You Got Your Dinosaurs in my Medieval Fantasy!

Jurassic World is out, so I’m exploiting that. Deal with it.

The greatest sin of Dungeons & Dragons 5^th Edition is that there is no Velociraptor or Deinonychus in the Monster Manual. Whether you care or not about the actual necessity of differentiating the two, the fact that what is likely the second-most well known dinosaur in the WORLD didn’t make it into the book is a black mark on ALL of the D&D design team. That said, the You have to change nothing to re-skin the lion as a raptor. It’s fast, and it has a bite, claws, and pounce attack.

So, how do you use Dinosaurs in your games? It’s an issue I’ve run into in the past when trying to figure out how to fit what are undoubtedly and irrefutably the MOST AWESOME animals in the history of the world into a traditionally-medieval fantasy game with swords and wizards and shit.

  

Seriously, guys. This is the essence of imagination.

The answer is, of course, that this is Dungeons & Freaking Dragons, yo! You want dinosaurs in your game, then put some dinosaurs in your game, man! There’s wizards and shit! Don’t leave my tyranno-bro out of the game!

So the real salient question is not whether or not you should include dragons, but rather HOW you should include them. I came up with 3.

Design Day: The Artificial

Last week on Design Day, I presented a new, shadowy race known as the Shadowkin. This week, I'm still on a races kick, so I decided to throw something else together...well, not exactly that. I'm actually updating an old race I designed: The Gearman.

Except these guys got a pretty major face-lift. They've been re-designed from the bottom-up, right down to the name. In addition, they have some new flavor that I hope you'll enjoy. I've been meaning to adjust them for a while now, since they're one of the player races in my home campaign setting. So here it is:

Design Day: The Shadowkin

I HAVE NO EXCUSE FOR THE LACK OF A FLAVOR FRIDAY AND A DESIGN DAY ON TUESDAY.

So the Bestiary 3 is coming out soon, and Paizo has been doing for the last month or so, posting monster stat blocks and previewing pictures of the monsters in the book. I actually collect Paizo art every time something cool comes up on their blog, so I’ve been snatching all of these pictures up as they came. And, well…there was one that inspired me to make something.