Hippos
this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2025
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Worldbuilding
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Turtles or Japanese spider crabs?
Horseshoe crabs or some kind of arthropods is what I'm working with... Something that seems totally alien and kind of repulsive, but plausible.
What am I missing - starfish or cephalopods perhaps?
Cephalopods would be interesting, especially because they are so intelligent.
Imagine a sentient giant octopus that drags a barge alongside a convoy of manned ships, and who interacts as part of the crew + gets their own daily fresh water/food ration. A member of the crew equally loved and feared, because the others know how screwed they'll be if they accidentally piss it off.
I love this idea. But I would do a more ancient looking Octopus. Make it have a long shell or some strange shape. Not the more familiar octopus you would see today but their weird Cambrian origin.
After reviewing the comments, I'm going with the Nautilus:
- Weird and cool ✅
- Actually uses jet propulsion ✅
- Kind of looks like a leaf blower ✅
Great. In case you change your mind I have been noodling on this and have a full blown idea that I will write out in full to get it out of my head . If I was doing this I would have used a large series of isopods and set the following systems around them.
In my head the chains of islands would have a slow but consistent current that allows for some boats to just float between islands. These boats would be slow and completely uncontrolled. In order to move faster the isopod ships would capture a swarm of isopods in low nets which would allow the boat to move faster in the opposite direction of the current since the isopods are moving towards new detritus. (This allows for interesting travel decisions since going each direction has a different type of ships and different travel speeds).
As the isopods ships gets to a new island they would need to pull up their nets to slow down. They would then harvest the isopods and start selling to refuel their water supplies. They would open the larger ones and sell their meat either raw or cook. They would also sell the cleaned shells from sizes of a pumpkin down to a few inches. In order to clean the shells they would throw them in a large vat alongside any isopods to small to harvest to ferment for months. This alcoholic fermented isopod meat would make a stew like drink which is what the crew primarily lives off of. All of the leftover meat and guts would be preserved this way for years. Once this raw meats have fermented long enough they can open it off the harvest the cleaned and bleached shells.
In order to catch a new swarm they will need some waste to attract them. After each island they would drop off the entire crew's collected excrement before they pull up the net to get them moving. That way the party will need to pay to travel and promise their excrement along the journey to the ship. Sure to get the party questioning and throw the players off.
My first thought was going to be dolphins but after reading your description a large mammal wouldn't exist at all. My next thought would be these barges aren't directed but rather falling the semi-erratic patterns of large schools of some smaller animals. These schools would follow a slow meandering direction through the more shallow seas but are unpredictable and slow. As far as animals go, I would go with crabs, isopod, krill or another crustaceans.
You could also have them pulled by something larger but an underwater burrower. I was thinking how cool and unpredictable would be have some kind of underwater, underground large worm would be. It would filter feed on buried detritus and would involve massive risk to get it attached but would be faster than the small animal method above. It would be the same idea as Dune sand worm riding but underwater. You could even using something like a purple worm as the stats.
I don't know how well they'd adapt to the salinity, but I like hadrosaurs. They might have been powerful swimmers.
- giant sea otters. They could also be trained as war beasts or treated as beloved pets by the crew.
- horshoe crabs. They've survived 500 million years, I'm sure they can survive this.