Constructing Cosmos: Part 13, Christalss (2/2)

Okay, final entry in the Constructing Cosmos series! This one is all about the creatures of Christalss, so I can think a little bit about how I can adapt some of these concepts into the Keys & Kingdoms multiverse in general, what can be exclusive to Christalss, what has to be changed in Christalss so it has synergy with Cosmos. Not that it needs too much synergy, I can make some changes here and there. For example, the D&D setting of Dark Sun reinterprets a lot of the D&D races; while elves, dwarves, and halflings are pretty similar from one world to another, they're rather different in Dark Sun -- only culturally, they don't use different rules or anything, but they feel different.

So, creatures. I divided the creatures of Christalss into nine categories, so a bit more simple than in D&D. The main categories were People, Animals, and Beasts, and I knew there would also be Undead and Bugs... and finally Constructs, Immortals, and Elementals... and I just now remembered there were also Plants, yikes, nearly forgot about them. So, let's talk about those categories, not in that order.

PEOPLE

People are, simply, the mortal and sapient inhabitants of Christalss. There was a time when some were classified as "people" and others as "monsters", but a recent development in the Christalss-Y time period is the understanding that there's no actual difference, they're all people. Not counting subtypes, hybrids, and unnatural variations, there are twenty-four kinds of people on Christalss... heh, I remember one story where I came up with the concept of a "one-day rush". Since there are twenty-four kinds of people, same as the number of hours in a day, a "one-day rush" is a term for when you've had sex with people from all twenty-four races (over the course of your whole life, to be clear, not in a day). Easier for the longer-lived races to accomplish, of course... hmm, I know I had a chart of the lifespan and life cycle details of all the peoples, but apparently I got rid of it at some point. Now, another thing you need to know is that I was in college studying biology when I was putting together serious details about Christalss, so I made a point of taxonomically classifying all the creatures.

Humanoids

This term was restricted to humans and creatures that can reproduce with humans, and I decided to restrict that to just four creatures: the human, elf, goblin, and hobgoblin. Humans, I assume, need no introduction. If I have to explain humans to you... please alert the scientific community of your existence. Elves, well, don't require much explanation either. They're a bit more hidden in Christalss than they are in typical high fantasy, as a lot of early Christalss was heavily influenced by Paolini's Inheritance series, itself possibly the most derivative fantasy story ever, so... yeah, "hidden elf village" was my template, rather than elves basically going around, coexisting. Goblins were basically slightly smaller, green-skinned elves, not tiny and ugly as most interpretations. Maybe some cat eyes, some pointy teeth, but ultimately very human. Hobgoblins, as in D&D, were human-sized and red-skinned; but my interpretation had a bit more of a devilish aesthetic, and possibly an origin to match.

And these four races being closely genetically related, they can interbreed, and I came up with names for every permutation of a person who is of two of these races. A human/elf is a half-elf, a fairly standard thing in fantasy, and similarly, a human/goblin is a half-goblin. A human/hobgoblin is a tyfling, derived from the D&D tiefling in appearance as well as name; I had the idea that a human/hobgoblin hybrid mysteriously has horns, a tail, possibly hooves, devilish details that neither humans nor hobgoblins have on their own. An elf/goblin is an elvog and an elf/hobgoblin is a hobia. Just, you know... words I made up that I thought evoked such things. And finally, a goblin/hobgoblin is a bloodgoblin.

Hybridization is something I want to keep out of Keys & Kingdoms; you'll notice this is the first time I've mentioned half-elves. It just gets too complicated. I didn't come up with anything for a person whose ancestry is of three or four of the humanoid types. So I'm thinking maybe we don't retain all this...

Now, here's a cool thing I came up with for Christalss: human subtypes. For all the beasts and monsters, the strangest creatures you'll come in contact with in Christalss are humans, even if they wouldn't be recognizable as humans if they turned up in our world. I cooked up four of 'em: there were the Forest Folk, who have sparkly silver skin, an affinity for the witchy magic of nature, and generally speak in a Shakespearean dialect. The Kro, who are essentially Neanderthals. The Templans, people from the jungle nation of Temple... there's some ancient spiritual stuff in the country of Temple, I imagine, and the people, hmm, they have a pidgin dialect, multicolored hair, and huge eyes whose irises change drastically in size and color depending on emotion and focus. And then the Thin Folk, basically an entire culture of Doug Joneses, very frail-looking people but possessed of great strength, I get the vibe they were desert nomads, not sure.

Giantkin

Once again, sorting together three basically-humanoid creatures who can interbreed. These were the orcs, giants, and ogres. Orcs are slightly over human-sized, and well, basically filled the societal role that half-orcs usually do in D&D, I get the vibe they were maybe the first race to be reclassified from "monster" to "person" as they managed to integrate and later proved that the entire distinction was a matter of attractiveness. Giants, I didn't develop them much... approximately 18 feet tall and had the whim that their hair comes in many colors. And then ogres were about 12 feet tall, generally thuggish and dim-witted, but... not cool to generalize like that.

For the crossbreeds, I identified an orc/giant as a half-giant, an orc/ogre as an orog, and a giant/ogre as a trog. Fascinating. Half-giant usually refers to a somewhat-oversized humanoid race, like maybe the goliaths of mainstream D&D, and there are also half-giants in Dark Sun. As for orogs, hmm... well, I think maybe in past editions an orog really is an orc/ogre hybrid? But maybe not, most of the time I see orogs as just a particularly large, strong, and intelligent variety of orc. An orc/ogre is usually called an ogrillon; in 5th Edition, a "half-ogre", in addition to the ogre half, can be half human, bugbear, hobgoblin, or orc, and the word "ogrillon" is just mentioned as another name for a half-ogre, while I'm pretty sure half-ogres and ogrillons were two different things in earlier editions. As for "trog"... well, it's a word often used for troglodytes, D&D creatures who are bad-smelling reptilian cave dwellers. Since the word "troglodyte" tends to evoke an ape-man of some sort, a lot of people find it odd that D&D applies the name to reptilian people and simply call them trogs instead. So... well, that gives me some stuff to think about. Final note being that a person of mixed orc, giant, and ogre ancestry is called a goroq, ooh, that's really cool.

Terrans

Terrans, so named because of their cultural association with earth and stone, consist of the dwarf and gnome. A person of mixed dwarf and gnome ancestry is called a brounie, spelled to better convey the pronunciation of "brownie", a vaguely dwarf- or gnome- or elf-like creature of folklore.

I was going with the D&D model here, dwarves being between four and five feet tall and extremely sturdy, gnomes being a little over three feet tall and generally goofy. I kind of replaced halflings with gnomes, finding halflings a bit too specifically Tolkien, and hey, in a world with gnomes but no halflings, gnomes have a whole lot more of a place, don't they?

As we've established, dwarves in Cosmos are a bit smaller due to being based on those from Snow White, and gnomes are much smaller, like the kind you keep in your garden. Well... maybe that doesn't have to be the case in all K&K campaign settings, maybe Christalss has more fantasy-standard dwarves and gnomes. I know Irregular Fantasy has halflings as well as bigger dwarves and I was considering making that world abide by K&K rules as well, so, yeah, this is where creatures changing from setting to setting might come in.

Fey

And we're done with those that are basically hominids, no more cross-breeding going forward. Despite the name, the creatures in this group are perfectly biological and mortal. They are the merfolk, siren, and nymph. I know that the merfolk of Christalss were a bit more scaly and finny than their Disney counterparts, and I also established that they're very short-lived, being adults at the age of 5 and not living past 20. Mm, not sure I still like that.

The sirens were made to be the evil counterparts of the merfolk; originally they were not all that visually distinguishable from merfolk, but over time I gave them wings and eventually changed their fish tails to serpent tails. Hypnotic voice? Hmm, maybe, I don't remember. And then the nymphs were more like pixies, tiny little sprites with bug wings, didn't develop them much.

Taurians

Mm, not a bad name, applied to three very differently-shaped people who have the one thing in common, that they combine attributes of humans and hooved animals, those being the satyr, minotaur, and centaur. Didn't develop any of them very much, just knew that they were around, that there are women of all three species, unlike their usual mythical counterparts, on account of here being fully natural biological creatures. Minotaurs, they vary in size across different stories, I had those of Christalss at about 10 feet.

Others

From here, all the peoples were kind of representations of various animal categories. The mammals, apart from the taurians, were represented by the canine gnoll and the feline imp. Gnolls I've already discussed, back in Part 7. As for imps, they were bipeds about the size of ordinary house cats... very humanoid, tailless and, culturally, with their fur grown in such a way as to conceal all of their facial features, so you'd never know they were feline unless you shaved one. I kind of like this creature's aesthetic and the personality it seemed to have, but it needs a new name, imps are little devils.

From here, there were two representatives of the reptile category: the kobold and the dragon. As in D&D, kobolds are long-snouted reptilian humanoids, between three and four feet tall, with a kangaroo-like body plan. I'm fond of kobolds from my D&D days; I didn't know much about their culture when I imported them into Christalss and I appreciate them more now than ever!

And then there's dragons. Classified as people because, well, they're mortal and they're sapient, even if they look like they'd belong in the "beast" category and their magic and majesty would suggest they get a category all their own. So, what was the deal with Christalss dragons? Well, I know a few things. The only town in Christalss I developed before writing it into a story was a place called Tiergrhydin Ceritazonne, generally referred to as "Dragon School" by non-dragons; I've always gotten the vibe that dragons have a liking for very complicated multisyllabic names, I get weirded out when I see a dragon with a name as simple as "Smaug", my D&D experience with dragons has me accustomed to names like Nizidramanii'yt and Icasaracht. Anyway, Dragon School is the only city in Christalss with a sizeable dragon population, they're usually more solitary and nomadic, and as the city's nickname suggests, it's home to an academy that teaches the finer points of being a dragon, something most dragons have to discover on their own.

I also had a mathematical equation in regards to Christalss's dragon characters: a dragon's age in centuries multiplied by four equals the length, in feet, of an average dragon of that age. Unwritten, I had the vibe that a dragon is about one foot long when it hatches, so by the time they're 100 years old, they've grown to four feet. And dragons reach their twilight years at about the age of 10,000, so they similarly max out at being approximately 400 feet long, easily able to decimate a football stadium. Those are some pretty absurd numbers... the years, not the feet. A dragon should not still be a child at the age of 100, I think like most reptiles they should grow to adult size very fast. And then continue to grow for the rest of their lives, all reptiles do that, and dragons in most stories are rather renowned for it. 10,000 years for a lifespan is also an absurdly long time, most fantasy worlds haven't even existed for that long. So, yeah, some adjustment to the dragon life cycle. To be determined. I figure their age categories will correspond to the size categories, so a hatchling is Tiny, still about a foot long, while if a dragon is lucky enough to reach the end of its natural lifespan, they're of Unbelievable size, because yeah, they totally still grow to be 400 feet long.

Hrmm, other notes about Christalss dragons... well, unlike in D&D, there's only one kind of dragon. They still come in every imaginable color and shape -- I was rather inspired by Gargoyles in that regard, the gargoyle race having endless variety of looks; in my folder there's a bunch of crazy designs for particular dragon characters. But the defining trait of every dragon is their color. And, powers? Well, I figured they all breathe fire, and I think maybe somewhere I once mentioned they can also all spit acid. I did want to have a little bit of D&D in there: see, red dragons have fire breath, blue have lightning, green have poison, black have acid, white have frost. The metallics have the same, except two kinds of metallic breathe fire and none breathe poison. So, hrmm, I'll swing back around to this, I want Cosmos to have D&D dragons, but my dragon designs from Christalss and their funky colors, it's worth considering keeping them preserved. Also shapeshifting, they can all do that.

Anyway, we're back to "other". The representative of the birds was the harpy, a human-sized creature resembling a terror bird, but with actual flight capabilities. Not crazy about the notion, thinking of bringing harpies in K&K a bit closer to their Greek counterpart, though I do picture them still having eagle beaks despite otherwise mostly looking human.

The amphibian representative was the troll. Yes indeed. D&D trolls do look vaguely amphibian, so I designed the trolls of Christalss with that in mind. The trolls of Christalss were massive frogs, with nasty claws on their hands, nine feet tall when standing erect (which, granted, they almost never do, their natural posture being hunched and crouched), and with the sharp-toothed, long-nosed face of a goblin shark. It was for this reason that I decided that goblin sharks, like squid, don't actually exist in Christalss, since it'd be disrespectful to name an animal after a goblin in a world where goblins really exist, and I didn't rename it because it would regardless be weird if a shark had the exact same face as a troll. Anyway... it was a really cool idea, maybe I'll stick with it for Christalss only; Cosmos trolls will be closer to the D&D model, with the filthy hair and the regeneration.

And the last of the people to go in an animal category, the sahuagin. One of D&D's handful of fish-people, I've always seen a certain refinement in the sahuagin which I'm not sure actually exists, and so I pictured them as the most civilized of the three ocean-dwelling races, quite unlike the more pastoral merfolk and barbaric sirens. So, yeah, not exactly the worshipers of demon-sharks they are in D&D, Christalss sahuagin, though those I've made into characters tend to be on the evil side, they're real sophisticated people.

And the last two types of people are non-animal in nature; the dryad is our representative for plants. Inspired by the 4th Edition dryad, which instead of looking like a beautiful woman with woody skin like the usual version, was a vaguely feminine tree creature with clawed hands and feet, and a face with no features but eyes. Struck me as hardcore. No mouth, so telepathic. Very much plant creatures in all aspects of their biology, except of course the part where they walk around and can see.

And the last of the twenty-four races, the spirit. Got the idea from Inheritance, which explains that "spirits" are not the souls of the dead, they're creatures in their own right, a race of beings of pure magical energy -- not unlike K&K's own fairies, actually. They're inscrutable in thought, "sorcerers" in the setting are people who gain magical powers by imprisoning and harnessing spirits, and they appear as little orbs of light that change in size. So, spirits in Christalss were somewhat based in that... they look more like sheets than orbs, and each has a particular elemental affinity, and it was a "conjurer" who specialized in summoning spirits to use magic. Basically only developed it because one very powerful spirit in particular was a prominent character in the first Christalss story.

Artificial Beings

In addition to the twenty-four standard peoples and their various hybrids, I also came up with a few types of beings who weren't so natural, some of whom started in stories, some made their way there later, some never did. Let's see what we've got.

First on the list was the inhuman. If I ever had a big plan for what that entails, I've forgotten it. I only know that it's something a human becomes, and I figured an inhuman looks like a photo-negative of the human they were before. What they do, I don't recall.

The cultchild was something I developed pretty thoroughly. A cult called the Harvest Moon had a lot of prominence all over Christalss, and the human women among its members had the power to extract the essence of a favorite animal and get themselves pregnant, resulting in the birth of the half-human, half-animal cultchildren, most of whom also become cult members, natch, but enough get away and integrate with society that nobody really bats an eye at them. I came up with some very specific rules about what a cultchild looks like based on what kind of animal their "father" is, and it can be any animal. Different rules for different taxonomic groups, so not every cultchild could be converted into a "native" character in Cosmos... pretty much only the mammals. I'll have to think, sometime, about what those rules might have been, if Christalss comes back, these guys will definitely have some involvement.

Then we have mutants, pretty much exactly what it sounds like. Humans (and I do mean just humans for these last three guys, humans are, eh, they're susceptible to stuff) who live in certain places, usually swamps, tainted by dark magic and alchemical acids and poisons, they have mutant children. A trio of such mutants were prominent antagonists in the first Christalss story ever, each with unique powers and deformities... pretty cool stuff, they're basically the X-Men in a fantasy world, not a bad idea.

Other things... dragonblood, basically like the half-dragons of D&D, already talked about it, as far as I can recall it was the same system. The magical beast, hmm, I don't recall what that entailed. Maybe it was an uplifted animal? And I seem to recall maybe it was also of unnatural, vibrant color? Not sure. Also, there was the spacespawn, creatures whose physiology was modified by alien technology, though few on Christalss believe in such things who haven't experienced it firsthand -- something to do with some characters who were a cat, rabbit, and little drake but are now... that, but intelligent and wisecracking and humanoid, possibly wearing space armor.

Next is deception, and I believe that's the term that replaced "bug"; see, I had "bug" as a separate category from "animal", just as D&D had "animal" and "vermin", but I decided to scrap that, invertebrates are totally animals, and I designated "bug" as the term for unnaturally large invertebrates, under the assumption that such creatures were always magical. I switched the word to "deception", guess I couldn't come up with anything better, under the assumption that any animal can be modified in such a way, not just a bug.

And finally in this category, the fleshmetal folk. Kind of a combination of the warforged from D&D and pretty much Transformers. Mostly they're a little over human-size and they change into chariots and rowboats and stuff, but they can be any vehicle, even one as big as a great sailing ship, and its humanoid robot form is of proportional size. Sounds pretty cool! I never included them in any stories. I wonder what can be done with them.

Organizations

Hmm, earlier lists of the people of Christalss also included organizations and factions that are prominent in the world, but apparently not the most recent one. Hmm... I know there was the Harvest Moon, the cult I mentioned. Also the Obelisk, an organization of wizards. Beyond that, hmm, I feel there was probably a paladin order, a druid order, and a thieves' guild, but I don't remember any details.

IMMORTALS

The native inhabitants of the underworld and the primordial world who are, indeed, immortal. I've not given these creatures very much thought, only in the most recent Christalss story ever conceived did I think of a reason for them to make much of an appearance. Here's what I've got, it's not much.

Demons

Underworld creatures, naturally... it seems I had only four types, that's not very many kinds of demons, you'd think they'd be the endless legions of hell. And for some reason, I messed with their names a lot. First was the fazuza, based on Pazuzu, a gargoyle-like demon from Mesopotamian mythology often included among pantheons of demon lords in fantasy and horror stories. Next were the glab and gonski, based on D&D's glabrezu, a popular demon type, and cornugon, a devil species that's not been seen for a few editions. They were so named because in the expansion pack of Baldur's Gate II, which saw the glabrezu and cornugon added to the game's selection of character models, imported from other games with the same engine, those files were called "glab" and "cornugonski" for some reason. Fourth was the cirnobog, based on the demon from Disney's Fantasia, identified in the film as being Satan himself but known by Disney fans as Chernabog, the name derived from a Slavic god of ill fate by the name of Chernobog. So, yeah, clearly not a section I thought about, like, at all. Don't think there's anything I can do with this information.

Other Immortals

Beyond the demons, the other immortals, I'm assuming most hailing from the primordial world. These consisted of the angel, not sure what their creature design would have been like, lots of options. Then the fairy and pixie... if I recall correctly, my first exposure to those two names applying to two different creatures comes from the game Dungeon Siege. Fairies were little winged women wreathed in gold light, and if you walked up to them, they healed you; pixies were much smaller and their light was purple, and they restored your mana. Presumably, I was shooting for something like that.

Beyond that was the djinn, throwing some genies into the story, don't know what my plans were there. Also the sphinx, sacred creature to the gods, protecting their treasure with, well, tests instead of protection. And finally the tarasque, an ox-dragon of French folklore which lends its name to the Tarrasque (capital T, two R's), a Godzilla-like D&D monster of immense power, promoted as of 5th Edition to being the most dangerous monster in the entire game. Well, I know there's a Tarrasque in Cosmos, and that it's specifically designed as a monster that kills god. Maybe, just maybe, they're in Christalss too, but way less important.

UNDEAD

Didn't give a hell of a lot of thought to the undead. A few types, a few characters, let's see what we've got.

Corpse-Class

Yes, I divided the undead into two classifications, I suppose I was still on a taxonomy kick. Corpse-class undead were those whose dead bodies are now ambulatory, walking around and... usually killing, I'd say.

You have your skeleton and zombie, your basic undead minions. The floating skull was an interesting thing, I had a certain fascination with such things in their scant few appearances... I always had the thought that floating skulls are like the gangsters of Christalss's undead world, but I was never sure what that meant. That's something to develop for all K&K settings for sure.

Then there's the ghoul, your classic ravenous flesh-eating evil thingy, and the mummy, guardians of tombs and stuff, intelligent but not interested in talking to intruders. And the vampire, you know, classic... although a lot of people I know are surprised when they find out there are vampires in D&D, isn't that interesting? I guess they come across as so much more a modern type of undead. And finally the lich, super-powerful undead spellcaster, I wonder if they should always be skeletal, or if some are skeletal but others just decayed... hmm. Thoughts to think.

Haunt-Class

Haunt-class undead are those that currently lack physical form, they're the spirits of who they used to be, not the bodies.

Starting with the poltergeist, a completely invisible undead creature that mostly just knocks objects around. Based on a story idea I once had involving them, they're completely invincible, you can't get rid of them, all you can do is hope they never get it in their heads to murder you. Not sure if that tracks... then there was the will-o'-wisp, I've already discussed those, didn't really have anything original in mind. The shadow, just... a shadow-themed undead. The ghost, whom I always saw as burdened with chains and wearing hoods. The phantom, which I guess was just some sort of even nastier ghost; the banshee, a miserable screaming ghost. And finally the wraith, the black shadow possessed with the desire to kill all living things.

So, a pretty good lineup of undead, but... there can totally be more than that.

PLANTS

As I said above, I very nearly forgot to put these on this blog post, they must have been written on the same piece of paper as some of the bugs/deceptions, and I threw those out months ago, for... reasons I'll get into when we get to animals. Once again, not a topic I thought about too hard.

Plants

So, for your basic plant creatures, I had what I still think was a pretty solid idea. Baldur's Gate II featured a handful of incredibly obscure D&D creatures, nowhere to be found in any recent editions and seldom thought of before, grouped them all together in a category called "mist creatures", and often, you'd fight groups consisting of one of each. They were the crimson death, vampiric mist, poison mist, mist horror, and wandering horror. And what I did was simply change all these mist creatures to plant creatures; the crimson death plant, vampire plant, poison plant, horror plant, and wandering plant. Not a bad idea, though I think I could have come up with a creature category with a better name than just "plant", and I basically just pictured them all as differently colored Piranha Plants from Mario. But it's something that can be developed for sure...

Trees

Well, I came up with a bit more variation this time, but... I don't remember what it was. There was a laughing tree and a devil tree... and others. I don't remember.

And, I think beyond the "plant" and "tree" categories, there was also the larch and tretch; in an unusual move, I was taking creatures directly from Dungeon Siege there. The larch is a hulking tree-like creature that infests dark forests or swamps, and the tretch is another swamp plant, a tree covered in eyeballs and mouths, which is stuck in one place but hunts by camouflaging itself as a normal tree before it strikes.

CONSTRUCTS

Figured constructs were necessary parts of fantasy, and... ooh, I do very much like the ideas I had here.

Guardians

Not sure why I decided to call them "guardians" instead of "golems", but I had pretty good ideas about diversifying such things, with the notion that there are some very affordable, and thus rather weak, guardians and then, well, there are some that are truly amazing. My image of guardians is that each is sculpted out of a certain material into a humanoid form, and then they all kind of bear the sigil of their maker where their face should be.

So, in the first category I had the guardians that are basically human-sized, starting with the wood guardian, kinda worked that notion into the wood sentinels of Cosmos. Other pitiful versions include the dust guardian, mud guardian, and feather guardian, of all things... and then more impressive ones like the shell guardian, slime guardian, and blood guardian. Finally, a longtime favorite of mine, the invisible guardian, distinguished by the very much not invisible helmet, sword, and shield it bears.

Larger guardians are made of some tougher materials; you have the stone guardian, ceramic guardian, sand guardian... and more supernatural-seeming versions like the bone guardian, earth guardian, and ice guardian, all the way to the downright immaterial: the fire guardian and magic guardian.

Then a trio of huge guardians: the iron guardian, marble guardian, and stardust guardian, ooh, gosh, what do you suppose stardust might be? Something from the primordial world, I guess. And finally the mountain stone guardian, not so named because it's literally made of stone specifically from mountains, but because it's a freaking gigantic colossus. Indeed, almost directly based on the colossi from Shadow of the Colossus, at least the humanoid ones, seemingly made of black stone as they all are.

Gargoyles

Hrmm, it appears the gargoyles are based on the first-generation gods, as the big ones are the primordial gargoyle and underworld gargoyle -- and there are five small ones, titled jade, topaz, emerald, sapphire, and ruby, which represent the five siblings. So presumably they'd have powers of a similar theme. As I may have mentioned: gargoyles in Cosmos are living creatures, but I assume there are your more traditional animated-stone gargoyles out there as well... they just need to be called something else besides gargoyles.

Basket Monster

The basket monster, like the tarasque and a handful of Christalss creatures you'll see later, was something I uncovered when skimming The Element Encyclopedia of Magical Creatures. I gave that book a more thorough re-read recently, wrote myself a tiny summary of each of the 1,600-ish creatures in the book, I'll be looking it over at some future point to consolidate it into what kind of critters I want to see in Cosmos and elsewhere.

Anyway, the basket monster. Very amusing name, certainly memorable. It's a basket, and then it sprouts legs and steals babies, never to be seen again. I actually developed this creature pretty thoroughly! I gave it a pair of big yellow eyeballs, equal parts funny and scary, and came up with a backstory: some ancient magic-user created a bunch of basket monsters, but died before he could give them a specific directive, so they just wander the world stealing random objects. They're so speedy as to be completely uncatchable, so no one's ever found their lair where they take all these things.

ELEMENTALS

A relatively last-minute addition to the Christalss mythos. Not sure why I even did it. I guess because I needed a place to stick engulfers?

Engulfers

Another thing plucked out of the Element Encyclopedia. Basically, it's a creature made of water, and it jumps partway out of the river and, y'know, engulfs you. So I thought that not only can there be a river engulfer, but also volcanic, tornado, rock, acid, and thunder varieties. Worth thinking about. Look at all those arbitrary elements I chose from. Kinda cool.

Archons

Basically regular elementals... not sure why I called them archons instead, I guess because I didn't want elemental to be a creature type and a category? Anyway, I started with the four classical elements: air archon, earth archon, fire archon, and water archon.

Then I think what I did after that was create every possible combination of the elements. I think. Let's take a look. The next cluster of six consisted of the dust archon, smoke archon, ice archon, magma archon, rock archon, and steam archon. Well, five of the six are the same as the mephits from 5th Edition, each consisting of two elements. Dust is air/earth, smoke is air/fire, magma is earth/fire, and steam is fire/water. Here's where it gets interesting... air/water in D&D makes ice, but I didn't know that at the time, this was well before I started looking into 5th Edition... but the placement would seem like that's what I was going for, how about that. Earth/water, of course, makes mud, but apparently I went for rock instead. Mud isn't very intimidating, I guess, and I'd already used it earlier as a type of guardian, so... I imagine my rationale was something like that.

Then there was the volcano archon, storm archon, lightning archon, and blizzard archon. I... guess these are meant to represent the four combinations of three elements? So maybe volcano is air/earth/fire, storm is air/earth/water, lightning is air/fire/water... but that leaves blizzard as earth/fire/water, that doesn't make sense. Maybe I decided not to actually bother with sticking to the combination theme, since the results weren't always impressive, and just went with evocative and impressive things. The final archon was the energy archon, where they all come together. Kinda cool, I guess? Interesting examination of how elements interact.

BEASTS

Okay, getting to the part I'm pretty excited about (not to be confused with the part I'm really excited about, which will come at the end). As I've mentioned in the past, in current D&D, the "beast" category is reserved for animals from the real world, but in earlier editions, such things got the "animal" category instead, and a "beast" was any creature that's basically an animal -- acts like one, has only animal intelligence, doesn't have any magical power -- but doesn't exist in real life.

And so it is here, and most of the beasts were more-or-less of my own invention. Deciding that existing in real life or not was a poor classification of whether something was an animal or a beast, I decided to give every beast something magical in its nature. If I came up with such things for all the beasts, I don't remember them.

Hmm... you know, this has kind of come up earlier, but it really shines here in the beast category: a lot of the species of beasts are, appearance-wise, just the type species but a different size and color. I guess I was still in something of a video game mindset. In a video game, you can only spare the time and money to create so many character models, so often you're left with several creatures that look the same, just with different stats. Maybe different sizes and colors. In a tabletop game, it's quite the opposite, it's the stats that are a limited resource because your DM has to keep track of every creature's stats, while the creatures can have as much variation in appearance as you want because you're using your imagination. So in a tabletop game, you're more likely to run into a bunch of very different-looking creatures that all have the same stats. So... just something to think about in the future when I come up with different species of things, to mix it up more, and maybe sometimes to not do that in case there's ever a K&K video game...

Yetis

This is an idea I've had for ages: that there are three species of yeti. The tundra yeti, which is the regular kind; the much larger and deadlier mountain yeti, and the smaller and less dangerous woodland sasquatch. Still taxonomically classifying everything, yetis are, naturally, apes.

Fey

As with people, this was a category, not necessarily for fey creatures, but for creatures that are basically mammalian but have some thoroughly non-mammalian traits, like the scaly tail of the merfolk or the insect wings of the nymph. Two of my "beasts" had to go into this category as well.

First was the mothman, based on the cryptid of the same name. Despite the "man" in the name it's essentially an animal, I guess an ape with some aspects of a moth? I had a pretty vivid idea of what it looked like, not sure how to explain it. And then there was the gryphon... apart from the fact that I much prefer to spell it "griffon" these days, I was torn on whether a griffon was a mammal or a bird... the mythical counterpart is obviously both, but in the biology-studyin' mood I was in, I had to pick one. I decided to go with mammal. So, the eagle head, the eagle wings? Covered in fur instead of feathers. Kind of interesting, I'd like to maybe see it in action someday... sure, maybe that's what Christalss griffons are like.

Horses

So, there was the unicorn and pegasus, not much to say there, except I imagined both of them coming in all sorts of different color variations, MLP style. And then the nightmare. Naturally, we've established that in K&K, unicorns and pegasi are celestials, and nightmares are fiends, way more cosmically important than just being beasts. Although, hmm, I do believe one Christalss hero rode a nightmare, I might as well think about how to re-contextualize that and make it possible when a nightmare is indeed a fiend.

Canines

Had three categories of canine beasts: the hellhound, chupacabra, and skriker.

The hellhound is basically just a big red wolf-dog-thingy that breathes fire. Also has the variants of the radiant hellhound and dark hellhound, associated with light and darkness and the forces thereof. Hm, might stick with that. My hellhounds maybe don't have to be literally from hell.

The chupacabra is another one based on a modern-day cryptid seldom seen in fantasy gaming! While the original chupacabra sightings reported a scaly alien, most subsequent sightings resemble a mangy coyote, probably because they're exactly that, and I'm going with the latter interpretation, just very slender and sinister hairless canines that suck blood. The default one is called the island chupacabra, and I also had the forest chupacabra and the red chupacabra, and I don't think there was anything special about any of them, just cheap recolors for a video game, I guess.

Finally, there was the skriker. I've spoken before about those black fey dogs with glowing eyes seen all over the place, I found the British "skriker" to be an exceptionally cool name for one of those. Definitely going to study the Element Encyclopedia again for more lore about that very common critter and a final word on what to call it. Of course, lots of creatures in both fantasy and reality have multiple names.

Jackalopes

Your classic big-ish rabbits with deer antlers. The main was the wood jackalope, and two others were the dusk jackalope and calico jackalope. Er, I'm sure they had powers to make them more impressive than just being big bunnies, but none of them come to mind, guess we'll find out later.

Drakes

And we're moving on to reptiles! Drakes are dragon-like critters, most of them fairly small. They were one of the first Christalss ideas I had, so each one does in fact have a unique design, I got some inspiration from How To Train Your Dragon, a very new film at the time.

So, approximately weakest to strongest, always my favorite way to arrange a list of creatures, we start with the fairy drake, basically a little blue lizard with butterfly wings, loosely inspired by D&D's faerie dragon. Then the tree drake, very similar but instead of wings, membranes stretching between its arms and legs like a flying squirrel, only it can actually fly by undulating through the air.

Those were the tiny ones. For the more medium-sized drakes, there's the river drake, very serpentine with no hind legs. The red drake, with frills resembling floppy ears and a beard as a little shout-out to the Great Red Dragon from Bone. The rock drake, rather like the gronckles from How To Train Your Dragon with some elements of an anglerfish as well. The dream drake, very noble-looking with a heroic chin, I imagine it has certain illusion powers. And the needle drake, very pointy and spiky.

And the most powerful of them include the martial drake, which has some looks of a Chinese dragon, and the queen drake, the largest and most elegant species, though fairly nondescript. So... drakes in Keys & Kingdoms, or at least just Christalss? I dunno. Gotta think about it.

Wyverns

As discussed, these dragon-like guys with talons and stinger tails can be trained with some difficulty. I had one character in a story who was a talking wyvern, the result of a genetic anomaly combined with that anomaly being recognized when the wyvern was a hatchling so it could be raised as a person; these freakishly intelligent wyverns in the wild generally just become pack alphas. Certainly an idea, certainly gonna hang onto it if I ever write that story again.

I called the default wyvern species a kingdom wyvern, and I put a bit of thought into their other species. The pygmy wyvern is a smaller, cuter one, dwells in jungles. The phantom wyvern is most similar to the kingdom wyvern except it's jet-black. And the giant white wyvern is, well, big and white. Lives in mountains or other snowy places.

Sea Monsters

Sea monsters are patterned after plesiosaurs, or rather outdated artistic depictions of plesiosaurs, with the flexible necks. Since dragons and most drakes have arms, legs, and wings, and a lot of depictions of basilisks have six legs or more, I thought having six limbs would be a recurring thing for monstrous reptiles, so sea monsters have six flippers. The basic one was the pelagic sea monster, with one lesser species, the tiny blue sea monster, and one greater, the emperor sea monster. "Sea monster" is too generic now in more vast fantasy worlds with all kinds of sea monsters, and... Cosmos, at least, is going to have actual plesiosaurs anyway, so not sure about retaining these guys.

Basilisks

In classical mythology, a basilisk is a fairly small lizard whose eyes turn you to stone. Modern depictions are usually quite a bit deadlier, and often six-legged as well. I had three species written down: the lily basilisk, scarlet basilisk, and emerald basilisk... means nothing to me. I figured they're actually rather beautiful and majestic, and share a certain ability with the real-world South American lizards that now bear the basilisk name: the ability to run across the surface of water.

Had a lot of thoughts about basilisks recently! Specifically, I'm thinking there can be a ton of varieties, based on those I've seen around D&D and other fiction. Maybe only some petrify with their gaze, while others poison, others kill. Maybe some are just tiny little geckos like the original mythical version, while others are giant destructive monstrosities as seen in Harry Potter or God of War (even if the former was a snake instead of a lizard, not gonna do that, we're just talking size and color and presentation), and a little bit of everything in-between.

Hook Horrors

D&D originals, I believe. Maybe best not to use them elsewhere. In D&D, hook horrors are cave dwellers with vulture-like heads, beetle-like bodies, and powerful legs and arms, with big heavy hooks for hands. Whether they're beasts or something a bit more intelligent and civilized varies by edition.

The Christalss version, I defined as being reptiles. Called the main one a cave hook horror, and the variants were the black hook horror, dry hook horror, and scaly hook horror. Hm, I figure the dry hook horror had a skeletal appearance and lives in deserts, like the Dry Bones from Mario, while the scaly hook horror has unsightly sticky-outy scales all over its body, I saw a fish like that once, it was unsettling. Probably not gonna go with this, I kind of have a plan for combining all the vulture-like creatures of D&D into a single, rather Skeksis-like, new thing.

Serpents

Not merely snakes, but big-ass snakes. It seems I actually had some real variation here! Never thought about them very hard, but I definitely had some cool designs. The rainbow serpent, hmm, those are another fairly common thing in mythology, not sure what my plan was. The water serpent, I know it's big and yellow and lives in the sea. The horned serpent, hmm... I'm thinking fairly similar to the water serpent, but freshwater and, you know, with horns.

Ooh, here's a couple of cool ones. The galactic serpent has a night-sky-like pattern on its scales, hence the name, and it hangs upside-down from cave ceilings and finds its prey with echolocation. The twisted serpent, I don't recall its particular looks or powers, just its quirk that, when it's in its striking stance, it holds its head upside-down. The shadow serpent and fire serpent are self-explanatory, and finally the parasite serpent; if I recall correctly, that one has a pointy sucky thing instead of a mouth.

Jabberwocky

The jabberwocky derives from a creature I'd made early on which I called simply a "terrible creature", with the explanation that it's so deadly that no in-universe person has ever survived to document its existence. I decided that didn't make much sense and eventually wrote a terrible creature into an early Christalss book, where a character explained that they still call it that because the first scholar to observe it wryly named it such under the assumption that no one could possibly ever get up close to it to study it properly.

Not sure what led me specifically to rename it to the jabberwocky instead, but it works; perhaps that first scholar to glimpse it gave it a nonsense name instead of a menacing one, but for the same reason. But yeah, I'll give it the draconic appearance of a lot of later interpretations of Lewis Carroll's jabberwock... and you know what? I'm gonna call it a jabberwock, because Jabberwocky is the name of the poem, the creature is called the jabberwock, I'm not going to cater to lowest common denominator by calling Frankenstein's creature "Frankenstein", you follow me? The jabberwock species in Christalss should have some of the notable abilities of the original terrible creature, such as acid spit, sufficient size and power that it often chews down entire trees, and... hmm... I feel like there was a third thing, but I can't recall.

Well, Alice in Wonderland (2010) is on my list, I suppose when I get there I'll think more about what a jabberwock might be like, and maybe throw in its fellow terrible creatures from the poem, the jubjub bird and bandersnatch. I don't see why not.

Great Birds

A very powerful trinity of great birds! How "great" we talking? Er, maybe not quite big enough to fly away with an elephant, but big enough that killing an elephant is no big deal. Somewhere in there. These three great birds represent fire, ice, and lightning, and I just realized that's the plot of the second Pokemon movie, that wasn't my intention, I just picked three "great birds" from various myths and they just happen to represent that trinity of elemental energies. Anyway, the majesty of the great birds is a big part of Christalss culture.

The three great birds are the roc, the phoenix, and the thunderbird. My first exposure to the word "roc" was the DreamWorks movie Sinbad (or, specifically, the Burger King placemat promoting the film after I saw it, as the creature is never called a roc in dialogue), and that roc was white-feathered, plumed like a harpy eagle, and had ice-breathing powers, so that's always been the first thing to come to mind when I hear "roc". If I were to be more authentic to mythology, a roc would merely be an impossibly gigantic eagle, no elemental powers to speak of, so I'm wondering if maybe I should have a purely-organic great bird in addition to the three elemental ones, or just stick with this trinity? Not sure. Anyway, a phoenix, you know one when you see one, a big red bird with fire powers, it isn't always as big as a roc, but it is here. And the thunderbird, most obscure of the three, but I've had a fascination since I was young. I always pictured it as a jet-black, crow-like bird with a curved beak, living in a jungle; that'll still work, but I suppose if it's going to stick with the theme it should be electricity-colored, yellow or maybe vibrant blue...

Moonbird

Hmm, I don't recall where I got this idea... ooh, yes I do, it was Inkheart. But they were reading from another book at the time, a book I assume actually exists... anyway, a moonbird, in my head, is a silver bird about the size and shape of a swan, glows like moonlight, er, presumably there's something else special about it! I'll look into it, I'm pretty sure the moonbird was mentioned in the Element Encyclopedia.

Cockatrices

Birds again. Snake-tailed chickens. Very closely related to the basilisk, mythologically, having similar origins and powers, the only core difference being that a cockatrice looks like a chicken, and a basilisk like a lizard. In modern D&D, a cockatrice is also much smaller than a basilisk, and turns you to stone with its bite, not its eyes.

So, I think I was leaning on the chicken thing, because the main cockatrice was called a white cockatrice, and I imagine it was just a big white chicken that's rather tough, and then the hellfire cockatrice, a slightly smaller red-feathered version that fights with fire; I think I was shouting-out the secret "chicken level" from the post-game of Dungeon Siege there. I also had a martyr cockatrice, I seem to vaguely recall maybe they spray blood from their eyes like a horny toad, that's their defense mechanism and that's why they're called that. And finally the stone-eye cockatrice, so I guess turning people to stone isn't a power of all cockatrices, just one species.

Leviathans

Hmm, this is a pretty clever idea, actually; I depicted leviathans as amphibians -- gigantic newts that live in the oceans. I don't know if amphibians can survive in saltwater, I don't know of any that do, I might want to look into that, but yeah... I do like my leviathan idea. The three species were the speckled leviathan, ashy leviathan, and flame fan leviathan, which sound to me just like cool color schemes, not anything special about the species.

Salamanders

In D&D, salamanders are snakelike humanoids composed of fire. Not a fan, really; I was already planning on using the Christalss version of salamanders in Cosmos as well. And the Christalss version of salamanders are, well, basically just salamanders from real life, but with the fiery power they have in legend. The type species is the fire salamander, and there's also the frost salamander, and then there's the larger king salamander, which has both fire and ice powers and whose diet consists primarily of the other two salamander species. As for the fact that salamanders share their name with a real-world animal, well, I'll just call real salamanders "newts" instead, easy-peasy.

Firefrog

Fascinating; the firefrog marks a rare instance of lifting straight from The Secrets of Droon. Firefrogs in Droon are, well, very large frogs who are wreathed in flame. I think they're green and their eyes and flames are purple, but I could be wrong, they never appear in color illustrations and sometimes I forget the description. So... maybe I keep firefrogs in core K&K as a shout-out? Or maybe I hang onto them until such a time comes that I adapt Droon and then develop the Droon tabletop RPG using K&K rules, hehe... that's the dream.

Devil Fish

And we move on from amphibians to fishes. And... I went with a devil fish, of all things. In real life, the term "devil fish" has been applied to a few things, such as a certain species of eagle ray, and certain types of whales back in the days of whaling, called "devil fish" because they would violently defend themselves, how dare they. The devil fish of Christalss was based on the titular monster of Devil Fish, an Italian Jaws ripoff that was featured on Mystery Science Theater 3000. The devil fish in the film was allegedly a genetically-engineered shark, but ultimately looks like a dunkleosteus with octopus tentacles, and that's the appearance I was going with for the Christalss devil fish.

Kelpies

The kelpies of Christalss were kind of like hippocampi, though each species was based on an actual species of seahorse. Were they just really big seahorses that you can ride around on, or did they have the actual horse-like traits of a hippocampus? I don't recall. D&D has giant seahorses... I wonder if a setting can have giant seahorses and hippocampi? Not sure.

Anyway, there was the reef kelpie, based on the common seahorse, the miniature kelpie, based on the pygmy seahorse, the noble kelpie, based on the weedy seadragon, and the royal kelpie, based on the leafy seadragon. Kinda neat, eh?

Krakens

As I mentioned earlier, I made the decision that if krakens exist, squid don't. Just a bit redundant and weird. I'm now working on the assumption that krakens don't resemble squid so we can have squid again, but the Christalss krakens were very much squid. The common kraken was just a big-ass brown squid. Then there was the berry kraken and luminous kraken, I think based on certain real-life squid species but way bigger... the oil kraken and sewer kraken, those sound nasty, I don't recall the details, and finally the sungold kraken, I think like a lot of aquatic creatures, I took some inspiration from Endless Ocean, that game has a lot of legendary gold-colored creatures.

Slimes

Finally, slimes. I was thinking basically they were big giant amoebas, and the three species were the green slime, mold slime, and jelly slime. Eh, I figure I'm going back to the D&D incarnation, which now calls the category "oozes" instead of "slimes", though Japanese media tends to still go with "slimes".

So, uh... yeah, I dunno. That was the beasts of Christalss, and those that continue to exist, well, they'll be going in several different categories when Christalss comes back under Keys & Kingdoms rules.

ANIMALS

And finally, we come to the aforementioned part I'm really excited about. I do so love animals! Or rather, "beasts", as they'll be called under K&K rules. I had a list of all the animals I was going to include in Christalss, but I don't have it anymore, I got rid of it after using it to create a new K&K thing called the "beast collection".

The beast collection started with a list of all the beasts found in 5th Edition D&D, taking note of their size and challenge rating and all their powers, and how I might modify some of those powers to be more to my liking. Then I went through every animal I had wanted to include in Christalss and thought about, at least, what their size and challenge rating and powers would be, based on animals already in D&D that would be very similar to them, and I came up with a pretty good set. I also looked into Pathfinder's animals for some extra inspiration, as the creators of Pathfinder seem to have just as much of an obsession with sticking exotic animals into their fantasy world as I do.

Now, 5th Edition acknowledges that its own beast index isn't a comprehensive list of every animal you could ever want for your game, but noted that you could just rename a stat block to create a new animal, directly suggesting using the "hawk" stats for a falcon, the "panther" stats for a jaguar, and, to be a bit more unorthodox, the "giant goat" stats for a buffalo. So I kept that in mind and lumped as many species as I could into a single stat block or at least with some minor variations. As I discuss the beast collection below, I'll try my best to recall what came before, the wide variety of creatures I had on the original list.

And, hmm, okay, decision, I do want to make note of the challenge rating of each animal. Every animal I took straight from the game, I used the challenge rating it had, and I used those numbers to assign CRs to closely-related animals, as general comparisons. I'm going to make note of that, even though by breaking away from 5E rules, K&K will presumably have a new challenge rating system, but these'll be some nice guidelines to start us off. So, to explain 5E's system. If a creature has a challenge rating of 2, that means one creature of that type is a fair challenge for an entire group of 2nd-level adventurers. The highest character level is 20, so creatures with a challenge rating higher than 20 represent epic challenges. For creatures that a 1st-level party can reasonably expect to fight in groups, there are challenge ratings of 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, and 0. Some creatures with challenge rating 0 are so completely harmless that they also grant 0 experience points when you defeat them, and I refer to those creatures as having a challenge rating of 00. The most powerful animal in the 5E metagame, as far as I'm aware, is the tyrannosaurus, which has a challenge rating of 8.

With that out of the way, let's begin.

Dinosaurs

In most editions of the D&D Monster Manual, animals go in an index in the back of the book instead of in the manual proper. Makes sense; when you're thumbing through a book looking for monsters, you don't want to have to flip past the pages on dogs and cats. The exception? Dinosaurs. Dinosaurs are right there in the alphabetical monster listings, somewhere after demons but before dragons. So, uh... I'll just keep up that tradition and talk about dinosaurs first... though, as an animal guy, I'm restricting this category to actual dinosaurs, unlike in D&D where pterosaurs and plesiosaurs and stuff go in there too.

So, as far as real dinosaurs, the Open Game License includes the stats for the triceratops (5) and tyrannosaurus (8). The tyrannosaurus has a challenge rating of 8, the most powerful animal in the game. Also in the core rules there's the ankylosaurus (3) and allosaurus (2); the latter is a good first example for a stat block that can be made flexible -- your allosaurus stat block can be any similar mid-size carnosaur like a carnotaurus or ceratosaurus.

The monster-related expansion pack Volo's Guide to Monsters threw in a few other animals, including plenty of dinosaurs. Those dinosaurs included the deinonychus (1) and velociraptor (1/4); I figure the latter could also stand in for similarly small-ish carnivores like the coelophysis, caudipteryx, or troodon -- remember, the velociraptors of Jurassic Park are actually deinonychus, based on a very short-lived hypothesis that deinonychus is actually a species in the velociraptor genus. Real velociraptors are only about the size of turkeys... and, lest we forget, all dinosaurs are feathery, at least a little.

Also in Volo's Guide is the stegosaurus (4), weird that such an iconic dinosaur didn't make the core rules. There's also a hadrosaurus, which I decided to rename to the more specific and iconic parasaurolophus (1/4), though the stats can stand in for any large hadrosaur, or even similarly-sized herbivores like the camptosaurus or plateosaurus. And finally the brontosaurus, don't like that name, not accurate, I've always preferred the brachiosaurus (5), though on second thought, even though I'm more personally fond of the "tall" kind of sauropod, I really shouldn't neglect the "long" kind like apatosaurus, maybe those would have two different stat blocks?

And now we come to the dinosaur stat blocks of my own "invention"; didn't detail the stat blocks or nothin', just decided on a size and challenge rating and a vague idea of what its abilities might be. As far as dinosaurs I'd already had lined up for Christalss, we have the microraptor (0)... or perhaps archaeopteryx, but I just prefer microraptor, they're real cool. Also the ornithomimus (1), I figure that can be a common riding mount, and spinosaurus (7), bigger and scarier than a tyrannosaurus but not actually more dangerous.

And then I decided to throw in four more that I think are worth representing: the tiny swarming compsognathus (1/8), spike-thumbed iguanodon (1/2), hard-headed pachycephalosaurus (1), and a dinosaur I only just learned existed, the scythe-clawed herbivore therizinosaurus (6). Now, I'm pretty sure I just covered all the really famous and cool ones, but there's a lot of dinosaurs out there, I don't imagine we're quite finished with the category yet.

Primates

So, with dinosaurs out of the way, let's go through the beast collection, in a rough sequence from the most to the least human-like. Naturally, that sequence starts with primates.

D&D's own miscellaneous index includes three primates: the baboon (0), ape (1/2), and giant ape (7). The baboon stats could also represent not only the various kinds of baboons I had in mind, but also lesser apes such as gibbons. The ape stats, well, that could represent any of the great apes: the chimpanzee, gorilla, or orangutan. I don't think they're so different that they'd need different stats. As for the giant ape, the second-strongest beast in the metagame, I assume it's based on King Kong.

In my Christalss plans, I also included various Old World monkeys and lemurs, which I think can all be lumped under a new stat block for a monkey (0), possibly with some variants like a prehensile tail to represent a New World monkey, and maybe a howling power to turn it into a howler monkey.

Let's talk dire beasts. D&D has always included "dire beasts", basically just bigger and more vicious versions of regular animals. Pathfinder did a really cool thing there by adapting each dire beast into being a prehistoric megafauna relative of the base creature; for instance, they re-flavored the dire ape (2) as being a gigantopithecus. 5th Edition D&D renamed all of the dire beasts into being "giant" beasts instead (except for the dire wolf, since that's a real thing), and I'm mostly following their lead there. Not here, of course, since "giant ape" equals King Kong... and while I'm not shy about using scientific names for some of these animals, I do think "dire ape" suits the gigantopithecus in a fantasy world better than its genus name.

Bears

D&D has their bases covered here, having three bear stats which perfectly match those I had listed in Christalss: the black bear (1/2), brown bear (1), and polar bear (2). Maybe the black bear stats can also be used for a panda, and the brown bear can represent not only a grizzly bear, but also some exotic types like the spectacled bear or sloth bear. As for the polar bear stats, D&D includes an option to give a polar bear night vision to make it a cave bear. The cave bear described is a fictional creature that lives in the underdark, but the name "cave bear" can also be applied to those that really lived in Europe during the ice age, so with that in mind, I'm thinking the cave bear should have the exact same stats as a polar bear.

Cats

There are lots of options in real D&D, starting with the regular cat (0) -- super under-powered, the D&D 5E cat can't even see in the dark or jump high, real cats are way more awesome than the 5E version. There was also the panther (1/4) -- when most people think "panther", they think a black leopard, but my preference is to apply that name to the mountain lion... or cougar, or puma, it's got a lot of names, and the one I use is "panther". The panther stat block, I imagine, can also be used for a cheetah, or maybe we can represent a cheetah by adding a sprinting ability to the panther stats.

From there, D&D has the lion (1) and tiger (1); very similar stats, but with slightly different specialties, I really like that. And the most powerful cat in the book was the saber-toothed tiger, whom I would rename to the more accurate saber-toothed cat (2).

Now, I'm adding two cats of my own: the lynx (0), for smallish felines like the bobcat or caracal, and the leopard (1/2), something between the panther and lion in power, can also represent a jaguar or a snow leopard.

Dogs

I had lots of dogs in Christalss... way more than was necessary, considering most of the popular canines in the world are pretty much all one species. D&D has the stats for a wolf (1/4), which I could easily use for all four wolves I created for Christalss: the gray wolf, white wolf, silver wolf, and red wolf. White wolves, or arctic wolves, are, like dogs, the same species as the gray wolf. The silver wolf was my representative for the Ethiopian wolf, an endangered species that inhabits the mountains of Africa; they're not actually silver, that would be some artistic license. And the red wolf was my representative of the South American maned wolf, which is actually a really big fox, not a wolf. Anyway, the one dire animal 5th Edition maintained was the dire wolf (1). Real big, for ridin'. Pretty sure that's true of the real-world dire wolf, and also those in A Song of Ice and Fire, for that matter, they're supposed to be the size of horses, that was missing from the show since, you know, they used real wolves.

Moving on, the other canines in the D&D index were the jackal and mastiff, which I'll rename simply to the dog (0) and large dog (1/8), respectively. I had, hmm, I want to say fifteen dog breeds listed for Christalss, five each of three different sizes? I gave each one a new name, since most dog breeds are named after places int he real world, but I don't remember the exact lineup. The standard "dog" stats represent your basic mid-sized dog breeds like a labrador or a golden retriever, and those stats can also represent similarly-sized canines such as the African wild dog, dingo, coyote, or, as the stat block was originally named, the jackal. The "large dog" stats, well, look no further than its original name of "mastiff". Earlier editions called mastiffs "riding dogs", as presumably they're big enough for a gnome or halfling to ride (or in the K&K world, a dwarf). So the large dog stats can represent big and powerful dogs like a mastiff, pit bull, doberman, rottweiler, or dane.

And for my own inventions, we have the small dog (0) and fox (0). Small dog stats for teeny foofy little dogs like your spaniels, yorkies, shih tzus, and so on. And foxes... it's odd, I never see foxes in RPGs despite their prominence in folklore. So, yeah, throw in some foxes, not merely the classic red ones you see in suburbs, but the big-eared fennec foxes out in the desert, and... I'm sure there's a third notable species of fox out there somewhere. Arctic! That's right, arctic foxes. Very fuzzy.

Hyenas

Well, there are only so many kinds of hyenas, they can all be encompassed by D&D's hyena (0) stats... pretty sure it's the most dangerous creature in the game that has a challenge rating of 0, kind of a "best clown in the circus" sort of honor. And there's also the giant hyena (1). Pathfinder's dire hyena is a hyaenodon, an extinct species that's not actually a hyena, just looks like one, I think K&K giant hyenas are just really big hyenas.

Mustelids

Mustelids are prominent in European folklore, so they have more presence than you'd expect in D&D, though again, why they included mustelids but not foxes, I can't imagine.

So, D&D has the weasel (0) and badger (0)... both rather underpowered, weasels are more clever and badgers more dangerous than the game gives them credit for. And there's also the giant weasel (1/8) and giant badger (1/4), both of around human size. I know kobolds ride giant weasels in some stories, I've seen that, that's pretty cool.

Weasel stats can represent a mongoose, and maybe it can have slight modifications, bit by bit: climbing to make it a ferret, swimming to make it an otter, and a spray attack to make it a skunk. Well, first things first: as the biology guy, I'd be remiss not to point out that mongooses and skunks aren't mustelids, but they're close enough. Secondly: in 5th Edition D&D, the smallest size is Tiny, every creature less than two feet long is in the Tiny category, but now that I'm bringing back Diminutive and Fine, it's time to consider the fact that otters and skunks are quite a bit bigger than weasels and ferrets, so it wouldn't work in this new system for them to have the exact same stats.

Anyway, for stats of my own, I'd throw in a raccoon (0), also not actually a mustelid, but we have to put it somewhere, and unlike a mongoose or skunk, it's enough unlike a mustelid that it should get its own stats. And, hmm, for some reason, 5th Edition is lacking in the wolverine (1/8), classic vicious little critter, and I'll also throw in the giant wolverine (1) of earlier editions, it's like a big rabid bear.

Pinnipeds

And we come to our first category with absolutely no representation in the current D&D 5E meta. Easy enough, I think three sets of stats will cover it: stats labelled seal (1/8), to represent most seal and sea lion species, giant seal (1), to represent really big and tough ones like the leopard seal and elephant seal, and walrus (1/2) for just that.

Ungulates

Lots of these to choose from. I had them in sub-categories back in the Christalss days, but trying to reconcile that with real taxonomy (it changes, you know, science changes as we learn more stuff, it's a beautiful thing) was frustrating enough that I just lumped all ungulates together. But I'll try to spread them out into narrower categories.

Let's start with horses. D&D has the draft horse (1/4), riding horse (1/4), and war horse (1/2). As with dogs, our ancestors bred horses for a number of purposes and specialties, and this trifecta covers it pretty well. Stats-wise, the draft horse has durability, the riding horse has speed, and the much more expensive war horse has both. Some encounter tables in the books indicate that wild horses use the riding horse stats. The rules also have a pony (1/8) for smaller heroes, and mule, which I renamed to being a donkey (1/8), because like I said... I find hybridization too complicated. I don't think a mule would use the same stats as a donkey, since the whole reason we use mules is that they're greater than the sum of their parts, they combine the best aspects of the horse and donkey, total Mary Sues really. Of course, mules are sterile, so I guess throwing them in would not complicate the stats of future generations at all. I figure maybe a zebra can also use donkey stats? And, let's finish this paragraph with one of those few ungulates that shares the perissodactyl category with horses, the rhinoceros (2). Pretty straightforward, I figure those stats can represent any rhinoceros, including the woolly variety.

Now let's talk bovines; those weren't in the core rules, but were introduced in Volo's Guide. Volo gave us stats for a cow, which could have some custom abilities added to make it an ox or a number of fictional cattle from the D&D world. I labelled my version of this stat block cattle (1/4), because the word "cow" sounds too exclusively female... of course, "cattle" sounds too plural. Maybe the cattle stats should be gendered; after all, a bull is much more dangerous than a cow or even a steer. Also in Volo's Guide was the aurochs (2), a bovine species which went extinct in the early 17th century and is common in fantasy stories, much more common as a beast of burden than it was in real life. Volo gave it a backstory related to the gods of the orcs, rather interestingly. In my mind, the aurochs stats can also stand in for big aggressive bovines like bison and buffalo, while things like yaks and oxen stick to the normal cattle stats.

And, I lied, there were bovines in the core rules, because goats are technically bovines, didja know? They gave us stats for a goat (0), I figure this can represent just about any goat, domestic or wild, and maybe a sheep if we lower its combat capabilities a bit. And there's also a giant goat (1/2), not much to say there. A musk ox, which despite the name is a goat, would, I think, use the cattle stats, just seems about that level.

Now let's talk deer. We have the deer (0), which can also represent a gazelle or a pronghorn antelope. The elk (1/4), I see that as an incredibly versatile stat block, it can represent not only an elk, but also closely-related deer species like a moose or caribou, or even less-related things like most types of antelope, or an okapi. Then there's the giant elk (2), which I picture as a megaloceros, but in fact, its D&D description shows us that giant elk can talk, and are so rare that sighting them is considered a powerful omen. So... magic megaloceros!

Then we have the pig category, consisting of the boar (1/4) and giant boar (2), not much to say there, boars are big in fantasy and folklore. And finally the camel (1/8), a stat block that can represent not only both of the world's camel species, but also, I think, its close relative the llama, and the macrauchenia, a vaguely camel-like beast from prehistoric South America I'm very fond of.

Now let's talk my fully custom-made ungulates! In roughly the same order by category, so starting with horses. I wanted to add in a dire horse (1), not sure why I felt the need to do that, I just figured, maybe there's some deadly horse out there in the world that, if you can tame it, is even better than a war horse, I guess Pathfinder and its large extinct horse relatives inspired that? Also a giant horse (2), I've just come to like that idea recently, of really huge horses that can be ridden by giants.

In the "other perissodactyl" category we have the tapir (1/8), I like those. And... might as well talk about hippos here, because people used to think hippos were pretty closely related to rhinos and tapirs, turns out the hippo is a very different kind of ungulate and elephants are something else entirely, "pachyderms" don't really exist. And indeed, I used to figure that to make a hippo I'd just slightly modify the rhino stats, let it swim, change its horn attack to a bite, but I decided, no, I'd just make a hippopotamus (3) from scratch. Also a pygmy hippopotamus (1/4), which... incredibly obscure, I know, but they're so adorable and so very unique, I had to do it.

And, since I lumped in the okapi with the elk, let's put its relative the giraffe (1) in there as well. There's nothing in the world quite like a giraffe, it definitely needs its own unique stat block. From there, I added a pig (0), you know, the domestic kind, not quite as tough as the wild boar; I figure a warthog, or smaller American pigs like the javelina, could also use these stats. And last of all I'd like the mention the giant camel (3), a creature that used to exist in North America and is among the biggest land mammals ever, super-cool.

Para-Ungulates

By "para-ungulates" I mean "afrotheres", but as that animal group, consisting of creatures which are like ungulates but not quite ungulates, has a name referring to the continent of Africa which does not exist in Christalss or Cosmos, I had to call them something else. I do not like the term "para-ungulates", it was the best I could come up with, we've gotta call them something else...

D&D had the elephant (4), naturally one of the biggest and toughest animals in the game, and the mammoth (6), the third-most-powerful beast in the game, right behind the giant ape and tyrannosaurus. Hard to say what the fourth most powerful is, as there are multiple beasts with a challenge rating of 5, but only one 6, 7, and 8, at least in the current D&D meta, I've added plenty of beasts of those power levels and greater, as you'll see later.

For my custom-made stats, let's start with the pygmy elephant (1/2). Thousands of years ago, there used to be teeny-tiny elephants in Italy, I bet they were cute as the dickens. And other creatures in the afrothere category include the aardvark (0) and manatee (0), creatures so harmless it'd probably be a pretty big waste of space to actually put them in an RPG monster book, but... I dunno, man, I really like all the animals.

Whales

You know they're saying whales are ungulates now? Apparently their closest relative is the hippopotamus. I don't like it. I know it's true, but I don't have to like it.

Anyway, D&D core rules had only one whale, the killer whale, which I'll be renaming to the much more proper orca (3). Only 3, eh? I question the wisdom of an orca being less dangerous than an elephant, might tweak that in our new system. Volo's Guide also had stats for a dolphin, but as those stats represent a creature only about 6 feet long with a very low challenge rating, I figured it'd be better to call it a porpoise (1/8). A real little dolphin.

From there, some custom stuff! Like my own dolphin (1/2), a bigger and tougher one, stats that represent, well, any toothy whale too big to be a porpoise and too small to be an orca, which is most of them: dolphins, river dolphins, belugas, pilot whales. I figured the narwhal (1/2), or at least the male with its tusk, has a different enough attack pattern from other toothed whales of its size that it merits a stat block of its own. And for the toothed whale even bigger than the orca, we have the cachalot whale (5)... most call it the sperm whale, but why on earth would you call an animal a "sperm whale" when you could call it anything else? Awkward as all hell. D&D 3E called it a cachalot whale, so I'm going with that.

And the cachalot's counterpart, also seen in 3E but missing from 5E, is the baleen whale (4). There are lots of kinds of baleen whales, I had a pretty good list, but I figure they can all fit in this single stat block. Except... now that I'm bringing back the Colossal size category, it might be a good idea to create some stats for a blue whale, since it's so much bigger than even any other kind of baleen whale.

Rodents

For rodents, D&D just has rats. The ordinary rat (0), the giant rat (1/8) -- still a fairly small creature, of the Small size category, but still bigger than a regular rat -- and the first swarm we'll be discussing today, the swarm of rats (1/4); there are some tiny creatures that swarm together, usually under supernatural influence, and represent a single creature all their own when they do so.

My current notes in the beast collection say that most rodents can be represented with some modification. Take the rat stats, give it better climbing and leaping stats to make it a squirrel, some digging stats to make it a groundhog, and better running and jumping stats to make it a rabbit. With the giant rat, you can give it some aquatic capabilities to make it a beaver or capybara, or some defensive quill abilities to make it a porcupine.

Now that the size categories are expanded a bit, not quite gonna work that way. For starters, a mouse is much smaller than a rat, so it gets its own stat block. A Fine-sized mouse might also be a gerbil, a hamster, or a chipmunk. The Diminutive-sized rat can still be modified into a squirrel, and also maybe a gopher, prairie dog, naked mole rat, chinchilla, or rabbit. Then at Tiny is where we find the groundhog and beaver, and also the hare, I think, I've only recently learned just how much bigger a hare is than a rabbit. And then Small is the giant rat and also the capybara. Hmm, not quite sure where a porcupine would go in that lineup, I'd have to look it up; same with a guinea pig.

And, once again for the record, I know rabbits and hares aren't actually rodents, but they're close enough. Ooh, you know what else is close enough? Hedgehogs. They should be in here somewhere too. Also moles. And shrews. Lots of things are close enough to being rodents that they can use these stats.

Volo's Guide included that rare 5th Edition beast that's a fictional creature, the cranium rat (0). Cranium rats are ordinary rats enhanced with psychic energy, giving them big pink exposed brains. A cranium rat by itself is exactly the same as an ordinary rat, buuut, when in close proximity to one another, they form hive minds. Ten cranium rats together are as intelligent as a human and, though they can't speak any languages, they can express themselves telepathically. When you whip up a swarm of cranium rats (5), well, then they can unleash powerful psychic attacks. Pretty sweet, eh? Cranium rats might be too iconically D&D for me to use them elsewhere, but my gosh, I love 'em, if there's any chance I can change the name, change a few other attributes, if there's any way I can squeeze 'em in.

Bats

D&D basically has bats covered, you've got the regular bat (0), the giant bat (1/4), large enough for a human to ride and generally associated with being the riding mounts of aerial goblin troops, and the swarm of bats (1/4). That pretty much covers it! At least it does when Tiny is the smallest size. Most bats are very tiny, Diminutive or maybe Fine, so in the Tiny size we can have some separate stats for a "giant fruit bat", representing species such as the aptly-named flying fox.

Pilosa

Here's our last batch of, you know, normal mammals, the placental ones. Pilosa is the order of mammals to which sloths and anteaters belong... in my original Christalss plans, I put armadillos in this category too, but apparently they don't actually belong there. I'm-a put 'em here anyway, simplify things. As you might expect, there are no pilosa in the D&D rules, so, I had to work from scratch.

So, I guess we'll start with the presently-existing ones, smallest to largest being the armadillo (0), sloth (0), and anteater (0). None of them are especially dangerous, but we can look back to find the glyptodon (1) and megatherium (3), a big badass armadillo and sloth from prehistory. Oh, and the armadillo stats can also represent a pangolin, an unrelated but very similar animal... everybody loves pangolins.

Marsupials

Last two mammal categories, reserved for the non-placental mammals. Creatures almost entirely exclusive to Australia, they don't get a lot of love in fantasy, and... I'm seeing why, since I had to admit that none of them have a very impressive challenge rating. We have the possum (0) and the kangaroo (0), and, I couldn't help myself, I know they're absolutely useless, but I had to throw in the koala (0) as well. And that's it, I figure wombats and bandicoots and Tasmanian devils, they can use use other creature's stats, you know, a bandicoot is basically a rat, a Tazzy devil is basically a wolverine...

But, let's not forget extinct marsupials. The prehistoric diprotodon (1/8) and far more recently extinct thylacine (1/8) are pretty cool.

Monotremes

These weird motherfuckers, the platypus (0) and echidna (0). They're not pitiful, they both have pretty interesting defenses, I guess a good thing about this expansion of sizes and hit point totals is that we can raise the tier of critters like this. Now, I've been avoiding redundancies between animals and mythical things throughout. If basilisks the mythical lizards exist, basilisks the regular lizards do not. If fire salamanders exist, salamanders as in newts, well, they're just called newts. In this case however, I'll flip it around, echidnas the monotreme exist, Echidna the wife of Typhon and mother of all monsters does not.

Crocodilians

Moving on to reptiles now! D&D has in the crocodilian category the crocodile (1/2) and giant crocodile (5). My list of Christalss crocodilians started with the deinosuchus, so I guess I'll just change its name to "giant crocodile". Deinosuchus was technically an alligator, but "crocodile" sounds more European, and, y'know, you want that in fantasy.

So, other crocodilians, well -- first of all, 1/2 is a pretty damn low CR, crocodiles are way deadlier than that. But, you know, assuming the crocodile does have a CR of 1/2, I'll add the alligator (1/4) and caiman (1/8). As for the gharial, India's resident crocodilian with a creepy long snout, mmm, they can use crocodile stats, they're about the same size.

Lizards

The lizard category encompass all sorts of critters. D&D only has two, starting with the regular ol' lizard (0). It climbs, it's got a little bite attack. I figured these stats could represent something teeny like a gecko or skink, bigger things like an iguana or chuckwalla, or even a tuatara which, once again, is close enough to being a lizard to go here. Slight modifications to the stats might include giving it a stealth bonus and some climbing and a tongue attack to make it a chameleon... hmm, that's a lot of modifications, but, no, doesn't merit a whole new set of stats. Give the lizard stats some gliding capabilities to make it a draco, or a blood spray power to make it a "devil lizard", which is what I decided to rename the horny toad. I suppose the horny toad already has the "horned lizard" name for those that want to be less informal, but, I dunno, I guess I had a thing going. Now, as you might imagine, this isn't going to work out for our new K&K system, an iguana is much larger than a gecko, gonna have to diversify the lizard stats a bit more now.

The other D&D lizard was the giant lizard (1/4), a common riding mount for cultures that live underground and/or have a reptilian motif. The giant lizard's stats came with two suggested modifications: that your giant lizard could walk on ceilings, or that it could be semi-aquatic; "both" was also valid.

And, from here I started customizing things to include all of the lizard species I had intended to include in Christalss, and I'd also noticed that Pathfinder has a lot of stats for different kinds of giant lizards -- namely, giant versions of real lizard species -- so I incorporated those as well.

I started with the whip lizard (0). I haven't been able to figure out what real species of lizard I had intended to give that name, but... I assume it has a tail attack, and is bigger than the standard "lizard", and I think it's of the appropriate size that its stats can be modified to become an "isle lizard", my fantasy-world name for the Galapagos marine iguana; might throw in a frilled lizard variant too, maybe it has an intimidation move. Then there was the beaded lizard (1/8), a small venomous lizard based on the Mexican beaded lizard and its more famous cousin the gila monster.

Then we move on to the monitor lizard (1/8), actually rather prominent in early D&D editions, I'm surprised they cut it. It can be modified to represent a giant gecko. And finally there's the dragon lizard (1), just the Komodo dragon but not called that because Komodo is a place, and the dire lizard (3), to represent the megalania, a gigantic prehistoric monitor lizard I've only recently learned of.

Now, the giant lizard stats are pure D&D, I figure the default stats just represent a generic big lizard, but I can replace the suggested modifications with specific modifications to make it a giant chameleon or a giant isle lizard. Or not? I kinda like the generic giant lizards that walk on ceilings. We'll figure it out.

Snakes

Snake names are fairly generic here in D&D, and that's okay, means you can picture just about any snake you want. For my adaptation, eenh, let's start with the flying snake (1/8), another of those very rare fictional members of the beast category, a tiny and brightly-colored feathered serpent of jungle lands. I like 'em, I'll keep 'em.

From there, D&D gave us four generic kids of snakes. The tiny-sized "poisonous snake" and medium-sized "giant poisonous snake"... first of all, snakes are venomous, not poisonous, so I changed their names to the tiny venomous snake (1/8) and venomous snake (1/4), also reducing the latter's size to Small. Then there was the large-sized constrictor snake (1/4) and huge-sized giant constrictor snake (2). Sounds fair. Oh, and then there was the swarm of venomous snakes (2), except they called them poisonous again.

Now! What I decided to do was expand these a bit: give the venomous snakes and the constrictor snakes four stat blocks apiece instead of two, to represent the various snakes I'd planned out for Christalss.

The "tiny" venomous snake can stand in for, er, I dunno, tiny vipers, I guess; while the "small" venomous snake is for adders and pit vipers and mambas and such, while then we'll bring about the medium-sized giant venomous snake (1/2), for rattlesnakes, sea snakes, other bigger ones. Maybe give it some variants, like an intimidating rattle ability for rattlesnakes, breath-holding for sea snakes -- no need to give it swimming, all the snakes in D&D are semi-aquatic, which was a nice touch. And finally the large-sized emperor venomous snake (1), representing the cobra and, eh, that's about it.

And then constrictors. I'd written down only three varieties of constrictor snake, so this was easier, I started with a medium-sized small constrictor snake (0) to represent the boa; the large-sized regular constrictor can be a python and the huge-sized giant constrictor can be an anaconda... or maybe the other way around? I can never remember which one is bigger. And then I figured I'd add the gargantuan-sized titan constrictor snake (4), representing the extinct titanoboa.

And then, a couple of little things to represent, well, snakes that are neither venomous nor constricting. The tiny snake (0) to stand in for, say, your garden-variety garter snake, and the non-venomous swarm of snakes (1/4). Neat, huh?

Turtles

No turtles in D&D, that's a crying shame, so, wrote up my own. We'll start with the turtle (0), representing any of the teeny land or freshwater varieties, followed by a larger but similarly harmless sea turtle (0), and more aggressive snapping turtle (1/8), then a tortoise (1/8), specifically the giant kind, regular-sized tortoises getting the turtle stats.

Then we can have the giant sea turtle (1/4) for basically just the leatherbacks, and the giant snapping turtle (1/2) to round it all off. Hmm... I thought about making a giant tortoise, like not just any ordinary giant tortoise but one massive enough that you can plant trees and build a house atop it, that's a fantasy staple. And sometimes they're sea turtles instead of tortoises, but that's a bit too precarious of a situation, I should think; sea turtles dive, man, not a great place to set up an island getaway. Regardless, I dunno, I think there comes a point when a giant, giant, giant tortoise is too big to still be a beast and has to be classified as something more supernatural, even if, as these creatures in stories usually do, it looks exactly like an ordinary tortoise.

Pterosaurs

The core rules of D&D have a pteranodon (1/4), in the dinosaur category of course. A pteranodon is nearly man-sized, meaning a halfling or other small character can ride it, and that and its low power level means it can be a ranger companion. So a halfling ranger can have a flying mount at a very low level and be the coolest guy in town.

Volo's Guide introduces the quetzalcoatlus, a mighty elephant-sized pterosaur. Super cool. I renamed it to the coatlus (2), since its actual genus name alludes to an Aztec god who doesn't exist in our setting, or if he does, wouldn't appreciate the comparison. And, yeah, I'm hesitant to include gigantic pterosaurs in a fantasy setting, feels like they make dragons and wyverns and griffons and other giant flying things less special. But it's an animal that exists, so I want to give it a chance.

Finally, I rounded out my own pterosaur lineup with a pterodactyl (0). Most people look at any pterosaur and call it a pterodactyl -- not so, the pterodactyl is a single species (the first pterosaur ever discovered, which probably contributes to the misconception), with no crest, and about the size of a hawk. These stats probably don't need to change much to represent other small pterosaurs like the rhamphorhynchus, dimorphodon, and tapejara. Ooh, and if we're bringing back smaller sizes, I can bring back the nemicolopterus, a very teeny species of pterosaur.

Marine Reptiles

The three creatures I placed in this category aren't especially closely-related to each other, but, meh, they had to go somewhere. The dinosaur list in core D&D includes the plesiosaur (2). Not much to say about that. And I'd also throw in the ichthyosaur (1/8) and mosasaur (6). Mosasaurs grew in popularity with Jurassic World, but I've always known they were insanely awesome.

Hmm, I just noticed my suggestion that the mosasaur have a "swallow" ability. Fascinating. In D&D, creatures only have a "swallow" ability if they're big enough to swallow humans, but in a world with diminutive adventurers, probably best to keep that ability in mind for just about every creature, wouldn't you say? Mm, this simulationist thing is a lot of hard work.

Synapsids

Eh, technically the word "synapsid" refers to mammals and creatures that are more mammalian than reptilian. Science used to call non-mammalian synapsids "mammal-like reptiles", but nowadays the term "proto-mammal" is preferred. Taxonomy is a gradient, but if I had to put proto-mammals in a box, I'd characterize them as reptiles. They're so much cooler that way.

And Volo's Guide included the best known proto-mammal, the dimetrodon (1/4). In the dinosaur category, of course, because it's a big dead reptilian thing and those always get associated with dinosaurs, but hey, the dimetrodon was doing the "big dead reptilian thing" deal way before the dinosaurs came along and made it popular.

Raptors

Moving along to birds. Birds, eh, they're not really a class anymore. As a kid, they always used to teach you that there are mammals, birds, and reptiles. Aside from the fact that this totally shafts amphibians and fishes, not to mention all invertebrates, we've figured out birds aren't actually a class. After all, we've known for some time that birds are a subset of the dinosaurs, right, and dinosaurs are a subset of reptiles, so... it took us a bit too long to realize that, by the transitive property, birds are a subset of reptiles. Taxonomy!

Anyway, raptors. D&D basically has this completely covered. They have stats for a hawk (0), owl (0), eagle (0), and vulture (0). That's pretty much it, any raptor you can imagine is pretty much one of those, an exception being the secretarybird, which I don't want to neglect, I guess to make them we just modify the eagle or vulture stats to have a better walking speed.

D&D also includes giant supernatural versions of all four raptors! There's the blood hawk (1/8), a big aggressive hawk. The giant eagle (1) is seemingly based on Tolkien, and they gave them some company in the form of the giant owl (1/4) and giant vulture (1), all three giant raptors being large enough to ride. The three giant raptors join the giant elk in being the only beasts in the game that can talk, and the three raptors alone are the only beasts to be smart enough to have alignments: giant eagles are good, giant vultures are evil, giant owls are neutral.

Small Birds

Figured there was no need to go into too much detail in small bird taxonomy, even back in the Christalss days I figured there was only need for a handful of bird species which could just be recolored, like a "finch" model you can recolor into any type of finch or sparrow or chickadee, y'know...

So, D&D only has the one: the raven (0). And the swarm of ravens (1/4). Raven stats can be used for any other sort of corvid, like a jay or magpie, or that most underrated of birds, the crow. Nobody talks about crows because "raven" sounds so much cooler, but crows are awesome.

Other stat blocks to represent all sorts of birds, I figured an additional four stat blocks would suffice. Starting with the sparrow (0), for very tiny birds like finches and wrens, maybe modify it with a little hovering ability to make it into a hummingbird. The cuckoo (0), for slightly larger birds, most of whom climb as well as fly; things like robins, woodpeckers, swallows. Can modify into a parrot by giving it a mimicry ability, or a roadrunner by giving it a faster walking speed -- roadrunners are, in fact, a type of cuckoo, I think that might be why I chose the cuckoo to be the representative of the stat block.

Then the pigeon (0) can represent, I guess, mostly pigeons, which includes doves. Finally, I figured I'd throw in the dodo (0), maybe a bit too big to be a "small bird", but it's a type of pigeon, so, nowhere else to put it.

Fowl

Nothing here for D&D to offer me, I started with the chicken (0). Those stats can represent other fowl like a pheasant, peafowl, maybe a quail, perhaps some land-dwelling non-fowl like the kiwi. Mm, maybe these species should at least have little modifications here and there, as for one thing, each has rather different flight capabilities. And then a separate stat block for the turkey (0), 'cause it's bigger.

Water Birds

Another category with all sorts of stuff in it which we can represent with only a handful of stat blocks, all of which I had to come up with myself. Let's start with the duck (0), which can also represent similarly tiny water birds such as loons, seagulls, terns, puffins, auks. The goose (0) for slightly bigger ones, such as swans and pelicans. Heh, interestingly, I did remember to include a swallow ability for the goose stat block, it could swallow tiny creatures, though I made a note that if the stat block isn't being used for a pelican, the DM would have to make a judgment call about whether the creature is tiny enough to be swallowed by the goose. Cute, but no need for that anymore.

Then we have the ibis (0), very mythically significant, can also represent a flamingo, crane, heron, any wading bird. Then an albatross (1/8), basically a big-ass seagull, isn't it, unique enough for its own stats.

And then, the penguin (0), a stat block to represent most species of penguin, as they tend to be about one foot tall, and then the giant penguin (0) for basically just the emperor penguin. And regarding penguins, I had a little idea -- I looked into a few video games about animals to give me ideas for the beast collection, most prominently the Zoo Tycoon games. And in Zoo Tycoon 2, if you do a bad job at cloning extinct animals for your zoo, you might accidentally end up with a killer penguin (8), species name eudyptes omnicidus, which one might liberally translate as "crested penguin that kills everything". It resembles an evil-looking rockhopper with glowing eyes and pointy teeth; it's the size of an emperor penguin, and if it comes into contact with any other animal, it kills it. Even a tyrannosaurus can't defeat the killer penguin, and you can't ever, ever get rid of it. A fun gag to troll the player in ZT2, a worthy if slightly surreal opponent in K&K.

Riding Birds

D&D 5E features a riding bird called the axe beak. That's a stupid name, especially since the creature it's supposed to represent is clearly a terror bird (1/4), which already has an absolutely spectacular name. The terror bird stats can represent other large long-legged extinct birds, such as the elephant bird or moa, and such things can be ridden into battle, they're quite ferocious.

To add onto that, I figured on creating stats for an ostrich (1/8), which can also represent the ostrich's fellow large ratites like the emu or cassowary. I think I'd make the ostrich medium-sized and therefore not rideable by humans; I know humans can and do ride ostriches, but have you ever seen it happen? It's really awkward-looking and precarious and generally not a very good idea, you cannot triumphantly ride into battle on the back of an ostrich, at least not if you're the size of an adult human.

Amphibians

The entire order of amphibians gets a category, 'cause, you know, not much to offer. D&D has the frog (00) -- yup, one of the two 00 animals in the real game is the frog, because after all, there's absolutely no way for a frog to hurt a human, that tracks, yeah? But the game also has the man-sized giant frog (1/4) and, even larger, the giant toad (1), large enough to carry one human on its back and swallow another one.

My "beast collection" plans were to modify the frog stats in two ways: first, get rid of its jumping abilities and you have a newt. So... an even more useless animal. And then, while the stats as-is could represent nearly any real-world frog or toad, I can give it poisonous skin to convert it to a poison dart frog, which naturally would boost its challenge rating to 0 as it can actually deal damage now. I also figured I'd add a giant newt (0), not as dangerous as the giant frog and toad, more based on actual giant salamanders that exist out in the world.

And now, well, now there has to be more than one set of normal-frog stats, because frogs come in lots of sizes, there are little tree frogs, and big bullfrogs, and, well, I don't think there need to be any sizes between the two. And in a world of diminutive adventurers, bullfrogs actually can do some harm, they are known to eat mice and tree frogs and other teeny things.

Fishes

As with ungulates, I had a whole bunch of categories for fishes before, but the changes in real-world taxonomy over the years rendered that too difficult, so I consolidated them into only two categories, "fishes" for bony fish, "sharks" for cartilaginous fish.

Crazy changes going on in taxonomy sometimes. You know, scientists are starting to say that the term "fish" is outdated. They're realizing that there are so many different fish of so many different lineages that to label all of them with a single term such as "fish" would be inaccurate. Crazy, isn't it? Not the first time the word's usage has changed, of course: less than 200 years ago, "fish" meant any animal that lives its entire life underwater. Herman Melville opined in the pages of Moby-Dick that he saw no need to implement the proposed change in the word's meaning, that he votes it's just easier to keep saying whales are fish.

Anyway, I'll try to kinda re-organize all my fishes by the original sub-categories for ease. I will say, whatever the future taxonomy ends up being, the grammatical conventions of fish are that if you're talking about multiple fish of the same species, they're "fish", but if you're talking about multiple species of fish, they're "fishes". Them's the rules.

Okay, D&D only had four fish stat blocks... oddly named, I must say. They started with a seahorse, the other 00 creature alongside the frog... seahorse is oddly specific, so I gave that block the name of one of the categories I'd created: the decorative fish (00), for any tiny fish you can keep in an aquarium that's totally harmless, like a clownfish, tang, angelfish, butterflyfish, and indeed, a seahorse, though Christalss originally didn't have seahorses on account of the kelpies. Then there's the giant seahorse (1/2), a colorful aquatic mount, though again I wonder whether the underwater horses people ride should literally be giant seahorses or if they should actually be horses with fish tails like in myths. It's called a hippocampus, which is also the genus name of seahorses. Confusing sometimes, isn't it, trying to reconcile nature with myth.

D&D also has piranhas, but for some reason, it doesn't call them piranhas. It calls them quippers. Heck if I know why they made that decision, but whatever, I'm switching it back to the piranha (0) and, naturally, the swarm of piranhas (1).

So, that's it for what D&D actually has, let's sift through my subcategories, starting, I suppose, with "decorative fish". In addition to the tiny ones (and might expand them to sizes other than tiny, for little things like guppies), I also noted stats for a large decorative fish (00), for, er, basically big species of wrasses, that's pretty much it, and the giant sunfish (0), known in reality as the ocean sunfish or mola-mola. And, I suppose this would be the category for the mudskipper (00), a unique enough fish that I figured it couldn't just use modified decorative fish stats. A category of creatures completely useless in combat, but, you know, if you ever want to cultivate an aquarium in your K&K game...

The next category would be "game fish", that's pretty much any fish that you eat, I suppose. The piranha stats, I figure that can represent a bass, cod, perch, mackerel -- basically, if it's a nondescript fish that can bite you, it gets the piranha stats, if it can't bite you, it gets decorative fish. Hmm, maybe some additional smaller ones, like anchovies and minnows -- oooh! That reminds me of the fishing minigames from The Sims 3, those had a pretty fun selection of fish, I'll look into that. Other little pets too!

Anyway, game fish. Well, there's the flyingfish (00), rather harmless and also unique; the marlin (1/8), you can't talk about fish you have to fight without throwing in swordfish and stuff. The catfish (0), I figure they're comparable to a piranha but different enough to merit different stats. Then, eh, how about a barracuda (0), gave the name to the barracuda because I figure that's the kind of game fish an adventurer would want to fight; other fish that can use those stats include the tuna, dorado, arowana, salmon, mahi-mahi, and so on. And then a gar (1/8), classic scary freshwater fish. A giant catfish (1/4), those really exist, and maybe can also stand in for a sturgeon or arapaima. And I figured a giant barracuda (1) and giant gar (2) would be a fun idea.

"Eel" category. We start with just the regular eel (0), that represents the really tiny ones. Then we have the giant eel (1/8), we're not talking huge eels, just regular-sized ones, mostly the moray eel, but also the conger eel, gulper eel, wolf eel... I don't think any of those last three are technically eels, but, they're called that 'cause they're close enough. And then the electric eel (1/2), also not really an eel, but hey, how often do you find a real animal that deals lightning damage? Pretty sweet.

Then I had a "deep-sea fish" category. Most such things are such very unique creatures, I lumped them together along with some fish that aren't necessarily deep-sea but are definitely very rare and exotic and alone in their taxonomic categories. For your basic deep-sea fish, I had the lancetfish (1/8), and the oarfish (1), and the anglerfish (1/4), ooh, that last might merit a few different stat blocks, there are lots of different anglerfish out there, and some of them, I hope you know, are much bigger than you thought they were. And here's also where I grouped a couple of very unique specimens, the coelacanth (1/4) and lamprey (1/8).

And my final fish category was the "poison fish", and I figured I could just use a single poison fish (1/8) stat block, maybe with some variants to represent different species, like the lionfish, scorpionfish, stonefish, pufferfish, boxfish, and... maybe a triggerfish, which doesn't have poison, but is part of this family.

Sharks

As I said, this category is for all cartilaginous fish. I originally divided them into five subcategories based on taxonomy: true sharks, strike sharks, rare sharks, slow sharks, and flat sharks. Meh, I don't think there's any need to really hang onto those, don't need the details.

D&D has three shark stats: the medium-sized reef shark (1/2), large-sized "hunter shark", which I've renamed to simply shark (2), and the huge-sized giant shark (5). I quite like that they chose the name "reef shark", I totally would have given it the same name, works for other basically human-scale sharks such as the frilled shark. The regular shark can represent most of them, I'd say most are "large", so here's where you find your tiger shark, most hammerhead sharks, goblin shark, blue shark, mako shark, all the good stuff. And the giant shark can be, mm, basically just the great white shark and let's say the Greenland shark, which I renamed to "northern shark" for Christalss.

So, other sharks might include the tiny shark (0), little things like dwarf sharks, leopard sharks, and dogfish; the carpet shark (1/4) which can encompass other slow-going bottom-dwelling sharks like the nurse shark and zebra shark, the basking shark (3), for that very species and the other two species of gigantic filter-feeders, the whale shark and megamouth shark, and finally the mega shark (10), which is very much a megalodon. Is that the first beast on the list stronger than a tyrannosaurus? Hehe, cool.

And then we have our "flat sharks". An ordinary stingray (1/4), and its lesser and greater counterparts, the lagoon ray (0) and giant stingray (1). And that leaves us with the angel shark (1/8), sawfish (1/8), and manta ray (1/2).

Crustaceans

Getting into invertebrates now! D&D has a crab (0), and a medium-sized giant crab which I'll change to being a small-sized king crab (1/8), more representative of how big crabs actually get, so it can be like a big Japanese spider crab or a coconut crab, what-have-you. The regular crab stats can also represent a lobster, and now, mm, a smaller variant to represent prawns and crawdads and such.

Customized thingies I prepared include the trilobite (0), can also represent isopods, horseshoe crabs, big shrimp, and other crustaceans that rely on biting instead of pinching with claws. Then a new and more powerful giant crab (1/4), and a large-sized siege crab (2), though in retrospect, crabs should be bigger than merely "large", and a crab worthy of the title "siege crab" would definitely have to be.

And then I had the giant shrimp (1/2), representative of the anomalocaris, a meter-long shrimp-like monster from half a billion years ago, the world's first apex predator. Or maybe just a giant shrimp.

Cephalopods

D&D provides us with the octopus (0) and giant octopus (1), that's nice of them. Then we'll see some similar escalation with the cuttlefish (0), squid (1/8), and giant squid (6). Then for the hard-shelled variant, we'll see the nautilus (0). And, I was initially thinking that I'd just use the nautilus stats for the cameroceras, a very popular ancient creature resembling a squid with a hard, cone-shaped shell. I didn't think much of cameroceras and didn't get why it was so popular, until on a whim I decided to look up how big it was. Turns out it was not, as I assumed, about the size of the modern nautilus; the cameroceras was 40 feet long, about the same size as the giant squid. Giant squid but with a hard shell? Fuck yeah, bring me cameroceras (9).

Bivalves

I figure ordinary clams and scallops and stuff can just use the stats of the ordinary crab, like clamping down with its shell instead of a crab's claws, to the same result. A giant clam (1/8), however, can still be its own thing, as it's more capable than a crab of similar size of just clamping down on an entire person.

Echinoderms

We can start with some starfish (0) stats... if we assume it's got like a little piercing attack, maybe some acid, the same set of stats can just as well represent a sea urchin, sea cucumber, or maybe even a sponge. For giant echinoderms, I decided to create a small-sized giant sea urchin (1/8), a medium-sized giant sea cucumber (1/4), and large-sized giant starfish (2).

Cnidarians

This category primarily consists of the jellyfish (1/8) and sea anemone (0). Those stats represent the tiny versions, and we can also bring in the significantly larger warship jellyfish (1/4) and giant jellyfish (2), and the fictional giant sea anemone (1/2).

BUGS

After the animal index, D&D 3E also included a vermin index, and I figured I might do the same here, as opposed to 5E, which puts its vermin in with the animals (as they're all of the beast category now) and a few not-special-enough monsters.

In Christalss, I similarly had vermin as a different category from animals, but eventually decided this wasn't anything inherent, as they're all animals really, but rather the "bugs" category, which I later changed to being called "deceptions", referred to animals who have been modified with magic, mostly to be huge. I not only had several insect categories sorted taxonomically, but also for every bug I came up with a number of gigantic and magical versions. I included shrimp in this category at the time, moving them back over to animals, nobody really thinks of crabs as being "bugs", even if they are closely related to insects and arachnids. I scrapped all of those earlier ideas and started over, and I fear I may have made a bit of a mess of it, at least as far as insects. So... while it'd be my impulse to list insects first in any vermin index, I'll save them for last for the time being.

Arachnids

So, D&D provided us with a spider (0) and scorpion (0), ostensibly completely normal spiders and scorpions, but as there's a lot of leeway in the "tiny" size category, and they're 1-4 hit points' worth of spider and scorpion who can beat a human in a fight if they get lucky, I'm thinking they're actually maybe a bit supernatural, in that I suspect they're arachnids of an equal size to, eh, maybe a cat, or at least a squirrel.

The beast index also has the giant spider (1) and giant scorpion (3), both large-sized, and also throws in the medium-sized giant wolf spider (1/4). There's a phase spider in that index too, but it's classed as a monster instead of a beast, since it's more supernatural than just some really big spider.

In creating my own arachnids, I basically followed the 3rd Edition model, which had tiny, small, medium, large, huge, gargantuan, and colossal stats for spiders, scorpions, and centipedes. Pathfinder did the same but instead of just listing each one as "medium giant spider", "large giant spider", etc., they gave each one a different name. I'm not gonna go that far, but I am definitely giving them more sizes than what 5E offers and giving them descriptive names just to follow the lead of the "giant wolf spider".

So, spiders. 5E already has tiny, medium, and large. For small, I threw in the giant crab spider (1/8), based on several species I made for Christalss based on those brightly-colored crab spiders that blend in with the flowers they live in. For huge, I added the giant wandering spider (5), also from Christalss, the wandering spider is a very scary spider with a scary name. Oh, how about that, this means there were beast collection spiders for every size category, because for gargantuan I added the giant elder spider (10), a truly massive and horrendously venomous tarantula. Back in the first Christalss story, the Elder Spider was an individual, not a species, but... when there's a creature, it always makes a lot more sense, story-wise, if it's a species, not just one guy.

I then added the giant emperor scorpion (8) so there could be a huge one, and while I was at it, I threw in a medium-sized giant harvestman (1/2). Harvestmen, perhaps better known as daddy-longlegs, are, you know, not technically spiders, and not as dangerous to humans due to their less-exposed fangs, but way more freaky-lookin', and not at all desirable to see at a humongous size, yeah?

Ticks are also arachnids, and Christalss had a few kinds of supernatural giant ticks, but... that's just kinda silly, maybe I don't do that.

Centipedes

5E is a bit more stingy with the centipedes than its predecessors; the only representative is the small-sized giant centipede (1/4)... to its credit, that 1/4 challenge rating makes it the strongest small-sized beast. Centipede poison in 5E specifically causes paralysis.

So, I figured I'd at least throw in a tiny-sized regular centipede (0) to go with the scorpion and spider. I also threw in some giant versions of the centipede's close companion the millipede, a large-sized giant millipede (1/8) and huge-sized titan millipede (2), hmm, I don't know about that, even if they're huge, I don't imagine millipedes are very good in a fight, nor especially intimidating, nor very useful as they don't have a body plan that makes them good riding mounts...

Trying to recall what kind of magical giant centipedes and millipedes I had in Christalss, and... I cannot. Let's move on.

Gastropods

I'd start this out with a sea slug (00), stats that represent just ordinary snails and slugs, although... I don't know about 00, aren't some sea slugs poisonous? Eh, we'll figure that out. For giant versions, I had a medium giant snail (1/8), specifically medium, I think, to represent the "racing snail" ridden by Deep Roy's character in The Neverending Story. And a huge giant slug (8). Wow, 8? Really? Maybe that's a bit overboard.

And I had some more specific snail ideas in Christalss. I don't recall the details, but I can definitely see the possibilities. Maybe some giant snails are only underwater, maybe some have hard metal shells, maybe some have a slime trail that's corrosive, maybe some have super-speed. Lots of things you can do with magic snails.

Worms

Start with an ordinary worm (00), which I suppose could actually have the exact same stats as a sea slug, except maybe if it's an earthworm then it digs... or if it's a leech, then it's a sea slug but also drinks blood, so, again, not 00.

Giant versions, well, there's the medium-sized giant leech (1/4), already involved in the story of The Choices, and the gargantuan giant worm (11). Yes, I decided the most dangerous beast in the game should be the giant worm! Eh, might rethink that, if I'm being inspired by Dune and Tremors and D&D's own "purple worm", maybe that ecological niche shouldn't be filled by a giant worm so worm-like that it qualifies as a beast. Or maybe it should. Hard to say.

Insects

Okay, I kind of gunked this up when creating a list of insect stats. Trying to think back, I'm pretty sure my insects were divided into the subcategories of "common insects" (beetles and butterflies), "flies" (flies, mosquitoes, dragonflies), "social insects" (ants, bees, wasps), "pestilential insects" (cockroaches, termites, fleas, earwigs), and "garden insects" (grasshoppers, mantises, stick insects). Or, eh, something like that, there was probably more I'm forgetting.

Insects in the D&D core rules consist of the iconic giant fire beetle (0), small-sized and so named only because it's glowy, doesn't (usually) actually spit fire. There's also the medium-sized giant wasp (1/2), and the stirge, the only beast in the game to be a completely fictional creature, can easily be re-flavored as a tiny-sized giant mosquito (1/8).

Then there's the swarm of insects (1/2). In addition to having a set of stats all its own, you can also add attributes to it to make it specifically a swarm of beetles, wasps, spiders, or centipedes. I might also include options for a swarm of scorpions, or, inspired by Pathfinder, I see they also have swarms for leeches, crabs, and jellyfish. And how about maggots as well? Volo's Guide has a swarm of rot grubs (1/2), and it's got a pretty unique ability to infest people and have individual rot grubs chew their way to the host's heart, which is certainly... yikes... but, you know, might just be an idea for just a "swarm of maggots" variant on the regular insect swarm.

That's a good reminder, talking of maggots: a lot of bugs have larval forms. Fighting a maggot or caterpillar is a pretty different experience from fighting a fly or moth. And, you know, no dishonor in fighting children in this case, as they're mindless rampaging vermin either way.

So, let's try to remember what I had, let's start with "common insects". I added the ordinary butterfly (00) and beetle (0), who could stand in for most of the other kinds of insects. I mused about a medium-sized giant moth (1/4), large-sized giant beetle (1), huge-sized giant sky beetle (3), and large-sized giant mountain moth (4). This basically covers everything I had in mind for Christalss, but I'm thinking I should do some more research on that front -- beetles make up 40% of insect species and 25% of all life on earth. There are thousands of different kinds of beetles I can employ without ever giving any of them supernatural abilities, and I'm sure butterflies and moths are no slouch in the variety department either, at the very least there are some pretty cool caterpillars out there.

Regarding flies, hmm, I don't seem to have any written down apart from the giant mosquito. Which surprises me, because I love dragonflies and I imagine giant dragonflies to be super big and deadly. Maybe I meant for giant dragonflies to have the same stats as giant moths and just neglected to write that down. And flies could have the same stats as bees, just with their piercing attacks flavored as bitey instead of stingy. And, hmm, I think I mostly remember the original Christalss version... flies had a lot of various habitat-themed versions, basically just cheap recolors with no actual difference. Mosquitoes had the properties of various weapons, from spears and ballistae, to drills and fists, that was kinda neat. And yes, I remember now: dragonflies had the colors of the main five D&D chromatic dragons, while damselflies had the colors of the more obscure ones, so I guess I was patterning dragonflies after dragons, hehe, that's kinda neat.

Up next are social insects, those are probably my favorite kinds of insects, ants and bees are cool. Hmm, in tabletop games, giant ants and bees often have different stats for the different sexes/castes of the hive/colony -- workers, soldiers, drones, and queens. That's kinda neat, actually, and it makes sense. Would I...? Mm, I know I did things a little differently from the way D&D and Pathfinder usually do. Giant ants are usually human-sized; I made my giant ant (1/8) tiny-sized. The giant bee (1/2) was small, and of course there's already a giant wasp and I threw in a regular wasp (0). But I also made a large-sized riding ant (1), that's kind of a thing I've seen a few times, ants large enough for people to ride. Back in Christalss, I don't remember what I did with bees and wasps, if anything, but I know I had three kinds of giant ants: fire, ice, and acid. They were tiny-sized and vibrantly-colored and attacked from a distance with projectiles of their element. 

"Pestilential insects", mm, the only one I seem to have written down is the giant cockroach (6). Huge! Because I think if a cockroach is to be scary, it has to be truly huge. Now that I'm dealing with sizes beyond gargantuan and thinking about how to deal with such things, hehe, you're gonna see roaches the size of the fucking mall, baby. That's basically what I did with roaches in Christalss, and I gave them names very evocative of how alarmingly huge they were, but I don't remember what those were.

And finally, "garden insects". I had a large giant mantis (2) and a huge giant stick insect (7), the strongest insect stat block I put together because, since stick insects are the largest insects in real life, they should also be the largest giant insect. Had a few other ideas in Christalss for various mantises, stick insects, grasshoppers, and crickets, but, eh, I don't think those are needed, really, I think these particular insects just have to be real big.

So, those are the actual insect stat blocks, and from there I figured they could be re-flavored into other kinds of insects, occasionally by changing their attributes. What I had for that was:

• giant wasp stats for giant grasshopper
• giant ant stats for giant flea
• giant bee stats for giant scarab or giant cricket
• riding ant stats for riding cricket or riding wasp

And now, I'm thinking... don't like it. Too weird and random. Gonna be more consistent with my bug stats.

~0~0~0~

Before I leave you for today, I had the realization that I've made a number of references to all the beasts that currently exist in 5E content, but... didn't actually know if that was true, I only have a handful of books outside the core rules -- two that are specifically related to monsters, but I didn't actually know what kind of beasts might have been released in books on other subjects. So I checked out DnDBeyond, a resource for every scrap of 5th Edition content in the world, and checked the list of beasts and discovered the following... restricting myself to stat blocks I could identify, some seemed to be fictional creatures or individual characters.

Primates: Tomb of Annihilation includes a flying monkey (0), Wizard of Oz style, I assume.

Dogs: An Icewind Dale-themed sourcebook includes stats for a fox (0), at last!

Pinnipeds: Surprisingly, featured in Icewind Dale. They have a seal (0) and walrus (1/4), so a bit weaker than my versions, and even a giant walrus (4).

Ungulates: Storm King's Thunder includes a pig (0) and sheep (0), and Icewind Dale has a mountain goat (1/8), so, different from my idea that sheep and mountain goats would just use goat stats.

Whales: Icewind Dale features a sperm whale (8), wow, that's much stronger than my version, equal to the tyrannosaurus, that's crazy. And, again... called it a sperm whale. Why does everyone act like that's a totally normal thing to call an animal? I know it's called that because its head is full of white goo, but that just makes it worse. We have the word "cachalot", why don't we use that anymore?

Rodents: Or close enough; Icewind Dale brings us a hare (0). I'm curious about what kind of skills and abilities official D&D gave to these creatures and how they differ from my own ideas, but... not curious enough to actually buy these books...

Lizards: Against the Giants has a huge-sized subterranean lizard (5), even stronger than my own dire lizard. Hey, I was only being conservative with how powerful I was making animals because that's what D&D did, they never went over 8 and only seldom went over 3...

Snakes: Ghost of Salt Marsh has a giant coral snake (4)... don't really know how to feel about that. Cool idea, I guess. Coral snake! That's it, that's an example of a tiny venomous snake. Cool.

Turtles: Tomb of Annihilation has a giant snapping turtle (3). Wow, again, same size as the one I made but way stronger. That's so weird.

Fishes: Okay; for starters, the Icewind Dale book has a knucklehead trout (0); they're a very important part of Icewind Dale's economy, but it never occurred to me they'd ever actually get stats. And from there, a few books include some big eels: Ghosts of Salt Marsh has a giant sea eel (1/2) and giant white moray eel (2), and Shrine of Tamoachan has a giant lightning eel (3). Now that I think about, eels that are actually gigantic are pretty cool, why did I give the "giant eel" title to the ordinary moray?

Crustaceans: Shrine of Tamoachan has a large giant crayfish (2), Storm King's Thunder has a huge hulking crab (5), and White Plume has an equally-huge giant crab (8). So... cool.

Well, my biggest takeaway is that they've given the tyrannosaurus two equals, in being CR 8 beasts. There was one beast with a CR over 8: Traxigor, with a CR of 12. Evidently, he's a Baldur's Gate character, a wizard who got turned into an otter but still has his spellcasting capabilities... well, that doesn't make sense by the rules I know, but I'm sure there's a story there with some exceptional circumstances. Point is, his CR is that high because he's a very powerful wizard, the takeaway here is that a perfectly normal animal completely maxes out at CR 8; for the second half of an adventurer's journey, they're completely unthreatened by animals. Fair enough.

~0~0~0~

This concludes the "Constructing Cosmos" series on the blog. What I'm gonna do next is write a summary of the first season of The Choices. No... on second thought, make that the entire series. I'll copy down everything I had in the WorldAnvil plot summaries and my personal Google Docs and include notes on how they need to be changed. In general it's pretty good; there's just a few empty spaces in the story and, again, the story never crosses paths with the world, I need to figure out how to do that. All the fighting styles, magical objects, and spells are straight out of D&D, don't wanna do that anymore.

And for now, we'll just be looking this over a bit, just mulling it over, we don't want to focus too much on writing The Choices until the pilot episode is finished, but then after that, I'll need my old writer's room assembled. Also a songwriter's room.