What are the best real world animals you've ever used, or think WOULD be great based for monsters in a table top rpg? Currently living or extinct species are all open for discussion here.It may be a little basic of a pick, but the Honey Badger is a vicious little beast that I've made SIGNIFICANTLY worse for my players. How? Simple; in different parts of the world you can find badgers the size of an Irish Wolfhound. These massive Badgers are incredibly tough, and with incredibly dense musculature. Some primitive tribes will use their dagger sized claws to make knives out of them as they're incredibly sharp.
>>97914709If your players do not fear the cassowary, it is necessary to make them.
Hyneria
>>97914714Ah yes, the living dinosaurs with knife feet that can kill a man. EVERYONE should fear those.
>>97914797They also make unnecessarily menacing sounds.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iy-9Z2KrjsY
>>97914709One of the best ways to do this is to never actually name the animal until the players have figured it out. Just describe it.>>97914714>>97914797>A bulky, black-bodied creature shambles into view, advancing slowly on two wicked, clawed feet. The bulk of its mass is covered in some sort of fibrous covering, yet you can't say whether it's fur or a type of feather. It has no forelimbs to speak of, but the head and neck that erupt from one end are a deep, striking blue. A blade like an axe erupts from the top of its head, above the two eyes of amber malice, and strange, red pendulums of flesh dangle from beneath its sharpened maw.
My ents were wiped out by a horde of malevolent ultrabeaver.
>>97914709Ah Stoffel you magnificent psychopath, if there is a Valhalla for animals, you're in it.
>>97914896Beaver teeth ain't nothing to fuck with.
>>97914709Cool but porcupine and honey badger ranges are on opposite sides of the planet. Was that graphic made by slop?
>>97914709I feel like I need to clarify that 85% of the honey badger strategy is audacious bluffing. It lives and dies on the bluff not being worth calling; any lion, leopard, and hyena worth it's weight could murk the honey badger if push came to shove. Most large dogs could too, a rottweiler, a german shepard, any wolfdog would win a hypothetical fight with the honey badger. It just LOOKS scary and it ACTS scary but in reality it's a rodent with ego and panache.
>>97915156They could kill it but not without getting fucked up. Predators cannot afford to get fucked up.Now elephants cucking to honey badgers are just bitch made. Step on it, you big pussy.
>>97915219no see that's the bluff! That's the mischief right there! It can't fuck up most predators in the way that it pretends it can. Lions beef with african buffalo; a badger isn't putting up the same fight as 200 pounds, minimum, of spite is.Elephants know they could and know the value of not doing.
>>97915156The honey badger might have gone through some internet-memey exaggeration of its abilities, but it's a tough motherfucker. There's a video of one surviving being trampled by an elephant several times. They are insanely compact and tough, and anything an elephant has trouble killing is worthy of respect considering they even fuck up hippos and rhinos. Anything the size of a lion/gator/human/etc. usually takes less then ten seconds for an elephant to murder, and the honey badger doesn't just fight it, it survives being kicked a solid thirty feet away in the air before rushing back in and ultimately chasing the elephant away.A honey badger might not "win" against a lion in a hypothetical fight to the death, but the key thing is that it's rarely a fight to the death. A honey badger is fast and durable and can inflict enough damage for a lion to regret fighting it in the first place and backing off. It's basically a "can take a hit, and deal a permanent injury" strategy that makes it bad math to engage with for any animal that cares more about its own well-being over whatever benefit killing the badger would provide.
>>97915320you are being HAD the mischievous mustelid is taking you for a RIDEthat is the strategy! That they are not worth the effort of fighting even if the lion prolly could!i will concede that they are tough motherfuckers
>>97915339It should also be noted that honey badgers do very well against dogs, because a honey badger's skin is incredibly tough and loose, making it hard to deal any real damage to it without suffering nasty bites in return. It doesn't even worry about most snakes because they can't bite through its skin.For something that only weighs about 30lbs, it's a pretty impressive animal, and its threat display is less a bluff and more a promise that you will regret judging it solely by its size.
>>97915400fun fact, the sun bear in continental asia employs the same loose skin trick against tigers. The tiger still wins more often than not. It's still fairly common to see old tigers with facial (snoutial?) scars from bear fights. Or it used to be, I suppose, back when both tigers and bears weren't pushed to extinction.
>>97914709The beast of Gevaudan, it was never identified so you can insert any creature you want into its role
>>97915485It was a wolf. It was just a floofy boy.
>>97915095A quick google search reveals there are porcupines in Africa too.There are also badgers and porcupines in Europe and North America
>>97915415>The tiger still wins more often than notFor an animal roughly double to triple the weight of a sun bear, it'd be embarrassing if the tiger lost. But, apparently, the sun bear can fight a tiger to an unfortunate draw.>https://web.archive.org/web/20230210171143/https://books.google.com/books?id=PAlJAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA510#v=onepage&q&f=falseThick, loose skin, evolved as a way to ignore bee stings, is a pretty useful perk for letting smaller animals deal with significantly larger predators. But, while the Sun Bear and Honey Badger both share this feature, the Sun Bear is arboreal (leading to its somewhat lanky appearance), and the Honey Badger is a burrowing animal, making the Honey Badger far more focused on being compact and putting as much muscle power in as small a package as possible. It is hard for the creatures with enough power to bite through its skin or otherwise overpower the badger to also place a bite where the badger can't retaliate.Honey Badgers are not invincible; Lions, Leopards, Hyenas, and Pythons do occasionally prey on them, and when your opponent weighs 4 to 10 times what you do, they tend to have a pretty big advantage in terms of power. But, even against that sort of overwhelming advantage, a Honey Badger can still occasionally grab a win.https://youtu.be/JgKN3BuvC3E?si=E5bbdDASsatSb8KM
>>97915572I have nothing more to add. I propose next animal for consideration be terror birds.
>>97915156>>97915219It's also that the honey badger just doesn't really have any defense other than to immediately escalate to 100 the instant it senses danger and hoping that the sudden resistance is enough to convince whatever is after them to back off.A porcupine is far more annoying for larger predators to deal with, but because the porcupine doesn't immediately scream and spaz out as soon as a predator gets close, it doesn't get a reputation for being a badass animal that predators don't want to mess with.For every video you can find of a honey badger fighting a lion and 'winning' by scaring it enough to actually run away, you can find plenty where the predator just commits and kills it.
>>97915572Yeah but, the bear is a bear, and the tiger is an oversized housecat.
>>97915630I remember using the 3.5 stats for Chocobos.
>>97915652Don't underestimate housecats.
>>97915668Chocobos are supposed to be about as tough as a horse I think, barring the really special ones.
>>97915400To be fair, we dont have to worry about most snakes either. The majority are not venomous elapid snakes, and of the venomous ones only a handful actually have enough venom to kill us. Beyond that most wont put venom in their bite in the first place, and if one does bite you you can just... stomp on it. No snake can chase or eat you, so the poor thing is just gambling on mutually assured destruction as a deterrant. Unless its one of the big constrictors obviously. But i think those might be able to take a honey badger so...
Hippopotamus, the Ford Bronco of the animal world.
>>97915720Between a horse and a chocobo in a fight, I'd definitely wager on the chocobo. They're very similar in size, with even similar minimums and maximums, but the chocobo has its massive beak and more importantly those giant claws on the end of its incredibly powerful, bipedal legs.
The honey badger has skin so loose, that it can turn around inside its own skin and bite you out of its anus
>>97914709Man.
>>97914709I have never used real world monsters, because monsters don't exist.I have never used real world animals either, because despite having a largely similar appearance, my in-game animals have different internal anatomy, function on different rules of biology, and are usually supernatural or connected to a supernatural force to some degree.I'd say my favorite real world animals I've based my animals and monsters on are predatory birds in general, wild dogs and cats of any combination and ratio, and lizards. Been thinking about including varieties of frogs, just to have low-level fodder enemies that cause different status ailments to fuck with the heroes.According to your own example, you didn't even use a real world animal, but instead made a different animal based on a real world animal.
>>97914709https://youtu.be/zsDwFGz0Okg?si=UWIanLkiV8jRDdlAhttps://youtu.be/Dm6hhtT3tZ4?si=yX5jyj7mk8XxAijKI made up D&D5 stats for Maned Wolfs, Megatheriums, Jaguars, Sauropods and a school of bigger needlefish, "Swarm of Javelin-fish".
>>97915810Snakes are horrifying. Even giant ones can squeeze into tight spaces. There could be a giant snake living in your couch or ceiling RIGHT NOW.
During the ecological upset caused by the end of the Ice Age, giant predatory otters moved in and became the apex land predators in a lot of places. They're fast, tough, highly intelligent, super social and well coordinated, and they have crazy strong bites like lions
>>97914709I unironically use rom as monstersIt started when the run curse of strahd (5e) and my players (we are european) just started killing them, so now I add them to replace wolves in fantasy settingsOn a more serious note: swans
