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Had a GM do some very similar to this once. It wasn't just dinosaurs for him though it was big animals in general. So anything bigger than a light horse just didn't exist in nature anymore.
The reason being, people had to kill them off. Anything larger ended up invaded by a spirit from some other world that was trying to get into ours. Similar to the fiendish template.
I can't remember the exact specifics.
Neutral Evil alignment
intelligence +3
natural armor +1
wisdom and charisma +1
fast healing 1
then some random warping like "left claw seeps caustic goo for extra 2f of acid damage" or "has a multitude of eyes so can't be flanked and gets a +3 to perception"
Imagine trying to fight a semi-intelligent evil whale that thinks it's fun to crush ships.
In the other world the sentient races were some sort of titan druids and it never occurred to them that our civilization might be topped by shrimpy little guys.
So they kept sending these possessing spirits into the biggest creatures to try and find one smart enough to open a portal for them.
Was a weird campaign in lots of respects.
Was a weird campaign in lots of respects.
But was it fun?
Was a weird campaign in lots of respects.But was it fun?
Most of it. Some of it was soooo weird that we were just like "uhmm ok what?"
There was a lot of behind the scenes world setup stuff that he apparently expected us to eventually figure out.
Like the whole thing with the other world evil titan druids. He really thought we would get that since it only affected large animals and kinda half awakened them.
He was pretty bummed that we just thought it was some kind of fiendish plot and fought it as if that is what it was.
shrugs Sometimes s%#% happens.
shrugs Sometimes s@@$ happens.
I think the main thing was he had way too many idea of situations, set-ups, sub-plots, fanciful personalities, etc... for any one campaign.
Let's say you like the works and style of a particular author such as David Eddings. He's got a few closely related series, a couple of unrelated but similar series, and at least 1 series very different from all the others.
Imagine trying to read all of his works by reading a few pages from one then a few pages from a different one. But you still have to get through all of them this summer so sometimes you skip a few pages.
That's kinda what if felt like at times.
.... Given my own stated goal of reading the entire Expanded universe of Star Wars, you have my condolences.
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I have a Thorny Trex that a village of Vegepygmies managed to summon as their demi-god in my home game. I decided they would call him Bloodfeast. ;)
To the OP: I highly recommend that there be a Hunter in your Inner World region that has the Primal Hunter Archetype and has Boon Companion and a 2 headed Trex Animal Companion.
Why not have the inner world actually be a separate dimension rather than the literal inside of the planet?
Funny you should bring say this because I've been thinking pretty much the same thing and the one way portal idea and finding a way to make it a two way doorway is really, really good. And having the portals be deep underground is a great way to tie in the Drow angle that's been niggling at my brain, too.
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I rather liked the idea someone mentioned about the albino, sightless beasties.
"The Land of the Lost" appeals to me as well, though I don't think I could resist a Lovecraftian take on that idea.
I think I might skim back through Stephen King's "Graveyard Shift" and "The Mist", and H.P. Lovecraft's "The Rats in the Walls" and "At the Mountains of Madness" again.
From there, build up a sunless, twilit, subterranean world populated by jungles of fungi where titanic, flabby, blind, tentacly, alien, not-quite-dinosaurs stomp through glowing mists and shadows, and an hellish ecosystem of blind, nightmarish, squirmy things flap and squirm and creep through the undergrowth, caverns, tunnels, vaults, and ruins of decayed and deranged lost civilizations...
"It was six-legged, I know that; its skin was slaty gray that mottled to dark brown in places.... Its skin was deeply wrinkled and grooved, and clinging to it were scores, hundreds, of those pinkish "bugs" with the stalk-eyes. I don't know how big it actually was, but it passed directly over us. One of its gray, wrinkled legs smashed down right
beside my window, and Mrs. Reppler said later she could not see the underside of its body, although she craned her neck up to look. She saw only two Cyclopean legs going up and up into the mist like living towers until they were lost to sight... I had an impression of something so big that it might have made a blue whale look the size of a trout - in other words, something so big that it defied the imagination. Then it was gone, sending a seismological series of thuds
back. it left tracks in the cement of the interstate, tracks so deep I could not see the bottoms... For a moment no one spoke. There was no sound but our breathing and the diminishing thud of that great Thing's passage. Then Billy said, "Was it a dinosaur, Dad?" ..."I don't think so. I don't think there was ever an animal that big, Billy. At least not on Earth." - Stephen King
"[Mi-Go] been inside the earth, too—there are openings which human beings know nothing of... and great worlds of unknown life down there; blue-litten K’n-yan, red-litten Yoth, and black, lightless N'kai. It’s from N’kai that frightful Tsathoggua came—you know, the amorphous, toad-like god-creature mentioned in the Pnakotic Manuscripts and the Necronomicon and the Commoriom myth-cycle preserved by the Atlantean high-priest Klarkash-Ton...." H.P.L.
"...The rats were moving in, creeping on their bellies, forcing them forward. 'Look,' Warwick said coldly. Hall saw. Something had happened to the rats back here, some hideous mutation that never could have
survived under the eye of the sun; nature would have forbidden it. But down here, nature had taken on another ghastly face. The rats were gigantic, some as high as three feet. But their rear legs were gone and they were blind as moles, like their flying cousins. They dragged them
selves forward with hideous eagerness.... The mutated bats had not lost their tails yet. It whipped around Hall's neck in a loathsome coil and
squeezed as the teeth sought the soft spot under his neck. It wriggled and flapped with its membranous wings, clutching the tatters of his shirt for purchase. " - Stephen King
"...I seemed to be looking down from an immense height upon a twilit grotto, knee-deep with filth, where a white-bearded daemon swineherd drove about with his staff a flock of fungous, flabby beasts whose appearance filled me with unutterable loathing..." H.P.L.
For the vaguely human, lost-technology aspect provided by Sleestaks, chuck in a good dose of silent, wide-eyed, deranged, degenerate, and suitably slimy and eerie Deros (see Richard Sharpe Shaver's mad ravings), padding through the darkness to operate their sinister buried and crumbling technologies to fill the surface world with madness, nightmares, and turmoil:
"...The elevator will descend... into the caverns. Chance has not looked favorably on occasional voyagers in those five hundred cages. They have pressed the wrong button, too many times. They have been seized by those who shuffle through the caverns, and they have been . . . treated. Now they ride the cages. They never speak, and they cannot meet your gaze. They stare up at the numbers as they light and then go off, riding up and down even after night has fallen. Their clothes are clean. There is a special dry cleaner who does the work. Once you saw one of them, and her eyes were filled with screams...." - Harlan Ellison
"Clothed in rags and dirt, hung all over with hand weapons, their hair long and matted, were the strangest, most disgusting creatures I had ever seen in my life. They were dwarfs, some of them white-haired, from the Gods know what hidden hole in Mu's endless warren of caverns. "What in the name of mother Mu are these things?" I asked.... "You already know of them... They come from the abandoned caves and cities of Mu.
When the machinery became defective from age, many centuries ago, a vast number of caverns were sealed up. Fugitives hid in them, used the defective pleasure stimulators, m and as a result, their children were these things...." They were dero, children of dero, enslaved in some manner by the derodite master who sought the death of all Mu! And the very fact of it brought home to me the greatness of the menace we were beginning to fight....
Oh, that's good stuff right there.