D&D General Dinosaurs in your campaigns

[Frozen_Heart]

Does your world not have gryphons or perytons too?

Nope neither. (It also doesn't have lions or stags, so neither half of griffons or perytons are there).

 

[CleverNickName]

I use them all the time. Just about every campaign I run has a "lost world" area that the heroes will visit at least once. (Often this is the Isle of Dread, reskinned/retooled for whatever setting or game edition we're playing.)

 

[Quartz]

. But I'm wondering how common or rare are they in your campaigns, for something that's extinct in our world.

My notional Celestial Imperium of Oerth is a society of dragonborn and lizardfolk so use of herbivorous dinosaurs as beasts of burden is a given. Smaller raptors take the roles of cats, hunting dogs, rats, and the like, but the larger carnivores would have been restricted to the more impenetrable places.

 

[Clint_L]

I've always found it amusing that Dinosaurs have been ever present in D&D. But I'm wondering how common or rare are they in your campaigns, for something that's extinct in our world.

Are they everywhere, or only live in secluded places?
Based on some more recent findings about Dinosaurs, do they have feathers or not on your campaign worlds?
Is there a Pleisosaurus that lives in a lake somewhere?

I like the King Kong Monster Island schtick, so in my campaign dinosaurs are confined to similar locales. And also, zombie dinosaurs rule so I often find a way to bring this big boi into the story:

 

[Mind of tempest]

it has occurred to me that some might wish to use dinosaurs as more a horrific monstrosity rather than a living animal, I heard old conan books do that although I have no primary source for this.

assuming someone might use them in that way beyond just straight up using real ones someone might wish to use the dnd monstrosities classes unnatural nature to turn out something deeply horrific to fight against, the kind of thing made by mind flayer or the more competent and sinister version of the lunatics who make owlbears and howler wasps.

for this I will link this video of some people coming up with a worse version of Jurassic World's indoraptor:
the resulting nightmare of biology is Mortalodon Anthrophagus meaning deadly-toothed human eater.

 

[lotuseater]

They are a common feature in my campaign because there's always a player who uses Polymorph to turn a party member into a T-rex.