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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Desdichado" data-source="post: 3524687" data-attributes="member: 2205">I am increasingly upset and personally offended by this great idea I had.  No matter what I do with it, it seems to actively resist being used in any meaningful way, but it's too good an idea for me to let go, so maybe if I toss it out here to the braintrust you can help me figure out where to take it.  I'll cross post this a few other places and see what I get, probably, too.It all started a few years ago while I was watching The Lost World.  Y'know, the second Jurassic park movie.  There's the scene where Peter Postlethwaite and his team arrive in a bunch of Hummers, trucks, motorcycles and whatnot and chase down herds of dinosaurs, looping them with ropes and cables and shooting them with tranqs and generally trying to round up and capture as many as possible, of course.  While watching this, I was immediately struck by it's similarity to Hatari! so much so that I pulled out the first movie and replaced it with the latter.  Then I watched Hatari!---which if you've never seen it, is a movie set c. 1960 around a company that lives in a compound in East Africa and catches animals for a living for zoos and circuses.  John Wayne headlines an ensemble cast that includes Elsa Martinelli, Hardy Krueger, Bruce Cabot, Red Buttons and others.  It's great fun, and is punctuated by action sequences where they're actually driving around on the savannah trying to catch animals.  Most of them  just run, of course, and have to be roped down---John Wayne's character spends most of these scenes belted into a seat rigged to the front hood of a pickup truck.  Others are a big more exciting---the rhino gores one character in the leg and smashes the truck quite a bit when they try to catch him, and the buffalo are hardly less belligerent.Then the idea hit me; how about a company of adventurers who catch dinosaurs to sell to specialty zoos and whatnot, and live somewhere where dinosaurs actually are common?  I'm not a huge fan of time travel, so I hatched up this idea of travelling to other planets via something not too disimilar to stargates.  The technology was discovered when a number of scaly humanoid aliens suddenly arrive on earth and start interacting with humans.  These guys are actually rather savage; they didn’t invent the technology, and they only know how to do basic maintainence and travel to worlds that are already pre-programmed in.  Who did the programming and why, and why complete prehistoric ecosystems exist on other planets are theorized about by many, but not really understood--I've kinda got something similar to The Ancient's of Traveller fame involved to cover that angle.  Gray aliens, who seem to operate on time frames of millions of years, have been manipulating evolution here and elsewhere for aims that only they understand.In any case, I'm not sure I care to go about answering those types of mysteries right off the bat---but I want to do something with the setting, and I seem unable to figure out exactly what.  I initially concieved of it when NaNoWriMo was imminent a few years ago, so I thought maybe I'd write a book/novel or at least series of short stories utilizing the setting, but I found that I was pretty much just retelling Hatari! except with dinosaurs.  More or less.  Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but I had hoped for more.  Then I thought about adopting it to a RPG campaign, but a hookable plot driving story just didn't present itself.  There's only so many times you can have encounters that consist of chasing down and subduing dinosaurs, fighting off rival hunter gangs, or exploring ancient gray alien ruins on strange worlds before it starts to get repetitive, so I wasn't quite sure how to do that either.Now, just last night I rewatched Hatari! (something I do on average twice a year or so) and this setting came back to my mind and I decided I'm tired of not knowing what to do with it.  Any ideas, anyone?</blockquote>

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