Monday 20 May 2024

Make Animal Fantasy Great Again

I am a qualified fan of animal fantasy - I confess it. My tastes lean more towads the quasi-realistic Watership Down/Duncton Wood end of the spectrum, wherein the animals basically act like animals except for having human-level intelligence and being able to 'speak' an actual language; while I adored the Redwall books in particular as a child, as an adult the inconsistencies in size dynamics between the different animal kinds and their surroundings makes the events depicted impossible to really visualise. But the basic concept appeals wherever on that spectrum it appears.

It's a source of some regret to me that there is no animal fantasy OSR game or campaign setting, at least that I know of,* which does what I think animal fantasy really needs to do in the sense of creating a plausible-seeming depiction of anthropomorphic animals such as they do not simply come across as 'furries' or as human beings in funny suits, but rather as actual sentient animal species. Join me then while I dream up a list of central characteristics that a proper animal fantasy OSR game needs to have in order to merit the description of being truly Great.

First, it should be embedded in a real-world ecology and geography. What I mean by this is that animal fantasy is going to be inherently more interesting if it is based on the anthropomorphisation of animals from a particular biome - a fantasy England in which there are harvest mouse-people, badger-people, hedgehog-people, robin-people etc.; a fantasy Japan in which there are crane-people, fox-people and deer-people; a fantasy Botswana in which there are secretary bird-people, cheetah-people and eland-people, and so on and so forth. Too much animal fantasy is based on the same bog standard set of cutesy species from basically Western European environments, and too much of it feels divorced from a specific region or locality. 

Second, it should follow through on doing justice to the goal of creating plausible sentient animal civilisations. In particular, it should think clearly about the type of civilisation a race of intelligent predators, or a race of intelligent birds, or a race of intelligent herbivores, would produce. Animals definitionally are not human, so the kinds of societies which such an RPG depicts should not seem like human societies as such - their core assumptions should be different, and flow from the type of animal species depicted.

Third, it should be founded in fantasy - it should involve magic, and weird gods, and the other trappings of fantasy, because that's what the audience is entitled to expect. Fantasy without magic feels wrong. (This is another major failing of Redwall.)

Fourth, it should acknowledge the founding sin of all animal fantasy, which is that it makes no sense which animal species get anthropomorphised and which don't. One has to simply accept that there are going to be mouse-people (or whatever) but they are mostly surrounded by ordinary animals - spiders, butterflies, beetles, and so on which are the 'proper' size in the sense of being about as big to a mouse-person as they are to a human. One could make an interesting animal fantasy setting in which everything is its 'proper' size, but this becomes hard to make work logistically if different animal species find themselves interacting. 

The best approach structurally is I think to decide where in the world the setting is based (let's, despite my earlier comments, use the British Isles as a basic template) and then take somewhere between 5-10 'core' species that are going to get the anthropomorphism treatment: let's say rabbits, stoats and weasels, blackbirds, wrens, newts, badgers, and pheasants. And then one would need to sit down and think through carefully what type of societies, what type of religions, what type of magic systems, and so on, these creatures would create - whether in isolation from each other or in a more symbiotic form.

For instance, it seems to me that one could readily dream up a type of society in which the lower-classes are rabbits, living a relatively independent existence as subsistence farmers or serfs, but who owe a kind of fealty to an aristrocracy of stoats and weasels who get to periodically come and kill and eat sacrificial victims on the basis of being pseudo-protective demigods. (Something like this type of society was indeed depicted in The Sparrow, a book which does not get recommended enough in OSR circles.) Or you could dream up a society of blackbirds which forms a kind of dispersed empire of different pockets of forest scattered across a very wide territory - because, since birds can fly, they see no particular need to rule a contiguous physical space. Or a society of badgers who live underground in hugh cathedral-setts ruled over by 'dominant' sows. Or a society of pheasants who roam nomadically over vast ranges and place little to no value on each other's lives. Or a society of newts who create lake-cities and form together for orgiastic religious mating rituals and protect each other's spawn in underwater fortresses. And so on and so forth.

The greatest controversy of RPG animal-fantasy of the OSR stripe would probably be species-as-class. I can see the arguments on either side, but I suspect this may spark a culture war the likes of which we have not seen since the days of G+.

*There was long ago an attempt.

61 comments:

  1. Bunnies and Burrows (1976) recently got a reprint: https://www.froggodgames.com/products/19157

    I don't know if it's OSR per se, but it's definitely old-school.

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    1. Nice! I have a copy of it somewhere on PDF I think.

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  2. A couple of overlooked classics of this fiction genre has to include Pork by Cris Freddi, at the no/low magic but lots of violence end of the spectrum, and The Talking Parcel by Gerald Durrell at the cute kids book with lots of high magic end. Both recommended! :-)

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  3. I'll take this opportunity to talk about a one-shot or minicampaign that I've thought about for a long time. It would be not quite fantasy, or the only fantastic element would be animal speech, but I do see it as an epic quest type thing. The idea is that the environment would be the Helsinki and southern Finland of my childhood in the late eighties (a setting I've gone back to repeatedly in RPGs) and the player characters would be members of the three corvids common in my area, hooded crows, jackdaws, and magpies, with ravens as the mighty, mysterious race that stayed in the woods and did not enter the human world. I like corvids, and of course they're smart and resourceful and unpredictable creatures in real life, so they could be treated very realistically in most respects. In fact, they love messing about with anything new and shiny, just like player characters. But I'm very much undecided on how to treat other animals. It could be that everything that's not a corvid is just a dumb brute to them, or maybe birds but only birds would all be sapient creatures (but of course songbirds are frivolous, waders are boring, and raptors are psychopathic), or go all out and have everything be an intelligent creature to some degree, even the worms and bugs you eat when you can't get trash or roadkill.

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    1. Birds are definitely an under-utilised resource in fantasy gaming.

      I like the idea of games in which the PCs are just intelligent animals in the Watership Down mode.

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  4. A game that sounds close to what you are describing is In the Light of A Faded World, (https://derekkinsman.itch.io/in-the-light-of-a-faded-world) where you essentially play as quite small animals (a mouse, a dragonfly, maybe a small turtle, things like that) going through a world where humanity has died out - though their ruins remain. There are, apparently, gangs of cats. As much as I love cats, they are absolutely terrifying predators, and I would imagine that to a mole or a mouse they occupy much the same mental space that dragons (if they were real) would for a human being.

    I think I'd like to play it at some point, though I don't know a great deal more about it than I have already said.

    I never read the Redwall books, but Watership Down was fantastic. And actually, there are some pretty haunting bits in The Wind in the Willows as well (specifically the bit where they meet Pan).

    It's definitely an interesting genre and it seems to me that it's underused in RPGs, especially considering (or possibly because?) it's probably one of the first games of "pretend" that many children play.

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    1. That definitely sounds like a nice idea - I may buy it and investigate.

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    2. You know, I figured I should put my money where my mouth is, so I have bought it. I'll let you know what I think!

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  5. I think having each species be sentient, tool-using, etc, yet still their "normal" size is a great way to enforce some distance from "just people what have whiskers and tails" - a band of roughly-equivalent sized animals (a couple mice, a robin, an unusually large stag beetle, a frog, that kind of thing) encountering a fox? That's not much if it's Disney's Robin Hood, but if the fox is the "normal" size, that's an encounter with a possibly predatory great beast, like a dragon or similar.

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    1. I definitely understand the appeal in the abstract, but in practice I wonder how achievable it is. A fox is not just like a dragon to a mouse - it is like a gargantuan to a mouse. The rules can perhaps be made to deal with this, but can the imagination?

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    2. Of course the imagination can, it requires even less imagination than the alternative, because you can just imagine a real fox interacting with a real mouse, and even find real videos of that to help visualize it. As soon as you start monkeying with the sizes you're doing extra anthropomorphizing, and you have to consider why you're making that species' size relationship with an unchanged species parallel our human relationship with that species.

      Also I think you're overestimating the size difference. Full grown Game of Thrones style dragon vs human is about right.

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0swpVzpno4

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    3. Yes, but the imagination also requires imagining a mouse with a sword etc fighting a fox, which is not the same thing at all.

      Also, I watch a family of foxes in my garden pretty much every night. I've seen them catch mice. And I know how tiny and frail a mouse is. This is not like man vs dragon, because dragons do not exist. It's a known animal vs a known animal, and we know how brutally straightforward it is for the one to catch and eat the other.

      By no means is it impossible to imagine, but it requires putting out of one's mind most of what we actually know about real world animals.

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  6. Go on and elaborate, nobody will do it else. In my region (east spain), the animals would be rabbits, otters, magpies, doves, snakes, mice, and the occasional scorpion. The greatest predator for them would be cats and a small hawk

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  7. I think it was Tolkien who distinguished what he called "beast fable" from fairy stories. He loved the latter, but the former left him cold. I am afraid that my experience on this mirrors the good professor's.

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    1. The difficulty is the word 'fable'. Obvously Aesop made use of talking animals, but that's not really what 'animal fantasy' means.

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  8. As a fellow lover of animal fantasy, I'm not sure I agree with your list of characteristics – although that's only to be expected. To me, having all animals their proper size works fine, and I don't feel any real need for magic either. The comic Mouse Guard is a fine example of both of these; the closest thing to a wizard the guardsmen have is the Apiary Keeper, who uses a little censer to control bees. He only seems to have a few about him at any given time, but they're a much more serious threat to something mouse- or stoat-sized.

    Alas, the series was bunged into almost immediate, indefinite hiatus after only two mainline books and one prequel series, and the official RPG is some Burning Wheel rubbish.

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    1. Yeah, I have the RPG and just couldn't be bothered with the system.

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  9. Have you checked Mausritter? Its setting is inspired by Mouseguard and it's mechanically based on Cairn/Into the Odd. You play as human-level intelligence mouses in a world full of predators eager to eat you.

    I think it's the setting that most naturally encapsulates "OSR-style of play", really easy to explain to new players without any beggage.

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    1. I have heard of it, but not read it. Cairn/Into the Odd is a tiny bit too rules-lite for my taste but will see what I make of it.

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    2. Came here to recommend it. It's a great little game.

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    3. Also came here to praise Mausritter. It's perhaps a little simplistic in some aspects, and is very clearly designed to appeal to people more familiar with playing boardgames (to the extent that, in the boxed set, you get counters for every possible piece of equipment that the players may end up carrying [though you don't really need to use them]). But it has some lovely touches, not least the rules for size differences between animals - there is no way that a single mouse can defeat a cat (this ties in with what you say about dragons in an earlier comment), they can only be overcome by mobs of mice working together.

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    4. This raises the question: would you rather fight a thousand mice-sized cats or a thousand cat-sized mice?

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  10. As a side note Adam's Plague Dogs (which I found more compiling than Watership Down but a lot less fun) could give some insight into how such a game could include humans as part of the environment. I agree that putting a hat and a jacket on a squirrel kind of breaks the fourth wall a bit too much, but, gotta tell ya, I really dig the Mouse Guard art even though I have no interest in its rpg.

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    1. I have read Plague Dogs, as a kid, but I remember very little of it.

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  11. There is a very cool RPG called “InBetween” by David Grophland like this about playing mice (or pseudo-mice) in the walls of a house. I think it is still in playtesting, alas. - Jason Bradley Thompson

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  12. There was a Powered By The Apocalypse game called The Warren which fit the Watership Down parameters (talking sentient animals with culture, no clothes or tools, humans exist, low/no magic).

    I haven't tried it but there is an RPG based on the underground hit board game Root, a political wargame with talking animal factions in a forest (clothes and tools, no humans, low/no magic).

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    1. Oh yeah, I remember hearing about The Warren. I'm afraid 'Powered by The Apocalypse' is a bit of a turn-off now for me.

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    2. The Warren is based on Apocalypse World and while its bones are very much an indie/story game it plays more like an OSR game than any other indie game I've ever come across. For example:
      -The rules are a very simple and stripped down version of AW that works very well.
      -There's no real metagame currency, the main currency you deal with is your rabbit's ability to keep it together and no panic, which is constantly being worn down by the hostile world around it.
      -The way the rules are set up really emphasize your rabbit's vulnerability and weakness in the face of a hostile world rather than the kind of latitude you generally get in indie games. I really like the way the gather information skill works specifically in getting you in a rabbit's headspace.
      -Its approach towards things like death and permanent injury have a much harder edge than you usually get form indie games. For example my rabbit took an injury that made him permanently unable to sprint.
      -Because of the above and some other details of his its set up, it's actually the most effective horror game (in a very Watership Down sense) that I've ever played.

      You might still not like it, but I found it much more fun to play than other "powered the by apocalypse" games. In a lot of ways it feels like a OSR/Indie hybrid in ways that work out well at the table.

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    3. OK, on that recommendation it sounds worth a try. Thanks.

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  13. I disagree on the third, I feel the animal protagonists and the change of scale are the fantasy. Making mice-people also wizards muddies the waters and makes it easy for the focus to drift towards the wizardry, and thus directly go against the second.

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    1. I like trying to imagine what kind of magic mice would use.

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    2. I agree that in itself sounds interesting!

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  14. Though not fitting all the stated criteria, Larry MacDougall's Gwelf is another fine animal fantasy setting ripe for gaming.
    Key advantages of these settings are broad genre literacy from childhood fiction, and species as personality archetypes (rather than faux-historical cultural stand-ins like Vikings and Celts) tends to be less problematic.

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  15. 'A society of pheasants who roam nomadically over vast ranges and place little to no value on each other's lives' - no love for TH White? Or are the various transformation sequences too close to a Just-So Story to contribute to Animal Fantasy?

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    1. What's the TH White reference there? I remember vaguely the animal transformation sequences but nothing to do with pheasants, but it has been a long time.

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    2. The portion of The Once and Future King where a young Arthur is transformed into a wild goose, who are (as I recall) pretty individualistic, if not uncaring about the lives of others.

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  16. You mentioned The Sparrow - do you mean the one by Mary Doria Russell? If so, this is the second time in two days I have randomly encountered it as a recommendation, so I reckon I should by it. Thank you.

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    1. Yes. I haven't read it in 20+ years but I remember really liking it a lot.

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    2. Thank you! I guess I am off to Amazon...

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    3. It's quite the wild ride. Hard to read at times, but a fantastic piece of sci-fi nonetheless.

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  17. If you haven't read it, you might enjoy Tailchaser's Song by Tad Williams. It's an animal fantasy in the Watership Down vein about feral cats, with more of an epic fantasy bend than WD, I think.

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    1. I have heard about it but not read it. Thinking back, there was a real flush of this sort of book during the 80s and 90s.

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  18. Humblewood is a fun little 5e setting in the anthromoporthic vein of Redwall and the Disney Robin Hood.

    I would like to see settings where the magic is suited to types of animals, ie the moles, like the ones in Duncton Wood, carving runes to cast slow but terrible spells, perhaps causing the ground to vibrate and turn into quicksand, or toads with chaos magic seeping from their skin, or bats sending echoes out into the spirit world to find items or souls....

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  19. Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIHM (source of the Secret of NIHM) is
    pretty great example that seems to come close to what you are talking about. It even has a "plausible" science fiction reason why these particular animals are bit more like a human society.

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    1. Yes, I have read/seen it - long ago though.

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  20. My favorite animal fantasy by far is Linnea Sterte's amazing graphic novel A Frog in the Fall, which prominently includes an element I think would be worth thinking about here: the different scales not only of size, but of time. In the comic, the main character is a young frog: literally less than a year old! It's his first fall. How would mice, which live for a year or two, relate to rabbits that can live to 10?

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    1. Yeah, I like that - rabbits as elves?

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    2. I was there, Greywhiskers. I was there, 3000 days ago...

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  21. Personally, my appendix N of Yoon-Suin, includes Beatrix Potter and in my campaign we have a lot of animal-human hybrids like the Tamasic men. I feel that this is kind of what you are going for in animal fantasy.

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    1. Ha! Well, I have almost completed a megadungeon (on hiatus while I finish off Yoon-Suin 2nd edition) which takes this to the next level.

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  22. A lovely idea, and great thoughts on animal fantasy as a whole. Out of interest, did you ever read the Deptford Mice books? It has a similar feel to Redwall (in that it is animals living in a pseudo medieval style society), but the animals are living in the shadow of the human civilization (iirc for all the medieval aesthetic of the animal world, it was set in the latter end of the 20th Century)

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  23. Having played Bunnies and Burrows with the designer and writer at a con, I'd say it's worth a look. The author's love for the zoology and animal behavioral foundations of the game is everywhere evident, and it really does go for a more "realistic animal fantasy" feel.

    It's cruncher than many OSR games, but not more so than AD&D - I'd put it in the "old school" bin at least (whether it's in the "OSR" bin depends on what you mean by that haha).

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  24. I'm a little late with this comment but I'm wondering how you feel about SF's adjacent sub-genre about uplifted animals.

    Here's a link to Judith Tarr's review of Andre Norton's novel, Breed to Come (https://reactormag.com/a-human-free-earth-andre-nortons-breed-to-come/).

    I am also reminded of Cordwainer Smith's stories about the Underpeople (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cordwainer_Smith).

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    1. Would the Rats of NIMH qualify?

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    2. (Frantically searching for a plot summary or overview online as I have neither seen the film adaptation nor read the original "Mrs. Frisby and ... ". )

      Sure. Why not? And also "We3" which sounds like a more sci-fi version of the Plague Dogs? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We3 )

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