D&D General Dinosaurs in your campaigns

[Vaalingrade]

Megafauna everywhere!

Triceratops are a common beast of burden alongside ankylosaurs. Tyrannosaurs stalk the foothills. Utahraptors (renamed to equiraptors) are mounts and velociraptors are hunting beasts.

And beyond the Mesozoic, megatheriums are warbeasts for elves, gastornis are also mounts, dienofelis are as common as wolves alongside terror birds, glyphtodons are dangerous pests and indracatheriums are domesticated for their meat.

 

[Shades of Eternity]

I made my own.

I worked under the old school idea that dinosaurs are particularly suseptable to demonic possession, thus creating terrorsaurs. aka demonic dinosaurs.

However, the cybercult often compensates by surgically removing possession and replacing them with bionics, thus creating dinocybers.

so yeah

demonic dinosaurs vs bionic dinosaurs.

plus a valid pc race are the fossilborn, whom are essentially dinosaur folk tieflings.

 

[Lazybones]

In my homebrew setting, dinosaurs are found on another continent far from the one where I run most of my campaigns (along with dragonborn and other "animal" humanoids like tabaxi). One of my groups made it over there, and their presence (bolstered a bit from the MM stock versions) really helped create the mood of a strange and dangerous place.

 

[cbwjm]

I typically don't use them, which annoys some people online who want to turn into a t-rex.

If I do use them then I'll use like:

• Creatures from a lost world area.
• Standard creatures in a prehistoric era game.
• Beasts of burden in games where scaled humanoids are dominant (so lizardfolk, dragonborn, snake-people) which can be folded in with the prehistory setting or a lost world area in the standard campaign.

 

[Zardnaar]

On my own worlds they're proto dragons the ancients infused with elemental power.

The true dragons were corrupted into the D&D ones.

 

[Shadowdweller00]

Present but rare, usually inhabiting isolated primeval regions. Often in jungles, but sometimes deserts. Why deserts? I don't know - giant lizards seem to fit deserts in my psyche somehow. Usually are distant relatives of dragons - in the same sense that lemurs are distant relatives to humans in the real world, being primates.

Having the BBEG drop victims into a room with a T-rex via secret trapdoor is a classic IMO. I adapt others to various purposes. I use pteranodon stats for a hybrid vulture-pteranodon mutant creature that scavenges the Mournlands in my Eberron game.

 

[Tonguez]

Velociraptors are very common imc, as a various toothed proto-avians. Lizardfolk are evolved Troodon, Urds are Yiqi and and microraptors are a rainforest 'bird'. Axebirds, Plesiosaurs and Andrewsarchus are all known beasts. Griffons, Owlbears and Serpent-hounds are all forms of Synapsid.

So yep medium, small and tiny dinosaurs are natural animals imc. Ceratopians are less common, but not rare.
Other Large and larger dinosaurs (Brontos, T Rex, Stegosaurs are rare and mainly lost world).

 

[Demetrios1453]

I tend to have them appear relatively randomly here and there, especially in remote, isolated areas like moors and uninhabited prairies. And jungles of course!

But talking about dinosaurs and D&D will always remind me of one of the most memorable encounters in the long-running 2e D&D campaign I was a part of in college. I had made up this huge random encounter table for the DM to use, and it did have dinosaurs in it for various biomes. Once, when we were going across a grassland to our next destination, we were attacked by a gorgosaurus, which somehow managed to get surprise on us, despite the DM having previously mentioned that we were in a "flat, treeless plain". After a bit of good-natured complaining about how a 30-foot-tall dinosaur could sneak up on us (and, to be fair, we were camped and it was dark out), we continued on with the encounter, which was actually rather tough for our level. After defeating it, the DM asked "OK, so what happened to your horses?" Someone said that we must have tied them to a tree, but the DM immediately countered with "flat, treeless plain", to which we had no answer to. Then suddenly, someone remembered that we were hauling around a statue of a petrified character who had stupidly charged towards a basilisk in the previous session (when the rest of the party was trying to prudently stay away from it, since, on our flat, treeless plain, we had spotted it from a distance), and he said "Oh, we tied them to the statue!" The DM (an engineering student) then proceeded to calculate exactly what forces would be exerted by a half-dozen panicked horses on a statue. I remember him saying "Oooooh, I'm gettng some nasty vectors here!" Needless to say, the petrified character was now in several pieces, and the player was not happy about it. Given that he was a "problem" player (see charging a basilisk above, which was merely the latest in a long line of anti-collaborative actions), few tears were shed when he left the game shortly afterwards.

 

[DrunkonDuty]

Love me some dinosaurs. Especially triceratops, the coolest of the dinosaurs.

I do prefer them to be located in distant, hard to reach places. I just find that the exoticism adds to the excitement.

Oh, and yes, they now have feathers.

Do we know if all Dino's had feathers? Or just some types?

 

[Tonguez]

Love me some dinosaurs. Especially triceratops, the coolest of the dinosaurs.

I do prefer them to be located in distant, hard to reach places. I just find that the exoticism adds to the excitement.

Oh, and yes, they now have feathers.

Do we know if all Dino's had feathers? Or just some types?

All dinosaurs were bipedal (at least until they got too heavy) but not all dinosaurs had feathers.
The defining trait of dinosaurs is the existence of a sacrum (3 or more fused vetebrae that connects the hips to the backbone) and the first types appeared 230+ million years ago but sign of feathers only begins 180 million years ago, so the earliest dinosaurs were not feathered.

only 77 types of dinosaur are definitely known to be feathered. The rest are very much debated but it seem likely that all Theropods and a few ornithiscians had feathers (although it is pointed out that all mammals have hair but Elephants and Whales are largely hairless - large adult theropods (eg Spnosaurus) might thus have been bald).

Ankylosaurs and Stegs were not feathered (though it may have had quills) and no evidence of feathers has been found amongst Sauropods. The ceratopsian Psittacosaurus had quills, but no sign of feathers have been found in other Ceratopsians including Triceratops.