Consider the Fomorian

I've been a bit AWOL recently after a rather productive spurt. I shall be trying to get back into the swing of things soon! To start things off, let's have a look at one of D&D's monsters that come from Irish mythology...

No one is entirely sure where the fomorians got their curse from. Some say it was archfey that forced them to show their internal ugliness on the outside. Others believe it was the gods, for the fomorians themselves give praise to no higher or lower powers. Perhaps they were once gods themselves, cast down by other divines for their cruelty. Mages speculate their attempts at fully mastering magic backfired, or that they are the result of exposure to arcane fallout.

The fomorian curse is focused on the malice and cruelty in their hearts. The more wicked a fomorian's thoughts and intent, the more disfigured their bodies become. This results in an almost neverending spiral, as the uglier the fomorian becomes, the more spiteful and self-loathing it feels.

No two fomorians turn out entirely the same. Some are covered in warts and monstrous growths; others have vestigial twins embedded in their flesh; some look angelic but reek like cesspits and speak like scraping metal sheets.

The Fomors by John Duncan

Reptilian Campaign

A friend of mine recently proposed running a campaign based on Dinosaurs of the Wild West by Shaun Keenan.

Image from Shaun Keenan's ArtsStation.

I chatted with him about potential ways that the idea could be used, which in turn led to him making the following (abbreviated) setting premise:

Long ago, the divine pantheon split into those that would strike out against the devils and those that would not. The warring gods were victorious, but in doing so disrupted the power struggle between devils and demons, resulting in demons breaching the surface world. To destroy them, the gods that had avoided hell used much of their power to banish the fiends back to their pits and lock their more violent brothers away, turning them into the new archdevils. This war caused mass arcane fallout, making a world where those with thicker skins (figuratively and literally) could endure moreso than others. This is the age of reptile supremacy.

Whilst it does detract from the simplicity that was dinosaurs in the Wild West, I ran with the ideas a bit further to see how players would actually interact with these concepts in a way that their characters would know and understand. Here are a few ideas that I'm especially happy with.

Gods & Devils

I am under the assumption that my friend was planning to either use or heavily be inspired by the Forgotten Realms pantheon, with Tyr as the god that headed the fight against the archdevils. With this in mind, the trapped gods are now the new archdevils. From this, you gain two pantheons; the pantheon of Old Gods that ended the great war but are now drained of power, and the pantheon of Fell Gods that have increased power but at terrible cost. The new archdevils take their duty- fighting the demons- seriously, and only they truly know whether they feel remorse for the position they now find themselves in.

All sacred animals and relevant symbols are of course replaced with dinosaurs and other large reptiles.

Tiefling Martyrdom

The first tieflings could mostly be paladins & clerics of the old gods, meaning tieflings (at least some of them) could be a very religious/zealous lot, seeing their makers as martyrs instead of evil entities. It could be a strange surprise for people to see these infernal humanoids practicing the same faiths they do, just as pious and humble as those around them. They know their forefathers fell from divinity out of their belief that they could make the world safer, and they still hope that if their gods can break free of the prison, they can continue their good work and fix the mess that the material plane now is.

Skull Collector by Raph Lomotan

Mammalian Underdark

Deep beneath the earth, the underworld houses an echo of what the world could be now; one without dinosaurs and reptilian overlords. It is a cold, harsh place, dwelled in by strange mammalian goliaths: cave mammoths, echolocating terror birds, pale smilodons. Hidden in small communities, shamanistic neanderthals hide from the cavern beasts and praise the remnants of the god war that have fallen through the cracks of the earth.

I pitched this idea to myself as an underground ice age. Imagine traveling through caverns and tunnels with low light and food, but everything is cold, covered in thick snow or slippery ice, and there are sabre-tooth cats lurking around the corner.

Watcher of the Ancients by Bjarke Pedersen

Giant skeletons

In my friend's original idea, the remaining gods that fought the demons used an army of giants and dragons to fight them. Whilst some dragons survived to help introduce the age of cold blood, the giants fell in battle.

Their skeletons litter the land, ripe for taking by those skilled with necromancy. In this land, 'undead' does not invoke memories of shambling hordes, but of gargantuan striding beasts that rise from the sands, called to new wars beyond the grave.

I am reminded of the Japanese gashadokuro: giant, invisible, vampiric skeletons.

Bound devils

People make pacts with weakened devils, binding them to objects to access their power. Some call them artificers, but others know the real truth. How else do their crossbows shoot hellfire bolts, or their cloaks shrug off damage and reveal a winged, horned shadow standing behind them at all times? What is devil worship but another kind of prayer? Can any of the believers in the weakened gods above claim to have communed with their lords face to face, to have shook their hand and left with blessings?

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I'd also highly recommend checking out Goblin Punch's mutant dinosaur generator, as well as their dinosaur cleric. It's a cool idea that could be fun to play with.

These ideas definitely aren't the most directly related to Wild West Dinosaurs, which is possibly why I like them- they can be used for other things outside of the initial premise.