Post/Author/DateTime	Post
Delfedd 12-23-06, 04:31 PM	I got this idea from the Campaign board. On it, a group of people are creating a dynamic town. This project will be much harder, as it will involve life itself. Magic should be taken into account. A post can be as many years as a person wishes, and it should stay with the rest of the posts. Remember, this evolution should end up near the standard D&D races, so rashes of vampires killing off the apes, giant meteors wiping out all the reptilian creatures, and unstopable monsters (besides the Tarasque) should not be used. Divine intervention should only rarely be allowed, Gods should come from the people, not the other way around, using the American Gods approach. Anyway, that's the basic idea. I don't want to get into a big argument over creation versus evolution, I just think that this would be more fun than saying "Then Gruumsh created orcs." Give names to your primal creatures. However, If a creature is a Dire Bear, call it a Dire bear, not a "Muluudium" The waters are teeming with single celled organisms. The creatures, filled with the primal magic created when the world was first born, have interesting abilities. Some cells ("Zappers") zap other cells, blasting them into small bits. Some (greeners) take light from the sun and turn it to energy. Some rare creatures ("takers" use magic to dominate other cells, and become the first multicelled organism. The takers often form the nucleus of the creature, with either greeners or Zappers making the outer shell. A few basic structures form, the Claws, mostly zappers, the mouths, a fair mix, and the drifters, mostly greeners. Drifters form the first multicelled plant life, becoming more and more numerous. Claws devour mouths. The Mouths themselves roam restlessly, trying to eat the single celled life.
Return of the Flumph 12-24-06, 04:45 AM	If I were any less tired right now, believe me, I would make a point of contributing.
Dracomortis 12-24-06, 11:54 AM	Can we also post ideas for evolved creatures - not what came before, but what is going to come? I've got quite a few of those sitting around.
JLaurHughes 12-24-06, 01:53 PM	Where to start? :whatsthis
Dracomortis 12-24-06, 06:12 PM	Oozes The first large, multicellular creatures to evolve were the oozes, which swam through the oceans like oversized jellyfish, devouring fish and other small creatures. Little more than clusters of cytoplasm controlled by a central nucleus, these creatures slowly developed into land born creatures as other primitive species emerged. Despite their large size, oozes can survive off of surprising little food for extended periods of time; having evolved before most large species were available as prey, a single creature the size of a human can support an ooze for nearly a month. Thus, many species of ooze have found underground dungeons and caves to be ideal hunting grounds; few predators exist in these environments, and the food supply is just enough for the ooze to subsist upon. The oozes of today have evolved specifically for this purpose: to hunt and to kill adventurers exploring in ruins and caverns. A variety of oozes have arisen from that single primordial species, the most well known of which is the gelatinous cube, which has evolved to be a cube 15 feet to a side: the exact dimensions of most dungeon hallways, in fact, so that it can ensure that it captures anything and everything in its path. Other varieties, such as the gray ooze, prefer stealth and ambush over the cube's frontal assault. Still others, like the ochre jelly, rely on their ability to infiltrate any possible environment; they can climb along walls and ceilings, squeeze under doors, and even ooze through cracks in the walls to reach their prey. Both the black pudding and the ochre jelly have retained some of the functions from their days as oversized cells, and possess the ability to split into two identical oozes when injured.
savant_warlord13 12-24-06, 06:36 PM	I already include evolution in my campaign. We have primordial and evolved versions of several monsters. The evolved ones are the result of mutagenic magical radiation. The primordial ones are holdovers from long ago, doomed extinction.
Delfedd 12-24-06, 09:51 PM	Ideas are super fun. Go for it. The oozes began growing, spreading over the water, making a gray film. Oozes flourished for a time, developing into more complex forms, such as jellyfish. Zappers attatched to the end of the tentacles helped them catch mouths. To combat this sudden lack of sunlight, the greeners and drifters began to become more agressive, growing up through the ooze assertively. Soon, these "plants" began colonizing the land, where little stood in the way.
Delfedd 12-27-06, 10:45 AM	bump
Dreamstryder 12-27-06, 05:19 PM	To combat predation, some jellyfish/anemones developed outer shells and became fish- or eel-like. Some oozes learned how to fill themselves with gases and just float (floaters), some out of the water entirely (flight of the jellyfishies!). The oozes on the water's surface (a kind of floater?) also served as platforms for new plants (free-floating jelly isles?).
Chaos_Descending 12-27-06, 08:28 PM	**Edit: It seems the term ****-Sapien is offensive... Time to L33T it I'm making a campaign setting based off of this. All starts out on an austrailian like continent. Main species there would be H0mo Sapian, H0mo Sylvanus and a variety of other species, listed in the Hominids family, but not the H0mo Genus. Dwarves, Halflings, Gnomes. The Monsters based there would mostly be Animals, eventually giving rise to Magical Beasts. Clerics eventually evolved from devotion to ideals, and tribes formed around them for saftey. I reclsified the Cosmology and magic a bit at this point to account for the sources of magic. Basically all magic is extraplaner, the clerics devoted themselves to a simple ideal and a plane. After an exidus of the Elves to another land, they, through nature worship discovered/created/summoned/unlocked the Fey Around the same time humans discovered Goblinoids an the opposite contindent. This also introduced a missing link in the chain, H0mo Orcus. (Which as a side note had evolved in the opposite direction as the elves, thus making humans able to interbreed with both, but ultimatly incompatable with each other) Abominations were summoned in by deranged clerics who drew power from the far planes, Outsider leached in from summons as well. Or were created through godhood, or quazi Godhood. (The first DR 1 god was Ascended from an advanced Awakened Dire Wolf of Legend) Dragons just appeared. They always have been a mystery. Oozes and the rest are pretty simple. They always existed, like Mold. Did I forget anything?
Delfedd 12-27-06, 10:33 PM	Chaos_Descending: very interesting. Feel free to contribute. Just as a recap We have three basic types of cells, dominators, zappers, and plants. The dominators give rise multicellular life as well as oozes. We have complex plants and animals, as well as flying jellyfish. Time to move onto land. As gravity from the worlds single moon pulls on the ocean, tides form, causing tidepools. Several small organisms become trapped in these pools, and create their own ecosystems. This life gives rise to a species which skuttles over the pools and removes some of the organisms. Not all of them, of course, just enough.
Dracomortis 12-28-06, 12:00 PM	Sandclaws In order to survive in small, land-locked bodies of water, the various oozes slowly developed into simple organisms such as krill, brine shrimp, and jellyfish, which were better suited to the sunnier regions of water. These organisms, although still relatively fragile and ooze-like, were the first to possess a more or less stable outer form. The next to arise from this primordial pool of evolution were sandclaws, a crab-like creature that marked the first full transition from ooze to animal. Although they lacked the hard shells common to modern crabs, these sandclaws possessed a tough, rubbery skin that protected them from the water they lived near, which had grown extremely acidic from constant inhabitation by the oozes. This protection had the added effect of allowing them to hunt and feed on these oozes, which is in part what eventually drove them underground. As their favored prey slowly moved outward from their watery homes, the sandclaws had to find a new food source, which was fulfilled in the various fish and eels which arose at about the same time. No longer needing protection from oozes and finding that certain species of eel had extremely effective teeth that tore through their fragile bodies, sandclaws slowly lost their flexible, acid-resistant skin in favor of a solid, nigh impenetrable shell, becoming the first crabs.
Delfedd 12-28-06, 10:05 PM	Nice. Tentacular Spiner The eels and fish, having grown evolutionarily complacent in their time with relatively few predators, where shocked by the influx of sandcrabs. As the oozes slowly retreated from the surface, there was a violent battle for the top of the food chain. Soon came a creature descended from a large fish. It contained large amount of zapper organisms in the beasts eight tentacles. With these zappers, the creature pulls its prey into its ravenous mouth. This creature could devour not only the fish and eels, but also the sandcrabs.