Alien Animals

[Ghostmoon]

Xyros, you mention that you cut and paste your information from a gazette. Is there additional information about Xyros available?

 

[A2Z]

Xyros, you mention that you cut and paste your information from a gazette. Is there additional information about Xyros available?

I'd be interested in seeing some more too. Your campaign setting sounds pretty interesting.

 

[s/LaSH]

Yes, Dougal Dixon's books are great. I've seen one other, called Man After Man, which basically assumes that humans, through genetic manipulation and later natural evolution, branch off into a bunch of weird species over the next hundred million years. A thousand or so years in, civilisation collapses, and at the very end the aliens show up, only they're us. It's pretty cool, charting a process of evolution rather than giving a slice of time like his previous books.

I've got New Dinosaurs, and it would make a fascinating world now that I think about it. Brickets browsing from the tall trees (crested dinosaurs with wooly coats and brightly striped tails), titanic gestalt hives on the riverbanks (gestalts are dog-sized hive dinos that survived the Ice Age by building these house-sized constructions), and the ultimate wolf in sheep's clothing, the jinx (it looks exactly like the herbivorous coneater, its chosen prey) - just a sampling of the dinosaurs in Europe. I'm certain that any intelligent species would do something weird and create bizarre new domesticated species...

 

[Xyros]

I don't want to hijack the thread, but in answer to the questions above, yes, there is a book, and a synopsis of it was sent to Wizards of the Coast in their recent contest, but since I'm constantly editing and re-editing it, and using it in connection with my players, I'm a little hesitant to post more, at least on this thread. Thank you for the kind words, though.

Back on subject - sorry, Tonguez - another useful book for alien animals, though sadly long out of print, is Jeff Rovin's 'The Transgalactic Guide to Solar System M-17.' In it one can find a large variety of alien life forms, each uniquely designed to its ecosystem and many quite adaptable to D&D. My favorites are the Lam - sessile land creatures literally rooted into the earth but possessing telepathic abilities - and the Mariviva - a huge, seal-like animal used by barbarians for crossing oceans (picture a giant seal with a saddle on its back).

 

[Desdichado]

An example here would be the Asian Tiger and the Tazmanian Tiger. One is a mammal and the other is a marsupial, but both look similar in both stature and camouflage.

Uhh, marsupials are mammals. Marsupials are much closer to tigers than, say the dinosaurs. And during the 120+ million years of dinosaur dominance of the earth, the megafauna looked completely different to the mammalian fauna that followed.

Convergence is a useful scientific theory for your purposes here, but be careful about taking it too far. Niches are very broad categories, and a number of different adaptive strategies can be equally successful at meeting them. There are a few niches that really demand certain body types (so phytosaurs and crocodilians look almost exactly the same, for instance, as do sharks, ichthyosaurs and dolphins despite wildly divergent ancestry.) But do velociraptors and leopards look very much alike, even though they were about the same size, and hypothetically filled the same "niche?" Or why do brachiosaurs and giraffes look so different in terms of size? Why do indricotheres look so much like sauropod dinosaurs, although nothing else has before or since since the dinosaurs themselves?

There should be more to it than simply swapping names and descriptions.

 

[DWARF]

Personally, I really don't like the idea of bipedal animals, like Chocobo's or 2-legged dinosaurs, as mounts. Ever try riding an ostrich? Try to see it sometime, it can be quite a bumpy ride. That's why most animals we ride ar bipedal.

What I'd like to see is some sort of riding animal that has 6 or 8 legs.

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

I wrote illithid cats once, but I don't know if that counts...

 

[s/LaSH]

I think the theory goes that the more legs on a mount, the smoother the ride. Giant ants would be good. Camels... well, camels are evil and want to cause you suffering for the rest of your artificially prolonged life. Or so I've heard; I've never been foolish enough to ride one.

It would be interesting to have a breed of camel with a delightful disposition, a smooth gait, and very small saliva glands thrown into a setting. It would freak anyone who knows camels way out. I think I'll use that at some point, actually.

Which reminds me... a slight change to an existing creature can be quiet alien enough. Suppose your crop of wheat gets eaten... by cats. Or you're attacked by a blood-sucking chicken. Alien? I think so.

 

[Lurks-no-More]

Or you're attacked by a blood-sucking chicken. Alien? I think so.

Not alien. Just stirge.

Anyway, I'll join the chorus and say that Dixon's books are tres awesome.

In fact, you could pretty much rip the entirety of "After Man" and use it as a D&D world. Just add some PC species, and possibly magic, and presto!

For added fun, don't use any of the PHB races. Make them awakened critters, or some sort of bizarre fey things, or both.