Weretiger by Jennette Brown

Normally solitary creatures, weretigers do occasionally mate and form families, though they normally scatter once the litter grows to maturity.

Jax and Thessia Ironsky are different. Very much in love with each other, unusually fertile, and free from the territoriality so common in their race, over the years they’ve raised a large family of over a dozen weretigers (some of them grandchildren). Needing some stability to raise their litters, they established themselves as spice merchants.

This has not gone without trouble. Several of their children chafe under the burden of running the business, since most of them hunt in the wilderness for rare roots and tree bark as spice ingredients. Several have threatened to take a large chunk of the family’s considerable savings and run off to start their own lives. None have yet followed through, perhaps recognizing Jax and Thessia’s shrewd business acumen.

Meanwhile, although the Ironsky family has managed to keep their true nature secret from the rest of the world, which believes they are simply an extended family of human spice merchants, their true natures occasionally slip. The younger members of the family prefer to hunt in animal and even hybrid form, and rumors of lycanthropes running through the wilderness spread daily.

As a friendly faction, Jax and Thessia are simply trying to make their way in the world and keep their family together. Either Jax or Thessia approach the PCs, and ask them to scare Ari, one of their grandchildren. He regularly hunts in hybrid form, has been spotted by hunters, and refuses to change his habits. They want the PCs to find him, subdue him, then tie him up and bring him back to the family manor house.

Consider adding a complication in the form of a city patrol who are extremely suspicious of a group of adventurers carrying an unconscious, tied-up member of a well-known merchant family into the city.

As a foe faction, the Ironskies are vicious predators who use their merchant prowess as a convenient cover for murder. Twice a year they capture a humanoid, release them deep into the woods, and hunt them for sport. The city watch task the PCs with investigating these vanished humanoids, all of whom can be traced back to dealings with the Ironsky family. The PCs must confront the family in their home, and Ironsky Manor turns into a death trap. Worse, the PCs will never catch the entire family home at once, so at least some members will escape to become recurring villains.

Grab maps of Ironsky Manor here.

Time travel is messy, and it always rewrites history. Someone has to keep track of all those changes.

And so, the Library of Time serves as a collection of books about history, all history, including the histories that no longer happened.

However, a book that tells of an alternate timeline can be a powerful weapon in the wrong person’s hands. The very existence of a book like that warps reality around it. As such, the library sends out Agents constantly in search of these books in the wild, books which they call “Rogues.”

Those very few people aware of the Library of Time will likely only interact with it through Agents. Agents look human, but each possesses a special superpower that makes them extremely formidable.

As a friendly faction, an Agent uses the PCs to locate Rogues. Usefully, the nature of the alternate timeline in the book will shift the world around it. For a Rogue in which Ancient Greece defeated Rome and became a superpower, its owner will possess an unusually high number of Ancient Greek artifacts. For a Rogue in which Germany won World War II, a Nazi theme will prevail.

As a foe faction, the PCs need a Rogue for vital information about an important historical character who died much earlier in the actual timeline. For a modern equivalent, imagine characters investigating the Kennedy assassination who discover a Rogue in which Lee Harvey Oswald wasn’t shot.

This, naturally, puts them at odds with an Agent or two.

Keep an eye on this blog; on Monday I’ll post a stat block for an Agent.