Hello Guys, Gals, and Nonbinary Pals, I present to you:
How to Tame a Tarasque
Now some of you may be asking, what is a tarasque? Others of you may know already! Tarasques are mythical monsters, commonly found in Dungeons & Dragons as an endgame level boss monster, but originates as a myth from medieval France as a way to describe the town of Tarascon got its name. And today, our goal is to take the tarasque and turn it into a creature that could functionally work in the modern day!
Firstly, it’s important to understand what a tarasque really is. In D&D, the tarasque is a monster of kaiju proportions, with a cohesive design that looks like a proper threat, and goes anywhere from hibernating from months or years on end to tearing a hole through your unsuspecting game. Unfortunately, the mythical version is what we’re using today, so we’re working with this:
[Credit: FoolishLittleMortal, Deviantart]
Yes that’s right, the tarrasque, while still maintaining its kaiju proportions, is a chimerical mash up of lion’s head, turtle’s shell, bear paws, ox body, and whatever kind of tail you want to give it. Which is both a massive shame and goes to show that medieval France truly had no idea of what an original character truly meant. But this is what we have, so it’s time to make it work.
Before we start answering the questions, we have to settle on a few other points as well. Firstly, it’s kaiju-esque proportions and solitary nature make it very difficult for a tarasque to survive past it's incredibly long lifespan, so we have to both shrink it down to size and give it enough smarts to understand the concept of friendship. Let’s say male tarasque are about 2 meters and 190kg, while female tarasque are slightly shorter and weigh about 130kg. Now we need to place the tarasque in the world - I’m thinking Africa, specifically in the Sahara. Tarasque are incredibly dangerous, mythically they can shrug off catapult fire faster than I can say “Procrastination Master”, so it’s best to keep these as far away from civilization proper as possible.
Now that we’ve addressed the tarasque in the room, its time to get down to business. How does a tarasque survive in the wild? Well, mythically the tarrasque is rampaging through southern France faster than Donald Trump’s ability to go out of business, so obviously it's a carnivore. A tarasque is as close to the top of the food chain any non-human can get, and due to its wildly incongruous character design filled with some of the most wildly overpowered pieces of animal it could ever wish for, would easily be able to take down whatever it wanted with pack tactics. If it did, however, run into a problem, don’t worry, it’s got a turtle shell the size of a smart car to fall back on! So you’d really have to hurt this thing good to be able to fight it!
You may also be asking “how does a tarasque interact with members of its species?” Well then, friend of indeterminate gender, do I have an answer for you! I mentioned this before, but tarasque would be powerful pack hunters, so clearly they should be working together for both efficient kill time and, more importantly, efficient intimidation power. Because who needs to kill stuff when you could just scare everything to death, right? There would be only a couple of males in a pack, outnumbered often 2 to 1 or 3 to 1 by the number of adult females, who would take care of the young tarasque and run the pack so the males can focus on finding food. Young tarasque would spend their time either being catered to by the adult females or spend their time play fighting each other more often than little kids getting into the cupboards, so they can grow up to be strong fighters! A tarasque should grow up into an adult by the age of 5 years. However, male tarasque would often be shunned by their pack in order to avoid inbreeding, which means they would need to either go solo or find a new pack that would let them in, often by brutal gladiatorial combat with the current adult males in front of throngs of screaming tarasque fans!
Social interactions with other animals would likely be left to a minimum, due mostly to its lack of cohesive design giving it the appeal of a 5 year old that pooped their pants while eating a bucket of glue. Social interactions with other animals would be limited, and probably center around watering holes within the Sahara, and would be notably muted at best most of the time. Most of the remaining interaction would go towards getting their paws up in other animals for faster takedowns than a new player walking into a Fortnite match against a bunch of pro players.
Unfortunately for our dear tarasque friends, no amount of plot armor or intimidation power is a match for an AK-47. Due to their nature as carnivores, I imagine that tarasques and humans would struggle to get along. And since tarasques don’t have opposable thumbs, they don’t stand much chance against the kind of heat that humans can pack. While a tarasque may be able to shrug of catapult fire, several dozen clips of simultaneous rifle fire would bring down just about anything. And don’t even get me started on nuclear power! These are tarasques, not tardigrades!
As for tarasque reproduction, I’m not saying they’d do it like they do it on the discovery channel…
but I'm also not saying I'm not.Wait, I thought we already dealt with the tarasque in the room! How is it back‽ Okay, fine. I have something to admit. As it stands, the tarasque would sink into the sand of the sahara and would never be able to make it back out due to its weight distribution. Bear paws don’t work on sand, the ox body/turtle shell combo is just way too heavy, while its ambiguous tail isn’t going to do it any favours either. We need to streamline. We can start by removing the bear paws and giving it something thats better for walking on sand. Replacing the ox body and turtle shell with a sleeker furred body and more fitting design that sacrifices its incredible defense. We can make its fur roughly the same colour as the sand in order to give it some stealth. And finally, we can give it a smaller and less functional tail. This means it doesn’t have to drag something half its body size across the desert, wasting precious time and energy,
This gives us something that looks like this…
[Credit: Wikipedia]
Any resemblance to a real animal is a masterpiece of design
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