Not a backstory quirk, but I have a fun alternative mechanic for a Druid!

I have a Druid PC in the campaign I’m running right now who’s still relatively new to DnD and was disappointed that Wild Shape is limited to just twice a day (the DnD movie might be partially responsible for this). After some discussion we came up with some homebrew rules that she’s happy with and I’ve really enjoyed too.

She chooses two animals per day that she can Wild Shape into and she can switch between them and her human form as often as she’d like, but their HP doesn’t reset and if one of them hits 0, she loses that Wild Shape for the day. She doesn’t have to choose them at the beginning of the day, but once she’s transformed into an animal, she’s locked into that animal for the rest of the day. So if she decides to transform into a cat to be sneaky at the beginning of the day, she loses out on a possibly big beefy meat shield later on. She also can’t choose the same animal twice.

It’s been a fun way of giving her the flexibility to go in and out of animal form during RP (and sometimes a little in battle) without feeling like the balance is thrown way off.

The zeitgeist with DND druids has always bored me. I play them exclusively evil, as I am finding out just as I think about it now.

There is a middle finger of vecna druid archetype that allows for unique shapeshifts into an abomination. It’s a lot of fun to play and the shapeshift options are very versatile and adjustable each shift. I role played a LE human who sook out expediting the heat death of the universe for the Eldritch pantheon. I joined the party as they were already doing a good job leading to the destruction of society. It was all for the purity of nature, of course.

Another I played was a spore druid who was basically Shaggy from Scooby Doo, but evil. The archetype I used was absolutely awful but it came with lots of good stories as I got incredibly high irl to play the character. I conspired with the DM against the party for the glory of Strahd for an entire year of play, and then abandoned the vampire lord when the party started winning the final fight. Convincing the party irl (who was none the wiser but absolutely hated my character) that Strahd was just trying to get in their heads to split the party will probably be my favorite memory of DND for all time.

I played a sort of gutter punk druid once. He’d grown up in a sort of nature commune that had been wiped out by a magical disaster, and had lived penniless and transient on the streets of cities for years afterwards. There was a deep, empathetic anger at the injustices of how the world was structured I really enjoyed playing. Rather than just some reactionary defense of nature as something separate from people, he knew a better world was possible for the people who lived in it too by finding harmony with nature.

I never had a chance to play him before I switched off of 5e, but I had an idea for one in my back pocket forever. It was a Circle of the Land (Arctic) Druid who talked in an exaggerated Canadian accent, used a hockey stick for his sheleleigh, and wildshaped into Canadian animals like beavers, moose, and goose.

My entire playgroup (including me) is Canadian, so I feel like we all would’ve gotten a good laugh out of that.

Gus watches from his hunting perch. He knows that the prey is there. He can smell it, hear it… He’s just waiting on his hunting partner to fulfill his end of the deal. Gus could easily handle this on his own, but when training a companion, it pays to be slow, especially when dealing with the limited capabilities of your “chosen” “assistant.” Rodge was neither Gus’s first choice (second third or fourth either), nor was he a particularly capable assistant, but somehow Rodge seemed to make the choice, which is against the order of things. Regardless, Gus was stuck with who he had, and all things considered, there were some unexpected benefits to Rodge. Who would have expected the talons? Claws? (“What are those things called in this case? I’ve not seen digits that function that way often,” Gus thinks to himself) would be so damn useful? Sadly though Rodge was absolutely terrible at sneaking and seemed almost blind most of the time. “At least he is able to take commands well enough to distract our targets, maybe one day he will be more useful than startling birds out of the undergrowth while hunting, and it’s not as though I need him to carry me around and rub my tummy with those…! Fingers, they’re called fingers!”

Gus Gato the awakened bobcat and Rodge the useless human ranger, druid companion pet

My favorite druid was a Wizard / Druid (Circle of the Land) multiclass. From a role-playing perspective I didn’t really differentiate between his wizard spells and his druid spells - he was a “hedge mage” hermit who taught himself how to work magic. He used a component pouch because that covered all the non-scarce spell components for both classes.

From a gameplay perspective, he wasn’t very powerful because his access to higher-level spells was delayed. On the other hand, he had a WIDE variety of lower-level spells. He was able to cast most level-appropriate ritual spells from both classes, always had a utility spell ready for any situation, and Arcane Recovery + Natural Recovery meant he almost never ran out of slots. He was a good versatile caster.

Oh, and he was a goblin who used Disguise Self to pass as a gnome whenever he visited civilization.

Ooh. I’m playing a circle of spores druid with no memory. He just crawled out of some primordial ooze one day. Wild shape is limited pretty hard when you’ve only seen half a dozen animals. I see him as a thing birthed from the heart of the forest as a protector, but he sees the world as a plaything. He’s slowly leaning into criminal tendencies with no alignment to hold him back, and no guidance from the roots that bore him. He made friends with some symbiotic vines at some point as a homebrew feat. It’s kind of fun to use the vines in flavored ways with a lot of the druid spells.

Not mine, but once heard of the concept of an undead spore druid with fungi inside its body that serve as its digestive system.

It was a novel idea.

My favorite ever Druid was a human named Cleetus Fernbottom. I modeled him after the idea of the swampbenders in Avatar: The Last Airbender.

He was middle aged, balding, spoke with a Southern accent and was about as wide as he was tall. He was from the swamp and loved all the critters there. But he was tricked into leaving for a life of adventure because his Druid Circle thought he was too dumb. He wasn’t the brightest, but he had a heart of gold.

Mechanically he was a Cirlce of the Moon Druid, and I mostly used Thorn Whip as my cantrip and Giant Toad as my wildshape. His primary function was CC.

I played a Druid a few years back whose magical focus was narrowly on stone and earth. The idea was her culture (from which she had been exiled years prior for failing to fulfill some of her clerical responsibilities) considered the world to be a huge grave, and her role in said society was to interact with and advocate for the decomposed and petrified remains of the long dead. So she considered herself something of a necromancer, just for the dead that are so far gone as to become the landscape. 5e isn’t built to support this interpretation of the Druid class, but we managed it with some minor reflavoring and homebrewing. It was a fun concept but her beliefs and goals ended up becoming too at odds with the rest of the party, so I retired her to avoid friction.

While it never got much past the concept phase, I think it would be fun to play a circle of stars druid as a magical girl. I was thinking this ancient elven man who learned a bit of the druidic magics of his people, but was always more fascinated with the stars. One day he connected with a group of gnomes who invented a flying machine that could take them to the moon, and immediately signed up for the trip. When he got there, he discovered a moon goddess that had been trapped there. They hit it off famously, he offered to help free her, and she turned him into a knight of sorts, giving him the transformation ability. When he transforms, he turns into this young, bubbly, vivacious eleven woman with crazy armor and the standard anime oversized weapon that is based on which form he transformed into. She still has all the same memories, ideas and goals, but with a completely different personality. It would be pretty entertaining.

I’ve been playing Elenath, a 500 year old Stars druid for about two years now. She was originally a priestess of a god of light (though a recent revelation uncovered some arcane truths) until a cataclysmic event shook the world and severed her connection. So she fled to the woods and looked to the cosmos to reconnect with her fey ancestry.

Playing a 500 year old character is really fun because she was alive for anything involving a History check. Though she’s rather disconnected from the modern world and is unaware of anything that happened in the last few hundred years.