Dinosaurs in D&D: Are They Anachronistic? | The Core Fantasies of Monsters
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- Опубликовано: 1 июн 2024
- Everyone has an arbitrary line for what makes sense in D&D and what doesn’t, but I find that dinosaurs often fall on one side of that divide… let’s see if we can figure out why that is.
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CW: Discussions of colonialism and white supremacy
Chapters:
00:00 - Intro
02:35 - Medieval Fantasy Shorthand
03:46 - Greyhawk Monsters
06:13 - The Isle of Dread
09:05 - A Word From Our Sponsor
10:32 - What is the Fantasy of Dinosaurs?
15:40 - Tomb of Annihilation and Lost World Narratives
19:14 - Final Thoughts
21:06 - Outro
Greyhawk's Monstrous Tricks and Combination Monsters | Stealing from Older Editions: • Greyhawk's Monstrous T...
Seth Skorkowsky: D&D Review - The Isle of Dread: • D&D Review - The Isle ...
Should Your Setting Have Spellcasting Services in Town? • Should Your Setting Ha...
Forgotten Realms Bad: • Why I Don't Like the F...
Cold Crash Pictures: Saurian Cinema: Colonialism & The Lost World: • Saurian Cinema: Coloni...
Hush Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
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Ok but for real, what’s your favorite dinosaur?
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My favorite dinosaur is Dilophosaurus Wetherili, the Double Crested Lizard of the early to mid Jurassic, native to North America around what is now northern Arizona.
It was popularized by Jurassic Park as a venomous spitter but in reality was more like a small allosaurus, being around 8 feet tall and 20 feet long.
Yeah, I’m a dinosaur nerd.
Argentinosaurus.
Utahraptor
Ceratosaurus
Dragons took the Wizard route when evolving from lizards and Dinosaurs took the Barbarian path.
DND CAMPAIGN WITH EVERYONE PLAYING GIANT LIZARD CREATURES!!
And birds took the monk route: fast and flashy, but fragile and with lots of extra useless abilities that sound very cool.
I think that would be a really cool concept. Especially if some of the dinos still got magic abilities. Imagine a T-rex with rooting magic that can hold it's prey.
I just want to share this because it is relevant:
I was in a campaign. We were on the cusp of leveling up to 7th level. I was a Sorcerer, with twinned spell, and was going to take Polymorph.
The previous mishap we had made our way through just before had us come face-to-face with dinosaurs.
MY DM LITERALLY SHOWED ME A TREX RIGHT BEFORE I WAS GONNA GET POLYMORPH.
I don't think he even knew that I was gonna start wrecking his encounters by twinned Polymorph trex'ing my two melee companions and Mirror Imaging myself.
Unfortunately the campaign ended early because my DM was arrested.
"my DM was arrested"
If I had a dime..🙄
The man's strategy was so savage his DM committed crimes!
I take it no one told your DM that it's okay to murder player characters, but not players?
Luckily, everyone I game with knows me as "the dinosaur guy", so it's never too much of a surprise when they show up in my games. Plus, the homebrew world I'm working on revolves around dinosaurs
Yes, my players would be surprised if I ever passed a chance to include dinosaurs in anything! :D
Yes! I play a wizard in my friend group's current campaign and will constantly polymorph into dinosaurs, though since the setting is based on Ptolemaic Egypt I elected to choose dinosaurs to match (Spinosaurus instead of Tyrannosaurus, Paralititan instead of Brontosaurus, etc). I'm also working our next campaign, a homebrew world which is going to be a "stonepunk" setting with cavemen and dinosaurs in the style of Primal or One Million Years BC.
@@Primordial_Soup That's awesome! Man, that sounds like a lot of fun
Last campaign I played a moon druid and we had a "no dinosaur" GM rule. But for a reunion one-shot with those characters, the GM gave us a story of touring a rich merchant's "private menagerie"... and then the orb powering the shields broke, and monsters start running free... and we escaped out a door right into a massive park WITH GIANT APES AND DINOSAURS. 😃 It was amazing. One of our party was eaten by T-Rex.
I think they even made a movie out of this one shot!
I slightly change the appearance and names of dinosaurs.
I find the scientific names of dinosaurs to be an element that pulls people out of the game.
New more fantasy names and slightly altered appearance helps the fantasy of ancient creatures that have grown and changed with a living world
I really like how Ixalan from Magic the Gathering took this approach, giving their dinosaurs different names and also covering them with colorful feathers, whether their real counterparts had them or not. It perfectly handwaves any potential "inaccuracies" with how they're presented in favor of just being cool.
In my setting, there’s a series of volcanic tropical islands, where sea elves, Merfolk, and Lizardfolk live and dinosaurs, aka Behemoths, are around. They are used as beasts of burden, war mounts, siege beasts. Food. The Lizardfolk view a few particular ones as avatars for their gods. And the reason I don’t have them in “civilized” places is because it’s one illegal to import them. And then if they do get lose, most ppl not native to those islands, or the marshes and remote places in the world, have never seen them, think they’re monsters, and they are immediately killed.
I'm glad you mentioned the dragons. If humans in european medieval fantasy cities can live with giant fire breathing lizards attacking them every two weeks, any civilization can prosper with the occasional medium non-firebreathing lizard, and occasional T-Rex.
DIRE LIZARDS!!!! Ok but seriously i had a problem with dinosaurs for a long time until i read some of the old Conan comics where they were called dragons. Then when Eberron came out and gave them non-scientific names, and that is when i realized that was the problem i had with them. The naming convention didnt fit with the rest of the fantasy.
I think that was always the case for me. Coming up with in-universe, non-scientific names for dinosaurs would definitely help.
I can see a bunch of haughty wizards using scientific names, but otherwise no one would use the latin names
I think this is a pretty simple problem to solve: use the translation of their latin names
Example: instead of Tyrannosaurus, he is called Tyrant Lizard. Instead of Iguanodon, he is called Iguana Tooth, or some variation of this name.
To me, if Conan can have dinosaurs, my setting can have dinosaurs.
I am one of those DMs that has never felt that dinosaurs "fit" in a DnD game, but, never really put much thought into it.
As you mentioned, though, it makes sense that the presence of dinosaurs in proximity to a humanoid civilization would significantly impact that civilization's development. Dragons would do the same, as you also mentioned, but there's a very significant difference between the two broad creature types: population. Dragons are very few and far between, especially compared to humanoid population centers.
I can imagine a situation where there are some powerful "guardian" type creatures (giants, dragons, etc) that protect the humanoids from the dinosaurs. In that scenario, then the dinosaurs are clearly known about (to some degree).
Definitely a good video as food for thought.
When I introduced dinosaurs to my players, I gave them in-universe rumors of a "massive land dragon" in the area, which was what the locals called the flightless dragons in the area. When they finally did encounter it in the nearby mountains, that was when I out of universe explained to my players they were face to face with a 'dire' tyrannosaurus. Gishath from ixalan. The fact that it filled the same "Apex" role as a dragon to this thriving, medieval town seemed a pretty easy sell that i'm grateful for.
Currently, I'm playing in a Tomb of Annihilation campaign! So, the dinosaurs honestly feel pretty great in our session. They always appear in the thick jungles, where you'd expect a towering primal behemoth to poke their head out. In our session too, Chult is a lot like that stereotypical 'Land of the Lost' that you mentioned. Tons of ancient ruins and dinos just hanging out.
I didn't expect there to be a huge chunk about it and colonialism! I have to admit, our GM has done a great job of detailing the native culture of Port Nyanzaru and the strifes of the city, dealing with the threats of colonialism and insurrection. It feels like a city that owes it's merits to the people, but that has been co-opted by colonial forces. We're currently working alongside a group of trade princes who seem to want to stomp out a lot of the colonial ties that some of the other enemy groups aligned with.
Eberron needs no explanation for dinosaurs OR robots AT THE SAME TIME. Eberron rules.
I'm not sure of the episode but campaign 2 had at least one t-rex when the Mighty Nein were on Rumblecusp. I remember Liam being conflicted because HE wanted to fight it, but knew Caleb wouldn't
Been wanting to *have* dinosaurs in the world I'm home brewing. I'm thinking of having them pushed back far from civilization. Maybe the natives had a war with them and were able to drive them away so they could establish a country. Now the Wilds have roaming, "wingless dragons"
I run them pretty much the exact same way. True Dragons are basically just the dominant evolutionary pinnacle of a completely separate tree of life. Now there are “draconids” that fill all sorts of biological niches in nature, like large cats, wolves, horses, etc.
In my last homebrew adventure the players were in an unexplored steppe that hadn’t been civilized in thousands of years. I decided when flipping through the monster manual to create a misty rainforest in a huge crevasse that had some dinosaurs for them to see and maybe fight. The most fun for me was describing the dinos without naming them directly, “you see a large bipedal reptilian creature…” etc
One of my DMs wanted to run Tomb of Anihilation once, but she hated Dinosaurs in DnD. The game never happened but I was truly flabbergasted. never experienced someone who wasn't down with Dinos in DnD before.
Also, check out "The Dinosaur Lords" by Victor Milan. It's a mostly low-fantasy book series where dinosaurs are a huge part of everyday, medieval life. Pretty good world building, very descriptive action and intrigue. Good stuff, and a massive inspiration for my world.
They are a pretty good read, it's a major shame that the third one ends on a cliffhanger and the author passed before finishing the fourth book
I'm a Warhammer fan, and I have to say making Lizardmen Aztec inspired dino riders was a piece of beauty.
There is nothing more badass than a 6 ft tall dinosaur man riding on the back of a T-Rex both wearing Aztec inspired armor, wielding a tepoztopilli. It's slightly lesser cousins will ride on the back of raptors. It is a beautiful and terrifying sight.
On the colonialism angle, I would say while that's obviously a worry and they are technologically behind vs The empire and not China. They are, however arguably better masters of the arcane then even the elves. They are Savage but not unreasonable and it's more a territorial Savagery than like a primitive one. They are one of the most stalwart and true defenders against Chaos.
While behind in tech versus the gunpowder wielding races, they are their superior in magic and certainly their match on the field of battle.
Why build a gun when the magic spear thrower goes further? Why build a tank, when the not T-Rex can survive multiple shots from it and eat it?
reminder that canonically all lustrian dragons were driven to extinction by carnosaurs lol
One of the reasons I absolutely LOVE Eberron as a setting is that you can have a gang of dinosaur-riding halflings pull a Wild West-style raid on a lightning rail train.
You had me at Dire Iguana. Another good one. Thanks, SGM.
I like how critical role did it in season 2 where the dinos were pulled into their realm from vocodo
I never really had a problem with dinosaurs in my games - I generally did what I would do with giants and other large dangerous and numerous creatures - have a region where people know they live and as a result tend to avoid going there except for expeditions to hunt them. Honestly, considering how often crashed spaceships containing energy weapon wielding aliens used to show up in old school modules - dinosaurs seemed quite reasonable by comparison.
1) Rule of Cool
2) What small toys does a family have on hand that could substitute for monsters...
3) "That still only counts as one!"
4) Nostalgia
5) People don't play D&D for the world, necessarily. They play it for the imagination, and dinosaurs are certainly that.
Dinosaurs in jungles are a staple of classic sword and sorcery fiction. But most modern players have never read classic fantasy fiction so they wouldn't know.
My dm had my druid visit a very rich person’s private collection of dinosaur fossils and that’s how I can wildshape into them.
I've always been in and run games where dinosaurs are on the table enjoyed by all. For us, it's never been a matter of why would they be there and instead a matter of why wouldn't they be there. It's not like there aren't weirder things. It also allows the beast/animal subtype to be relevant longer for our ranger friends.
Aftee telling my players about a living spell that is corrupting the planes, I threw in a dinosaur combat encounter to tell them 'yeah, things are getting weird'
4th edition did it best, herbivore dinos were called behemoth, and all the carnivores were drakes. So much more immersive than the scientific names and people could still recognize them for what they were at the table.
Fighting a "Fang Titan Drake" is pretty epic.
As a big Dinotopia fan Dinosaurs are always part of my world , most of the time they are part of some lost island/continent. right now I'm doing a alt earth campaign set on a warm Antarctica and there are Dinosaurs there. I also have bought a lot of Sandy Petersons Cthulhu Mythos so theres a bit of At the Mountains of Madness inspiration in there.
One thing that's never made sense to me is the disconnect between accepting dragons but not dinosaurs, especially since we're pretty sure dino bones were our basis for dragons in the first place. But more practically - if you have dragons and other huge monsters, why *not* have dinosaurs as their primary food source? They need lots of meat!
An argument towards people who do do the whole "How could humans exsist and make society with dinosaurs around?!?" I dont know, maybe the same way they survived in these settings against dragons, and giants, and literal abominations from beyond the stars! Dinosaurs are just ya know, in the end, animals.
I'd like to mention two things:
1. WoTCy tried addressing the disconnect some people feel with dinosaurs in DnD in 4e. There all the carnivores got labeled as "drakes" and all the herbivores as "behemoths". They went back on that because people just called them by their dinosaur names anyway. The only exception are the elemental drakes from Dark Sun, which act as replacements for traditional dragons. The fire one looks like an early Spinosaurus reconstruction.
2. Despite being a paleonerd, I've cooled on their depictions in fantasy settings. Especially since most of what I've seen, takes the Warhammer Fantasy route and uses them to exoticize mezoamerica. Even wizards in MtG couldn't resist the trope and put dinosaur in their own central american themed set Ixalan, but adleast the natives there were humans instead of replacing them w lizard/serpentfolk.
When one of my DMs put us in a valley that had a ton of prehistoric life I was SO THRILLED and the entire party was excited to fight them as we haven’t done so before.
When I build a region, I make sure to place encounters that wouldn’t just break the ecosystem entirely; for example, if I’m building a rural countryside, I can’t put owlbears or even dire wolves because there would be no one believably strong enough to survive them. Instead, those creatures are usually designated to regions that are mostly uninhabited, and the people who live near it will even build their roads AROUND such areas so as to avoid them entirely. There may even be road signs warning travelers they are passing a known owlbear habitat, but as long as they stay on the road, they should be relatively safe. It would make sense that the population has gone thru some trial and error in setting up proper boundaries for safe passage around those places. The same rule of thumb could be said for dragons as well. No existing village would live within a country’s width of a known lair or roost, unless they were possibly subjugated by those dragons already. Making a believable world ecosystem is pretty basic DM design, and there’s a way to do it with every monster. For me personally, the idea of an isolated island known to be inhabited by “massive lizards” or an area in the underdark where huge ancient creatures live are all believable implementations for dinosaur habitats.
It's crazy how things can collide. I came across Cold Crash Pictures mere weeks ago!
As for dinosaurs in DnD, I usually keep them to a separate area of the world, but not because of anachronism. It's because an ecosystem couldn't support both dragons and tyrannosaurs or giants and titanosaurs. So I tend to make them like a regional difference in fauna rather than a lost world.
In the first proper campaign I ever ran, the premise was that the party all got shipwrecked on a mysterious cursed island. Since the reason the ship was there wasn't important, I told the players that I would base what it was doing on the PCs' backstories and a few character decisions later, it was a ship smuggling creatures from Dinosaur Island to the civilized lands. (The Druid PC had a sauropod companion, and the Witch had one of the little chicken dinosaurs as her familiar, from her time living on the island.)
Our table's theory was that, honestly, dinosaurs aren't all that impressive to D&D characters. Yeah, some of them are big and dangerous, but they are just regular animals. They don't talk, or breathe fire or teleport or eat your soul or anything like that. And I feel like in many D&D-type settings, it doesn't really make sense to have a period in the past with animals that lived and mostly died out before humanoids evolved, since generally humanoids DIDN'T evolve, but were created by gods or whatever. And if there is a population of dinos today, then they aren't "remnants of a past age" - in-universe, they are as much a part of the present as anything else.
I think it makes the most sense to cordon the dinosaurs off on one continent that they haven't really spread from and just have them be animals unique to that area. Think about all the weird stuff that only lives in Australia. You wouldn't expect a kangaroo to be hopping around in Rome, but if you saw one, you wouldn't immediately declare "that is impossible!". That way, dinosaurs exist and can be brought into the story (or the PCs brought to them) but aren't likely to be wandering around your pseudo-German medieval town.
While the humanoids living alongside dinosaurs having primitive technology is a descendant of colonialist tropes, I think the in-universe justification might be less that "dinosaurs make it impossible to build up an advanced civilization" and more "humanoids with advanced technology are prone to exterminating unintelligent threats that live around them." And this is a D&D world, where a halfling who kills enough rats can develop the ability to simply punch a T-Rex to death. It's also possible that such a society leans into Druidic teachings and magic to control or at least divert the dangerous dinosaurs, rather than have to fight them all the time, which would discourage the development of metalworking either due to Druidic values or a lack of need.
As a last note, I was playing in a campaign where the PCs went through a portal to the setting's sub-Saharan Africa-inspired region, and the GM had a lot of fun when an elephant popped up, informing us that our character have no idea what it is, but it's probably a violent carnivore - after all, it's huge and has knives sticking out of its face! There are plenty of present-day real-world animals that would seem just as bizarre to the average PCs as dinosaurs would.
I've always kind of felt like it's weird to have this real creature in a fantasy setting, so thanks for helping me explore that :) and y'know what? Dinosaurs are cool, that's all the meta justification needed!
Having started playing D&D with the Basic D&D rules, which included X1 The Isle of Dread, and other pulp inspired adventures like The Lost City, I guess I have more tolerance for dinosaurs appearing in my campaigns. I ran Tomb of Annihilation and described the dinosaurs used in Port Nyanzaru, had my players fearing an encounter with the King of Feathers, and used the Zombie T-Rex. I think there is a place for prehistoric creatures in D&D, whether dinosaurs or megafauna, which the Dire Wolf is technically supposed to be. I haven't played in Eberron, but Eberron is a good example of integrating dinosaurs into a campaign without the exoticism of the Isle of Dread or Tomb of Annihilation.
I did an entire arc that ripped off Jurassic Park to explain dinosaurs. Just some arcane scientists using a modified clone spell. I loved it and players loved it because its peak childhood fantasy: "If I was stuck on jurassic park, I would just use magic to kill them"
In the giants UA, there's a druid subclass dedicated to the ancient, primordial world, and nature as it existed before the influence of humanoid civilizations. I think that subclass is probably a good one to use for players who wanna be dinosaurs but their DM won't allow it in their setting.
But, I think because dnd doesn't take place on earth, but instead in a fantasy world, I don't think there's any reason not to allow dinosaurs in that world. If there are not just dragons, but dragonborn, kobolds, lizardfolk, and other giant lizard creatures, logically there's no reason why a creature that looks like a dragon but has no wings or fire breath can't also exist. IIRC, the word dragon in medieval times was really a catch all for any giant serpent, lizard, or even fish anyway.
I'm not an expert on Eberron, even if it is one of my top three settings, but I remember a Keith Baker's article explaining that on Eberron there was no extinction event, so most species of dinosaurs survived up to the present.
On Khorvaire (the usual PCs' continents), dinosaurs are more common in the Talenta Plains region, where Halflings use them as rides or beasts of burden. These are usually smaller dinosaurs (like velociraptors), but there are a few larger ones.
Meanwhile, on the dragon-dominated continent of Argoness, dinosaurs of all sizes are a normal occurence. There are many species and a T-Rex is just the local equivalent of a lion or grizzly.
That mid-roll ad has to be the best ad I have seen in a very long time, and I don't mean just on YT, but just generally.
Great content as always.
One way to add dragons into a typical fantasy world without all the fuzz about a lost place at the rear-end of nowhere is just to say they're a subtype or relative of dragons. If dragons are all over the place, then their relatives can be there, too. That's how they did it in FFXII and how I do it in my DnD campaign
Coincidentally, I was catching up with Oxventure this past week or so, and their latest season, Extinction, kind of relates to this topic, since they were basically doing D&D Jurassic Park (Though without the theme park element, instead based around a scientist resurrecting extinct species via necromancy as a preservation method), and while it was mostly dinosaurs getting resurrected, and the clear expectation that mostly the extinct animals in Geth are the same as the extinct animals in our world, established that Giraffes are extinct in their campaign setting and Pterodactyls aren't.
In my opinion when I hear the question, "why are there dinosaurs in D&D" I hear, "Why are there dinosaurs in my flying dinosaur game." If you have a problem with dinosaurs then you should rightly have a problem with dragons, drakes, trrrasques, and any other abnormally large lizard thing, which we happen to have plenty of in-game.
I also ran a game for my kids where a hapless wizard playing around with time travel magic summons some dinos.
In the first campaign I played in, where the party teleported to different locations and planets, we traveled to a mostly uncharted planet and to an excavation site where there was an undead dinosaur. The whole planet was inhibited by dinosaurs of different kinds that the party saw, but I don't think we actually fought anything but the undead one. Sadly the campaign stopped abruptly due to scheduling problems and we didn't get to finish the adventure, but it was very cool to see dinosaurs in a dnd setting.
In the campaign I'm currently playing in (with a different DM), the party is stuck on The Isle of the Lost in a pocket dimension where all lost things, creatures and ancestry end up. We haven't come across dinosaurs yet, but I wouldn't put it past my DM. However, in this setting (coincidentally also a galaxy) dragons and dragonborns are 'extinct' but have been seen by the party on the island, so we'll see what other types of 'lost' creatures we'll meet.
I'm really glad to see more people talking about dinosaurs in d&d, I feel like it's a whole world of possibilities to draw inspiration from, plus they work as a simple monster as well as animals that live somewhere, and the best thing is that they are real, they existed and yet we see them as something so far away, I love that kind of fantasy.
To give an example, the setting I created for my campaign focuses on an archipelago full of dinosaurs that recently started to be populated by mainlanders, so that clash between ordinary people trying to survive and discovering these strange but familiar creatures is the vibe I want to give by including dinosaurs (technically in-world I don't call them dinosaurs, but obviously they are, I treat them more like magical beasts than ancient beings lost in time).
Finally, I loved the video and thank you very much for bringing light to the subject, thank you!!
When I run a game, typically it is a homebrew worlds and it either a hard no or hard yes on dinosaurs. It depends on the mood I am wanting to set. The hard yes worlds I have ran will typically then not have some other monsters like dragons, but the dinosaurs maybe have some dragon like powers. sometimes I will do a version of "Hollow World" or the "Gazetteer" series.
I ran Isle of Dread when I was 12, so early 90s. As far as I recall nobody at mybtable had trouble with dinosaurs.
I've never been a big fan of dinosaurs in D&D, but you've helped me rethink that position. I still believe in only wild shaping or polymorphing into creatures you've seen, though.
As a DM who uses dinosaurs, both official and literally anything out of a Dino book (fun fact; not including creatures not scientifically classified as dinosaurs there’s over 700 species, and if I use all prehistoric animals, there’s so many it feels wrong for a fantasy world not to have some prehistoric animals, be it prehistoric fish, sea reptiles, oversized bugs, or other)
My dinosaurs are clever creatures and stuff like Dianaraptors (renamed Utahraptors after the roman equivalent of Artemis, Diana, and modified Deinonychus stat blocks) can open doors. (Cue jurassic park scene where my level 1 players are hiding under a table as a raptor is walking past like the kitchen scene)
My setting has several dinosaur gods which is why dinosaurs are everywhere. And although cities have arisen in a land full of dinosaurs, the dinosaurs proved super deadly so it took literally millions of years in setting for cities to be built, and dinosaurs live everywhere on every continent as far as the arctic with dinosaurs like Yutyrannus and Nannuqsaurus, to the tropics with Herrarasaurus and Brachiosaurus.
And they have guns in this world too which were created using magic for those incapable of magical capabilities because it’s difficult to learn and use magic.
I used dinosaurs in a game, west marches style, where the area was wild and uncharted. Giant lizard monster, only passing by them. And because they jad no expectation of dinos in their fantasy game:
They shat bricks.
One of my favorite takes on the trope comes from a campaign setting my brother made, where for some unknown, unexplained reason, four cities on the world got ripped out of time and thrown back to the age of dinosaurs, all from different cultures and I believe from different time periods. Three of the four (the last being a smaller town literally named "Crossroads" and a melting pot of the rest) all developed different approaches to dealing with local dinosaurs and interact in interesting ways. It evokes the core fantasy of "lost in time" without the risks of marginalizing minorities, because there are no natives; everyone human was in one of those cities when they appeared, or is descended from them.
So we are a year and months into this 2e campaign, and last week we teleport to a ridiculously old forest to find a ridiculously old wizard. Massive trees, super thick around, and we feel this thumping from the dark a long way off: giants right, big trolls? 7 Brachiosaurus come strolling through the trees and right past us.
Wild our DM waited a year to drop any hint of dinos, let alone a jurassic park moment on us if he had them in his world for 20 years.
the game I play with folks has raptors that go "woosh" but then all bets were off after the DM introduced the "Cave clam" in response to an offhand comment I made about why were we finding pearls in a cave wall along with some other gems. (pretty sure he just rolled a random table) Now because of my smartass comments the whole campaign is Clams all the way down.
Instead of making "the natives" that live alongside dinosaurs a less developed civilization, I often choose either wood elves or one of the animalistic species.
I do make it quite clear that (mostly through the use of magic) their civilization is very much developed. Although often with a smaller population (density) than other countries, to still sell that "wild men live with nature"-vibe.
Basically dragons was the medieval word for dinosaurs, Introducing the Medieval Dragon is an interesting book for those who are interested in history.
I personally view it as an either or for world building. I find the middle ages more interesting than the more renaissance period that is the standard of "fantasy land", or the early modern of pulp fiction. So I like to go with a more Ars Magica mythic European setting and have dragons, rather than the modern view of what creatures from those fossils were.
17:42 I think the main reason for this discrepancy is the characterization of dragons vs dinosaurs. Typically depicted as relatively mindless apex predators, humans would be constantly under threat of being hunted by carnivorous dinos, and large-scale civilizations would be hindered by the territorial nature of the beasts. That is contrasted with dragons, who not only are vastly more intelligent, but also are known to be extremely narcissistic and avaricious.
While dinosaurs are viewed as primal animals, dragons require the presence of advanced civilizations to produce the treasures that will satisfy their lust of gold and worship. Were humans still in the stone age, dragons would have to mine and create their own hoards rather than obtaining them through conquest and tithing.
Heh. I first played DnD back at the start of the 80's.. (I was 10 in 1980).
And sometime after Empire came out, we once fought waves of T-rex's with magic based AT-AT's basically.. lol.. walking platforms with magic cannons.
And it was just the best.. we all had tons of fun! ALL the fun in fact.. every last drop. 😁
I personally think the biggest issue many players have with dinosaurs in D&D is their names. We know, through pop-culture osmosis, that each dinosaur's name has a scientific basis - that it is a Latin-based description. It adds a "scientific" weight to dinosaurs that more conventional fantasy monsters lack. It's interesting to note that the D&D 4e core setting actively promoted dinosaurs as common-place domesticated and wild animals in itself, but it did so by calling them "drakes" and "behemoths".
Dinosaurs belong in D&D
Hell so do Aliens
Greyhawk literally has a crashed UFO in it
Gary's idea was "Genre, what's genre; put everything in the game"
Mind you, you don't gotta follow the ideas of a random dead middle aged white dude just because he helped invent the roleplaying game in its entirety; hero worship is for suckers.
But, I basically use Dinosaurs just like I do any other massive animal or otherwise fantasy creature.
One setting I made had a resurgent Dwarven nation that had mastered taming the neighboring fauna and as such getting big ass Triceratops as the far superior beast of burden over Oxen, Pterandon as aerial scout mounts for the army and plate armored T-Rex for super Cavalry (rarely though for T-Rex; they don't actually have the type of general terrain that's key for ground cavalry; lots of cliff/mountainside or jungle/rainforest and coastal territory that they had to fight in)
One of their highest grossing exports are the middle sized Dinos as purchasable exotic mounts or in bulk for cavalry mercenary companies that want an edge.
I've never really fallen into that stereotype of the gross "lost city" mythos from colonialism, nor do I ever use the real world colonialism base for how my settings developed in its several thousand years histories.
Like why would I want to include the gross horrible acts and attitudes of those empires in my games or the bias' they laid on the folk they "discovered" out there?
Fucking disgusting.
Again Mike is dangling that Carrot of him learning about Eberron in front of us.... :D
Honestly, I think the problem with dinosaurs is less about whether they fit into the core fantasy of a given campaign, but more like the Critical Role example, of a player trying to introduce them (usually via polymorph) into a setting where maybe it doesn't make sense for them to be there. 99% of the problems with dinosaurs in DnD could be resolved by just changing their type to "monstrosity" or something similar. Or use the common homebrew rule that you can't polymorph into a creature if you haven't seen one before.
I wanted to come back and say this, dinosaurs are a "fact of life" in eberron, but eberron is a setting with strong themes of "civilization" for lack of a better word... and dinosaurs being outside of places of civilization are meant to contribute to a sense of contrast between civilization and people outside it.
we never managed to get there but had a player character from there, but in one of my campaign worlds i had a large island with two warring factions, both lead by dragons, the humanoids on the island being lizardfolk, yuan-ti, and kobolds (maybe a few other types, but those were the big three) and the majority of the fauna were dinosaurs, or adjacent creatures. because the half-dragon template existed i was looking into making half-dragon dinosaurs as potential boss monsters if the party planned to visit after the kobold druid from the island joined them
Have to say, if Mike is trapped in my campaign setting and having to deal with my notes, I'm not sure I want to put it in WorldAnvil. 😂
Not directly related to dinosaurs themselves, but when My players caused a accidental magical mishap outside Blackstaff Tower, I used the T-Rex slot verbatim to represent the massively enlarged chicken that had resulted from the experimental enlarged/reduce spell....
Your world anvil ad was so good Mike that you made me actually watch it 🎉
My campaign is seafaring so I just have an island That Time Forgot Full of Dinosaurs. In the last session, a new character was introduced to the party by attacking them while polymorph as a dinosaur until her concentration was broken and she returned to having regular amount of intelligence and could recognize that the players are not affiliated with the people that were attacking her so we just running back for that at some point she wound up on that island briefly
19:50 great video, although societies that use stone technology aren't necessarily small and simple. for example, mesoamerican civilizations used a mixture of stone and bronze tools but had large complex stratified societies
The really famous bits of Egyptian history fall into late Neolithic and early Bronze Age, and no one accuses them of being primitive (except when they say aliens built it all).
I'm juggling a few ideas of how I could include dinosaurs in my setting. The easy route is putting them on a remote island where they escaped whatever killed them off a long time ago. Given the amount of time that passed, that's an opportunity to give them some speculative evolution and make some original dinosaurs! Dougal Dixon's "The New Dinosaurs" is all about this idea.
Another idea I've had is giving dinosaurs their own plane of existence, in a world parallel to ours but jumped millions of years in the past, or an alternate history where, similarly to the last idea, whatever killed the dinosaurs never happened.
A third option is pulling an Eberron and believably integrating dinosaurs into the rest of the world. A friend of mine is working on a fantasy story where pterosaurs are equivalent to dragons, and various small and large dinosaurs and other prehistoric beasts walk among the conventional animals. The key to this option is making sure the dinosaurs aren't so overpowered that they would realistically kill everything else. Me and my friend are both biology students and a speculative evolution and ecology of dinosaurs is just kind of problem we love to come up with solutions to.
I've also recently thought of integrating dinosaurs and dragons - what if dragons used to rule the world, and they ate dinosaurs, which were large enough to provide a steady source of food. Perhaps the climate cooled, the world became less biologically productive and the dinosaurs started to die out, one of the factors that drove dragons into rarity, allowing the smaller, weaker humanoid races to inherit the world.
Oddly enough, my argument that birds are technically dinosaurs and therefore the PC's literally ate a dinosaur the last time they had chicken, did not go over well...
Haha! That was a really creative and funny ad for world anvil! Thoroughly enjoyed it!
"You can have all the dinosaurs you want, but they need the feathers, and proto-feathers that dinosaurs would have actually had according to more recent archeology"...
"Wait, why you are turning them ALL in the pets, and mounts?!"
The other side of the same coin is robots and aliens. Sure they can be hand waved as magical robots and dimensional aliens but it is the same pulp stories as the source. It's interesting that Eberron has both the robots and the dinosaurs and yet the theme is more noir than pulp action.
This is actually good and compelling scholarship, and I'm here for it!
Before even finishing the video, GOSH was Ella Enchanted a terrible, bad-faith adaptation of an actually excellent book. Wait, we're not talking about that? 😋 OKAY ON TO DINOS.
As a certified dino-lover, I think I've been really lucky. Thankfully, all of my DMs have been aggressively pro-dinosaur, and as a DM I even have a homebrew world for my Isekai campaign where dinos are alive and well and even used as mounts and beasts of labor. 😂 We're all ignoring biological plausibility and my ranger constantly uses beast speech to chat with them. Everyone's having a great time.
In my first campaign, the druid's player needed a little help establishing a narrative niche, so I introduced the idea that dinosaurs used to exist in their country, but "hero culture", the desire to go kill something big, claim its treasure, and never pay for a drink again, led to every animal resembling a dragon being hunted. The earth guided our druid to clutches of eggs it had protected since that day, so she could repopulate her island - empty after the Cult of the Dragon essentially turned a green dragon into a nuke - with baby dinosaurs, in hopes of one day building a land bridge and letting them migrate to the mainland. This also provided a nice pace for her to unlock dinosaur Wild Shapes
That druid's player did end up ghosting the party for the end of the campaign, but in an epilogue I told the party that she succeeded, and now Evermeet is essentially Jurassic Park.
However, this only applied to the main country. When dinosaurs come up in countries outside the one my stories center on, I remind my players, "your ancestors hunted them to extinction where you're from, but other countries didn't develop the same hero culture gung-ho on lizard murder".
I like the thunderbeast content were a Mayan Lohengrin civilization has domesticated dinosaurs and have alchemical musketeers and are debating the worth of conquering the cold continent
I put the Isle of Dread in my world specifically to explain dinosaurs in the world. Also changed it to have an infernal theme as to "Why" the island is there and claiming shipwrecked people to be its native population.
I just ran a session where the druid spoke to an elasmotherium that was with its heard grazing along the swords coast by Lelion
I play a ton of pulp games so dinos make regular appearances. I love dinos in low fantasy, historical fantasy, or swords and sorcery type settings in addition to pulp. One my favorite NPC lines ever was from a hunter trying to get the party to help him hunt a triceratops.... "You ever hunt a triceratops? It's like a rhino only twice as big and three times as horny!"
The in-universe justification is that Chult and Tomb of Annihilation exist. It's a far off jungle where strange and wondrous animals exist.
Also, Chult is not an island, it is a peninsula.
Great video, BANGER of an ad read.
As long as they aren't called by scientific names I feel they fit. A giant hungry bipedal lizard? Good! Some rando screaming "Help! a Spinosaurus!"? No thats a fin lizard
I think its hillarious that some people clump up "medieval civilization" and "progress" together
I would argue that dinosaurs are the original fantasy monsters - I seem to remember one story of table-top war games between Romans and Celts, and to balance the scale, the Celts could summon mastodons.
all dinosaurs in my homebrew world are in the underdark most of my table has caught on that it was meant to be a huge nod to "Journey to the Center of the Earth" but it also has lead to cool world building moments.
Drow with mounted triceratops
Duergar with battle dinos
and my personal favorite, an Elder Brain T Rex
GM: "We don't allow dinosaurs"
Me: "Okay. Then I want to be a magically mutated wingless dragon with short forearms and legs that look like I never skip leg day"
In a world where dragons fly in the skies, giants roam the land, mammoths are part of the landscape and you can summon a sabertooth tiger to ride about on, dinosaurs seeming out of place remains quite bizarre to me.
I love dinosaurs in my game. I have them as beasts of burden and mounts even in capital cities.
A good way to use dinosaurs in the none lose world could be to make them a branch of the draconic family that evolved into a beast and lose much of it's draconic heritage with the main thing left over being their physical form which leads to the introduction to use when describing them for the first time. My suggestion being something like this: "you hear heavy steps of a powerful and muscular beast, as it comes closer you can feel the vibration in the ground reach your chest causing you to hold your breath. Upon revealing itself you see something of a draconic heritage with fist sized scale, large reptilian eyes, (fill in the rest of the character traits for your dinosaur of choice but framed as a dragon). This you all now as a dinosaur, a (species here)"
This let's you make them common knowledge and add some life to your world showing that things change over time and that even dragons can evolve throughout the millennium's
I have an island (actually a continent) full of dinosaurs in my campaign.
It has an El Dorado inspired civilization in it, with feathered coatls and dragons, also feathered and colorful in that continent. Fauna and civilization has developed differently, but they are as advanced as other humans in technology and magic.
The civilization is not lost, nor primitive, and the only explanation for dinos to be there and not at the “European” continent (which has mammoths and sabertooths) is that this continent is cold, and the Dorado is warm. Both civilizations have developed in dangerous environments because what makes humans thrive in my world is collaboration. I put humans in some abhorrent conditions, surrounded by monsters, but focus on how getting together made for great communities.
I not only have European and Mayan, as well as an Arabic-Silkroad civilization, an Egyptian kingdom, Greek islands, English-German Knights , French Musketeers, Sephardi Pirates… I actuallyI include all and any mythology I can fit into my world. I want it to be full of wonders, and there’s little things more interesting to me than history and mythology. I think it’s great inspiration.
Who wouldn’t want to see a feathered cavalry of TRexes fighting against a phalanx of greek Minotauri, ambushed by anubian jackalheads of Egipt? Or have vampiric Conquistadores marching against a group of Oni Ronins?
And if you don’t want to offend peoples you don’t belong to, just don’t put “your” mythology in any better position of authority over other peoples’ mythologies. Don’t insult anyone’s beliefs, nor connect it just to something negative. No civilization has survived on ritualistic human sacrifice, and stories of that are most likely propaganda. Heck, my grandma used to hear that Communists eat babies.
So go crazy and study whatever you find interesting and add it to your campaigns, but make it humane. Balance good and bad characters. Show glory, and struggle. Show the simple lives of normal people in those lands. Is not that hard.
I don’t even like “evil” goblins. In my world they are just protectors of the forest and the fey. Different to the point of conflict and confusion. I don’t see the point of relating “civilization” and “goodness”.
And after this rant, just have fun and spread love y’all
My DM's setting is -- as D&D implies -- post-post-apocalyptic. Those ruins had to come from somewhere. The dinosaurs in his game are pretty specifically located on one particular island. Why are there dinosaurs on that island? Because before that apocalypse we're post-post of? Some wizards did a Jurassic Park. [There was also some time magic, some shenanigans in said apocalypse, and a Land of the Lost situation that is technically where lizardfolk come from. My DM's setting is *very* weird sometimes.]
That said, I definitely think it depends on vibes whether they fit. But I think even in a setting where they don't "fit," they can work fine, but become monstrosities rather than beasts.
I haven’t watched the video yet, but when you mentioned in a different video that this one was coming out, the first thing I thought was, “I hate dinosaurs in DnD.” I think that’s one of the few DnD opinions I have that I refuse to budge on. I don’t like dinosaurs in DnD, and I don’t want them in my games.
Okay, now I’m going to watch the video.
Edit for brief post-video thoughts: I think part of my issue is that I categorize “unexpected dinosaurs” as a sci fi trope. I strongly favor fantasy-based DnD games. Dinosaurs don’t feel anachronistic, they feel like the wrong genre entirely and break my suspension of disbelief (as silly as that might be to say). The only fantasy story I’ve ever seen dinosaurs work in is that one Dresden Files book (you know the one), because it was urban fantasy with a plot about necromancy. Temporarily raising a dinosaur from the dead in a world where long-extinct dinosaurs are already a known fact (aka, our world) doesn’t feel quite as genre-breaking as suddenly tossing them into a high fantasy setting.
I personally feel that dinosaurs make sense in a fantasy setting.
Without a worldwide cataclysm like a meteor strike, why would dinosaurs die out? On Earth, there was a megawinter after the strike threw tons of matter into the atmosphere and basically starved out the largest animals, especially those which were adapted to the heat of the Cretaceous age. Some smaller dinos were insulated by feathers and have survived to the modern day as birds.
I used an upgraded version of the Tarrasque in my Drakkenheim game. Since it's besically D&D's Godzilla, the main thing I added was a breath weapon. It looked like a beam of Godzilla's "atomic fire", but it caused fission, it was disintegrating force damage. An aarakocra can't just plink away with a shortbow for hours.
Dinosaurs in Eberron are mostly found in the Talenta Plains and jungles of Q'Barra. The people which live among them are primarily halflings, who train and ride some of them. Some non-dinosaur reptiles like pteranodons are included, and the halflings use their own names for the beasts, translating to things like 'glidewings' instead of scientific pseudo-Latin.
In the Magic the Gathering world of Ixalan, there's a himan culture which trains and fights with dinosaurs. They're superficially similar to Aztecs, and there's another culture on the same world which is like age-of-colonialism Spain, except they're ruled by vampires. Neither vampires nor dino-riders have an overwhelming advantage. They're also not completely focused on one another because there's also a culture of river-dwelling merfolk who mostly coexist with the humans, and a bunch of pirate fleets joined into an armada, most of whom are rebels against the vampire empire.
I think there's a third way to include Dinos into Fantasy: Make them part of the Dragon Family. The reason why I say this because there's two ways I've seen it done:
Final Fantasy 14 have dinos among the powerful Dragon race that is fighting against the Ishgardians in Heavensworn (as dragons evolved to be part of Eorzea as Mismoger actually came from a planet of Space Dragons but he and his eggs were the last living, and I think there was maybe one or two other Final Fantasy games make Dinos into part of the dragon family, but not sure which ones)
Dungeon Crawl Classics make them a form of "Primative Dragon" where they're pretty much dragons but they're older than the usual dragon, so their breath weapons didn't fully form, however they didn't die out yet because there wasn't some end of the world event to kill them out, and thus while they're less now, they do exist in smaller numbers.
This way you can take out the problems of the Colonialism with explaining the dinos, but also it takes out a lot of trying to bend the mind to making it work. But this is an idea that may help those who don't like those options.