The Nagual

A martial artist who shares a body with an animal self — you don’t turn into the beast, you let pieces of it surface, and your fists borrow its instincts one strike at a time.

Campaign rules apply. Thirteen spells are banned, two are modified, and every spellcaster uses spell points instead of spell slots in this campaign — see Campaign Rules. This document already conforms: banned spells have been removed and replaced at the same level, modified spells are annotated where they appear, and spell slots have been converted to spell points.

Identity

Everyone has an animal self; almost no one ever meets it. You did — in fever, in initiation, in the dark treeline before dawn — and your fighting is the ongoing negotiation between the two of you about who is wearing whom. You do not become the animal. That would be simpler. Instead it surfaces: a jaguar’s forelimbs for one strike, an owl’s eyes for one watch, a serpent’s hinged jaw for one terrible moment, and then your own face again, breathing hard. In a story you are the one who notices first and is trusted last: half scout, half stranger, and wholly loyal to someone nobody else can see.

The Nagual is a monk whose primal magic is expressed as partial, fluid metamorphosis. Your animal self is not a power source. It is a someone — one particular animal, glimpsed in dream and carried in the body ever after, with its own appetites and its own opinions about your friends. You fight at fist range, spending a reservoir of primal force to let borrowed instinct ride your blows, and you cast a thin, curated slice of nature magic that mirrors your animal’s nature. Your casting ability is Wisdom — the quality of attention that lets you hear what the other half of you is trying to say — and every fight is a partnership, one mind choosing and one mind chasing.

Class Overview

Spellcasting summary. You prepare and cast spells from the Nagual spell list — Primal spells that mirror your animal’s nature, plus a few named class additions (see Spellcasting) — using Wisdom. Spell save DC = 8 + your Proficiency Bonus + your Wisdom modifier; spell attack modifier = your Proficiency Bonus + your Wisdom modifier. You are a half-caster on the long-rest spell point pool, and your day-to-day at-will fighting magic is your fists — a body that remembers being other bodies — not damage cantrips, though you do learn a few utility cantrips (see Utility Cantrips).

Class Table

Feral Surge dice scale with your Martial Arts die and your level: 1 die at levels 1–10, 3 dice at levels 11–16, and 5 dice at levels 17–20. Its cost also escalates: 1 Qi at levels 1–10, 2 at levels 11–16, and 3 at levels 17–20 (see Feral Surge).

Cantrips Known: 1 at level 2, 2 at level 7, 3 at level 13 — utility only (see Utility Cantrips).

Unarmored Movement: +10 ft at level 2, +15 ft at level 6, +20 ft at level 10, +25 ft at level 14, +30 ft at level 18. From level 9 you can also run up vertical surfaces and across liquids (see Unarmored Movement).

Mystic Arcanum: one 6th-level spell at 13, one 7th at 16, one 8th at 19 — each cast once per Long Rest without spending spell points or Qi (see Mystic Arcanum).

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Class Features

Level 1: Martial Arts

Your unarmed strikes are not learned forms so much as borrowed instincts — a claw that closes a half-second before the mind decides to close it. While you are unarmed or wielding a simple weapon and you aren’t wearing armor or wielding a Shield, you gain the following benefits.

• Die. You can roll your Martial Arts die in place of the normal damage of your Unarmed Strikes and simple weapons. This die changes as you gain Nagual levels, as shown on the class table.
• Dexterity. You can use your Dexterity modifier instead of your Strength modifier for the attack and damage rolls of your Unarmed Strikes and simple weapons.
• Bonus Strike. When you take the Attack action on your turn and make an Unarmed Strike or a simple weapon attack as part of it, you can make one additional Unarmed Strike as a Bonus Action.

Reflavor your unarmed strikes freely as claw rakes, fang strikes, coiling blows, or whatever your bonded animal would do — the rules don’t change, only the picture.

Level 1: Unarmored Defense

While you aren’t wearing armor or wielding a Shield, your base Armor Class equals 10 + your Dexterity modifier + your Wisdom modifier — you read a blow coming the way a hunted thing does, and half of dodging is knowing early.

Level 1: The Other Self

You have met your animal self, and it is someone. Choose that animal — not merely a species but a single individual you encountered in dream or waking life (a particular jaguar with a torn ear; a specific serpent coiled around a specific stone; the owl that watched you the winter you nearly died). Work with your DM to give this animal a name and a short history. It is any Beast in concept — this is flavor and lens, not a stat block. Your class features draw their picture from this bond: your strikes are its natural weapons, your spells are its instincts made manifest, and your Aspects are its body surfacing through yours. The bond has no separate mechanics beyond your other features, but it is the fictional throughline for all of them, and your DM may call on it for omens, hooks, and complications.

Your animal self — present even when unseen — grants you two things now.

• The Second Watch. Once per Short or Long Rest, as a Magic action, you release your animal self as an intangible spirit for up to 10 minutes. It looks like a translucent version of your animal, can move up to 60 feet from you on each of your turns (a Fly Speed if its animal flies), can’t interact with objects or be harmed, and is invisible to creatures other than you (creatures with Truesight, and Beasts, can see it). While it’s out, you can perceive through its senses instead of your own (no action required to switch).
• A Second Opinion. A number of times equal to your Wisdom modifier (minimum once) per Long Rest, when you make a Wisdom (Insight) or Wisdom (Perception) check, you can consult your animal self: add your Proficiency Bonus to the check, or, if you already add it, double it for that check. The DM may tell you what your animal self concludes, which is not always what you would have.

Level 1: Feral Surge

You carry a reservoir of primal force — the pressure of the other body wanting to move. You have a pool of Qi points equal to your Nagual level, as shown on the class table (at level 20, The Whole Animal adds 5). The disciplines call this Qi; in you it is not drawn from breath and stillness but from the animal itself — its own vitality, lent and repaid.

Once on each of your turns, immediately after you hit a creature with an Unarmed Strike or a simple weapon, you can spend Qi — 1 at levels 1–10, 2 at levels 11–16, and 3 at levels 17–20 — to let your animal self’s fury ride the blow as part of that same hit. This costs no action, Bonus Action, or Reaction, and doesn’t replace any other part of your turn. Roll a number of your Martial Arts dice and add your Wisdom modifier; the target takes that much extra damage of the same type as the triggering strike. The number of dice is 1 at levels 1–10, 3 at levels 11–16, and 5 at levels 17–20.

Predator’s Surge. While you are wearing at least one Aspect, the Feral Surge carries that animal’s intent. Once on each of your turns, when a creature takes Feral Surge damage from you, it makes a Wisdom saving throw against your spell save DC. On a failure, it suffers one rider, set by the Aspect you wear:

• A predatory Aspect (claw, fang, or jaw: Jaguar’s Forelimbs or Serpent’s Jaw): it has the Frightened condition until the end of its next turn.
• Any other Aspect (such as Owl’s Eyes or Tortoise’s Shell): its Speed is halved until the end of its next turn.

If you wear Aspects of both kinds, you choose which rider on each Surge.

Hybrid recovery. You regain expended Qi on a rhythm deliberately distinct from a pure short-rest martial: you regain Qi equal to half your Nagual Qi maximum (rounded down, minimum 1) when you finish a Short Rest, and all of it when you finish a Long Rest. If you also have Qi from another class, this rule refills only your Nagual share of the pool (see Multiclassing). The animal never fully rests, but it recovers fastest in sleep. (Your spell points, by contrast, return only on a Long Rest — see Spellcasting.)

Level 2: Aspects

The negotiation begins in earnest — the animal can now surface piece by piece. As a Bonus Action, spend the listed Qi to let an Aspect rise: a single part of your animal self’s body overtaking yours. An Aspect lasts 10 minutes, until you have the Incapacitated condition, or until you dismiss it (no action). The Aspects Worn column of the class table caps how many you can wear at once; surfacing one past the cap ends an Aspect of your choice.

Surfacing an Aspect spends its cost from the same Qi pool that fuels Feral Surge — the body only has so much of the other in it at once.

Aspect list (level 2+).

• Jaguar’s Forelimbs (1). Your Unarmed Strikes deal Slashing damage, and once on each of your turns when you hit a creature with one, it takes extra damage equal to one roll of your Martial Arts die. (This is separate from Feral Surge; both can land on the same hit.)
• Owl’s Eyes (1). You have Darkvision out to 120 feet, and Advantage on Wisdom (Perception) checks that rely on sight.
• Hare’s Legs (1). Your Speed increases by 15 feet, your jump distances triple, and standing up from Prone costs you no movement.
• Ape’s Arms (1). You gain a Climb Speed equal to your Speed, and your reach with Unarmed Strikes increases by 5 feet.
• Serpent’s Jaw (2). Once on each of your turns when you hit a creature with an Unarmed Strike, it makes a Constitution saving throw against your spell save DC. On a failure, it takes Poison damage equal to two rolls of your Martial Arts die and has the Poisoned condition until the start of your next turn.
• Heron’s Poise (1). You can move across unstable or yielding surfaces — water, snow crust, rotted planks, a shield’s edge — without breaking through or losing balance, and you have Advantage on Dexterity (Acrobatics) checks to keep your footing.
• Hound’s Nose (1). You have Advantage on Wisdom (Survival) checks to track by scent and on checks to notice Hidden or Invisible creatures within 30 feet by smell.
• Tortoise’s Shell (2). You gain a +2 bonus to Armor Class, and your Speed decreases by 10 feet.
• Fish’s Gills (1). You can breathe water, and you gain a Swim Speed equal to your Speed.

Level 2: Spellcasting

Some of the negotiation happens in the old, wordless language. You prepare and cast spells from the Nagual spell list, Primal spells that mirror your animal’s nature. See the Spellcasting section after the subclasses for the full rules and the Nagual spell list. No damage cantrips, but you learn utility cantrips (see below) — your at-will fighting magic is still a body that remembers being other bodies.

Level 2: Utility Cantrips

Your animal self’s magic does not trickle into small damage, but it can be shaped to small useful ends. You learn 1 cantrip at level 2, a 2nd at level 7, and a 3rd at level 13, from the list below — utility cantrips only (no attack roll, no damage, no save-for-damage). They use Wisdom. You can swap one when you gain a level. Choose from: Druidcraft, Elementalism, Guidance, Mending, Message, Minor Illusion, Resistance, Spare the Dying (Minor Illusion is a class addition from the Arcane list). Elementalism is the 2024 cantrip that absorbed the older Control Flame, Mold Earth, Shape Water and Gust from Xanathar’s Guide to Everything; a table still using those may take any of them in its place.

Level 2: Kindred Resilience

Your body has begun to harden to match your animal self’s — its hide, its blood, its tolerance for the thing that would kill you. When you finish a Long Rest, choose one damage type from Acid, Cold, Fire, Lightning, Poison, or Thunder, reflecting your animal’s environment or defenses. You have Resistance to that damage type until you next finish a Long Rest.

In addition, when you fail a Constitution saving throw to maintain Concentration on a spell, you can spend 1 Qi as a Reaction to reroll the save, keeping the new result.

Level 2: Unarmored Movement

Unarmored Movement — what you call the Four-Legged Stride. The body remembers how the animal runs even while it is wearing a human shape, and the memory arrives in the legs long before it arrives anywhere you could point to.

While you aren’t wearing armor or wielding a Shield, your Speed increases by 10 feet. This bonus increases when you reach certain Nagual levels, as shown on the class table: +15 feet at level 6, +20 feet at level 10, +25 feet at level 14, and +30 feet at level 18.

Starting at level 9, you can also move along vertical surfaces and across liquids on your turn without falling during that move — nothing in the animal has ever accepted that a wall is a different thing from the ground.

Stacking. This bonus stacks with every other Speed increase you have, including the Hare’s Legs Aspect, Run Down (Skin of the Prowler), and Loping Advance (Skin of the Pack); the Tortoise’s Shell Aspect’s −10-foot penalty applies against the total. They are separate effects from separate sources, and none of them is a bonus to the same thing twice.

Level 3: Skin

Your relationship with the animal self has a shape, and the shape has a name. Choose a Skin — Prowler, Witness, Guardian, Reborn, Venom-Coil, or Pack — detailed after the base class features. You gain its level 3 features now, and further features at levels 6, 11, and 17.

Level 4: Ability Score Improvement

You gain the Ability Score Improvement feat or another feat of your choice for which you qualify. You gain this feature again at levels 8, 12, and 16.

Level 5: Extra Attack

You can attack twice, instead of once, whenever you take the Attack action on your turn.

Level 6: Unarmored Movement (+15 ft)

Your Unarmored Movement bonus increases to +15 feet.

Level 7: Prey’s Wisdom

Nothing that has been hunted ever fully sleeps. You have Advantage on Initiative rolls, and while your animal self is with you, being surprised doesn’t give you Disadvantage on your Initiative roll. Your animal self is always with you, unless The Second Watch is active and the spirit has ranged far away.

Level 9: Greater Aspects

The deeper animals answer now. Add these to your Aspect list.

• Condor’s Wings (3). You gain a Fly Speed equal to your Speed. While you wear this Aspect, your Aspects Worn cap is reduced by 1.
• Mammoth’s Frame (3). You and your gear become Large (if there’s room). You have Advantage on Strength checks and Strength saving throws, and your Unarmed Strikes deal an extra 1d4 damage of their type.
• Chameleon’s Hide (2). While you remain motionless or move 10 feet or less on your turn, you have the Invisible condition until the start of your next turn. Attacking or casting a spell ends the invisibility until your next turn starts.
• Wolverine’s Heart (2). The first time each wearing that you drop to half your Hit Point maximum or fewer, you gain Temporary Hit Points equal to your Nagual level. While you wear this Aspect, you have Immunity to the Frightened condition.

Level 10: Unarmored Movement (+20 ft)

Your Unarmored Movement bonus increases to +20 feet.

Level 10: Animal Vigor

The body that holds many bodies is hard to spoil. You have Immunity to the Poisoned condition and to disease, and you need only 4 hours of sleep to gain the benefit of a Long Rest — your animal self keeps the other half of the watch.

Level 13: Quickened Surfacing

The animal is faster than deliberation now. Once on each of your turns, you can surface an Aspect using no action rather than a Bonus Action.

Level 13: Mystic Arcanum

Mystic Arcanum — what you call Wearing the Great Aspect. Three times in your life the negotiation runs the other way: the animal is briefly larger than the person wearing it, and what surfaces is not a jaw or a wing but the whole weather the animal lives inside.

You learn one 6th-level spell from your class’s list. You can cast it once without spending spell points or Qi, and you regain the ability to do so when you finish a Long Rest. At level 16 you learn a 7th-level spell, and at level 19 an 8th-level spell, each cast once per Long Rest in the same way. Whenever you gain a level in this class, you can replace one of these spells with another of the same level from your class’s list. These spells use your Wisdom.

Each Arcanum spell has its own once-per-Long-Rest use — casting the 6th-level one does not spend the 7th or the 8th. Your Arcanum spells are still Nagual spells, so they must pass the Allowed spells test in the Spellcasting section or be a class addition named on the list, and the prohibition on restoring Hit Points still holds: the animal self never learns to give a body back, no matter how much of it surfaces. See the 6th–8th Level (Mystic Arcanum only) entries on the Nagual spell list for suggested picks.

Level 14: Unarmored Movement (+25 ft)

Your Unarmored Movement bonus increases to +25 feet.

Level 14: The Standing Truce

The negotiation has become a partnership. When you finish a Long Rest, choose one Aspect with a cost of 1: until you next finish a Long Rest, it is worn permanently, costs nothing to maintain, and doesn’t count against your Aspects Worn cap. Neither of you has to keep asking anymore.

Level 15: Waking Instinct

When you roll Initiative and have 4 or fewer Qi remaining, you regain Qi equal to your Wisdom modifier. The body braces before the mind knows why.

Level 18: Unarmored Movement (+30 ft)

Your Unarmored Movement bonus increases to +30 feet.

Level 18: Second Skin

Once per Long Rest, as a Bonus Action, you stop negotiating and let the animal fully to the surface for 1 minute — a hybrid form that is unmistakably both of you. For the duration:

• every rider from an Aspect you’re wearing that is limited to once on each of your turns (such as Jaguar’s Forelimbs or Serpent’s Jaw) can trigger twice on each of your turns instead;
• your Feral Surge costs no Qi;
• you gain Temporary Hit Points equal to twice your Nagual level; and
• your Aspects Worn cap increases by 2.

You can end this effect early (no action).

Level 19: Epic Boon

You gain an Epic Boon feat or another feat of your choice for which you qualify. Boon of Dimensional Travel and Boon of Truesight both suit a Nagual well.

Level 20: The Whole Animal

The animal and the person have stopped keeping separate accounts. Your Qi maximum increases by 5 (to 25), and when you roll Initiative, you regain all expended Qi.

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Skins (Subclasses)

A Skin is the shape your bond has settled into — the particular way the animal and the person have learned to share one life. It changes nothing about that they share it, only how. It is a way of living with the animal, not a power you serve, and nothing in it needs a god, a people or a place. Each world gives the six Skins their own names (see In Different Worlds), and the myths behind them are credited under Origins and Inspiration.

Skin of the Prowler

The animal in you knows what everything tastes like when it’s afraid.

Prowlers surfaced a predator, and the partnership runs like a hunting pair: one mind choosing the prey, one mind chasing it down. They are the shock troops of the class — built to end a fight’s opening exchange decisively.

Level 3: Run Down. On any turn you take the Attack action, your Speed increases by 10 feet. If you move at least 15 feet in a straight line toward a creature and then hit it with an Unarmed Strike on the same turn, the strike deals extra damage equal to one roll of your Martial Arts die, and the target makes a Strength saving throw against your spell save DC or falls Prone — pounced.

Level 6: The Chosen Quarry. As a Bonus Action, mark a creature you can see as your quarry (no Concentration; one quarry at a time; the mark lasts until the quarry drops to 0 Hit Points or you mark another). You have Advantage on Wisdom (Perception) and Wisdom (Survival) checks to find it, and once on each of your turns you deal extra damage equal to your Wisdom modifier when you hit it with an attack.

Level 11: Apex. Your Unarmed Strikes score a critical hit on a roll of 19 or 20. In addition, Beasts and Monstrosities whose Challenge Rating is at or below half your Nagual level have the Frightened condition while within 30 feet of you, unless you allow otherwise — they know a bigger predator on sight.

Level 17: Kill Stroke. Once on each of your turns, immediately after you reduce a creature to 0 Hit Points or score a critical hit with an Unarmed Strike, you can make one Unarmed Strike as part of the same action. When you do, each enemy of your choice within 15 feet that can see you makes a Wisdom saving throw against your spell save DC or has the Frightened condition until the end of its next turn — the fear of the moment after the pounce lands.

Playing a Prowler: the discipline isn’t the chase — the animal handles the chase. The discipline is choosing prey correctly. Your arc is about the list of things you will not hunt, and who gets to add to it.

Skin of the Witness

Some animal selves surfaced with eyes instead of teeth.

Witnesses partnered with a watcher — owl, raven, heron — and walk the border between waking and dream, seeing what the day hides and what the future has not yet decided to show.

Level 3: Long Watch. The Second Watch improves: your animal self can range up to 1 mile from you, lasts up to 1 hour, and can slip through any opening a housecat could. In addition, once per Short or Long Rest, when a creature you can see makes an attack roll, ability check, or saving throw, you can roll a d4 and add it to or subtract it from that roll, after seeing the roll but before knowing the outcome — you saw it coming a half-second early. This costs no action, Reaction, or Qi, works even on someone else’s turn, and is a separate use from The Second Watch.

Level 6: Read the Wind. You always know the location of any Invisible or Ethereal creature within 30 feet of you that isn’t behind Total Cover. In addition, you can cast detect thoughts once per Long Rest without spending spell points (Wisdom is your spellcasting ability for it).

Level 11: Walk in Two Worlds. You can see into the Ethereal Plane out to 60 feet. As a Bonus Action, spend 3 Qi to step half out of the world until the start of your next turn: attack rolls against you have Disadvantage, and you can move through creatures and objects as Difficult Terrain (if you end your turn inside one, you’re shunted to the nearest unoccupied space and take 1d10 Force damage).

Level 17: The One Dream. When you finish a Long Rest, you may recount the dream your animal self walked: ask the DM one question about a creature, place, or object you have seen, and receive a truthful one-sentence answer delivered as dream-imagery. In addition, your Long Watch die becomes a d6 and is usable twice per Short or Long Rest.

Playing a Witness: you are the party’s early warning and its conscience — you see things, including things about your friends they didn’t offer. Decide early what you do with truths nobody asked you to collect.

Skin of the Guardian

Some animals surface for the herd, not the hunt.

Guardians partnered with a protector — bear, boar, mother-wolf — and their body surfaces armor and fury in defense of chosen people. Of all the Skins, theirs is the one that holds the line rather than breaks it.

Level 3: Warding Body. When a creature you can see hits an ally within 5 feet of you with an attack, you can take a Reaction to interpose surfacing hide and muscle: the ally gains a bonus to Armor Class equal to your Wisdom modifier (maximum +3) against that attack (potentially causing it to miss). If it still hits, you can choose to take the attack’s damage instead of the ally.

Level 6: Bristle. While you’re wearing at least one Aspect, a creature that hits you with a melee attack while within 5 feet of you takes damage equal to your Wisdom modifier — quills, tusks, a warning bite. The body answers on its own.

Level 11: The Den. As a Magic action, spend 3 Qi. For 1 minute, allies within 10 feet of you gain Temporary Hit Points equal to your Wisdom modifier at the start of each of their turns, and you can use Warding Body once per round without expending your Reaction.

Level 17: Unfallen. Once per Short or Long Rest, when you’re reduced to 0 Hit Points but not killed outright, you drop to 1 Hit Point instead and immediately surface any one Aspect for free — the animal simply refuses.

Playing a Guardian: choose your herd out loud. The animal’s protection is not abstract — it is these people — and the interesting friction is what happens when the herd disagrees with you about what’s safe.

Skin of the Reborn

In the deepest initiations, the border stops holding.

The Reborn can do the thing every other Skin stops short of: full merger. The oldest tellings say such a person shares one fate with the animal — one body’s wounds appearing on the other, one death owed for two lives.

Level 3: Wild Shape — what you call Deep Merge. Once per Short or Long Rest, as a Bonus Action, you fully transform into your animal self. This functions as the Wild Shape feature, except: the transformation lasts up to 10 minutes; you use any official Beast stat block of CR 1/4 or lower that fits the animal; and you keep your Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma scores; your saving throw proficiencies; and your Hit Points (you don’t gain the Beast’s). Your Unarmed Strike attack and damage replace the form’s natural weapons if they’d deal more. You can’t speak or cast spells while merged — the old language needs no words, but spells do. You can end the merge early (no action).

Level 6: Shared Fate. The bond’s oldest price, turned into a shield. When you take damage, you can take a Reaction to let your animal self carry half of it: reduce the damage by half (rounded down). Your animal self is then spent — you lose the benefits of The Second Watch and A Second Opinion, and can’t use Deep Merge — until you finish a Short or Long Rest. The wound appears on the animal instead. It never reproaches you. That’s worse.

Level 11: Chimera Merge. Your Wild Shape (Deep Merge) improves: you can use a Beast stat block of CR 2 or lower, you can cast your prepared spells while merged, and you can wear Aspects while merged — a jaguar with a condor’s wings, if the two of you agree.

Level 17: The Second Birth. Once per Long Rest, when you die, you don’t. At the start of the next round you reappear within 30 feet of where you fell, in your animal self’s form (as Chimera Merge), with Hit Points equal to your Nagual level, and you must remain merged for 1 hour. Each use ages you visibly — the tellings are clear that the animal gives up some of its own span to carry you back.

Playing a Reborn: the boundary everyone else maintains is, for you, a door. Play the vertigo of it — after a long merge, you reach for latches with the wrong limb. The endgame question is the one the oldest tellings ask: when the border finally dissolves for good, who walks away, and will that person still love what you loved?

Skin of the Venom-Coil

The serpent doesn’t outrun anything. It waits, and then the fight is already over.

Venom-Coils partnered with a serpent — coil and venom, patience and stillness — and favor control over burst. They poison, paralyze, constrict, and disable rather than simply outdamage, and their coiling defenses make them exceptionally hard to pin down or finish off.

Level 3: Venomous Strike. Once per turn, even on someone else’s turn, when you hit a creature with an Unarmed Strike or a simple weapon, you can spend 1 Qi to inject primal venom. This costs no action, and you can do it on the same hit as Feral Surge. The target makes a Constitution saving throw against your spell save DC. On a failure, it takes Poison damage equal to one roll of your Martial Arts die + your Wisdom modifier and has the Poisoned condition until the end of its next turn. A creature immune to the Poisoned condition is immune to this feature.

Level 6: Coiling Defense. As a Reaction when you’re hit by a melee attack, you can spend 1 Qi to impose Disadvantage on that attack roll after seeing the roll but before damage is applied, coiling away from the worst of the blow (this can turn a hit into a miss). You can use this Reaction a number of times equal to your Wisdom modifier (minimum once) between Long Rests, regardless of Qi spent.

Level 11: Paralytic Fang. Your venom can still muscle and mind alike. When you use Venomous Strike, you can spend 1 additional Qi: on a failed save, in addition to the poison, the target has the Paralyzed condition until the end of its next turn (on a success it takes half the Poison damage and isn’t paralyzed). Once a creature is paralyzed by this feature, it is immune to the paralysis (though not the poison) for 24 hours.

Level 17: Serpent’s Coil. As a Magic action, spend 3 Qi to lash out with a spectral coil of your animal self at a creature within 15 feet. It makes a Strength saving throw against your spell save DC. On a failure, it takes 4d8 Poison damage and has the Grappled and Restrained conditions (escape DC equal to your spell save DC); on a success it takes half damage and isn’t held. If the creature is held, you must maintain Concentration on the coil, up to 1 minute, as on a spell (so taking damage calls for Constitution saving throws to keep it). It counts as your one Concentration: when the creature is held, any spell you are concentrating on ends, and starting a Concentration spell ends the coil. The coil ends when your Concentration ends, when the creature escapes the grapple (which ends both conditions), or if the creature is ever more than 15 feet from you. You can hold only one Serpent’s Coil at a time.

Playing a Venom-Coil: you go eerily still when others would panic — the same stillness the animal uses on the branch above the trail. Your fights are decided before the biggest blows land, and you are the party member who makes a dangerous thing stop moving so everyone else can breathe.

Skin of the Pack

One wolf is a rumor. The pack is a verdict.

Those of the Pack surfaced a wolf, a hound, a hunting-dog — an animal whose whole genius is together. Their bond runs outward into their companions: they turn a band of adventurers into a coordinated hunt, and their own power is largely spent making everyone around them lethal.

Level 3: The Hunt Is Shared. Once on each of your turns, when you hit a creature that is within 5 feet of one of your allies, the strike deals extra damage equal to your Wisdom modifier. In addition, as a Bonus Action you can spend 1 Qi to let out a hunting call, choosing a creature you can see. Until the end of your next turn, you and your allies have Advantage on attack rolls against that creature while at least one of your allies is within 5 feet of it.

Level 6: Loping Advance. Your Speed increases by 10 feet. When you take the Attack action on your turn, one ally within 30 feet who can see or hear you can use their Reaction to move up to half their Speed without provoking Opportunity Attacks — the pack moves as one body.

Level 11: Cut From the Herd. When a creature within 5 feet of you takes damage from one of your allies, you can take a Reaction to make one Unarmed Strike against it (once per round). If that creature is currently the target of your hunting call, the strike deals extra damage equal to one roll of your Martial Arts die.

Level 17: The Whole Pack Turns. You can now use the hunting call of The Hunt Is Shared as part of the same Bonus Action as any other Aspect surfacing, or using no action once on each of your turns. In addition, while a creature is the target of your hunting call, your allies score critical hits against it on a roll of 19 or 20, and the first time each of your allies hits it on each of their turns, it takes extra damage equal to your Wisdom modifier.

Playing a Pack: your power is other people. Learn your party’s names the way a wolf learns a pack’s — by scent, by habit, by who breaks left when frightened. You are rarely the biggest number on the board and almost always the reason the biggest number landed. Decide what you do when the pack wants to run down something you’d have let go.

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Spellcasting

Your bond lets you call on primal magic that mirrors your animal’s nature — instinctual and territorial, sinuous or watchful, never scholarly. It does not, and cannot, restore life: the animal self knows how to spend a body, not how to give one back. There is no healing on your list, and that is deliberate.

Casting ability. Wisdom is your spellcasting ability for your Nagual spells. You use it whenever a spell refers to your spellcasting ability, and:

• Spell save DC = 8 + your Proficiency Bonus + your Wisdom modifier.
• Spell attack modifier = your Proficiency Bonus + your Wisdom modifier.

Prepared spells. You prepare a list of spells that are available for you to cast, choosing from the Nagual spell list below. The number of spells you can prepare equals your Wisdom modifier + half your Nagual level (rounded down, minimum 1), as reflected in the Prepared Spells column of the class table. The spells must be of a level no higher than your Max Spell Level. Whenever you finish a Long Rest, you can replace any number of prepared spells with others from the Nagual spell list.

Allowed spells. Your spells of 1st through 5th level come only from the Nagual spell list below; it is a closed list, and the DM does not add others. The list is built by one test, which also governs your Mystic Arcanum choices: a Primal spell (from the 2024 Druid or Ranger lists) that is either of the Divination, Enchantment, or Transmutation school, or any Primal spell that targets or summons a Beast, or affects plants or terrain — even if that spell belongs to another school. This is what lets in the class’s signature magic like Entangle, Spike Growth and Giant Insect alongside the three core schools. Where that test runs short, the list names class additions that don’t meet it, such as Pass without Trace, Freedom of Movement and Conjure Animals; they are on your list like any other spell. No spell that restores Hit Points is on the list or may be chosen (no Cure Wounds, Healing Word, Aura of Vitality and the like), regardless of school.

Spell Points (half-caster, long-rest). This campaign uses spell points in place of spell slots (see Campaign Rules). Your pool is shown in the Spell Points column of the class table, and the Max Spell Level column shows the highest level of spell you can cast from it (1st at level 2, 2nd at 5, 3rd at 9, 4th at 13, 5th at 17). To cast a spell of 1st level or higher, spend spell points equal to its cost — 1st 2, 2nd 3, 3rd 5, 4th 6, 5th 7. You can cast a spell at any higher level up to your Max Spell Level by paying that level’s cost, and it takes effect as a higher-level version, exactly as the spell describes. You regain all spent spell points when you finish a Long Rest. Your spell points and your Qi points are separate pools: neither can pay for the other, and they recover on their own schedules. You can never spend spell points on a spell of 6th level or higher — those come only from Mystic Arcanum. If you also have long-rest spell points from another class, combine them as described under Multiclassing. Unlike your Qi points, your spellcasting is a long-rest resource, so your two engines recover on different clocks.

Ritual casting. You can cast a Nagual spell you have prepared as a ritual if that spell has the Ritual tag.

No damage cantrips, but you learn utility cantrips. Your animal self’s magic never trickles into small at-will damage — your at-will fighting magic is Martial Arts, your Aspects, and Feral Surge, a body that remembers being other bodies. It can, however, be shaped to small useful ends: you learn utility cantrips as described under Utility Cantrips (1 at level 2, a 2nd at level 7, a 3rd at level 13), using Wisdom.

Nagual Spell List

This is a closed list: every spell you prepare of 1st through 5th level comes from it. It holds 75 spells (17 / 22 / 16 / 10 / 10 at 1st–5th level, about three-quarters of the 2024 Player’s Handbook Sorcerer list at each level), sorted alphabetically within each level. Every spell below is an official spell from the 2024 Player’s Handbook, except Whirlwind (an Arcanum option), which is from Xanathar’s Guide to Everything. Most are Primal spells that pass the test above. Those marked class addition don’t: Expeditious Retreat, Feather Fall, See Invisibility, Suggestion, Gaseous Form, Dominate Person and Hold Monster come from outside the Druid and Ranger lists, and the rest are Primal spells outside the test’s schools and themes. They are on the list by design.

1st level (17)

• Alarm (class addition, Abjuration — the animal that wakes at one footfall)
• Animal Friendship (Enchantment)
• Charm Person (Enchantment)
• Detect Magic (Divination, ritual)
• Detect Poison and Disease (Divination, ritual)
• Ensnaring Strike (plant/terrain — vines)
• Entangle (plant/terrain)
• Expeditious Retreat (class addition, Transmutation — the hare’s burst)
• Faerie Fire (class addition, Evocation — the predator’s eye picks out what hides)
• Feather Fall (class addition, Transmutation — the cat’s landing)
• Fog Cloud (class addition, Conjuration — weather)
• Hail of Thorns (plant — thorns)
• Hunter’s Mark (Divination)
• Jump (Transmutation)
• Longstrider (Transmutation)
• Purify Food and Drink (Transmutation, ritual)
• Speak with Animals (Divination, ritual)

2nd level (22)

• Animal Messenger (Enchantment, ritual)
• Augury (Divination, ritual)
• Barkskin (Transmutation)
• Beast Sense (Divination, ritual)
• Cordon of Arrows (Transmutation)
• Darkvision (Transmutation)
• Enhance Ability (Transmutation)
• Enlarge/Reduce (Transmutation)
• Find Traps (Divination)
• Gust of Wind (class addition, Evocation — weather)
• Heat Metal (Transmutation)
• Hold Person (Enchantment)
• Locate Animals or Plants (Divination, ritual)
• Locate Object (Divination)
• Magic Weapon (Transmutation)
• Pass without Trace (class addition, Abjuration — the hunting pair’s stealth)
• Protection from Poison (class addition, Abjuration — the venom-coil’s own blood)
• See Invisibility (class addition, Divination — the animal senses what hides)
• Silence (class addition, Illusion — the stalker’s hush)
• Spike Growth (plant/terrain)
• Suggestion (class addition, Enchantment — the herd’s pull on one mind)
• Summon Beast (Conjuration — summons a Beast)

3rd level (16)

• Call Lightning (class addition, Conjuration — weather)
• Conjure Animals (class addition, Conjuration — spectral nature spirits, not Beasts)
• Dispel Magic (class addition, Abjuration — the animal shakes off what was laid on it)
• Elemental Weapon (Transmutation)
• Feign Death (class addition, Necromancy — the playing-dead of the hunted)
• Gaseous Form (class addition, Transmutation — the body made mist)
• Meld into Stone (terrain, ritual)
• Nondetection (class addition, Abjuration — the hunted thing’s hiding)
• Plant Growth (plant/terrain)
• Protection from Energy (class addition, Abjuration — hide against the elements)
• Sleet Storm (terrain)
• Speak with Plants (Transmutation)
• Summon Fey (class addition, Conjuration — a spirit of the wild)
• Water Breathing (Transmutation, ritual)
• Water Walk (Transmutation, ritual)
• Wind Wall (class addition, Evocation — weather)

4th level (10)

• Charm Monster (Enchantment)
• Confusion (Enchantment)
• Conjure Woodland Beings (class addition, Conjuration — summons nature spirits)
• Dominate Beast (Enchantment)
• Freedom of Movement (class addition, Abjuration — slips every snare)
• Giant Insect (Conjuration — summons a Beast)
• Grasping Vine (plant/terrain)
• Locate Creature (Divination)
• Polymorph (Transmutation — the border, made spell)
• Stoneskin (Transmutation)

5th level (10)

• Antilife Shell (class addition, Abjuration — beast-ward)
• Awaken (Transmutation)
• Commune with Nature (Divination, ritual)
• Contagion (class addition, Necromancy — the venom given time)
• Dominate Person (class addition, Enchantment — from the Arcane list)
• Geas (Enchantment)
• Hold Monster (class addition, Enchantment — from the Arcane list)
• Insect Plague (terrain — Beasts)
• Scrying (Divination)
• Tree Stride (plant/terrain)

6th–8th Level — Mystic Arcanum only

You can never spend spell points on a spell of 6th level or higher, and none of the spells below can be cast with spell points. They are reachable only through Mystic Arcanum — one 6th-level spell at level 13, one 7th at 16, one 8th at 19, each cast once without spending spell points or Qi and regained on a Long Rest. They do not count against your Prepared Spells.

6th Level (Arcanum only — chosen at level 13)

• Move Earth (Transmutation — the ground remembering a shape it used to have)
• Flesh to Stone (Transmutation — the border, imposed on someone else)
• Wall of Thorns (plant/terrain)
• Sunbeam (class addition, Evocation — the dawn the herd is driven into)

7th Level (Arcanum only — chosen at level 16)

• Reverse Gravity (Transmutation — terrain, turned inside out)
• Mirage Arcane (terrain — the land wearing an Aspect of its own)
• Whirlwind (class addition, Evocation, Xanathar’s Guide to Everything — weather)
• Fire Storm (class addition, Evocation — the dry-season burn)

8th Level (Arcanum only — chosen at level 19)

• Animal Shapes (Transmutation — Beasts; you finally hand the gift to other people)
• Antipathy/Sympathy (Enchantment — territory, made absolute)
• Earthquake (terrain)
• Control Weather (terrain/weather)

Note on the no-healing rule: the obvious Primal picks at these levels — Heal (6th) and Regenerate (7th) — both restore Hit Points and are therefore not available to a Nagual, at Arcanum or anywhere else. The hole is deliberate and it does not close at high level.

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Multiclassing

To multiclass into or out of the Nagual, you need Dexterity 13 and Wisdom 13. When you take your first Nagual level from another class, you gain proficiency with simple weapons; you gain Martial Arts and Unarmored Defense if you don’t already have them; and you gain The Other Self, Qi, Feral Surge, and Aspects sized to your Nagual levels only — read every “Nagual level” as exactly the number of levels you have in this class, so this class’s Qi entry, Aspects Worn cap, and Feral Surge dice all follow your Nagual level, not your character level. You gain Extra Attack from this class only if you don’t already have it. Because you are a half-caster, your Nagual spell points combine with those of other spellcasting classes under the standard multiclass spellcaster rules and the multiclass spell point table in Campaign Rules (count half your Nagual levels, rounded down, toward your combined caster level); your prepared-spell count is still figured from your Nagual level and Wisdom as above, and your Qi points remain separate from your spell points, on their own hybrid-recovery clock.

Qi from more than one class. If another class in this library also gives you Qi points, or the Monk class gives you Focus Points, you have a single pool of Qi points; your Monk features spend it as Focus Points. Its maximum is the total of each class’s Qi or Focus entry for your level in that class (including any feature that raises a class’s maximum). A feature from any of those classes can spend from it. Each class’s share recovers by that class’s own rule, and a feature that reduces one class’s maximum reduces only that class’s share. Each feature keeps its own limits (once per turn, Surge dice, and so on). While your pool combines more than one class, you can use each class’s Surge no more times between one rest and the next than your level in that class. A feature that restores all of a class’s Qi or Focus Points restores no more than that class’s entry.

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In Different Worlds

Setting layer. Everything above this heading works unchanged in each of these worlds; only names, looks and stories differ. Names here are setting names, each mapped to the neutral name the rules use.

Mythic culture — Mesoamerican-inspired (the class’s origin)

Who has it. A fantasy world built from Mesoamerican images, not a portrait of any real people. Every child is born on a day with a sign, and with it an animal whose life runs beside the child’s and shares its wounds. Those who meet theirs, in fever or a hard initiation, are called naguals: respected the way a sharp knife is, and kept at a slight distance.

What they call it. The class is the Nagual; the animal self is the tonal; the Feral Surge is the Totem Surge; Aspects keep their name. The Skins keep their plain names, except that the Prowler is the Hunter, jaguar-bonded and honoured like a jaguar warrior.

How it looks and sounds. An Aspect rises with a smell of wet stone and copal smoke, and the pupils go round and gold. The Second Watch is a pale jaguar at the edge of the firelight that only the dogs turn to see.

Story hook. A healer sickens with no wound on her: somewhere in the hills her tonal is hurt. The party’s nagual follows the trail to a collector who has learned that hunting the animal is a way to hunt the person.

Rules caveat. None. Day-signs and shared fate are story; no feature needs a calendar, a god or a sorcerer’s lineage. If the story hurts a character’s animal self, as in the hook, that is a complication for the DM to narrate: no feature deals damage or imposes a condition for it, and only Shared Fate (Reborn) moves a wound between the two. The table gives this world’s names; Origins explains its “totem” words.

Neutral name (rules)	Mesoamerican-inspired name
animal self · a carved figure of your animal self	tonal · a carved figure of your tonal’s animal
The Other Self · Feral Surge (form: Predator’s Surge) · Kindred Resilience	Totemic Bond · Totem Surge (form: Predator’s Surge) · Totemic Resilience
Skin of the Prowler	Skin of the Hunter
Skin of the Reborn	Skin of the Twice-Born
Skin of the Witness · Guardian · Venom-Coil · Pack	unchanged
Prowlers · Witnesses · Guardians · the Reborn · Venom-Coils · those of the Pack	Hunter naguals · Witness naguals · Guardian naguals · Twice-Born naguals · Venom-Coil naguals · Pack naguals
Aspects, Second Skin, The Standing Truce and every other feature	unchanged

Gritty low magic

Who has it. Frontier country, where magic is a rumour and a hanging matter. The class runs in trapper families: a child who goes into the woods with a fever and comes out with a wolf’s patience is marked, and the family keeps quiet. The marked hire out as trackers and scouts.

What they call it. The class is the marked; the animal self is the other one; the Feral Surge is letting it bite; Aspects are tells. Skins are trade-names:

Skin	Trade-name
Prowler · Witness · Guardian	the Ambusher · the Lookout · the Sheepdog
Reborn · Venom-Coil · Pack	the Turned · the Adder · the Whipper-in

How it looks and sounds. No light and no colour: a jaw that sits wrong, hands suddenly the wrong shape for gloves, wet fur in a dry room. The marked surface where nobody is watching, because a worn Aspect is plain to anyone who looks. When the Second Watch is out, the horses go quiet.

Story hook. The sheriff posts a bounty on a wolf that killed two of his deputies. The party’s marked one knows the torn ear and the limp: it is someone’s other one, and that someone rides with the posse.

Rules caveat. Worlds like this often have no other planes. If so, Walk in Two Worlds (Witness) sees into nothing, though its half-step out of the world works as written; Read the Wind’s Ethereal clause rarely matters. The Second Watch stays invisible to all but you, Beasts and creatures with Truesight, which is why the horses notice.

Urban intrigue

Who has it. One great city of guild-houses and old families, where an animal self is a matter of record. The Rolls of Arms list every declared bond, and houses arrange marriages around them. Those who fight are crest-sworn: bodyguards, enforcers and duellists, licensed to surface in public and fined when they surface without a licence.

What they call it. The class is the crest-sworn; the animal self is one’s crest; the Feral Surge is the crest’s due; Aspects are quarterings; Second Skin is bearing full arms. Skins are offices of a house:

Skin	House office
Prowler · Witness · Guardian	the Sword · the Eyes · the Shield
Reborn · Venom-Coil · Pack	the Rampant · the Quiet Cup · the Retinue

How it looks and sounds. Surfacing is ceremony: a crest-sworn bows before an Aspect rises, and the vain powder the seam where fur meets skin with gold. One quartering in a ballroom is a threat; two are a declaration. Great houses keep cats in their studies, because a Beast can see the Second Watch where a footman cannot.

Story hook. The Rolls say the heir of House Vell was born without a crest. The party’s crest-sworn has seen the heir’s animal self at a window, an owl on nobody’s register, and three houses would kill to learn whose blood it came from.

Rules caveat. None. The Rolls and the licences are fiction; no feature needs them.

Planar crossroads

Who has it. A hub city on a wheel of gates between planes, where animal selves come from everywhere: a salt-lizard from a dry plane, a cloud-ray, a beetle that sings. Dock wardens charge a traveller with an animal self two fares, half as a joke, so the class are two-fares: gate guards, guides and smugglers’ muscle.

What they call it. The class is the two-fare; the animal self is the passenger; the Feral Surge is the passenger’s turn; Aspects are showings. Skins are dock crews:

Skin	Crew
Prowler · Witness · Guardian	the Boarders · the Crow’s-Nest · the Bulkhead
Reborn · Venom-Coil · Pack	the Round-Trippers · the Bilge-Snakes · the Crew

How it looks and sounds. A showing carries its home plane with it: a beetle-carapace forearm that rings like struck tin, eyes lit by a sun nobody here has seen. The Second Watch might be a fish-shape swimming through a tavern’s air, noticed by the cats and by anything there with truesight, and by no one else.

Story hook. A customs clerk counts a traveller who arrived with two passengers, and only one is the traveller’s own. Someone is stealing animal selves between planes, and the party’s two-fare has started dreaming in a stranger’s language.

Rules caveat. A strange animal self changes the look, never the rules: a two-fare whose passenger is a cloud-ray still flies with Condor’s Wings, and a Reborn uses the nearest official Beast stat block for Wild Shape. The Ethereal Plane is close by, so Walk in Two Worlds and Read the Wind work at full value.

Origins and Inspiration

Inspiration, not setting. Nothing here is a rule, and nothing here is assumed by one.

Nagualismo. The class takes its name and its central image from nagualismo (nagualism), a family of beliefs found across Mesoamerica from before the Spanish conquest to the present day, among Nahua, Zapotec, Mixe and many Maya peoples, among others, in Mexico and Central America. The Nahuatl word nāhualli (Spanish nahual or nagual) names a person able to take an animal form. In colonial sources such a person is often a ritual specialist or sorcerer, sometimes protective and sometimes feared; Sahagún’s sixteenth-century Florentine Codex describes nahualli of both kinds. In many places the word also names the animal form or animal double itself. The etymology is debated.

The tonal and the companion animal. Nahuatl tōnalli is harder to translate. It is a vital force or soul associated with heat, the sun and the head, and with the day-sign of a person’s birth in the 260-day ritual count, the tōnalpōhualli. In many later and present-day communities, tonal names an animal companion, or co-essence, born at the same moment as a person and bound to the same fate: if the animal is hurt, the person sickens. Maya languages have their own words for such companions. Classic Maya inscriptions write a sign read way, long understood as a spirit companion or co-essence, though some epigraphers now read the way beings mainly as spirits of sorcery and disease sent by powerful people; Tzotzil speakers in highland Chiapas speak of the chanul. Since George Foster’s 1944 study, anthropologists have often separated nagualism, the power to transform, from tonalism, the shared fate with an animal companion, though living practice does not always keep them apart.

What the class keeps and what it changes. The class keeps tonalism’s central claim, that the animal is a someone with its own life rather than a power or a pet. The rules say so in as many words: “your animal self is not a power source; it is a someone”. The class turns nagualism’s transformation into something partial and negotiated, the Aspects, and gives full transformation only to the Reborn. Its use of tonal for the animal follows the ethnographic sense. It does not follow the popular pairing in Carlos Castaneda’s books, where tonal means the ordinary, ordered world and nagual the unknown; scholars have widely doubted those books’ ethnographic claims since the 1970s. The Mesoamerican-inspired names above use “totem”, which English took from the Ojibwe (Anishinaabe) doodem, a clan and its animal emblem. That is a North American idea, different from the Mesoamerican companion animal, and the two should not be confused. The rules leave the word out, much as the 2024 Player’s Handbook reworked the Totem Warrior Barbarian as the Path of the Wild Heart.

Respect and limits. Nagualismo is not a closed chapter of history. It is lived, varied and local, and it belongs to the communities who hold it. Even the class’s name is a word still in everyday use, in Mexican Spanish and in Indigenous languages of the region, and in many communities it is spoken with caution. This class adapts a few of its images for a game. It does not depict, teach or claim to represent any community’s beliefs or practices. The Aspects, the Skins, their powers and the rule against healing are all inventions. A table that wants a Mesoamerican-inspired world should build it from good sources and treat living belief with the care it would want for its own.

The Skins and their touchstones

Skin (neutral)	Mesoamerican-inspired name	Mythic centre	Second touchstone	Alt-culture reskin
Prowler	Hunter	The jaguar nāhualli	The Mexica jaguar warriors	A taiga people’s tiger-dream
Witness	Witness	Athena’s owl	Huginn and Muninn	Siberian shamans’ helping spirits
Guardian	Guardian	The berserkir	Artio, the bear goddess	The Ainu bear kamuy
Reborn	Twice-Born	The selkie	Sigmund’s wolf-skins	A Mesoamerican-inspired fused bond
Venom-Coil	Venom-Coil	The Nāgas	Python at Delphi	The serpent vodun of the Fon
Pack	Pack	The úlfheðnar	The she-wolf of Rome	Steppe wolf-ancestry

• Prowler. The jaguar, among the most powerful and feared forms a nāhualli could take, and an animal long tied to rulers and night. The Mexica jaguar warriors (ocēlōmeh, singular ocēlōtl) were, with the eagle warriors, the best known of the elite military orders. Tezcatlipoca, the “Smoking Mirror”, was a god of night, sorcery and rulership, and his jaguar aspect is often identified with Tepeyōllōtl, “heart of the mountain”. Reskin: a taiga hunting lineage whose eldest child dreams a tiger before their first winter kill. This is the class’s invention, loosely after the regard in which peoples of the Amur basin hold the tiger.
• Witness. The little owl that stood for Athena on Athenian coins. The Nahua tecolotl, the owl whose call was heard as an omen of misfortune or death. Huginn and Muninn (“thought” and “memory” or “mind”), the ravens who fly out over the world for Odin each day in Grímnismál. Reskin: a helping spirit of the Siberian shamanic traditions that travels the upper world and reports back in dream.
• Guardian. The berserkir, a name often read as “bear-shirts”, though the reading is debated. Artio, a Celtic bear goddess known from a Gallo-Roman bronze found at Muri, near Bern. In literature rather than myth, Beorn the skin-changer, host and bear, from Tolkien’s The Hobbit. Reskin: a bear-guardian drawn from the Ainu understanding of the bear as a kamuy, a god who visits the human world wearing a bear’s fur. Making the bear the one who stands between the village and the dark is the class’s invention: in Ainu tradition the god who guards the village, kotan kor kamuy, is usually the fish owl. The Ainu are a living people, and the kamuy belong to their own practice.
• Reborn. The selkie of Orkney, Shetland and Faroese tales, who cannot find her sealskin to go home. The kitsune of Japanese folklore, who in tales such as Kuzunoha’s lives as a human wife until she is seen in her fox shape. In the Völsunga saga, Sigmund and Sinfjötli put on wolf-skins they cannot take off, and can shed them only every tenth day. Reskin: in a Mesoamerican-inspired frame, a person whose transformed shape and companion animal have become one, at the price of a single shared death. This is the class’s invention: it joins the two ideas that anthropologists often keep apart.
• Venom-Coil. The Nāgas, the serpent beings of Hindu, Buddhist and Jain traditions, often shown half-human in art. Python, the serpent at Delphi whom Apollo killed, beside the omphalos or “navel” of the world. Quetzalcōātl, the feathered serpent, is a creator and culture hero linked with wind and learning, not with venom; the Skin borrows only the serpent’s image. Reskin: a fantasy serpent-priesthood of the coil and the cure, inspired by Dan (Aido-Hwedo), the rainbow serpent of Fon and Ewe vodun, which is a living religion, and by Dangbe, the python vodun still honoured at the Temple of Pythons in Ouidah, Benin. The priesthood and its cure are invented; they do not describe how vodun is practised.
• Pack. The úlfheðnar, the “wolf-coats” of Norse poetry and sagas. Sköll and Hati, the wolves who chase the sun and moon in Snorri’s Gylfaginning; Hati is called the son of Hróðvitnir, usually taken to be Fenrir. The she-wolf who suckled the twins Romulus and Remus in Rome’s founding legend. Reskin: a steppe wolf-brotherhood who count descent from a grey wolf, after the she-wolf ancestress of the Ashina (Göktürk) royal clan in Chinese chronicles, and Börte Chino (“grey-blue wolf”), the first ancestor of the Mongols in the Secret History; whether the Secret History means a wolf or a man of that name is debated.

How the material was adapted

The class is a Mesoamerican-rooted shapeshifter, but no god, place, people or calendar appears in its rules. The tonal became your animal self: a plain phrase that keeps the one claim the design depends on, that the animal is a person with its own life and opinions, and drops the cosmology around it. The day-sign, the shared death and the sorcerer’s reputation live in the Mesoamerican-inspired example above, beside other worlds’ names for the same bond. The six Skins have plain English names; the jaguar Skin is the Prowler in the rules because the 2024 Ranger already has a Hunter subclass. Their touchstones stay here, as credit for where the shapes came from and not as a claim about what any tradition believes.

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Playing a Nagual

The core of the character is that your power is a someone. Give the animal self a personality that is not yours — hungrier, calmer, older, funnier — and let it want things: a route through the hills instead of the road, a wide berth around one particular NPC, an hour at dusk doing nothing but watching. The single best habit for playing this class: once per session, let your animal self be right when you were wrong, and once per session, overrule it. The relationship stays alive exactly as long as neither of you always wins. Contrast yourself with druids and nature clerics by being personal rather than institutional — you answer to no grove, no circle, no council, only to the private, wordless bond between you and one animal — and remember that harming your animal self, or its species, should land on you like a threat against family, not an abstract offense.

The physicality of the power. Decide how the surfacing looks — beautiful, unsettling, holy, or private — and how your character feels about being seen mid-Aspect. When an Aspect rises, narrate the seam: the jaw that unhinges a half-inch too far, the pupils that go round and gold, the shoulder blades that suggest a wing before there is one. One who hides the animal is carrying shame or protecting a secret; one who surfaces casually at dinner is making a statement about what counts as a person. Play your durability at the table — you’re a frontline anchor who wades in and holds, not a glass burst-striker.

Where did you meet? The fever-dream initiation is traditional, but consider: a childhood so lonely the animal came to keep you company; a near-death where it carried you back the first time, unofficially; an inherited bond (your grandmother’s animal self was an owl, and so, it turns out, is yours — the same owl?); or a formal apprenticeship where meeting your animal was the graduation everyone feared. Give the animal a specific history, not a species — the particular jaguar at the particular waterhole in the particular season — because specificity is the whole point of the bond.

Quirks (d6).

1. You eat in the animal’s order — protein first, always.
2. You turn your head, not your eyes, to look at things.
3. You say “we,” then correct it to “I” — or you’ve stopped correcting it.
4. You dislike mirrors; the reflection is sometimes not configured the way you left it.
5. You groom — yourself, and absent-mindedly, your friends.
6. You sleep curled in the animal’s shape and deny it.

Bonds and hooks (d6).

1. Your animal self is older than you — it has surfaced in your family before, and it remembers things about your grandmother it can’t say in words.
2. A hunter is collecting animal selves; you’ve met one empty-eyed survivor, and you can’t stop thinking about the eyes.
3. Your animal is afraid of exactly one place on the map and won’t say why.
4. A child in your village just met their animal, badly; you’re the only one who can teach them.
5. You once wore an Aspect for a month straight, and something of you still hasn’t fully surfaced back.
6. The animal chose you over someone else — and that someone knows.

The arc by tier.

• Levels 1–4: two strangers sharing a body — play the negotiation as literal, with visible pauses where you ask before the animal answers.
• Levels 5–10: fluency; the surfacing is graceful now, and the danger is forgetting the animal is a partner rather than equipment.
• Levels 11–16: the border thins — The Standing Truce means one Aspect never fully leaves, and people who knew you before start noticing what you’ve become and what you’ve kept.
• Levels 17–20: the question every telling about your kind eventually asks — not “will the animal take over,” which was never the real danger, but “when the two of you have finished becoming one thing, will that thing still love what you loved?”

In the party. You’re a versatile skirmisher and a durable frontline: never the highest single number, but the right tool surfacing at the right moment — scout, tracker, climber, face-reader, ambush-breaker, and a reliable melee line that’s very hard to put down. You pair beautifully with a party that plans, because Aspects reward knowing what’s coming, and your Skin decides your flavor of contribution: Prowler opens fights, Guardian holds them, Venom-Coil shuts a threat down, Pack makes everyone else lethal, Witness sees the trap first, Reborn goes places bodies aren’t supposed to go. Socially, you’re the one who notices — the flicker of a lie, the wrong smell in the cellar, the horse that’s afraid for a reason.

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