Dungeons and Dinosaurs is a screencap Campaign Comic based on Jurassic Park, and later, its first sequel. Not long ago, a DM named Steve decided to host a tabletop RPG with the help of his twin brother, Mike. Steve and Mike created an impressive, immersive campaign involving a dinosaur-based theme park, and invited their college friends Alan, Chris, and Liz to play. Chris brought his newbie roommate Ian along, and for a time, things were going smoothly… until Steve invited an infamously obnoxious player named Ned to participate.
Things got a little rougher in the game, and a lot rougher in reality from that point on.
It can be read here.
Dungeons and Dinosaurs provides examples of the following tropes:
- Adaptational Badass: Ian’s daughter decides she doesn’t just want to play Dr. Malcolm’s daughter, so her character is changed to that of a young scientist working alongside Dr. Malcolm.
- Adaptation Species Change: The Velociraptors from the movie are changed to Utahraptors for the campaign.
- Alcohol-Induced Idiocy: After hashing out their differences at a local bar, Ian and Ned come in a bit later than the others. Ned is sober enough, but Ian is incredibly drunk, bumping into things and knocking them over on the way to the table. When he comes around enough to realize his character is in the back of a jeep with a broken leg, he decides he’s fused with the jeep to become “Malcomus Prime”.
- Always Identical Twins: Mike is Steve's identical twin brother and co-GM, who joins the game remotely.
- Author Appeal: Many of the model buildings and such are made of LEGO, which the creator claims to use often in their own campaigns.
- Backseat Driver: As Ian, Ellie, and Muldoon are being chased by Rexy in a jeep, Ian panics and starts yelling at Muldoon to go faster, slalom, and/or Do a Barrel Roll.
- Blatant Lies: After Alan gets a low roll trying to get Tim out of the tree, and Steve tells him he just turned the wheel on the land cruiser, he and Chris start to panic. Liz brushes Steve’s words off as “flavor text”, and Steve agrees with her… while rolling several dice of his own.
- Boring, but Practical: When the time comes to decide who’ll go to flip the breakers in the maintenance shed, the players agree to send Mr. Arnold – an NPC that co-GM Mike has been controlling. Ned claims he’s specced for the task, so it's the safest course of action, even though it’ll mean all the actual players will just be waiting around in the security bunker for several turns.
- Casanova Wannabe: Ian spends quite a bit of time hitting on Liz, to her bemusement. It's part of why he made his Constitution so high, as he's a new player and misunderstood the meaning of the stat.
- Color-Coded Speech: Every character has differently colored speech boxes, as per Campaign Comic tradition. Ian is red, Alan is green, Steve is yellow, Mike is a darker yellow, Liz is magenta, Chris is light blue, Ned is orange, Kelly is purple, and TAPR is dark blue.
- The Cracker: Dennis is apparently a notorious cyberterrorist in this world, and Hammond hired him to keep other threats at bay.
- Creepy Child: Tim and Lex creep Alan out, due to their stubborn, creepy attitudes, with Alan calling them "Hansel and Gretel meet The Stepford Wives". Tim has an odd fixation on control, and Lex insists Alan call her "Fraulein", and both seem to have an odd fixation with serving Ingen through fearsome science experiments. This angle is dropped after Chris takes control of Tim, and Ned takes control of Lex.
- Death by Adaptation: The British family in the beginning of the "Ghosts of Site B" arc. In the original film, they were a family who managed to get away from Isla Sorna without losing anyone after scaring off the Compy swarm. Here, they're UN Inspectors who were almost all slaughtered by the Compies.
- Embarrassed by a Child: Liz is on the receiving end of this from Kelly during the "Ghosts of Site B" arc.
Liz: Hi there, you must be Kelly. I've heard a lot about you.
Kelly: You must be Liz, the lady who was kissing my dad and someone else at the same time.
- Enfant Terrible: During the flashback scene in the "Ghosts of Site B" arc showing the "Incident" at Site B, Miss Galore's young daughter cheerily asks a servant for alka-seltzer tablets to feed the seagulls. She then expresses disappointment when she can’t find any to "pop", feeds them to the Compies instead, and decides she wants her parents to destroy the "stupid island" out of boredom.
- Expositron 9000: TAPR functions as this, it tells the players how the dinosaurs were cloned back to life (though only Chris is listening), what species they encounter, and also identifies the West Indian Lilac plant poisoning the Triceratops.
- Expy: Dr. Grant is initially one of Indiana Jones, due to an autocorrect error in an email where Steve asked him to play as an archaeologist instead of a paleontologist. Liz admits she based Dr. Sattler heavily on Dr. Jane Goodall.
- Fear Is the Appropriate Response: When Rexy starts to tear through the fence, Ian initially tries to rally Alan and Chris, saying that if they don't panic, keep their heads, and just get through the encounter, they can make the teetering DREAD Tower Ned's problem since Nedry is still lost in the park. Then Steve pulls out a massive T-rex model and states that it's size-accurate to the minifigures. Ian quickly changes his tune.
Ian: Okay, yeah, we can do a bit of panicking.
- Foreshadowing: While Steve is reviewing the rules to the DREAD tower in the helicopter, Chris mentions he feels like the tower will be the death of him. He's also the one warning everyone to look out for the tower whenever someone gets up. Given what ultimately happens to Gennaro...
- GMPC: Steve tends to play as Hammond in-character to deliver exposition, while Mike initially plays as Dr. Wu, then switches to Mr. Arnold until the character’s death.
- Hand Wave: Brought up (and even named) after Hammond, Sattler, Muldoon, and Malcolm take refuge in the emergency bunker under the visitor’s center; there’s a brief argument over whether to roll to see if the injured Malcolm got carried down without further injury, or just dismiss it as something that happened without incident.
- Hate Sink: Ned is a rude, smug, arrogant, childish, bigoted asshole whose actions put everyone in danger in-game. Chris claims he's having a hard time finding a game anywhere in the Midwest because of his attitude. He slowly gets much better over time.
- Herr Doktor: Hammond has a thick German accent, though Tim and Lex, his Child Prodigy Mad Scientist "Wunderkind" grandchildren, fit the trope a bit better.
- Hot-Blooded: Ian threatens to lay Ned out within minutes of meeting him, which isn't surprising, given Ned's personality. Steve shuts him down immediately, and Ian apologizes, admitting he needs to work on his temper.
- Hurricane of Puns: Alan and Ian indulge in these on occasion.
- I Choose to Stay: In the biggest departure from the films, Steve has Hammond do this on Isla Nublar at the very end of the story arc of the first film, making it his new home as he plans to rebuild the park.
- Instant A.I.: Just Add Water!: TAPR is a startlingly advanced AI developed by Mike, who is using the game as a learning experience. They usually just tell the players about the dinosaurs they come across, but when Liz and Ian get more interested in learning about Mike and Steve's histories as GMs than listening to Mr. DNA's Exposition Dump, a frustrated TAPR spews out the remaining information in binary as quickly and loudly as possible before going quiet to sulk. Later, it hacks into Mike's phone without his knowledge and warns everyone that Ned's program is continuing, and will be shutting down fences in the park. Ned even compares it to Skynet with how fast it learns.
- Insufferable Genius: Ned is incredibly obnoxious, but writes out a legitimately complex and brilliant bit of actual computer code as part of his plan for Nedry.
- It's Going Down: The DREAD tower, something Chris got from a horror campaign. It's a Jenga tower, and whenever anyone pulls a block out instead of using the dice, it will be a critical success if they succeed... but almost certain doom if they fail. By the time the Tyrannosaurus breaks out, it's very unstable due to Ned abusing it for Nedry's plan, and it finally collapses when Chris tries a last pull to save Gennaro. Gennaro is promptly eaten by Rexy. Later, Ian bumps the table and knocks the tower down to get Nedry killed.
- Jerkass Has a Point: As obnoxious as Ned is, he’s correct that Ian’s physical threats are completely out of line, that the low roll that got Nedry a faceful of Dilophosaurus venom should have been a dodge roll, and – though he says it in the rudest way possible – that Ian’s attempts with Liz are neither wanted nor reciprocated. His blowing off Lex's backstory in favor of writing a new one (making her an expert in computer programming and making sammiches) is an odd combination of progressive and Stay in the Kitchen that nevertheless lets the party survive.
- Laser-Guided Karma: The little girl being attacked by Compies at the beginning of the "Ghosts of Site B" arc is a bratty little sadist who tried to kill them with Alka-seltzer tablets. When they turn on her, it comes across as actually being almost deserved.
- Last Chance Hit Point: Mentioned by name in the author’s notes. Tim takes a beating going down the cliff in the Land Cruiser, and by the time Alan rescues him, he only has five hit points left.
- Like Brother and Sister: Alan and Liz are this, being very close but both completely uninterested in romance.
- Ludicrous Gibs: A Lighter and Softer version comes when Steve decides to demonstrate what happens to a cow lowered into the Raptor pen by sticking a jelly donut into a running blender. The result is rather messy.
- Munchkin: Ned is this, playing Nedry to get $15 million and ditch everyone else on the island, while min/maxing his character in favor of high intelligence, which he feels will grant him an advantage in a more modern setting. He's also a complete jerk.
- Noodle Incident: Exactly WHAT happened between Ian and Liz is never explained, though their friends do take some time to speculate.
- No OSHA Compliance: The Mano de Dios Amber Mine is a cartoonishly horrible and dangerous place, with tunnels constantly collapsing and most of the workers being crippled, even the children.
- Prayer Is a Last Resort: In the climax, when every player save Ian is unarmed and cornered by raptors, Alan calls for "Divine Intervention" from "Polyhedros, Master of Shapes" as a gameplay mechanism; it has a 1-in-100 chance of working. According to Chris, it worked for Alan once before and it's been his go-to in impossible situations ever since.
- Read the Map Upside Down: While following Ian's instructions guiding Ellie through the maintenance tunnels, Liz gets lost for a bit. Ian then realizes he was reading the map upside-down, and Liz figures out how to find the power junction by herself.
- Real Life Writes the Plot: Steve scraps the initial Dilophosaurus encounter for the party, as well as a couple others, after accidentally leaving several of his dinosaur models at Mike's dorm.
- Redemption Quest: Ned's playing as Muldoon turns into one of these, as he's forced to actually work with the others to survive.
- Reluctant Fanservice Girl: After a jelly donut sends a huge glob of filling down Liz's front, Steve, Chris, and Ian immediately fall over each other offering to help replace her top (with varying levels of innocence behind their motives), completely ignoring the jelly that went everywhere else. Alan admits to Mike that this sort of thing happens to her a lot.
- The Roleplayer: Steve is one, going out of his way to make the experience more immersive, even using a robot arm from his old LEGO mindstorms set to move paper-mache eggs in a nest. Chris is also one, actually rolling the dice so Gennaro can slip off to use the bathroom while he does the same.
- Shout-Out: While admiring the visitor center made from LEGO blocks, Chris mentions a past jungle-themed campaign that ended at the Empire State Building.
- Sitcom Arch-Nemesis: Ned is obnoxious in general, but he and Ian deeply dislike each other in particular.
- Spanner in the Works: Mike had an entirely different storyline planned out for the game, but Nedry’s program killing the power and his subsequent death (thanks to Ian jostling the table) yanked the plot over towards something more closely resembling the film.
- Split Screen: Four of the comics are like this, for the scene where Ellie is flipping the park’s circuit breakers back on while Alan and the kids are climbing the perimeter fence.
- Stuff Blowing Up: When Ray Arnold shuts the entire park’s power down and tries to turn it back on, Mike claims the entire island is immediately vaporized in a gigantic mushroom cloud. Steve immediately shuts THAT down, scolding him. Mike grumbles that he’d have gone through with it if Steve hadn’t nixed his "Atomic King of the Monsters" game idea.
- Suddenly Sober: When a booze-soaked Ian realizes Rexy is approaching while Malcolm’s stuck in the back of a jeep with a broken leg, he becomes completely lucid over the course of a few sentences.
- Terrifying Tyrannosaur: Rexy is a major threat in-game in a couple sequences, and starts bordering on The Dreaded for her size and Super-Toughness. During a chase sequence, she slams into a tree and endures 48 hp damage. Liz claims this is enough to kill Ellie four times over, but Rexy isn't even bloodied.
- Walking Techbane: Dr. Grant was always this, but here it's actually a gameplay mechanic; Alan took "Not Machine Compatible" as a flaw while creating the character.
- Wham Shot: The arrival of the Brachiosaurus is this for the players, as up until that point, the campaign seemed to be setting up as a semi-realistic modern island adventure.
- What the Hell, Hero?: When Ned tries a last-ditch effort to save Nedry with the DREAD tower, Ian – fed up with his attitude – secretly bumps the table and collapses it early. Ned calls him out, leading to a vicious argument before Steve tells Ned to leave. Afterwards, Steve asks Ian if he bumped it. Ian confesses, and is unrepentant, citing Ned’s obnoxiousness and arrogance. Everyone else calls Ian out on it, pointing out taking the low road isn’t the way to deal with a toxic player in the long term.
- Who's on First?: A brief misunderstanding when Dr Wu is introduced, with the name "Wu" being mistaken for "Who".
