Animal Life (sage field)
Animal life is a sage field available to druids, providing familiarity with animals — complex, boned & muscular creatures whose bodies pump blood. Knowledge is gained regarding animal origins, ranges, lifestyles and instincts. By studying animals in their environment, characters are able to predict their movements, seek means of communication, benefit from the natural resources that animals offer and use studies of anatomy and bodily functions as a basis for zoological evolution and engineering.
The field includes the following sage studies:
- Amphibians & Reptiles: the study of scaly, four-legged, cold-blooded egg-laying animals, including both creatures who spend part of their lives in water and those who are born and live all their lives on land.
- Birds: the study of feathered, winged, two-legged, warm-blooded egg-laying animals, characterized by a beak with no teeth and a lightweight skeleton.
- Bugs & Spiders: the study of multi-legged, exoskeletal insects, characterized by antennae, pincers, stingers, wings and a wide variety of other features.
- Golems: the art of bestowing life into creature-appearing constructs designed from homogenous natural materials, typically flesh, stone, clay, wood, metal and cloth, leavened dough or plant root.
- Mammals: the study of warm blooded, hairy animals with four limbs gestated through live birth, with a wide variety of features. The knowledge includes humanoid forms to some degree.
- Sea Life: the study of marine creatures and animals dwelling in both salt and freshwater environments, characterized by their ability to swim and breathe underwater.
- Slime Moulds: the study of jellies, metamorphs, moulds, oozes, puddings and slimes, enabling the character to explain the behaviour and dangers of these creatures.
Although the creatures examined in some of these studies are not "animals" and may be considered monsters in some cases, these creatures behave in various ways that are animal-like — thus their study is more appropriately found among more traditional animals than within studies of plant life.
