Exploring 'Titanic' Monster Options Through Splattered Ink's Dinosaur-Inspired D&D Expansion

If there’s one thing that I always enjoy seeing more of in games, it’s more dinosaurs in a story. That’s what Darryl Jones of Splattered Ink Games aimed to do with his last two expansions. He crowdfunded A Time Traveler’s Guide to Dinosaur Hunting for $447,000 in 2025 and is now seeking to expand the world through Monsters of Rend World, an expansion adding new monsters and biomes for players to pick up.

Why dinosaurs? “My son,” Jones told TTRPG Insider. “He had a dinosaur phase as he was growing up. As he got excited, so did I. So I had my dinosaur phase at age 45.” He was also inspired by the work of other 5e supplement publishers, like Heliana’s, and by how they tried to do more than just “fantasy character variants.” So he did time travel and dinosaurs; two ideas that fit well but don’t naturally transfer to a tabletop RPG format.

It was weird, but “the weirder I got, the more my fans liked it, “ Jones admitted.

The story is set in a fantastical interpretation of dinosaur culture, centered on multiverse shards and a family whose actions shattered the timeline, creating the setting for players to explore.

Jones says he tried to base the adaptation of dinosaurs on paleontological research in a similar way to Dr. Dhrolin’s Dictionary of Dinosaurs but didn’t limit the creature design in that way. The setting draws on ideas of corruption, magic, science fiction, and a lot more.

It also offers variations of dinosaur monsters. While D&D has a few standard dinosaur stats (T-Rex is a common one in my games), books like this allow for exploring what made a lot of the gigantic lizards of the past interesting.

Monsters of Rend World attempts to expand on this. It’s the latest project from Jones, who wanted to offer a bestiary of weird and scary monsters informed by the terrifying creatures seen in Monster Hunter or Elden Ring. The book expands on the shard-based multiverse storytelling that Jones is trying to do, using a number of biomes to inspire creature ideas. That helps provide players with options and ideas to fit beasts into a number of different flavors.

The biomes themselves are designed to be quite detailed, Jones added, offering a guide for how the insect life, plant life, and other organisms in a distinct region might coexist and interact.

The book also offers what it calls “Titan-Class” monsters, which are the highest challenge rating and range from mountain-sized stone dragons to skeletons of creatures from the past.

While the book is written with the shard-based realms of Time Traveler’s Guide in mind, Jones says that the resources could also be used to expand on established settings (such as if you want a scary subterranean section in a Ravenloft campaign).

You can check out Monsters of Rend World on Kickstarter today.

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Splattered Ink and Jones’ Other Projects

While Time Traveler’s Guide and Rend World are taking Jones’ priorities at this time, he also mentioned other projects he’s working on. The first is a second book set in the Alwaysgreen Forest of Dobberton, the setting for his Ennie-nominated D&D campaign Seeds of Decay. Initial playtests for the ‘bridge’ adventure between the first and second books were tested at GenCon this year, with a hope of starting the project some time in 2027.

 Jones also said he is playtesting Framework, a new diceless RPG system in which players spend resources to perform skills rather than roll dice. The system received some early tests at GenCon, and signups for the playtest releases are available on the Splattered Ink website.

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