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Thursday, August 1, 2019

Generic beastfolk in crunch and fluff

Fantasy gaming is full of different beastfolk races. There are catfolk, ratfolk, lizardfolk, mongrelfolk, etc. They are almost always highly specific in terms of which animal they anthropomorphize, and sometimes may display subraces with more specific features like halfling-size ratfolk, squirrel-tailed ratfolk, etc. They are typically created by dark magic or a precursor race.

What is less common are generic beastfolk races who don't have a fixed animal aspect. There are a fair amount of supplements for beastfolk that let you build the race yourself rather than presenting a preset race, but there are few that do anything similar with the world building. (In contrast to the beastmen's random mutations being taken for granted.)

For example, the ferrans in Thunderscape: the World of Aden have multiple animal aspects within the same species. They are divided into three branches of mammalian, avian or reptilian. However, a ferran may only have children with a member of the same branch and their child will inherit the same animal aspect as one of their parents.

By contrast, the sankarjin span the full spectrum of avian, aquatic, amphibian, mammal, reptile, and insectoid. They do not have hereditary appearances: a wolf and a sheep may have a child who is reptilian or rabbit. (The link appears to be dead and I cannot find any copies elsewhere, so sorry about that!)

The beastfolk in Victoriana by Cubicle 7 Games are a more extreme example compared to ferrans. They are a race, but their animal aspect is random rather than hereditary. What is further interesting and bizarre is that stereotypes are associated with animal aspects: ratfolk are disliked, dogfolk are accepted, lionfolk are beloved, etc.

There are not, to my knowledge, beastfolk races where the character (as opposed to the player) may choose their animal aspect. Or change it. Or have multiple aspects like a chimera (except for the aforementioned mongrelfolk). I guess that is something to world build later.

ADDENDUM 11/19/2019: This writeup depicts beastmen as transformed animals, and "flora sapiens" as evolved plants.

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