Talking animals are a staple of fairy tales but I rarely see anything about them in the context of Veeky Forums. Yet I find the concept fun and quite fantasy-like.
Outside the Awakened animals of 3rd edition, Are there any RPG rulesets or books that explicitly bring up talking animals? Do you have your animals ever talk in games, and if so, how are they presented in the setting and how do others - humans and humanoids, and nontalking animals - react to them?
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All that fairy tale stuff you brought upntends to be a bit removed from the rest of the world - feywild and such. When the party explores those strange alien lands, some animals can talk.
They're usually sufficiently freaked out.
Talking animals are fairly common in Ars Magica. Fairies are often encountered in the forms of talking animals because well, fairy tales. Animals associated with the Realm of Magic also tend to develop speech and reason as they increase in might. And even if a particular beast of virtue doesn't talk, it's going to learn all your character's languages once it gets bound as a familiar.
My current campaign has a tanuki who sounds like a mix of Stan from Monkey Island and the THATS A LOT OF NUTS guy from Kung Pow
He is, regrettably for the party, their underworld contact for folklore matters.
Heavy use in children's books may have lead to associations that clashed with the "cool mature" image that was used to market to gamers.
More recently on Veeky Forums oversensitivity to furries and newfags and /pol/fags trying to fit in has resulted in a backlash to any animalistic characteristics.
Golden Sky Stories.
it's a game about shapeshifting animals helping people. Its adorable as fuck.
You can't really drop the whole "shapeshifting" part,sadly.
What's this pic?
It's a talking dog whose dream is to be a wolf. The wolves, unlike him, can't speak - and also don't care for him as anything else than a meal.
Don't worry, he's saved.
Small sad dog whose name is roughly translated to "Gloomy" or something akin to that, who wishes that he was a wolf.
I'd love to run/play a whimsical fantasy type of game, I've always found the more nonsensical settings to be pretty interesting.
But a lot of people don't like those kind of things because they seem fairly childish and it can be annoying to play through a world where the rules don't always make sense.
There is nothing wrong with fairy tales and talking animals have nothing to do with furries.
If the people had ever read a fairy tale they'd know that animals (or how people thought animals acted) in them often act like animals, even in fables. They are short tempered, whimsical and often uniterested about then problems of people.
Furries on the other hand are just bestiality light, they have nothing to do with the animals other than appearance and the writers and artists haven't interacted with wild or domestic animal in their life.
Moomins are comfy as fuck.
>There is nothing wrong with fairy tales and talking animals have nothing to do with furries.
That's the point, Satan, yet a lot of people overcompensate in order to display how little they have to do with the things they don't like. They hide deeper into their shells lest someone might accuse them of something.
My last character had a talking wolf companion. He was actually a werewolf who OD'd on magic drugs, remained stuck in wolf form and shrunk to the side of a cocker. Eating dog treats would make him bigger, eating soap would make him smaller, and drinking a cask of wine would make him temporarily fuckhuge. He was played by the DM and was the loud, sassy and rude to my serious, reserved and polite.
That sounds both awesome and adorable, and sufficiently fairy-tale-esque.
It's from the Moomin anime.
Like somebody else said, I use fey for talking animals.
>If the people had ever read a fairy tale they'd know that animals (or how people thought animals acted) in them often act like animals, even in fables.
And yet work from Aesop and others occasionally do the whole "whimsical person with an animal head" trope, making them pretty much indistinguishable from humans apart from maybe a stereotyped trait or two loosely tied to their animal. Makes me think it is YOU who have never read these fables before. They are basically furries in suits and pea coats in many tales.
I understand where you're coming from, but at the same time your post exudes the long-stale resentment of, "eww furries" which only reinforces the stigma of ANYONE wanting to play animal folk. Beasts and animal people don't have to conform to a single archetype or trope, and they can literally be fuzzy humans if some right. Please stop letting your fear of anonymous people jacking it to sparkledogs limit the creative potential of talking animals.
It really depends. Sure, many fables have animals as a story telling vessels. Especially the ones where there are just animals talking to each other.
But I've read multiple stories where humans ask help from animals the animals don't give a flying fuck. Then again people in fables talk with rocks, fires, roads, ovens, wells, buckets and cart wheels too and those don't really act anything like their counterparts so I guess the whole argument was bit simplified.
Metamorphosis Alpa.
Pugmire.
My 5e party consists of a stone giant, a lizard man, a snake woman and a cat man
this is pretty much par for the course from what ive seen
They're human animals, though, and those guys have been quite common for a while now.
Actual perfectly normal animals, save for being able to talk, are still rare.
Burning Wheel's great wolves.
What about Narnia?
If there's a tabletop RPG based on Narnia, I wouldn't know of it.
>bestiality lite
Depends on the dude. For a lot of people it's the xenophilia side that gets the appeal, hence why Garrus and other inhuman aliens are so popular on furry sites.
There's nothing wrong with wanting to fuck inhuman sapients.
The Warren, but it's the "animals talk only with animals" type of talking.
That being said, what the hell. Say your halflings are giant beavers a là Narnia and voilà.
>Animals associated with the Realm of Magic also tend to develop speech and reason as they increase in might
>Animals associated with the Realm of Magic
>Realm of Magic
>magical realm
Hmmm....
A bit of a stretch, innit.
Wargs (friendly with goblins), ravens (friendly with dwarves), and burrowing mammals (friendly with gnomes) speak in my campaign setting.
Guys, guys, I think we're too attached to how we expect such a concept to exist. We essentially only see furries due to the great rage of millenia ago, and OP seems to want straight up fairy-tale style animals talking.
As in, fairy tales made in olden times (before the 21st century or just in Russia) that were animated.
Ya know, the friendly simplified animal which at best can walk on two legs, and that is the closest it gets to anthromorphism (besides the fact they can talk).
Why don't we include that? In fact, what happened to those really old styles of fairy tales not produced by Disney?
Fuck it, I'm making a thread.
Closest I've ever played was a My Little Pony homebrew. Technically, all the characters were talking animals.
It was lots of fun until the homebrew's author decided they needed a special snowflake class just for them that was pretty much every playground superpower rolled into one class (I shoot my superstrong magic beams! monster can't hit me because I teleport away!! also I'm the daughter of Satan). I still name any griffon I get - in videogames or tabletops - after him; I don't think anyone knows the connection.
I don't have a griffon picture, so here's a sphinx.
Heresy.
I can't even all caps my writing, just heresy.
Sassy talking cats are my favorite, especially if they have no other powers, they're just smart and can talk either physically or telepathically. They'll still want to do cat things like jump after that rat or sleeping next to the fire.
The cat-god in Althalus is a good example if you remove the divinity.
Mouse Guard is pretty good if you're looking for a redwall-themed game
>D&D rulebook mentions that poison can be fatal
>FATAL is the name of a shitty RPG
Hmmm
If you ever revisit the campaign, there's an official RPG now. It's pretty good.
Is it actually fun? had some doubts reading it.
It is. What doubts?
Tales of Equestria, huh?
Probably won't revisit the campaign, since I sincerely doubt the classes and mechanics would just happen to transfer over enough for the characters to remain roughly the same.
Also,
>only pony heroes
Fuck that noise. My griffon's best friend was a changeling who liked to nap on his back; it was adorable and no pony-only stuff can replicate it.
Get these hippos out of this thread and lets put them back in the zoo where they belong!
They're -not- hippos! As a zoologist you'd think I would know what I'm talking about.
That said, that also means they're not relevant to this thread, which is about talking animals rather than animal people.
So yeah take them away.
FUCKING FURRY