Thread 96384806

setting have war elephants?

Because it has war sauropods.

They're not as impressive against other fantasy beast mounts. Though their gritty realistic basis appeals to me some. They work best in low-magic settings like LotR

Only elephant i'd consider adding in my setting is your fat fucking mum HAHA gotem.

No but shes a beaut please tell her I love her.

>>96384989
>low-magic settings like LotR

>>96384806 (OP)
Because war elephants were a meme unit way too costly to maintain, way too prone to panic, and anyway they'd be BTFO by canister shot or musket fire effortlessly.

Elephants aren't effective cavalry when your landmass is entirely sky islands

>>96384806 (OP)
But it does
Also war ostriches and tortoises

>>96384806 (OP)
They all died in an alpine crossing.

It does though.

They don't like people riding on their backs.

>>96384806 (OP)
because armored ceratopsians take the theoretically good idea of "giant big monsters swarm" and make them difficult to kill, given their face is a shield with spears attached, as well as lower to the ground for maximum ramming potential.

>>96384830
With scorpions mounted on the howdahs with the 3 dozen or so archers/crossbowmen?

I don't have any elephant models, so have to make do with dinosaurs.

>>96384806 (OP)
because they're irrelephant

Because my setting doesn't have war.

War dragons are better.

>>96384989
>elves
>hobbits
>dwarves
>hobbits
>giant tree men
>living trees
>man-carrying eagles
>magic rings
>magic seeing stones
>magic doors
>wizards that are angels
>orcs
>goblins
>uruk-hai
>trolls
>wargs
>a dark lord/flaming eye on top of a tower
>giant spiders
>a bog of living undead
>a cave of living undead
>phantoms riding evil horses
>evil wyvern things
>an evil town that shoots a laser in the sky

>low magic

Bait? Retardation?

>>96385003
>>96386704
>yes there are only five wizards in canon and they hardly cast spells
>yes 90% of characters fight with normal medieval weaponry
>yes the magic system is notoriously underdeveloped
>but... it's literally indistinguishable from muh heckin dnd! I am not being an obtuse smart ass by deliberately conflating low magic with low fantasy!!

>>96388317
>magic system is notoriously underdeveloped
There is no "magic system". Either you have an intimate understanding of how God's creation works or you don't.

>>96386704
While I get that LotR is suppose to be some kind of pre-history and all the fantastic stuff goes away eventually but I always wonder how you'd handle a bog of ghosts in a modern time setting.

>"Don't go by the lake, there are dead things in it."
>"Dude, no one believes that shit anymore. It's probably some schizo base head orc living out there."
>"And that makes it better?!"

>>96388317
>Yes I saw le epic reddit video about how gandalf is actually a level 3 chungus wizard, how can you tell?

Alright, get this:

I have a homebrew setting for D&D, and I made a custom list of wildlife that is present in the setting. It's a temperate area, no arctic, no tropics, no not!africa. It has elephants, but they are mammoths/mastodons with the stats of asian elephants, and I used some of the additions from frostburn animals. I call them "kogoloxen"; a name I picked up from warcraft back in like 2003; I dont remember what they are.

So far in the setting, no group has made real use of them, but I might have an npc or group of npcs use one or two or three at some point, and theres nothing stopping players from going and getting some and training them for combat. Humans use horses and the really elite knights ride gryphons. Orcs don't generally ride anything but one tribe rides bison a bit. Gnolls don't ride. The other races don't share the kogoloxens habitat.

Civilization isn't as big or widespread in my setting, it's more like the iron age or wild west in that sense. Mass combat with huge numbers of soldiers just isn't something that happens often. The bigger the group of low-level soldiers, the more likely they are to get wiped by some high CR threat.

>>96384806 (OP)
I don't develop the areas elephants would come from because it doesn't really interest me to do so.

>>96384806 (OP)
The elephants are too powerful to be tamed

>>96384806 (OP)
It does
A lot of the regions are impassable seas of very tall and dense grass that humanoids cannot pass through
So they board colossal mammoth creatures that pretty much act as ships because they are able to pass through it
There are sometimes fights between different crews

>>96384806 (OP)
since we're talking about elephants, how do I make my elephant humanoids not look silly. Making the ears and trunk smaller of course, but I feel that isn't enough to get them to look serious.

Why didn't war elephants became more of a thing? In every instance they got used they seemed more like a novelty, rather than an actual strategic mount, like horses.

>>96390883
>>96385021

>>96390883
>Only available in Africa and India in any significant quantity
>Incredibly difficult to tame and train
>Cannot be fully domesticated like horses or other beasts of burden
>Have a nasty habit of trampling your own troops if they get sufficiently spooked
>Require massive amounts of food to keep alive
It basically comes down to them requiring a large amount of investment and supply chain that's arguably better spent on cheaper, more reliable units.