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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Meek" data-source="post: 5401464" data-attributes="member: 78339">The conception of animism I use for my own setting is a bit weirder, in that the Spirit World and the Mortal World are the same. In fact one could say the mortals all live in the Spirit World, really. There are noticeable differences between what is a Transcendental Being (scholarly in-universe term for a Spirit) and what isn't, that the learned folk have observed. Something like an owlbear is someone schmuck's pointless biology project gone wrong, but all Dragons are Spirits, elementals would be Spirits, and the vast majority of Spirits are humanoid personifications of concepts, and they interact on a pretty daily basis with mortals since most mortals live in rural villages. If you've ever heard of the Touhou project games, it's sort of the same concept, you have people living a stone's throw away from a bamboo forest where a phoenix in human form fights a moon lady all day.There's also a bunch of creatures that would be "magical beasts" or something in D&D, that in my setting just come from Nature like normal animals do. Stuff like, I dunno, blink dogs. Those aren't some dude's terrible science experiment, they're just the result of the world being so magical that this stuff just exists. The dividing line between "some dude's stupid science experiment" and "native creature" is whether I think it's stupid – owlbears rank pretty high on that <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" />.I do this because in my setting I DO want there to be "mook creatures" that are cooler than normal animals, but aren't taboo to thwack. You don't (or at least I don't) want every single creature to have religious protection, sometimes you need to let players stab something in the face repeatedly and make amulets out of its bones. So in my setting there's clear and definite lines between what constitutes a Spirit, what's some dude's science experiment, and blink dogs, dinosaurs and other monsters.</blockquote>

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