The Silurian Game and Diegetic Adventuring Parties

30 Jul, 2026

This post is the result of two post ideas I had around the same time and thought would be better as one interesting post than two mediocre posts.

1. I've been thinking about something I call The Silurian Game, which is where you play your preferred dungeon game but simply "palette swap" medieval Europe for the late Cretaceous period. Instead of humans, dwarves, halflings, and elves, you play different subspecies of sentient bipedal reptiles called Silurians (after the Silurian hypothesis, itself named after the Doctor Who monster of the same name¹). While it would take a little bit of prep to figure out, for instance, what kind of dinosaurs replace your random wolf encounters, it's otherwise almost entirely a matter of imagining the fictional world differently, a kind of logical endpoint of the "Just Use Bears" tip.
2. I've been playing an open table West Marches game of Caverns of Thracia, DM'd (Judged?) by d4 hp magic-user. The dungeon is fairly deadly and most of our expeditions have been with only a few players, so PC turnover is quite high. Furthermore, the open table nature means that individual players are also coming in and out at different times. I was thinking about how one would justify the mechanical convenience of allowing a very high-degree of information and resources to be shared between PCs of the same player and between PCs within the same adventuring party. Combining this concept with The Silurian Game was my "Eureka!" moment, and yielded the following explanation:

Watsonian

The sentient bipedal reptiles known as Silurians all have latent psionic abilities acquired as a random mutation from a distant evolutionary ancestor. A small percentage (approximately 1%) of Silurians demonstrate great powers such as psychokinesis, telekinesis, and extra-sensory perception. These mages are highly prized or hunted down for their capabilities by their less gifted kin, depending on the settlement.

Nevertheless, all Silurians have the ability to communicate telepathically with certain others. Due to changes in the reproductive habits of Silurians and the branching into distinct subspecies² since this mutation occurred, those with whom a given Silurian can communicate telepathically does not follow any clear constraints of heredity, background, or skillset.

In Silurian culture, a group that shares a telepathic link is called a skura. All members of a skura can share psychic impressions with one another, including their relative location and whether they are in danger. By adulthood, a given Silurian will have some sense of who is in their skura, and will travel great distances to find them as a kind of rite of passage. Once a skura has been formed, it remains relatively static, changing only as members die or join the skura. Practically, this means the skura is the basic unit of Silurian society, analogous to human "families," though this translation is inexact: even if two members of the same skura procreate, it is highly unlikely their offspring will be in their skura.

A group of skuras is called a kashtal, analogous to human "clans." A kashtal pools its resources and is governed, semi-democratically, by a council of its most senior members, often the most senior member of each skura.

The ability to share information between members of a skura actually disincentivizes collaboration within a single skura. It is much more advantageous, for example, to have one member of each skura assigned to a different task. In a skura with 3 members, for instance, one member can guard a campsite while one member goes hunting and one goes foraging. Their telepathic link means that if any member is in danger, the other members will be alerted. This leads to the third type of Silurian social unit, the ixin. The ixin is analogous to an "expeditionary force" or a "legion," meaning a group of members of a single kashtal, each from different skuras. While members of a single skura can have similar or different skillsets, ixins tend to be comprised of Silurians with complimentary skills: i.e. someone skilled in fighting, someone skilled in herb lore, someone skilled in tracking, etc.

Doylesian

This is a lot of made-up words meant to justify quite common dungeon game conventions. The skura is, in game terms, a player's "stable" of PCs. Having a player's PCs share a telepathic link justifies why one PC would know things another PC has learned: as long as they are played by the same player, they are members of the same skura.

The kashtal, then, is an adventuring party as a whole, or a "company," if you will. All of the PCs of all of the players who will ever play in a given open table are part of the kashtal.

The ixin, finally, is the party for a single session, the group of PCs who embark on any given expedition or dungeoncrawl. The idea of the skura, diegetically, actually justifies why it would make sense for only a single PC from each player to go on a dangerous journey.

Finally, while I think these explanations are neat, I think that these diegetic explanations can intrude on or infiltrate the setting in a really neat way, because it's not just the PCs that have them: all the other Silurians in the game are in their own skuras. Life is both simpler in many ways and more complicated in many others if you know what a dozen other people are thinking are at any given time.

A Last Thought

The Silurians have three distinct concepts for what might simply be translated as "destiny" or "fate". They can be regarded as gods, but this is not entirely accurate:

• Tiam is the raw material of creation. The rocks, the sky, the trees were all made by tiam (or perhaps more accurately, are made of tiam) and unintelligent creatures are controlled by tiam.
• Paliar is a higher ordering principle, akin to something like Freud's superego. It is the force which maintains the skura and a kind of consciousness that acts through intelligent creatures. When you do something without entirely knowing why, that's paliar.
• Tais is the force of chance or randomness. When a rope frays exactly when it shouldn't, that's tais. When an untrained spearman makes a perfect strike, that's tais, too.³

Footnotes