Lanaal Featherbreeze

[ericlboyd]

Greetings, I'm trying to recreate a character from a novel, Lanaal Featherbreeze from Son of Thunder.

Base race: gold elf

Abilities: She appears to have:

Speak with Animals (avians)
Wild Empathy (avians)

Ability to shapeshift into any avian form (in its original size, and only avians):

No evidence of spell abilities or particular martial prowess, although she does attack with her talons while in bird form and use darts in elf form.

Level doesn't matter.

Closest things I've found:

Complete Adventurer: Bird Lord
Player's Handbook II: Druid ACF Shapeshifter

The former might give the Speak with Animals and Wild Empathy. The latter might work, except the level 1 ability is Predatory Form, which suggests some land-bound predator. (Maybe terror bird?) Also, the shapeshifting does not change your size.

Anyhow, I'm still not satisfied. Looking for template or class that gives you a real focus on avian shapeshifting.

--Eric

[Silvercrys]

Not familiar with the novel, but you're unlikely to find anything that specific -- magic users in DnD generally have a very broad range of abilities, so most shapeshifting allows a huge number of different forms rather than just birds.

But there isn't any real reason you couldn't only use Wildshape to turn into bird forms as a personal restriction. You won't be as strong as a "normal" druid but they're one of the strongest classes in the game later on anyway.

The closest thing I know of to a bird specific one is the Swanmay Prestige Class from the Book of Exalted Deeds, but it only allows you to turn into a Swan (and requires you to be Exalted which is kind of like having a Paladin code to follow without the Lawful bits).

The Master of Many Forms Prestige Class from Complete Adventurer will allow you to turn into literally anything including Dragons at 10th level (character level 15), but doesn't advance Druid spellcasting and is a bit on the weaker side if you only use it to turn into stuff like Rocs. You could enter it with the Wildshape Ranger alternate class feature from Unearthed Arcana/the SRD to be a Shapeshifter without needing spellcasting at all (well, Ranger 5 has a small number of spells), though. I believe that also gets you Wild Empathy. It's the only way to be able to change into really big stuff (like Rocs) other than using spells that I know of, though.

[ZamielVanWeber]

The Shapeshift druid variant lets you turn into any animal you want but the stats are locked so you would have a lot of flightless bird options.

There is also a totem druid that will let you wildshape into a single animal and eagle is an option there.

Edit: I did it again and messed up Aspect of Nature and Shapeshift. So you already know about shapeshift but totem druid still exists. I don't know of any ACFs that shred casting for druids though.

[pabelfly]

The Shapeshift druid variant lets you turn into any animal you want but the stats are locked so you would have a lot of flightless bird options.

There is also a totem druid that will let you wildshape into a single animal and eagle is an option there.

Edit: I did it again and messed up Aspect of Nature and Shapeshift. So you already know about shapeshift but totem druid still exists. I don't know of any ACFs that shred casting for druids though.

I'd just ask to trade spellcasting for some fighter feats. Ranger and Paladin have variants that can do that, and it makes your character weaker from a char-op perspective, so it's not an unreasonable request.