101 atypical druids

[Rfkannen]

Hey why not continue the trend.


1) The gardener. He was a noble with a particular love of his garden, he would spend all day in it, singing to his flowers and watering his tomatoes. One day he heard the flowers sing back.

2) Street rat. He was born on the streets, stealing food and being pushed around, treated like an animal. He lived with the other street animals, and learned from them, the racoons taught him how to find food, cats told him where to sleep, roached told him how to stay stealthy. He became so connected to the cities animals that he connected to nature itself.

[Crisis21]

3. The City Slicker

He grew up in the city. Knew every street, every building, and those who frequented them. He explored every side alley and crawl hole in his youth, and could tell you all the best gossip, as well as how true it was, by his mid teens. He knows who to talk to for whatever you need, and who to avoid for your own good. He discovered that there is an essence to the city every bit as natural and nuanced as any so-called 'wilderness'. And he will see that essence protected from any who would poison it.

4. The Highlander

"What, you dinnae think dwarves coulda be druids, laddie? Well I'm guess'n ye must be feelin' pretty stupid 'bout now, ay?"

5. The Mountain Man

He's big. He's muscular. He's covered in furs so thick you're not entirely sure he's actually a he. You just know he looks over the snow-capped peaks and will happily break anyone who seeks to harm them over his knee.

[NovenFromTheSun]

6. The polluter.

Some druids might say that as populous becomes more advance they're damaging the world, but this one sees things differently. Ecosystems and species come, go, and are replaced; why complain when the two-legged types are speeding up that process? Nature is merely changing, and this druid's fine with watching and seeing what results.

[Braininthejar2]

7 The Pirate Lord. The loot belongs to his crew, the dead belong to the sharks. He belongs to the goddess of the sea, and he will see to it that everyone fears her.

[hymer]

8: The Astrologer. She sleeps much of the day away, but for the rest, she's very helpful, knowledgeable and useful to decent people near her. But she spends nearly all night watching the skies (unless it's cloudy), taking measurements, making notes. Because in the celestial cycles are the key to all understanding of cycles where we are now, and cycles are everything.

9: The Entropist. Everything dies. It will become part of the cycle of life and death, and new life will arise from it. But every time this happens, the world becomes a little colder. Cold is the ultimate truth. Warmth is life, and it is ever fleeting, ever dispersing. The end times are drawing inexorably closer, and no force in the universe can stop it.

[Geddy2112]

10. The humanoid hero
-The anthropogenic sphere is just as much a part of nature from a forest, ocean, river, stream, desert, etc. Humanoids are just primates(or some other highly evolved derivative) with fancy tools, language, and very complex social rituals. They certainly can despoil nature, but humanoids are equally part of the natural world, as are their creations. Keeping a balance between the two, and ensuring they live in harmony instead of strife(including defending people when nature gives them a bit too hard of a smack) is this druid's purpose.

[Anderlith]

The City Planner

This girl loves nature, but doesn't like getting too dirty. So she lives in a nice clean city, she sits on the city council of elders. She makes nature progressive laws & builds parks where elementals help protect the city & it's residents. No one is likely to vandalize a tree or fountain when the earth, or trees might rise up against you.

[Archpaladin Zousha]

12. The Green Man's Knight: The natural world needs its champions just as courts both mortal and fey do. This young, noble-hearted person was chosen to be such a champion. They ride into battle on their animal companion, a spear and a sharp sword in hand, ready to challenge and slay those malicious or careless enough to destroy nature's glorious gifts. Their leathers are no shining armor, but they carry themselves as nobly as any "civilized" paladin.

[Bohandas]

13.) The Aberration- This is a mind-flayer druid who has adopted a humanoid settlement as it's protected piece of "wilderness"

[JBPuffin]

14. The Metallurgist - Who needs a forge when one can sculpt metal with one's bare hands?

[Nupo]

15. A Gnome that lives deep underground and has never been to the surface. Lives among the mushrooms and other fungus. Consorts with burrowing animals and other subterranean life.

[Segev]

Others've already commented on similar ones, but:

16. Ants build hives. So do humanoids. He lives in a walled manor in a major metropolis, and views the city and its surroundings as one natural thing. As a gardener and zookeeper, he is steward over all creatures who dwell within his reach.

17. A nature shaman who views nature not as something to be revered, but to be dominated. Not in the pathetic ways of most men, who seek to shape it to their will and cower in fear from it, no no. By beating it at its own game and proving he can survive anything it throws at him, he has earned the right to fling everything it has at anything he wishes.

18. The necrodruid who views life and death as not a cycle, but two sides of the same coin. He is master of both; the living beasts serve him in life, and the unliving serve him in undeath. Leaving corpses to rot unused is wasteful. Negligent.

19. To most who know her, she's a simple veterinarian. She runs an animal shelter, and is every farmer's favorite go-to girl for caring for their sick livestock and work animals. Woe betide those who beat or mistreat them. She'll know. She always knows.

20. The Beast lurks in the shadows outside of town. It hunts any who break the taboos. Any who leave the protection of the town markers. But...no raiders have ever plagued this village; any who try fall prey to the Beast; they always break its taboos. And those who follow the rules are safe from other natural dangers, too...

[Bohandas]

21.) The Scoundrel - Druid of Olidammara (or other god of rogues and scoundrels). Involved with pot, and rat baiting, and various types of animal racing, and psychadelic mushrooms, and weather rituals involving getting ladies to take their clothes off so his god will make it rain

22.) The Control Freak - Lawful Neutral. Aggressively micromanages the plants and animals of the forest like an overzealous character from My Little Pony.

[VoxRationis]

23). The ES major: Young, urban, upper-middle-class, and well-educated. Knows nature mostly as the thing which his fellow city-dwellers are breaking in one way or another.

[Braininthejar2]

24 - the animal mama. Don't touch those dire boars! They're not mean, just scared, honest! She's been here for months and they'd never hurt her.

[Anderlith]

I don'the know if this is atypical or not, but I feel like sharing a character i played in nWoD
Boyd Brady, an Irish-American who learned the old ways of druidhood from his grandpa. He was a slacker stoner type, who travelled in a beat up van, which he grew pot in, & other various plants & herbs. The van was painted with a sign on the side saying Boyd's Botanicals & he would sell his plants both legal & illegal for money. (Only resources 1) He only wore sweatpants & flip flops because he would shape-shifting into animals a lot. Ran around naked a lot too. Also flirted with most everyone. Fun times.

[Dappershire]

13.) The Aberration- This is a mind-flayer druid who has adopted a humanoid settlement as it's protected piece of "wilderness"

Came here purely to make sure your idea made it here too. I'm just in totes love with the image. "Lookit the furry little prey beasts. With their strange audible tongue, and Euclidean nest angles. I shall walk as one with the 'humans', learn their wild ways, and perhaps awaken one's intellect to gather an animal companion..."


25. The Wild- Other Druids think they know Nature. Its secrets. Its dangers. Bears? Wolves? Heh. They know nothing. My jungles fill with life. All of it trying to end yours. The massed violence of your bear is nothing to that of the Tyrannosaur. The tactics of your wolf is nothing to that of the Deinonychus. Oh, you know plants? Fight your way out of one that has started digesting you in your sleep, and then speak to me of plants. My advise to you; study the rabbit. Its senses, its habits, its skill in running the Maze of Life. It may be the only thing that saves you; for the real Druid is here now.

[hymer]

26: The Nature Planner.
"Yes, I'm here to give you advance notice. We'll be putting an end to all that monoculture you have over on that hillside, starting spring next year."
"But that's me wheat field!"
"Right, but we're going to use it to expand the brushwood in this quarter. It's part of the preparations for reclaiming the dam."
"But the dam keeps the village safe!"
"Not for long, now. There'll be a beautiful river running through this valley, and the village commons will become a swamp again. It'll be a sight to see, I can tell you!"

[iceman10058]

The Warrior:

He became a druid not because he feels the wild needs protecting, only fools believe that. The wilds hold creatures so terrifing and powerful that most men would run in feer with soiled trowsers.

No he became a druid to tap into this raw power, to harness it and use it for himself.

[souridealist]

This feels like cheating, because there's actually a Pathfinder archetype for it, but:

28) The Wild Child: Maybe she was abandoned at birth by a cruel parent, maybe she was orphaned by mischance - but she didn't die. Wolves found her, or bears, or apes or serpents; they raised her as a strange little creature of their own. She's a creature of nowhere; other humans are a source of mystification and terror to her; she may not even be able to speak - but the animals and the land know her, and she knows them, and there's a power in that all its own.

Also,

29) The Accidental Mother: He wanted to be a jeweler. But he just had to go the wrong way at the wrong time, had to stop by the animal pens or the hatching pits or just the edge of the woods, and now a rare and precious creature thinks he is its mommy. He can't just let it die; what kind of jerk do you think he is, to let a helpless animal suffer? But the only ones who know anything about how to keep these things alive are the druids, and they don't share out parts of their knowledge, so now he's going to revere nature and he's going to like it, young man. He just has to hope he learns fast enough to keep up with his baby's growth...

[ATHATH]

30) The Witch: Treats nature as just another power source, and not as something particularly special that should be preserved and revered.

[Adeon Hawkwood]

31. The Sustainability Advisor

The Dwarf Clan Hold is buried under the mountains with a population the size of a major city and like all cities it is dependent on the surrounding areas to provide the resources that its people need. However resources are not infinite and without careful management the land will eventually be stripped bare and the Hold will die.

This management falls to the Clan's druids. They monitor the health of the farmland, regrow forests to provide wood for future generations and supervise the filling of abandoned pit mines so that the area can be reclaimed. When the population of the hold starts growing to much for the land to support they advise the Clan's leaders so that they can deal with it before it becomes a crisis, generally by arranging for the establishment of a new Hold in the wilderness where members of the Clan can emigrate.

The druids themselves rarely leave the immediate area of the Clan Hold but when invaders threaten they take to the field alongside their brethren, wearing suits of armor crafted from stone plates and wielding enormous stone hammers.

[hamiltond465]

32. The Wildfire.

With an affinity for fire, perhaps raised in a desert, or with a touch of demon in their blood, this druid directs the natural cycles of forest-fires, and occasionally heads the more violent of the anti-civilization circles.

[hymer]

33: The economy manipulator
Realizing that high humanoid population density is the bane of the natural world, and that cities run according to economic principles, this druid has studied economics extensively. S/he searches out the balance points and keeps a finger on the figurative tiller, surreptitiously deciding whether any given town or village in her/his area will grow, shrink or stay about the same. Farming, fishing, clean water, labour shortages, collapsing or booming mines, diseases spreading or not, etc. are all within her/his influence.

[Archpaladin Zousha]

33: The economy manipulator
Realizing that high humanoid population density is the bane of the natural world, and that cities run according to economic principles, this druid has studied economics extensively. S/he searches out the balance points and keeps a finger on the figurative tiller, surreptitiously deciding whether any given town or village in her/his area will grow, shrink or stay about the same. Farming, fishing, clean water, labour shortages, collapsing or booming mines, diseases spreading or not, etc. are all within her/his influence.
Back in the campaign I played an Ahnold Schwarzenegger paladin in, one of our party members was exactly like this! Despite being a druid, he always managed to negotiate our services for the best rewards from local rulers and always knew the most cost-effective method to keep our party alive, right up until the end of the campaign when he was destroyed by the sphere of annihilation in the final battle with the Clockwork Spirit!

34. The Banana Man: An eccentric islander with a bunch of fresh bananas always growing from the top of his enchanted staff. He generously shares his bountiful fruit with any he encounters, usually starving castaways on his island who credit his gifts with keeping them alive long enough to return to civilization. Colorful songbirds follow him wherever his carefree wanderings take him and sing as he dances around the fire to appease the spirits of the jungle long into the night.

[The Duskblade]

35: The Shifted.

For whatever reason they have taken the form of an animal and never returned. Maybe they are stuck that way and are seeking to return to their human form, or maybe they just decided they'd rather be a Hawk or Wolf. Either way it's certainly affected their mental state.

36: The ExtraPlanar

It's a big multiverse. What is natural on one Plane might be unnatural, bizarre or dangerous on another. This druid has come to a new universe and has decided to bring 'Nature' with him.

[DigoDragon]

37. The Unoptimist. This druid doesn't take the Natural Spell feat. :smalltongue:

[Crisis21]

38: The Storm Chaser

More than anything else in nature, this druid loves extreme weather. I mean loves it. They can't get enough of the howling winds, the pounding rain, the crashing thunder, or the rampant destruction that nature unleashes in her most primal of furies. And so they spend their days hunting down the fiercest storms they hear about just to bask in the glory of nature's fury one more time.

[Morphic tide]

39: The Far Landers. They learned a truth that has rarely been remembered, for it is so utterly contrary to what most see as "nature" that they hesitate to consider it a thing worth considering. These Druids learned that the Gods, and those before the Gods, and so on, wrought the Planes from the stuff of the Far Lands, and these madmen seek to return those planes to the true nature of everything. Unfortunately, because of frequent travel through the Far Lands, the few planes where this truth is actually true are long forgotten and already returned to the Far Lands and the group is too insane and persistent to realize that the situation isn't true for all planes.

[thamolas]

The Terraformer -- Spends time wandering deserts, ruined cities, and wastelands. In her pack, she carries seeds of various plants and carefully sprouts them. Every morning and night, she plants seedlings, co-ordinated so that they have a high chance of survival and will positively affect water retention, the water table itself, topsoil, and encourage gradual animal migration. If the lack of shade or water is an issue, she does what she can to establish water sources and build shade structures.

Kind of like this guy, but with magic powers: http://gizmodo.com/the-man-who-planted-a-forest-bigger-than-central-park-1606128111

[Herobizkit]

The Oozemaster: Borrowed lovingly from 3e, this Underdark Druid is fascinated with oozes, slimes and jellies. He maintains a farm to cultivate these creatures. In addition to maintaining a grove of edible fungi, he also collects spores. And molds. ^_^

[Sredni Vashtar]

The Cannibal: "Look, meat is meat, right? It's how life is. You live, you eat. You die, you are eaten. And I don't quite understand your insistence that 'sentience' is a factor here. Yeah, this elf could speak to you about their hopes and dreams, but a deer can too if you listen closely enough. Pass the gravy."

[Dappershire]

The Cannibal: "Look, meat is meat, right? It's how life is. You live, you eat. You die, you are eaten. And I don't quite understand your insistence that 'sentience' is a factor here. Yeah, this elf could speak to you about their hopes and dreams, but a deer can too if you listen closely enough. Pass the gravy."


43. The Vegetarian: Constantly travels the farmlands, awakening the minds of beast and fowl en masse. "Lets see them eat something that can beg for its life...cows have feelings too!"

[Sredni Vashtar]

43. The Vegetarian: Constantly travels the farmlands, awakening the minds of beast and fowl en masse. "Lets see them eat something that can beg for its life...cows have feelings too!"

44. The Hungry: "The animals talk to me. The plants talk to me. I can't eat anything!"

[Vizzerdrix]

44. The Hungry: "The animals talk to me. The plants talk to me. I can't eat anything!"

45 The Glutton- Only by becoming one can everything truly exist in harmony. Now please pass me the gravy.

46- the reclaimer- Sometimes nature needs a little help retaking forgotten places. This druid is a specialist who helps demolish old dungeons, forgotten castles, and abandonded wizard towers. Most often has a few rust monsters on hand to break down the metal bits

47-Aberations are just strange animals that ended up far from home, and someone needs to look out for them too.

[a_flemish_guy]

48: The Darwinist:
this guy has totally absorbed the notion of "nature: red of tooth and claw"

he remakes the animals in his forest into ferocious versions of their former selfs as to make them better at "surviving" (read: killing)

bassicly resides over the local "monster valley"