Need weird, creepy animal ideas

[Dannyalcatraz]

1) One of the things I've noticed about nature shows is that what really weirds people out is when "lower" life forms eat nominally "higher" life forms, especially in creepy ways. If you've ever seen a large spider eat a bird, you know what I mean. (See also 3, below)

2) Anything that liquifies its prey in whole or in part, especially from the inside out, is a guaranteed creepout. Mostly, you're talking land-based arthropods- spiders, scorpions, flies, etc.

3) Anything that eats its live prey whole...sloooooowly...creeps people out. Most people would think constrictor snake first, but they don't do the live part. Cone Snails, OTOH, use a harpoon-like radula to inject a nonlethal paralytic poison into small fish (and other prey) and eat them whole. I used a Giant sized one of these in a campaign once...the hate of the thing was almost visceral.

 

[Krug]

1) Lizards with multiple heads and multiple tails. One of the heads is incredibly intelligent and chides the other head, which appears to be always asleep or snapping at people. The tails whip around wildly, and the lizard will drop one of the tails, which skitters around to distract enemies, when it's being chased.

2) Rats with third eyes that can see through walls. They report to a 'head rat', who knows all about whatever might be occuring in the city.

3) Oozes with still sentient creatures within still being consumed in it.

 

[Baron Opal]

The two things that creeped my players out to no end were zombie wasps and cordicepsis fungi. Great stuff enhanced by the fact that they're real.

 

[Chaldfont]

How about animals fused with inanimate objects? One way to increase the creepiness is to have animals that are more pathetic and pitiful than dangerous. That's not to mean they aren't dangerous, they still need to be a threat. But it might be fun to make your players feel like they are putting these things out of their misery rather than defending themselves from a slavering mindless killer.

So maybe something like:

A carriage team freakishly fused with it's carriage. The horses are panicked and out of their minds in pain so they run out of control down the street threatening to trample any who get in their way.

A couple of mangy stray dogs fused with a corpse. The dog heads bite at each other and the corpse as much as they do the PCs.

A small cupid statue from a fountain covered in bird wings. It's light enough to fly short distances in random directions but could fall out of the sky onto someone's head at any time.

Ok, now I'm creeping myself out.

 

[mhensley]

pigs eating a child

undead pets

birds that seem to be watching you

 

[The Grumpy Celt]

Flying, air breathing sharks.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Take iconic critters and template them...Blink Dogs, for instance.

Their blinking ability SCREAMS chaos. Make them Flying, Dire, Feral, Reptilian, Gelatinous, Spellwarped or Multiheaded Learnean Cryo Blink Dogs and you really have something.

Something nasty.

 

[Angel Tarragon]

Flying, air breathing sharks.

Oh, you mean like the Terlen?

 

[The Grumpy Celt]

Oh, you mean like the Terlen?

I didn't know there was an actually monster of this. The ones I saw in a nightmare I once had didn't have wings, they just flew around and chased me into a thicket of mesquit trees.

As for another monster... how about...

flesh eating locust (swam type of monster)

 

[NealTS]

Assuming you don't want to go with the "chaos as radiation" route (which many of these posts, including my own, were predicated on), there are all sorts of other fun, lighter things you can do.

Keep in mind that magic can go wrong, too. Here's a perfect opportunity to bring in those living spells from Eberron, especially as applied to weird, rare spells. The living fireball is overdone. Instead, use a living Quench (Could be scary to humans underground) or a Living Plant Growth. The thing is totally invisible, and can only be tracked by the path of grass that's suddenly growing an inch a second. This would admittedly only be able to do slam damage, unless you want to bend the rules a bit and have the elf's bow start twisting away in his hand, growing branches and leaves.

Or maybe "mutated" undead. Bring out all those weird tricks you've always imagined a skeleton doing, like throwing his chomping head at you or dispersing into a whirling cloud of bones. Maybe even skeletal "Spiders" consisting of a skull resting on two downward-facing hands. Or a zombie that's completely typical, except that it's intelligent, urbane, and quite vexed at his current predicament. "I say, my hand seems to have fallen off. Most embarassing."

A final idea is living places, awakened by the power of chaos. The Genius Loci from the Epic Level Handbook would be perfect for this. It could eat most parties alive if it wanted to, being an epic encounter, so just make it not want to. Maybe it just wants to talk. Maybe it wants to be fed. Maybe it becomes the PCs' patron.