Book Week 2025, Day 3: Dungeon delvers delight in Dr Dhrohlin’s Dictionary of Dinosaurs

This book is squarely at the intersection of being an objectively great thing to have in the world, and a subjectively great thing to have on my gaming shelf. I’ve been playing tabletop RPGs since I was 16, and running Dungeons & Dragons for over a decade, including an elaborate “Dinosaur Island” campaign for my son when he was younger. Just this year my current party has had to deal with an Octyrannopus — one of my homebrew monsters:

— as well as a gigantic, very aquatic, possibly-somewhat-undead Spinosaurus. In game, that horror was summoned on the shore of the Sunless Sea by a gnoll necromancer. But I summoned it from the pages of Dr Dhrolin’s Dictionary of Dinosaurs, which is packed with so much good stuff that it’s hard to know where to begin.

First off, as it says on the tin, the book has a bunch of dinosaurs, which go waaay beyond the standard half-dozen or so from the official D&D Monster Manual. It’s nice to see some love for some of the more recently-described, not-yet-famous taxa like the titanosaur Mnyamawamtuka.

But it’s not just dinosaurs sensu stricto — the book also has a healthy leavening of pterosaurs, marine reptiles, and non-dinosaurian critters to round out your random encounter tables and fictional ecosystems.

And speaking of ecosystems, the book covers four in some depth: the Yixian, Bahariya, and Crato Formations, and Hateg Island, including flora, landscape, climate, and so on, so dungeon masters can give their players some you-are-there verisimilitude, or use the covered ecosystems as guides for fleshing out their own homebrew worlds. I believe that every single organism in the book — dinosaur, pterosaur, fish, or plant — comes with optional magical rules, so dungeon masters can dial in the high-to-low magic level of their game worlds. There’s just so much in here, to use as written or mine for inspiration.

Note that each critter gets at least one two-page spread (a few prominent taxa get two or more spreads), and, crucially, all the game-relevant info is usually available on a single spread. Why is this important? I’ve heard it may be largely fixed for the new 2024 Monster Manual, which I’ve not yet acquired, but all three of the 2014 D&D core rulebooks, and most of the official campaign books that followed, are UI disasters when it comes to consistently putting the info that people will need at the table (i.e., at speed) where it will be immediately accessible — which is the One Job that an RPG book really needs to do well. RPG books are sort of like a combo of emergency manual and cookbook in requiring good, reader-focused structure and graphic design for usability on the fly. If you can’t find what you need quickly, and ideally get all the info for a given thing without turning the page, the book has failed as a game reference, no matter how great the ideas and writing are. Why Wizards of the Coast can’t figure this out for most of the official D&D books is quite beyond me (possibly because they keep firing the whole D&D creative crew and then replacing them with newcomers, so neither institutional memory nor game-creation expertise accumulate as they should). But like a lot of 3rd-party products, Dr Dhrolin’s gets it right, and runs circles around WOTC books in terms of usability at the table.

When a critter gets more than one spread, it’s either for a splash page of art, or more options, or both. There are a handful of custom dinos chosen as high-level pledge rewards by backers when the book was crowdfunded. For example, You-Know-Who here, which struck me as a neat linkage between Mark Witton’s scientific thoughts on what a max-size tyrannosaur would have been like, as explored in his new book, King Tyrant, and a truly awesome challenge to throw at a D&D party. The big, weird spinosaur my party recently faced is another of these special purpose, beyond-the-ordinary, truly monstrous foes. As a dungeon master, it’s nice to have a selection of boss dinos locked and loaded.

For people new to dinosaurs and paleontology, there’s a really lovely, concise introduction that would not be out of place in almost any popular science book about dinosaurs. The book is built in two versions, for D&D 5E and Pathfinder 2E, but there’s such a wealth of good ideas and great art inside that I think it would be worth picking up for anyone interested, no matter what system they run (it’s an article of faith with me that dungeon masters should freely adapt or homebrew stats as needed).

I’m especially impressed by Dr Dhrolin’s as a sort of global and all-encompassing guide to bringing paleontology into tabletop games. It includes ideas on how this might happen at all — lost worlds, time travel, necromancy, and more — NPCs to hook parties into paleo-themed adventures, and new subclasses and other options, for newly-generated characters or pre-existing ones encountering dinosaurian realms for the first time.

Want to ride a dinosaur? The book has you covered, with taming and domestication rules.

Want to play a dinosaur, or a pterosaur? You can do that, too, with six new playable species, complete with notes on their societies.

Just like great paleoart? The visuals alone are worth the price of admission, with Mark Witton providing art for the critters and Jules Kiely on plants, items, and some of the new playable species and character options. The book is a shade over 300 pages long, illustrated in full color throughout, and with pretty pictures on almost every spread. It’s a staggering amount of art.

Finally, a word on professionalism. Considered broadly, RPG products tend to be very hit-and-miss. It’s a genre where new authors can sometimes bring new ideas to the table pretty quickly, and without having all the interesting bits sanded off by corporate focus groups, but also one where a certain level of amateurish production is almost endemic. Even the official WOTC books, pretty as they are, rarely seem to have been designed and assembled by anyone who actually plays D&D regularly, or understands how books get used mid-game. Dr Dhrolin’s is one of the most professionally — and considerately — produced products ever put out for 5E. The creative team — Drs. Nathan Barling and Michael O’Sullivan on writing, Mark Witton and Jules Kiely on art, and a host of others (nicely detailed and credited on page 8) — had the ambition to make it wide-ranging, the closest thing that’s ever existed to one-stop-shopping for dinosaurs in RPGs, while also understanding the brief to make it useable at speed at the gaming table, and while also delivering an attractive, high quality, solidly-constructed book that feels good in the hand and is a joy to just flip through. If you like dinosaurs and paleontology, it’s great — every critter even gets a small section of references! If you like D&D, it’s jam-packed with ideas, well-organized, and actually useful in prep and in play. If, like me, you’re into both things, it’s basically aersolized, weaponized crack, and you probably already own a copy.

If you need more convincing, professional dungeon master and RPG creator Ginny Di has a great video review.

Dr Dhrolin’s Dictionary of Dinosaurs has been out for a year now, so this is yet again something I could have and should have covered a lot sooner. But this entry is still timely. Right now, and for about 59 hours after I hit the “publish” button (= until sometime on Dec. 1), PalaeoGames has big discounts on Dr Dhrolin’s and lots of other associated goodies, including tokens, battle maps, a fillable character sheet, and 3D-printable digital models (delivered as STLs), through their current crowdfunding campaign, Dr Dhrolin’s Festive Party 2025. You can also pre-order the follow-up volume, Professor Primula’s Primer of Palaeontology, which is being developed as I type. This is a hoard of good stuff, just in time for holiday shopping. Go do the right thing.

Source: https://svpow.com/2025/11/29/book-week-2025-day-3-dr-dhrohlins-dictionary-of-dinosaurs/