but like what's the new bestiary
July 14, 2025
I think I've talked about this before, but since then the project has gone through plenty of changes. In between those changes, I started my own blog, and so I thought it would be appropriate to make a newer post about the whole thing. So here I go.
A good chunk of my art now has been of my (open!) species, the Thanun. Thing is, they don't exist in isolation. In fact, they're part of an entire universe! And not just one that's built around them... OK yes, it kind of is. But the rest of this universe, in my opinion, stands on its own, and there's a few extra species on top of it.
The name I've been using to refer to this universe has been the New Bestiary. The genre it's in varies and is constantly changing. But if you crave categories, there's a few key words I've found to describe it: grimdark, cyberpunk, space opera (?), and political drama. Oh, and the whole thing is brimming with furry influence. Sorry, that's my bad.
To simplify, the setting is a war-scorched cosmos. Humanity is subjugated alongside many other species-- much like these species, our culture as we know it is wiped from existence. Billions are either drafted or bred for war. Resources are strained, major factions are stretched thin, and life for almost everyone is very difficult, in war and out of it.
There isn't a huge focus on people doing massive things. Instead the stories I make for the New Bestiary center around the lives of average people. I... haven't made any stories yet. But I plan to make these stories center around optimism. The New Bestiary has mostly been about hope in a universe that opposes it. This isn't to lessen the darkness of the world or to turn all the violence into a circus. War drives the story, it isn't a comic relief character.
What rotten womb did this come out of?
The New Bestiary was made from a giant disorganized setting I had since I was a tween, roughly. Essentially, I was constantly thinking about sci-fi settings. I liked sci-fi stuff and I wanted to make something myself. When I listened to music I translated it into action scenes. I wanted a desktop PC for a good while, and I said the first thing I would make was a game in Unity for my sci-fi world at the time.
That game never got made. But using that computer I did draw stuff for that world. A few years pass, I turned that world into "Drachenworld". It was set in an Isekai-esque world where chunks of our world are teleported to a bizarro version of Earth. There's art for it on my DeviantArt-- here's one that I made for the Megacoats, who I keep forgetting about. Along with Megacoats, one species I had were the Gigamites, who become important-- I'll talk more about them in a second.
Anyways, my late teen years arrive and I get more into cyberpunk and darker stuff. I ditched the confused cartoon vibe and went for a darker aesthetic that was equally confusing still. This is where the Zhhanun come from, who I'll also talk about later. This was also when the earth-centered setting turned into the war-scorched cosmos from earlier. The mood was of a hard sci-fi war thriller, between Halo and John Wick. Quite recently, grimdark came into the picture, and since then that mood turned into a pretty dark one!
How I'd describe it nowadays is... exactly how I described it earlier? Were you not reading this post?? Oh, you were??? I'll explain again anyways! It's something I'm a bit more comfortable with; a soft worldbuilding project, set in a grimdark world, centering around the lives of the big and small aliens trying to endure it's gruesomeness.
And soft worldbuilding specifically. I've come to dislike the "hard" worldbuilding that at one point just consumed this project entirely. Before I started writing, I was going to write "the world really deserves a newer wiki for it's lore". But I want the world and it's lore to be set in motion-- in stories-- rather than being tucked away in a mere wiki article.
Ok, now what are Gigamites and what the hell are the Zhhanun?
The Zhhanun are the evolution of the Gigamites.
Back in the very first world I mentioned, there were "Nightmares", synthetic demon scalies that eventually became the focal point of that world. Eventually I came up with a hybrid between them and another species of parasite bugs that also existed in the world. They were the "Gigamites" I talked about earlier.
Later on came Drachenworld. Nightmares turned into an unnamed alien forerunner race (later on they became the Hellknights, another species of mine that's currently on life support to be frank). The Gigamites, however, stuck around. I also made art of them here's a particularly ugly piece. But instead of being a hybrid of two fictional species, they were now just a hybrid between the alien race and moths. A piece of lore in that world was that the aliens were making fusions between themselves and the native species of Earth-- the Megacoats were a hybrid between them and wolves, for example.
Initially the Gigamites were going to be heavily integrated into human civilization-- they had no culture of their own, really. Then I gave them their own culture. This is when I started to get into conlanging, so I gave them a language and with it their own name. And I remember... neither.
Then, the setting became more sci-fi, and I turned the Gigamites into aliens. This is what created the Nuna, who would become the Zhhanun we know today.
If anything in the New Bestiary is going anywhere, I want it to be the Zhhanun species. They really deserve their own page somewhere, but let me give you the spiel here. The best thing I can describe them as is anthropomorphic space bears. They are giant, semi-arboreal sophonts adapted to the sub-zero winters of Ðaov's tropics. Their behavior is somewhere between humans and raccoons. Their cultures are scarred ones, traumatized by millennia of conflict and exploitation. In the New Bestiary, they are the second most populous race in the known cosmos, and right now they live in their darkest era yet.
There's also a subspecies of the Zhhanun-- the Movathhanun, who are genetically engineered super soldiers employed for special missions. I would make a reference here but I feel the big war game company would sue me. Jjadzh is one character I have, she is the only Movathhanun character I have and so far the only one I've published art of. I have two others that are on their way.
They're kind of important. They've essentially acted as the Minions of the New Bestiary. They are to this world like slugcats are to Rain World. They're the fellas you will see.
Well, what will we see?
The M.O. of this world has been to make games based on it. For the longest time, I wanted to make an open world RPG. Even before the New Bestiary, I wanted a turn-based action RPG for Drachenworld, featuring base-building. Yes, Pokemon already did this. No, I did not grow up on Pokemon. I grew up on people who grew up on Pokemon. I am a nostalgia parasite.
For the New Bestiary I feel I also had a similar idea. But it eventually came to me that an open world is pretty damn hard to make! So I reduced my scope. Initially I was going to make an FPS campaign game along the lines of Halo and Batman: Arkham. But I eventually felt the story was too deep and dialog-oriented for a game to do it justice.
So instead, my pitch is a character-oriented survival shooter. It's a permadeath RPG, almost like a roguelike. But the focus is less on randomly generated levels and more on you character! Your character is heavily personalized and levels up as you play. I also plan on having a few mechanics with little to no gameplay impact-- like relationships, sanity, and changes in appearance. You lose all of this when you die. I plan to have previous playthroughs impact future ones, as well. I'm not sure if that'll be easier to develop, but hey, it isn't an open world RPG.
Back to stories, I want to do something with them. The first thing I thought of was animations-- ideally, short films. The caveat there is that these stories have dialogue! I don't have voice actors and I'm not really a voice actor myself. So instead, I'm aiming for webcomics. Initially I wanted a serialized series, but I want these comics focused on worldbuilding and character shenanigans, so the series will likely be episodic.
Essentially, I don't want to put the burden on myself nor on you, the reader, to mess with a giant story-line. At the same time, I also want things like character arcs. You'll see them, but you should also be able to just hop into an episode without having watched the rest of the series. This, at the same time, gives me the power to ask "what if she do that" and make story of her do that.
Wiki?
I already talked about wikis, but let me explain what my decision is.
I already sort of have a wiki. I have planets, maps, languages, and species. All of that has to go somewhere, and it's on my computer, in a kind-of sort-of wiki format, i.e. Obsidian notes. I will eventually make a wiki for this stuff. I just don't want to kick off a wiki and have that be the sole product of this world, you dig? I want to start off with a story or a game, because that represents the core of this world and it's purpose. A knowledge base doesn't really do this world justice.
Outro
The most important I got out of this article, personally, is that I really need to put my projects on a sticky note on a monitor. But the New Bestiary has taught me way more lessons. Look at my DeviantArt and you'll realize that a good chunk of my art has been for the New Bestiary. I learned how to draw because of the New Bestiary. I learned a good chunk of biology, geography, and especially linguistics because of my desire to worldbuild, which comes from the New Bestiary. I learned my writing workflow because of the New Bestiary. I learned how to write stories because of the New Bestiary.
The key thing is that the New Bestiary represents a good chunk of my identity and life, at least right now. So, uh, I don't want to let it rot in my brain. Expect more, then!