I just find the whole concept really amusingly silly "This is the same animal, but larger, making it more dangerous."
What, is there - like - a dire penguin?
Dire Animals
I just find the whole concept really amusingly silly "This is the same animal, but larger, making it more dangerous."
What, is there - like - a dire penguin?
>What, is there - like - a dire penguin?
Yes, It's like a penguin, only dire.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dire_wolf
Latin "dirus" = "scary"
>What, is there - like - a dire penguin?
of course not, we would never use such a silly name.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palaeeudyptes_klekowskii
instead we call it "mega penguin"
God-Emperor Penguin.
>cat < lynx < cougar < lion
>tiger sharks aren't dangerous at all while great whitessharks don't even hunt humans but maim/kill them by accident
>a dire penguin sounds ridiculous until you find out an ostrich can kill you with its talons
>tiger sharks aren't dangerous
Tiger sharks will attack humans and continue to attack them.
Hammersharks and other sharks are less dangerous because they are polite or moronic because they stop once they realize you are human usually.
While sharks aren't a major threat tiger, bull, and great whites are still dangerous
>What, is there - like - a dire penguin?
Yes.
DnD started with the dire wolves from real life, then acted as if 'dire' is a modifier to regular animals, and dire eventually came to mean something slightly different in tabletop culture. There are, however, many prehistoric versions of current animals that were far larger than now. A 'dire' bear would more accurately be referred to as a 'cave bear' - which is what I'm doing in my setting, because prehistoric animals are cool.
That's always what I presumed. Dire didn't just mean Big, it meant "More of every valid reason our ancestors had primal fear of it."
A regular wolf is bad, a Dire wolf is bigger, more feral, bigger teeth, Sharper claws, rough hair like fiberglass, and invariably infused with the rage and general toughness of your average wild boar during mating season.
I equate it to using "Sabretooth" as an adjective in prehistoric fiction.
I, too, enjoy deploying "extinct species that is pretty much an extant species but larger" in my games. Your players will immediately have a grasp of its ecology, behavior, and anatomy without need for exposition.
enter hell pig. roll initiative
Of all the animals my caveman brain thinks I could actually take in a bare-handed fight, the three it absolutely does NOT consider are any non-black bear, chimpanzees, and wild boars.
Even more terrifying concept.
Those things were essentially just land hippos.
>I equate it to using "Sabretooth" as an adjective in prehistoric fiction.
Dire, cave, sabretooth, even 'hell', as
demonstrates, it's all the same. Might as well use them all, since they're there.
>What, is there - like - a dire penguin?
Yes, and they're nothing new:
https://lovecraft.fandom.com/wiki/Albino_penguin
Don't link gaydom wiki's when there's alternative sources.
>amusingly silly
Its realistic for any oversized predator. Size evaluation is pretty much the most basic mode of threat evaluation. I wouldn't trust most house cats if they were suddenly bumped to grizzli bear size.
Knew a girl who had a snake. She thought it loved her and knew her because when she slept it escaped its terrarium and went to sleep next to her... except it was really doing that stretchy thing where they go all straight except for the last part of their tail, which is when they are sizing preys to eat them. She didn't like when I told her that.
Sorry, you've been deboonked
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/snake-measure/
Chances are it just found her body warmth desirous.
>"This is the same animal, but larger, making it more dangerous."
>What, is there - like - a dire penguin?
so a dire wolf would also be a dinolykos and other combinations, maybe dinoLycaon
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Λυκάων
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/λύκος#Ancient_Greek
dinosaur (n.)
one of the Dinosauria, a class of extinct Mesozoic reptiles often of enormous size, 1841, coined in Modern Latin by Sir Richard Owen, from Greek deinos "terrible" (see dire) + sauros "lizard" (see -saurus). Figurative sense of "person or institution not adapting to change" is from 1952. Related: Dinosaurian.
also from 1841
dire (adj.)
"causing or attended by great fear, dreadful, awful," 1560s, from Latin dirus "fearful, awful, boding ill," a religious term, which is of unknown origin. Apparently a dialect word in Latin; perhaps from Oscan and Umbrian and perhaps cognate with Greek deinos "terrible," Sanskrit dvis- 'hate, enmity, enemy," from PIE root *dwei-, forming words for "fear; hatred."
-saurus
element used in forming dinosaur names, from Latinized form of Greek sauros "lizard," a word of unknown origin; possibly related to saulos "twisting, wavering."
Play Age of Wonders
He's killed before! He'll kill again!
Don't make me send a Dire human at you!
So, an ogre?
A neanderthal. A cave human. A cave man, if you will.
Those were smaller, actually. Don't get me wrong, humans are ice age megafauna. But we're the dire version of river-dwelling chimps. You're a dire bonobo.
Wouldn't a dire human be a giant?
>What, is there - like - a dire penguin?
They were born of atomic steel
PENGUIN ATTACK!
Life and death were so unreal
PENGUIN ATTACK!
>This is the same animal, but larger, making it more dangerous
Yes.
>What, is there - like - a dire penguin?
They're found at the south pole - Archaon was TERRIFIED of them.
It sucks how the recent past had some many more cool giant mammals and reptiles and even birds, and we just have the fake and gay leftovers. Like sloths used to be respectable.
That is, in a fair number of cases, our own damn fault.
>inb4 dire giant
>dire hobbit
>It's just some dude80gh
One of the most dreaded creatures in any universe... The dire tween.