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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Desdichado" data-source="post: 4498482" data-attributes="member: 2205">I've come to the realization over the last few years that what I've long professed and what I actually do in this regard are at odds.I've long been a fan of "low fantasy" and that means low level PC's fighting feral housecats in the forest and being seriously threatened by them, right?Well, it turns out my games feature a lot of the fantastic after all.  I didn't really think that it was all that fantastic, but on reflection, it is.  Sure; I like to have random thugs attack the PC's frequently, but I rarely put them up against animals.  I their serious (as opposed to simply random) encounters are always with something weird.Part of the reason for this is that I tend to run games like fantasy X-files.  Sure, the fantasy world itself might not be too fantastic, really, but the PCs tend to have jobs that ensure they go out of their way to find what there is and confront it.  So, I certainly don't think of myself as a high fantasy type guy, but I have relatively fantastical campaigns after all.  Then again, high fantasy is not equivalent to high wahoo.  The two are only tangentially related.That said, laser bears or lightning scorpions aren't my idea of fantasy.  That is, to a certain extent, lasersharking.  I like my fantasy creatures to be more coherent than simply "it's a scorpion, except really big and it shoots lightning out of its tail."  To be unusual or unique, a creature doesn't require some mechanical gizmo.  In fact, I think the "lets just give him lightning damage" syndrome is counterproductive to making interesting creatures.  A crutch, if you will.More and more I'm inspired by an almost pseudo-scientific take, influenced by Barsoom.  Edgar Rice Burroughs sent John Carter to a fantasy planet, and did he have actual Earth animals on his fantasy planet?  Of course not, that would ridiculous.  He had animals that filled the same role but a banth was fundamentally different from a lion; a calot was fundamentally different from a dog, and a thoat was fundamentally different from a horse.  They just stood in the same role.My latest fantasy settings, if I'm going to include mundane animals (like people) I want to have some kind of backstory explaining why regular earth animals (and people) are on this completely different world, and how did they get to be the same?  The way evolution works, there's no way that a different world would end up with wolves exactly, or bears, or people, unless they were brought there.So I tend to have an earth-diaspora; people came to my fantasy world in the distant past, bringing with them some (but not all) of their animals, and then they adapted slightly in unique ways to their new environment.However, the native animals are much, much more alien.  More like the banths, thoats and calots, or even more alien yet.Sigh.  I'm rambling, aren't I?  I'm not sure where I'm weighing in on the question, other than talking about things I've done in the past about the issue.  I've certainly seen an evolution of my viewpoint just in the last few years.</blockquote>

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