Been a bit, but here's Hide of the Beast, my weird cursed tabaxi grappler. Big monstery 18-year-old that he is.

Anyway, his entire family line was cursed when one of his ancestors rejected advances from a warlock who had his patron curse them. They grew monstrous and scaly and were run into the woods where they lived in solitude in the thickest part of the forest's heart for generations. Now they're essentially a folktale. The Growling Wood, people say, is full of monsters cursed by dark magic and evil luck. Throughout the years, a fair number of tabaxi men, women, and children have gone in but never come back out, or they're seen years later as monstrous things.

(Anyone who is part of the family, through blood or marriage or adoption, gets the curse.)

But due to this isolation and general hardship, now it's just Beast, his aunt, his mother, and his grandmother (his father died a few years back from an infected hunting injury). Oh, the other part of the curse is that there's a chance, with enough stress or raw emotion, members of the family will turn feral + become rampaging bestial versions of themselves. It doesn't happen often, but is a threat, and there's no fix unless the curse is broken.

The curse can only be broken by the warlock, but nobody knows who he was or what happened to him (or even if he's still alive, because he must be *killed by one of the cursed* or must *willingly remove the curse*).