain, and the weather. This manifests in summoning magic, in elemental control, in manipulating plants and terrain, and otherwise bending the natural world to their will. In part, this means that druids are sometimes rather dependent on the environment around them — but the environment will always produce something somehow useful to the druid.
Shapechanging
Druids can adopt the shapes of various creatures. Some druids are fluid and flexible in their transformations, while others will choose a selected form or forms. Some use their abilities in combat, others purely for scouting and research. These forms may be natural animals, or may even be fey creatures or supernatural beings at higher levels.
Elemental Power
Fire. Earth. Wind. Water. Even Wood. Metal. Lightning. Ice. Light and Darkness. Life and Death. All of the base elements of the world respond to a druid's call. A druid can manifest these elements, manipulate them, and use them to attack their enemies, or defend their allies.
Druid Play Experience
Combat
Druids in combat are effectively "squishy wizards:" long-range fighters who employ combat magic to win the day. For a druid, that "combat magic" may include animals, plants, faerie, insects, or elementals that they've befriended or summoned.
Exploration
Druids shine when exploring wilderness areas. Their magic helps them shape their environment so that it is no longer hazardous, and their ability to interact with plants, animals, and the fey make them excellent point guards for the wilderness. However, they are not strong in more urban or underground areas.
Interaction
While druids interact very well with animals, the fey, elementals, and plants, they are not so good at interacting with other people. Often, others consider them eccentric outsiders at best, and dangerous savages at worst, closer to the beasts of the land than to their fellow people.
Circles
Druids organize in circles with a rather strict hierarchy that protect and nurture the wilderness outside of cities. Druids may organize around natural features such as a specific mountain, river, or grove, defending that area from incursion and pollution and getting to know that one area and its wild inhabitants very intimately. Visitors from outside the wild area may find themselves watched, or even accosted, if they invade the place.
A druid character climbs the ranks in a druid circle via combat with those of a higher rank, requiring a struggle for dominance not unlike that seen among herd animals, wherein the older, more powerful individuals cling to the highest ranks until something younger and more driven can steal it from them.