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daimaru wrote:I can't find -anything- on this other than race horses can't take the rigors of the wilderness. Apparently the other breeds are supposed to magically subsist on whatever they find to eat. Does anyone know if anything else is said about it?

No, nothing else is ever said.

In the real world, a horse subject to constant, fast travel would need a supplement to whatever grazing it could pick up during breaks. Generally grain, and I'd have to pack some along, along with my own food supplies. Is this true in Rifts? If it is, I would think that as a biomancer I could grow Gifts of Nature to supplement the horses night time grazing. True?

Your getting into "GM's call" territorty. Palladium veiws horse-travel rules as inconsequential and in all probability forgot it even put those blurbs into south america.

But something to think about: a large reason for the Mongols incredible mobility wasn't the speed or strength of their horses--they were actually pretty diminuitive by european standards. it's that they had great endurance and could forage everything needing no supplementary grain. This fact alone freed them of the logistical constraints of a huge wagon train of grain following behind like most calvary forces did.

Race horses are bred for speed and size (to increase leg stride). These features means they need more calories than can be conviently gotten by grazing grass during breaks. sure they will, but it's not enough. A smaller, studier pony on the other hand is fine, because it's smaller, slower, and thus needs and burns fewer calories. The larger the animal, the more they need to eat to sustain themselves. The faster they can go, the more calories they burn. A slow, small horse will do much better in the wilderness than a large race horse, even if the race horse will out-run it in the short term, in the long term the pony covered twice the distance in a day. it's a marathon, not a sprint.

daimaru wrote:I can't find -anything- on this other than race horses can't take the rigors of the wilderness. Apparently the other breeds are supposed to magically subsist on whatever they find to eat. Does anyone know if anything else is said about it?

In the real world, a horse subject to constant, fast travel would need a supplement to whatever grazing it could pick up during breaks. Generally grain, and I'd have to pack some along, along with my own food supplies. Is this true in Rifts?

I don't remember where I saw it -whether in Rifts or in PFRPG -but there was a section in some Book somewhere that explicitly states that you can't just take your "average" horse (apparently meaning your horse that you're taking out on long rides and physically rigorous adventures, not just sitting around most of the day like regular horses in the wild do) and just feed it grass. It has to have grains, too, as a sizeable part of its diet.

If it is, I would think that as a biomancer I could grow Gifts of Nature to supplement the horses night time grazing. True?

There doesn't seem to be any "lifeform limit" on who can or cannot use the Gift Of Nature.

HOWEVER, the magic seems to be geared towards a human-sized person, and as such you might have to feed the horse more than one (GM's call, really; he might very well rule that the spell magically sustains the one that eats it, and therefore the physical size of the creature doesn't really matter).