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Anthropomorphic races


Michael Hopcroft

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If i wanted to run a Furry HERO game (notice I said "if"), what would be the best way to model the differenes between the various kinds of furries? Are there special ways in hero to build cats that are different from dogs that are different from wolves that are different from fioxes that a different from rabbits, but all able to do essentially the same things humans do in this world?

 

Also, is a restricted diet worth points? If you can only digest meat and all creatures are sentient, then you are either going to be a ruthless killer or society's norms would permit predation (in which case herubores might have to take a very large Hunted to reflect the fact that a significant portion of society sees them as food).

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Originally posted by Captain Obvious

I suppose the easiest way to handle this would be to say that there are sentient humanoid animals and regular animals. The regular animals have the same rights that real world regular animals have....

 

aka slim and none? Beat a dog in this world and you get a foine. beat a person and you go to jail.

 

The comic Kevin & Kell posits a world where all animals, including insects, are sentient and predation is big buisness. When a lady wolf defies the customs of her species by marrying a rabbit, all sorts of complications ensue. For a while her brother kept trying to kill and eat her husband -- of course he was such a bad hunter that he was less like a wolf and more like The Coyote.

 

Hunting is also a varisty sport at most high schools and colleges in that world.

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don't know how relevant this is, but I have been itching to create a Scooby-Doo type character.

I'm always amused at how Scooby can be in scenes with 'normal' (i.e., canine intelligence) dogs yet be so different w/out notice [by the public].

 

IIRC one of the DH issues had something modeling this type of character/construct, I'm pretty sure it was in one of the early issues.

I plan to make some time to research that.

 

I noticed, after some intense examination, that the Bestiary doesn't cover anything like a cartoon animal,... did I miss it?

Time has been tight of late, imagine that.

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I'll post my normal response for anthropormophic games. Look at Jade/Iron-Claw system for ideas.

 

http://www.sanguine.com/Downloads/

 

In the "Summary Sheets" section they have a pdf called races. This lists how they do races. Basically all races have certain advantages (claws, teeth, etc) and natural skills. Other additions include a habitat which gives bonuses when doing skills in that habitat (like PER rolls, survival rolls, etc). Also the racial sense would be a PER bonus to that particular sense.

 

They get around the carnivourous animals by replacing typical animals with lizard equivilants. Ie, there is a small flightless lizard which tastes just like chicken, and large lizard which is used for hauling goods or people.

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I suppose it's safe to mention this now

 

I am publishing two different anthropomorphic games in 2004 that take totally different approaches to the problem of carnivores.

 

In Fuzz: the Furry Police RPG one of the central tenets of civilized existence is that you don't eat sentient beings. It's a gigantic social and religous taboo; in the words of Ibrahim, founder of the first of the OVerfaiths, "Eat nothing that thinks". Not all the animal races rose to sentience, so there are plenty of non-sentient animals for the carnivores to eat. And those carnovires who do violate the taboo are considered the worst of sociopaths.

 

On the other hand, the world of The Kevin & Kell Roleplaying Game (based on the popular online comic by Bill Holbrook) accepts predation as a fact of life. in fact, it's big business. The heroine of the comic is an employee of herdthinners, inc., leading supplier of groceries to the civilized carnivores. herbivores have come to accept that they might be eaten at any time, and it keeps them on their toes. The central theme of the comic is what happens when a wolfess and a rabbit overcome their natural tendencies, fall in love and marry. Kell, the wolf, remains a carnivore and a top-flight predator, who goes out into the wild every day to go to work (and her job comes with its own paid lunch!). But so far she has not eaten her husband (well, not in any manner he would object to:) ) and she restricts herself to prey that has chosen to live in "the Wild" and accept the risks therof. The circle of life is respected by all in that world, and it is generally accepted that the fate of the old and slow is to be, well, dinner.

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  • 3 weeks later...
Originally posted by BNakagawa

Huh. Let me know if you need illos for the anthro cop game. I can do that.

 

E-mail me. Send me a private message if you need my address. We are always looking for artists.

 

Speaking of whiuch, I am trying to see if the HERO System is available for license for this particular project. It seems unlikely, but I'm sure it's worth asking.

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  • 4 weeks later...

This could get interesting. I was wondering if anyone had made templates or prefabs for:

 

Cat-people

Dog-people

Rabbits

Foxes

wolves

Bears

Weasels and Otters

Kangaroos

Koalas

 

Would The HERO System Bestairy be any help in assigning characteritics that are represnative of certain animal species for their humanoid versions?

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Originally posted by Michael Hopcroft

Would The HERO System Bestairy be any help in assigning characteritics that are represnative of certain animal species for their humanoid versions?

 

In some ways yes. The books does have character sheets for "Cat-people," "Gorrila-people" and the like.

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Originally posted by Michael Hopcroft

This could get interesting. I was wondering if anyone had made templates or prefabs for:

 

Cat-people

Dog-people

Rabbits

Foxes

wolves

Bears

Weasels and Otters

Kangaroos

Koalas

 

Check out Keith Curtis's site Savage Earth (it's in his .sig). And look under beasts. He's got a number of anthropomorphics there. Granted, they are somewhat Americas-centric, but it should give you an idea for the ones he hasn't done.

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Dang - its name and author are escaping my overworked brain at the moment, but there was an interesting sci-fi novel that dealt with this predator/prey thing.

 

The predators formed an overclass: their somewhat violent and highly ritualised society kept their own population in check and also stopped them from just wandering off and eating the "prey-person" who had come to deliver their new suit. The prey-people (ie: herbivores) were much more numerous, and they lived in villages, grew their own food and (eventually) ended up in the pot.

 

If you wanted to do the whole furry route, you could adapt this idea to different races: Lion men are noble caste, since traditionally, they can beat up pretty much anything, while dog people are more "middle class". Cows are definately peons in terms of rights, but respected socially because they are the base of the social structure. (I can imagine a dilettante leopard writing a piece entitled "The noble sacrifice of the cow". Omnivores might be more middle class - they eat meat after all - but are probably despised by true carnivores for their disgusting eating habits and resented by herbivores for the same reason. You might buy your carpets from a Rat, but you wouldn't want to invite one to dinner...

 

Of course throw weapons and armour - or firearms - into the mix and you have revolution brewing....

 

It's an interesting idea.

 

cheers, Mark

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Originally posted by Southern Cross

Check out Mark Stanley's Freefall.It features Florence Ambrose,one of the fourteen genetically engineered Bowman's Wolves in that universe.

 

Yeah, Flo is pretty cool (especially when they show her doing something 'canine' and getting mortally embarrassed over it). But I never knew there were only fourteen Bowman's Wolves.

 

Say, SC, you a furfan by any chance? I'm just wondering if you ever saw any of the crossovers with Flo/Freefall and McMoo's Zonie (the comic about the coyote).

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  • 4 weeks later...

Hi Michael,

 

Try and get a hold of the RPG "Albedo." It was a very serious, hard sci-fi RPG. It had some well quantified character templates for different animal species.

 

Barring that, the "Albedo" comic book was very good too. Just for the story if anything, it wasn't your typical furries comic.

 

K.

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Re: Anthropomorphic races

 

Greetings HERO citizens , some great resources for RPGs are Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles by Palladium , Usagi Yojimbo by Gold Rush Games , and GURPS Bestiary by SJGames .

 

You could also get some great ideas from various Fantasy/SciFi novels . Bryan Jacques - Martin the Warrior , Salamanstrom , Red Wall , etc...

Stan Sakai - Usagi Yojimbo . A fantastic black and white comic both simple and elagent .

More later ...

 

P.S.: are you aiming at a particular GENRE . Pulp/Noir , CyberPuck/Anime , ???

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  • 1 year later...

Re: Anthropomorphic races

 

Just my two cents; If you're not going for very "deep" detail on the various animals, pick one stereotypical thing about the races (reflexes for cats, size for elephants, sneakiness for weasels or rats, etc) and build a Fantasy-style racial package around that.

For more detailed "races", I'd reccommend either the After the Bomb rpg or Ironclaw, as they may be easier to get ahold of than most others. Another easy-to-purchase suplement might be Big Ears, Small Mouse for BESM.

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Re: Anthropomorphic races

 

 

They get around the carnivourous animals by replacing typical animals with lizard equivilants. Ie, there is a small flightless lizard which tastes just like chicken, and large lizard which is used for hauling goods or people.

 

And fish..don't forget fish.

 

of course the hebivores also have elephants, hippos, rhinos, and gorillas on their side...

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  • 4 weeks later...

Re: Anthropomorphic races

 

The comic Kevin & Kell posits a world where all animals' date=' including insects, are sentient and predation is big buisness.[/quote']If all animals were sentient, the most likely result of this one would be 'Kill Bunnies'.

 

The bunnies, mice, deer, and 'assorted cute fuzzies' would by definition vastly outnumber the predator races.

 

They would arm themselves and take a page from history's 'G' section - genocide. Armed rabbits would wipe out the foxes, cats, wolves, and even polar bears. Even if you armed the predators. At that point it becomes a numbers game.

 

Consider China's advance into Korea during the Korea war, when one out of five Chinese solders had a rifle capable of only a few shots at most before needing to reload and vastly out of date even in that era. The rest of them had old grenades that looked something like those flasher things guys on airport runways use to direct traffic - big and bulky. They just got maybe four or five of those to tie onto their uniforms.

 

A lot of them got nothing.

 

But they still swept back the most advanced military in the world of that day - because they outnumbered us on the order of millions.

 

 

Consider a herd of buffalo with guns going after the wolves on their heels, even if those wolves had tanks - the book on that one doesn't have many pages and it doesn't end well for the wolves...

 

 

The premise works in comedy, but if you apply it to any world where the actors have free will, it will be over for the predators very fast. Gm's already have to tie down most gamers to keep them from having their PCs look like Rambo-Bunnies... In this setting, you'd have to tell them ahead of time to ignore the logical consequences as a part of the genre.

 

 

 

All that out of the way....

 

 

I've got predator anthropomorphs in my (of all things) hard science post cyberpunk setting. They're not common in the location of the setting by any means, but they are out there in UN controlled space. Earth governments engineered them as soldiers they could use in the most 'ethically challenging' missions - no matter how advanced tech gets, at the end of the day it always takes infantry to finish the fight. Infantry with built in infravision, sonar, claws, scent tracking, superior hearing, and conviently short lifespans is ideal - especially if you don't mind them eating the POWs.

 

Plus, not being human, you can do agent orange, mustard gas, anthrax, and ebola drops on territory you need final solutions for without worrying about clearing them out first.

 

 

I've also got the 'cute fuzzy animal' anthropomorphs - this time flipped as humans with added 'cute animal' DNA to produce an ideal labor supply for human trafficking - one built to be submissive, attractive, and lacking in the complications of civil rights. The original model for them - anime catgirls. In the settng they were designed by a Japanese firm by the name of 'Genki Neko' and then 'ripped' by the Chinese government. A WTO patent suit later declares all the Chinese 'copies' illegal and the UN goes to the task of 'euthenizing' roughly 1 billion of them scattered throughout the solar system before the far-colonies revolt (out of a sense of profit/property loss rather than social equity) and arm theirs.

 

But I don't have Hero system stats for any of this.

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Re: Anthropomorphic races

 

Dang - its name and author are escaping my overworked brain at the moment, but there was an interesting sci-fi novel that dealt with this predator/prey thing.

 

The predators formed an overclass: their somewhat violent and highly ritualised society kept their own population in check and also stopped them from just wandering off and eating the "prey-person" who had come to deliver their new suit. The prey-people (ie: herbivores) were much more numerous, and they lived in villages, grew their own food and (eventually) ended up in the pot.

 

Mark, I am pretty sure you are thinking of The Sparrow (http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0552997773/026-9012798-3104441).

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