Horse Equivalents

They are too weak to even carry proper baggage, not to mention grown-up person. Lack of proper pack animals is often contributed to lack of wheel in Americas, since there was no animal strong enough to pull carriages. Meaning they've could invent wheel, but had no real use for it.

>what are camels

Llamas are AWFUL beasts of burden, since they are amazingly weak. Adult person with proper backpack can carry more without a fuss than a llama.

If you're referring to the Inca, than the most commonly given reason for them never going for the wheel is that the terrain the lived in (which is to say, the Andes) would've made them worthless. For what other civilizations have used wagons, the Incas just used pack llamas, who can climb stairs and navigate rocks better than any cart.

they actually did invent the wheel, but used it mostly for toys and such. Really interesting stuff. Did a campaign based on bronze age societies, nearly wrote a 50 page paper on the subject on accident.

Alright, I'll accept camels, but that still makes only two species out of however many vaguely equine animals which are appropriate for riding. That and they're not American native, which is what OP wanted to focus on.

I'm more focused on the plains surrounding Andes. Perfectly flat surfaces, but llamas can carry, not pull, so carts weren't of much use. Especially since their anatomy makes it complicated with harness, so... yeah.
Llamas suck as pack animals and are even worse as beast of burden in general. But they provide great wool and can withstand things that would kill sheeps, which is nice.

I know that. And that's why I point out there is a huge difference between knowing wheel (duh, it's not really THAT hard) and having real, practical use for it. Kind of Hero of Alexandria and his steam toys - all the principles on the table, but no real use for them aside toys.

>Alpaca
>Mounted
>In full armour
The poor thing broke its spine three times in the process

But they're still extra carrying capacity on top of your backpack. Also, where are you getting these figures for comparison? Most non-nobles from Medieval-type time periods are not going to have the same sort of nutrition (and hence muscle/bone development) as modern man, and probably no comparable fibers or other bagmaking materials except leather, so if you're referring to modern adult makes and proper backpacks, the comparison may not be as unfavourable as you think.

You know, "horses" weren't exactly great riding animals either when humans first encountered them, whoever knows how many hundreds of thousands of years ago. Just like the "dogs" made shit companions and the "cows" weren't all that something for milking. All the animals we know today as domesticated (or even that people have known as domesticated in late prehistory) are the result of thousands and thousands of generations of selective breeding, to the point that many of them aren't even considered the same species as their progenitors anymore. You could use the same logic to say that in this world llamas have been domesticated for so long that they've been bred into usefulness, but in that case:

A. They're not exactly llamas anymore.
B. You're going to have to assume humans have existed in the Americas for a hundred thousand years, rather than the sixteen thousand or so they did in real life (it having been the last continent to be colonized by humans). The effects this might've had on its ecology, culture, etc. are so vast it most likely wouldn't even look like anything we imagine as America anymore, except geographically.

Well to be fair the Incans invented roads, but since the terrain is mountainous and hilly as fuck, and they made steep inclines, they see wheels as inconvenient for travel.

There most likely were horses in the Americas when humans first arrived. They just went the way of the Australian megafauna: in Eurasia, animals suited for eventual domestication have evolved alongside humans since forever, building up a proper hostility towards them as the humans became better hunters. In continents where humans have never been seen before, only to arrive with their hunting skills already sharpened in Eurasia, they quickly drove all the viable animals extinct, leaving them with no real candidates for domestication millennia down the line. It pretty much doomed entire continents to the stone age until the 18th century or so.

user, the amount of muscles has literally nothing to do with the subject. The way llamas got their legs, spine and ribcage bones alligned means they simply can't carry much.

This. It is theorized that if the mass extinction of 30,000 years ago hadn't happened in Australia, the Aboriginals could've gone somewhere. As it is, they literally had no way to develop out of the hunter-gatherer stage until the Europeans showed up. Shouldn't have taken advantage of all those docile diprotodonts, eh?

Fun fact: marupials generally have two penises/vaginas. They are utilized in tandem during intercourse.

Australia is truly mother nature's recycle bin.

>diprotodon
What the fuck am I googling

An elephant sized koala.

Fantasy occasionally makes use of domesticated elk/moose.

Bison and stags, if we're only allowing real-world animals from the Americas.

In prehistory, there may have been giant sloths in the Americas; I'm not sure.

Yup. Megatheria, they were called.

>riding a sloth
>an animal so slow it's name is synonymous with extreme laziness
>an animal whose natural defense mechanism is that it moves so little its fur gets covered in moss and it looks like a rock

Wouldn't you get there faster riding a turtle?

Diamond detected

Virtually any prehistoric megafauna in my opinion; Hyenadons, Entelodons, Andrewsarchuses, Woolly Rhinos...

It's one of the few things Diamond got right, mainly because it's one of the few things where he got by actual studies on the poor llama rather than his feels about north south transmission (the entirety of the crop package used by the Five Nations and the more sedentary algonquian peoples south of the great lakes came from way, way south of there and still thrived in much of Canada and the NE)

For actual mounts though? Reindeer would have been the shit as a native proto mount and there's hints of the inuit trying locally to domesticate the north american deer variants, but founder effect is a bitch when you live in the literal worst climate for humans to thrive in. The finns and lapps pulled it off, though.

IIRC in 3.5 the joke went that dire badger and dire weasels were perfect mounts for gnomes because they could specifically talk to them and the ferret is a domesticated species.

Anything porcine, as a mount, is kinda retarded. Riding dogs could be bred in small races, but have the problem of needing meat, which makes them expensive to feed (same general issue as griffon riders).

How about giant reptiles?

Really large Maine Coons?

Finding an animal isn't the problem, it's your world. Just say there are horses in Nonamerica. Your problem is considering the possible implications of their existence. Horses mean more than just mounted knights (though they certainly mean that, and that by itself means a great deal - to give just a tiny example, the existence of mounted warriors for whom it is practical to wear heavy metal armor is theorized to have given Euroasian societies an incentive to further invest in metallurgy and mechanics). Horses mean faster, easier trade and communication between communities, leading to the creation of larger societies than isolated tribes and promoting cultural and technological advances. They mean less labor-intensive construction and agriculture. They mean a revolution in industry and warfare.

The introduction of horses to native societies have transformed some into unrecognizability in the hundred few years since its happened. If you'd given them millennia, there's no telling how the Americas could've looked like. Sioux eventually domesticating the bison and building stone cities on the plains? A united Southwestern empire? Mexica who, having access to better livestock, have never come to rely on cannibalism for survival, a practice which has never evolved into the custom of human sacrifice which has fueled the growth of their empire?

>you will never ride this to battle

Carnivores make shitty livestock/riding animals. Too expensive to feed. Same reason the idea of riding bears from higher up wouldn't work. One of the reasons horses worked as well as they did was that you could (further back enough, of course, we're talking literal stone age in here) take care of them by pretty much "stopping using them for a few hours".

No, there aren't. They would have been domesticated.

That being said, it's fantasy, I don't see with the problem with saying that there is a slightly large bred of llamas that does the trick.

On the other hand, Maine Coons can be trained, are loyal to the humans they bond with, intelligent and their predatory abilities make them excellent battle mounts. Plus, their thick fur would act as additional armor.

Yes but they're also too expensive to feed. Case in point, there's no real historical precedence for humans having ever bred predatory animals as mounts. Like said, one of the most important things to think about when trying to come up with an alternate history is "if _______ sounds so sensible, how come it's never actually happened?". Usually you'll find out that it's because it's not actually that sensible.

>Horse equivalents that aren't giant birds?
Give me chocobos or give me death.

Tanks. Very small tanks that you ride on top of. That run off of magic.

Yakul. Whatever that is.

Red elk, according to Miyazaki.

Tankettes?

Maybe a little bit bigger. I was thinking of something like an FT-17 without the turret.

Riding elks. Bison for cow equivalents.

You could have extraordinarily large dogs.

Camels are literally from North America.

My setting does giant moths as riding animals, but I just read the thread and that's probably not exactly what you're looking for.

Horses were also too small to do anything but pull carts for a long while. Breeding could make Llamas viable.

So do all reptiles. And?

It's already big. Scale it bigger with magic and...

Some deer are used similarly in the real world, it's just that riding them is rare.

They ought to be bigger. EMBIGGEN THE DEER

I thought about that as well, but it seems likely that a giant reptile like a komodo dragon or crocodile would just roll over, get up and kill and eat you.

You don't know what you ask, traveler.

But that doesn't mean it isn't a cool idea; just not a realistic one.

EVERYBODY NEEDS A CAMEL!

Can I get one discounted and slightly used?

Wouldn't it be a camelope, if you're talking about the Americas?

>not having your officers led into battle by war hippos

what the fuck are you doing

There is no cavalry to dire weasel cavalry

The noble giant capybara! I've always thought they had a stoic, regal look for a marshland knight needing a semi-aquatic mount. Also, they're super-chill around people.

Graham?

...

No, but I'm glad to hear I apparently have like-minded fellows.

The camelope never went extinct and was domesticated by humans. Done.

What an expression from someone riding a fucking weasel

Just look at some now-extinct animals that lived in the Americas. Like dire wolves. Or mastodons. Or giant sloths. Giant sloth cavalry? I think we all know the answer to that question, user.

>the Aboriginals could've gone somewhere

>Giant sloth cavalry
A terrible notion.

A world where the noble Capybara Knights protect their marshlands from the depredations of the foul Sloth Riders, whose arboreal mounts creep silently among the treetops, waiting to ambush their unsuspecting prey.

>CGP Grey

Technically, Morocco and Algeria are also in the Western hemisphere. Granted, not in America, but I imagine camels could live in dry bits of Mexico or the southern USA easily enough.

Heck, there are hundreds of thousands of camels in Australia. If a species can live and thrive there, it can live anywhere.

This thread needs more wacky Texas history
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Camel_Corps

Beat me to it

...

I wanted to use some kind of Not!Horse in my setting.

I was thinking something along the lines of a bio-engineered super animal that's similar to the horse, but much faster, more resilient and more versatile - enough so that they compete in many ways with automobiles for personal use and the transport of small amounts of goods. But I don't know what I'd want it to look like.

What ever you use instead of a horse, I find that it's important to buy them from a good vendor.

Bears are almost never carnivores or even mostly carnivores (Polar Bears are the only ones that are), the problem with bears is that they can't survive on roughage and need to forage vegetables and berries and fruits whereas horses can just munch grass and leaves and be fine.

Giant Sloths were actually pretty mean mother fuckers and quite fast for their size. They acted far more like grizzly bears than sloths.

I'm an ardent Texas History buff, and I'm ashamed that I didn't know we tried to make use of camels.

seems like they might have actually been quite useful out in West Texas from the Wiki.

In a similar vein, turns out SE Texas and the Gulf Coast are actually really great climate for Elephants.

>transplanting the "standard fantasy setting" into an American geography rather than a European one

Didn't read the thread, but you might not know the original Greyhawk setting was a fantasy version of the Americas.

>According to molecular data, the New World and Old World camelids diverged 11 million years ago.[44] In spite of this, these species can still hybridize and produce fertile offspring.[45] The cama is a camel–llama hybrid bred by scientists who wanted to see how closely related the parent species were.[46] Scientists collected semen from a camel via an artificial vagina and inseminated a llama after stimulating ovulation with gonadotrophin injections.[47] The cama has ears halfway between the length of camel and llama ears, no hump, longer legs than the llama, and partially cloven hooves.[48][49] According to cama breeder Lulu Skidmore, cama have "the fleece of the llamas" and "the strength and patience of the camel".[47] Like the mule, camas are sterile, despite both parents having the same number of chromosomes.

Neat.

Been playing a lot of this game. Just go full ham and add dinosaurs and ancient mammels.

>Mounted raptor packs roaming the forests as aggressive skirmishers.
>Mountain men prefer heavier saber cats for ambushing in the craggy terrain.
>The plains tribe just added their third brontosaur to their trade caravan.
>River folk have a pod of Ichthyosaurus to herd fish and have rigged saddles for short jaunts up and down river.

Other honerable mentions include Wooly Rhinos and giant sized beezlebuffo frogs that you straddle yourself too and hang on for dear life. If you like weird mounts this is your game. And someone should totally adapt a tg version of it.

>yaks
>giant boars
>giant snails
>giant land bats
>tigers
>giant beetles
>motherfucking GUAR

>post-apoc Texarkana gets conquered by Hannibal on Elephants
Fund it

How surefooted is it?

Does the giant goat have no name?

In realistic terms, horses and camels are pretty much the only good riding animals. Elephants too I suppose, but I'd almost consider them a different category.

In fantasy terms, pretty much anything that's big enough works

>Elk
>Moose
>Bison
>Bears
>Giant goats
>Giant boars
>Giant insects
>Giant spiders
>Giant lizards
>Giant canines/felines
>Giant kangaroos maybe?

We could call him "Bob."
"Bob the giant goat."

I played a campaign in not-Australia, where the child king of a local tribe rode in the pouch of an above sized kangaroo.

The kangaroo was also a trained bodyguard and kicked the shit out of us when we tried to start something.

How bout this crazy fucker?

Chalicothere, part horse, part gorilla, herbivore, probably ate grass and leaves, had long hooked claws. Had to be musclebound to carry their odd physiche. Long arms might have been useful for throwing things.

Slap a harness on these things and now you have pack animals that will take potshots at enemies with rocks and stones as you fight.

Forgot pic.

The idea of humans domesticating and breeding "Riding Bison" is awesome, and should definitely be a focal point of your world building.

Jesus, how would you even stop a bison knight charge? It's just too much mass.