The Shadow of Hojo Mori

There is a continent with many names. Many of them are spoken in the language of its native inhabitants, an ancient race of saurian bipeds. They are all descriptive names, if you understand that language, and many of them are contradictory.

It is indisputable that this continent exhibits certain unique properties, but there are different points of view regarding the precise nature of these qualities. As a result, what the dwindling highland empire refers to as the One True Land, some others call Exodus or the Wandering Isles, and still others call Nexus.

There are other sentient species there too, from what may or may not be other places, depending on whether other places truly exist, which the saurians consider a matter of debate. They tend to assign this place the name of their cultural concept of hell.*

There is a dense rainforest on this continent, named for the saurian who once ruled it with an iron fist, Hojo Mori, whose kingdom died with him. His descendants seem incapable of working together, and only only hold any authority within their own isolated settlements. They are feudal lords who only promise protection to those within their own city walls, and there are many dangers in the wilderness.

The place is overrun not only with dinosaurs (or rather, what the dinosaurs may have evolved into if they had escaped extinction eons ago), but also traces of the many outside cultures that Hojo Mori brought here long ago to enslave and exploit.

YES BUT WHAT SORT OF THINGS DOES THAT INCLUDE

Abandoned Mining Colony

• Emerald mine, abandoned 30 years ago when the earth into which the mine was carved was granted sentience and mobility by magical eco-terrorists. Anti-bodies formed in the shape of earth elementals and slaughtered anyone who couldn’t escape in time.
• A few of the gems are in easy-to-spot locations on the first level. The elementals, stomping around below, sound like the faint echoes of heavy industry at a distance.
• Lower levels contain more gems guarded by elemental antibodies. The elementals are incredibly loud, and have no chance of sneaking up on anyone who isn’t deaf. They exist as part of a hive mind that allows them to co-ordinate their attacks and defense, effectively adding +2 HD in combat whenever two or more elementals are present.
• The lowest level contains a hive-mind crystal. Destroying it triggers a massive earthquake that collapses the mine.

Bronze Jungle Tyrant

• Inspection of this huge, elaborate statue of the regional apex predator (basically like a t-rex but more so) reveals that it’s actually a vehicle with six seats in the head.
• The activation gem (glows a brilliant white, is the size of your head, probably being worshipped by some feral tribe of filthy humans or elves or something) is missing.

Frozen Pond

• A mace is half-buried in middle of a wide, frozen pond. The air here isn’t any colder than the surrounding rainforest, except within a foot or so of the ice itself.
• There’s the skeleton of a sea monster visible, trapped underneath the ice.
• Dislodging the mace requires a successful strength check and causes the pond to instantly melt, freeing an undead two-headed plesiosaur that attacks immediately, and dropping whoever’s standing on the surface of the pond into the water.
• Three trigger words are inscribed on the mace’s handle, in the personal cypher of a long-dead saurian artificer. When these words are muttered before striking a contiguous body of standing freshwater, the mace causes the water to change phase as appropriate. The trigger words are codes for “liquefy,” “solidify,” “vaporize,” and “condense.”
• the trigger words can also be used to cause additional elemental damage. When attacking a human, for example, the “vaporize” trigger word would cause 1d6 fire damage as the water content of their blood turned to steam, and the “solidify” would cause 1d6 cold damage as it became ice.

Bone Dog Encampment

• Semi-nomadic escaped slaves taken from a universe where canine bipeds naturally grow partial exoskeletons. Only females are present.
• PC bone dogs have hit dice and combat abilities as fighters, have advantage to wisdom tests related to scent and hearing, natural armor as chain, and a bite attack (but cannot use manufactured armor). Typical NPCs have from 1–4 HD and are usually armed with clubs or spears and bolas or slings. Their leader, Argluff, has 6 HD and wields a katana.
• Their community won’t survive past this generation on its own, as the males were all killed in a unsuccessful insurrection attempt.
• They need help to accomplish at least one of three goals: to get home or, failing that, to find some means of perpetuating their society here; either way, they also desire genocidal vengeance against their saurian ex-captors.

*The rare exceptions are usually those that have actually proven somewhat successful in this environment, such as the insectoid hive-minds, whose name for the place translates as Newhome. The individual hives have no names — the insectoids simply think of them as either This-Hive or Not-This-Hive, which are more similar conceptually to me/you than to here/there.

Dungeons & Dinosaurs

The multiverse contains infinite realities and grows with every decision or random occurrence. Most of those realities include some version of the star Sol, but relatively few of those realities still include some version of the planet Earth. This planet has been destroyed in millions of ways over the millennia, and its continued existence grows more unlikely by the day.

Some of these apocalypses have been the result of an external cataclysm. The astral body that collided with earth in its early history, forming the moon, could have been more massive, or approached at a slightly different angle, which means that in many timelines, it was, and the Earth was demolished long before it would have become suitable for life as we know it.

Many, many of these Earths were destroyed in the crossfire of wars fought among their own inhabitants. In some of the universes where restraint proved too difficult when it came to nuclear warfare, even those weapons failed to satisfy the wrath of the warlords and generals and presidents and kings. The survivors were forced underground but the war would continue. Sometimes the core of the planet would become part of the battlefield, compromising the Earth’s structure. A few realities produced particularly enterprising and ingenious madmen that managed to trigger a supernova event, destroying their entire solar system.

Even on the Earths that physically survived, mass extinction events were fairly common on most. Each of these massive die-offs cleared the way for another form of life to have its shot. The only hope of any particular genetic strain of surviving one of these events was in producing a species intelligent enough to see the event coming and prevent or escape it (bear in mind that most technologically or magically advanced civilization that the Earths produce also bring about their own extinction, so even if evolution somehow gets that far it’s still a crapshoot).

In some of those realities, the great oxygenation event (when early plants poisoned the world with oxygen, and the rest of life had to adapt to the abundance of this new toxin) happened a few hundred million years earlier, giving cambrian life a longer period in which to develop. The cambrian intelligences that ruled some of those worlds were the first to escape to other Earths, where they lie dormant beneath the oceans, while their cultists on land prepare for their awakening.

On one branch of the world tree (which is a much more apt metaphor for the multiverse than the ancients are likely to have realized), the great permian extinction occurred a hundred million years before it did in ours, greatly extending the length of the mesozoic period, giving the dinosaurs plenty of time to produce a species capable of language and tool use. Great saurian empires rose and fell much as our own have (that is to say, through a tragic history of violence, treachery and greed). Meanwhile, the academically inclined continued to work towards understanding the world around them and adapting it to their own needs.

When the saurian astrologers of those worlds recognized impending doom in giant asteroid form, they severed their homeland from their own timeline, expelling the land from its original place in the multiverse. This is how Exodus, the Prodigal Continent, came to be.

This continent, about the size of Australia, would jump to a wildly different shade of reality every year or so, and continues to do so sixty five and a half million years later. It’s been known by many names on uncountable worlds, including Atlantis. Due to the fractal nature of the multiverse, it’s essentially certain that more than one version of Exodus exists, but if more than one has ever appeared in the same world at the same time, the history of their interaction was lost long ago.

Nations and philosophies have risen and fallen on the continent over the course of countless generations. Few saurian philosophers today even remember the traditional world tree model and those who do reject it, perceiving themselves as the one true people, denizens of the one true continent in a constantly shifting universe. 

One of the few constants throughout the multiverse is that any civilization which stops thinking of outsiders as real people no longer sees abuse and exploitation of those outsiders as morally wrong. This universal truth, coupled with what the saurians perceived as an outside world that was almost constantly rewriting itself from scratch, has largely shaped the behavior of this species. Generally speaking, any time the saurians themselves aren’t too busy with some internal crisis, they appear in a new world and make contact with the most intelligent ephemerals they can find (as they refer to any species not from their continent), take advantage of them and enslaving as many as possible to support their own extravagant lifestyle. 

Bringing up the propagation of these slave races on Exodus and using that as a philosophical counterargument is a good way to be labeled a heretic. 

Many of these species revolted and were wiped out, but a few managed to escape, organize, and claim territory. The saurians, who once ruled the entire continent, retreated and unified in the highlands. The lowland regions are littered with the crumbling ruins of their towns and fortresses, and the highlands are home to a federation of saurian city states, having adopted savage humans as their current slave race of choice.

Having been exposed to wildly varying conditions throughout the vast majority of their history, the saurians have become one of the most versatile races in the multiverse. Their adventuring class, the rokai, are responsible for defending what’s left of saurian territory, exploring the various outside worlds looking for opportunities, and maintaining order within the federation’s borders. Rokai are expected to acquaint themselves with the arts of the magician and the swordsman alike, as well as the more practical skills of the scout or thief.

In terms of game mechanics, a level 1 rokai starts with a combination of abilities normally associated with a thief, fighter, or magic user, without excelling in any of those areas. From then on, every time the rokai increases in level, they must decide which of those three classes to advance in.

These stats are for LotFP because that’s more or less what I’m running at the moment, and because I couldn’t give a fuck less about niche protection if I tried. Making it work for another game might require shifting some numbers or adding some abilities depending on the ruleset, but the basic framework is:

SAURIAN ROKAI

XP Progression: as fighter

HP: 1d4 + constitution bonus at first level, as chosen class each time the rokai levels up.

Start with 2 skill points, gain 2 more when leveling up as a specialist.

Start knowing read magic and two random (or one chosen) 1st level spells. Begin with the spell progression of a 1st level magic user and increase when leveling up as a magic user.

Start with an attack bonus of +1 and add one when leveling up as a fighter. Can use all the same combat options as a fighter.

Saving throws: All five saving throws start at 16 until the rokai reaches level 2, then the saves vs paralysis and poison decrease by one when leveling up as a fighter, and saves vs spell and device do the same when leveling up as a magic user. When advancing as a specialist, saves vs poison and device decrease by 1, and the save against breath weapons decreases by 2.

Saurians also have the following natural abilities:

Bite attack, 1d4 damage.

Dinosaur affinity (similar to the affinity humans have for dogs and horses).

Scent up to 1/4 mile.

Scales provide natural protection as leather armor.

Random Mutant Dinosaurs

Ashley: "These tables are stupid. You can roll on them and get a colossal flying reptile with tail spikes and a neck shield."

Me: "These tables are awesome. You can roll on them and get a colossal flying reptile with tail spikes and a neck shield."

Roll 1d4, 1d6, 1d8, 1d10, and 1d12 all at once. Or, if you already know you need (for example) a huge bipedal ambush predator, just roll the d10 and d12.

Rolling the d10 and d12 multiple times is likely to produce absurd results that may or may not be just what you want.

d4

1 quadruped

2 flying reptile

3 biped

4 aquatic

d6

1 tiny

2 small

3 medium

4 large

5 huge

6 colossal

d8

1 pack hunter

2 ambush predator

3 solo hunter

4 territorial herbivore

5 curious herbivore

6 herd herbivore

7 curious scavenger

8 skittish omnivore

d10

1 neck shield

2 back shell

3 bright feathers

4 spiked joints

5 back fin

6 spine plates

7 bony skull ornament

8 neck frill

9 spine spikes

10 covered in bristles

d12

1 1d3 horns

2 tail club

3 tail spikes

4 long neck & tail

5 sharp beak

6 tusks*

7 razor claws*

8 disease carrier

9 acid spit

10 radioactive breath

11 froglike tongue

12 speech & intelligence

*All dinosaurs have bite and claw attacks. These ones just do a shitload of damage in comparison.

If you only roll the d12 one time, there's a 1/3 chance of getting an extremely not realistic result that changes up the encounter. That feels about right to me. If you want to cut that stuff out completely for some reason, just use another d8 instead of a d12.

Now have a drink and make up a kickass sword & sorcery style name for your dinosaur species, like "dragonhawk" or "great tooth" or even "death lizard." Repeat the process a few times, maybe fudge a roll here and there, and a whole ecosystem starts to emerge.

You know what an owlbear is, right?

Okay so this is going to be a post where I talk about dinosaurs.

Not all dinosaur species vanished without a trace. Dromaeososaurids (the theropod group that includes velociraptor and deinonychus), for example, evolved into birds. (Well, probably. Most paleontologists agree that's most likely what happened.) There’s actually a team of scientists working on activating genes, suppressed by evolution but still present, to cause atavistic traits that add up to living velociraptors. The science consultant guy from Jurassic Park is involved.

A theoretical family tree of dromaeosaurid species from this article.

Anyway, one of the steps in that evolution was the microraptor gui (also similar species like tetrapterix). They were smaller and lighter than their ancestors, and their scales had become feathers. Their limbs were still basically like those of a theropod — true wings would come later, as would beaks. Still, the feathers on their limbs were long and thick enough to allow them to climb trees and wait for much larger prey to pass by underneath, then glide down with all four limbs spread out like an X-Wing, and grab onto their target. At this point, they would probably have held on with their forelegs and repeatedly kicked down with their viciously clawed rear legs in a sprinting motion, while tearing at the walking meal with their razor sharp teeth. I don’t know if they were pack hunters, but I’d be surprised to learn they weren’t.

5 attacks during the surprise round.

While some of gui's descendants became even smaller, the terror birds of pre-human South America were huge, flightless apex predators. Their useless wings were like an encore of t-rex’s stubby little forelegs. So, coming to the point of this post, an owlbear is basically a terror bird with fore claws and atavistic proportions. It could even have reverted to tetrapterix’s ambush predator hunting behavior.All of which means that this Reaper mini is the least silly and most terrifying owlbear mini there is.

RAWR