Today's Topic is " What is Your Favorite Beast?" as we continue our celebration of International Original Dungeons and Dragons Month!
By beast I mean mundane animal. I am not sure that I have just one favorite beast. I am fond of using many of them in my games and in Wilderness areas you are more likely to encounter animals if you hold a position and remain quiet.
My Wilderness areas are rich with game and I have large areas that are outside the direct control of humans/demi-humans or of humanoid or other intelligent monsters. Another feature of my world, are huge mega-herds.
Here in the real world we live in there are not many mega-herds left.
Caribou(aka reindeer) in Alaska have about 32 herds consisting of about 950,000 animals. Some of these herds are shared with Canada's Yukon Territory. Canada also has herds that are not part of this count as well.
In the Serengeti-Masai Mara over one million wildebeests move through Tanzania and Kenya in Africa and this takes place twice per year.
About 300,000 zebras move along the same route as the wildebeests in Tanzania and Kenya.
In the past bison(buffalo) in the American West migrated in herds of up to 4,000,000 animals and with former total estimated numbers of 30,000,000 animals.
In southern Africa, springbok once migrated in huge dense herds of hundreds of thousands of animals with total numbers in the millions.
So these types of huge herds migrating with the seasons occur in my world and players over the years have encountered them on different occasions.
I am also fond of bears and players will encounter them from time to time in the wilderness. My bears tend to be on the large side with some types of bears averaging 2500 lbs.
I am also quite fond of lions and tigers and panthers which also tend towards larger sizes in my worlds.
I also have my gorillas and chimpanzees and other large primates that may once have existed.
Really if anything exists or has existed it might show up in my worlds and I like to combine features and extrapolate animals that could have been or might have been.
I am fond of mega fauna and look to natural history from creatures to use in game.
I suppose my most used wild animal that is a predator are wolves. I have always loved dogs (we always had several growing up) and wolves. IMC they come in a variety of colors depending on the type of habitat and adults will range from 100 lbs up to 250 lbs. Wolves typically run in packs ranging from three to twenty wolves. Wolves IMC can match the fastest horses for short distances and as predators they are the ultra-marathon endurance champion hunters, so being about to outrun wolves initially does not mean you are home free if game is scarce and/or they have other reasons to focus on you.
Wolves have a distinct social structure with rules and so in some of my games I have made wolves one of the intelligent sentient races as NPCs that players have encountered.
Wolves tend to mate for life and wolves will sacrifice themselves for the pack or family unit. They can eat a enormous amount at one meal and then may not eat for several days. Eating a huge amount is a survival trait, since they might not have a successful hunt every day, especially in the lean winter time. Oh, yeah, my worlds have seasons including winter.
The topic for tomorrow is "Monster Humanoids, What About Them?"
By beast I mean mundane animal. I am not sure that I have just one favorite beast. I am fond of using many of them in my games and in Wilderness areas you are more likely to encounter animals if you hold a position and remain quiet.
My Wilderness areas are rich with game and I have large areas that are outside the direct control of humans/demi-humans or of humanoid or other intelligent monsters. Another feature of my world, are huge mega-herds.
Here in the real world we live in there are not many mega-herds left.
Caribou(aka reindeer) in Alaska have about 32 herds consisting of about 950,000 animals. Some of these herds are shared with Canada's Yukon Territory. Canada also has herds that are not part of this count as well.
In the Serengeti-Masai Mara over one million wildebeests move through Tanzania and Kenya in Africa and this takes place twice per year.
About 300,000 zebras move along the same route as the wildebeests in Tanzania and Kenya.
In the past bison(buffalo) in the American West migrated in herds of up to 4,000,000 animals and with former total estimated numbers of 30,000,000 animals.
In southern Africa, springbok once migrated in huge dense herds of hundreds of thousands of animals with total numbers in the millions.
So these types of huge herds migrating with the seasons occur in my world and players over the years have encountered them on different occasions.
I am also fond of bears and players will encounter them from time to time in the wilderness. My bears tend to be on the large side with some types of bears averaging 2500 lbs.
I am also quite fond of lions and tigers and panthers which also tend towards larger sizes in my worlds.
I also have my gorillas and chimpanzees and other large primates that may once have existed.
Really if anything exists or has existed it might show up in my worlds and I like to combine features and extrapolate animals that could have been or might have been.
I am fond of mega fauna and look to natural history from creatures to use in game.
I suppose my most used wild animal that is a predator are wolves. I have always loved dogs (we always had several growing up) and wolves. IMC they come in a variety of colors depending on the type of habitat and adults will range from 100 lbs up to 250 lbs. Wolves typically run in packs ranging from three to twenty wolves. Wolves IMC can match the fastest horses for short distances and as predators they are the ultra-marathon endurance champion hunters, so being about to outrun wolves initially does not mean you are home free if game is scarce and/or they have other reasons to focus on you.
Wolves have a distinct social structure with rules and so in some of my games I have made wolves one of the intelligent sentient races as NPCs that players have encountered.
Wolves tend to mate for life and wolves will sacrifice themselves for the pack or family unit. They can eat a enormous amount at one meal and then may not eat for several days. Eating a huge amount is a survival trait, since they might not have a successful hunt every day, especially in the lean winter time. Oh, yeah, my worlds have seasons including winter.
The topic for tomorrow is "Monster Humanoids, What About Them?"
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