[3.5] Do Anthopormorphic Animals Make Sense?

[Gale]

Savage Species introduces anthropomorphic animals as playable races and I've always wondered the reasoning behind them in D&D. Unlike other races no explanation is given as to their origins, habitats, culture, etc. It could be as simple as a wizard did it; but I've always wanted a more satisfactory answer. Is this something that should be left up the players to elaborate on or is there actually an explanation somewhere?
I've always been hesitant to use them as a player race or NPC because I never knew how other characters would react to them. They could be seen as ordinary citizens or the freak results of magical experimentation.

[squiggit]

I like the magic experiment route because it's easy and quick and can let a player play a thing without having to worry about making a culture for it. Hell, pathfinder even has a spell that does this.

As for how people would react? Well the game already has anthropomorphic lizards, hyenas, snakes, cats and birds in the system already, so think about how one might react to those as a baseline. And then add a little for the weirdness of this creature and adjust based on player tolerance.

[Chronos]

Well, where did any other race come from? Anthropomorphic animals might just be a normal part of the setting. You use them if you want to play in a setting where there are anthropomorphic animals, like Narnia or the world of the Spellsinger books.

[Killer Angel]

It could be as simple as a wizard did it; but I've always wanted a more satisfactory answer.

A furry wizard did it.

[Exegesis]

Sentience is expensive IRL, but in a world with magic it's possible there are many computing shortcuts that could be taken—the first, blindly evolved spells are not grand effects, simply ways to save a few bits by delegating them to the leywaves. Eventually this makes all kinds of extravagant adapations viable.

If you want to make this sentience comparable to spells you could say it's something like unseen servant, or sprinting, and the anthropic animal's brain is "dormant" most of the time. Luckily their sentient time should more than cover an adventuring day.

Naturally evolved nerveskitters, sleeps, cause fears, and true strikes would be common of course. And using magic to support enormous bodies.

[Tragak]

They make precisely as much sense as anything else in the game does. No more, no less :smalltongue:

[SimonMoon6]

I just know that I once tried to play an anthro whale using the Savage Species rule, a barbarian that I named "Bubba Blubba"... but the DM vetoed that character. :(

An anthro animal would seem weird in a human-centric culture. But D&D has so many sentient races, many available as PCs, that a typical city could be full of quite a number of strange inhabitants. I mean, where do they all hang out? If the world already allows for half-dragon mineral water orcs, then what's so weird about a cat person? If you can already have a were-rat, what's so strange about a dog person?

[M Placeholder]

what's so strange about a dog person?

http://www.pandius.com/lupnhist.html

On a planet that might be a living being and is hollow, and has Gnomes flying around in biplanes, nothing.

[gorfnab]

Another amusing source for anthropomorphic animals is school mascots.

Anthropomorphic Dire Badger (~Bard 1/ Marshal 2 or something similar)
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/68/BuckinghamUBadger.jpg/220px-BuckinghamUBadger.jpg

[dysprosium]

In a game that I ran that was cut short, two of the PCs were anthropomorphic animals as well as a couple of NPCs. It was going to be revealed that they were all creations of a certain wizard.

Other settings could have a more pronounced population of anthropomorphic animals. It just depends upon what the players and the DMs cook up.

[atemu1234]

If they're there as part of the world, anthropomorphic dogs are no less odd than hyena-headed gnolls or lizardfolk. It's just that the PLAYERS aren't used to them, not the characters.

Created by magic, in the distant past, doesn't really change that. Maybe they're considered second-class by the majority older races (read:Warforged), or maybe they have fully integrated.