The teacher stared at us with tears streaming down her face, destroyed, as a lab technician tried to restore order. The gas taps were burning like an oil rig and a window was cracked. A long-dead frog pickled in formaldehyde lay sprawled on the floor, doing the breaststroke. The floor was littered with broken microscopes, biological specimens, crippled stools, and torn books. We played a game as a class where the object was to smash school equipment of the greatest value in one lesson and pass it off as an accident. The result was something akin to a guerrilla war between largely disillusioned teachers and some of the most bored and aggressive kids imaginable. The kids who gave a damn had departed the year before, leaving the losers to fester away the next three years in a place no one wanted to be. There was a chasm between that headmistress and us. Plenty of us were bright enough, but we had no intention of displaying it in school. We were firmly set, like our fathers and grandfathers, mothers and grandmothers before us, on being what we were, and had always been. Her words flowed past us without registering, a sermon she'd delivered many times before. We were basically sorted aged twelve between those deemed intelligent (who were sent to a "grammar school") and those of us that weren't (who stayed at the "comprehensive"). Sitting surrounded by a mass of other academic non-achievers listening to an old battle-weary teacher lecturing us how we should aim to be more than just farmworkers, joiners, brickies, electricians, and hairdressers. I was in an assembly at the 1960s shoddy built concrete comprehensive school in our local town. If they were ever incapacitated or knocked unconscious, a group of beasts would appear within moments and protect them with their lives.I realized we were different, really different, on a rainy morning in 1987. The most powerful druids could call upon their summoned nature spirit to protect them during times of greatest need. Similarly, either the druids or their nature spirits could bolstered the life force of any creature they conjured by magical means. More experienced druids could direct these nature spirits to protect their charge animals. These spirits created an aura around them that enhanced the abilities of the druid and their allies. They gained the power to summon nature spirits to their aid, specifically those of either bears, hawks, or unicorns. They gained fluency in the Sylvan language and came to understand the meaning of gestures, noises, and body language made and exhibited by wild animals. Abilities ĭruids of the Circle of Shepherd learned early on how to speak with beasts and fey. They often preferred to live out in the wild, nearer to the animals for which they cared and further away from dense population centers. In rare instances, these druids took it upon themselves to protect innocent people, typically from among the common folk of the Realms. They viewed themselves as guardians and caretakers of the innocent creatures under their charge. Culture Ĭircle of the Shepherd druids focused of protecting defenseless animals and fey beings in context of natural cycles of life and death. These druids made every effort to cast out predatory monsters from their lands, admonish greedy hunters who slew more than was necessary, and like other druids, keep at bay the encroachment of civilization upon the natural world.
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