Animal encounters are a part of Traveller that don't seem to be used
much. Part of that may be that it's just plain hard to come up with a
memorable animal instead of just another run-of-the-mill "Capellan
alligator" or "Arcturan leopard". Or maybe they're just too easy to
overcome by PCs who are armed past the teeth, not just to them, with
everything from 15mm machine guns to FGMPs.

A real problem is making your animals fit their environment - if you
don't do a good job of that, you end up with what I grew up scornfully
calling a "D&D ecology" - you had all these whatsits roaming around the
dungeon, with no visible means of support, and no reason that they
should be Just That Way, _except_ to be Something Nasty for the PCs to
encounter.

One can argue in favor of Capellan Alligators or Arcturan Leopards on
the basis of "form follows function" - that is, if you have a niche for
an apex predator, in a certain environment, the apex predator is going
to develop pretty much the same way, and what you get might as well be
called an "alligator" or a "leopard". But that gets boring pretty fast.
So it's got purple dots on a green background instead of black on tawny.
It's still a damn leopard, and it's still boring.

So, how can you make an animal more memorable? To start with, there's
Robert Weaver's article in the July/August 2016 Freelance Traveller,
"More Than Four Legs and Nasty Pointy Teeth". That sets out some ideas
of what an animal can do - or what weapons or abilities it might have -
that make you sit up and take notice. But even there, you want it to fit
your ecology - I don't care if you call them "sand crab", "land prawn",
or "zatku", if they're going to swarm every year, make sure you
understand why, and how it fits in.

Now, I've been talking about animals here, but while writing this, I had
a thought - everything I've said here applies to plants as well. There
is a wide variety of carnivorous (also known as insectivorous) plants
known on Earth; there's no reason that the principle can't be applied to
extraterrestrial plant-analogues. Whether they can reasonably grow to
the point of being able to take large (meaning significantly larger than
insects) prey is an open question, but remember, this is Science
Fiction, and you do get some leeway.

So, the solicitation: A Non-Boring Animal - or Plant - that can present
a challenge to a PC or party of PCs. Well-designed ones are accumulated
for printing in the Less Dangerous Game section of future issues of
Freelance Traveller.

--
Jeff Zeitlin, Editor
Freelance Traveller
    The Electronic Fan-Supported
    Traveller® Fanzine and Resource

xxxxxx@freelancetraveller.com
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