The Oleron, a giant flightless bird mount for your 3.5 game
Tuesday, March 17, 2009 at 07:32AM Want a critter you can add to nearly any campaign in any environment? Want to spice up your average mount selection? Did you enjoy wasting 10 hours of your life racing, raising, and breeding the gold chocobo (Gods, why?)? Then you'll love the U20 Oleron, freely downloadable from the Critter Crate right now.
Delicious...
On Spearing and Flinging Prey with Your Beak
The oleron's improved grab and fling abilities can spell death for poorly-armoured PCs with poor grapple checks, especially if you're a bit of an evil DM who runs multiple olerons, one at a time (oleron 1 skewers and flings your sorceror to oleron 2, who skewers and flings him to oleron 3, and so on). Ugly stuff, and a situation your players will probably find disagreeable).
By the time your players are level 4-5 and you're running multiple olerons, the PCs probably have sufficient armor classes and grapple checks to arrest this ornithological attack, but it's something to be aware of.
On Riding Your Oleron into Battle
Olerons are pretty easy to domesticate, and can be trained for war. Their reach, improved grab, fling, and scent abilities make them arguably better-than-average mounts (although they're less stable and less able to carry heavier loads around). I enjoy running olerons in my game, but be sure you know what your players are getting if you allow them in yours.
Finally, enjoy!
3.5 Edition, Mount, critters, monsters in 3E, DMing, Dungeons and Dragons Monsters 
Reader Comments (2)
Blech. No offense, but I hate large, flightless birds. Nothing worse then a microcephalic giant something trying to peck your eyes out. Had I been Lovecraft, Cthulu would have been a 600' tall ostrich.
(Actually, your idea is quite cool. Just not my cuppa tea, y'know?)
Heh, no offense taken. Some critters just creep us out. I hate harvestmen (daddy-long-legs) and those giant mayflies with their flailing legs...
I'm glad you like the idea, but I can't really take much credit—this is essentially a kiwi made large size, plus some creative licenses. I'm not sure where I learned about them, but I'm guessing it was Life of Birds.
Nature's pretty awesome.