seventeenth issue - RPG Review

Mesozoic Safari:
A GURPS Dinosaurs Designer's Notes
by Stephen Dedman
Carruthers swore profusely and unimaginatively as he
trudged across the floodplain. It had cost him a small
fortune in bribes to smuggle his grandfather's
Kalashnikov back to the Cretaceous, and he was sure
that smuggling his trophies home would cost more still ­
assuming any trophies eventuated. He hadn't seen any
dinosaurs much larger than a turkey since his arrival,
and all of those had escaped into the wetlands. The
longer he took to bag a dinosaur, he knew, the more
likely the Timecops were to catch him with the evidence.
The weather was colder than he'd expected, most of the
plants and small animals he'd seen had looked
suspiciously modern, and he suspected that the insects
were rapidly evolving a strain immune to his Pestguard.
But his scanner indicated many large animals on the far
side of the redwood forest ahead of him, so he tramped
onwards.
An hour later, he was staring at a huge herd of elephantsized
Triceratops horridus as they migrated south. From
the side, they were dark grey mottled with green and
brown, resembling weathered rocks encrusted with
lichen and moss; from the front, however, their neck
frills were as shockingly colourful as a mandrill's nose
or a butterfly's wings. A head like that on the wall of his office, Carruthers realised, would give pause to anyone
questioning his courage. He picked a middle­sized sub­adult ­ no point in choosing a head larger than the room, after
all ­ and aimed at its ribcage, figuring that there had to be a heart in there somewhere. He'd heard that dinosaur
brains were too small to be targeted, and he didn't wish to mark that magnificent face. He switched the select to full
autofire, and blasted away for three seconds.
To his horror, the herd split apparently at random, like four­ton gazelle. Several stampeded in his direction;
Carruthers fired his last three rounds before turning and running. In his last moments, he thought how utterly unfair it
was that creatures so large could be so fast.
Scavenging Troodons found his remains just after nightfall, leaving nothing for the Timecops but the tattered remnants
of an environment suit and a twisted wreck of the gun.
12 RPG REVIEW ISSUE SEVENTEEN September 2012