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Kami2awa
2016-04-20, 02:13 AM
I recently played the very beautiful game "Firewatch", set in the American wilderness. During that game you find all manner of natural phenomena, including early on in the game a huge tree torn apart by a bear sharpening its claws.

Reading a book on wildlife a short time later, this got me thinking that in RPGs, monsters often seem to live in forests and other environments without really affecting them. Adventuring in these areas, PCs should be encountering tracks, bones, droppings and stranger things. Consider the party finding half-eaten animals that seem to have been cooked, suggesting a monster with fire-based abilities is nearby. An evil monster might imitate a shrike's gibbet, on a much bigger scale. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shrike#Behaviour)

A really big monster would have difficulty even moving around in a woodland without leaving an obvious trail. There are several nature-themed classes in D&D and this would seem an opportunity for them to use their skills quite a bit.

Has anyone used this much in their games? Any ideas for making it interesting?

Vinyadan
2016-04-20, 05:55 AM
I think dragons are a special case, because they are feral in a way, but as smart as humans in another. They can't manufacture items, but they hoard them out of greed. They could be glorified, fire-breathing, unstoppable magpies which destroy castles and armies for the glittery things inside. But they know how much they are worth for humans, which magpies don't.

A huge predator often doesn't really need to hide its tracks, because they are the biggest, meanest, smartest thing around. Bears come to mind. However, this isn't always the case, and canids do try to hide signals of their passage. Plus, dragons know how humans think. So either they show excessive displays of power to keep humans scared away, or they try to keep the lowest possible profile. Which, once you are a huge flying lizard who breathes fire, isn't exactly easy.

Maybe you could compare a dragon to a bird of prey like an eagle or an owl. Assume that they need similar things, only big enough to sustain them - the place they live, the things they hunt, the size of their territory. A dragon could roar as an eagle screeches when taking to air, and you could have some very agile dragons feeding on birds, like peregrine falcons do.

There also is the matter of "culture": there are wolf packs which only hunt certain animals, while another pack in the same territory only hunts a different prey. Dragons could occasionally do the same, with species which aren't wildly aggressive towards each other, like good dragons.

There also is the matter that dragons tend not to die, which suggests me that some individual evil dragons may eat hatchlings or deliberately break or devour their eggs and just be done with it: they don't need a dynasty. Lions do something similar, although the reasons are different (sex). At the same time, birds or reptiles eating their own eggs isn't something I ever heard of unless unfertilized or hungry, as evolution requires them to grow overly attached to them and protect them.

Thrudd
2016-04-20, 08:19 AM
I recently played the very beautiful game "Firewatch", set in the American wilderness. During that game you find all manner of natural phenomena, including early on in the game a huge tree torn apart by a bear sharpening its claws.

Reading a book on wildlife a short time later, this got me thinking that in RPGs, monsters often seem to live in forests and other environments without really affecting them. Adventuring in these areas, PCs should be encountering tracks, bones, droppings and stranger things. Consider the party finding half-eaten animals that seem to have been cooked, suggesting a monster with fire-based abilities is nearby. An evil monster might imitate a shrike's gibbet, on a much bigger scale. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shrike#Behaviour)

A really big monster would have difficulty even moving around in a woodland without leaving an obvious trail. There are several nature-themed classes in D&D and this would seem an opportunity for them to use their skills quite a bit.

Has anyone used this much in their games? Any ideas for making it interesting?

Absolutely. Putting details like this into your descriptions helps the world feel more alive and also gets the characters paying attention. You should do it all the time, describing how the inhabitants of the world affect their surroundings.

Say you roll a wandering monster while the party is traveling in the forest, it is an owlbear. Instead of just saying "an owlbear rushes out of the trees toward you!", start describing the tree scratches they see near the path. Then there's a big owl-pellet with deer bones in it a bit farther down. Now the players are concerned...you roll for surprise to see if they notice where it is before it sees them...

Komatik
2016-04-20, 08:37 AM
Doesn't even need to be an encounter. Just using the random tables and entities known to inhabit the place (like outlaw gangs or dragons or the like) as environmental detail would do a lot.

Knaight
2016-04-20, 09:46 AM
I use this all the time. As an example, I recently mapped out a path network for a wilderness area* (which is an uncharacteristic level of prep, but whatever). Each node has a particular thing of note in it a certain portion of the time, and the paths between them all have quick notes about how the environment is modified from the norm by whatever significant denizen is on the node. For instance, in the swampy area at the bottom, there's a territory that belongs to a gigantic heron. There are also explicit notes that there's a major shortage of everything that heron eats, while the rest of the swamp is full of frogs, fish, etc. There's also the systematic stripping of unusually large branches for nesting material, and a few other things.

It's not just for "monsters" either. Settings are generally lived in, with the notable exception of lots of the space (dead planets, and good old vacuum) in some science fiction and space fantasy. Some of what lives in them is animals, some is people, both leave their mark.

*It's a mountain occupied by a powerful druid figure and some modified animals of theirs, that goes from a swampy basin to alpine conditions.


Plus, dragons know how humans think. So either they show excessive displays of power to keep humans scared away, or they try to keep the lowest possible profile. Which, once you are a huge flying lizard who breathes fire, isn't exactly easy.
It depends on the dragon. There's highly intelligent spellcasters like in D&D, there's titanic monstrosities that fight entire armies, and there's animal intellect creatures that fly and breathe fire - and that's just the big three, without bringing in various other creatures which got stuck under the dragon label due to translation weirdness or less common dragons.