Shanghai, 1927. China is divided by civil war. In an effort to unify the country, Chinese nationalists along with the U.S. Army recruit three obscure DC Comics heroes – Bat Lash, Enemy Ace, and Biff Bradley – to recover a pair of mythological swords. The catch? The swords are located on the long lost “Dragon Isle,” and the heroes must also bring back a dragon to convince the Chinese the legend is true. And if that wasn’t enough, it turns out the communists, Japanese and supervillain Vandal Savage also want the swords - and they’re willing to kill for them.
My thoughts
Guns of the Dragon was a four-part miniseries published in 1998 and 1999 by DC Comics. The idea came from writer and illustrator Tim Truman, who wanted to pen a pulp adventure in the spirit of Indiana Jones but using DC characters appropriate for the time period. He also decided to set most of the action on Dinosaur Island, a location that was featured prominently in the War that Time Forgot, a 1960s comic about World War II soldiers fighting dinosaurs on an isolated Pacific island.
As for miniseries itself, all the pieces are there for a good story, and the plot gets off to a decent start in the first issue. But once the characters reach the island things fall apart. The main problem is there are simply too many villains, and their competing storylines break up the action. The art is inconsistent – sometimes it is really good, other times it is simply serviceable. And for a comic that came out several years after Jurassic Park, the dinosaurs are a disappointment. They are drawn as lumbering, tail-dragging behemoths. I would have rather seen them portrayed as the active, agile creatures we know they were.
That said, Guns of the Dragon is an interesting piece of DC lore that fans of the comic universe may appreciate more than I did. Unfortunately, the miniseries has never been collected in a single volume. You will need to find the individual issues online or in a comic book store.
Trivia
Dinosaur Island would pop up sporadically in the DC universe in later comics, and the island itself became a villain in the miniseries DC: The New Frontier.
Thrilling Expeditions: Valley of the Thunder Lizard allows players to play big game hunters in a lost valley populated with creatures from before the rise of man, or have their pirates going ashore on an island where Neanderthals battle Saurians, or time traveling tourists suddenly stranded in Earth’s distant past.
This title will add dinosaurs not only to the .45 Adventure system, but to Gloire and Fantastic Worlds. In addition, the book will provide a Big Game Archetype for each of the three game systems. This release will allow players who may enjoy more than one of our games, the chance to get one book to cover all three.
The Valley of the Thunder Lizard is the first of the Thrilling Expeditions series of supplements. These supplements will be heavy on scenarios with at least one multi-part scenario for each game system. These scenarios should provide you with plenty of ideas for your own games.
So grab your rifle and prepare for Thrilling Expeditions!
My thoughts
Valley of the Thunder Lizard is a supplement for three tabletop miniatures gaming systems by Rattrap Productions, all of which share the same basic mechanics. “Miniatures games?” you say. “You mean like Warhammer 40K?” Actually, no. Warhammer games usually involve dozens of miniatures scattered across a large tabletop. The beauty of Rattrap’s systems is they are designed to be played with only a few 28mm miniatures in an area that can be a small as 2x2 feet. Building large Warhammer armies is expensive. Rattrap’s systems are designed for gamers on a budget.
All three systems use 10-sided dice to resolve conflicts. When attacking, for example, both players roll dice and add any modifiers specific to their figures. The player with the highest number wins the roll. Each figure have seven skills tied to a specific body location. Skills include brains, speed and brawn. When a part of the body takes damage, the associated skill is usually reduced by one point, making it harder to pass any challenges using that skill.
As for the systems themselves, .45 Adventure covers the 1930s pulp action genre, like Indiana Jones or The Shadow; Gloire covers pirates; Fantastic Worlds covers 1930s space pulp serials like Flash Gordon.
Valley of the Thunder Lizards is a solid supplement for anyone who plays miniatures games. It comes with stats for a wide variety of prehistoric creatures along with rules modeling how different types of animals should behave. There are a fairly large number of multi-part scenarios, each specific to one of the three game systems, although they could easily be adapted to the system of your choice. There is no background about the lost world genre itself as the author assumes players already are familiar with it.
I’m glad I have Valley of the Thunder Lizard although I admittedly don’t use any of its core systems – they are a bit too heavy on record keeping for me, given you must track wound locations (although, to be fair, it is easier than it sounds). Still, the scenarios and the book itself can be scavenged for ideas no matter what system you use. One thing to note is that since the supplement came out, a second edition of .45 Adventure has been published that makes several changes to the rules, including the use of multiple dice. I’m not sure how easily Valley of the Thunder Lizard can be adapted to the new system.
The time and place is Mongolia of the 1920s. Warlords and freeroaming bandits battle for control of the countryside. Your team of researchers and explorers must race against time to recover the fossils and get them out of the dangerous warzone and back to the safety of the International Zone in Shanghai.
The scenarios in this book are designed for 2 to 6 players. There are four chapters (scenarios), each is capable of being played in a single evening or several can be played at one session.
This book also introduces nine new archetypes to .45 Adventure; including Professors, Bandits, and the Dragon Lady. There are new rules for Mounted models and eight new skills you can add to provide even more diversification for your figures.
So put on your campaign hat, strap on your .45 and get ready for Dragon Bones: Adventures in the Gobi Desert!
My thoughts
Dragon Bones is a campaign supplement for the .45 Adventure tabletop miniatures rules system, which is explained in greater detail in my review of Thrilling Adventures: Valley of the Thunder Lizard. For the purposes of this review, it should be noted that Dragon Bones is not a stand-alone product. Rather, it is a series of linked game scenarios involving a fossil hunting expedition in the Gobi Desert in the 1920s.
The inspiration for Dragon Bones was the Central Asiatic Expeditions, led by famed explorer Roy Chapman Andrews. Among the discoveries made by Andrews’ team were the first scientifically documented fossilized dinosaur eggs. While paleontology was not the only reason for the expeditions – Andrews was a zoologist, not a paleontologist – it takes center stage in Dragon Bones. One player plays a team of well-armed scientists seeking to transport a cache of fossils out of Mongolia. The other player plays as a gang of Mongolian bandits wanting to steal the fossils. Each scenario has certain number of goals each player must attain to be victorious.
Dragon Bones is a fairly short supplement with only four scenarios, and one of them is only played if the expedition gets captured in the course of the other three. It does contain a few new rules for .45 Adventure, but those may have been made obsolete with the release of the second edition of the ruleset. There is no background about the setting except a short opening story setting up the adventures. You may find many of the provided character stats useful if you still play with the first edition of the rules, but otherwise there is nothing here gamers couldn’t come up with on their own.
Trivia
For any players interested in playing out the Central Asiatic Expeditions on their tabletops, the U.K.-based miniatures manufacture Copplestone Castings sells some appropriate figures. Check out the site’s “Back of Beyond” section.
Reginald Rivers won’t take just anyone into the past to hunt dinosaurs. No, as the time traveling safari guide in L. Sprague de Camp’s classic short story “A Gun for Dinosaur” explains, he only takes big men strong enough to handle the type of weaponry needed to bring down the terrible lizards:
Here you are: my own private gun for the work, a Continental .600. Does look like a shotgun, doesn’t it? But it’s rifled, as you can see by looking through the barrels. Shoots a pair of .600 Nitro Express cartridges the size of bananas; weighs nearly seven kilos and has a muzzle energy of over twenty-two hundred KGMs. Costs twenty thousand dollars. A lot of money for a gun, eh?
Yes, a lot of money, but not so much if you want to stop a charging T. rex dead in its tracks, according to Rivers’ thinking.
Rivers isn’t the only time traveling hunter in fiction to speculate about what guns to bring along on a dinosaur hunt. Henry Vickers of David Drake’s Time Safari gives his clients a lecture on making sure they only carry weapons they can handle:
What I said, what I meant, was that size isn’t important, penetration and bullet placement is what’s important. The .458 penetrates fine – with solids – I hope to God all of you know to bring solids, not soft-nosed bullets. If you are not comfortable with that much recoil, you’re liable to flinch. And that means you’ll miss, even at the ranges you shoot dinos at. A wounded dino running around, anywhere up to a hundred tons of him, and that’s when things get messy.
As the above two examples illustrate, some science fiction authors have put a lot of thought into what types of guns would be needed to bring down already extinct species. So, were they right or were they off-target?
Let me answer that question by first admitting that I don’t know much about guns. Go ahead and revoke my man card if you wish. But I’m going to give it my best try by making a couple assumptions.
First, there is a wide array of military-grade, anti-armor weaponry I’m sure would more than do the trick. However, a lot of this weaponry must be mounted on vehicles because it is too heavy to lug around. There were no roads in the Mesozoic and most of the landscape would have been impassable terrain, so any hunters in the era would need to look for game on foot. That means they are going to need guns that are light enough to carry but have enough stopping power to bring down multi-ton dinosaurs.
Second, we can rule out a common assumption made by many early science fiction writers: That dinosaurs would be harder to kill than mammals because they had primitive nervous systems. Paleontologist Jose Luis Sanz noted this myth in his history of dinosaurs in popular culture, Starring T. rex! Dinosaur Mythology and Popular Culture. Referring to Poul Anderson’s short story “Wildcat,” in which a large carnivorous dinosaur continues to threaten the heroes even after being gutted by a spray of gunfire, the scientist wrote:
Anderson’s daring ideas are based on the strict inclusion of dinosaurs within the level of organization of present-day reptiles, with a generous supplementary dose of misinformation. Anderson supposed that dinosaurs would have tremendous vitality against wounds and mutilations (“a reptile dies with greater difficulty, since it is less alive”).
Dinosaurs were probably no harder to kill than mammals of a similar size. Of course, there were dinosaurs much larger than any land mammal that ever lived.
So, with those two assumptions in mind, what is a good gun for dinosaur? Here I’m going to cheat because at least one expert on firearms already has weighed in on the subject. Outdoor Life columnist John B. Snow pondered this question back in 2009 after watching Jurassic Park with his kids. His answer varied depending on the type of dinosaur. As for T. rex:
Personally, I wouldn’t go any lighter than a .458 Lott. The .470 NE (Nitro Express), .500 NE and .600 NE would also be good contenders. I would probably opt for a double-rifle with a red-dot sight on it. I’d want that red dot for precise bullet placement as the only shot that makes sense is a broadside shot that takes out either the hip or smashes the knee. Take out the leg to put it down and then finish it off with a double lung shot or a shot in the neck.
As for the smaller raptors, give Snow a star for pointing out the movie’s Velociraptors were much larger than the real thing. His choice of weapon would be a semi-auto shotgun loaded with buckshot. As for their larger cousin, Deinonychus:
A semi-auto shotgun loaded with slugs might serve well, but I’m going with a Springfield Armory M1A Socom 16 for this job. I’d put either an EOTech optic up front on it or something like the Trijicon SRS. Mount a SureFire X400 combo weapon light/laser and you’ll be good to go.
The 1997 film Jurassic Park: The Lost World also gave us an answer to the question. In it, the “great white hunter” character Roland Tembo carries a .600 Nitro Express – an “elephant gun” – specially made for the movie by the California gun builder Butch Searcy.
Still, let’s be honest: Any civilization that has invented time travel probably has access to firearms far more powerful than anything we have today. Or maybe not. In the David Gerrold’s 1978 novel Deathbeast, laser guns prove ineffective against a T. rex because the animal is simply too large for the beams to do major damage. Stick with bullets.
Then again, maybe you don’t need guns at all. In his nonfiction A Survival Guide: Living with Dinosaurs in the Jurassic Period, geologist Dougal Dixon said bolas – ropes with weights tied at their ends – would be useful in capturing smaller dinosaurs for food. Of course, you would have to first learn how to throw a bolas without smacking yourself in the face. Consider the following video the first step on your path to becoming a mighty dinosaur hunter:
