Tell me about the flora and fauna in your setting Veeky Forums is it earth-like? alien? something from the past?

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D'aww, look at the Steller's sea cow. Such a shame they were wiped out right after they were discovered.

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For the Tau Sept World I'm trying to fluff, I'm running the clock backwards a few million years and then going forward again. Plus adding weird stuff.
>small arboral mammals only
>bipedal mollusk land predators
>trilobite descendants
>icthyosaurs
>birds replacing crocodilians
>aerial plankton that glide between volcanoes for nutrients

Basically any natural animal that has existed. I don't care that it doesn't make sense from an evolutionary perspective

Also whatever magical anything I can justify so my players can have fun

Looks so. Check out the one for baboons or house cats some time.

>discovered 1741
>extinct by 1768

To be fair, at the time people thought that God would just make more of them and human-caused extinction wasn't possible.

Why did everything shrink in the last 20 million years. We got the blue whale, but that's an outlier. Most everything that's big today is tiny compared to most of history.

We came out of the Ice Age just a couple hundred thousand years ago, and most of the large land animals were too specialized for those environments to survive.

For real though, some of those things have no business being that size fucking hell.

The fuck is that thing?

Takes a good chunk from speculative evolution. Unique flora is the hardest for me to really develop for so I don't devote as much towards it, but I do look into some of the more obscure things I can find and try to work it into some unique plant or even fungi species.

Fauna is much easier for me as it usually grabs players' attention quicker and provides encounters/mounts/meals/quests for them to gravitate towards. One of the better surprises for them was when they heard tales of "lochwolves." Semi-aquatic creatures of vaguely canine appearance that hunted like crocodiles, and a group of them terrorized a local Castle.

I based them on an offshoot of early whales.

One of my players is fucking terrified of them now.

A historical French cryptid called the Beast of Gévaudan. There is a lot of speculation as to it's actual identity, and judging from the hooves that artist might be implying it's some kind of Andrewsarchus.

Accurate dinosaurs, fucked up mutants, and the results of a zoologist going 'I want a bit of everything'.

The Snapple, like an apple but it snaps into twelve slices independent of a core. Can be found on a variety of different tree forms.

The Flufferpiller, an enormous neotenous caterpillar, some can reach a weight of one metric tonne. They shed their skins as they grow and the great furry hides are considered a prize.

The Grumblehop, an enormous angora rabbit, roughly the size of a horse. Herded and sheared by ranchers for its soft fur.

The Emperor Crab, an enormous island sized crab, much of its body is rarely seen above the waves. It feeds on plankton, krill, and other organic substances that it acquires via sifting. Usually seen around reefs.

Syrupshrooms, white mushrooms of varying size, often found on roots or the floor of various island jungles. They usually weep red, green, or blue liquid and they tend to taste like a variety of mushrooms.

Inkers, squid, cuttlefish, and octopi that display a primitive culture. For whatever reason these molluscs have developed mating habits that lead to them clustering together in small family groups. They use tools and display a fondness for collecting shiny objects.

I want to include some bits of speculative evolution in my setting to try and translate typical fantasy creatures (dragons, goblins, mermaids, dryads, etc.) into realistic animals and creatures.

My only problem is that I have yet to find a decent explanation for why humanoid species, like mermaids, would end up resembling humans enough to fit the role.
Assuming they evolved directly from humans, or from closely related primitive humans/apes, then in those couple million years it would have taken them to evolve a thick tail, flippers, third eyelids etc. they should reasonably also have lost their neck and their hair like other aquatic mammals—but that'd look rather hideous.
The only options I see here are going for a more alien æsthetic (like Zoras in Zelda); explaining it by those looking the most like humans being the most successful at trading bronze tools and weapons and other useful stuff with land-dwellers (who were too creeped out by the more streamlined ones); or making the mermaids not mermaids at all but more like frog-people who still have largely human anatomy but lots of webbing between digits and other adaptations that could evolve more quickly.

Humans were better at everything and either hunted any big animals to extinction or starved them out by hunting their prey more efficiently than they could.
A N T H R O P O C E N E

Hell yeah, speculative evolution is great for stealing cool flora and fauna from. Do you know Serina? Cool setting about the life evolving on a planet terraformed with a very small set of source organisms. Most of the land-dwelling vertebrates are descended from canaries, so it's an entire ecosystem of flightless birds, some of which are really creepy. Those lanks, man, I am not comfortable with a predator that tall. Though there are some smaller animals that are descended from lungfish that evolved to be fully amphibious and then into a sort of reptile analog. They're tripedal, the lungfish's muscular tail evolving into a dedicated support. Really cool stuff.

My setting is Dwarf Fortress.
>Giant versions of animals work just fine in savage lands, but start having joint problems, lose the ability to fly, collapse entirely, etc. when they enter tamer lands
>Ditto for animal men
>A Wizard Did It for things like foxsquirrels
>Magical radiation from the sun feeds crazy fast plant growth, where there are less plants, the radiation penetrates deep into the ground and feeds the cavern ecosystems

Trading with humans sounds like the best option. Civilization would have a really hard time evolving underwater because things like fire don't work. Trade with land dwellers might help it happen.

The Tenfold Goose

It's a Canadian Goose that is ten times as powerful as an ordinary goose. They fly at 400 miles per hour, honk at several hundred decibels, can peck a man to death with little effort and are totally indistinguishable from ordinary geese.

I'd always thought it was some kind of hyena. Do we have more information now?

Beware, for death comes on brown wings. In the days of yellow leaves, look you to the north for thy doom.

>Flufferpiller
So I get that they're neotenous, but what would happen if one were to pupate and develop into a kind of butterfly? If they molt then it could just be a question of the number of instars they have to go through. How do they die? Do they die?

>Tribal squid
ooooo my boy! This is one of my favorite things to see in worldbuilding. Did all three clades develop separately or are they different morphs; That is, do cuttlefish, squids, and octopuses exist in the same family groups or are they members of different tribes?

Flufferpillers are not capable of developing into moths or butterflies without chemical intervention. Should it occur you'd have an enormous flightless insect with great display wings that would likely get eaten by predators.

Often times they simply run out of food to support their bodies (which is why its important for farmed ones to be harvested before they reach critical mass) or they get eaten by predators. Small ones are surprisingly quick and large ones usually have sheer mass on their side.

The tribal Molluscs usually stick to their proper clades but the more advanced tribes are made up of all three groups as they've merely changed behaviours. Some species often die on mating to provide the young with food so you'll see designated parents raising the children. In the ones that don't they do decently enough but the various different capabilities the three clades have can sometimes combine to provide the combined tribes distinct advantages over the non-combined tribes.

Tl;DR
Flufferpillars get too big and run out of food, sometimes disease, usually predators.

Molluscs, it varies based on the area but there are species segregated and inclusive tribes.

>Serina
I genuinely have not, and this sounds exceptionally interesting. Have any more to go on?

We still don't have a definitive answer. Best bets are escaped lion or striped hyena. Nothing pointing to it being a late-surviving hooved predator.

It's mostly because Dinosaurs were really good at getting enormous and mammals aren't, and then we killed all the large mammals.

There's a few explanations as to why they're so much better, one is that they come from eggs versus live birth, as in mammals growing a large baby becomes much more resource intensive. Elephants have one baby and that entire process takes two years. Sauropod could lay fifty eggs and be done with it right then and there.

The second reason is more related to Sauropods. Large mammals all chew their food, which means you need a big head with powerful jaw muscles and teeth. Sauropods just stripped or ate branches whole instead of chewing their food, which meant their necks could grow longer not needing to support a large head. That they don't chew their food meant the entire digestive process happens in the stomach, and so as time went on the stomach got bigger and so did the animals.

As I understand, it's a commentary on just how incorrectly someone can interpret an animal by considering its skeleton alone. So, pretty much.

>My only problem is that I have yet to find a decent explanation for why humanoid species, like mermaids, would end up resembling humans enough to fit the role.
a friend of mine has it so some species end up magically imitating Humans to varying degrees, most often Fairies(which is a very diverse group), to give an example one group of them are evolved from wasps, some have the imitation trait so strong it's hard to notice anything particularly inhuman about them, while others don't have it at all so are basically just giant intelligent wasps

In their defense, apparently they were absolutely delicious.

also nice dubs

For the most part you'll find a number of animals and plants similar to what you would find in the real world but there are extreme biomes and equally extreme creatures as well as the concept of elemental affinities.

For example, Granite Lions are Mountain lion/cougars who don't have fur except for their manes (males have longer manes than females) As cubs the parents will paw and smash rocks and the cubs bodies secret a fluid that causes the rubble to cling to their skin. Over time with rolling and rubbing against rock it becomes smoother and thicker until thick plates of living stone form on their body giving them natural armor.

Another example are Elk like creatures who, during winter have their horns secret fluids that causes ice and snow to cling to their horns creating sharp and nearly unbreakable ice horns that fall off during the spring and summer

I had an idea while driving home

How absurd does a large lake or wetlands of sort comprised of non-Newtonian fluids sound? I had thought of some way to put a twist on a regular "tar pits" kind of location and had the mental picture of someone riding a speeder bike over the lake's surface before some kind of weird alien creature reached out from the solid lake of sorts and try to drag the guy in.

Is it an idea worth fleshing out or should I just stick to a normal tar pit?

It's not impossible that a native algae could have non-Newtonian properties. All a non-Newtonian fluid need is a long, generally starchy molecule and water.

What kind of alien creatures would live in that kind of area though?

Depends on a few factors. Is it oobleck all the way down, or just as a layer near the surface, like ice? Presumably this isn't like algal bloom, and this stuff has evolved for the specific environment it lives in, rather than just being a normal organism that's temporarily very successful.

I kind of like the idea of having the larger bodies of notwater only partially covered in this algae and some smaller bodies of it being completely full of the algae. Would allow me to take advantage of a wider variety of ayylmaos.

For the larger bodies of water with this algae, there could be an alien that has integrated the algae into its hunting style? Maybe it uses long arms to pull you down into the algae from the water below to choke you out or drown you in the thicker algae.

In the first case, where you're literally dealing with a lake of sludge, your dominant species would need to breathe air. Likewise, they'd have to swim very slowly, and they'd probably have highly specialized vision, if any. They'd look like hybrids of fossorial and amphibious animals, most likely, like big toads crossed with star-nosed moles.

I could see a predator that feeds on low-flying animals by just sitting on the surface with its eyes peering up, before jumping out of the sludge.

continuing from here I can't imagine this stuff is too easy to eat, since it's basically just a vat of paste, but you could have some large herbivores which are pretty much just perpetual eating machines, half-immersed in oobgae and just eating their way across the "water." You could also have surface-dwelling "fish" that get away from predators by just vibrating their bodies, so that they'd skip across the surface like stones until they plop down out of danger.

Maybe some kind of surface floating passive algae eater of some kind? Looks like a big lily pad or something and just kind of drifts in the tides or winds and eats whatever algae it runs into? Would give the players some sort of stable ground in any encounters in this ooze lake

Alternatively some kind of brontosaurus thing that just walks through the lakes and eats from nearby trees? Maybe it primarily stays in the water due to high internal body temperature?

I like the vibrofish idea too. Maybe I'll take a note from the Souls series and make it so those fish produce or consume some kind of rare material, so players scramble to get it and make big money before it vibrates through the algae and swims off

Yeah, that all sounds good. I'm just spitballing from a spec bio perspective, so I'm admittedly not considering gameplay mechanics.

No no, it's good. Definitely helping me to put some things in perspective. I think I've got enough of the basics to flesh out the area more. Thanks user

The face looks like it was drawn by a furry

Not a furry so far as I know, but she's done children's books.

I can see where you get the impression though.

They all have built in plasma cannon.

Our flora and fauna are very earth like, just magical. Like seasons just don't happen. Instead there are flocks of winter birds that migrate around the world. They go to a warm area to eat, but they bring with them snow, killing the plants forcing them to migrate to the next area.

Or we have enchanted boys that temp travelers off their paths with food, wine, and sexual pleasure. The men are free to leave at any time and they are not under any hypnosis or spell, but they just can't seem to leave and forget about their life completely.

We also have a lot of unique dragons. We have a brood mother dragon who take care of baby dragons of other species, her ribs are outside of her chest making a cage for them to hide in. The baby dragons are then like schools of fish that can attack in swarms and bring down much larger game.

Ayyy all the way

Wouldn't that apply to birds, fish, and reptiles too?

Why are this map's Greenland and Antarctica based on their height WITH the glaciers? Should be much much lower.

Post-glacial rebound m8. As the landmass is being freed from the massive weight of the ice sheets bearing down upon it, it slowly rises. The same process is happening in the Finnish Archipelago Sea and in Scotland right now.

Interesting.

That said, looks like that other map doesn't take it into account and just flooded the globe without deglaciating the poles.

bump

Could raptors fill the niche that's normally covered by wolves?