Many of you have heard us talking about this in passing, some have seen them in the wild, so to speak, and enthusiastic visitors of our website have seen them posted in the past week. But today, we would like to announce the 3rd team that we have designed, the Animals! Big thanks to Amit Thulasidasan for the character art and Viktor Kolodiazhniy for the faction logo.
You can learn a little bit about each of them on our website on the Animals Page.
I’ll be writing a more in depth article about how the Animals function as a faction in the future, when all the rules for our factions are more stable (this includes the Survivalists and Peacemakers). But here, I’m going to quickly talk about what inspired the team and what their faction theme is.
The idea came about when Brendan and I were spitballing faction ideas, and one of us (can’t remember who now) said, “Wouldn’t it be funny if we had a team of animals that escaped from the zoo during the chaos?”. BOOM! The faction took hold right then and there. This was back in the day where Brendan and I each designed a full faction ourselves (we now co-design each faction), so I took on the Animals faction design because I was so intrigued by the idea of having a team with no humans.
As for the rules, I kept my focus on the question, “How do animals differ than humans?”
Most of them don’t have dexterous hands, and make do with other body parts. The elephant uses her trunks, wolf uses paws and mouth, etc…
Their sizes vary greatly (unlike humans), so I picked 6 animals that span a good range of the sizes.
They won’t be able to use the ranged weapons that humans use (but they have their ways).
They’re not as intelligent (more on this later) as humans, BUT they are often times better at certain things (hunting, searching for food, etc…)
Then, I added some Omicron Protocol world specific traits:
All of them are augmented by cybernetics in one way or another.
All of them suffered some traumatic life experience.
All of them… “changed”… when the virus outbreak happened. More on that in an upcoming story!
And voila, we have faction! As a side note, it was super rewarding to do research for our characters when designing them, since Brendan and I always want to be as accurate and authentic as possible when creating a new character. I can now say I know a LOT more about the animal kingdom after this faction. :P
I’ll be going more in depth about the faction abilities and basic tactics, once we have the rules in a good place, but I hope this preview whet your appetites for these awesome creatures!
In the meantime, please ask questions in the comments section about them if you like. What do you like about them? What do you want to know?