Version 1.4 of my #FourthWorld “drift” of Dungeon World to the Earthdawn setting uses different subsystems for: hirelings, mounts, animal companions, and summoned spirits/creatures. In the next version, all these subsystems will be unified, reduced down to using (mostly) the followers rules from Perilous Wilds. Among a lot of other work, one of the things this means is that I need to define Instincts for a bunch of mounts (at least those defined in Mounted Combat and those in version 1.4).
I could use some help with this.
Please give me Instincts for typical mounts/companion animals and such. Anything that that might get ridden by humans, orcs, trolls, fairies, etc.
I’m not as familiar as I’d like with Earthdawn, but some instincts to start it off:
To serve. (loyal beasts, such as horses)
To participate in violence. (creatures like wargs)
To zoom through new landscapes. (playful mounts, such as I’d imagine fairies riding, like fairy dragons and dragonflies)
To pull. (have you ever seen a sled dog on a training sled? Those dogs virtually don’t stop.)
Instinct: to smell everything
Draft horse: to panic
War horse: to charge headlong
Donkey: to refuse
(more to come)
Elephant: to amuse itself
Rhino: to assert its dominance
Pegasus: to respect only its favorite
Griffon: to devour horse flesh
(the trick to good follower instincts, IMO, is that they need to describe what the follower does that is problematic; otherwise, it never really triggers a loyalty test)
Yeah, as far as mounts go, I’ve been thinking “if left unattended, what inconvenient thing will this mount get up to?”
So, like:
Bear (or maybe lion): to sleep
Lester Ward sure, that works, too. It gives you a nudge on what to do with the mount when the PCs aren’t actively commanding it.
I still prefer a more broad “what inconvenient thing that they do” (whenever), because that lets you bring the instinct into play in times of stress or just whenever they want the mount to do something else.
Like, if your griffon mount has an instinct of “to devour horse flesh” and you fly past a caravan, you’re going to be triggering Order Followers to keep it in line. It makes the instinct more of an active element of play, rather than something that happens when you leave the mount off camera and then come back to it.
(This is assuming you’re using Loyalty & Order Followers from The Perilous Wilds. If you’re not, then never mind.)
I could use some additional help on moves for various large herbivores that can be used as mounts: rhino, elephant, something like a triceratops, something like a really large and angry cow, etc. There are only so many ways to list “trample them”.