The Dinosaurs and Their God (AKA "Dinosaurs Attack Heaven")

 Largely inspired by (read - stolen from) this wonderful article by Goblin Punch.

Pre-Exposition Exposition

So.

The dinosaurs.

Most of the bits you know are still the same. Prehistoric animals, massive and scaly, wiped out in a mass extinction, their bones still litter the countryside, all that good stuff. You can fill in the blanks I don't cover, you know what a bloody dinosaur is, which means that I can skip right on to the actually interesting bits, the stuff you don't already know.

Animals have their own form of worship, and their own gods. These gods are often not the anthropomorphic figures we find familiar, nor is the animal's worship composed of rhythmic chants and holy sacraments. Most animals wouldn't be smart enough to come up with that kind of stuff, anyway. 

No, the worship of animals manifest in their actions. When a rabbit freezes in fear from an onrushing threat, it is sending up a fragment of an almost-prayer to its little rabbit god. When a wolf seizes that rabbit in its jaws and tears it apart, that wolf is offering up an almost-prayer to its lupine god. So it is that gods can emerge, even when there are no intelligent beings around to build them temples and sing their praises, and so it was with the dinosaurs. The dinosaurs had their own gods, and very many of them.

Beast-gods don't tend to amount to much of anything. They are more intelligent than beasts, but far from masterminds. For the most part, they simply exist in the background, unknown to almost all intelligent creature. 

And so it was for the vast majority of dinosaur-gods. They were content to do nothing much in particular, and soak up the almost-prayer they were provided. The problems arose when one god in particular started wanting more.

The Ancient Times

Tyrus Ferox began existence as an ordinary beast-god, but they would not remain so. Through some unknown means, a higher level of intelligence was awoken within them, and alongside that intelligence came a lust for power. Ferox began a divine campaign against the other beast-gods, killing them and absorbing any forms of almost-worship they possessed into himself. The other beast-gods were not prepared for this. They were used to the violence that comes when a predator preys upon weaker beings, but this was something entirely different. For Ferox, this was not a battle for survival or reproduction, but a war.

This would be what most people of our world might call the end-Triassic extinction.

And so it came about that Tyrus Ferox became sole lord over the dinosaurs. It took time for the world to return to as it was before the war, but time has always been a resource Ferox possessed in abundance. The world would be rebuilt, greater than it was before, and united under one god's rule. 

This should have been enough for Ferox, but it wasn't. They leaned down upon the world and bestowed a few of his chosen with intelligence to match his own, and in his name they constructed an empire. This, too, should have been enough for Ferox, but it wasn't. Ferox went beyond the bounds of dinosaurs, enslaving all living things upon the world to the will of his and his children. Nothing, not land, nor skies, nor sea was free from his control. 

There were pockets of resistance, of course. Deep ocean trenches that the land-dwelling dinosaurs could not enter. Great mountains, confident that they would outlast any empire, who refused to bow. Small pockets of non-saurian animals, guarded by mysterious protectors. But Ferox knew these would fall, in time. It did not satisfy them.

Ferox was, by any standard of measurement, a god, but they were not the god. They had not ordered the world, and they did not know who placed the sun in the sky, or separated land from sea, or first gave rise to life itself. (In truth, these questions still vex learned men to this day. No one is quite sure, though there are myriad religions who would be absolutely delighted to inform you.) 

Not knowing these things had never bothered them, but now they had nothing better to do but consider these questions. They began to eat at Ferox, and the great beast slowly came to a realization, and then became filled with a great conviction.

They would find these creators, wherever they hid, and they would conquer them. Then and only then, thought Ferox, could they truly be content.

Another era went by, and the dominion of Ferox grew grander still. It was at the very height of this civilization that the master plan of Tyrus Ferox went into effect.

The creators, Ferox thought, must have been hiding in the Heavens, and so to find them, Ferox must assault the Heavens. So began a great construction, and a great genocide. The empire built machines of ancient wood, of enchanted alloys, and most horribly of all, out of the flesh and bone of their pterosaur slaves. To this day, the few surviving pterosaurs have not let their rage die out. If you value your life, never call one of them a dinosaur.

The invasion commenced on the anniversary of the day Ferox slew the last of his rival dinosaur-gods. It must have been a horrible sight, armies of dinosaurs ascending towards the sky, perched atop machines of wood and bone and flesh. Ferox stood at their very head, incarnate in a physical form, their smile made all the more horrible by their blood-stained teeth.

It is said that it rained fire and blood for a full year, and that by the time it was over, the sun was obscured by ash, and the earthly empire of Tyrus Ferox was no more. Some creatures survived, through luck or miracle, but the dinosaurs had been rendered utterly extinct.

But this was not the end of Tyrus Ferox, far from it. No one knows what occurred within the Heavens, but it is clear that Ferox survived, alongside the remnants of his army. They returned, but not to the world they had left. Instead, they found a scarred and blasted landscape, filled with the corpses of their kin. But this was not the end of their suffering, for it was at this moment that Ferox realized an even more terrible truth - They and their army had returned not to the present, but to the past. As his worshipers and their civilization had become artifacts of a bygone era, so had Ferox himself fallen a few steps behind the present. 

And so, that is the fate of Tyrus Ferox and his armies. They are condemned to roam the past, forever chasing after the present, but never arriving. Ferox would like nothing more than to destroy the usurpers who have sprung up in his place, but as long as he remains locked behind the world, he cannot harm even the weakest of beings.

The Modern Day

It would be all well and good if everything ended there, with Ferox and his legion forever safely out of reach, but there are those who might see his return. Dinosaur-Clerics seek to see the return of Ferox, and while they are mostly composed of the more reptilian races, some mammals are still among their ranks. These dinosaur-cults mostly exist hidden in the wilderness, because almost all more mainstream religions hate them, and will kill them on sight. This is partially by the dinosaur-cults habit of preforming ritual humanoid sacrifices by suffocating their victims within artificial tar pits.

While Ferox cannot directly interfere with the present, they can still grant spells as any normal god might.

Imprisonment has changed Ferox, or at the very least changed how they are worship. The old Tyrus Ferox is worshiped under the name "Tyrus Ferox, Wild Lord of Ages Past", but several new aspects have also emerged. When worshiped as "Tyrus Ferox, Ageless Lord of the Eternal Tar-Pits", more emphasis is placed on their imprisonment, and the physical remains of dinosaurs that exist today. As "Tyrus Ferox, Paradox Lord of the Infinite Boneyard",  more credit is given to their control over time. Finally, the newly emerged avian heresy worships "Tyrus Ferox, Feathered Lord of Endless Grace". They are both the biggest departure from the original, and the most socially accepted, due to having (publicly) toned down or eliminated many of the faith's less socially acceptable practices. They are also notable for claiming that it is not reptiles, but avians which are the true successors to Ferox, and that the dinosaurs had not scales, but feathers.

Worshipers of the Wild Lord call upon dinosaurs to assist them in the same way other religions call upon angels or fiends, and worshipers of the Feathered Lord do the same, with a different coat of paint. Faithful of the Paradox Lord instead summon up psuedo-imaginary dinosaurs, species which might have existed, had past events run a different course. On some rare occasions, they even manage to summon up dinosaurs which are fully corporeal, but have still never existed. Ageless Lord devotees tend to favor servants who are still fossilized, and have a penchant for creating tar-zombies.

These sects hate each other, and each insists that the others are nothing but heretical nonsense.

Even within the sects, goals differ from group to group. Many are content to just get by while worshiping their god. Some have half-formed plans to form their own armies and conquer the world to bring about another epoch of dinosaurs. Some plot in secret to break the barrier separating Ferox from the rest of the world, bring them once more into the present, where legions of dinosaurs shall remake the world in their image.

How do I use this?

Ferox and his dinosaur hordes might make an interesting alternative to the traditional "BBEG wants to unseal an Ancient Evil/Open a portal to the Abyss" story. Demons and Lovecraftian horrors have been done to death, but have you ever seen the world threatened by unending hordes of dinosaurs? 

Dinosaur-tech can make for interesting loot. I don't have any hard aesthetic guidelines to give you, but think something like weapons and armor built out of multicolored rocks, petrified wood, and the fossilized bones of ancient creatures. Plus, any magic that isn't designed to be used by humanoids can make for interesting moments.

Ferox seems pretty evil in this post, and they are often warlike and angry, but they aren't entirely evil. Sure, they do want to destroy or enslave the modern-day world in order to usher in a new era of dinosaur-kind, but if you left your house for a work trip only to return and find it infested with vermin, I expect you'd have quite the same reaction. And sure, they might be a god of war and violence, but they preside over the gentle contemplation of herbivores just as much they do the carnivore's pursuit of prey, just as much the love a mother has for her eggs as the vicious cunning a raptor uses to down a larger animal. How evil even is predation, anyway? It's not as if the modern world is filled with vegetarians. You might use Ferox as a god worshiped by a PC, if they wanted something unusual.