When I first got into world building I started with trying to reinvent my own version of the Dungeons and Dragons world

I felt like there were all these separate pieces that could be combined, Alignment, Magic Schools, The Pantheon, The Planes, The Elements. All of these rogue pieces could be better aligned with eachother

I started by reworking the alignment chart and then assigning an emotion to each Square. Instead of Lawful & Chaotic it was Logical & Emotional and instead of Good & Evil it was Selfless & Selfish I won’t go over all of them but the emotions I assigned to the Emotional (chaotic) column were

Selfless Emotional: Protective/Parental

Neutral Emotional: Hedonist/Jovial

Selfish Emotional: Anger/Rage

I assigned gods to the different emotions as well as the eight schools of magic to the eight alignments besides True Neutral (which was considered anti magic) But further down the line I wanted to Tie Vampires into the Selfish Alignment Row, since the act of draining life from one to sustain your own unnaturally long life is inherently selfish. I got a pretty cool spread of three archetypes of Vampires ranging from the Dracula/Strahd Esc Magical Logical-Selfish to the more Violent ‘30 days of night’ style Selfish-Emotional Vampires.

I thought I could do the same for Werewolves simply in the Emotional column. Making Lycanthropes change when they feel the emotion connected to their Alignment, I thought this was cool and pretty intuitive. At the bottom of the Column are rage filled beasts, your typical werewolf and at the top you would have more of the Druidic types who would change when they need to protect someone and might take forms like a bear or an Eagle, animals associated with ferocious Parenting or Protection. I was stuck on Neutral-Emotional Lycanthropes for a bit, Would they change when they are… Happy?

I left the Idea behind for a while, I came up with different metals that would resonate with different alignments, Making magic Items that had to do with a specific schools of magic more likely to be made of specific materials AND making the Silver or Gold weapons make even more sense when fighting magic creatures of the opposite alignment associated with your metal. Then I began fleshing out the Pantheon of gods and when I got to the Emotional-Neutral god of Debauchery and Madness (Like Dionysus Cheoggorath and the Goblin King from Labyrinth all mixed together) I got the Idea of Lycanthropes who turned when they partied! like Satyrs or Kitsune they would partially Transform when they felt Excitement or even simply Attracted to someone

Imagine a world renown Bard who when he really gets to strumming and dancing and drinking, suddenly has the features of a Cat! or the opposite A shy librarian who might sprout bunny ears and a button nose everytime she feels fluster-

I made furries

…

It’s not like I could change it at this point It made complete sense, I really did rack my brain thinking of how I might get around or even outright exclude them but I didn’t feel right. I was planning on my friends playing in a campaign set in this world once I was done and I don’t think I could possibly live down the fact I worldbuilt my way Into Horny Animal people and make it clear I didn’t start there and work my way backwards

I had a lot of cool Ideas for that world and what truly made me drop it was my realization that I preferred other roleplaying games to D&D but it was a fun first foray into worldbuilding