Animals — Wildlife, Companions and Prehistoric Creatures

What Counts as an Animal?

Animal
Capra (goat) by Francesco Londonio (1723-1786), painted 1755-1765, oil on paper, 23 x 18 cm. Accademia Carrara, Bergamo, Italy

An animal is a living, nonhuman creature, usually a vertebrate with no magical abilities and no innate capacity for language or culture. Animals usually have additional information on how they can serve as companions.

Armoured animals are not all dinosaurs: Desmatosuchus and Stagonolepis are Triassic aetosaurs, while Glyptodon is a much later armoured mammal. Each offers a different defensive encounter.

Find an Animal

Browse the environmental suggestions below, or open the complete 327-entry alphabetical Animal index.

Along roads and farms: dogs and bloodhounds follow scent trails, ravens betray disturbances around a camp, and reindeer matter to travellers crossing northern country. For smaller creatures, begin with bats or the wildcat.

Forests and wild ground: brown bears are formidable without being monsters, while apes can make a forest encounter unpredictable without requiring a battle. The goliath frog belongs to the world of real wildlife, not an invented swamp horror.

Rivers, coasts and open seas: compare the great white shark, orca and whale before deciding what a sailor actually sees. Walruses and the much smaller blue-ringed octopus present very different risks close to shore.

Prehistoric wildlife: start with the dinosaur collection, then consider a glyptodon, Smilodon, Agriotherium or Uintatherium. These animals lived in different periods and environments; their appearance together is a campaign choice, not real natural history.

For creatures with supernatural powers or legendary origins, continue to the Magical Beasts collection or the wider Bestiary. The pages linked above retain their own edition statistics, habitats and encounter details.

Animal Type Rules — Pathfinder 1e and D&D 3.5e

The following Hit Dice, base attack, skill and trait rules describe the legacy animal creature type. D&D 5e and 2024 use their own Beast stat blocks rather than this type’s base attack and Hit Dice progression.

An animal has the following features (unless otherwise noted).

  • d8 Hit Die.
  • Base attack bonus equal to 3/4 total Hit Dice (medium progression).
  • Good Fortitude and Reflex saves.
  • Skill points equal to 2 + Intelligence modifier (minimum 1) per Hit Die. The following are class skills for animals: Acrobatics, Climb, Fly, 
  • Perception, Stealth, and Swim.
  • Traits: An animal possesses the following traits (unless otherwise noted in a creature’s entry).
  • Intelligence score of 1 or 2 (no creature with an Intelligence score of 3 or higher can be an animal).
  • Low-Light Vision.
  • Alignment: Always neutral.
  • Treasure: None.
  • Proficient with its natural weapons only. A noncombative herbivore treats its natural weapons as secondary attacks. Such attacks are made with a -5 penalty on the creature’s attack rolls, and the animal receives only 1/2 its Strength modifier as a damage adjustment.
  • Proficient with no armor unless trained for war. (See FAQs and Handle Animal Skill.)
  • Animals breathe, eat, and sleep.

Complete Animal A–Z Catalogue (327 entries)

This complete alphabetical catalogue also contains legendary animals and game adaptations. Their presence in the Animal archive does not establish a real-world habitat, period or rules edition. Use the guided encounters above if you would rather choose by environment.

The search covers all site pages. To browse this collection only, open one of the alphabetical groups below. Links are directly to published entries.

A–C — 62 entries
D–F — 77 entries
G–I — 40 entries
J–L — 16 entries
M–O — 40 entries
P–R — 30 entries
S–U — 47 entries
V–Z — 15 entries

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