Dinosaur Planet

[ghosty]

I watched the original B&W version of King Kong over the weekend and then caught Jurassic Park on cable...and well it began a train of thought which I just can't complete.

Lets say the PCs find a world populated by dinosaurs, all types from all periods...wow a palentologists dream come true (without hokey DNA/cloning). But where do I go from there. The big game hunter here to kill the most dangerous predators comes to mind but its so overdone.

One idea would be that as dinosaurs remained the dominant species they have developed sentient intelligence, not all but some like the Utahraptor...and the hunters don't realise it and the PCs have to stop the hunters and prevent a breach of the Prime Directive at the same time. Can you image a race of starfaring 'raptors, they'll put the Gorn to shame, I guarantee you.

Any thoughts?

[Erik Filean]

Originally posted by ghosty
I watched the original B&W version of King Kong over the weekend and then caught Jurassic Park on cable...and well it began a train of thought which I just can't complete.

Lets say the PCs find a world populated by dinosaurs, all types from all periods...wow a palentologists dream come true (without hokey DNA/cloning). But where do I go from there. The big game hunter here to kill the most dangerous predators comes to mind but its so overdone.

One idea would be that as dinosaurs remained the dominant species they have developed sentient intelligence, not all but some like the Utahraptor...and the hunters don't realise it and the PCs have to stop the hunters and prevent a breach of the Prime Directive at the same time. Can you image a race of starfaring 'raptors, they'll put the Gorn to shame, I guarantee you.

Any thoughts?

My only thought is that it's going to take some explaining to account for a planet full of evolutionarily stagnant Earth dinosaurs from all parts of the Mesozoic.

Why not a planet inhabited by animals analogous to Earth's dinosaurs--similar enough to make the point and capture the fun value, but different enough to piece together a sensible ecology and give the GM the fun of creating his/her own beasties?

[Dan Stack]

I myself had a dino time-travel adventure, featuring the Voth (as seen on Voyager):

http://www.geocities.com/breschau_of...e_species.html

It involved the Voth being genetically engineered by the Thrint Imperium (Slavers, as referred to in Niven's Known Space series and the animated episode "The Slaver Weapon"). They had rebelled against the Thrint and as revenge the Thrint were dropping a rock on the Earth. The characters helped the Voth make it off Earth despite the attempts of the Thrint.

But you've got my mind chugging - in addition to being a Trekkie, I love dinosaurs and wouldn't mind using them again.

One danger. If you want good science, if dinosaurs survived, after 65 million years dinosaurs would bear little resemblance to the species of the late Cretaceous.

I'd suggest a planet of transplanted dinosaurs, brought back by cloning, a-la Jurassic Park. Perhaps the Gorn have done it and have "uplifted" a species or two as an experiment or to have a slave race. Or a weapon against humans.

Just some rambling...

Other possibilities - perhaps there was a Voth hibernation ship, filled with dino-embryos, that was lost and only landed on a planet after a 64.5 million years of journeying. Unfortunately, there was another sentient species on that world, leading to massive warfare, which the characters arrive in the middle of. Perhaps the Voth even uplifted Raptors to serve as warriors and it allowed them to win the war but the Raptors turned on them, ravaging the planet, causing the tech to drop immensely - good for fans of post-apocalyptic works.

[Diamond]

Here's something that might help: I wrote up ICON stats for dinosaurs for use in my Pulp Adventure one-shots.

Tyranosaurus Rex - 8 ton pouncing hunter
Fitness 2 Strength +55
Coordination 3
Presence 9
Instinct 1 Ferocity +2
Resistance 45 + 2 armor
Bite 4 Damage 55+2d6
Stomp/tail swipe: 2 Damage 57+1d6

Triceratops - 8 ton grazing herbivore
Fitness 2 Strength +45
Coordination 2
Presence 6
Instinct 1
Resistance 40 + 12 armor for attacks from the front, + 4 armor from the sides or rear.
Horn 3 Dmg 45+3d6 +1 for every 10m/round charged.

Brontosaurus/Apatosaurus - 35 ton grazing herbivore
Fitness 2 Strength +70
Coordination 1
Presence 7
Instinct 1 Perception +2 that head atop the long neck can
see things coming from a long way away!
Resitance 60
Stomp/tail 2 Damage 62+1d6

Velociraptor 200kg hunter
Fitness 4 strength +2
Coordination 4
Presence 5
Instinct 3 ferocity +2
REsistance 6
Bite 3 damage 6+1d6
Claw slash 4 damage 6+2d6

Notes: Check your favorite resource or movie for descriptions and behavior. The large dinosaurs here are intended to reflect
the big, dumb, slow dinosaurs shown in earlier movies. The velociraptor is a smarter, faster, more modern (and Jurassic-Park-like) enterpretation.

[Ineti]

For some ideas, check out Anne McCaffrey's books Dinosaur Planet and Dinosaur Planet Survivors. They're about a group who crash-lands on a planet full of dinosaurs. It's been ages since I've read them, though, but I do recall they were really good.

[Anarchy Bob]

I think it's way obvious but.

Why do you need all those weirdo explanations for a planet filled with dinosaurs?

Did life on that planet HAVE to start at the time it did on ours?

Of course, this only works if you don't want to bother about the sentient species of dinosaur.

[Aldaron]

I've thought about doing this sort of thing, as well. Next to sci-fi and gaming, dinosaurs are one of my favourite hobbies (have been ever since I was about 4. Now my nearly-five-year-old son is carrying on the family tradition! )

My idea was something along the lines of them having been transplanted by the Preservers. Basically, the Preservers had a sort of Prime Directive code, and when they saw the asteroid heading for Earth, they didn't stop it, but they did take enough dinos to populate a tropical world somewhere in the Alpha or Beta quadrants.

Shortly before/after landing on the "Jurassic Park Planet", however, the Preserver ship malfunctioned and crash-landed. The dinosaurs, in stasis, have remained so for the last 65 million years. <i>Something</i> the PCs do shuts down the stasis, and you have a group of Cretaceous dinosaurs running about.

The only catch here is that to keep it realistic, you'd have to use only Cretaceous dinos - T-rex, the various 'raptors, Deinonychus, Triceratops, Brachiosaurus, Iquanadon - some of the "classics" like Stegasaurus simply didn't exist by the Cretaceous.

Still, it'd be interesting to unashamedly plagiarise JP III and have the 'raptors <i>already</i> heading for sentience - a realisation that would rock the paleantology world when it realises how close Earth came to speaking "raptorese".

On a somewhat-related note, my son (who turns five in February), recently came home from Kinder. It seems him and his friends were discussing and playing football (Australian rules style, that is). I'm not a football fan (or sports of any kind, actually), so he's never been exposed to it before, but he came home asking if he could barrack for the Geelong Cats.

I said: "Of course you can, Simon - you can barrack for any team you like."

His response: "Hmmm...are there any Frogs or Dinosaurs?"
On the negative response from me (given thru a choking fit of laughter), he very gravely confirmed that he would indeed support the Cats, then.

Maybe you had to be there, but I thought it was hysterical.

[ghosty]

Amazing what we teach our kids. Is he going to be a role-playing Trekkie as well?

Your idea of how Dino World came into existence is basically what I had in mind, a Preserver project to save dinos from armageddon. Without a ELE on this new world, the dinos survived and evolved into a civilization of their own and its true that I did think this idea up after JPIII, it'll be a tribute of sorts of Michael Cricthon and others who kept the dinosaur legends alive.

I was thinking, that perhaps this is not only a world populated by dinosaurs but a world sort of the like the Lost World TV series. A sort of pulp adventure world for the PCs to crash land on and survive until they can be picked up.

[Greg Smith]

I too thought of 'The Lost World'. I love it. It's both hokey and cool at the same time.

There is a dinosaur RPG coming out in the near future. I can't remember what it's called, but it involves Dino PCs!! Which should be a laugh.

[mactavish]

I thought that perhaps when the Voth fled Earth that they brought either eggs, specimens, or DNA samples from some of the various "thudner lizards." I, too, envisioned a world populated by Earth dinosaurs, and perhaps the Voth Circle of Zoology could be of some help here.

I would imagine that the Voth homeworld would likely have transplanted plants and animals from the Jurassic, Triassic, and other "dino"-eras on Earth. Perhaps, too, they created zoological sanctuaries along the way when the eggs hatched/specimens grew too large for their ships. This could explain some of the semi-reptilian and/or proto-mamalian races found throughout the galaxy (where they are not contradicted by canon, of course).

This could make for an interesting exploration as the PCs find a planet inhabited by the descendants of Earth's dinosaurs (sentient or otherwise) as well as lost Voth colonies, advanced technologies, and so on. Perhaps the Voth installed a device that prevents the dinosaurs from achieving sentience, keeping them [roughly] in their "original" form for eons.

Perhaps a colony of Voth ancestors that have long since forgotten their origins, reverted to primitive lifestyles, only to eventually grow and rediscover space flight and other stuff. Such an offshoot race could be similar to the Voth, but less technically advanced. Likely physically divergent as well (I'm told that millions of years has that effect on a race).

For something different, how about a cosmic string fragment or a natural microwormhole that moved through the Sol system 100 MYA, taking a big chunk of a continent with it and relocating it in another system?

Imagine a kind of <i>Land of the Lost</i> setting where the PCs' <i>Runabout</i> crashes far out of sensor range on a dinosaur-infested jungle world. Maybe there are some members of a Voth sub-race trying in vain to reactivate some lost Voth technology in order to escape. That alone could make for an entire sub-plot or even a whole new Series.

mactavish out.

[ghosty]

One idea for a comedic episode is for Harry Mudd to have acquired a supply of dino-DNA and he's found a unihabited planet somewhere and wants to build a dino theme park. Well his genetic sequencer goes awry and he produces a race of intelligent 'raptors who take him hostage. The PCs inavertently (due to a plot hook) arrive and have to get him and his tourists out of this one.

[Michael Barratt]

I'm gonna say the bad words: "Time Travel."

Hey, what if those dinos in the big bad rock-fall from the sky didn't all die out, but walked/ran/fell through temporal/spacial anomalies that left them on this planet - recently (within a century or so).

It could have been Voth technology. Fleeing whoever it was that chased them from Earth, they used a technology that was "self-destroying" to eliminate whatever bits and pieces they left behind, toss it into temporal stasis in a null-dimension, then come back when they did and put forth the appropriate signal (or, even better, it was a device they took with them so that they could temporally regenerate all their stuff when they got where they were going, and it would put it on the new planet). It was a very large affect, however, and sucked in some dinos as well.

So, on their run, the damned thing got lost. The ship of Voth carrying it were attacked/crashed/whatever - ended up on the planet where you want the dinos to be now. Over time, the device, though built to last, failed. A century ago it destabalized, and bits and pieces of the technology did indeed reform - but the lifeforms fared much better, and voila - dinos.

The Doc

[ghosty]

I have to put my foot down...no time tavel...time tavel and dimensional travel is fun to write about but is a bitch to run...

[Warren]

Sometime ago I was working on a world setting for a different Rpg/story. The premise I had setup was an Ancient Alien culture had terraformed a planet to be a lab. This lab was to study the flora and fauna of a planet they had recently observed (Earth). It was a newly formed planet and they desired to study and preserve specimens. They had access to technology similiar to the Iconian Gates. Now as time progressed they had gathered various plants and animals from many different eras and stored them in isolated areas/stasis. Then came a new lifeform(humans) they gathered samples of many cultures and groups. This slowly came to and end just before the discovery of gunpowder. Now something happened to the Aliens. They disappeared. Without their control the lab's containment areas broke down and the many samples were mixed together. This created a patchwork world in which I could use almost anything from the pregunpowder age and ignore the usual problems of mixing eras. Now this wasn't intended for Star trek but you might find it useful. Oh I almost forgot, the Aliens had indulged in some limited genetic experiments.

[ghosty]

Originally posted by Warren
Sometime ago I was working on a world setting for a different Rpg/story. The premise I had setup was an Ancient Alien culture had terraformed a planet to be a lab. This lab was to study the flora and fauna of a planet they had recently observed (Earth). It was a newly formed planet and they desired to study and preserve specimens. They had access to technology similiar to the Iconian Gates. Now as time progressed they had gathered various plants and animals from many different eras and stored them in isolated areas/stasis. Then came a new lifeform(humans) they gathered samples of many cultures and groups. This slowly came to and end just before the discovery of gunpowder. Now something happened to the Aliens. They disappeared. Without their control the lab's containment areas broke down and the many samples were mixed together. This created a patchwork world in which I could use almost anything from the pregunpowder age and ignore the usual problems of mixing eras. Now this wasn't intended for Star trek but you might find it useful. Oh I almost forgot, the Aliens had indulged in some limited genetic experiments.

Sound like the Preservers to me but on a smaller scale, instead of spreading out the various cultures on a multitutde of worlds they dumped everything on one planet.

Genetic experiments...well that has some potential to explain the apemen and lizardmen of a "Lost World" type encounter.