Dinosaurs and their kin (as well as insects) replace mammals (except for humans, that is) both as wild beasts and domesticated enemies. Dinosaur Riders! Triceratops egg omletes! Random encounter with a T-Rex!Great minds think alike! I’ve been cooking on exactly this for a while (I worked with pen & paper though, hope I can find my books).
I’ve definitely gone with tropical utopia, I’ve drawn a world map that I’ve zoomed in and zoomed in (I used the Hexbooks from Albatross Press).
It’s just the local place that’s tropical, not necessarily the whole world.
The name of the continent is Selte’azda, which means in the local language “Dwelling of the Terrible Ones”.
The time line is that first, dinos lived there.
Then, just a hundred or two hundred years ago, humans came along and quickly settled along the coast line — so right off the bat we have a strip of civilization with wilderness to the west and oceans with weird islands to the east.
Then a few decades ago weird things started leaking in a la The House on the Borderland (the old novel, not B2).
I’ve changed the alignments from lawful v. chaotic to instead be alignments with one or the other of the two clashing dimensions — humans, plants, dinosaurs from this vs demons and orcs (in the style of HotB) from the other.
There are ancient ruins and buildings in two ways—perhaps some old dinosaur civilizations, but also that ruins and buildings have warped over from across the Border.
As for technology, the only things I’ve got for sure is that I want to put some flickering bulbsand fluerencent tubes in some of the dungeons, and have some tile floors and busted-up radiators there. I imagine that cross the Border there is access to all worlds and technologies.
I’ve got my economy more or less done (again, it’s in a paper book), what I miss is dinosaur stats (I have GURPS Dinosaurs but I couldn’t convert them easily since I only have a little experience with the well-known family of games that ACKS belong to) and also lairs for all types of monsters.
Maybe what would be most helpful for me would be a small flowchart on how to make lairs for the ACKS book’s monsters .
It was hard to map out the realm and understand the economy chapter in ACKS. I wish it had been more of a step-by-step instruction—but I did understand it finally so now that part is done.