hell-creek-colony

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not to be controversial, but hadrosaurs should have the same level of fear and respect being put on their names as moose

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While it's not the terrifying death world some awesomebro types portray it as, Maastrichtian Laramidia is still a wild, unforgiving place that will not hesitate to kill you if you give it the opportunity. In order to make sure that doesn't happen, all colonists are given mandatory survival training upon their arrival. In addition to this, everyone is strongly recommended to own at least one firearm (provided they're legally able to do so) in case they end up needing to hunt or defend themselves, and since firearms safety is important Roberta campaigned pretty hard for the colony to set up a shooting range to make sure everyone can actually use their guns without endangering themselves or others.

...That this also allows her to indulge in one of her favorite hobbies on the side is just an unrelated bonus, she swears.

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I would remove Dakotaraptor and off the top of my head I can think of at least one theropod that's missing (Eoneophron), but this image I got off Wikipedia should give a pretty good idea of what dinosaurs the Hell Creek colonists could expect to encounter.

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One of the first things that new arrivals to Hell Creek learn is that dinosaurs are just animals, not the bloodthirsty monsters that popular movies portray them as. That while they should certainly be respected, they should not be feared.

The second thing they learn is that all goes out the window with azhdarchids because they're fucking creepy as shit.

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Things I'd put in my ideal multiplayer time-travel survival sandbox game set in Laramidia a million years before the Chicxulub impact

Scientifically accurate dinosaurs that act like believable animals

Killing anything (other than in self defense) is completely optional, all game progression is done through collecting samples for scientists and surveying the landscape for potential colony expansion

You can be left handed

You can customize your gear

Every player gets a little assigned house in the colony hub area but they can also go build a place out in the wilderness if they want

All PvP is opt-in and explicitly non-lethal using paintballs or simunition or whatever

Nothing in the game costs real money

Frankly excessive amount of character customization options

Genital customization to rival Baldur's Gate 3

Enough pronoun options to ensure right-wing shitheads will never play it

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Despite being even further north than it is today due to continental drift, Hell Creek's climate is a lot like that of northern Florida: hot and rainy in the summer, and cooler (but by no means what I would consider especially cold) in the winter. Also with long days in the summer and short days in the winter, on account of being up where like Alberta is today.

The plants are wrong obviously, but I think these pictures I took of Myakka River State Park in 2008 capture the overall vibe I have in mind for parts of the surrounding area:

Since a lot of the area is also seasonal floodplains, they had to be very careful when first choosing a location for the colony so they wouldn't get flooded once the summer rains came through.

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On the one hand, I don't speak Latin.

On the other hand, a substantial portion of the current population of Hell Creek are academic turbo-nerds, so of course they would vote for the colony's official motto, "Building our future in the past," to be in Latin.

Which an online translator tells me is Aedificans nostrum futurum in praeteritum.

If that's wrong, don't blame me. I don't fuckin' speak Latin.

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...However I don't want these animals to just be Laramidian reskins of Therizinosaurus and Deinocheirus, obviously, so I...might have to draw...some concepts...god dammit.

Since we know therizinosaurids were in Laramidia as recently as the Turonian, I'm absolutely including a fictional Maastrichtian genus in this setting.

(Therizinosaurus by Gabriel Ugueto for reference.)

They're pretty rare in the part of Laramidia that most Hell Creek Colony material would be set, but expeditions further inland into the more upland areas would stand a pretty good chance of running into them.

I'm also using Paraxenisaurus to justify the inclusion of a fictional Maastrichtian Laramidian deinocheirid somewhere outside the area of the colony as well.

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One of the biggest hurdles in getting Hell Creek Colony self sufficient is agriculture, since they're still figuring out what Cretaceous plants are safe to eat and worth the effort to cultivate, and they're hesitant to just start growing modern plants out in the open for fear of them getting out and fucking up the local ecosystem. They've still got a farm set up, but it's an enclosed hydroponic setup sealed off from the outside.

Of course Richboy McFuckface (placeholder name) wants to just say fuck it and build a traditional farm anyway, but so far Chief Administrator Einhorn has been able to convince him that the scientific importance of keeping the environment un-fucked outweighs the potential bad PR of causing an ecological catastrophe by planting modern crops all willy nilly.

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"I'm not like lifting stuff directly from it or anything obviously"

Take for example Saurian's depiction of Paleosaniwa:

(Illustration by RJ Palmer)

As cool a concept as a monitor-sized gila monster is, this project won't be going with that idea since a recent analysis puts Paleosaniwa outside both varanids (monitor lizards) and helodermatids (gila monsters and beaded lizards) as a stem varanoid.

I've long since given up waiting for any meaningful progress to be made on the actual Saurian game, but their Field Guide to Hell Creek is very cool book and a useful resource for this project. I'm not like lifting stuff directly from it or anything obviously, but it's been pretty helpful in figuring out the local flora, fauna, and environments that the colony would be dealing with.

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So at first I was going to have Richboy McFuckface (placeholder name) also own a company that manufactures electric vehicles of dubious quality, which he forces the colony to use for field work despite the fact that they're not well suited for the environment and also just generally kind of shitty.

But now I feel like that might be a little too on the nose, and also as crappy a dude as Richboy McFuckface (placeholder name) is I feel like he's still not as much of a vile fuckass as we now know Elon Musk to be, so I kinda don't want him to be just like a thinly-veiled parody as much anymore.

He'd still absolutely make the colony use shoddily-made electric jeeps though, whether one of his companies manufactured them or not. (He doesn't give two shits about preserving the Cretaceous environment, but fueling a fleet of gas-powered vehicles would be too much of a hassle and he also doesn't want to deal with the negative publicity that spewing a bunch of exhaust fumes into the air would bring.)

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Oh hey, I have some old drawings I did of Hell Creek animals, don't I.

Here's a T. rex I started for my Gondolend series and never finished, based on its appearance in The Beasts of Kulig County. I won't be reusing this design for this project, though they will definitely have some form of feathering.

Some older T. rex drawings I have sitting on my hard drive. These were back when I was still really influenced by the art of Greg Paul, so they're way too skinny by modern standards and this project's T. rex definitely will not look like this.

It's Anzu, everyone's favorite giant caenagnathid! This will also probably forever remain unfinished, because as I was working on it I just got burned out on drawing and that hasn't really changed since.

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I feel like these were made mostly based on vibes rather than any actual fossil evidence, but I still think this video is a good reference for how weird and alien Laramidia probably sounded.

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While I generally try to avoid basing the appearance of my characters on real-life people (in fact I can think of only two other times I've done it), I absolutely cannot imagine Margo Einhorn, the wholly unqualified nepo-baby social media influencer daughter of the colony's Chief Administrator Miranda Einhorn and the colony's founder Richboy McFuckface (placeholder name), as not looking like model Jane Galt. Specifically these two gifs:

...Which I think also kind of sum up the two sides of her personality as well.

When they first met at a promotional event for the official founding of Hell Creek Colony, Roberta Greene's initial impression of her was that she looked like she had a lot of opinions about French cinema.

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Unlike its portrayal in a lot of modern media, the colonization of Laramidia quickly revealed that despite their fearsome appearance, adult Tyrannosaurus are not aggressive towards humans.

This is partly due to their huge size simply making us too small to be worth the effort, and also the aforementioned fact that we're completely alien to their world and they simply don't recognize us as a potential prey item and as predators who need to be able to hunt in order to live they're wary of messing with something they don't know that could potentially injure them. As a result this has led to a growing perception back in the modern day of T. rex as a gentle cinnamon roll, which is generally seen by the colonists as dangerously inaccurate.

After all, anything as big as a T. rex could kill the absolute fuck out of a human without even meaning to, so the colonists still try to give them a wide berth even if they're not aggressive.

Juvenile T. rex are another matter, being smaller, more curious and less cautious, and much faster and more agile than the adults.

(Juvenile T. rex and Ornithomimus by Mark Witton.)

While no one's been attacked by a T. rex yet, it's generally agreed that if and when it does happen it's most likely going to be a juvenile doing the attacking.

(Art by Brian Franczak.)

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By the way, I'm totally running with the idea that with their powerful jaws, sharp beaks, and shearing teeth ceratopsians were essentially gigantic hogs that ate whatever they wanted, up to and including (usually scavenged) meat.

(Scavenging Styracosaurus by Mark Witton.)

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The inquisitive and opportunistic Pectinodon is a common sight around Hell Creek Colony. In the two years since it was established the area's Pectinodon quickly came to associate the strange new creatures and their structures with safety and food, since other local animals big enough to pose a threat mostly kept away and the colonists couldn't resist feeding the cute little theropods.

In fact, the local Pectinodon seem to have gotten so comfortable around humans so quickly that some colonists are starting to wonder if they haven't begun inadvertently domesticating themselves, and if future Laramidians won't have pet troodontids the way we have dogs and cats.