How do you use Dinosaurs in your home games?

[doc the grey]

The title really speaks for itself but to elaborate, how do you use dinosaurs in your home games? Considering that they are historically fantastical creatures (by modern standards) from a time hundreds of millions of years removed from human history and not usually something used in common fantasy fiction I'm wondering how you guys use them in your home games? Are they extinct creatures sometimes brought back from the dead by wizards and sorcerers to prove their might, rare beasts of distant lands, common place beasts of burden, or something completely new? I would love to hear what you guys do with them when left to your own devices.

[Odraude]

I like using them like Journey to the Center of the Earth. As subterranean remnants of the past, usually springing up on islands and jungles.

[SwnyNerdgasm]

I've always wanted to throwa continent based on Dinotopia into my homebrew setting, I just never say down and did it

[Ascalaphus]

I'm leaning towards a "lost world" approach: some continents have dinosaurs, others don't. I think that an ecosystem will feel better if it's mostly in one evolutionary period: modern, ice age or dinosaur age. Mixing those up may feel even stranger than the insertion of owlbears.

That does mean that Summon Nature's Ally will need some work.

[doc the grey]

Ascalaphus wrote:

I'm leaning towards a "lost world" approach: some continents have dinosaurs, others don't. I think that an ecosystem will feel better if it's mostly in one evolutionary period: modern, ice age or dinosaur age. Mixing those up may feel even stranger than the insertion of owlbears.

That does mean that Summon Nature's Ally will need some work.

.

In my homebrew they think of them as dragons, descended from the great beasts and losing a lot of that grand power but still holding that grandeur. If they were to think about it from an evolutionary standpoint dinosaurs are probably either offshoots of dragons, primitive ancestors of dragons, or descendants of certain dragons with the answer varying from dinosaur to dinosaur. Also I like to kind of have them spread over the land but with the larger dinosaurs concentrated in more wild areas where they would have more room to roam while the smaller opportunistic dinosaurs like compsognathus', protoceratops, or velociraptors being able to better survive in human environments like villages or towns.

[Deblin]

I've never had dinosaurs in a game where a player was an expert (e.g. had expressed any interest whatsoever in) the evolutionary biology of the setting.

What I would probably roll with is that there are multiple continents or isolated islands, where a more localized version of the big cretaceous extinction event and the dominance of mammals and smaller-scale therapods (e.g. birds) happened as in Earth, and another isolated region where the dinosaurs kept on keepin' on and continued to evolve. Then, at some point before the rise of sentience, something broke the isolation of the two biomes (land bridge, bored non-sentient pre-god, etc) and it all mixed together again and started competing, tossing evolution in even weirder directions as the niches went crazy.

I guess if you wanted to be extreme about it the biomes could be different material planes with some sort of magical barrier-jumping being the re-integration event.

This has several advantages over the "dragons" approach and the Lost World approach:

First, you get to account for all the reptilian and mammal-but-with-scales stuff with the same biological explanation: because the "magical"/divine environment is shared, sentient races got shaped from the saurian continent as well as the mammalian by the same forces, accounting for kobolds, serpent folk, and yes, Dragons, without resorting to full-on "a wizard did it".

Secondly, it helps resolve the fail-paleontology of the dinosaurs themselves. Sure, real dinosaurs had features like feathers and so on, but these "modern" dinosaurs have parallel-evolution'd back to scales for some reason that was biologically legit at the time.

Thirdly, when your players inevitably get into time-travel shenanigans and land in the pleistocene (as they will if they're asking this question... just roll with it, it'll happen) it'll provide a nice Cthulhu-style creep factor as they gradually realize that a major chunk of the wildlife and population appear to be missing. Lots of genocide/racism themes to put ice down their back, there.

(Disclaimer: I'm the kind of bastard DM that randomly puts a werewolf in a module for an otherwise-entirely-mundane Spycraft campaign, force the players to work it out from scratch, and then never put another supernatural element anywhere just so they're always looking over their shoulders. So point three is probably a YMMV thing.)

[Aelfborn]

I deal with them by not including them. The only way that I would include dinosaurs is if I were to run an entire campaign in which "primitive" versions of the races and dinosaurs coexisted (in which case, most monsters would not exist). This would mean altering most of the classes that I would allow to reflect available weapons and armor. It would also mean other changes in which case I would turn to Ray Winninger's Dungeoncraft articles in which he built such a campaign as an example of campaign design.

[Ascalaphus]

The world I'm currently designing has several playable lizard humanoid races. I'm thinking that maybe some Columbian Exchange has been going on since explorers started Wind Walking to other continents.