Livestock of fantasy

[Booper]

In real life humans have many kinds of livestock kept for milk, meat, eggs, honey, wool, transportation, etc.

What kinds of livestock have you seen or used in campaigns/books/whatever and what were they kept for? Large beetles raised for chitin? Lizards whose regrowable tails are regularly harvested? Plant-animal hybrids with fruits that taste like a hotdog?

ATM I'm not planning on actually doing anything with this information; I'm just curious. :smallbiggrin:

[sktarq]

Well my first thing to say would be is to take another look at Darksun.

As for myself I have a real love of domesticating invertabrates.

Epoxy adhesive/sealant (+1 hardness)-based on lac
Mollusk shellfish (like an abalone) who's shell is extra hard, or extremely pretty and heat resistant (and is used in place of ceramics for plates and forks etc)
A giant crab whose she'll is shaved and used like stained glass (based of capiz)
An ooze that can be alchemically treated to basically be plastic or rubber from a snail
A religious icon dancing sea slug (filled with chloroplasts and so dances endlessly)
A deer who provides leather and meat but is really valued for their hooves which are extremely tough but slightly flexible-like a klippspringer.
An octopus/cuttlefish who is slightly psionic and whose leather is still able to change colour with the wearer's emotion.
A squid whose skin can be dried and made into strings for musical instruments (+1 to perform)

[inuyasha]

Not really a livestock thing, but more of a resource thing. I once in a campaign had a sort of large tree that was rare, but it's bark had the consistency of beef jerky and had a nutty taste, so some rangers would scratch it off with their fingernails and eat it to survive. It was kinda cool as just a sort of background thing nobody payed much attention to.

[Admiral Squish]

In my crossroads setting, we have domesticated mastodons, called mammut, in canada, which come in several breeds for different kinds of resources. There are ivory mammut, which have four tusks and shed one pair or the other every few years. There are milk mammut, which produce milk year-round. There are wool mammut, which produce a more luxurious sort of wool called tsawo. There are even mammut that are bred for speed.
There's also domesticated giant otters around the great lakes, about the same weight as dogs, but longer, with shorter legs. Teams can pull kayaks, hunt and retrieve fish and shellfish in the rivers and lakes, or chase fish into nets.
Oh, and also, there's fey goats, which are regular goats gifted with just a little bit of fey magic in exchange for their service as mounts and beasts of burden for the little folk.


This one time I played a farmer who maintained a ranch full of all sorts of exotic beasts and mounts. Unicorns, pegasi, hippocampi, therapod dinosaurs, both herbivorous and predatory, triceratops-like beasts of burden, riding spiders, mule beetles... I had a pretty long list somewhere, but I can't find it anymore.

[lightningcat]

Lets see, in my setting I've had the following:
A breed of octopus that the aquatic races used as dogs.
Dwarves used a type of triceratops for heavy duty hauling, especially in dangerous tunnels.
Winged cats are common pets among the elves.
There were flying whales that were used as cargo animals, and flying killer whales to protect convoys.
Riding birds, aka Chocobos. Enough said.
Predatory horses and large riding dogs. Used by different groups of humans, primarily for war.
Caravan turtles, used as living wagons by halflings, who lived inside a chamber of the shell.

[VoxRationis]

Elven horses, smaller and lighter than normal horses and adapted for forest use; tube-worm analogues which grow in volcanic pools and are used by dwarves as a food source; hyper-aggressive falcons which attack things like dragons (they go for the wing membranes); dire weasels as guard/attack animals.

Intelligent spiders trade their silk as an export good, though they of course aren't livestock.

[Balyano]

I had a city state on this peninsula that domesticated oozes. Oozes can be reproduced by splitting the mass in two and not allowing it to recombine. New strains can be created by exposing them to various carcinogens, often in conjunction with biological material from something with a desired quality, usually doesn't work, or gets undesired results, but sometimes a lucky or persistent breeder succeeds. Most of them were bred to be no more acidic than lemon juice, often less than that.

In the morning and after meals you open a jar and insert one variety into your mouth, it eats the food particles, plaque, and bacteria. After it fills your mouth with its minty flavored gooeyness for a minuter or so you spit it back into the jar and are left with a pearly white smile. Unless its a joke variety and your being pranked.

You need a bath you say? Nonsense, thats disgusting, what you need is to lay in a tub with a specially bred ooze. It eats the dirt and grime and dead skin and leaves you smelling in any one of dozens of aromas ranging from lilac, to cinnamon, to baby powder, to spring rain, to no scent at all.

A similar ooze is used in place of toilet paper.

A variety of ooze flavors exist, from lemon, to bacon, to beef, to sauerkraut, to chocolate, to apple, to spinach, you name it somebody has the ooze for you, or is working on creating the variety. You feed your scraps and garbage to your jars of ooze. Scoop out some ooze, use it in your cooking, the bit thats left in the jar grows to fill it again, just add garbage.

Speaking of garbage, you know a good way to get rid of unwanted waste? Oozes thats what. And you really don't want blockages in your sewers, better send an ooze or two through the system to each any build up.

Oh your a miner? Heres and ooze with a taste for gold, let it loose and it will find a vein. Oh iron? Yes we have a variety for that too. Oh you want to refine your ores? Yep, you see an ooze can dissolve away the unwanted minerals and leave behind just what you want to use, just make sure you use the right ooze for the mineral in question.

Want to silence a political rival? Well just slip him a drop of a deadly ooze, it will eat the fool from the inside.

Currently there is a huge prize for anyone that develops an ooze that eats weeds and pests but leaves the crops alone, no one has collected this money as of yet, this prize was established decades ago.