Really cool, and yes, its eye look so small. Great work :)

Big bitey beady-eyed beastie!

This is really cool! It's always nice seeing new species from that gap between "dinosaurs" and "critters we're familiar with."

As a brief Dungeons and Dragons question, what is your opinion on dire creatures in that? Well, in third edition at least, I'm not sure how they're handled now. I'm thinking specifically of the sort of mutation template where they get all sorts of giant fangs and giant twisted up hide-plates all over them. Do you like the idea of those at all or do you prefer them as large versions of normal animals as with real-world dire wolves?

I really like Tertiary mammals so I'm pretty biased in favor of the dire guys being actual Paleocene and earlier stuff. The big rules reasons for dire animals (giving druids an upgrade in animal companions, etc) don't preclude having basically prehistoric animals showing up. My big reasons;

1. A big trope that D&D hits is the idea of the Lost World. That you'd have an area where the players get to encounter dinosaurs. Going beyond that any world which has places where dinosaurs could survive, is probably a place which can have areas of more recent fauna. Certainly having mammoths wandering around is pretty D&D, and there's D&D precedent for gnolls having hyaenodons as companions... (uh. Those are borophagid dogs, and not hyenids at all!). Given the sheer biological diversity of D&D game worlds, why shouldn't some older forms have survived? You can argue that something like a Leviathan (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Livyatan_melvillei) would exist in a world with huge seas full of big nasty critters at least as easily as you can argue that naw, something like that would've gone extinct the moment seagoing dragons evolved.

2. I figure that monsters are what makes D&D cool. Believable critters which actually existed are badass. So if I tell you the orc chieftain is mounted on a giant boar/hippo/whatever with spikes and plates, that's kinda badass. But if I tell you the orc chieftain is riding a plate-armored Daeodon, I can point out the Wikipedia entry (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daeodon). That's really cool, at least to me. Additionally most D&D games take place in faux-Europe, with a little bit of North America and northern Asia thrown in for good measure. Paleocene and earlier critters add some neat megafauna to the lands of snow and temperate forests.

3. It's thematic in ways not usually acknowledged. Przewalski Horses were thought of by Mongolians as pretty much sacred, this weird ancestral holdover. Pandas generated a lot of weird mythology, and were sent as Imperial gifts in diplomacy. In a game where you can fight all sorts of weird monsters, "it's a deer. With spikes on it" can be less than inspiring. Having the dire animals be actual Tertiary critters adds back the weirdness of what most players will think of as normal stuff. I'd love to see a game where some of the Tertiary critters are thought of as big stuff worthy of myth!

Ahhh, I love this so much. I had actually kind of houseruled/altered my game to change dire animals into something a bit like what you describe, using vague real world parallels. It's still basically a mutation, just an evolutionary throwback sort of mutation. Having all your druids stuck with awkward knobbly critterthings when they get over level 14 or so is rather uncool.

BUT YOU. You put even more thought into it than I did. And when someone puts more thought than I do into something nerdy in dungeons and dragons, I can only respect them.

Heh. I think about D&D a lot. I think it's 'cause AD&D was this big, dramatically cool thing at a point in my life when not much was keeping me going, as a kid. Probably a worse habit than my internet addiction.

Funny, that is exactly the same thing that got me into dungeons and dragons. I really latched on to the manuals and made a world out of them even when I was living in a position where I had nobody to play with :p

Similarities I was talking about earlier, yeah. There was a gaming club which met every month or so in the basement of a Sergeant Pepper's Pizza Circus. It's how I got introduced to Battletech, Car Wars, Twilight 2000, but I didn't get to all that many meetings. And even though I technically lived in a suburb, it was a long haul to get to the game shop, plus my folks didn't always give me MARTA fare, so that was always a really special occasion.

Ahh! It really seems that absence makes the heart grow fonder when it comes to games as well. I actually collected and built/painted warhammer when I was living on the reservation. It was a 6 hour drive or so each way across dirt roads to get to the community that had one random gaming shop. It was run by some nerdy kids who had it funded by assets from their mom's bowing alley, haha. I'd always stock up on random games and things there so it was always a giddy car ride that felt like Christmas.

What other games or tabletop systems did you grow up playing?

This is where it gets really embarrassing in terms of age or lack of experience. I swear I wound up playing Car Wars far more often than nearly anything else, this without actually owning any Car Wars books! Mostly played AD&D, Battletech, and Twilight 2000. I gazed longingly at the Paranoia stuff owned by the other kids in in-house suspension, but never got to play. I was really poor - that's actually part of why I started drawing in college, it was a way of getting miniatures I couldn't afford.

I had it easier. If I had fare, I could walk 30-40 minutes, hop a bus, and then an hour later I could be at Sword of the Phoenix, which went out of business relatively recently. And that was amazing. All these games, all these miniatures. This meant someone was playing them! It was pretty reassuring.

Cool, thanks for triggering an interesting search/new reading. The action shot is boss even if the scavenger idea seems to make sense.