Originally Posted by Varyon
What is says in the title. I'm working a bit on my Oubliette setting again, and am formalizing the "classes" of monsters the dungeons produce. One such class is a human/animal hybrid along the lines of the centaur. Each dungeon has an element - earth, wind, water, fire, darkness - and corresponding clade - mammals, birds, fish*, reptiles, arthropods, respectively. These hybrids follow the trend of being some animal roughly below the neck, with a second, human torso from the waist up (complete with head and arms).
Such creatures are extremely common in mythology and fantasy, so I'm curious if there's a good generic term someone has come up with. I've seen "taur" used, but that seems to be exclusively about four-legged types, and only one (maybe two) of mine fit with that. I'm currently thinking of the class as "chimera," but would prefer a more precise term (as chimera could easily refer to any sort of human/animal hybrid, or indeed various animal/animal hybrids like griffons and the like). I currently plan to use centaurs for the mammals, lamias for the reptiles, and arachnes (basically, driders where the top half is human instead of drow) for the arthropods. For birds, I'm torn between basically mounting a human body on something akin to a griffon (which I've seen at least once, in Dungeon Meshi) or creating some strange creature that's a giant bird with a human torso mounted on it (which I don't think I've even seen). For fish, I'm torn between a mermaid and a cephalomaid (octopus below the waist).
*While there probably won't be any aquatic arthropods, I may make use of aquatic animals other than fish for inspiration, like sea mammals (historically thought of as fish anyway) and cephalopods.
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