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View Full Version : Hiss! Buzz! Splorch! - I need Lizards, Insects, and Squids



Yora
2017-01-22, 12:52 PM
My alien forest fantasy world is in need of more wondrous and weird critters. I want to have a strange wilderness like Dark Sun or Barsoom but set in huge forests instead of deserts. And to get away from more familiar European and North American animals but still keep things somewhat realistic and not completely unrecognizable I am going for somewhat of a prehistoric theme. Giant reptiles and insects are something we don't really have anymore but recognize from dinosaur books. Which every boy over the age of 5 should have a decent library of.
Somewhat less paleontologic sound but thematically fitting would be lots of slimy tentacles in the water.

While I have a good start with basic wild animals, I also want to expand into a good selection of cool monsters for players to fight. Giant monitor lizards are cool, but don't really offer a lot of variety in how they fight.What I am looking for are ideas for more fantastical creatures that still continue the theme of giant reptiles, insects, and squids. Any suggestions from less popular existing monster books would also be welcome.
I am open to all suggestions. Ideas for giving standard critters a new touch or reskinning other monsters to give them a mesozoic appearance would all also be great help.

hymer
2017-01-22, 03:00 PM
I'm thinking 5e here: A reskinned earth elemental as an antlion? Reskinned water elemental as a mass of tentacles? Reskinned air elemental as a storm of flying insects that can literally pick you up and throw you when working in concert?

Cernor
2017-01-23, 09:51 AM
Fallout has some decent critters, considering almost everything is an insect or reptile... Giant ants, fire ants, radroaches, giant grasshoppers, giant mosquitoes, bloatflies, and Cazadors (mutant tarantula hawks) are the insects I can recall off the top of my head. Oh, and 8-foot long Radscropions.

As far as reptiles are concerned... Geckos and Deathclaws are all I can think of, but they nicely fill the niche of "low-power pack hunter" and "terrifying apex predator" rather nicely. However, not being D&D creatures means there probably aren't stat blocks for them anywhere.

EDIT: As far as squids are concerned... Hydras work well (each head becomes a "tentacle"), as do vine blights (a mass of vines becomes a mass of tentacles).

Yora
2017-01-23, 11:12 AM
Ropers also make a great mechanical template for anything with lots of grabbing tentacles.

ImNotTrevor
2017-01-23, 11:14 AM
I'd say to go through the monster manual, grab stat blocks, and remove all fluff information. Then make a reptilian, insectile, or mollusk-ian fluff to drape over the stats.

Monsters are just collections of numbers with a description attached. Change the description and BAM. Problem solved.

Kol Korran
2017-01-23, 12:56 PM
A few ideas, most of them coming from D&D manuals, possibly with some reflavoring...
1. From my compendium for maligned and forgotten monsters (See the full sig). I think you can definitely use the stirge, possibly the hydra, possibly the gibbering mouther. With their reflavoring, they could add an element of old horror...

2. I quite like a few monster from the MM3:
- Ambush drake: Remove the flight, add swimming or climbing speed, and you got medium sized powerful lizards, with posions bite and slowing breath (Perhaps change the effect similar to stinkign cloud?) They can be cunning slightly magical vicious ambushing lizards!
- Harpoon Spider: Basically a big spider, which can "fish" targets, dragging them up the trees!
- Ssvalkor: another "minor" dragon, with poison breath and bite... Feels quite... lizardy...

3. A few classical monsters form the MM1, again with potential twists:
- Carrion crawler.
- Otyughs!
- Purple worms... If you change it to swimming, and perhaps make it a bit smaller, (And change color), I think it can be quite a terrifying "giant swamp eel of doom!"
- Aboleths! I think if you downgrade the "Ancient alien mastermind evil" down to creepy ancient looking fishy with slime tentacles (And some lowered powers), it can make for interesting... fauna...
- Assassin vines: tentacles, but more plant than flesh! Fit these kind of setting nicely... Advance them for HUGE, ancient assassin vines!
- Wyvern! I think yo can drop the flight and enable them either to climb or swim, and you got one more deadly predator...
- Rust rot monster! Some sort of an insect/ lizard/ bug, who's touch quickens the rot of organic (not necesserily alive) material? leather armors, spear shaft, clothes and more... You can give this ability to some swarms of tiny bugs...
- Basilisks... their eyes may turn to stone, or to wood... Say, those trees look awefully life like, don't they? :smalleek:

Just some ideas, I may think of more later...

Fable Wright
2017-01-23, 01:11 PM
Some possible inspirations:

There's a species of bee that fights its natural predator by surrounding it and heating it to death with the temperature of their huddle. This could be lifted directly into giant fire-bees, that are individually harmless unless you're surrounded, at which point you get start getting seriously burned, or more exotic variants like lightning bees, who act as normal but whose fuzzy honeybee back carries an electric charge just waiting to turn into a storm around other bees.

For the water, I present the Dire Mantis Shrimp: Pathfinder stats (http://www.d20pfsrd.com/bestiary/monster-listings/vermin/mantis/giant-mantis), The Oatmeal's write-up (http://theoatmeal.com/comics/mantis_shrimp).

Reptiles may include pack-hunting grapplers like velociraptors. They may include magpie-like Archaeopteryx that steal things from the party like thieving monkeys. Or tall ones who move so little they accumulate moss, and their barky neck and tough back make them look like a tree next to a boulder. There are, of course, crocodilian encounters in the water, and perhaps for ranged fights, you could have animals that shoot boiling blood from their eyes, (poisonous) quill-throwing creatures that live in trees, and of course you have spiders and their various possibly-reptilian symbiotes for trapping/battlefield control encounters.

Yora
2017-01-24, 02:02 PM
Electric bees are awesome. I got to use those. :smallbiggrin:

Knaight
2017-01-24, 02:25 PM
How much water is there - there are a lot of fun Cambrian and Precambrian options here. There's (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Trilobite_Ordovicien_8127.jpg) massive (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Olenoides_superbus,_Late_Middle_Cambrian,_Upp er_Marjum_Formation,_House_Range,_Millard_County,_ Utah,_USA_-_Houston_Museum_of_Natural_Science_-_DSC01415.JPG) trilobites (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Triarthrus_NT_small.jpg), as just one example. There's ostracoderms (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostracoderm). Then there's the rest of the Paleozoic, with its pelycosaurs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pelycosaur), dicynodonts (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dicynodont) and then diplocaulus (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diplocaulus)in particular. I'd also look into zooplankton of any era, scaled up to macroscopic levels for the smaller end. For instance, take (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ctenophora#/media/File:Haeckel_Ctenophorae.jpg) these (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salp) animals (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaetognatha#/media/File:MEB_back.png).

Lord Torath
2017-01-24, 02:47 PM
How about the Decampus, a tree-octopus? First appeared in B3 - Palace of the Silver Princess. Doesn't have an ink cloud that I'm aware of, but maybe a powerful musk spray could take the place of that.

Yora
2017-01-24, 04:13 PM
Plenty of water, but PCs will almost entirely hang out in rivers and on lakeshores. While there are a lot of really cool sea creatures, they are not really of much use in an RPG.
But there's still plenty of cool river animals as well.

Mechalich
2017-01-24, 08:28 PM
Ideas for giving standard critters a new touch or reskinning other monsters to give them a mesozoic appearance would all also be great help.

Have you played FFXV? If not, try to grab some art from that game, it mostly does what you're looking for. The game version of the Bulette, for example, is much more saurian in orientation than standard D&D or PF art. The same thing is true thematically of the crocodilian Sea Devils, a variety of modified mammals, giant toads, and bird monsters like cockatrice.

Knaight
2017-01-25, 09:11 AM
Plenty of water, but PCs will almost entirely hang out in rivers and on lakeshores. While there are a lot of really cool sea creatures, they are not really of much use in an RPG.
But there's still plenty of cool river animals as well.

Well, a few of those were land animals, so there's still something. Others could be converted, although you'd need a better term than "land trilobite".