Magical curses are funny things. Especially old curses that appear deceptively simple.
We don't know exactly who the wizard was who tried to cure lycanthropy because nothing of them remained after the top floor of their house blew up. Fortunately, nobody appeared to have been harmed aside from the closest trees, and their house was in the middle of a big forest.
We have some scattered notes, written in cipher because of course they are. What we have managed piece together is that they tried to reverse the curse in some way.
At first it was just another wizard who fell victim to their own hubris or curiosity, depending on your point of view.
But then the people started to appear. Half feral and skittish with only very rudimentary speech, but unmistakably speech nontheless. The people in the villages at the edge of the forest were equally wary, puzzled and empathetic.
They appeared regularly but sporadically. It was six months before a trapper came in with the final clue. He had snared a fox, coming upon it late as he checked his traps. And then the fox changed into a young man before his eyes.
At first he thought it was one of the fey, but it was not. For a gift of a silver comb and a story, the fey did provide then answer to the trapper though. It was an anthrothrope. A beast who transformed into a human.
It caused quite a stir among the villages around the forest. It was debated wether they should kill these new... people animals, like they did with most lycanthropes, or just shun them. Or even try to help them.
No real consensus was reached. The people animals were rarely violent when they approached humans, unlike many lycanthropes, and they had a hunger to learn as much as they often were physically hungry for food.
Most people ended up mostly ignoring them, occasionally giving them some food or offering some lessons in exchange for a service. A few were bent on hunting them down and killing them, a task that proved quite difficult indeed. A few were openly welcoming to them, offering shelter and lessons and encouraging them to live among or alongside the regular humans.
People being people, it was among the later group that it was discovered that the anthrothrope nature bred true when they had a child with a human.
It was a strange sight indeed at first, seeing fox kits and human children playing games as if they were siblings, and part of the month there were more human children playing together and no animals, but despite some muttering and grumbling they were tolerated, sometimes even welcomed. Perhaps because a few of the families now had wolf and bear members who protected their four-legged and two-legged kin alike and most of those who had wanted to kill the anthrothropes were now dead.
There are still lycanthropes, and they are as dangerous as ever, and the druids and priest have confirmed that the anthrothrope condition still registers as a curse.
But whatever the wizard did, even though it didn't reverse lycanthropy, it seems this curse is less malignant, even if it leads to some quite unusual family constellations.
