D&D Druid: 5 Wildshapes Your Dungeon Master Will Not Allow
It’s not happening. All of these are completely rules-legal, but you’re still not gonna get to play as them. There’s no way your GM will sign off on them, unless they’re going for a completely nonsensical setting or don’t mind crippling power disparities.
Look upon these Wildshapes, ye mighty, and despair:
1. The Haungharassk
Starting with this one because I talked about it in a previous article! This giant snail has a golden shell and even shinier stats, able to carry 9 passengers, climb walls, grant temporary hitpoints and remove curses with a single touch. It is hideously overpowered for its CR0 status, and most GMs will flatly refuse any attempt by their players to find one and add it to their DruidDex.
2. Minecraft Wolf
It’s gonna take a pretty flexible setting to justify blocky LEGO wolves, but those who somehow get permission will enjoy these straight upgrades to normal wolves. For some reason they get an extra +2 to their passive perception, and they’re mentioned to be adapted to the tundra, qualifying them for Extreme Cold immunity. Also your friends can use you as a stepping stool!
3. Enormous Tentacle
Honestly, you might be able to get this one through. The primary weird thing about it is that it’s even considered a beast, when it’s really more of a body part. (Maybe your GM will give you the entire Kraken, you never know until you ask!) It’s a hell of a CR2 Wildshape if you can pitch it too, coming with a swim speed, blindsight, auto-grappling attacks and a Huge size. Then there’s the Reach feature that says it can reach “anywhere inside the room”, a very vague ability that is just asking for player abuse.
4. Winter Wolf
Hey, another weird wolf! And this one relies on a very questionable interpretation of the rules in Tales of the Yawning Portal. You see, Winter Wolves are CR3 monstrosities who do not qualify for Wildshape by any means. But the module stats “young winter wolves” as CR1 Beasts. So, if druids can legally become young winter wolves, could they pick one who’s on the cusp of adulthood, perhaps making use of an ally’s bestow curse to rapidly age themselves to the older statblock? Probably not, but it’s in there!
5. Onyx
Onyx is an ordinary housecat who hails from the Acquisitions Incorporated sample adventure “Orrery of the Wanderer”. However, since that adventure involves being shrunken down to a miniscule size, her stats are grossly inflated to let her fill a similar role to the cats from The Secret of NIMH or The Borrowers. If you treat her statblock-as-written, she’s a CR0 Huge beast with 400ft of movement who is immune to all damage and explicitly cannot be killed by any means. But your GM would need to be huffing catnip to possibly allow that in a regular-sized adventure.
Bonus #6. Female Steeder
Female Steeders are giant buglike mounts from Out of the Abyss who get an incredible laundry list of features for a CR1 monster. +7 Stealth, darkvision, spider climb, auto-grapple on hit… but the one you’re here for is their ability to leap 90 feet vertically or horizontally, which you can combo with the jump spell to travel a horrifying 270ft through the air in a single round. The problem is that the devs realized their mistake and updated it to be a monstrosity in future publications, pretty solidly indicating they considered it overpowered for a low-level druid form. A few other quirky ex-beasts got similar treatment, including the spell-reflecting Crag Cats and invisibility-detecting tressyms.
No fun allowed! In many ways the steady pruning of any vaguely-fantastic beasts from the Wildshape roster reminds me of the dearth of martial weapon types in 5e. It really feels like spells are the only mechanic allowed to blossom exponentially, while the more melee-oriented among us are stuck with the same limited choices because, I dunno, maybe they think giving us something vaguely-creative will break the entire game. (Of course, they might have a point, considering how unbelievably versatile druids already are!)