Yes, its true. Lycanthropy isn't perfect. It has its ups and downs. Here are the downs:

1. You cannot access you inventory while in were-form.

2. You are cursed forever to kill innocents (every 13 days an inside source says.)

3. Your reputation may drop.(not permanantly) Do not quote me on this.

4. You will be hunted 'til extinction by adventurers and werewolf hunters.

5. If you want to be cured, you will have to perform a rather pain-in-the-ass quest to get the cure.

* In beast-form, you (of course) have no access to your inventory: this means you can't pick up just about anything, drop anything, or get anything from (or put anything into) your wagon. You also cannot search corpses, and trying to do so is a VERY bad idea: when you click on the body, all items in it will be DESTROYED. Even if you switch back to human and try again, you will just get a message saying "the body has no treasure". One way around this problem is to kill all the monsters in a given section of dungeon, then switch to the human shape and retrace your steps, looting the corpses as you go. It's still a big pain. However, if the full moon is out, this problem is easy to avoid: you can kill a monster, change to human, grab all the stuff you want from the corpse, and let yourself change right back into beast-form a few moments later.

* When in beast-form, you cannot wield ANY weapons whatsoever: you have to rely on your claws, and the damage done by your claws (and your chance of scoring a hit) depends upon your hand-to-hand skill. Even with that 30 point bonus one gets at the onset of lycanthropy, many adventurers will find thier ability in this area to be less than stellar. (Of course, that will improve with time... at the upper levels, hand-to-hand can do nearly as much damage with each hit as a daedric dai-katana. A bit of advice: don't get into any barroom brawls with an experienced lycanthrope! ) This is a BIG problem for characters who rely heavily upon weapons for survival. Even the full moon doesn't help here: it takes time to re-equip a weapon, and you are likely to get in no more than one or two swings for your pains before being forced back into the werebeast form. Your best bet here is either 1) bone up on hand-to-hand, or 2) find Hircine's Ring, but that's a pretty tough thing to get yer claws on...

* If you enter a town while in beast-form (the beast-form really takes in on the chin - er, snout - here, doesn't it?), you will find the place deserted: no guards, no citizenry, nothing. (Let's face it: what would YOU do if you saw a werewolf heading towards your town? Offer them a plate of brownies?) Curiously, the same thing happens if you leave a buidling in the town while shapechanged. You have to be in human form for anybody to be strolling around outside. The full moon works nicely here! Just enter a building, change to a human, and leave. Even though you're about to change back within moments, there'll be people wandering blissfully about. Buncha dopes. However, even if the town is deserted, the full moon isn't out, and you don't feel like returning to human form (or you can't... I TOLD you not to throw away that spellbook!), you can still summon the town guards by committing some silly crime. Vagrancy works nicely. "Hey, we know you're a savage, feral monster and all, but there's absolutely no sleeping in our streets, period! HALT! HALT! HAHAHA!" Slaying guards, of course, will satisfy the ever-present "need to hunt the innocent" (described below).

* Sigh. Again, while in beast-form, your reputation will effectively be -100 points lower than usual. (Thankfully, this penalty promptly vanishes upon returning to the human shape: it applies to the wolf-form ONLY.) What this means is that most people won't want to speak to you at all when you're a werewolf: you'll get "no response" unless you were really, really, really in that person's good graces as a human. Oddly, you can ask for quests without any problem whatsoever. No problem, if the full moon is out. Switch to a human, and nobody seems to be bothered by the fact that you had 3-inch fangs and claws just moments earlier. Other than that, there isn't much you can do. Sheesh, why are you trying to carry on a conversation in THIS state, anyway?

* Pull up a chair (or just sit on your haunches ) if you haven't already... it's time to talk about "the need to hunt the innocent", and it's probably THE most complicated and universally misunderstood aspect of Tamriellian lycanthropy. (No, it does not occur once a month or once every full moon or once a week. Forget about any of that stuff, it's all nonsense.)

Here goes: As I mentioned way back in the "good stuff" section, something I called a "hunt clock" is set to 14 days at the moment one becomes a lycanthrope. When 14 days have passed, the "clock" reaches zero, and it stays right there. Simple enough, right? Sure. So why do you care? Here's why: the moment the "hunt clock" reaches zero, your character is stricken with "the need to hunt the innocent", in a BIG WAY. (You'll know it when it happens, because the game will say "you feel the need to hunt the innocent" at the top of the screen. If you're in the habit of ignoring stuff that appears at the top of the screen, you'd better lose that habit PRONTO.) At that time, your maximum health point total will rapidly plumment to 4 (and so will your current health point total, of course). Not a good condition to be in if you're planning on engaging in any dangerous activities, such as, say, adventuring. Fortunately, nothing further happens if you ignore "the need to hunt the innocent", no matter how long you do so: the "hunt clock" remains stuck at zero, and you remain stuck at 4 health.and if you DO NOT hunt the innocent or if you get caught doing so. well...you are screwed!

So what do you do to get out of this situation? Well, you have to slay an "innocent person", of course. (This is why lycanthropy is referred to as a "curse", in case you were wondering.) In Daggerfall, "innocent people" refers to the town/city citizens who are strolling blissfully about outside in the streets during the daytime. "Innocent people" ALSO includes the armor-clad guards who scream "HALT!" and race forth like lemmings whenever you commit some no-no (such as murder, for instance). All you need to do is kill ONE of these unfortunates (killing more than one at a time is both pointless and useless), and the "need to hunt the innocent" will go away. (Note that it is NOT necessary to be in beast-form when you do the deed.)

You'll drop to 4 health, you'll need to kill an innocent, the clock resets to 14 days, and so on. So it's a pretty unattractive situation.

Your maximum health-point total will increase to its previous level immediately (your current health will have to be restored through magic or resting, unfortunately), and your "hunt clock" will be reset back to 14 days... ...and promptly begin counting down once again. And once it hits zero, the same thing will happen all over again, ready or not.

There IS a way to take some of the sting out of this problem. Now, if what you can't stand is the killing of innocents, I can't help ya. Your character is on thier own as far as coming to grips with THAT is concerned. On the other hand, if all that really bothers you is being reduced to 4 health points at innoppurtune moments, that's solvable. See, the BIG SECRET is this: ---> If you kill an innocent BEFORE the "hunt clock" counts down to zero, the clock will promptly reset back to 14 days anyway!

<--- Guess what that means? It means that if you waste an innocent when the clock is at 7 days, or 4 days, or 2 days, or even 12 hours, you get another 14 days of freedom from "the need to hunt the innocent" right then and there, on the spot. In fact, as long as you never allow 14 days to pass after a killing before you commit the next killing, you will NEVER, EVER "feel the need the need to hunt the innocent", and you will NEVER see your maximum health points drop to 4 again, EVER.

Of course, you still need to "hunt the innocent": you just never FEEL the need gnawing at you, because you're always satisfying the urge before it reaches a critical level (i.e. before the "hunt clock" reaches zero). Boy, do I ever hope this system is used in Morrowind, because I've got it PEGGED, man! And if you don't believe me, try it yourself. You won't regret it!

* Lycanthrope hunters. I could probably write page upon page about these drooling, arrogant idiots, but I'll keep it short.

Actually, these guys don't give you many problems until about a year after you become a lycanthrope. Sometime around then, you will receive a vicious letter from a hunter, informing you that you have been "found out" (true enough). Because of their maniacal obsession with the personal destruction of all werebeasts, however, lycanthrope hunters will never report you to the authorities, and so your legal reputation will not drop at this time. (Ask around a bit, and you'll find that the hunter went through some traumatic childhood experience that obviously destroyed their sanity.)

You now have two choices: dump the letter on the ground and ignore it (a very appealing option) or visit a priest, mentioned in the letter, who knows how to cure lycanthropy. If you ignore the threat, you will soon come under attack from the hunter's flunkies. A particularly wimpy and fumbling werewolf may succumb under this assault, but if that's the case, you have probably not been following the advice on this web site. Anyway, the hunters will eventually tire of throwing themselves suicidally at you (even utter lunatics can only take so much), and leave you alone... for another year anyway. Then the fun begins anew. If you humor your advesary and pay a visit to the priest, they'll babble on about "the beast" and "resisting the beast" (whatever! ), and then finally offer you a chance at a cure: transmitting the disease to a "latent" lycanthrope.

If you agree to this route, I'm not lending you any help with it: if you're so dissatisfied with lycanthropy, you'll figure it out! However, if you DISAGREE to this method (i.e. you click "No"), the priest doesn't give up on you. Instead, they tell you about a coven of witches called "the witches of Glenmoril Wyrd", who allegedly possess a cure for lycanthropy, and send you out to locate them. Agreeing to this quest is actually a GOOD thing: you'll go on a jaunt through a couple of fairly tough dungeons, and then you'll receive a map showing you where the coven is located. Whether the coven actually has a cure is not something I actually care to discuss. Hmph. What's important here is that the witches of Glenmoril Wyrd are the ONLY witches capable of summoning the Daedra Prince Hircine... and I refuse to defile his name by speaking of him any further in the "bad stuff" section! He's got his own section on this site. Read that. Of course, even if you do visit the priest, the lycanthrope hunters will soon attack you anyway. That's because they're complete lunatics... but I think I'm repeating myself here...