Hello!!

[Kyberwulf]

Hello.
In honor of Friday the 13th, I want your help. I know this ins't alot of time!

I want to design a Druidic Circle with... 13 members.

All must fall within the levels of 12-13 disregard LA but if the NPC has HD from being a creature i.g. Minotaur Apply those to the level.

The Leader of the Circle is a Moonspeaker.

[Zale]

Oh.. It is the Thirteenth. Nearly missed it.

I'm not precisely good at optimizing but, hey, this is a Druid. They're hard to mess up.

I'm assuming this is 3.5, with most sources allowed.

[eggs]

Druid is probably the single most customization-discouraging class in D&D.

If you rolled 13 times on the Reincarnate table, picked animal companions at random and filled the feat slots of every one of them with the same progression of Augment Summoning->Natural Spell->Summon Elemental->Quicken Spell, they'd still have more build-based variety than most PC druids, and still would have problems with being on the high end of the power curve.

[Zale]

Why so?

A Druid can choose sub-optimal options and still do fairly well, can't they?

[Flickerdart]

13 different druids, eh?

1 Arcane Hierophant with an uber pet
1 Planar Shepherd with one of the less broken planes
1 Fochluchan Lyrist
1 Summoner
1 Wildshape focused guy going MoMF (because we're not high enough level for Shapechange)
1 plain Druid, a sort of Jack of all Druid Trades
1 uh...that's all I got. We're 7 Druids short!

[JellyPooga]

How about having 3 each of the Neutral-X (Neutral Evil, etc.) alignments with only the main dude being 'True' Neutral? It's not a massive or even particularly noticable difference between them, but thematically it kinda works. Within each 'triad', you could repeat certain themes; 3's are a good number and appear in all sorts of folklore and mythology. One 'triad' (perhaps the Neutral Good one) could all be women; a Maiden a Mother and a Hag, for example. The Neutral Evil triad could be a male or otherwise more destructive equivalent. The third triad (perhaps the Chaotic Neutral one) could represent the "changable" elemental forces somehow (storms, fire, air, weather, etc.) and the fourth the "stable" ones (earth, time, etc.).

Quite how you stat these out is up to you.

[Zale]

And when all else fails, throw on some obscure races and templates.

Anthropomorphic Bat anyone?

[Randomguy]

Why so?

A Druid can choose sub-optimal options and still do fairly well, can't they?

Yes, they can.

A cool thing about a Coven with so many members is that you can super-specialise your druids, so each can have a very specific role.

I recommend:
One summoner specialist, with feats and stuff to boost summoning. Greenbound summoning, augment summoning, stuff like that. (I don't actually know what greenbound summoning does, but I've heard it was a very strong option).

One healer, with feats and items to boost healing, like the spontaneous healer feat maybe.

One Cloistered Cleric of Obad-Hai (or possibly Elhonna) with some nature-y domains, to give them more versatility than just the druid spell list. (This could be the healer, actually). A wild cohort would be a nice touch for this one.

One wildshape specialist, either with a bunch of wildshape improving feats, like dragon wildshape and Fast Wildshape and stuff. or with the Master of Many Forms prestige class. This could possibly be a Wildshape mystic Ranger. Losing the druid casting sucks, but with 12 other full casters around it's no great loss.

One Arcane Heirophant, again to give them more than just the druid list to work with. This could possibly be a Sylph.

One Beastmaster, for a bunch of Animal Companions that the entire group can buff.

A spontaneous casting variant Druid that specialises in blasting, with loads of metamagic feats.

Possibly a daggerspell Shaper.

A shapeshift variant druid with high Strength.

A shugenja, a spirit shaman or a nature themed Wu-Jen wouldn't be too out of place. Maybe even one of each.

[Aurenthal]

I haven't seen the suggestion of a buffer, take extend spell and spam his buffing spells.

[Urpriest]

Any reason we're aiming for HD 13 and not CR 13?