For Buckets of Blood by the magnificent Chloe
Your body is not your own. Your hands are shaking. Your mouth is salivating. The fever is getting worse. But you're not going to give up just yet. You saw a face in the celling of the hospital. It spoke to you and told you secrets, oh so beautiful secrets, that let you live longer. All you need is their pineal glands - you ate one of a nurse and it made you so much stronger. Now you feel a wild beast inside - but you can hold it in check. You just need another fix.

Rabid Druid:

• Starting equipment: A torn up hospital gown, covered in dried up blood. A stolen surgical implement that still has a bit of her brain on it. Rabies. Will to survive (expend to heal 3d6 damage at any time)
• Starting skill: (roll d4) 1. Bat's Echolocation 2. Fox's Stealth 3. Squirrel's Climbing 4. Dog's nose

(This is a cursed class - you are forced to take further templates in it as you level up, removing templates of other classes if needed)

• A: Rabies, Sickly Strength
• B: Bites of change
• C: Thirst for blood
• D: Speak with plague

Rabies: You have a thing in your brain, a beast that is gnawing at it, eating your nerves from the inside. You have struck a bargain with it, however - as long as you will keep feeding it, this sickness will not kill you. One normal human pineal gland lasts you for 3d4+4 days when the illness doesn't cause you any penalties. You may salivate, froth, shudder and shake. You may scream when seeing water and yet constantly feel parched. But you take no penalties. When it wears off, you have a week until you die. Your saliva transmits rabies and if you get vaccinated the disease immediately flares up, killing you before the vaccine has a chance to work. As for magical healing - it doesn't work and deals you 3d6 non-lethal damage, as your body rapidly expels the normally healing energies. If you are incapacitated by it, you have a seizure.

Sickly Strength: The Thing that lives inside of you gave you more than your life, though. It gave you power, sheer and brutal power that you can use to feed it and stay alive. You can damage yourself with d4 damage (can't bring you below 0 HP, lashes at your Constitution, temporarily damaging it instead) to either:

• Deal an additional 2d4+2

damage with your attack

• See a secret of your surroundings, revealed through delirium
• Commit an act of ridiculous strength, like lifting a car for a few seconds or anything else that a human in hysteric strength is capable of.

Bites of Change: Creatures bite each other all the time. They most often don't appreciate the intimacy of it. The connection. The creature in you does, however. You can ask it for help, giving up a day from what it gave you and in return change into a creature that bit you before in all regards but physical. If a fish bit you, you can swim and breathe underwater, even if you should gurgle and die. If a bird bit you, you can fly by flapping your arms. It would look funny if not your look of exertion and the madness letting you fly. You also have the HP and size and natural weapons of the creature you mimic, even if you look completely normal. If you are reduced to 0 HP in this form you return to your normal one with 0 HP.

Thirst for blood: You learn something - even if water disgusts you you can sate your thirst with blood. Your fangs elongate - you are a true predator now. Your bite in your human form deals d10 damage and heals you for the same amount as damage dealt. So do your bites in other forms.

Speak with plague: As your delirium deepens you begin to see the truth about the world - it is a collection of plagues that live together, plagues of different sorts. Plagues of natural catastrophes, plagues of civilization, plagues of ideas. When you focus on a single thing (living, dead or inanimate) you may ask its plague a question. It will speak in your shivers that send you a code - in faces that show up in the darkness between your ears. It knows only about what the things that make it up do to further it - so a plague of a church will know what its members to do induct others, or a plague of a species of animals will know about their reproduction, migration and how prey upon other creatures. You can sacrifice creatures for them - in return they will infect systems you want them to infect.