Alien Animals

[Tonguez]

In most campaigns it would seem that 'animals' and especially mundane animals are kept as they are irl. - You know people ride around on horses have pet dogs and raise sheep, cattle, pigs and chickens on their farms.

Has anyone used an entirely 'alien' set of 'mundane' animals in these mundane roles?

Say a world in which the common mount is the Chochobo, where Farmers tend heards of sixlegged Tweegs and the hopping Gonk is the most popular pet.

I know Barsoom (as in Edgar Rice Burroughs) had some alien animals has anyone else?

 

[frankthedm]

Grand idea for giving a world its own Feel. Right up there with a world with its own vulgarities.

Noi Ji Tat!

 

[Tsyr]

Grand idea for giving a world its own Feel. Right up there with a world with its own vulgarities.

Noi Ji Tat!

Not the same thing.

Granted, if you just started calling a cow a "fleem", and in all other respects it was a cow, that's one thing. But actualy creating new animals alltogether (IE, Chocobos) is something else entierly.

 

[Balgus]

Well, evolution states that animals evolve to fill a niche. So an animal on this planet that inhabits the same environment as another animal on another planet will inevitably converge to basically the same organism (even though it is extremely different)

So, in all respects, you can use the stats for a cow, and call it a mok. The Martians use the mok as food. It is elatively the same size and weight as an earth cow, but it has a horn which drips a green liquid that is very tasty to the martians.

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.

So as long as you come up with varying characteristics to give each planet its own feel, while still keeping a general treand of using "eart equivalent stats" then that should be fine. (ie substituting chocobo for ostrich)

 

[Xyros]

From my gazetter (excuse the cut and paste):

Xyros is a foreign world full of strange and bizarre sights. Horses, lions, and bears are unfamiliar to its residents, as are most other forms of terrestrial life. The sky is green, the grass is orange, and the trees are both golden and throbbing. Monsters such as the dread lewartaan and the multi-winged peninga take the place of chimeras and wyverns, and the disembodied brain sars and floating contemplators are every bit as psionically dangerous as any mind flayer or aboleth. The oldest cities are made of crystal and unbreakable glass. Though they have stood for millennia, they appear as if but newly constructed.

Two suns - one cold, one bright and warm - illumine each of Xyros's long days, though they are the least of the planet's celestial boasts. Twenty-two crystalline moons occupy the crowded Xyrosian sky and glide across its emerald firmament in an intricate and never-ending ballet. Floating between them is Xyros's ring - the Ring - a flattened hoop of dust and crystal. Seen from the Hundred Cities of Xospahic, the Ring appears as a magnificent glowing arc across the sky, a band so thickly packed as to appear completely solid.

Plainly put, Xyros is not Earth, Scarn, or Toril.

Dwarves, elves, and gnomes do not make Xyrosian adventurers. Even humans are not found in great numbers here. Instead, the "standard" races of Xyros are unique to the milieu, including the bifurcated-limbed xaransu and the polyhedral-headed xos. Arcane wizards are unknown; psions and psychic warriors are the primary wielders of "magic" on Xyros. Priests pray to deities, but these deities do not grant spells, nor do they commune with their worshippers outside of demanding sacrifices to placate their perpetual hungers.

Xyros, in short, as a campaign setting, bears little familiarity to "standard" Dungeons and Dragons, and particularly so to pseudo-European backdrops like the Forgotten Realms, Greyhawk, or the Scarred Lands. Though medieval in culture and technology, Xospahic - the gazetteer focus of this book - is clearly the alien realm of an alien world.

- - - (end paste)

I tend to use the stats for regular animals and some monsters but just tweak them to look more "alien."

 

[the Jester]

There are a lot of exotic bird types in my campaign- kocho are the common mounts, for example. Horses are extremely rare and exotic; so rare that most characters (pc and npc alike) aren't aware of their existence.

I also have garen, which are a lot like zebras except two colors of green, yellow and brown; linnep, which are smaller equine creatures; bosoch and bodokod, which are two breeds of dwarven-employed beetle of burden; and I use rothe as a common herd animal/steak type.

 

[Severion]

I am using mutated animals in my Omega World game, pretty obvious i guess. I've introduced two domestic animals so far; Howz (gargantuan cows) and Llambs (llama/sheep crosses). We also herd Rez (nonsentient humans).

 

[Ace]

I prefer Earthlike critters if only so I don't have to explain what a Bleck'Cha looks like everytime some one encounters one.

I do have a few weirdies though,

Mips -- Little Vole,Mouse, Gopher critter that are very tasty and prolific

and Curra which are basically coy dogs

Inveting my own vulagrities, not unless they are in English

Saints and Prophets! By The Nine! is just to much trouble

 

[s/LaSH]

I'm running medieval Earth, but I've altered it (and some MM monsters too). There's a whole branch of homonoid reptiles running parallel to homonoid mammals; this includes kobolds and troglodytes as the equivalent of monkeys and gorillas, except they tend to live in colder climates. And there are tiny things that live under rocks that can cause your finger to go numb if you poke them; a hideous mutant of this species balloons to a hundred times its normal size and becomes a carrion crawler.

Oh, and dire rats have ended up on the cooking spit... they're not a recognised species, just another hideous mutant critter, but there seem to be enough of them for recipes to get around.

 

[ColonelHardisson]

If you want an ecosystem that seems terrestrial, but which has a touch of the alien, I'd recommend trying to get hold of Dougal Dixon's After Man and The New Dinosaurs. These are great books, filled with evocative color artwork, that explore evolution and its implications using unique perspectives. After Man, my favorite, uses the premise of an Earth 50 million years after the extinction of mankind. Rabbits and rats have evolved to fill many of the top herbivore and carnivore niches (rabbucks (deer-like) and predator rats (filling the niches that felines and canines filled), respectively). Beyond those, we see the return of megafauna in the north, and the rise of the gigantelopes across the globe. The New Dinosaurs postulates an Earth that exists now, but in which dinosaurs never became extinct. How Dixon speculates they may have continued to evolve and fill the niches that are filled in our world by familiar animals is fascinating.