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Message: <blockquote data-quote="jdrakeh" data-source="post: 3696316" data-attributes="member: 13892">Apparently you didn't read my first post (specifically the portion pertaining to horses). I'm not suggesting that you give animals a different name and change nothing else. I'm suggesting (again, as I illustrated with horses earlier) that one could grant such animals a remarkable ability or two but have them retain some semblance of normalacy. The horses mentioned can run distances of hundreds of miles in mere hours and their feet produce flames when they strike the ground -- noticeably alien, though still familiar enough to be conducive to gaming. Owlbears and Dave Hargrave's flying sharks also serve as good examples of this design philosophy, actually. These animals aren't the totally alien weird of the Roper, though they're just weird enough to be markedly different from their Earth counterparts. This is a better approach than totally alien, I suspect. The drawback of totally alien creatures is that for ever person who finds them to be 20 kinds of cool, there's always another person who thinks that they're rediculously stupid (this seems to be the case with many "original" creatures in RPGs, anyhow). So, I guess, what I'm advocating is neither wholesale alien natures or pure mundane but something of a middle ground. Just alien enough to not be a mundane North American Brown Bear. Not so alien that it's unrecognizeable as a bear at all.</blockquote>