How do animal spawns work?

[theTrav]

nah, in this case it is the dev's that are incorrect. brodgar is in the center of a circle, not a ring.
The ring that they call ring 2 is the first ring.

how many rings our are you from brodgar? 0, I'm in brodgar's territory, or 1, I am 1 ring out from brodgar

[loftar]

Of course, this "circle" of which you speak is just a special case of a ring, where the inner diameter is zero; that innermost ring having that characteristic being the first ring (i.e. ring 1). ;)

Either way, we do, indeed, not normally speak of rings at all. The terms in which we normally spoke, before people started discussing the map, were simply creature levels. The creatures closest to Brodgar are level 1 creatures, while those in Mordor are level 10 creatures. The rings are simply the boundaries where the composition of our current (makeshift) creature level function and the floor function transitions between different integral values. (The creature levels are actually non-integral values, but some creature properties -- like where they start being aggressive, or their list of available attacks -- only change at integral transitions)