inspirations

Arguably I'm drawing inspiration for this little project from all over than damn place -- from novels to manga to video games to other rpgs.

There's an echo of the 3e druid and ranger and their animal companions; over in Final Fantasy-land there's Rinoa and Angelo in VIII and Shadow and Interceptor in VI, not to mention the Mediators, Beastmasters and their hordes in the Tactics games.

In fiction of all stripes, the trope of the traveler and their companion animal, often mystically linked, is so engrained that it's become a stereotype. It's even worse in certain strains of manga, if the companion in question is small and has Mysterious Powers [tm] --

But the overwhelming inspiration for the human-beast meshing in TherionRPG is to be found in the novel Tomorrow's Sphinx, written by Clare Bell. The mental bonding between Asu-Kheknemt and his young king, the two functioning as one individual, is a perfect example of what I'm trying to reflect in the mechanics for Therion.