On the 'animalmen' thing, can I get this clarified-- is 'animalmen' just a catch-all term that could mean ANYTHING-men or will they largely be based of off existing creatures? Like, could there be... I don't know, microclinemen? I know the new HFS or Forgotten Beasts or whatever may be based off of materials and so on, but is there a restriction on the animalmen generation?
Not greened because I imagine the community can clarify.
Ok, so with templates you can load the traits of another creature and then just change the traits you want to. Basically it is fast and easy. If you wanted to make a fish man and the only difference was that it had arms and legs then you load some fish template and add arms and legs to it- all that other stuff like how dwarves like it for it's fish lips and having a swim bladder or whatever was in the fish template is there automatically instead of you having to type it all out or copy and paste.
The real advantage is that you can change the template and update a bunch of creatures instead of having to go and edit them all by hand but that's bordering on programmer knowledge laymen wouldn't care about.So yes, it's humanoid forms of other creatures. Certain things can take almost any type of material to make their skin out of and such (good luck against steel anything) but you won't see basalt earth elementals roaming around, or at least not in the context we're talking about. The rocks are materials and those are a different sort of thing from creatures, which I hope you can tell from the previous paragraph.
You could make an animate stone man template and then use that to speedily make a bunch of custom creatures made out of whatever types of stone if you want but you'd still have to type out the relevant text for each one and stick it in a file in the right folder.
so a release before the end of March -- hell, even before the end of this week -- is quite likely.
And so it begins.
-_-
Intriguingly, most earlier animalmen were vermin derived (ratmen, antmen, olmmen, slugmen, batmen etc.) Never seen any catgirls, elephantmen, lionians, gatorpeople or snowmen.
...I wonder if all the animen in a camp will be of one type or a mix of various mutants?
I seem to have slight memories of Tigermen.