How do you use dinosaurs in your campaign?

[Dillon]

How?
That would screw up the ecosystem. What use is an undead dino to a Plains Indian style culture? Definitely not a good food source.

I was economical with my words. The setting is a non-historical deeply weird west. Neither myself or my players are comfortable with genocide or slavery. So no plains Indians, and in the post-war frontier it is necromancy that has been banned, not the institututon of slavery.

 

[Tonguez]

I was economical with my words. The setting is a non-historical deeply weird west. Neither myself or my players are comfortable with genocide or slavery. So no plains Indians, and in the post-war frontier it is necromancy that has been banned, not the institututon of slavery.

you’re uncomfortable with genocide but you’ve removed plains indians entirely - from a weird west setting?

oh the irony

 

[Dillon]

you’re uncomfortable with genocide but you’ve removed plains indians entirely - from a weird west setting?

oh the irony

You raise an excellent point. I can see now that it is clearly a mistake on my part to refer to my setting as weird west. The phrase weird west strongly implies a historic wild west with the addition of elements like magic, Cthulhu, or steampunk technology. I intend for my setting to have as much resemblance to the historic wild west as the Firefly TV show did, although I won't be requiring my players to have characters who are adherants to a lost cause narrative. A better way of describing my setting might be Gaslamp Fantasy Frontier, drawing on a mix of ideas from both wild west and sword and planet stories, and the Ishmael Reed poem I am a Cowboy in the Boat of Ra. I do want to include themes from western genre films, such as the tension between justice/vengeance or freedom/responsibility. To get back to the dinosaurs, the idea of the lichosaur in the game is to play a role as a non-renewable resource being exploited by the settlers, where the indigenous people (Therionthropes - animal headed humanoids) see the lichosaurs as sacred ancestors. So a lichosaur is like a whale, on land, and I can throw in a villain obsessed with hunting down a great white T-Rex. It is a hook for conflict that my players can choose to engage with or ignore.

 

[Tonguez]

You raise an excellent point. I can see now that it is clearly a mistake on my part to refer to my setting as weird west. The phrase weird west strongly implies a historic wild west with the addition of elements like magic, Cthulhu, or steampunk technology. I intend for my setting to have as much resemblance to the historic wild west as the Firefly TV show did, although I won't be requiring my players to have characters who are adherants to a lost cause narrative. A better way of describing my setting might be Gaslamp Fantasy Frontier, drawing on a mix of ideas from both wild west and sword and planet stories, and the Ishmael Reed poem I am a Cowboy in the Boat of Ra. I do want to include themes from western genre films, such as the tension between justice/vengeance or freedom/responsibility. To get back to the dinosaurs, the idea of the lichosaur in the game is to play a role as a non-renewable resource being exploited by the settlers, where the indigenous people (Therionthropes - animal headed humanoids) see the lichosaurs as sacred ancestors. So a lichosaur is like a whale, on land, and I can throw in a villain obsessed with hunting down a great white T-Rex. It is a hook for conflict that my players can choose to engage with or ignore.

that actually sounds kinda cool and gaslamp fantasy frontier is very evocative - nice

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

@Dillon

Soooo...the Therionthropes perform the rituals transforming certain special Dino’s into undead?

 

[CleverNickName]

I use dinosaurs all the time. In the game world, there wasn't an asteroid impact millions of years ago, there was no Yellowstone caldera collapse, no ice age. So dinosaurs are all alive and well in certain regions of the planet...usually in the remote tropical islands and dense jungles far from civilization.

 

[GMMichael]

My gods put dinosaur-evidence in the ground and then never mention it to mortals. Just to mess with them.

Besides that, dinosaurs are an excellent way to include non-magical dragons in one's game (besides giving them spells, breath weapons, and physically-impossible flight, and then pronouncing them non-magical).