Animals
From Genco
General Animal Information
Animals use many methods other than sight and scent to navigate about the world. Some use the misasma, others the sun, moon, temperature fluctuations or magnetic fields. Some animals have a direct connections to the magical realm, while others have been left to breed their enhancements out into the wild. These connections to elemental energy streams are special, and can be cultivated.
Animal Tracking
Creatures leave tracks nearly anywhere they travel. These tracks vary greatly in detectability from nearly-non-existent to blatantly obvious. Each species travels differently and leavess different trails. Studying a certain animal will increase your awareness of the signs associated with that animal's movement through the wilderness. These tracks become visible and selectable with enough tracking skill, and may literally be followed to the creature that's making them.
Animal tracks fade over time, and can be erased by overlapping tracks made by another animal. A bear following a woodland creature will overwrite the tracks and even scent trails of it's victim as it travels.
You are taught at first to track animals by observing obscure clues and studying the behavior of certain animals. Successfully tracking animals increases the visibility of their specific tracks. Understanding the behavior of the animal being tracked makes more specific tracks available for identification, but does not directly affect your Tracking ability, just making it easier to successfully find the creature, generating more successful attempts to track, subsequently increasing your tracking skill more quickly.
Mastery of tracking allows you to choose from a list of trails already identified around you, and may auto-follow trails with a mouse-click. Learning about human tracking allows you to recognize tracks made by specific individuals, allowing one to effortlessly follow a player that has slipped past you, or outrun you somehow. Master makes all previously manual skills automatic.
Learning general migration patterns will ensure a successful hunt. Mastery also grants you bonuses to stealth, as knowledge of this skill allows you to avoid leaving clues behind. Depending on the master tracker's familiarity with the terrain and locale, even another master tracker will find it difficult if not impossible to hunt an agile and adept tracker.
Weather elements can obscure or completely remove even fresh tracks.
All creatures make noise. Each noise has a set radius in which it can be heard. Trackers can learn to recognize these sounds and are given a list of animals making noise in the area. This can include the sounds made by a running human, aiding in tracking people, increasing awareness of all surroundings. Master trackers can hear even the slightest sounds behind them, and can sense directional changes in the wind, making it easier to avoid giving their prey a wiff of their body odor.
Animals maintain a natural stealth that makes them undetectable to novice and untrained eyes. Study of general animal lore allows layers to see them.
An animal's "intelligence" and "sneakiness" is actually its ability to stay hidden. An animal's natural stealth is hindered in proportion to its size.
Each species of animal follows different migration paths and hunting grounds.
Players can be attacked by powerful wild creatures if displaced from their normal hunting grounds.
Birds usually stay in the aerial layer.
Animals are normally very difficult to kill. Most are very fast and experienced, able to attack quickly and retreat without taking damage. Players will not have to kill many animals to quickly increase their skills. Groups of players can easily take down prey, but must work together to surround it without alerting it to their presence.
