animal characters on the borders of fairyland
Apr 29, 2021 23:13:43 GMT -5
Admin Pete, El Borak, and 2 more like this
Post by hengest on Apr 29, 2021 23:13:43 GMT -5
(Note: this also belongs in the Fairy Tale section here.)
(Think I saw a link recently to an animal homebrew RPG, am leaving it alone til I get a few of these thoughts down)
On the borders of fairy country, where you can still find all manner of normal things, you will find animals (many of them burrowers) that seem to be more like men than they might otherwise be. Sometimes, you are not sure just what is going on. They are animals, but they have features or habits that make them more familiar and, at the same time, strange.
Roll as directed for random generation or simply choose as you will.
Number of features: 1d10. Then roll the appropriate number of times on the following table, dropping numbers that are re-rolled.
Table of features
(Since it may seem odd to have a cluster of these features without speech, I suggest that if the number of features rolled is ≥ 3, speech be thrown in.)
Sample animals, randomly rolled:
1)
7 features.
Features rolled: 9 8 4 2 64 7. So:
Family
Magic
Personality
Clothing
Cooking
Ambition
(Speech included because number of features ≥ 3)
This becomes:
Thomas Badger. Father of a family that includes his wife Audrey and their three children. Thomas is always seen dressed neatly in such garb as a well-to-do farmer might wear to church in the mid-19th century, and even the discarded bedding outside his den always looks fresh. His knowledge of herbs extends well beyond their uses for badger medicine; he has a solid sense for how to use them to make almost any poor fare into a tasty dish. Thomas and Audrey are sometimes of different minds about the finer points of cooking. Beyond the use of his badger body and senses, Thomas has mastery of a quiet magic, difficult for humans to understand, that keeps him and his family well-informed about the wider country where they live. He sees a future where his descendants have as many as three dens within a trivially tiring trundle of his present homestead [note: badgers keep mental track of distances in terms of trundle, where trundling refers to a slow badger gait, below the speed of the paces known as hustle and crash. So a trivially tiring trundle represents the space that one can cover at a trundle with such ease that one would not even weigh the energy requirements before setting off.]
2)
10 (!) features rolled, minus duplicates
2, 12, 9,2, 6, 12, 11, 12, 1, 12
Clothing
Strength
Family
Narrative
Weakness
Speech
This becomes:
Joan Bunny. Joan's main item of clothing is a homemade straw hat that she wears when tending her herb garden, of which she is not as proud as she should be. She has a knack for getting even the wildest herbs to grow as she wishes. She also wears gardening gloves that look to be woven of a fine grass. She has no children of her own but lives with her mother Margaret and her maiden aunt Juliana for whom she is the caretaker. Joan has a tendency to bite when she feels stifled or cornered. Her picture of her life is coherent from kittenhood, when she learned much of her herbcraft from her aunt, down to the present. She half-imagines her memories as a path snaking through the circles of the seasons in the wood.
[At this point, I see that 1d10 features can produce very human animals. Of course, it's possible to roll low, too, but I want to turn down the die value and see what happens. I'll commit to doing two of these at 1d6.]
3)
2 features rolled.
1, 2
Speech
Clothing
This becomes:
The Mole. As he peeps out of a molehill, you see that the Mole is wearing a filthy workshirt that looks like it has not been changed in ages. When you speak to him, he vanishes in fright, but may poke his head back out if you said something that warrants a reply. He is not a farmer in a mole's skin. He is a mole with a mole's interests and fears. Information about, or protection from, local snakes and owls might go a long way to securing his aid.
4)
2 features rolled
7, 4 (no speech included)
Ambition
Personality
Squirrel Grayson. Squirrel Grayson cannot tell you his name, but this is what another local might call him. He wears no trousers and smokes no pipe, but a brief acquaintance with him will tell you that he is at least as present as you are. Even by his body language you can tell that he is asserting his right to be here while he refrains from impinging on your right to pass through. This is a complex mind in uneasy balance with his surroundings. Repeated encounters will show that Squirrel Grayson has a plan for his tree and several others nearby: through a complex set of wordless favor-arrangements with his neighbors, he hopes to have three winters' acorns built up for one winter. Once that treasure has been amassed, he expects to pivot it into more local power.
[Committing to two more 1d6 animals, rolled 3 and 6, let's see where it goes. For a twist, another idea is to rank the features in terms of "strength" in accordance with the order in which they were rolled. I will attempt this below.]
5)
3 features rolled
6, 7, 5
Narrative
Ambition
Cooking
(Speech included)
This becomes:
Sandy Cowbird. Sandy has a massive set of thoughts regarding her life, past and present but most especially what it to some. It is almost as if she has roots in the future that nourish her understanding of her past. Her unusual dream is that her young will learn to build their own nests as she has been unable to do. Her young can hear her vocalizations and song at a distance. If she succeeds in this, singing encouragement to them in their early lives, her children will be the culture heroes that founded a family of cowbirds who no longer live as parasites in strangers' nests. Sandy sees everything that could take place in this future and continually measures her own past against it. Since her young do not live with her, her cooking various seeds into stews in a tiny pot looks like an empty nester's strange fancy.
6)
6 features rolled
3, 2, 6,2, 5, 9
Smoking
Clothing
Narrative
Cooking
Family
(Speech included)
This becomes:
Twain Duck. Twain's central feature is his love of smoking. He is rarely found without a passably-rolled cigarette dangling from his bill and smoke pouring from his nostrils. Where he gets his tobacco and how he rolls these is anyone's guess. He must spend nearly as much time on his wardrobe, which is more varied than that of many animals in this country. He has three bizarrely ornate waistcoats, each with its own color scheme and a set of repeated symbols that cannot be random. Twain tells his story after a little prompting: it is coherent but not so remarkable. The most memorable event he recalls to you is that when he was an egg, a weasel tried to eat him but was put off by the violent pecking he replied with from inside. You think of that innocent bill defending itself and wonder just what brought it to become the unusual, smoky, and decorated creature you see before you. Twain eats as any duck on most days, but does at times make a fish soup in a puddle that he heats by a means unknown to others. It may surprise you to learn that Twain is a family duck, since he gives the impression of being a free agent. You wonder what he can possibly be like with his ducklings and wife in their home.
***
I think this about bottoms out my initial creative impulse here, happy to hear from anyone, see your animals, whatever, and I will try to be back to this.
Thanks to Admin Pete for previewing much of this post.
(Think I saw a link recently to an animal homebrew RPG, am leaving it alone til I get a few of these thoughts down)
On the borders of fairy country, where you can still find all manner of normal things, you will find animals (many of them burrowers) that seem to be more like men than they might otherwise be. Sometimes, you are not sure just what is going on. They are animals, but they have features or habits that make them more familiar and, at the same time, strange.
Roll as directed for random generation or simply choose as you will.
Number of features: 1d10. Then roll the appropriate number of times on the following table, dropping numbers that are re-rolled.
Table of features
(Since it may seem odd to have a cluster of these features without speech, I suggest that if the number of features rolled is ≥ 3, speech be thrown in.)
| 1 | Speech - the gift of speech intelligible to humans, as well as normal communications within the animal world. |
| 2 | Clothing - the animal prefers to wear clothing, at least sometimes. Anything from a loincloth to Peter Rabbit's jacket to a full tailored costume for the time or for some other time. |
| 3 | Smoking - the animal is sometimes seen with a pipe (or similar device, depending on setting). |
| 4 | Personality - a fully developed personality intelligible to humans. |
| 5 | Cooking - a preference for cooked food of some kind and the ability and equipment to prepare it |
| 6 | Narrative - the ability to present a coherent narrative of one's life and adventures in terms intelligible to humans. |
| 7 | Ambition - the ability to imagine a position of significantly greater personal comfort or power, and the desire to obtain it. |
| 8 | Magic - a degree of skill with what humans call magic. |
| 9 | Family - the creature has a nuclear or extended family, in the same den or nearby. Their features may be similar or quite different, but they are probably not "regular" animals. |
| 10 | Feud - the creature has a long-standing personal dispute with a human or another creature nearby. |
| 11 | Weakness - any weakness at all, including the inclination to abuse things that are otherwise good, although it is rare to see an animal with a human capacity for true addiction. |
| 12 | Strength - a particular strength of any degree: musical skill, special quickness, practical mathematics or geometry, anything. |
Sample animals, randomly rolled:
1)
7 features.
Features rolled: 9 8 4 2 6
Family
Magic
Personality
Clothing
Cooking
Ambition
(Speech included because number of features ≥ 3)
This becomes:
Thomas Badger. Father of a family that includes his wife Audrey and their three children. Thomas is always seen dressed neatly in such garb as a well-to-do farmer might wear to church in the mid-19th century, and even the discarded bedding outside his den always looks fresh. His knowledge of herbs extends well beyond their uses for badger medicine; he has a solid sense for how to use them to make almost any poor fare into a tasty dish. Thomas and Audrey are sometimes of different minds about the finer points of cooking. Beyond the use of his badger body and senses, Thomas has mastery of a quiet magic, difficult for humans to understand, that keeps him and his family well-informed about the wider country where they live. He sees a future where his descendants have as many as three dens within a trivially tiring trundle of his present homestead [note: badgers keep mental track of distances in terms of trundle, where trundling refers to a slow badger gait, below the speed of the paces known as hustle and crash. So a trivially tiring trundle represents the space that one can cover at a trundle with such ease that one would not even weigh the energy requirements before setting off.]
2)
10 (!) features rolled, minus duplicates
2, 12, 9,
Clothing
Strength
Family
Narrative
Weakness
Speech
This becomes:
Joan Bunny. Joan's main item of clothing is a homemade straw hat that she wears when tending her herb garden, of which she is not as proud as she should be. She has a knack for getting even the wildest herbs to grow as she wishes. She also wears gardening gloves that look to be woven of a fine grass. She has no children of her own but lives with her mother Margaret and her maiden aunt Juliana for whom she is the caretaker. Joan has a tendency to bite when she feels stifled or cornered. Her picture of her life is coherent from kittenhood, when she learned much of her herbcraft from her aunt, down to the present. She half-imagines her memories as a path snaking through the circles of the seasons in the wood.
[At this point, I see that 1d10 features can produce very human animals. Of course, it's possible to roll low, too, but I want to turn down the die value and see what happens. I'll commit to doing two of these at 1d6.]
3)
2 features rolled.
1, 2
Speech
Clothing
This becomes:
The Mole. As he peeps out of a molehill, you see that the Mole is wearing a filthy workshirt that looks like it has not been changed in ages. When you speak to him, he vanishes in fright, but may poke his head back out if you said something that warrants a reply. He is not a farmer in a mole's skin. He is a mole with a mole's interests and fears. Information about, or protection from, local snakes and owls might go a long way to securing his aid.
4)
2 features rolled
7, 4 (no speech included)
Ambition
Personality
Squirrel Grayson. Squirrel Grayson cannot tell you his name, but this is what another local might call him. He wears no trousers and smokes no pipe, but a brief acquaintance with him will tell you that he is at least as present as you are. Even by his body language you can tell that he is asserting his right to be here while he refrains from impinging on your right to pass through. This is a complex mind in uneasy balance with his surroundings. Repeated encounters will show that Squirrel Grayson has a plan for his tree and several others nearby: through a complex set of wordless favor-arrangements with his neighbors, he hopes to have three winters' acorns built up for one winter. Once that treasure has been amassed, he expects to pivot it into more local power.
[Committing to two more 1d6 animals, rolled 3 and 6, let's see where it goes. For a twist, another idea is to rank the features in terms of "strength" in accordance with the order in which they were rolled. I will attempt this below.]
5)
3 features rolled
6, 7, 5
Narrative
Ambition
Cooking
(Speech included)
This becomes:
Sandy Cowbird. Sandy has a massive set of thoughts regarding her life, past and present but most especially what it to some. It is almost as if she has roots in the future that nourish her understanding of her past. Her unusual dream is that her young will learn to build their own nests as she has been unable to do. Her young can hear her vocalizations and song at a distance. If she succeeds in this, singing encouragement to them in their early lives, her children will be the culture heroes that founded a family of cowbirds who no longer live as parasites in strangers' nests. Sandy sees everything that could take place in this future and continually measures her own past against it. Since her young do not live with her, her cooking various seeds into stews in a tiny pot looks like an empty nester's strange fancy.
6)
6 features rolled
3, 2, 6,
Smoking
Clothing
Narrative
Cooking
Family
(Speech included)
This becomes:
Twain Duck. Twain's central feature is his love of smoking. He is rarely found without a passably-rolled cigarette dangling from his bill and smoke pouring from his nostrils. Where he gets his tobacco and how he rolls these is anyone's guess. He must spend nearly as much time on his wardrobe, which is more varied than that of many animals in this country. He has three bizarrely ornate waistcoats, each with its own color scheme and a set of repeated symbols that cannot be random. Twain tells his story after a little prompting: it is coherent but not so remarkable. The most memorable event he recalls to you is that when he was an egg, a weasel tried to eat him but was put off by the violent pecking he replied with from inside. You think of that innocent bill defending itself and wonder just what brought it to become the unusual, smoky, and decorated creature you see before you. Twain eats as any duck on most days, but does at times make a fish soup in a puddle that he heats by a means unknown to others. It may surprise you to learn that Twain is a family duck, since he gives the impression of being a free agent. You wonder what he can possibly be like with his ducklings and wife in their home.
***
I think this about bottoms out my initial creative impulse here, happy to hear from anyone, see your animals, whatever, and I will try to be back to this.
Thanks to Admin Pete for previewing much of this post.
