I need inspiration for worldbuilding that feels fun or alive for my players.I'm currently making a new world and campaign while trying out GURPS again. It's basically "Dinos but modern setting" and I am trying to figure out how to make them make sense and part of the world. We have a physical table and leftover dino and city toys while freeing our friends' attic.The easiest way is to take it from jurassic park (original) with the T-Rex in manhattan. Except its all the dinos being released and now humanity is trying to live with them instead of performing pest control because they are exotic and they control what dinos to keep and kill. But the problem is how do I make it feel like there is a world where humans continue on with daily lives but dinos just now walk among them? I'm trying to build the world where something like a man-sized pet dinosaur is about as exotic as seeing a private horse-drawn carriage in a small city. Neat to look at but not something you see everyday before moving on.I know settings like DnD have dinosaurs and Warhammer (not familiar which one) has Dinosaurs in an army set/faction. But I'm looking for inspiration of them in a modern day setting that isn't the new Jurassic Park films. I'm looking for something that people and dinos would realistically if put in the modern day.Friend suggested to do the "Dinos always existed in human history", but then that changes society entirely. Fun to speculate, but tough to organize.
>>98053606Hello welcome to tg! We have a seperate general for worldbuilding. You are welcome to join the discussion there with other nevergames. Enjoy your stay!
>>98053625Ah shit. I typed "Dino" on CTRL+F. Didn't see the worldbuilding thread.
>>98053606If dinosaurs were still alive in the modern world they would either go extinct or be forced to only live in sanctuaries and protected zones that amount to 4% of their natural habitats, like the t-rex would be as fucked as the polar bear is
>>98053606You can treat Dinos like other dangerous animals that are mostly found in jungles/forests.They'd fit in Australia perfectly fine.
>>98053637That's what I was thinking. I don't like the new jurassic world movies because of the fact that there's no way they'd let sauropods run freely on the street. And superpredators would definitely be hunted to extinction. I would imagine something like protoceratops pets like dogs on a leash in a modern day setting or small insectivore birds. I'll try to put in collective society as grounds for if a species is kept or killed, but I gotta admit I completely forgot about sanctuaries and protected zones.>>98053642I guess honing in on an "Invasive Species" subplot would be a good idea. Like what happened with the toads and rabbits in australia.
>>98053662The jurassic world movies feel like they're trying to get more and more retarded with each entry on purposeLike what the fuck do you think would happen if a t-rex was set loose in modern north america? it would either starve to death cause there's nothing to eat or just get shot by some micropenis
>>98053662>I would imagine something like protoceratops pets like dogs on a leash in a modern day settingEven that would probably be too dangerous, lt might be around dog sized but that thing could genuinely bite someone's arm clean off with basically no effort
>>98053606>from jurassic park (original) with the T-Rex in manhattan.That was The Lost World, not the original Jurassic Park, and it was San Diego, not Manhattan.
>>98053769>it would either starve to death cause there's nothing to eatFeral hogs
>>98053787Ah, thanks. It's been a while since I saw the movie in english.>>98053776Good point. So that's why I am trying to figure out how to make it more believable that dinosaurs are part of the world again now, so I've been listing things that are believeable in the setting that isn't "A Velociraptor named Princess" when it's no different to a pitbull.The setting is to mix a man-vs-nature/beast and man-vs-society conflicts. Honestly, if man ould, leave out tainted meat for the trex or just use firearms as pest-control until the problem's solved, but I'm trying to make it so that there is a valid reason to keep at least some of them.
>>98053792Anon, this is one of the t-rex's standard prey that it ate regularly, feral hogs would be like tic tacs to it
Man, it must suck to lose your immersion so easily, and to even need immersion when you're playing a game.
>>98053633Simple mistake.You should have looked for "worldbuilding" before making your worldbuilding thread.
>>98053843And would you care to compare the size of a blue whale to its standard prey? T-Rex ate those because they were around, but that in no way means it would be incapable of adapting to a diet of hogs.
>>98054063>And would you care to compare the size of a blue whale to its standard prey?Yes because catching and eating krill is completely effortless as opposed to somehow ambushing or catching up to feral hogs when you're built for wrestling other giants to death and not hunting smaller, faster preyAre you like, mentally retarded or something? do you understand how the world around you works?
>>98053792They're tiny omnivores compared to a 10 ton apex predators that needs to eat a human a day to survive.https://what-if.xkcd.com/78/
>>98053606>But the problem is how do I make it feel like there is a world where humans continue on with daily lives but dinos just now walk among them?Massive social media campaign to sell them to the populace as ethically correct household pets, servants and expenditures. Like a mix of animal rights, hippie return to earth stuff and land back movements. Mix in constant celebrity endorsements and silicon valley cranking out dinosaur clones to sell similar to the AI bubble's >it has to make money eventually if we put it in everything and maybe a megachurch dinosaurs walked the earth with man revival.
>>98053625>Hello welcome to tg! We have a seperate general for worldbuilding. You are welcome to join the discussion there with other nevergames. Enjoy your stay!Your Janny application was rejected or what?
>>98054608>nerr hurr durr jannies applicationIs this all you can say to justify your world building spam?It's almost as obnoxious as those questfags were.
>>98054623But enough about the eight Magic the Gathering generals up at this moment or the four OSR threads (not including any schizo offshoot spam where one guy seethes about sandboxes vs railroading for months), what's your favorite dino?
>>98054718>attempting whataboutism>attempting it about threads about actual games and not just worldbuildingYou're pathetic.
>>98054736Yes, I'm sure hiroshimoot's funds are low and he's running out of internet, but I'm sure the board can survive a single thread about a real game no one's replied to in days being bumped off. It also seems like despite OP's mistake, simply by filtering the word "worldbuilding" you never would've had the mistfortune of seeing this extra thread in the catalog. I know I filtered out quite a few quests back in the day. Mine's stegosaurus, by the way.
>>98054794Stegosaurus Quest was shit.
>>98054806Oh shit, they had one like that? Probably trash like them all, but I'll never know because of the, you know, filters.
>>98054833The filters don't work, which is why /qst/ exists now.Kinda like how there's already a dedicated thread for worldbuilding.
>>98053769Cattle. It's conveniently grouped in one place, so it could eat several at once.
>>98055019It gets shot in like 2 days max
>>98053606I'm not sure what applies from the fantasy dinos I have. The hobgoblins make cheese out of their crop milk, if that helps.If this is in the US, you bet a couple creationists would adopt dinos and use them to claim they are at most ten thousand years ago, like everything else.>Friend suggested to do the "Dinos always existed in human history", but then that changes society entirely. Fun to speculate, but tough to organize.What if you pulled a "Pacific Rim"? Dinos suddenly appeared one day, maybe out a portal, maybe out of a NASA FTL experiment going wrong, maybe they just start showing up in several continents and no one figured out how. But people adjusted and tried to eat them and got ate by them, and reserves were built and toys sold. And now paleontologists are fighting over how "many mysteries are being solved by studying live animals" X "how can you know these dinos are exactly like the fossil ones" X "excuse me, this is the biology field, go dig bones and don't bother our test subjects". https://youtu.be/DOemQ-3Cjxs?si=m7sdoz_94UP79zIb
>>98053606You could go the Xenozoic Tales route:>Post-apocalyptic setting, but there are havens of civilization here and there. So there are cities, cars, and stuff.>Dinosaurs arrived during the apocalypse, but that was generations ago, so people have gotten used to them.>The dinosaurs themselves were the product of genetic experiments, but not in the JP way. Rather, an experiment meant to study how life first appeared was launched, then ran amok. For some reason, it reran the full course of phylogeny in accelerated form (Don't think about it too closely). That's why you suddenly started getting not just dinosaurs, but also trilobites and mammoths living again.If you want something more realistic, you could go with something along these lines:>Global societal collapse>A biotech company launched rewilding experiments shortly beforehand>With the collapse, the experiment ran wild, and now there are dinosaurs everywhere>We are 100 years later, and the world is only now getting back to a pre-collapse level of development. So it all roughly looks like today, but with dinosaurs.
>>98056038Alternatively, you have the Dinosaur Attack route:>Time travel experiment ran amok>Opens portals all over the planet, to the dinosaur era>So now you have dinosaurs messing with the modern world in all sorts of hilariously gory way>Dinosaur Satan is involved, somehowWasn't the TV series Primeval based on the same premise?
>>98056060Here are a few other options, just because I f*cking love dinosaurs.One which I wanted to use for a Dino Riders/Xenozoic Tales-inspired campaign:>Time travel technology is working and stable, but it turns out to be travel to a parallel dimension, so it doesn't affect the present time.>Governments/corporations decide to send a colony to the late Cretaceous period to mine resources there. It doesn't matter, because the K-T event is coming anyway, so whatever damage you cause to the ecosystem there won't matter.>An accident happens, and the colony is cut off.>Big hints that it may be the result of present-day Earth being destroyed. Maybe.>So now you have a population of millions of humans, stranded in the Cretaceous period. The K-T event is coming. If they stop it, they destroy any chance for mammals to rise and therefore for mankind to evolve on this Earth. But if they don't stop it, they will all die, and they may very well be the last humans alive on either EarthAnother one:>Intelligent dinosaurs emerged towards the end of the Cretaceous period. They f*cked off to another star system before the K-T event. It was their fault, by the way.>Now they are back and want their planet back>Good news though, they are pretty chill and are fine with living alongside us.>They brought their fauna though and want to implant it back. This is non-negotiable. They agree to cure cancer in exchange thoughAlright, a last one:>Earth is doomed because of a supernova or something.>Interdimensional travel is discovered and humans are sent to the closest alternative Earth available, or maybe the closest available with no humans. This one happens to have dinosaurs on it>Depending on how close you want your setting to be to the modern day, you can fine-tune when dimensional travel technology was discovered and how much advance warning mankind had of the impending supernova. So the population on Earth 2 can go from 10,000 hand-picked survivors to billions of refugees
There are over ten thousand species of dinosaur alive at this very moment. They're harmless.
>>98056364My local ones start screaming about their superiority to mammals at 4am and are driving me mad, despite being roughly the size and shape of a sparrow (some are fucking chonky).
>>98054189>Social Media and PropagandaThat's really good and I wish I thought that earlier. I just had them try to make them into either livestock or service animals.>MegachurchI don't know what that is but I'm guessing like a modern cathedral but for modern "Retelling" of christianityI had part of the idea that microraptors are integrated in human society since pidgeons are abundant in big cities for example for an invasive species subplot.Another one is trying to use them as performance or entertainment animals like zoo'd bears and tigers in vegas. I had a different idea of big raptors competing with wolves in wild territory.>>98055019There is no way they'd dine on cattle for long before going the way of the taz tiger
>>98058499>>98055904Yeah, I figured it was easier to do the whole "Dinos suddenly appeared one day." and originally it was supposed to be corp gen experiment for immortality and reviving the dead, failed, and the corp is destroyed in the process. But I do like the NASA FTL experiment idea. Better than generic playing god plotpoint.I have on my checklist a "Bonewars 2: Electric Boogaloo" for my friends and I.>>98056038>Xenozoic TalesThanks for the material. I'll actually look into this this weekend.>Post-war and Post-collapse societyActually better than what I thought where there was no collapse.>>98056060>Dinosaur attack and Dinosaur SatanGoddamn I want what they are smoking. Sounds like a fun read.>>98056161>K-T avoidanceI can see that added into the plot. This is a modern day setting because the buildings we have are just modern cities and skyscrapers. we also have some random trees and huts not really up to scale, but it gives me inspiration on building the setting now with some animal and dinosaur toys.Definitely not doing the intelligent dinosaurs though, sadly. The premise I wrote is that humanity is on top. But still thankfull for the inspiration.Broke in 2 posts because it's detected as spam for some reason.
I think the important thing to remember is unless you go the time travel route, scientific accuracy to our modern understanding of non-avian dinosaurs becomes less essential. Jurassic Park style clones can open up interesting ideas about gene editing and splicing unique abilities onto the animals, and a lost world type scenario will still require the species to have changed and adapted over millions of years to an insular environment. Things like island gigantism and dwarfism would in the end create novel species which wouldn't be recognized from the fossil record.Just as an example an isolated environment might not have enough to support a T. Rex population unless something unnatural is occurring. But medium sized theropods are still terrifying to a human.
>>98058499>I don't know what that isOh man. Basically various forms of evangelical christians in the USA making fuck huge churches and spectacle events. iirc the technical definition is 2K attendees a week but most of the ones I'm thinking of are 10K and up. Its a specifically americana thing. Mixing this with some of the more fringe stuff where I'm from that for real preaches that dinosaurs walked the earth with man, so you can have a big bunch of religious fervour about dinosaurs coming back as part of revelations. Just start slapping dinosaurs in everything. Don't overthink it, this will line up with the sales and production side not thinking about it too much either just get those fucking dinos into those consumer markets nownownow. Having a notable amount of them get abandoned shortly after purchase works, humans are shitheads like that. Post covid animal shelters were overwhelmed with pets people realized they didn't want. Ditching an invasive species pet in the woods or the park is for sure what we would do with microraptors and even bigger ones.
>>980536060. We already have dinosaurs. We call them birds.1. Mesozoic had significantly higher concentration of oxygen in air. I doubt it giants like stegosaurus or T. rex would survive on modern Earth.2. If I were you I'd ignore Jurassic Park franchise and go small. Enantiornithines (toothy birds, claws on wings), Microraptors ("five-winged" gliders – see pic), Troodontidae (prehensile hands, binocular vision, record mesozoic encephalisation quotient (5.8-6.5; for reference humans are 7.5 and corvids considered bird geniuses are at 4.0... If not for a Chicxulub impact the niche for smart omnivores with good eyesight that humans evolved from might never open.). They'd be your "man-sized pet dinosaur.")
>>98059065Actually that second point is entirely incorrect. Dinosaurs were able to support such large sizes because of their incredibly efficient respiratory systems, the mesozoic had oxygen levels very comparable to today.
