More thunks on the bestiary of my probably-never-going-to-exist big gay rpg. This is mostly random free-form stuff, but I’ll lead off answering the question I asked at the end of the last post on the topic: what animals do I want to see here? Like what mundane animals live there, and how do they interact with magical monsters and people? Easy to imagine unicorns and griffins and cockatrices ruling all lesser beasts with their unnatural ways.
Maybe not tho. Maybe those beasties just exist in balance with everything else in the ecosystem, doing their own distinct niches. It’s easier to come up with the magickal monsters when the baseline fauna is decided on. Wouldn’t have half eagle half lions in a world with no lions, right? To that end, creatures I’d like to see: The standard Eurasian fare, since this is another RPG inspired by the world of knights in shining armor. They need horses to ride. They could have similar distributions, but maybe more lions and tigers in the europey West than there were by medieval times in our world. But besides that, it would be nice to have some more cool animals.
How can you have an Africa-inspired south without Afrotherian animals like elephants? Maybe the seaside could have dugongs and manatees, southern rocks could be crawlin’ with hyraxes. Or would those be outcompeted by marmots? Other cool African animals that have a bit of representation elsewhere include mongooses and hyenas and crocodiles, cobras, leopards… I should have regional variations on these. Like maybe male lions in the west have manes that look like mohawks, or leopards in the north have no spots, just… whatever. If loxodonta could roll up on the Europe-like area without needing a Hannibal to drive them, they surely would. How weird could that be? Should I make up my own oddball members for this clade, with funkier tusks? How about rhinos? Europe used to have rhinos too.
No Americas means no sloths or New World monkeys or armadillos, no capybaras or guinea pigs, no cougars or jaguarundis or ocelots, no coyotes or raccoons or opossums or toucans or condors… Who would I miss the most? Who would I want to steal? Jaguars could just be stocky semi-aquatic leopard species, and I could use other cheats to get similar weirdos in. Coyotes and golden jackals are very similar. I guess in lieu of armadillos we could have more varied pangolin species. That’d be cool. Condors are pretty neat but mostly I prefer Old World vultures. Maybe capybaras could get replaced with micro hippopotami or semi-aquatic hyraxes – some holdover intermediate form on the grade to sirenians.
I do love Australian and New Zealand animals but for this I can lose ’em. Did we lose any animals in the Pleistocene that would be cool to snatch back for this..? I don’t feel the need. Stick some wool on the iciest boys. Going further prehistoric, I do think non-avian dinosaurs are fun to combine with high fantasy, but for simplicity’s sake I’ll lose them here. Ooh lemurs and fossas… No Madagascar… Yeah, sorry lemurs. You can get your revenge in Gun Lemurs.
I like the idea of making large animal fauna very different from inner sea to outer ocean. Fish could be sorta samey by evolving before the sea was enclosed, but all the large mammals emerged after that. Maybe the inner sea could have abundant nautiloids because all the pinnipeds are on the ocean side, maybe it could have a whole separate radiation of whales that split from the ocean whales when the last common ancestor still had hooves. Or they got outcompeted by giant crocodiles or sharks or sea cows. Maybe hoofed whales could still exist, or other protowhale variants, niches something like a cross between a peccary and a capybara on crack.
Whence magical beasties, like unicorns and such? They’d be created by gods or wizards or the magic of the Outer Wild, but establish breeding populations on Gaya. I might crib some ideas from Pliny, but it would be cool to just make up my own that match the vibe. Was just randomly reminded of the “leontophone” recently, sounds fun. I think griffins would be specialized predators of pegasi. Take that, u majestic creatures. I was calling the RPG The Cockatrice because dicks but the poison roosters should be here too… No special thoughts on these for the moment.
In looking at the story Puss in Boots (before the most recent time I was messing with it), I was struck by the absurdity of these helpful animals in fairy tales, and wanted to include something like that in my RPG. I wrote a first draft novel once in this world, called The Death Knight. It can’t be published anytime soon, but it’s a hoot. I made a Puss-type character for it, which was real fun to write. Just a cat that likes you for cat reasons, but is also magical and talking. Teddy bear picnic havers.
So magic animals are cat-sized, whether they’re a bullfrog or a raven or a snake, and they talk, and they can do some random impossible thing as part of their gimmick. Sub-type “Divinity.” My husband was saying he thought the game should have Watership Down type characters, like a goose in a bonnet, that live in treehouse villages. That would be a different, less magical category. Call them talking animals? Probably the ones to hang out with faeries.
I should probably ask a furry how they’d prefer to see a game handle humanoid animal people. I had a few thoughts on that. One, just more hate for the splatbook tendency of D&D to produce redundant concepts. There were like a dozen plus lizard races in those books! I don’t wanna do like that. My initial idea for an animal-themed character race was animal-headed people, like the minotaur, like characters from Bojack Horseman, as a singular race that had random animal heads that said something about their personalities. Like a beaver-headed dude and a crow-headed woman could give birth to twin babies where one had a chicken head and one had an alligator head. But furries always want their fursonae to have more animalistic features to the body as well, to have tails and paws and shit. Merely having an animal head will not satisfy them.
So animal races that are more like, furry bod. Like wolfen from Palladium’s fantasy RPG, or the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, or those ducks from Runequest. But do I have it be one race that can have any kinda animal type, like the animal-head thing I originally conceived, or just animal races that are all that animal type, like the aforementioned examples? If I start making races based on animals, where do I draw the line? Which ones do I include?
More importantly, if I make content with a nod toward trans girls someday, shouldn’t I include anime catgirls? How cat should they be? How about puppygirls? Where does pony play fit into all this? The head spins. I’m not trying to make the furriest RPG. That’s somebody else’s job. Incidentally, if you know of furry RPGs you wanna recommend in the comments, I’d like to hear about ’em.
Moving on, other things I’ve thought about. Greek mythology, like, the freaks at the bacchanal. Satyrs, maenads, sileni. I never knew about sileni until I saw the movie Šileni by Jan Švankmajer. It didn’t have anything to do with them, just that the mythological creatures symbolize madness and that movie was about insanity, in its own theatrical (stock ableist) way. I enjoyed that film a lot. But what are sileni? Some sources have them as an old man or satyr on a donkey, some don’t distinguish between them and satyrs, etc. It varies. Point is, they’re in the retinue of Dionysus partying with deadly abandon, along with maenads and satyrs and centaurs. I liked the donkey connection and made them into donkey people, similar mix of animal and human features to that of satyrs.
Maenads brings me back to nymphs. For some reason, most of the interesting ideas I’ve come up with for player races are centered on nymphs. There were a lot of nymphs in mythology by a lot of names, and no real official canon to it all. They were always pretty ladies with some kind of supernatural origin or power (in this maenads may have been outliers), but I’m like, no way. They can have whatever gender, in my book. So what will they be?
Immortal pretty people that form out of nature by spontaneous generation, but rarely. That got me thinking about immortality. In RPGs you always level up the longer your alive, which produces the unrealistic phenomenon of old people being the most powerful. Granny has a hundred hit points. Watch out. What about immortals tho? How can you play a character like that, who might have a billion zillion experience points? My solution was that they lose their skills and memories if they don’t practice them, and they sometimes go dormant for long periods of time. This came to me as a mental image of people in the foam of a wave, of in the rocks of a mountain, or floating in clouds, or tangled in tree branches. What if you found a guy in the woods who went to sleep four-hundred years ago, and was half-buried in soil and roots? Kinda cool. This could allow people to play an old character as a 1st level guy who has to work his way back to the skills he once had, who has memories of bygone lives that could have been glorious or mundane.
Didja know the Cyclops wasn’t the only giant Ulysses met on his journey? On one island his crew met a city of giant people who just started gobbling them up like chicken wings. It was a horrifically evocative idea, actually, if you get a mental picture of it. The Laestrygonians. The times I’d seen reference to them in the past weren’t quite the same as what I’ve turned up more recently, and I have been cobbling together a race of giants pretty different from the original notion. Still, gotta have big chompers.
That puts me in mind of ogres. From Europe to Japan there is a concept of an ogre, with a lot of variety over that range. Generally it’s a wild man, giant and club-wielding, an eater of men. There’s blurred boundaries with the idea of the Green Man, but I feel like ogres are more universally large and bullying. This puts me in mind of child abuse, and they aren’t the only monster that do so. Lamias are famous for eating children. With these two archetypes in mind, I once had an idea for an RPG where the characters are all children of lamias and ogres, in high school, some question of whether it’s a metaphor or a dream or reality within the setting, blah blah blah. The point tho. Big scary monsters can be scary &/or psychologically interesting.
When I was thinking on playable races I had an idea that could be reserved for high-power adventures where the characters could be demigods. They’d have similar stats to regular characters, but have some limited ways they could break the rules. Like in Jason and the Argonauts when Hercules chucks a rock out to a distant island and another guy who is not as strong sez “I can do that,” and achieves it by skipping the stone. Home boy, that is not possible. But as much of a headache as that could be to adjudicate in game terms, the flava would be sweet. I’d like to see if I could make it work.
I mention this in an article about monster ideas because I realized I’d already embraced a similar idea for magical animals, and that implies they are a kind of divinity, doesn’t it? So in this conception, they’re like nymphs, naturally emerging from nature, possibly on a path to becoming gods themselves, or just fucking around and living as an interesting little part of the world, until their time is over. Angels and devils should likewise have some kind of powers not available to anybody in the material world unless they somehow also are born with or achieve divinity, on a spectrum leading up to gods of heaven and hell. Less interesting to me, but a natural extension of that line of thought.
Elfs. I don’t know why elves gotta have multiple types, some kinda Tolkien damage, but I couldn’t shake it off. My husband thinks elves should be short but other partisans are sayin’ they should be tall. Some should be lofty and live in silver light, some should be wild boyz. The idea of duality in dökkálfar and ljósálfar call out to my ass as well, and we’ve had a few others I wanted to squeak in. The list is currently at high elves, light elves, dark elves, garbage elves, glamer elves, and murder elves. Garbage elves are downtrodden of urban realms, glamer elves have extra magickalism, murder elves have affinity for other murder faeries like kelpies and rusalka, and the other are the usual shmusual. My idea on dark elves is that they can have unnatural skin tones which may or may not be dark, and they have a more lively / informal / chaotic culture. Light elves more ordered and prim with human-like skin tones that can also be very dark depending on where in the world they come from. Gettin away from evil / good as well as light / dark skin tones as having implications, I hope.
I hinted at some of my other thoughts in the last post on this topic without getting into them properly, and running out of time on this post, so I’ll let it stand at this.
I really let my queue get dry. I have an idea for a post and I queue it before it’s actually done, and as I rush this out eight hours before I’m required to wake up for work tomorrow, I marvel at how it came to this. I guess I had a little glut of high-effort posts all come due around the same time. Whatever. Check out more excessive word count tomorrow, with Dead Milkmen Part II.
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