How do you guys deal with fauna in your settings?

>dat one horse face
>"I can't believe we're stopping for ducks"

I like this.

Hey, those are magical ducks, bro. They're clearly not just crossing, but talking to the dude.

So what do you get if you cross a fox and a bunny?

What do you get when you mix orange and grey, good taste user.

>So what do you get if you cross a fox and a bunny?

Holy shit that would be the raddest thing. As a GM, you should use what skills and talents you possess to make the best possible world for your players to shit around in.

Don't hold back, user. Some of the best games/stories are started by the GM/writer using their specialties to the fullest.

Unless my players are fighting it, they're generally uninterested, so I don't bother.

The only problem is I'm not a GM yetz and honestly I feel far too nervous to GM

I've been working on a homebrew setting, but almost nothing is written down and I always find it hard to get motivated to write the stuff, and stumped when Ibdo start because I don't k ow where to start.

And don't tell me to write during the summer, because I'm going to be busy with field work and research all summer

>I don't want my players accusing me of injecting my major/profession into games

Just do it. If it's what gets you excited your players will go with it. As long as it's not Magical Realm of course.

If I didn't inject my major into games I would never run.

You know what, Thank you anons, you've convinced me to get back to writing the setting. Hopefully I'll actually get some progress and finish all the cosmology and backstory stuff

I love you guys

Been building a setting where there's a lot of symbiosis between species. For one thing, photosynthetic animals are fairly common. There was also a bit of a "green revolution" a while back due to somebody figuring out that certain crops grown side-by-side produced much larger yields of both.

Figuring out how this would change human understanding of biology is the difficult thing here. If survival of the fittest is no longer the guiding philosophy, what fills the gap?

wait, didn't horses got bigger with time?

Use a reason other than science, say its magic. Two organisms using the same resource pool will invariably have a negative outcome for each. But since your seem set on this, make it magic...hell you could go full brony and call it the magic of friendship.

upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/dd/FoodWebSimple.jpg

For a barebones framework. I used this to design a manmade ecosystem used by a failing civilization. Sci-fi setting, as hard as I could go without making it boring.

>One human culture becomes rather conservative
>Sees everyone else as a bunch of cannibal monsters
>Gets as far from the rest of civilization as possible, takes over some planet with little to no axial tilt
>Insular trapezocracy/plutocracy of sorts promptly dominates what's supposed to be a democratic republic
>Space travel degenerates into crude transports between the planet and its two moons
>Planetary biosphere is limited to humans plus their agricultural practices
>Overpopulation goes unchecked, as do idiot managers, industrial pollution, and dubs
>Populace moves into arcologies, rather than fix their shit
>Agriculture moves indoors as well

The food web revolved around algae, tiny tuna, cockroaches, truffles, meat dogs, and something akin to the "three sister" agricultural method. Obviously all the organisms involved (including the humans to a degree) had various genetic modifications. The cockroaches and algae went uneaten by the populace, but everything else was up for grabs.

All species that benefit from symbiosis end up forming into a single massive super-organism.

These super-organisms compete with each other. The strongest survives to reproduce.

Please start a thread with some mapped out trophic webs. I want a real setting dammit. My limited biology knows how to set up simple dungeon ecosystems, but yours would be fantastic. You can be a boon to GMs everywhere.

Simple. Evolution, by simple terms, is merely changes is genetic frequency over the course of generations.

Survival of the fittest does not necissarily equate to predation, rather predation is only a minor componant. Survival of the fittest is , simply, those individuals who are more adept and surviving against selective pressures are the ones most likely to reproduce and spread their genetic legacies further. You can still have selective pressures in the form of competition for resources (which will always be a factor), niche isolation and segregation, Genetic Drift, and Stochastic Forces.

The thing about Evolution is that, it does not have a point or end goal. It is often random and most mutations that do occur are often unnoticeable (unless you have autozygous alleles due to inbreeding, thats how you get Hapsburgs and Kentucky Blue Folk), or are nonfactors because it creates inviabl offspring who perish either as gametes or shortly after forming a zygote.

Survival of the fittest is merely "survival of who doesn't die and can have sex properly".

This is one of the reasons why rainforests have such high levels of biodiversity. They are very stable environments with few selective pressures, so mutations that don't outright murder you are more likely to succeed and pass on to the next generation, which also allows for high levels of speciation and niche diversification, hence why you can have 200 different species of insect in each tree in a jungle. Yet there is still competition for resources and some selective pressures, because honestly meat is very nutrient and protien dense and the digestive system require less energy investment than grazers, provides easier storage to other forms.

The question is, what kind of dungeon or setting, what manner of animals are available, what kinds of niches can we exploit, and what do we have to work with. You can't just make a trophic web willynilly, You have to start somewhere.

her, forgot to link the answer to your question in

By beating the shit out of my players with them.

Thunderams, Saber Wolves, Fire Foxes, Acid Turtles. My players know what it means to fear when they step outside the sheltered boundaries of their high walled cities.

They also make weapons and armor from their carcasses.

>I want a real setting dammit.

Holy shit this is the most ass-backwards approach to GMing I have ever encountered.

You know what gets people interested? Stories. Not billion-word documents detailing the minutiae of your world's dragon ecological niche or the evolutionary history of your orcs. Stories. About people. Who want things. And take action to get what they want. And face obstacles along the way that they must overcome.

No-one will ever give a shit about the fucking trophic webs of your non-existent ecosystems, unless that information is, in some contrived fashion, actually important to the player characters and their struggles. If you want to make a setting that's actually fun and engaging, start with a plot hook and work outwards from there.

Why would you assume that the creatures of a fantasy world have DNA? Why would you assume that the creatures of a fantasy world operate under evolutionary pressures? Why would you assume that a fantasy world's underlying physics resemble are own in any way, especially when there are old men in robes and pointy hats going around shooting lightning from their fingertips?

The creatures might be manifestations of different shades of fire. They might have been created long ago by the skillful hand of God. The whole universe might in fact be a figment of a dream of the Godhead.

In short, why in the fuck are you forcing modern scientific models onto worlds where you have no reason to believe they apply?

>running an underwater exploration game
>claymore sharks
>bobbit hydras
>breath weapon gulper eels
>giant mantis shrimp
>angry cannibal savage lobster people
>telekinetic jellyfish swarms that combine their magical potency to fight as one
>vampire squid
>lamprey hydra
>everything

>ratbirds
Pigeons
>snakefish
Eels
>bearlabradors
LoK
Okay user.

>Why would you assume that the creatures of a fantasy world operate under evolutionary pressures?

Yo. Dude he was replying to here. To explain at length: I did because that's what I wanted to do.

I see what you're saying, sir. So, some Not!Darwin could still have looked at everything going on and figured out that, yeah, there is some benefit to symbiosis that means species utilizing it are more apt to survive.

Exactly how would that apply to photosynthetic animals, though? In our world, such organisms are rare even at the micro level, and nearly unheard of at the vertebrate level. What exactly is the hurdle, there? Is it simply more energy efficient to be sessile if photosynthetic and to consume such organisms if motile?

>Why would you assume that the creatures of a fantasy world have DNA?
Because the guy I was originally replying to gave me no other means of understanding the underlying forces of physics and causation for his setting, so I had to make make assumptions to answer his query since he failed to give specifications.

Also yes, you can get away with the kind of bullshit in TES, because they actually went out of thier way to explain Anu and Padhome Dream nature of the universe, yet even then it still operates under some sense of logic, because its simpler for people to understand it that way and because Anu is an Autist

Also
>hy would you assume that a fantasy world's underlying physics resemble are own in any way
The proof is on the guy starting the stuff. Further, even if you ignore the evolution stuff, the basic principles of selective forces and the like are based in logic, and are flexible enough for you to change the specifics to work in whatever fantasy land you want it to. Say the universe works under deific quotas? sure, you can adjust to that. However, just because a world runs on pure magic and phantasms, doesn't mean you can skimp out on details and its on you to explain why the universe doesn't work like ours. Otherwise its just laziness and it just makes those things into pointless window dressing that expects people to not care diddlysquat about it, meaning there was probably no point anyway in trying to even make it different in the first place because it all exists in the realm of "because I said so"

I'm not mandating that everything be scientific, just that you have internal consistency to the setting and the ramifications therein, and that you make it clear exactly how the universe is different on the fundamental level.

If that's your style and you just want to focus on killing orcs, that fine and dandy, but then why would you even come to this thread anyway? As for me, I'm going to make a setting where Bulletes have a spot in the ecosystem

You're wasting your time. Your players will never care about your masterfully crafted dungeon ecosystems or whatever the fuck. They will march into your dungeons, kill everything in their path, steal anything shiny that's not nailed down, torture any evil NPCs they meet for information about the BBEG, and then leave, having spared not a single thought for all the time and effort you put into your precious ecology.

Because your priorities are fundamentally fucked.
Worldbuilders are the dregs of the fantasy genre.

All they'll care about is "what kind of monsters can we expect?" and "how do we kill them and claim the loot they were guarding?", neither of which hinges on knowing anything about the ecosystems you invented.

I get that. I do, and I have some good stories, but if my players (loveable fucktards that they are) decide to go off and become magical biologists, I plan to let them, and I don't really have the ability to give them exactly what they want on my own.

I let my players go out and drive the story, and I make the world around them. But I am not an expert in every field of the world, so I try to use the expertise of others to make up for my shortcomings. If I can't, I just say it's magic and I don't gotta explain shit.

I use IRL fauna + the Monster Manuals + the not retarded part of that 80's speculative biology book.
Shame there aren't much illustrations outside the offcial ones.

some did some didn't Horses at one point or another were a highly varied lot I used to have a couple pictures of them but since I dont, settle for this? Also as for me, it all depends if Im going pulpy its whatever but I also like at least a believable ecology and a sensible enviroment then again I also helped on Lenore and the Veeky Forums archipelago in making their life feel consistent.

"Survival of the fittest" and "evolution" is a microcosm of a more universal rule: "machines that break down less last longer than machines that break down more." (you can toss in some things about replication, but essentially, it's still a universal rule) Evolution holds true not just for living things, but for all things; you will naturally end up with more 'things' that self-replicate, or last a long time, or are well suited to the environment. The same reason why mammoths don't exist any more is why there's not very much native aluminium in the rocks, it's all tied up in bauxite, and why not very many people are Zoroastrian--it was 'selected' against, and more stable variants were 'selected' for.

Basically I challenge the premise that survival of the fittest can be anything other than the guiding philosophy.

That being said, as biology advances on Earth, we're finding that symbiosis between species is not just commonplace, but truly ubiquitous, and that these relationships are often very unusual. Forests would not exist without fungi in the soil fixing nutrients for the roots to uptake, which in turn receive sugars that the tree manufactures via photosynthesis. Tobacco plants' primary pollinator is the hawk moth, the caterpillars of which are the tobacco plant's primary predator. Plants communicate via chemical signals, and an entire field of plants can react to something that happened to one of them. Life in intrinsically intertwined at the most fundamental levels.

I'm sorry your players are so shitty and you've become bitter at the world, desu.

Actually I'd say that all depends on how you present the game as well. If you start with saying 'this is focused on exploration and surviving the environment or something along those lines that might take the time. Im not saying it will work for every group ever but some will love this shit.

>Assuming I'm running a game with this setting of mine instead of building it for other purposes.

Way to run off the deep end, there, chief.

So, any recommended reading to get into the world of crazy critters?

>because it all exists in the realm of "because I said so"

But that's the case with all fictional stories, everywhere, forever. Fiction is not a window into another world, and only spoiled because we petty humans fail to translate it into prose or visuals. Fiction is the product of human intellect. Everything in a narrative exists because the creator(s) decided it should exist. Things aren't "realistic" in a story - they merely reflect what the author believes is real, which needn't actually be true.

Indeed, when you see something unrealistic in a story, the smart thing to do isn't to whine about how dumb and ignorant the creator is for not knowing what they're doing. The smart thing is to first consider what the author was actually trying to do, which is usually something very different from "adhere to reality in all facets, 100% of the time". Maybe the reason their world doesn't totally match up with reality is because they were more interested in the themes and emotional arc of their story, instead of pandering to the desires of pedantic nerds?.

No, I don't have to explain why my fictional worlds don't work like our own. "Because I said so" is, in fact, the only answer a fiction writer needs.

Show us in the doll where the murderhobos touched you

Free snuggles due to Animal Handling mods out the wazoo. It gets just as ridiculous as you think it does.

Generally I put a difference between "normal" animals and "bad" (more or less planarshit), "corrupted" animals

I haven't abandoned my answer for you, I'm just moving to a library to respond, since my home internet stopped working. Will be with you in two shakes.

Hey, mate, it's an image board. Your response is durable, and I'm very patient. No worries.

FUCK my page refreshed, that 2000 words of the first post gone. Time to start from scratch and be shit at it
>Exactly how would that apply to photosynthetic animals, though?
Its not as difficult or uncommon as you think. Elysia chlorotica is a species of seaslug that, upon feasting on a particular species of algae, will actually incorporate the chloroplastic DNA of the algae into thier own cells and conduct photosynthesis. Some mutant strains of aphid are capable are capable of producing their own carotinoids. And, on the vertibrate level, spotted salamanders are known to form an endosymbiotic relationship with algae while developing as eggs, and will continue to host these algal cultures in their own cells even into adulthood.

Now, to understand a few background things first, the source of chloroplasts, the organelles that allow algae and plant cells to conduct photosynthesis, is believed to have come about when one bacteria swallowed a cyanobacteria and, instead of eating it it kept the sucker around to keep producing energy for it. The reason why animals don't seem to have this is, well simply, that the ancestors of zooprotists and phytoprotists had separated long ago and they never really mutated into analogous structures again, mainly because each started to dominate and exclude the other out of their primitive niches.

>Is it simply more energy efficient to be sessile if photosynthetic
That's part of it, as well as the previous fact of the two just never coming back together. Further, you must also keep in mind the need of the organism to also acquire other macronutrients other than Carbon, Hydrogen, and Oxygen. For plants, thier sessile nature allows them to take advantage of nutrient cycling by bacteria and other organisms in the pedosphere. However, there are exceptions, as "carnivorous" plants "eat" bugs and other organisms due to thier own environment lacking some of these essential nutrients.

(1/2 or 3)

As such, it could make sense that an organisms that in symbiotic in nature, much akin to the afore mentioned salamander, could as part of the symbiotic relationship exchange extra sugars and the like for excess nitrogen and phosphorous. All you would need is either and explained ambient magic effect (if a fantasy setting and not horrible hamfisted) or many generations of genetic conditioning, and one could see potentential. Perhaps each species develops a genetic symbiotic trait associated with a particular type of autotroph, and thus when consumed the animal's body instead of acts as an auger for growth and development of the cutting or seedling like pic related

I'd imagine that these organisms could possibly exist as filter feeders/strainers since thier energy need would be somewhat smaller, or they instead just eat other plants and animals at lower rates and frequencies, giving them a competitive advantage in terms of long term energy conversations and possible improved waste management.

Further, behaviorally, almost any and all photosynthetic animals would develop a habit of basking, if only for a while. As such, organisms highly likely for form such a relationship with plants, much in the some way desert reptiles will start the morning with basking and re-positioning their bodies for proper alignment to catch the most rays. For such behaviors, I recommend looking up the behavior of Horned Lizards and other Iguanids, as I'd imagine they would be pleased as punch to form such symbiotic relationships in a fantasy setting.

For mammals and birds, I'd imagine the relationship would be a bit more like "having a tree growing out my back" sort of thing, or maybe growing photosynthetic growths in a few of their hair or feather follicles.

So yeah, photosynthetic symbiosis and endosymbiosis could work with few factors taken into account when working under the assumption of alternate evolutionary paths. Granted most of this is speculation, but its reasonable.

Granted, it is possible to have it possible work for other environments and locals, though it'd have to get pretty specialized in how it worked.

And more questions? Anything on specifics? I think I forgot some stuff when my first post was lost in the refresh, so ask if you need clarification.

...

Obviously that picture is in the future.

>My group can't do thing X so I tell everyone it's impossible.

well this thread died rather abruptly.

So whats a good resource of some prehistoric mammals that'd look good in a low fantasy setting.Also, to all you bio nerds here;
members.casema.nl/gertvandijk/

I think you were more than helpful, sir. This setting of mine is leaning very much toward the "realistic" fantasy side of things, so it's gladdening to know that some of the more outlandish things are at least possible, given certain events over a long period. Now I have some proper guidance on concocting the reasons for some of the organisms in my setting to have evolved, at least so far as a semblance of plausibility is concerned.

It's funny you mention basking reptiles and such, as I've already envisioned some photosynthetic dragons who engage in such behavior. You've raised some ideas of photosynthetic birds I'll have to play around with, as well.

Really, though, I can hardly thank you enough for your efforts. I honestly didn't expect half as much insight from anyone on Veeky Forums.

Gotta admit, this is a tough one. In my wackier fantasy games, I just name things by function and game stats. The delicious meaty egg laying machines are called chickens, even though they look like beetles. The giant running reptile mounts are called horses. It allows a sort of flexibility in the players minds, while allowing an ease of language. It sort of works

Had giant spider that had a pouch full of flammable, lighter than air, gases. They were big badasses that generally torched prey before chewing them to pulp.

>Hydrogen Molotov Bombardier Spiders
I can dig it. Reminds me if an idea I had for flying desert plants