Identity and Shapeshifting

Reading through Ultimate Wilderness over the weekend, about shape-changing options for druids, the new shifter class, and general polymorph magic. I'm particularly interested because I was looking for new stuff my wife could use in our Rise of the Runelords/Jade Regent campaign my friend Erik runs. (It’s awesome. I’m playing a Minkai samurai and his twin sister, who is an alchemist, and running a disgraced noble family. My wife plays a half-orc druid with the Fire Domain who’s first reaction to most situations is to wild shape into a bear and eat something’s face or set it on fire, or both.) Anyway, I wanted to see if Ultimate Wilderness had some cool stuff for her, which it does.

But this effort got me thinking: having the capability of literally transforming yourself into something else at will—how does that change your perception of who you are? Gender becomes extremely fluid with these spells and abilities; hell, even species does. What does that do to your psyche? Does spending hours per day as a bear change how you think about the world? I would have to imagine the answer is yes, but I can’t quite imagine how.

Do you develop a taste for raw salmon? I feel this is the tendency in literature: your shape-shifted form (especially if it is an animal) starts to take over. Would it though? Or would it be a blending? Or, if you swap to different forms a lot, do you start becoming this chimera mind? How does having a certain set of senses one moment and not the next affect how you process information? Do you experience phantom smells or magnetic fields?