A Time Traveler's Guide to Dinosaur Hunting

July Update from GenCon
8 days ago – Sat, Aug 01, 2026 at 07:21:15 AM

Hail Adventurers!

The days here are starting to get shorter and we're beginning to approach fall. We wanted to put your rewards in your hands somewhere in fall, and we've been hard at work behind the scenes in layout and logistics, but unfortunately it looks like you should expect your physical rewards to reach you closer to the first snow than before the leaves change.

We'll be sharing more details soon, but what you should know is this:

We believe you deserve the best possible version of your rewards — you've been with us practically since the idea for this time-traveling dinosaur project hatched, and we won't settle for anything less than the best execution we can deliver.

We are dedicated to getting your rewards to you, and progress is being made — Darryl has been (and continues to be) working with our manufacturer to make sure we get everything right. That's eaten into the time he's had to finalize the layout for the PDFs, which are coming along but not quite ready yet.

We know that you expected to see your rewards sometime this fall. We expected that too. We're sorry that you'll be waiting longer than you expected. We believe that once you have the books in your hands, you'll see that the extra time and care were well worth it.

Finishing A Time Traveler's Guide to Dinosaur Hunting Remains A Priority

You are, of course, wondering what this means as far as when to expect your rewards. Unfortunately, we don't have a new date just yet, and this is a busy season for us — not just with dinosaurs (which remain at the top of our priority list), but with taking the chance to connect with as many of you in person as we can at Gen Con, and with the launch of Rend World (which we'd planned to launch after A Time Traveler's Guide to Dinosaur Hunting was set for manufacturing).

A Time Traveler's Guide to Dinosaur Hunting is seeing steady progress. The adventures are written and the dinosaurs for the bestiary are ready — we're doing the last bit of refining and polishing, but the great majority of this work is complete.

We know that the launch of the Rend World Kickstarter campaign before your rewards have entered manufacturing might make some of you a little nervous. Rest assured, we're not pressing pause on getting your dinosaurs out to you.

You'll Continue To See Updates From Us

We'll be keeping you updated as everything unfolds. As it stands right now, before we can get you more information about when to expect your rewards and what shipping charges will be, we need to solidify everything as far as manufacturing. When we know more about that, you will too.

If you want to see more from us between updates here, particularly on our progress with the books, we often share art and other notes about progress in our Discord community. We'll also be releasing more preview content through Backerkit, so keep an eye out for those notifications as well.

We are hard at work on bringing you dinosaurs, but we always love to hear from you. If you want to reach out to us, you can do that in the Discord, in the comments section here, or by emailing Altair at [email protected].

Dinosaurs Spotted On The Horizon
about 1 month ago – Tue, Jun 30, 2026 at 08:15:07 PM

Hail, Adventurers!

It's almost time for rewards to embark on a journey to you - we're wrapping up the last details, dotting 'i's and crossing 't's, and making sure that each dinosaur is ready to go. We'll let you know a little more about shipping charges, but first:

Head Count: 302 Dinosaurs & Other Prehistoric Critters

Want to know what's coming? We snapped a few quick pictures of the table of contents for the bestiary.

Preparations For Fulfillment

As we prepare to get all of your books and other treasures out to you, we're coming up on the time to charge for shipping. 

Fulfillment - a big improvement. We met with our fulfillment partner, and there is a new option for how fulfillment is handled: manufacturing prepack. That means each pledge will be packed per backer before everything goes onto cargo boats. The result is faster fulfillment and far fewer mistakes. Everything you pledged for will be boxed specifically for you, right from the start.

We're still nailing down the exact figures, but you should expect to see shipping charges in BackerKit soon. As soon as we have an exact number and a date, we'll get that information out to you.

Where Things Stand

We're honored to be building something this ambitious alongside you, and we're rowing hard for the shore. It still catches me off guard how massive this project is. 800 pages, 302 creatures, two books. Tokens, cards, STLs. You all know. You unlocked all those beautiful stretch goals. 

Our manufacturer is ready and waiting to begin as soon as files are finalized and proofed. They know we're in a hurry. But we won't cut corners to speed up production. This project deserves every effort required to ensure it is the best RPG product it can be.

While you wait, if you haven't already checked them out, we recently made two new alpha adventures available on BackerKit. We hope you enjoy them. If you have a chance to try them out, please let us know what you think.

Layout & Final Art. This is the last major task on the book itself. Eight hundred pages is no small beast to wrangle, but it's coming together page by page.

Digital Rewards

Miniatures & Digital Tools. The final list of models is locked and in the hands of our 3D sculptor. The final creature list has gone out to our token artists, and we've kicked off the review process with VTT developers to get these creatures onto your virtual tabletops.

Travel To Another 'Verse With Rend World

One 'verse could never be enough.

Take your campaigns from mundane to metal in Rend World! 

Need a place for your 'verse-hopping party of time travelers to crash land for an impromptu one-shot? Choose one of Rend World's biomes and a handful of monsters for quick game prep.

Designing an epic campaign of your own? We've got you there too. Whether your table spends levels one through twenty in an epic campaign immersed in Rend World lore or you sprinkle its monsters through your story, you'll find resources to amaze and surprise your players. Speaking of resources, Rend World will be compatible with the crafting and harvesting system found in Heliana's Guide to Monster Hunting.

We’re crafting a bestiary of interconnected monsters with living, deadly, biomes that are perfect to drop into ANY campaign! 

Each biome is designed from the ground up, so from underground lairs to skyfaring dragons, each of Rend World’s unique creatures is designed as part of a richly detailed and interconnected environment.

You can find out more on our launch announcement page. >CLICK HERE< Drop by and check it out! Sign up for FREE to instantly unlock creature stat block downloads (the slimigator will warm your heart) and become a VIP before the campaign begins to unlock a VIP ONLY digital adventure, Lullaby of the Cave Nurse,bonus stat block downloads,and more!

NEW VIP REWARD!!! - Cracked Nebula Dice

A Few Last Words

Your enthusiasm for our time travel dinosaur adventure has been a source of joy and inspiration for us as we've worked on this project. Many of you have already signed up for VIP status, shared Rend World with your friends, and come to chat with us about it. We're beyond thrilled (and grateful). We couldn't ask for a better community.

Want to chat with us (and some other people who love dinosaurs and other cool stuff)? Join us on Discord, the ancestral home of Splattered Ink's internet cryptid!

You can also reach Altair by email at [email protected] with questions, comments, or cute pictures of cats. 

Safe journeys friends!

Darryl & Altair

May
2 months ago – Sat, May 30, 2026 at 06:00:41 PM

Hail Adventurers!

Apologies if we've been a little quiet lately. We've been heads-down on A Time Traveler's Guide to Dinosaur Hunting. All fourteen adventures are written. All that remains is artwork, layout, and polish.

We're almost there. All the writing is done. Every adventure, every creature, and all the player options. Now we're in final editing, layout, art integration, and proofing. The step that takes all of this content from "finished concept" to "the thing we promised you."

I'd originally planned to get more PDFs into your hands with this update. I'm not ready to send them yet. I'm an artist first and a scheduler somewhere further down. I felt I should send this update now rather than wait, because I wanted you to know we're making real progress and moving toward the finish line.

The truth is, the scope of this project is enormous. You can see in the screen capture above that the adventure book is over 500 pages. Dinosaur awesomeness at this scale can't be rushed, and if I'm honest, "rushing" has never exactly been my superpower. Making beautiful things? Maybe. I'm committed to getting all of it to the standard you deserve. I truly love this project and no shortcuts will be taken. The hardest part is behind us. What's left is making it look as good as it reads.

More PDFs are coming soon. Thank you for your patience, and for putting up with an artist who would rather be a little late than ship something he doesn't love.

What Does This Mean For The Timeline?

There are many possible futures, but we’re very close to release, our chronometric fluctuation counters are just barely flickering, and our data indicates:

• PDF Books will available to be download by July
• Shipping charges will happen sometime in July
• Physical rewards should arrive before the leaves change

While there are some possibilities that even a time traveler can't predict, we’ll keep you updated as we have more information to share about more specific dates. 

A Shattered Timeline Means Infinite Worlds–And Those Worlds Need Monsters!

Whether you use Rend World’s creatures and environments to populate new worlds in the ‘Verse or in a completely different campaign, we’re excited to see what you do with them.

Speaking of what you do with monsters, we’re excited to share that we’re making our crafting system for Rend World compatible with Heliana’s Guide to Monster Hunting.

Come Play With Splattered Ink At Gen Con

We’ve assembled a team of GMs to run at Gen Con and we hope to see you there! You can join us for the following adventures:

A Time Traveler's Guide to Dinosaur Hunting (5e)

In the Jungle, No One Cares if You Scream (4 hr) 

Lock 'n' load. The Carbonide facility is a slaughterhouse, mutated austroraptors that hunt like tacticians, crystalline horrors, eggs ready to hatch. Aliens meets Jurassic Park. 5th-level pre-gens provided.

The Conquest of Baird (4 hr)

A raw world of volcanoes and tar pits. Tribal warlords. A kentrosaurus-riding barbarian who wants your time machine. Help the stegosaurian refugees or get trampled trying. 5th-level pre-gens provided.

Seeds of Decay (5e)

The Ice Lizard's Mine (4 hr) 

The Ironspire Mine has gone silent. An ancient ice lizard has sealed it shut, a goblin named Trin has woken something worse, and Cloven Rock is starving in the dark. Custom classes, 5th-level pre-gens. For fans of The Dark Crystal and The NeverEnding Story.

Framework — the Diceless RPG

No dice. No mercy. Framework is a diceless RPG where strategy and resource management are the only things between survival and the grave.

Breach at Bishonia (3 hr · Fantasy Horror)

Bishonia's walls have stood for thirty years. Tonight a desperate father pounds on the gates with a special child in his arms, and something Unmade hunts them through the dark. Open the gates? Watch them die?

The Tide-Walker's Song (3 hr · Pirates)

The full moon passed three days ago. Drowned sailors crawl onto the docks looking for the iron-forged doom, heralded by the Tide-Walker, a ghost wolf that walks the waves. Find what was stolen before the whole town is lead to a murky death beneath crimson waves.

Final Sync (3 hr · Cyberpunk)

2078. NeuroSync 7 went live and minds started snapping. The virus hops bodies, kills the host then jumps to the next synced person. You're analog, the only reason the virus hasn't jumped to you. Cut Node Zero or die trying.

Interested in booking a space at one of our tables? You can view (and sign up for) our scheduled games here. Several tables have already sold out. Jump on tickets now before they are gone.

Can’t Make It To Gen Con Or Can’t Wait Until Then To Talk To Us?

You can find us in our Discord server or email Altair at [email protected]. We love hearing from you.

That’s all for now–we have a book to finish for you.

Darryl & Altair 

Adventuring Across the 'Verse - Two New Alpha Adventures!
4 months ago – Mon, Apr 13, 2026 at 05:43:24 AM

Hail Adventurers!

We know you’re ready. 

Find some dice. Sharpen some pencils. Call a friend or three. 

We’ve got two new alpha adventures, Last Gasp Of A Dying World and You Can’t Outrun Extinction, and an updated version of In The Jungle No One Cares If You Scream ready for you.

The Fortelling

Fragments of knowledge were scattered across centuries, worlds, and 'verses. The people of Ytalin did what they could to capture that knowledge, inscribing warnings on walls that lead to the golden wall and it's timeline-destrying lock.

Last Gasp Of A Dying World

The Good News: You made it through your last adventure – quite possibly just barely. You’re in a time machine. It could be that you’re home, enjoying the familiar low hum of a quantum engine and looking out into the impossibility of the space that lives between seconds. It could be that you’re in a ship stolen in a daring escape, trying to acquaint yourself with a set of controls marked by glyphs you’ve never seen before. It could be that you are in a cryotube, on a ship cycling through world after world, timeline after timeline, dimension after dimension searching for the world that will be your last hope for a new home. 

The possibilities about how you come to this moment are as endless as the possibilities for what happens after.

The Bad News: Your new adventure arrives, as they so frequently do, unexpectedly. The familiar low hum of the quantum engine stutters. You tap a glyph and your new ship surges into a timejump whose coordinates were set before you took the controls. You awake from cryosleep unexpectedly to the blaring of alarms. 

Possibilities stretch outward beyond this moment. Endless. But this moment, right now – it is specific.

Welcome to Hardoon.

Your timeship is mired somewhere and somewhen unexpected. You’ll need to escape your stalled ship and find some way to repair it, easier said than done in a besieged city on a doomed world. 

Good luck.

You Can’t Outrun Extinction

Tormana. Near Past. The Royal Academy of Maths and Sciences sends Dr. Elizar Vaskoon to explore Tormana’s past in search of weapons that will secure Tormana’s future.

Tormana. Ancient Past. Dr. Vaskoon witnesses the deadly predators that ruled Tormana and fell into extinction long ago. He collects specimens and returns with them to his lab, intending to augment an ancient predator into an unstoppable killing machine.

Tormana. Near Past. Dr. Vaskoon achieves success in overwhelming measure. His creation, the GIGA-rex, an ancient apex predator augmented with the very latest advanced technology is practically unstoppable – and it’s no longer under his, or anyone’s, control.

Tormana. Present. There’s a chance to stop the cyborg dinosaurs. Slim. Fading. But it is a chance. A lone messenger steps through a portal in search of the help they’ll need to save their world.

You’re their last chance, but it could be your last mission. Will you step through a portal to save a ragged band of survivors trying to survive in the wasteland their world has become?

Other Worlds Than These

Ready to take your campaign from mundane to METAL! 

Wherever and whenever your party is adventuring, one thing is certain – they’re going to need MONSTERS. We’re crafting a bestiary of interconnect monsters with living, deadly, biomes, perfect to drop into ANY campaign! (Great even for filling some gaps between TTGtDH adventures.) 

Each biome is designed from the ground up, so from underground lairs to skyfaring dragons, each of Rend World’s unique creatures is designed as part of a richly detailed and interconnected environment. 

Each bestiary entry will include:

• Original Artwork
• Creature Stat Block
• Environmental Details
• Immersive Lore

You can find out more on our launch announcement page. >CLICK HERE< Drop by and check it out! Sing up for FREE to instantly unlock creature stat block downloads(the slimigator will warm your heart) and become a VIP before the campaign begins to unlock a VIP ONLY digital adventure, Lullaby of the Cave Nurse, bonus stat block downloads, and more!

Questions? Comments? Found Our Displaced Temporal Inverter Coil In A Time Eddy?

We love to hear from you! 

You’re welcome to carve a message on a monument that will remain for millennia, but it may be easier to reach us by sending a message to [email protected]. 

Find us, and other like-minded travelers, in our growing Discord community. Drop by to discuss dinos, time travel, TTRPGs, or just about anything else with us.

Darryl & Altair

PS. If you have found that temporal inverter coil, we really need that. Please let us know ASAP.

February Update & Our Summer Convention Schedule
5 months ago – Fri, Feb 27, 2026 at 02:21:21 PM

Hail, Adventurers!

It’s hard to believe a year has flown by since the Time Traveler’s Guide to Dinosaur Hunting Kickstarter. Your enthusiasm and support have been absolutely amazing. Whether you’ve been chatting with us in Discord about dinosaurs, commenting on our Kickstarter updates, dropping by to let us know where you want to head next, or just quietly trusting us to get this project out to you – thank you so much!

We're at 175,000 words of adventure text!

That doesn't include the bestiary or player's guide. I assure you, I know it's not just about size - the quality is there too. Some of the adventures have swollen in word count just for that reason, to ensure you have the best possible experience running time-traveling-dinosaur senanagains at your table!

Here are a few more pieces of the amazing art this book will be full of!

We’ve sharpened our quills to wrap up the last adventures for A Time Traveler’s Guide to Dinosaur Hunting and record the last entries in the bestiary. We’re closing on finishing these, so you should expect to see some new alpha adventures soon, and we expect to send out the finished PDFs by May.

We hoped to get you the printed books in June and while we won’t quite manage that, it looks like those books will be coming a little later - we won’t have exact dates until a little later in the manufacturing process, but we expect you should be able to tear open some boxes and adventure through dimensions with physical books somewhere around late summer.

Come And Join The Hunt At Gary Con, Gen Con, And Gamehole Con!!!

Darryl (and our amazing convention GMs) love getting the chance to meet you and run games for you. Here are a few upcoming chances to catch us in the wild.

Gary Con | March 19-22  | Lake Geneva, WI

It’s only a few weeks until Gary Con and there are only a few slots to join us Friday for In the Dome! If you’ll be at the convention and want to grab one of those seats, you can do that here.

Gen Con | July 30-August 2 | Indianapolis, IN

Splattered Ink will be at Gen Con! We'll be running a full slate of games: 

•  In the Jungle No One Cares if You Scream: A Time Traveler's Guide to Dinosaur Hunting (4 sessions)
• The Conquest of Baird: A Time Traveler's Guide to Dinosaur Hunting (4 sessions)
• The Ice Lizard's Mine: NEW Seeds of Decay (4 sessions)
• Breach at Bishonia: Framework Dark Fantasy (2 sessions)
• Final Sync: Framework Cyberpunk (2 sessions)
• The Tide-Walker's Song: Framework Pirates (2 sessions)

Keep your eye on the GenCon website for when sessions go on sale and search Splattered Ink!

Gamehole Con | October 15-18 | Madison, WI

You’ll also be able to join us this fall at Gamehole Con. We’re still making plans for this one, and details will be announced as we have them. We'll have a booth and likely run several RPG sessions from A Time Traveler's Guide to Dinosaur Hunting, Seeds of Decay, and upcoming products!  

• If you’re interested in seeing a Making of A Time Traveler’s Guide panel with several of the writers, comment below and let us know.

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Build a ship, pilot a mech, play as an alien species, or roll up a character with one of 40+ sci-fi subclasses. Back it today on Kickstarter -- and play D&D in space!

As always, 
Thank you!
Altair, the internet cryptid
and Darryl