Dr Dhrolin’s Dictionary of Dinosaurs: A Prehistoric D&D Deep-Dive

• Expansive Bestiary
• Character Options
• Optional High-Fantasy Rules
• Dinosaurs in Your Worlds
• Holistic Settings
• Scientific Information

Expansive Bestiary

Dinosaurs, Pterosaurs, Marine Reptiles, and more!

First and foremost is the “Dictionary of Dinosaurs” itself. This is a collection of 57 prehistoric creatures (most with magical variants, discussed further below). We’ve included a bunch of fan-favourites, like Velociraptor, Spinosaurus, and Quetzalcoatlus, as well as a whole heap of more unusual animals that you might not have heard of before, like Garjainia and Tanystropheus!

These give you a wider choice of prehistoric animals to use in your games and are also designed to be reflective of the real animal, with dynamic traits and attacks that are derived from their actual biology.

Anatomy, Ecology, and Behaviour

The stat blocks themselves are only the surface of the bestiary content in Dr Dhrolin’s Dictionary of Dinosaurs. For each creature, we’ve also included a full description of its anatomy, ecology, behaviour, and evolutionary relationships. By reading this, you’ll not only learn how these animals can fit into your game world, but you’ll also discover how they will interact with players, often resulting in far more interesting encounters than mere combat slogs.

Additionally, Dr Dhrolin’s Dictionary of Dinosaurs contains 6 extra animal Behaviour Tables that allow you to apply more general behaviours to creatures based on their relative size or lifestyle. These aren’t just for prehistoric animals and can be used for other Beast type creatures in your games, allowing for more realistic and dynamic encounters!

Environmental Icons and Evolutionary Mutation Tables

Most players expect to see dinosaurs (& other Mesozoic reptiles) in humid jungle biomes, whereas, in reality, they inhabited a wide array of habitats from frigid snowy mountains to open fern plains. To ensure that you can populate your game worlds with animals that are appropriately adapted to the environment, we’ve included an environmental icon system. This allows you to select any animal at a glance that fits into the environment perfectly, because it is actually adapted to it. From personal experience as a DM, I can tell you that there’s nothing quite like surprising your players who were expecting Yeti on a mountain top with a hunting pack of Yutyrannus instead.

However, we didn’t stop there! We also created two Evolutionary Mutation Tables that have traits and attacks that can be applied to any creature (not just our prehistoric ones!), providing that creature with an added buff. Many of those mutations also have an associated environmental icon, so they can be used to adapt any creature to a new environment.

Stunning Artwork

We teamed up with world-famous palaeo-artist Dr Mark Witton to bring the content in Dr Dhrolin’s Dictionary of Dinosaurs to life. The entire book is stunningly illustrated with the most up-to-date scientific reconstructions of these animals. Honestly, the artwork speaks for itself.

Character Options

6 New Playable Species

We’ve introduced six new playable prehistoric species that allow you to play as a dinofolk character or fill your world with prehistoric NPCs. They are:

• Pluvenn. These rural British-themed raptor-folk combine all of the classical aspects of a Beatrix Potter-esque society with the murderous brutality of predatory obligate carnivores. Beware their monthly feasting festivals, as you might just end up on the menu.
• The Manyhorn. The Manyhorn are a complex society of different ceratopsian-folk working as merchants, scientists, and politicians among distinct guilds. The convoluted interplay of their guilds rivals that of any bustling city’s factions (albeit with more horns).
• Jeholrak. These small, skulking neornithischian-folk (try saying that 10 times!) live in the shadows of larger prehistoric-folk. Through cunning, subterfuge, and pheromonal influences, they’re able to overcome their diminutive stature.
• Ankylier. Conversely, the hulking brutish ankylosaur-folk tower over others. The aggressiveness and industriousness of these metal workers is only outweighed by their shear resilience to physical harm. They are the ultimate armoured people.
• Limukin. These reclusive noasaurid-folk are highly in-tune with nature and, like the wilds they inhabit, can slowly change over time, having much more malleable bodies than other species. They also secrete potent toxins, making mundane arrows, spears, and slings into deadly envenomed weapons.
• The Children of Seth. These flying pterosaur-folk travel the world as traders, explorers, and wanderers. With their astounding memories and long lives, they can recount stories and legends from every culture they meet.

3 New Subclasses

With these three prehistoric-themed subclasses, you can live out your dino-hunter fantasies or connect with your world’s deep past. They are:

• Ranger: Big Game Hunter. Inspired by classical pith-helmeted hunters, the Big Game Hunter doubles down on ranged combat over melee abilities and spells. Levy your foes’ size against them and make use of specialist ammunition to snare or blast your prey into oblivion.
• Fighter: Bonesmith. The Bonesmith is a gory combat blacksmith who can construct all manner of armour and weapons, as well as a combat minion, from the carcasses of slain foes. Using their gruesome knowledge of anatomy, they can dismember their foes with precise strikes or unravel their bodies with potent spells.
• Druid: Circle of Cycles. Druids of the Circle of Cycles venerate time and evolution. By drawing on power and knowledge from deep time, they are able to manipulate evolution, both of creatures (including themselves) and the cosmos, glimpsing the future. They can buff allies, de-buff foes, and adapt their Wild Shape to any need.

Backgrounds, Feats, and Items

Accompanying these character options are a suite of extra customisations that allow you to better theme your character to match their origin from, or interest in, prehistory. Backgrounds like the Time-Lost (someone brought through time), Palaeontologist, and Geologist help flesh out your character and each comes with classic personality tables too.

You can then choose to double-down on these by picking from 8 palaeontology and geology-themed feats like Behaviourist and Volcanologist, or flood your inventory with up to 30 unique palaeontology-themed magic items. All of these can be combined with other elements from the book to make for a totally immersive prehistoric campaign.

Optional High-Fantasy Rules

While we, as scientists, love believable gameplay grounded in reality, we completely understand that D&D is fundamentally a fantasy setting. As such, we wanted to provide DMs the opportunity to bring our content into their high-fantasy game worlds without feeling mundane. So, we also designed the following:

Optional Magical Rules for Each Creature

All of our prehistoric creatures (excluding a couple of fantasy ‘boss’ monsters) have associated Optional Magical Rules. These add unique fantastical traits to each creature based on their described anatomy, a pun from their name, or a palaeontological in-joke. In most cases, these come with a CR increase and can make for exciting stand-out ‘champion’ creatures in an otherwise mundane herd/flock.

NPCs for Every New Species

For each of our new playable species, we’ve also included 3 on-theme NPCs that tie into the flavour of that species’ example culture. Combined with more familiar stat blocks like Commoner and Guard, these allow you to construct entire settlements that not only have the species’ appearance, but actually function in the manner that the species is described.

We’ve also included NPC stat blocks for Dr Dhrolin himself and the mysterious Chronoficer. These two characters can act as mediaries to help incorporate prehistoric storylines into your games or accompany your players on their wild adventures… or even be the BBEG!

Dinosaurs in Your Worlds

If you’re including lots of Dinosaurs (& other Mesozoic reptiles) in your game world, it’s only fitting that the world acknowledges their presence appropriately. To help do this, we’ve created some interesting new rules that allow players and NPCs to interact with them on a broader scale, namely being able to tame these animals, purchase and construct howdahs to ride them into battle, and there are even rules for determining colloquial names for them. Afterall, we can’t expect all Commoners to know what a Velociraptor is and they’d probably just call it a “Razor-Clawed Slasher” or something similar.

Holistic Settings

In case it wasn’t obvious by now, we’re really keen on making sure that all of our prehistoric content can fit into any game world cohesively. To absolutely cement this, we’ve also included the following:

Plot Hooks for Introducing Prehistoric Components

If you want to play around with having more prehistoric creatures in your games but don’t want to change your overall game world, we’ve got you covered! Dr Dhrolin’s Dictionary of Dinosaurs includes several plot hook ideas that allow you to introduce these elements in a contained story arc (which can, of course, spill over into the main story if you want!). These include themes pulled from popular culture, like “Necromancer Island” – an isolated tropical island where a mysterious benefactor is paying for the resurrection of prehistoric animals in enclosures (sound familiar?).

4 Real-World Holistic Environments

There’s no better way to experience a prehistoric setting than to be placed in the middle of an actual real-world ancient ecosystem, with plants and animals from that real place in time. We’ve selected 4 real-world fossil sites and reconstructed them for D&D, with animals, plants, weather, and environmental hazards that were actually there in real life. These are:

• The Yixian Formation. This chilly high-altitude volcanic environment was populated by fuzzy dinosaurs, frigid forests, and volcanic lakes that periodically bubbled with toxic gasses.
• The Bahariya Formation. This ultra-productive coastal mangrove environment teemed with life and was filled with an abnormally high number of giant predators.
• Hațeg Island. This real island (or archipelago) from Earth’s history was populated by miniature dinosaurs that lived in the shadows of giant flying predatory pterosaurs.
• The Crato Formation. This oasis of colourful life within an otherwise arid scrubland hides a lethal secret within its cloudy waters – best not to go diving.

Each of these holistic environments comes with a battle map (with Yixian and Hațeg also having an additional cave each) built into D&D Beyond’s VTT, allowing you to drag and drop players directly into that ancient setting!

Prehistoric Plants

As mentioned above, we’ve included prehistoric plants in our four holistic environments – 5 each to be precise. These 20 total plants aren’t just for decoration, as each comes with its own Optional Magical Rules that allow players to interact with them. We undertook considerable research to ensure that these were accurate, with all of the plants illustrated by palaeobotanist Julianne Kiely, several of which had never been reconstructed before!

Scientific Information

Scientific References Throughout the Book

On the topic of scientific research, we made sure that all of the information presented in Dr Dhrolin’s Dictionary of Dinosaurs is accurate and up to date (at the time of publication). To prove that, we’ve included scientific references for all of the information presented for every animal, plant, and environment throughout the book.

Budding palaeontologists can use these for further reading, if you’re interested in the technical details.

Introductions to Palaeontology and Geology

On that note, we’ve also included general scientific information about palaeontology and geology in introductory sections within the book. These help frame the context and terminology used throughout the book and are written to be accessible to anyone.

Careers Advice for Aspiring Palaeontologists

Finally, we also included a section on careers advice and how to become a palaeontologist. This is, without a doubt, the most common question we are asked as science educators and most people are delighted to hear that there are indeed lots of ways to become a palaeontologist and that not all of them require a formal college education! If you want to start down that road, you can take the first steps with Dr Dhrolin’s Dictionary of Dinosaurs.

Explore a Land Before Time

Phew! That just about covers all of the stuff that you’ll find in Dr Dhrolin’s Dictionary of Dinosaurs. As you can see, it is absolutely bursting at the seams with content, including all of the bells and whistles needed to bring that content into your games without disrupting an existing story.

I’m also delighted to inform you that D&D Beyond has done a truly exceptional job ensuring that the content is seamlessly added to their systems. You can immediately assemble your own dino-folk character using the integrated Character Builder, or throw your players straight into a prehistoric environment in one of the battle maps in D&D Beyond’s VTT, populated by tokens for every prehistoric creature and NPC.

Thanks again for joining me in this deep dive, and I wish you lucky rolls on your prehistoric adventures!

Dr Barling