A vukodlak is a shapeshifting being of South Slavic folklore, a person who becomes a wolf, and in many Balkan traditions a corpse that will not stay buried. It sits on the blurred line between the werewolf and the vampire, and it is one of the darkest threads in the whole Slavic weave.
MORANA: The Open Grave is a free Slavic folk-horror card game you can play in your browser right now, no download and no signup.
The name vukodlak comes from Slavic roots meaning, roughly, "wolf's hair" or "wolf's pelt," and it appears in many forms across the South Slavic languages, kin to the West Slavic vlkodlak and the wider family of wolf-men in European folklore. The word traveled and shifted: in parts of the Balkans it came to name a revenant, a returning dead thing, as much as a living shapeshifter.
In the older sense, a vukodlak is a human who takes the form of a wolf, whether by curse, by fate, or under a particular moon. In the later Balkan sense, it is the restless dead, a body that rises and preys on the living, so close to the vampire that the words were sometimes used for the same fear. What unites both is the refusal to remain what it should be: not fully man, not fully beast, not fully dead.
Communities took real precautions against it. Folklore records the burial rites, the crossroads graves, and the measures meant to keep a suspected vukodlak from rising or roaming, precautions that, in the tales, rarely work as hoped. The vukodlak belongs to the tradition's hard edge, the part of Slavic folklore concerned with death that does not end cleanly, which is the exact soil MORANA grows in.
In MORANA: The Open Grave, he is Vukodlak Moon-Cursed, a Rare Wild Spirit, and his rules are pure folklore: "Reborn: returns with +4 Power and Clash 3." He is the creature built to be killed, because killing him is how he grows: struck down, he crosses to the Open Grave and rises stronger, exactly the revenant that will not stay buried. His flavour says it plainly: "Bury him at a crossroads. It rarely helps." He is one of the clearest cards in the game for teaching the Reborn mechanic and the Open Grave. Read him in the Grimoire, and see how the returning dead read as puzzles on the Read the Grave page.
The vukodlak is the beating heart of the game's central idea. MORANA is a game where death is the middle of the card, not the end, and no folk figure carries that better than the thing that comes back from the grave meaner than it went in. He is the card that makes new players understand, in one turn, why the graveyard here is a battlefield.
Sources: general references on the vukodlak and vlkodlak such as the entries "Vukodlak" and Slavic werewolf and vampire folklore, and comparative works on Balkan revenant traditions. Where meanings differ by region, this page notes both the werewolf and the revenant sense. This page retells public-domain folklore in our own words for background. The card described is part of the planned First Turning set. This page describes MORANA only and does not reference any other product.