I'm working on a Gaea's Revenge set up and was wondering if this sounds a bit too cruel towards the players.

The idea I had was that a rattle snake gets into their tent/sleeping bag and attacks. I'm still working out the details, but thought that given the venomous nature of the attack, players should require a Vitality check until treated with each failure adding 1 physical stress to the victim (poison effect).

I was thinking of tweaking the Flock of birds stats for the snake (features still to be determined), but was curious as to what others thought about the idea.

Other "fun" animals:

Brown recluse spiders . Untreated bites become necrotic !

Certain wild animals in North America can still carry the Plague . Now that's easily treated with antibiotics, but those might be hard to come by during a world wide mass panic. Or they might carry rabies . Pack of rabid wolverines anyone? (Wolverines!)

Duckbill platypuss . No really! they have spurs with venomous glands on their limbs and while the venom is not leathal to humans it's extremly painfull and can incapasitate humans. Imagine your players face when one of them get's taken down by a duckbill platypuss of all things!

Killer bees! Already a fearsome threat but now guided by Gaega they will strike at key targets.

Comodo dragon . Not native to North america, so might be a bit of a stretch for your players to encounter one. But they have a venom that stops your blood from clotting and your wounds from healing properly.

You know, I think I'd rather take my chances against Cthulhu...

You might have a bit of trouble finding a duckbill platypus in North America too ;-).

But then I live in Australia, so you just may have given me a really good, novel idea. Then again there's so many venomous creatures here I can really take my pick.

On a non venomous note I think I recall somewhere about long instinct animals making a come back which could make for some interesting ideas. You could have dogs and wolves reaching proportions of dire wolves, cats regressing back to their sabre tooth ancestors, birds following their genetic path backwards into raptors and other flesh eating dinosaurs, the return of some truly impressive reptilian carnivores and from an Australian perspective, marsupials regressing back to marsupial lions, giant kangaroos and wombats etc.

Not that you need to do this, there's still some impressive animals going around today that with nature taking over could do some major damage. It just might give the players a thrill (or total terror) to see walking relics from the past coming to retake the Earth.

Australia: Spiders. Spiders everywhere.

Everything is better with dinosaurs. That devolution thing would be cool. Or maybe Gaea is very fickle and desides one day that dinosaurs are fashionable again and now it's mankind's turn to go extinct. So all of a sudden dinosaurs are coming back and they all kill and attack humans on sight (even the herbivores) The downside ofcourse is the players (if they are anything like me) would spend more time and effort hunting a T-rex than trying to stay alive.

Now the thing I would do as Gaea would be to hyper evolve all flora and fauna to become inedible by humans. The downside with that scenario however is you'll find out how ok your friends are with the concept of cannibalism.

Australia: Spiders. Spiders everywhere.

And don't forget snakes and jellyfish and wasps and even ants that can kill you!