Night druids
They are also known as twisted druids, or famine druids, or plague druids, or pestilence druids.
They are a rare subclass of druids. They are so rare not everyone agrees they exist.
A druid normally reveres nature and cares for forests in general and the sacred trees in particular. Druids spend their lives making forests and the wilderness generally into beautiful places.
Generally, druids are like psychic gardeners. A forest cared for by an order of druids for centuries becomes a powerful magic place, where the trees grow in patterns that boost the magic of the druids during their rituals.
With enough time, the trees in the forest form a conscious emergent organism.
But sometimes, when a druid's forest is destroyed, a druid is transformed into an agent of wrath.
These night druids seek to wipe out whatever they blame for the death of their holy forests.
How druids become night druids
It is not well understood by outsiders how the transformation works, but there are theories. The death of the forest might work as a sacrifice and the druid seeking transformation to a night druid must perform a certain ritual.
There are rumors that sometimes the forest may transform the druid into a night druid without the druid's consent, and the forest's last act is to place a geas on the druid to avenge the forest's death.
The legend
The legend of the night druid is often told as a cautionary tale.
A new town grows prosperous and becomes a center of trade and banking for the kingdom.
Soon the new town is a great city, bigger and more opulent than any other city in the kingdom, except the capital city.
The acquisition of wealth and luxury become the obsession of the people.
Merchants in the town, hungry for new sources of profit, realize the nearby forest is full of rare and beautiful ancient trees.
The merchants send teams of loggers into the forests to make camps and begin harvesting the trees.
Bidders across the kingdom immediately promise fortunes for these logs once news spreads about them. The logs are indeed from ancient magic trees. Owning furniture made from this wood becomes a status symbol. The most powerful families aim to buy enough to build whole palaces with it.
After a short time, the merchants selling the logs have grown very wealthy indeed. They have paid for roads to be made into the forest, and they have hired anyone willing to work to go to their logging camps.
The forest is vast and the merchants they have many, many years before the last tree falls.
The forest is home to a very old and tiny order of druids. The druids have not met with any other people in centuries, preferring to ignore what is outside the border of the forest.
The druids discover the loggers that are cutting down trees and dragging them away to be shipped on barges to the winning bidders.
The druids request a meeting with the mayor of the city, and the druid leader travels with a few attendants to the city.
In a strange and ancient accent, the old druid explains how these trees are holy to them, and they cannot be cut down, and appeals to the mayor's better nature.
He explains how the order of druids have cared for this forest for centuries.
And there are special groves in the forest, where particular trees were planted in particular locations.
And now, after all these years, the trees are mature, and the druids do certain rituals.
But if the trees are cut down, then it will again be centuries before they grow back. And they will need to be tended by an order of druids the whole time.
The druid offers the mayor a gift of different seedlings and explains how his order will help the mayor start his own forest garden.
The mayor says to the druid, "I simply can't wait that long. We are not as long-lived as your kind."
"Your rituals and your promises are worth almost nothing to me, compared to the wealth that I can extract from the forest."
The mayor gives the secret signal and his guards attack the druid and his attendants.
The druids fight bravely. One of the attendants transforms to a bat and flies away.
The mayor commands his wizards to send hawks and owls out after the attendant, but the bat escapes them and makes it back into the forest.
The other druids fall soon after, but not after many guards are also killed.
That night, the forest fights back. Terrified loggers flee camps.
But the merchant guid will not be deprived of this source of wealth. It contacts the mercenary guild. The merchants hire armies of mercenaries to wipe out the druids in the forest.
And for weeks, a savage battle rages between wave after wave of mercenaries and the small ancient order of druids.
Many mercenaries die horrible deaths. But the merchants spend more money and hire more and send them into the forest to hunt druids.
The merchants start running out of money.
Out of desperation, the merchants strikes a deal with a powerful mercenary clan, offering to pay them by sharing profits after the forest is harvest.
The mercenaries demand a huge chunk of the profits.
This represents vastly more money than the mercenary guild now can ever they ever imagined making, so their leaders send everyone into the forest.
After brutal violence and many dead mercenaries, finally, the few remaining surviving druids retreat into a corner of the forest.
Then the mercenaries clear a line and then build a wall trapping the druids in their corner.
From that corner, they watch the logging crews return to cut down the sacred groves.
The druids are down to a few number, and they stage small raids against logging crews when they can, but they have mostly been defeated.
With logging exports able to resume, gold pours into the merchants of the city.
The mercenary clan also grows insanely rich.
The transformation
The legend says on a new moon, the last corner of the forest went up in flames. It isn't clear who burned the forest. Some say it was part of the ritual to create the night druid. Others say the night druid was born in response to the destruction of the forest.
After the fire finally ended, the next day, the forest was just an empty landscape of black charcoal ash and intermittent dead tree trunks.
The night druid's revenge
A new disease began infecting the people of the city. People cough and spit and then as the infection worsens, they often cough up clouds of black and gray vapor, almost like ashes.
The disease spreads through the air and soon the entire city was quarantined.
Soon almost everyone died or fled the city.
Then slowly the ashmouth disease appeared in other cities. Slowly, it seemed that anyone that had any contact with any of the sacred trees that were cut down got the disease. Some recovered. Others did not.
The disease terrified everyone.
Eventually people started shipping barges of the old trees back to the city.
The city was now almost empty, except for a few gangs of bandits that were looting the city while fighting each other.
Barges with the logs arrived in the harbor. The cargo was left there and the crews fled away as quickly as possible.
Contrast with regular druids
Most druids spend their lives guarding, healing, growing the forest, and generally prefer to work with nature in harmony.
There are long held traditions where farmers leaves gifts in their fields after planting. They hope to lure druids from the forests nearby, who maybe bless their crops.
This is what most people think about when they think about the forest folk.
But night druids seek to wipe out civilization and restore the world to a land where there is no clearing of land for farming or for building cities.
Signs of night druids
There are superstitions about signs that a night druid is targeting a city (or village, or farm) for destruction.
People may break out in strange skin rashes.
People will notice more insects appear everywhere, and the insects will look unfamiliar, even bizarre and threatening.
People and livestock will experience more insect stings.
Livestock will often grow very ill.
Crops will suffer.
Weather will become more threatening.
Cultivate plagues
The night druids, in their words, correct the imbalance of nature by destroying the source of the imbalance.
They are often said to destroy cities by using what was already inside them.
They can magnify the effect of all the diseases of civilization.
The plague druids have rituals to create a new pathogen. As more rituals are performed, the pathogen grows stronger, and the plague druid grows weaker.
The night druid intensifies an existing disease by cultivating it in himself or herself.
This can require the plague druid to risk his own death as he or she develops the new more lethal strain of disease.
At some point the plague druid may die, so usually they decide to stop making the plague stronger. Instead, the plague druid performs new rituals to build an immunity to the disease.
Then once healthy enough, the plague druid then goes to wherever he wants to destroy, and spreads it.
Disease can be spread through biting insects, like mosquitoes, or by throwing their own blood into the faces of people in crowds, or many other methods.
pest infestation
Night druids often cause swarms of pests, like locusts, or rats to invade towns.
The rats spread disease but are often vastly more aggressive and brave than typical rats.