The False Werewolf

Inspired by a recent episode of the Maniculum. 

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To the greater world the faoladh (written phonetically as Fé La)  is a variety of lycanthrope from the Northwestern Isles. Several popular bestiaries describe it as an intelligent and beneficent creature, occasionally acting as a sort of guardian to travelers or livestock and contents itself to live on rabbits, fish, and wild deer when in their lupine form. Travel narratives containing faoladh encounters sell quite well, and have fueled a modest but steady stream of mainlander monster-watchers, scholars, and unclassified tourists in the isles, hoping to catch a glimpse of this rare creature (or for the greater dreamers, a glimpse of the hidden village somewhere in the moors where they can learn mystical combat arts from the peaceful wolf-folk.)

And every year a few more tourists never make it home, because everything in those bestiaries is horseshit. The faoladh isn't even a lycanthrope; it's a mimic. 

See, there's something called a clade-shift event; a population of mimics (from a few individuals up to an entire species) will undergo a radical adaptation to take advantage of an open ecolological niche, and this transformation is performed at such totality that the mimicry abilities are entirely lost and the novel form becomes permanent. CS Events are the second most common source of new and emerging species in the world next to wizard's experiments (see And Suddenly, They're Here (Habimbra, 678) and The Metamorphics (Ilwan-Shaz, 706) for a detailed exploration of the phenomenon), with an estimated 15-30% of the world's non-manmade monster species deriving through this process.

Faoladh retain both the ambush-hunting strategy and mild cognitohazardous properties of their earlier forms: unless they are exercising a significant amount of attention and focus, nearby humans will interpret the faoladh as harmless, allowing the beast to to make an easy kill. Faoladh are solitary hunters, and their area-of-effect is not strong enough to mask their a killing from observers (even those within the field); as such, their targets are primarily lone travelers or individuals separated from their group.

Most monstrumists believe faoladh are the result an extremely recent CS Event - all descriptions of the creature are dated within the last two decades, and the popular bestiaries provide either unsourced (and nearly always fabricated) folkloric traditions or distortions of extant Northwestern lycanthrope stories.

This would, under ideal circumstances, be the end of it. Corrections would be made in the next edition and life would go on. But the faoladh has proven to be remarkably popular among amateur monstrumists on the mainland, and accounts of faoladh encounters have proven to be a lucrative micro-market. The authors are by and large fantasists unfamiliar with the history and folklore of the Isles, not only continuing to proclaim that there are indeed benevolent wolf-men in the Isles, but aggressively shouting down attempts at correction by scholars and naturalists. Indeed, the lead editor of the 4th edition of The Codex Monstrissimus received so many angry letters that he had them bound in leather and put on his bookshelf.

The spread of misinformation is now so pronounced that the faoladh population has begun to demonstrate behaviors wholly invented by the writers of those false accounts, leading to a drastic increase in tourist death. Attempts to stem the further promulgation of misinformation through a public awareness campaign have been unsuccessful thus far, and it is expected that the county councils of Flat Rock, Dolmen Hill, White Creek, and Queen's Tomb will enact a travel ban and dedicated hunting season this upcoming winter to try and bring both the narrative and the foaladh population under control.

The faoladh's legacy is ultimately a case study in how misinformation endures correction. The first major publication to describe a monster, no matter how errant, will shape public perception long after it is released, even if it debunked by later research.

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Faoladh (Fé La) 

Appearance:  Wolf-headed humanoid; grey-white or russet-cream colored fur

Defense: Rubbery hide

Attacks: Jaws that bite; claws that catch; lacerating tongue

Motivation: Hunger, territoriality 

Special Properties: Cognitohazardous area-of-effect (pacification, cognition-dulling); may shift between bipedal and quadrupedal forms; limited ability to imitate human face structure, will compensate by obscuring with facial hair.

1d10 False narratives players might have heard: This faoladh...

1. ... saves an infant from an adder that crawled into its crib in the middle of the night.
2. ... directs lost travelers to a hidden spring.
3. ... solves a mysterious murder by discerning the presence of a possessive demon. 
4. ... adopts an abandoned child and teaches them magic and/or martial arts.
5. ... delivers fish and seabirds to the house of a sick farmer.
6. ... disguises itself as a beggar to find a missing clan heir. 
7. ... falls in love with a woman wearing a daffodil-yellow dress.
8. ... rescues a noblewoman from an unhappy marriage.
9. ... guards a cache of pirates' treasure until a worthy inheritor comes forth.
10. ... retrieves a lost prize sheep.