Chimera part 2: fantasy gaming

As established in part 1, chimeras have appeared in a variety of body plans. Fantasy games have tried to incorporate these variations as distinct monsters of their own.

In Dungeons & Dragons

The chimera was typed as a "dragon-kin" in the Rules Cyclopedia, but its relation to dragons remains questionable across editions as it was never again typed as a dragon.

The standard D&D chimera uses a "Society" body plan with dragon's wings. The dragon head is a red dragon by default. Oddly enough, the chimera cannot have another color for said head. Instead, that is restricted to a different species related to chimera known as a dracimera. The dracimera is either a different species, a crossbreed of a chimera and another dragon, or a different species descended from crossbreeding. (Pathfinder removed this distinction, allowing chimeras to have variable colored dragon heads.)

There were also other variants of the chimera. The gorgimera replaces the goat head with a gorgon and gains the ability to exhale petrifying gas.

3e introduced a “chimerical creature” template that allowed GMs to replace the lion portion with another creature. For example, the mantimera replaces the lion with a manticore and gains the manticore's spiked tail attack.

The thessalmera appeared in the entry on thessalmonsters, being a combination of thessalhydra and chimera. It replaced the goat's head with a giant maw and gained a mane of thessalhydra heads.

Mantimera, Shining South ©Wizards of the Coast

In third party products

Monster Encyclopaedia II featured a family of monsters called the chimae, with its members includinv the lion chimae and ram chimae. They were giant snakes with the head of a lion and a ram, respectively. Their name suggested a relation the chimera, but this was never explained in the fluff.

Notes of the Wandering Alchemist included a post on re-skinning chimeras for environmental variants: "Re-skinning Monsters: Chimera Proof Of Concept."

Nerdarchy included articles on randomized chimeras and metallic chimeras.

Pathfinder

Pathfinder Bestiary includes the chimera by default and allows them to have any chromatic dragon head. It also mentions that the manticore is able to crossbreed with lions, lamias, chimeras and sphinxes. A half-manticore chimera, lamia or sphinx gains the manticore's spiked tail attack, but is otherwise identical to their standard versions.

Classic Monsters Revisited provided some simple guidelines for chimera's environmental variants, replacing the goat and lion portions with animals from the current environment while leaving the statblock largely unchanged (aka reskinning). It featured the "legendary" chimera (modeled after the Hesiodic version) and "orthos" as more detailed chimera variants.

"EN World TRAILseeker #19: Chimeric Fusion" provided guidelines for creating tripartite chimeras from any three creatures. Twenty example aspects are provided, including "yeti, aboleth, spider, golem, and cobra."

Other

Mazes & Minotaurs introduces the "aberrant beast," which is the offspring of a chimera and another creature. In that game the standard chimera is the three-headed Hesiodic variety, whereas the aberrant beast resembles the single-headed Homeric variety.

13th Age featured the classic Lycian chimera, but specified that the chimera’s appearance fluctuated. Its body parts moved around daily and included bits of additional animals beyond the traditional lion, goat, and dragon. This allows its game traits to fluctuate, making it less predictable.

The OSR game Blood & Treasure introduced a set of tables for GMs to randomly generate their own chimeras.

Octopus Carnival included posts on "chimerae" and "snake-maned lion" for GURPS.

In video gaming

The Final Fantasy series of games features a huge variety of chimeras. Not only the classical lion-goat-dragon chimera, but chimeras including snakes, eagles, bulls, and more!

In future posts I'd like to explore the chimera variants in more detail...