Does your setting have an apex predator? If so, what makes it dangerous?

Yeah
My character

Less humans to steal it.

Every time someone says "apex predator", all I can think about is this guy and the fact all he needed was a fedora

The Tenragor. Its largest of the Gors, and has a massive tongue that it snatches up prey with. Due to their stony hide, they're almost impossible to kill without special equipment, and a pair of Temragors can hollow out a fortress like fucking ant-eaters in under a week.

Dune-style sandworms. At least in the massive desert covering one half of the planet, anyway.

Humans.

>intelligence
>ability to use powerful magic
>subjective morality
>often look at living beings and think "I wonder what that tastes like"
>get high off taking risks

Everything in my setting has to chance to become a magic user at birth even things like insects or microscopic creatures.
The most dangerous events on the planet are algae blooms because if even 5% of the bloom are born as magic users, they start casting growth and light spells.
Last 2 mass extinctions in the settings were because of algae blooms. The one before those two was a bee colony summoning extraplanar creatures to protect their hive.

Dire lions with wings

They are intelligent and not too violen but if they are hungry and want to eat you, you will get eaten.

>Does your setting have an apex predator? If so, what makes it dangerous?

I want to say the trio of Terrasque, Aquasque, and Ignasque whom while not "predators" in the sense that they actively hunt down prey to kill and eat could be considered apex predators due to them simply moving in a direction and eating everything in the path of their gnashing maws. The Aquasque, though, is a filter feeding, so they don't "gnash", so much as they just suck in food, filter out the water, etc.. The others do the actual gnashing and anything too small to gnash is either swallowed whole and crushed by throat-stones or just digested.

The Zone.

>Terrasque, Aquasque, and Ignasque
groudon, kyogre and rayquaza?

But also less trees to produce it. I know most oxygen is actually created in the seas, but still. Although I guess that most plant-life should actually have recovered by now. But there were masses of huge insects and shit already in Fallout 1, less than a century after the bombs, and likely even less time since the end of the nuclear winters.

I guess it's possible that the ice tied up mass amounts of carbon dioxide, increasing oxygen levels, and then when the carbon dioxide was released after the winters fueled a massive growth-spurt of plant life, in turn elevating oxygen levels further down the line? Sounds like a bit of a stretch.

Makes me wonder how South America and Southern Asia have fared. Between the resource wars forcing the utter rape of the rain forests, the nuclear fire and then the global winter, not much vegetation could've survived, but afterward it must've fucking exploded, likely fully engulfing the ruins of the old world.

Cazaclaws don't play around.

>Terrasque, Aquasque, and Ignasque
Please tell me this is a cancer of your own making.

Why no Ventusque?

Vicious, stinking pack hunters with caustic, blinding spit

Anything that can wield magic or came into possession of an ability through a variety of means. If a kitten can cast a fireball and wants someone dead, well, that person is going to be fucking dead.

Innately though then it would depend on geographic location. The Dragon family is naturally strong but you also have "alpha" versions of animals that are occasionally born that will decimate a village if they're that type of animal.

Yes it does

Darkseid is the universe's apex predator. He is dangerous because Darkseid is the innate instinct in all living things to kill

Humans and any hominid race in literally every setting, bar none.
Prove me wrong.

This sounds oddly adorable

>using mary sue comic book villains with no weaknesses in your campaign

5% of the bacteria on the planet are magic users? The campaign was over before it ever began. Your gut fauna is throwing fireballs around right now.

Which system, and how did you make it work.

Nah, all mutations was credited to huge vats of FEV leaking into the atmosphere during the worst of the Nuclear fallout, deposited it around the globe. That's why humans outside the Vaults are impure.

He is saying bugs that big need boatloads of O2 in the air because they don't breathe efficiently. FEV or no FEV.

>materialistic
You cheeky cunt

Well, his immune system can also cast fireballs , can't it ? And they'd be microscopic fireballs. At most, they'd cause some disgestive problems.

FEV is the damned point of everthing. o2 levels high or low, the damned bugs would be big cause of it.

The big one from an old campaign setting I helped make were called Pale Dancers. They were small, fleshy blobs of gray meat with perfect osteokinesis, as long as it or a bone it controlled was in contact with what it wanted to move, to the point of liquefaction. They'd make ambulatory bodies out of bones and then mindlessly wander around grabbing more and more. Small ones would make good midlevel party encounters, aiming to pierce the body and tear out the skeleton in a coup-de-grace if they could, and can kill the weak (read; non-player) instantly.

The problem is that they don't die of old age, and they have no limit to the amount of bone they can shape, as long as it remains in contact. The largest one still living is the size of Rhode Island and floats through the oceans as a living vessel for the silicate-based species living on it, eating whales and krakens. The largest one ever recorded ate the corpse of a god and became the moon.

Funnily enough, a genetic abomination literally named 'Apex'. A super intelligent humanoid predator created literally to be the ultimate predator in an effort to cull the planet's big monstrous predators that otherwise make it difficult to get a hold of the planet's natural resources (orbital bombardment was no option, too risky).

Let's just say that it was far too successful.

>The largest one ever recorded ate the corpse of a god and became the moon.

Damn son, that's pretty cool.

It really depends on each ecosystem, but overall the apex predators are dragons. Adults dragons are colossal, genius-level intelligent and absolutely ruthless and conscious of their fortitude and capability of destruction. The only terrestrial beings capable of facing them hand to hand are storm giants, and those fuckers live isolated, contemplative lives in their own mountain kingdom, not giving a fuck about anything outside their territory. Luckily for the setting's inhabitants, dragons are pretty scarce.

Stars, because they were made to contain.

neat.jpg

I've always liked the Devilman idea of a world where every species is constantly evolving/mutating to kill each other. Where it seriously creates a planet of mutated freaks because of the constant rapid changes. Blizzard must have liked it because the Primal Zerg in SC2 is CLEARLY based on it (that and the main villain is named Amon, which is the demon MC in Devilman).

Here's the ova version of what I mean. Slightly NSFW for having demon nipples
youtube.com/watch?v=P7X_4LnsgO8

No, that's stupid. If that were the case, the algae (which are also in fact microscopic algae) couldn't cast anything relevant.

>inb4 hurr it's magic ain't gotta explain shit

Take this for example: In your body, right now, just yours, there are more bacteria than cells of your own. Statistically, they would be able to end up killing you before you could kill them. Now, that's just for you. Literally every other human in the world also abides by this rule, or they wouldn't really function. Now take that into account, plus the fact that, surprise surprise. Pretty much every higher animal has trillions of bacteria living inside them, as well. Oh, of course, also, do you consider viruses living beings? Because a great part of the scientific comunity does, so they're magic too. Most viruses are smaller than bacteria, so you could say there's 10:1 ratio of viruses to bacteria, so they also can become magic.

If today, the rule of "everything can become magic" would be aplied, eight second later the universe would have ended.

tl:dr: Your setting is dumb.

This is a Maroth.
>12 meters tall as adult at minimum
>Born 2-3 meters tall with functioning wings which become vestigial later in life
>Males will immediately leave the den they are born in while females will eat their weakened mothers in their sleep and take over the den
>Old dens are full of clean-picked adult female skeletons
>Exoskeletons get harder as they age
>They know how to
>They don't die until something kills them, usually another Maroth
>Have been known to tear wyverns out of the sky
>Largely immune to psychic control-- it just makes them mad
>Thus, when a displaced female Maroth makes a den near a town, the town either blows up all entrances to the den or just up and moves
Not quite the Tarrasques of the setting but epic-level for sure. I wouldn't put the party against anything but a baby.

I will kill one, eat it, and make it into armor.

Pic related.

But also, as a more serious answer, does it count if it's sapient? Or, well, has a motive other than a biological drive?

>became the moon
That's fucking cool but I wanna ask some questions.
How did it get into orbit to become the moon?
What killed the god, and what were they the god of?
Is it alive up there? If you look up at night, can you see it desperately writhing and clawing fruitlessly at the void?

Then you would have armor of regular, albeit thick, bone.
Assuming you're talking about doing that to a baby. Even if you could kill and eat an adult, you certainly wouldn't be able to fashion armour out of its bones.

The moon wasn't originally in orbit.

So the god in question wasn't really a proper god, it was an adventurer from a different prime material plane pulled through reality via a cosmic convergence event that warped him and his party via absurd amounts of raw magic and spatial bullshit into eldritch nightmare gods. This god in particular, the God of Void, existed in a perpetual Schrodinger's Cat state where it could will itself and others with it into being places by existing in two places at once, then shifting itself fully from one to the other. In order to kill it, the dragons and elves created a ritual that pinned it in place midway through a shift between points, tearing it into pieces. However, its death let off a significant enough burst of void to kill (almost) all of the dragons, nearly all of the elves, and sink a continent. The half-real corpse of the god fell into the ocean where it was consumed by a Pale Dancer, and a combination of ambient void-power and the panicked efforts of one of the dwarven gods launched it into orbit.

For the first few thousand years, the moon was both alive and constantly moving, its surface shifting and changing enough that one of the major cultures of the world based a religion off of it. However, since the corpse of a not-god of nonexistence can't actually accumulate or use worship, they got no magic out of it. Their clerics have been bullshitting people with applied science and parlor tricks for centuries. Recently it's calmed down though, almost suspiciously so. The Voidgod is waking up, and intermingling with the nascent will of the Pale Dancer into something strange and new. The moon is now hollow.

I feel a new setting brewing. Thanks for the inspiration.

Predators (Yautja) are sapient and usually the apex predator of wherever they go. Dragons are also sapient in most fantasy settings, for instance, so I'd say yes, it does count.

I don't know if it counts since it's a god, but it's definitely top-dog as predators go.

>Please tell me this is a cancer of your own making.

What's your problem, user?

A god of hunters who usually takes the form of an owl the size of an ancient dragon.
In-story, he's the bastard child of a tryst between the god of war and the goddess of forests, who both hate each other's guts on principle but are sexually attracted to each other regardless and love their son. He's been raise by his aunt in the cold north and tasked with killing and eating champions of evil (hey, even gods need to eat, and his aunt isn't exactly the nicest person). Currently, he serves as his aunt's enforcer and has been terrorizing the evil in her domain for most of the time he's been around. Right now, he's still in relative infancy, so may the pantheon have mercy on you if you make an enemy of him- he'll only get stronger.
Gameplay-wise, he takes multiple turns, has resistance to most forms of damage and immunity to fire, cold, necrotic, radiant, and poison damage specifically, immunity to disease, immunity to most status effects, has access to the druid, cleric, and ranger spell list, can simply declare most magic (especially divination) plain doesn't affect him, has legendary resistances, and if he enters stealth mode he can't be found unless he wants to be or another, more powerful god is searching for him.
Oh, and in case you've forgotten, he's an owl the size of a fucking dragon.

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Followup: What counts as a "predator"?

Yes.
>it's the DM.
>it's the DM.

In my setting, dragons are superintelligent creatures who can see the future and have overpowered abilities. They're also not physical. Their physical forms are a craft of their own.
Then there's Soghs.
Soghs are the soul of a young dragon, unconscious and unable to think beyond the "here and now", but at full power. They could grow by sheer willpower, but they don't fully control that. They're a black goo which absorbs everything in their path, growing multiple arms, tentacles, wings, eyes and mouths, casting random and very powerful spells. Many of them are dragged to the depths of the lower realities, where they're bound until they evolve, but some of them can be be pulled out, either by their own will or by someone else's. When that happens, death ensues, as it cannot be destroyed. The only thing which can stop a Sogh is sending the recipient of its soul back to the lower reality. Then the body promptly follows or dies.

There's also the Hy'yug, which is like an underground furry mole from the desert. Not really an apex predator, but pretty dangerous. Where there's food they multiply, and where they multiply they cause great chaos, overpowering warriors with their many teeth or extremely long, sharp claws. When they're too many they generally die out on their own. Oh, and the best thing about them: they dig. A Hy'yug quest would be a task for low level adventurers, but it may end up razing an entire city if it gets out of hand.

Finally there's the white shivers. Of a superior yet basic intelligent, they are forest and swamp dwellers, but they could live anywhere where there's no sun. They have moth-like wings and their bodies emmit a strange, shivering light. That light either hypnotizes whoever watches it or creates illusions. These humanoid creatures remain unseen until it's their time to feed. Then they guide the travellers to one of their many designated trapped zones, where they surround them and feast on their blood.

He who preys on the predators.

I yearn to instil this level of fear.

Yes, the apex predator is man (to the best of player knowledge and character knowledge of PCs). Between a tendency towards some kind of strength, an unyielding bloodlust combined with the power of magic, and the desire to try eating anything they kill outside of most sentient species, mankind is truly the most terrifying predator. Men at war terrify dwarves, elves, and most of the other sentient races outside of some rare circumstances due to the horde mentality combined with massive firepower and a potentially large set of skills.

Yarracks are a somewhat Apex predator from my plains biome. They're beastmen who have lost their mind and behave like a pack of wild animals. No more, no less. They're named yarracks because that's the annoying sound they constantly do.

There's also Sweet Deception, or Malavdine waterflower. The Malavdine is a giant nymphaea floating plant. The flower at the center is edible and has some curative and spiritual properties. Sadly, when the plant is hungry it also has an attractive aroma that makes anyone who smells it WANT it. And when that happens, the Sweet Deception waits until you're close enough and folds, revealing his mouth full of tiny sharp teeth. Then you get melted by the acid substances inside its mouth. As if this wasn't enough, the plan has a toad-like tongue which is extremely fast and effective at pulling things inside. It eats crocodiles, it eats hyenas... oh, and they can live for thousands of years, there's no known limit for how big they can grow. Some of them cab be of the size of a lake.

Is this bad? It's worse. The soul of the creatures eaten by the plant gets trapped and it makes the flower grow. Priests and mages of all sorts consume this plant to survive when they merge with greater spirits.
Luckily, this plant only grows on the darkest bogs and sunlight harms it. But watch it: sunlight also destroys the flower!

> A Deathclaw with Cazador poison damage

A tarrasque that has cazador breath. In that it shoots living cazadors out of its mouth as a breath attack.

Critterlings.

Basically wind piranhas.

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If it hunts other creatures, it's a predator. If it hunts or at least can overpower absolutely everything in its vicinity and there's no other species in the ecosystem capable of taking it down, then it's the apex predator.

Osmosis Jones TTRPG?

So literally Emrakul?

Fallout 3 was a masterpiece and you know it subhuman

¡Cuidado! ¡Llamas!

Sorry, your opinion is factually wrong.
FNV is better fallout.

Cazador weren't in 3

Wrong

For real, there was not a single cazador in all of fallout 3. They were an enemy type made specifically for new Vegas. They're native to the area because of a wild experiment. Please prove me wrong
fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Cazador

fallout 3 was and is mediocre at best, its only accomplishment being that it birthed new vegas

...

Darkseid's greatest weakness is that he's not Superman.

Would a giant extra-dimensional serpent, who wants to wipe out all life, count?

Really, it's the ones who become clerics you have to watch out for. Growth isn't going to do much on a cellular scale. But create food creates enough food to feed several people no matter how tiny your mass is. Now that's a way to make a fungal bloom go apocalyptic.

>All that shit about being eaten in such detail.

Spot the vorefag.

First Fallout is best Fallout

Fallout > Tactics > All other Fallouts > Actual Dogshit > Brotherhood of Steel

Is that a cazador deathclaw
>It needs a nightstalker as tail

>Be universe apex predator and apex deity for like the whole of New Gods
>Become the eternal buttmonkey
>Never become anything else
Worse than Thanos

Yormungard is THE apex predator, but only if it doesn't die like a bitch in Ragnarok. Hint: Thor manages to go for a double KO, dying horrible of its poison
Meanwhile Fenris could be that, but the Gods fucked him up so much, that he only gets to eat the sun during Ragnarok, and then die horribly to Odin, fixing the issue.
You also have stuff like Nidhoggr, which is basically a cosmic vulture, and nothing more.

You see OP, there's an universal answer to most tabletop related questions, like yours, or "Who is your game's equivalent of hitler" or "Is there someone who likes to bang horses in your setting?" :
The Players

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I like this pickle.

It is basically a perpetually hungry, fat TRex-zilla with rows of shark teeth growing by the dozens covering most of it's face, it has a corrosive saliva and can vomit up toxic clouds of who knows what.
It eats anyone and anything it finds, if there are other monsters in the area, it eat that, if it pins you down, it will eat you, if you cut it's tail with your sharp ass sword IT WILL EAT THE TAIL.
When it gets mad it overheats, steam fumes out of it's skin and it's muscles bulk up and it get's even huger, the skin stretches exposing scars all over it's skin, just like Zangief.

On terms of predators giant, predatory, space tardigrades.

In terms of strongest thing, the space-time worms. They don't do much.

That's a realistic drawing of a scyther isn't it

A LION DOESN'T FEEL REMORSE WHEN IT KILLS A GAZELLE

It's a Pokéfusion of Marowak and Scyther. Its original name was supposed to be Marother, but it sounds wacky.
I still remember the thread... Many good ideas for monsters and creatures I'd say.

I knew I recognized it from somewhere.
If you're up to it, I'd like to hear more about Maroths and their life cycles/behavior/interactions with societies.

its technically a scyther/marrowack fusion, then drawn realistically

I actually like the primal zerg alot, granted I feel they'd work better as a beta build of the zerg rather then "the unaltered version" I would love to see a new starcraft RPG to play with zerus as a game setting