Tell me about the Elephants in your setting, Veeky Forums

obv northern tribes ride them to battle

The not!arabs have them as a sacred animal. A warrior's greatest reward is to be fused with one and become a "qapukulu", a biped pachiderm with a lifetime's worth of military experience. They get their own howdah backpacks with two support gunners and swivel guns.

Their capital is also a titanic elephant made of arab calligraphy inscribed into reality as to mean roads, buildings and local djinns. People walk around in the "skin" like if gravity was subjective.

Kinda like this.

Time for the pachyderms to pack it in?

They're the national animal/delicacy of the AFEZ, one of the factions in the world.

Came here to say this. Fuck yeah zoobooks

They have weak, human-like bodies and dream of ages past, when they had wings to fly, and feet to Dance.

nice reference.

They lack eyes and are much smaller than normal elephants, they live in cave systems because the whole world is a cave system

Much like IRL, in several armies war elephants are a prestige unit of immense power, but are also difficult to use and expensive to maintain.

Also kind of thinking about having Elephants/Mammoths as an animal used by Dwarves.

Get out! - you try naming a cooler herbivore

Regular elephants are still on earth, but a myriad of modified and chimeric elephant like creatures are considered quite vital to the later stages of terraforming.

That picture is so cool.

One nation has access to Mastadons and one general uses does use them in his army. He gets his shit wrecked when an opposing general fields larger mammoths from another nation that spook his Mastadons into wrecking his lines.

My elephants are colonial royalists.

They're mostly different shades of grey, stick to savannae and mountain ranges.
Sometimes one wanders too long into the Splatters - those slowly evolve and de-evolve into the Baku, elephant-people with vague psychic and magical power.

Nothing special about them; there are some island species of small elephants, similar to the Java elephants, plus some bigger species in the equator part of a continent far away from the "civilized world". The polar region still houses many herds of mammoths and mastodons, though, along with other species of prehistorical megafauna (that are mostly extinct practically everywhere else). The reason these herds survives is that the orcs in my setting, even if they're evil and barbaric, have a deep respect for every beast and animal bigger and stronger than them. They won't even hunt them, just scavenge, and won't let any other humanoid species do it.

There's an artifical species of beastmen called Udonda, created centuries ago by a now gone empire of evil elves adept at biomancy, who made them along with all the other beastmen to serve as slaves, shock troops and playthings. In the setting's present all beastmen have united in a single nation, working together to preserve their freedom, and Udonda work as teachers, judges, librarians and other intellectual jobs, since their race have degenerated over time due to defects in the creation of their ancestors. There were also rhinomen, but they went extinct around a century ago for similar reasons.

Some of them are french

That's really cool

Grey as a mouse,
Big as a house,
Nose like a snake,
I make the earth shake,
As I tramp through the grass;
Trees crack as I pass.
With horns in my mouth
I walk in the South,
Flapping big ears.
Beyond count of years
I stump round and round,
Never lie on the ground,
Not even to die.
Oliphaunt am I,
Biggest of all,
Huge, old, and tall.
If ever you'd met me
You wouldn't forget me.
If you never do,
You won't think I'm true;
But old Oliphaunt am I,
And I never lie.

My brethren

my name is Cow,
and wen its nite,
or wen the moon
is shiyning brite,
and all the men
haf gon to bed -
i stay up late.
i lik the bred.

Actually rather common in my setting. It's a sword and sorcery bronze age conan setting. Relatively untamed an often used for food. However, there are FEW people who have been able to make use of war elephants. Obviously, those who could capitalize on elephants as mounts would be in awesome condition.

They're indiginous to an Eastern country, and nobody in the Western continent where the game is focused has ever even heard of one, except perhaps some merchants and aristocrats.

There might be a plot coming up where an invading army shows up and has friggin elephants though. That's going to be pretty cool. The setting is mostly devoid of really hueg monsters, so much as in real life, a society's first military encounter with elephants is the rough equivalent of a Roman army attempting to fight fucking dragons.

And hands to break.

why do I have vivid memories of babar's palace burning during some sort of coup?

My world has anthro herm elephants. Ever have an elephant jerk you off with her prehensile girldick?

Monarchies fall.

youtu.be/2CqtLGEFVrY

One of my players is a woke elephant. They made friends with an ogre named Timothy. Fun times

I home brewed up some more miniature ones to add mount diversity to !notAfrica in my games. There are choices all the way from large horse to modern house sized. I brewed in various traits too, shield ears, extra or even straight tusks for firing, etc.

Elephants were hunted to extinction centuries ago, then artificially revived centuries later by paleobiologists who only had fossil records to go by, and now it's 1000 years after that and the technological global society was wiped off the face of the earth, and the biosphere repopulated by machines based on that same incomplete fossil record.

So they look like pic related.

Not my setting, but there are regular uplifted elephants and Neophants, who are smaller, stronger, and have got hands they can curl into fist-feet. They do however see some prejudice both from regular elephants and from humans.
Also non-uplifted elephants exist.

Pic related is one of the mercenary company's 2 official "big guys", though he's by no means the most dangerous member of the company.

Big woolly mammoths are the best elephants

Elephants with frickin laser-eyes.

Sadly OOP, but Chaos warriors had this rad War Mammoth

Ganesha, you are better than this

Southern elephants follow a migration pattern that forces them to swim across an island chain. This chain is home to Gnomes and inevitably Gnomes tame the elephants to provide 'workhorse' muscle or use them as mobile homes.

They roam the vast Enlei Plains of the Vollherran continent. they are unchallenged in strength and agression. one of my potential BBEG is a barbarian with the elephant totem. he chose the elephant because he saw how violent for the sake of violence the bull elephants were (especially when they were in musth. there are mammoths in the northern regions of my settinng too, but my players havent made it up there yet.

That's awesome user! I like that elephant warrior idea

Blink Mammoths

If this actually posts, it's a homebrew that I found to be pretty cool.

They look like medieval paintings of elephants, eg horses with funny noses

ah, thought I was losing it for a second

WALL JUST GOT TEN FEET HIGHER, CARLOS.

Someone likes All Yesterdays.

If you like elephants then you should watch 'the Brothers Grimsby'.

Thank you anons!

Not him but I'm partial to megatheriums. I have them in the setting too, as cattle for not!gauchos, even as a war beast and ocasional enemy. Same CR as the elephant. It can kinda go into a berserk state.

My setting is The Throes of Passhun in a Worlde Gonne Madde!!
Withe A Thousand Elephantes!

This thread makes me depressed we killed all the Mammoths.

Mammoths (or near-mammoths) are one of the things we're most likely to be able to bring back from extinction (and there are teams working on it, if you give it a google), thanks to a combination of having very similar relatives still alive, and an assload of them frozen under siberian ice.

I'd put a good bet on a mammoth in my lifetime

Aren't mammoths as closely related to Indian elephants as we are to Chimpanzees, though?

If artificial wombs become enough of an advanced thing, they would largely invalidate the need for living relatives of extinct animals: you'd just need enough DNA to cobble together a zygote and you'd be well on your way to making as many mammoths, mastodons, sabretooth tigers, or dodo birds all without needing some other animal to give birth to it.

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They can be found in several parts of the world, though they don't occur naturally where the campaign is occurring. The ruler of the city has a menagerie with some.

But! There is also a "secret" cult comprising most of the aristocracy of the kingdom that performs rites twice-yearly in an elephant temple. They have animated elephant statues, cool sigils and robes, the works. It's "secret" because it's not in any way illegal, and all their servants know, therefore everyone who knows anything knows about it.

For most of the participants it's a method of social networking and the "worship" is half-ironic. For a minority of them there's a sort of Prosperity Gospel going on, where they know the chants and slogans don't have any magical or religious power but they think the metaphor is powerful enough to help them succeed anyway.

And a select few know the truth, which is that the elephants are actually a cover story for the what they really worship.

My players never got to it, but I was going to have Strahd unleash a zombified mammoth on them. Even a dragonborn barbarian has to at least flinch when three tons of angry rotting flesh comes charging at him, tusks sharp as spears.

My setting is alt-magic-history-Pleistocene, basically taking Graham Hancock's books at face value and making the Atlanteans like that one animated movie, only spread all over parts of the world now underwater. Pachyderms roam Eurasia, Africa, and the Americas. Mammoths figure especially strongly in North America and Siberia.

Holy shit I remember getting this issue of zoo books, I specifically saved this issue for this poster when I started donating the magazines to the library a few years later. Always wondered what the fuck was up with that elephant that looked like it had a pancake on its head

Dwarves and, to a lesser extent, orcs use them as dray animals for large instruments of war. Some dwarves also use them as transport animals, but this is largely a status thing, since they aren't as fast as many other options. Orcs sometimes use them as actual war beasts, but this is generally only when they are desperate. Elephants are difficult to replace.

What about mechanical elephants?

This is actually Art™, but an elephant seems like a fairly good form to make a walking creature, robot or vehicle.

Ashur?

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