Antelope & Elk

From the Northlands’ coniferous forests to the Southlands’ sun-soaked veldts, antelopes and elk add verisimilitude to your campaign—and serve as handy mounts or food sources in a pinch. 

Then again, if your game world is a disk or a torus or the back of a dragon, maybe terms like “North” and “South” are meaningless…but you probably still need some springboks.

The antelopes of Kavash are wild animals, but that doesn’t mean the local tribes don’t lay claim to them.  Killing an antelope may invite visits from an ash-painted herder, a catfolk game warden, a bugbear thug, or a centaur speaker for the Wild—all depending on what side of the river you’re on and whose buck you’ve slain.

The Tsotaki clan has always seemed a bit foreign to the rest of the shogunate—favoring oracles over the Court of Elementalists and riding their strange river elks into battle instead of horses.  The shogun longs to bring them to heel, but he has a mountain clan of ninjas that needs exterminating first.

During the dry season, lighting a signal fire is courting disaster, and ponies suffer too greatly from thirst.  Halfling outriders take hardier kudus as messenger mounts instead, racing across the plains with colored scarves trailing behind them or aloft on kite strings to get the word out.  Having an extra gore attack doesn’t hurt either in a land of lions, ankhegs, giant ants, and worse.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 3 147

I started adding Bestiary 3 beasts to the blog when we hit the letter E.  If the elk hadn’t been paired with the antelope, it would have been the second entry.  So I have been waiting to post this since literally January of 2012.

Elk-riding samurai?  Yes, I’m a little in love with Princess Mononoke.

On a completely unrelated note, as an American born in Belgium by a fluke of luck, today was a very weird day.

And as someone who wore the name P-Funk through most of college, I think this is really cool.