What’s a Beast-Man?

Sometimes splitting hairs on definitions is actually a little bit important.  Sometimes, a rose by any other name would be a completely different thing.  Sorry Willie.

So what’s a “beast-man” and what’s a chimera?  And how do you pronounce chimera?  We’ll leave that one to a later time.  But most of all, why does it matter?

Here’s how we see it, and we absolutely admit, there is some room for argument!  A beast-man is part animal and part “man”.  A chimera is more than one animal joined together in some way.  So a centaur and a minotaur are both beast-men.  Part horse, part man, or part bull, part man.  But a griffin is a chimera - part lion, part eagle.  I wanted to use a pegasus as an example, but I’m still debating what that other part is - goose?  swan?  eagle?  does it matter?

Let’s go with that question:  Does it matter?  It does!  Beast men are men, people.  Chimeras are monsters.  They may not be evil.  They might even be herbivores, but they are monsters and they are not people.  That matters because just as you wouldn’t see a dog or a tiger as an NPC, you wouldn’t see a hippogriff as a playable race.  But could you play a centaur?  Seemingly of course!  After all, he has a fully formed human head, capable of speech and likely the casting of magic.

So that’s the underlying difference - monster or man, but is that enough of an explanation?  Let’s focus on “man” for a moment.  I was really tempted to make the centaurs of Fletnern half horse, half elf.  Why? because the elves and the centaurs come from the same place.  It seemed like it worked.  But I went back in the world’s history and the answer came to me pretty easily.

The question of human or elf came down to how were they created?  Are they natural?  Well, yes, they are natural, in that they, like nearly every other animal, monster or race, were created by the gods.  When the gods of horses created centaurs, they were competing with the gods of men (probably titans, but at least one of the races of men).  So they would have crafted their centaurs to be men instead of elves.

But what about the chimeras?  Are they natural?  Yes, for the same reason, at least most of them.  Very few chimeras were actually created by people; most were created by the gods.  Therefore, they are as natural as you can get in a fantasy game.

If this all seems unimportant then I’m not yet explaining my main point:  There is a major difference between a centaur and a pegasus.  Both are half horse and half something else, but one is a sentient being and the other is an animal.  Beast-men can think, form civilizations, be player characters.  Chimeras are very interesting and very “fantasy/myth” monsters, but as clever as they might be, they are not people.  They will not form civilizations, and they do not make for very good PCs.  Both groups work great as enemies for the PCs to come up against, but they are fundamentally different styles of creatures.

That means it matters when your party encounters minotaurs or one of the other seemingly “monster” beast-men.  Minotaurs can think.  They can use weapons.  They can lay traps.  Griffons don’t do those things.  They use what the gods gave them and that’s about it.

Now, don’t ask us about sphinxes, because that’s one where we’re still on the fence.  I really think they’re chimeras, but they have human-esque faces.  So I guess they’re beast-men?  What do you think?