A player in my current dinosaur-themed Savage Worlds campaign sent me this and I thought I’d pass it along:
Goodies
A Time Traveler’s Guide to Dinosaur Hunting will be a large monster manual for Dungeons and Dragons 5e. It will have a bunch of dinosaurs. Some of them with laser guns and some of will be undead, like in that episode of Genndy Tartakovsky’s Primal, and some of them will be aliens. The book doesn’t exist yet, but its Kickstarter page claims that it will have 300+ entries, plus a bunch of new classes and weapons and player races. They’re doing an a la carte tier system, so you get whatever goodies you pay for. The most expensive stock tiers ($200 and $400+) get you custom dice and VTT materials.
It also comes with an adventure set in a steampunk American West where people ride dinosaurs instead of horses. If you want to slot it in to an existing campaign you’ll have to adapt it because there’s very little chance that that’s what you’re currently running. Odds are its a modern adventure path style thing though, so it probably won’t be designed for that sort of play.
They’re also invoking the multiverse to explain all the different genre mach-up stuff in the book. The sales page treats it as an after-thought, which is probably for the best.
Team
Ink Games, the company producing the book, hired on a bunch of people you may or may not recognize: Jeff Grubb, Kat Kruger, Alex Kammer, Craig Sawyer, Zac Goins, Alan Patrick, Ginny Loveday, and Benjamin Palmer. The only person I here I know about is Jeff Grubb and the author credits him as working on “Grayhawk with Ed Greenwood.” Ignoring that the page misspelled Greyhawk, which as a fan irks me, I’m not aware of those two people working together on anything for that setting and I’m not aware of Ed Greenwood directly contributing to the setting outside of his article on Hell in an early issue of Dragon magazine. I did an internet search and it didn’t show anything either.
Other details that might interest you: they say they’ve gotten a paleontologist consultant and that they want their dinosaurs that aren’t undead alien cyborgs to be realistic. Some of the art backs that claim up, but some of it looks like they’re also doing old-style dinosaurs. Maybe they’ll pad out the entries by having a T-Rex that walks with its tail out, one that drags its tail on the ground, and one that hops like a kangaroo.
Other Books
Dinosaurs in D&D specifically and RPGs in general aren’t anything new. The page claims that this is something that’s relatively rare, and that’s really wrong. The first published version of D&D had dinosaurs on the swamp encounter table. Every monster manual has had a dinosaur section, even 4e which gave them a fantasy makeover. 5e even had a popular adventure set in Chult, a classic lost world type setting.
Outside of D&D, just on this website I gave a glowing review to GURPS: Lands Out of Time. Monte Cook’s Cipher System has Predation, which has dinosaur stats and a setting that’s like that old Fox show Terra Nova but a hundred years later. If you search on Drive-Thru RPG and set the filter to non-core books only you get 405 results. Dinosaurs stuff isn’t competing with generic D&D fantasy, but nothing is. Compared to everything else, they aren’t doing too bad.
Verdict
If you’re running 5e D&D and you want to use it to play tabletop ARK: Survival Evolved, then, based on current information, will probably be worth your time. If you want to go and grab a bunch of outdoor survival rules this book sounds like it would be good for a Primal game too. It could also help you fill out Chult in Tomb of Annihilation, or any similar adventures. Goodman Games has a 5e version of Isle of Dread and there’s a bunch of fan-conversions of Savage Tide to 5e.
If you want to shoot these guys money for this book there’s a “Build Your Own Set” tier that lets you pick and choose what you want. That’s pretty cool and what I would pick if I were going to get it. There’s 20 days left to back this thing, with 37 backers they’ve already hit their goal, and at time of writing they’re estimating that they’ll be able to get it to you by June of next year. Here’s the link.
