What animals are fearsome enough to terrorize a small town? How could they be beefed up into real terrors?

Boxing gloves do nonlethal damage.

Make them immune to fire.

army ants
ants can be grown *with science* to be a lot bigger, up to 200% bigger. imagine driver ants mixed with jumping ants/bulldog ants.
Now im agine waking up covered in them.

they protect the hand of the person punching more then they protect the person being punched.

Boxing became more dangerous after gloves were introduced as they let people punch harder without fear of hurting their hands.

It warms my heart that you know about boxing gloves, but it may as well be pointless unrelated knowledge, since regardless of reality, by the system rules, boxing gloves deal nonlethal damage and the system rules are the only thing that matters.

ONe Elephant can wreck a small village pretty good. IF you need to beef it up you could make it a magical elephant that blasts sonic waves from its trunk and has telekinesis, I guess. OR you could make it twice the size of a normal elephant and it just steps on huts and eats everything remotely edible, including people.

Mountain lion or a lynx would do a good job at it.

Bobcats are too small/adorable to warrent a major threat besides a lost eye or finger.

A boar that's grown excessively large, like 5 feet or more at the shoulder, would be enough to terrorize a town. Shit, that sounds cool for a low level commoner type game.

Bears.

>A flock of Canada Geese
He said terrorize, not slaughter

I've found the idea of a house cat with the fiendish template terrorizing a town as part of a level one adventure entertaining.

> Flying insect swarm that can travel over seas by resting on each other's corpses floating over the water and eating each other mid-air.

Fuck locust.

A huge boar would indeed be pretty terrifying.

Also this. Imagine a double-sized polar bear.

My suggestion: crocodiles. Especially in the middle ages when the river was where most people got all their water from. There's no avoiding its hunting grounds. They already can and do hunt humans, and in parts of Africa there are still to this day villages terrorized by them. Plus, just imagine trying to kill it with the weapons you'd have access to in a small medieval town.

Just scale it up a bit and maybe make it a bit craftier than normal and you'd have a pretty tough time dealing with it.

Bear with aids

> Who is Gustave the Crocodile.

Fine, a single goose

Any normal woodland animal with rogue class features.
Stealth wolf.
Boar with lockpick.
Woodpecker with sneak attack.
Skunk with hips.
Fox with bluff.

>Boar with lockpick

>Boar with lockpick.

Jesus krist for real

>Boar with lock pick
Oh my god Can you fucking imagine that shit

>Boar with lockpick.

...

Just knowing that any pig is only a couple of weeks away from going full boar whole hog? is enough to scare me

Holy fuck this is amazing
The fuckers I play with won't know what to do

A large wolf.

THAT CAN OPEN DOORS!

>ctrl+f
>emus
>nothing

For shame Veeky Forums

seconding this holy fuck

youtube.com/watch?v=0VLDK8PuAuI&list=PL446kBb3Vy-_kpCrZllnHfJib2nEFnHu3

dem cassowary claws. 9:30 for claw action.

The legend of Oinkblade shall be relived!

Bears or any large cats will do.
I'm a fan of giant owls. Imagine being out out late at night and being afraid you might get snatched away by cold talons falling silently from the sky. Or the rumors that might spread after people keep disappearing, sometimes just with a gust of wind when others have their heads turned.

Big Cats are classics for this, sometimes scaling up to terrorizing entire regions. You've got shit like the Tsavo maneaters who ate something like 30ish people during their little buffet.

You really want to take a go at it go Leopards though because Leopards are bastards.

See-
The Rudraprayag Leopard (kill count 125)
The Panar Leopard (Kill count 400)

The Rudraprayag Leopard did some straight up Slasher Movie killer shit to like an instance where it broke into a pen housing a bunch of goats, bypassed all the goats, and ate the goatherder.

Tigers are another good one but IIRC statistically tigers are the big cat most likely to fit the 'got hurt and can't hunt it's old prey anymore so it goes maneater' stereotype which undercuts their threat a little...

Then you remember the 436 people killed by the Champawat Tigress.

...

General consensus was that it was a wolf, though some assert it was a hyena escaped from a menagerie.

I plan to introduce a large bear into my game that one of the (noble) party member's peasants have developed a real terror for. At first it was just a nuisance, taking and mauling livestock, but it started killing people not long after that. Attempts to hunt it have largely been foiled due to how the beast seems uncannily intelligent, and it killed one trio of trackers sent after it outright. Now folks are on the edge of revolt, since just the other night it burst into a peasant's cottage and slaughtered him and his entire family - it didn't even eat them. The locals are beginning to think it's some sort of vengeful daemon.

Bears are common threats to rural communitites as they get attracted to garbage.

Coyotes were increasingly becoming a problem near the outskirts of the city I lived in. Development pushed out a lot of prey animals, so the Coyotes started preying on animals commonly found in cities, namely small dogs and housecats. It'd be less of an issue if they had a taste for squirrel, though. Those things are fucking everywhere.

There have been insect issues as well. I've heard of people moving out of places due to things like bees and wasps making hives inside the walls, ants and cockroaches... Spiders might be a thing... I'm assuming you're doing fantasy, so just tack "Dire" onto something and make it huge.

>It'd be less of an issue if they had a taste for squirrel, though
I strongly suspect that squirrel tastes godawful, because nothing seems to eat it willingly

Great book. The story about him killing a bear with a rock and hachet is my favorite. Robin is best dog.

Tell that to Mississippi

I think it's because they're always able to run to the trees. They seem like the sheer numbers would attract more hawks and owls, but I think those birds are better at attacking mice and other ground-lurking critters. Trees are tougher to navigate.

Something that hunts squirrel, but ignores cats and dogs... that's what's needed.

At least in europe we have less of an issue with squirrels everywhere thanks to this little murder machine.

Cats and dogs hunt squirrels.

I agree, a single wolf will do
Particularly if it it is clever enough to evade traps and snares.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lobo_the_King_of_Currumpaw

This

Swarms of strangely croaking frogs that explode when stepped on.

Dire kangaroos

>Giant Owl hunting you at night

Shit forgot my pic

>Bears
>Alligators
>Boars
>Wolves

Just make them territorial and aggressive

Google is your friend.

Either:
+Dire
or
+Plauge

Dire Goose

>Make them immune to fire.
Make them SPREAD fire

...

Dire anything

This, giant badgers are terrifying.

A single dire goose versus the halfling militia of a small village, who wins?

...

>Skunk with hips.

...

Squirrel is not that bad. Just very gamey.

T. southerner

Birds of prey big enough to snatch a person.

Include me in the screencap

Full bore.

Caucasian shepherds with rabbies.

Those motherfuckers can disembowel with a kick.

Deep Goose

Nobody.

One winter a wolf pack killed about 40 people in Paris. It was in 1400something I think..

>it has 5 attacks
>75HP
>CR2
I don't think so

Hippo

A wolf, a boar, a lion or big cat, a wolverine, a bear can do the trick. If coastal or on stilts, an angry whale.

Not much is needed. Desperation, hunger, or just plain ol animal bloodlust can drive entire regions or nations to terror.

Have a large terrestrial bird like the ostrich/emu already suggested, but make it a bird of prey that stomps its victims to death like the secretary bird.

Secretary birds also apparently wait near fires to kill any possible food that's trying to escape

-Bears, no explanation needed
-Wolves, same as bears plus they have a history of terrorizing small towns/villages.
-Boars, these fuckers are aggressive and they can get up there in terms of both weight and size.
-Large predatory birds, there are stories about massive eagles and other such birds in America and elsewhere where they snatch up small children.
-Kangaroos, Just watch a video about what these guys are capable of.
-Sharks, just watch Jaws and other shark movies.
-Emmus, as was stated before.
-Tigers and Lions, Very common in Africa and India where these big cats attack people.
-Hyenas, sort of like wolves
-Dingos, "Dingo took my baby" was real and there has been a few times where Dingos have supposedly been found with human bones in their bellies.
-Hippos, most deadliest animal in Africa
-Alligators/Crocs, self explanatory
-Panthers and other mountain cats, they're known to attack people on occasion.
-Snakes, Anaconda comes to mind (the movie)
-Dolphins have been known to drag people away and rape them all the while drowning their victims.
-Camel-back Spiders

More comes to mind but we can sit here all day naming animals and other things like insects.

Make them from fire

>What animals are fearsome enough to terrorize a small town?
Wasps, motherfucking wasps.

>How could they be beefed up into real terrors?
Make them strong and tall enough to overpower humans, fast enough to outrun/outfly humans, intelligent enough to find and hunt humans and malicious enough to hunt humans out of fucking spite.

Waspgirls may seem cute at first, but they're actually a pretty solid reason for all of humanity to kill themselves.

>Skunk with hips.
Now i dont consider myself a furry but i will make exceptions for a skunk
Sign me up

>wolverine
C'mon, it's not even a pack animal!

Martens
Those fuckers kill your chickens and rabbits, nibble through your cables of your car and general are a complete menace.

Cats are pretty horrifying in OWoD and AD&D.

and in real life as well

I'm sorry, I read that as Boars with lipstick

but then I saw skunk with hips and thought it's close enough

When I was at university, friends flatmate had this yippydog, part chihuahua, part terrier or some sort and complete arsehole
>Anyway, come home from night on the piss
>At the front door the yippydog is all covered in blood and pretty happy to see us
>Which is odd as the arsehole in him usually made him hate everything living

>Banister to the stairwell is broken
>Someone's crying in the kitchen
>Junkie with Achilles torn out, multiple bruises
>Fell down the stairs, beaned the living shit out of himself on the banister, woke up and tried to crawl out
>Give the cunt a good booting for breaking the window to get in, call the cops

Cops literally couldn't stop giggling at how it had happened

I don't think people realize how tough pigs and boars actually are.

Think of the biggest dude you've ever seen. Thinking of them? Shaq. He weighs 344 pounds and is 7'1. Could probably reach things ten to eleven feet high.

Think of the biggest quarterbacks and football players you know. They're probably 400-ish pounds.

The human body was not made to put all of its weight into bodyblows and tackles. It can utilize some of it. We were not made to destroy things with our shoulders.

A boar is. Its entire skull and face are made of bone and cartilage meant to propel a 500+ pound animal with the density of an anvil at around 30 miles an hour, with a low center of gravity.

As a child my family raised pigs. I've seen what even lazy domestic pigs can do with their shouts. Flipping thousand pound troughs and piggy houses and porches like children tip over plastic play houses. Touch their necks and it's like the biceps of ten men.

Look up how the Germans used to hunt wild boars. They explicitly used long spears too long for impaled pigs to berserk their way down the shaft impaling them to finish the spearman off.

Have you ever been kissed and fawned on by a big friendly dog? They're likely 200 pounds, at most. These things don't need to pick locks, because they are their own keys.

The only thing preventing a boar, or a family of large boars and sows from terrorizing people, is intelligence.

Intelligent wild pigs already have the meanness and the body. If they had the numbers and coordination, they could level suburbia.

>no Tsavo Man Eaters

What the absolute fuck Veeky Forums.
They made a movie about these mother fuckers. (And a damn good one at that)

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsavo_Man-Eaters

...

alternatively.

>During the next nine months of construction, twomaneless maleTsavo lionsstalked the campsite, dragging Indian workers from their tents at night and devouring them.
>Crews tried to scare off the lions and built campfires and thornfences around their camp for protection to keep the man-eaters out; the lions leaped over or crawled through the thorn fences.
>Patterson […] wounded the first lion with one bullet from a high-calibre rifle. This shot struck the lion in its back leg, but it escaped. Later, it returned at night and began stalking Patterson as he tried to hunt it.
>He shot it through the shoulder, penetrating its heart with a more powerful rifle and found it lying dead the next morning not far from his platform.

>The second lion was shot at most nine times, five with the same rifle, three with a third and once with a fourth rifle.
>The first was fired from atop a scaffolding Patterson had built near goat kills done by the lion. Two, both from the second rifle were shot into it eleven days later as the lion was stalking Patterson and trying to flee.
>When they had found the lion the next day thereafter, Patterson shot it three more times with the same rifle, severely crippling it, and shot it three times with the third rifle, twice in the chest, and once in the head, which killed it.
>He claimed it died gnawing on a fallen tree branch, still trying to reach him.

>The first lion killed measured 9feet 8inches (2.95m) from nose to tip of tail. It took eight men to carry the carcass back to camp.
>The exact number of people killed by the lions is unclear. Patterson gave several figures, overall claiming that there were 135 victims. (Though modern researchers suggest it was more likely 35)

Dire giant spiders

You've already posted a damn good example OP. Boar are destructive to vegetation and animals, smart as all fuck ( they will learn from their mistakes if you let them escape), big as all fuck, and mean as all fuck. To top it all off they breed like rabbits. You want to terrorize a town? Have a few of the really big porkers ( like 200 pounds and above) settle in nearby with a few 600 plus lbs males. Either that or go full Ilha da Queimada Grande and have the town find out in the worst of ways that they've set up shop in mini Australia. Make it start subtle though; a random bite here, a decrease in rodents and birds there, all okay, right? Suddenly livestock and pets are dropping like flies and either Mister McMullen the town elder or little Johnny are found dead and covered in bites in their houses one morning. From there it should be pretty easy to ramp up the terror.