This question is not specific to any DnD edition so I will not post in a generalWhere do you keep your dinosaurs? Do you weave them into forests and plains alongside wolves and bears and jaguars or do you have a specific dinosaur continent where every dinosaur in the monster manual lives? Like that one dinosaur island in Final Fantasy VI. That's a kino island.
>>98572639Typically the latter. Not necessarily a continent or island, but places where segmented populations could exist or thrive. So sometimes it's also isolated valleys, jungles on the far side of a desert, the moon, other planes of existence, etc.The only times I've put them in a normal ecosystem is when I also made them more explicitly supernatural.
What goes on in this giant area of the oceans? It doesnt even have many islands."Across the distant, inhospitable oceans far south of the Spice Lands..."Alright, there we go, a dinosaur subcontinent. I'm adding it. Add in some cavemen and its golden.
>>98573727The Poo Ocean...
>>98572639Treat them like endemic species surviving in odd, isolated pockets where the ecology allows for it, OP.Koolasuchus is a really cool example of that, a species of a giant pseudo-amphibian emerging far past the point of when animals like that went extinct hundreds of millions years ago essentially all-around the rest of the world.To be perfectly frank with you, if you don't have any kind of mass-extinction event in your world's history, there's no reason for incredibly successful lineages of animals being misplaced from their niches. The only problem you have to worry about is a sort of visual consistency. If you want an animal to feel ancient, you have to convey its one-of-a-kind morphology by picking an unusual critter - in that case, think about portraying it as a Coelocanth kind of situation.
>>98573869>Koolasuchus>eally cool example
>>98573906What can I say, it's in the name.Paleontology would be a much more well-financed field with entries like "Oilsaurus," those people are just bad a marketing.
I stole this idea from a blogger. Dinosaurs rule the past, all of it, starting in the most infinitesimal time ago and stretching back to the beginning. And the more you know about them, the more dangerous they are. If you've never heard of one, you get dorky Victorian iguanadons. If you bring the Time Wizard, you'll be greeted by feathered therapods with bullshit move speeds, and sauropods that can make sonic booms with their tails. Their role is destroying time that's already happened, or rather reverting it to a primal state. They're langoliers. Using any form of time magic, you might be able to summon dinosaurs. It's dangerous to use Time Stop too much in the same place, because dinosaurs will catch up. Even a relatively simple spell like Haste carries some risk. Dinosaurs can be weaponized if you find enough time crystals (obviously some sorcerer has already done this and he needs to be stopped). To answer your question, they're everywhere. At any place there might be a velociraptor watching you, waiting for you to take just one accidental slip back on the Timeline. Anywhere anybody's fucked with Time, add a small chance for a random dinosaur encounter.
>>98574124Honestly a great pitch for the more primordial/demonic depiction but you should probably be very careful with including too much modern accurate(tm) paleofaggotry.If anything, for a fantasy setting where you give prehistoric animals supernatural traits, going full-Victorian is a better move tbdesu. Highlight their wrongness by amplifying the whole "hailing from a time when the world was meaner and rougher" thing.They don't bleed, their hearts don't stop beating weeks after being ripped out, their eyes are so reflective they flashbang the room if they are caught in the light, they don't breathe, and when they do - they exhale pure sulphur fumes. Also, the "smallest" dinosaur is about the size of a house, and the biggest could probably reach into the horizon and swallow stars. They are not supernatural inherently like that, they are just the product of a world long-gone, and for the better at that.Protip: if you want a lower-level trash mob, you could use something like an internal parasite from them.
>>98574020>those people are just bad a marketingAre not, it's just all the oil money goes to the Invertebrate Paleontologist!!!
>>98572639Normally the former but a country in a setting I'm writing now uses the latter.
>>98572639>Where do you keep your dinosaurs?Coincidentally, none of my settings have had a big enough extinction event to permanently kill off the dinosaurs, so they've had more time to adapt and inter-mingle with the other modern animals. With that in mind however: dinosaur population and species density is highest on and around the equator and within the southern hemisphere. For as savage and brutal as they are, they need consistent greenhouse conditions, high humidity, and a year-round growing season to provide them with enough sustenance to fuel their insane growth and reproduction rates. Specifically, they like jungles and rainforests, and despite their bulk and appetite they're uniquely suited to spreading jungle: they eat a lot of large-pitted fruits, they crush and mulch the undergrowth, and they have cast-iron stomachs perfect for digesting nearly any vegetation into dung. TLDR; They utterly dominate the environments they're comfortable in, but *outside of the specific conditions they flourish in they're a bit too niche to rough it out with the mammals. *There's definitely exceptions though:-A lot of the smaller to medium-sized theropods are so birdlike, intelligent, and innocuous they can seamlessly integrate into modern ecologies. Think raptors, ornithomimuds, oviraptors, and the odd ceratosaurus. -Many of the larger herbivores, like sauropods and ceratopsids, will migrate seasonally, or form vagrant populations during droughts, outside of their territory. -Pterosaurs and marine reptiles have cosmopolitan distributions: you'll find them basically everywhere and anywhere, with their only limitation being availability of food and water temperature. They're INCREDIBLY competitive.
>>98572639The forgotten jungle island or secret underground world because I’m a hack who just is going by what they did in King Kong
>>98573869Leslie and Gerry Kool are nice too. Mike Cleeland is a pretty good bloke too.
In Brazil of course.
>>98572639I've only used a dinosaur once. The party was fighting an Inevitable and was starting to lose badly so I hand waved a T-Rex showing up and dividing the lawful outsider's attention so the party could escape (for the time, they are called inevitables for a reason).
In a quarantine zone caused by a cyberpunk biotechnology megacorp lab accident. They're birds that have been exposed to a genetically engineered virus that activates dormant genes from evolutionary ancestors buried in the junk DNA (think Monkey Business from Cowboy Bebop). Some develop stable mutations and can even breed normally, having healthy dinosaur offspring, but others degenerate into disgusting, teratomic masses of random bird and reptile parts.
>>98573727That's where the lost continent of Lemuria is located.
>>98576451You seem to be fundamentally misunderstanding what made the continents lost.
>>98572639Besides the explicit mention of "the monster manual", your questions aren't specific to D&D.
>>98572639I usually weave one or two in randomly with other animals/monsters. But I also like to create certain, secluded regions that just have tons of dinos.In my last campaign, it was typical medieval European fantasy land. However, to the west the players knew of this mountain ridge, and everyone said that they never went past this ridge because "Titans" lived out there... They kept thinking some sort of giant monster men lived that way, but when they finall went to explore that region, "Titans" were actually dinosaurs.
>>98572639Everywhere. My setting has "drakes", which are a convenient way for me to add unscientific dinosaurs anywhere I want, and alter them any way I want.
I'm running Tomb of Annihilation and am planning to add some homebrew Troodon into the mix, inspired by how they were portrayed in the TellTale Jurassic Park>diminutive pack hunters>giant saucer eyes, can see in the dark>venomous bite that causes paralysis and delirium >they build their nests around the bodies of paralyzed prey, the warmth of their still-living bodies acting as biological incubators for their eggs
>>98574124This is a fun idea, reminds of me of Tops' Dinosaurs Attack! trading cards, where it's revealed all the dinosaurs are secretly working for The Supreme Monstrosity, literally dinosaur Satan
>>98572639Everywhere. The goblinoid lands have more dinos, but that's because they tame a lot of them. And their goddess of life, death and rebirth is a titanic sauropod whose passage tears the land, its lungs change the weather, its blood empowers flying beasts nesting on its back, and whole groves sprout from its shit.>>98575804Fica quieto, não é pros gringos saberem.
>>98572639Space fantasy. Forget everything else. You better have big planetary rings in the horizon behind some neon colored dinosaurs on an alien planet with purple rocks. Or else you're wasting your life.
>>98572639I keep them in a clear plastic bag with an owlbear, a bulette, and a rust monster.
>>98572639I shove them into the Hollow Earth.Yes, the Hollow Earth is below the Underdark.
>>98572639Ceratopsian cattle drakeVelociraptor bird drakeSpinomellus phalanx drakeGorgonopsid lion drakeAmbulocetus river wolfTrue Dragons (neither bird-like nor crocodile-like but a third branch of the archosaur tree)Live within a jungle sanctuary hidden in the far north. Pterosaur wyverns and crocodilian wyrms live elsewhere. Read my novellas for more details.
