Would roleplaying in the stone age be any interesting...

Would roleplaying in the stone age be any interesting? Could an adventure during the period do anything better or different than standard medieval fantasy?

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sciencemag.org/news/2016/03/slaughter-bridge-uncovering-colossal-bronze-age-battle
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varna_Necropolis
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Anything can be interesting with enough creativity put into it. If we're talking real world stone age, deal with that tribal warfare, those dangerous hunts, exploring and trying to expand your tribe, ect. I have no idea if Farcry Primal is any good in the story department, but maybe give that a look to learn from/learn what to avoid.

Stone age fantasy could be even more wild, with magic and ancient elves and dwarves and actual dinosaurs and all that good shit.

I could see it working if you play up the characters' superstitions, like taking strange weather occurrences or sicknesses and describing them to be something supernatural. Your players might not even realize you're just detailing something mundane if you describe it strange enough, and it'll help them play into the feeling of being in an untamed world.

But what's probably going to happen is several hours of stale Flintstones jokes, so if you're alright with that more power to you.

>Murderous Elves are in their primacy with their bronze weapon.
>Humans invent Cold Iron weapons.
>Elf civilisation is destroyed by humans using iron weapons.

Have "Magic" just be firebombs and shit.

youtube.com/watch?v=XTLyXamRvk4&list=PLiMUXftcSX2eliojTtAv90N2odPXZtvLX

Wolfpacks and Winter Snow does exactly this (ask in /osrg/). It's more "fantasy cavemen" (with all the now-disproven tropes like living in caves, etc.) rather than trying to be a realistic take on playing stone age societies, but it's got some interesting ways that it plays around with the XP formula to try to incentivize using all the parts of a kill in creative ways.

It adapts the old-school D&D gameflow of "explore dungeon - kill monster - get treasure - build castle with treasure" to "explore cave - kill monster - get food - settle tribe in cave with food".

Other interesting bits is how it has spellcasting based on fixed area runes, and so forth - lots of ideas in there for a Stone Age game even if you don't use it.

One thing you need to realize: Stone Age societies weren't a handful of cavemen huddling in a stony pit going after mammoths with clubs and occasionally stealing women from a neighbouring tribe. They could be fairly complex. There were early attempts at farming which lead to amassing trasure in exchage for back-breaking work, hundreds of miles long chains of trade, massive building projects that required everybody in a day's travel radius to cooperate.
Also, this guy () is correct, you can make anything appealing if you're creative with it.

>early iron is better than bronze
no

Glorantha has an area called Balazar with a neolithic tech level. It's a neat area.

When it's poisonous for your enemy to be even near to it, it is.

>now-disproven tropes like living in caves

Whaaaat?

he's playing upon the weakness to iron that classic elves had you uneducated baboon

Ron Perlman was born for this one.

Idea: Have them shape a civilization that will return in a later game to immerse themselves deeper into the world, like Spore if it didn't suck.

There isn't really anything that the later ages have that the stone age doesn't to make it a less interesting setting as far as a campaign goes. The classic 'bbeg wants to destroy the world, go stop him' story is completely possible in that setting. And for something more political, tribal relations can be just as interesting as the interaction between kingdoms. Maybe a bit more simple, but just as interesting.

Lots of rape and animalistic behaviour.

>Could an adventure during the period do anything better or different than standard medieval fantasy?
In any way that matters, probably not. Setting just changes what things look like and what words are used to describe them.

Sounds interesting to me

>stone age
>bronze weapons
>iron weapons
nigga stop.

sure

It's ok. We can make the elves carry bronze weapons. It wouldn't be the unique setting where the elves were the first civilisation.

And Everett McGill, he's got that Neolithic forehead

>Could an adventure during the period do anything better or different than standard medieval fantasy?

>Why do you want to run a game in the Stone Age other than any other one?

The answer to both those questions is the same.

Played a game called "Og" about a month ago. You are limited to just a few words, and have to use them and hand gestures to communicate. It's not serious by any means but it was actually quite a lot of fun.

I have a bit of an obsession with pre-historic age. I've read several academic works about the time period and saw quite a few museum exhibits on early Mesopotamian civilizations.

I'd say all of that is irrelevant imo, unless your players are all incredibly spergy about this time period you could do a generic fantasy/ sword and sandal kind of game in that setting. Going too far back would severely limit your options, so I suggest not going further than ~6000 years ago on Earth's time scale - that's when the early agricultural civilization was forming, and some of the earliest cities are dated to that time period. If you go further back, there won't be much for players to attach themselves to.

There's quite a few decent short stories and novels based on even earlier pre-historic periods out there, although they are not entirely realistic.

>Going too far back would severely limit your options
Could you expand on that?

part 2

If you're going to stick with pre-historic age setting, it would be easy to adapt the trappings of generic fantasy to the times of the first cities. Think Çatalhöyük - google it. It's one of the earlier cities, built around 7000 BC. So 7000-8000 years before King Arthur. 7000 or so years before the Greeks. Really old school shit.

A pre-historic city like this could be an important place in your campaign. It's as close to the capital or the king's castle as you can be given the constraints, a true hub of trading, religion, and culture.

Every other place would be wilderness to some extent.

So basic campaign hooks are there - the first and greatest city in the region, a true marvel of technology and civilization, is under a threat from X.

Evidence shows that people learned to make walls before the agriculture.

Conquest (1983)

If you go to a time before major cities, or major cultural groups, you'd just end up with small groups of people who don't understand each other, don't really share any cultural ideas and are just feral.

I'd imagine some people would be interested in playing a very heavily survivalist game where 50% of time you're hunting for basic sustenance and other 50% of time you're trying not to get killed by other groups of hunter-gatherers, but a lot of modern tropes regarding exciting adventures don't really apply if you go that far back. That's purely my own opinion tho.

The time before permanent settlements, or before any meaningful agriculture, is a bit too alien to a modern human.

I imagine most of the impact of a stone age setting would be everything being smaller and more vulnerable.

Fewer people, greater distances between communities, smaller and less secure structures, war bands instead of armies. Most people know one another on a first-name basis. Family relations would be serious problems or opportunities that affect the entire tribe. Skilled tradesmen of any sort would be precious and probably follow single master-apprentice family lines. Material goods of all sorts would be precious, never mind actual magic. High stakes even with 'simple' hazards like feral wildlife, terrain, and weather. Most knowledge held by elders and bards instead of in books and maps. Vast stretches of dangerous unknown.

You could run a pretty typical campaign with everything just dialed down a few notches, except the world which is bigger and scarier.

Good inspiration material - Quest for Fire (1981). A movie with no speech whatsoever, about cavemen questing for fire and discovering the missionary position along the way.

"Adventures of prehistoric boy" by Ernest d'Hervilly. It's written in like 1900, so it's not all that historically accurate - but it's a cool story. It's in french, but there's probably an english translation somewhere. TLDR: a caveman boy fucks up at keeping a fire lit, gets exiled, finds his way into an early settlement by the river, grows up there and becomes more civilized.

There's a few other writers but most of them are not in English.

A few years ago when I was really into Pathfinder (lol), I've started developing a pre-historic setting where magic was primal and uncontrolled, most intelligent races were still in their cavemen primal days and so on.

I never really took this idea too far, but here's some of the more notable ideas that I would hope to re-use in the future.

Main races:
humans (think cavemen and early hunter-gatherers, most of the time, with differently themed tribes). Most live in small groups, have some form of shamanism or religion, persist via hunting and gathering with just the earliest idea of agriculture.

halflings- feral things. They learned how to tame wolves/dogs, and their culture is very much about it. They hunt from the wolf's back, they feed on meat together, it's a very symbiotic relationship. They mainly focus on stealth, traps and tamed dogs.

Lizardmen - the vanguard of civilization. They're not at all friendly to anyone else. Most advanced magicians in the setting, live in walled cities with pyramids and stone granaries. Capable of smelting metal, comparable to very early bronze age. They're the ancient empire/ generic villain race of the setting

>greater distances between communities
They might be greater relative to the speed of travel but objectively speaking they can't be that great. Neighbouring tribe probably lives on the other side of that hill there or across a river. Local witch everyone asks for counsel lives in a clearing in this forest. Healing herb grows in a swamp over there
Otherwise, people just wouldn't know about it

>Capable of smelting metal, comparable to very early bronze age.
Might just limit that to copper, because bronze requires vast trading networks

80s Dragon Magazine had a nice article about an Ice Age setting.

>Would roleplaying in the stone age be any interesting?

Read this OP

People never really lived in caves in any meaningful sense. We mostly find bodies in caves because they tend to be more protected from the elements and all the people who died outside don't leave as much evidence.

It sure can. Especially because the Stone Age did not abruptly end across the world. Small pockets of metal working civilizations emerged and slowly spread the light of knowledge either by conquest or by other groups joining the fold.

sciencemag.org/news/2016/03/slaughter-bridge-uncovering-colossal-bronze-age-battle

Take this battle for examples. Thousands of men assembled from places entirely too distant to be chance. And a thousand people in general was a nice town back then. To devote thousands of fighting age men to war instead of farming or defense meant something huge was going down. What was it? We have no clue. What we do know is you had generals and other nobility wielding copper and bronze weapons along with metal armor. Many soldiers were still using wood and stone weapons though. Imagine using a Louisville slugger-esque club against an archer who just shot a flint arrow at you. After you bludgeon his skull in, a glimmering man enters your peripherals. You try to swing at him, but his shiny clothes crack your club. He gores you with his copper spear with one single thrust. It easily pierces the furs your wrapped around your core for protection.

Must have been insane to have Bronze Age warriors fighting alongside and against Stone Age tribesmen and warriors.

That's why the Stone Age could produce a much better AND different story than the standard medieval fantasy. Medieval stuff we are fairly certain about and have sources on. Stone Age? Yeah we got a few thicc fertility statues and burials. A city here and there... but nothing that we can just open up and study like a Roman manuscript kept in a Frankish monastery.

Your campaign/adventure can easily capture this magic and fantasy. That's what the Stone Age was: a time of magic becoming reality and reality creating more magic.

Absolutely! Fantasy Cave Men is one of my favorite setting ideas. I particularly like including the most fanciful concepts of early hominids. For example, Boskop Man was almost certainly simply an unusual looking early human, but running them as a sub-species of hyper intelligent but diminutive creatures is more fun. Pair that with strong and loyal but unimaginative Neanderthals, fearsome, adaptable Cro-Magnons, and bold, adventuresome Flores Man (AKA Hobbits), and you have the makings of a wacky adventure party.
It's an age of literal monsters, giant sloths, mastodons, 23 foot long reptiles that can swallow a man whole, saber cats, not to mention whatever horrid things live in the water, and just getting from point A to point B can be an incredible adventure. If you like pulp, include relict dinosaurs, psychic powers, maybe the decadent remains of some sort of advanced prehistoric civilization, or even Chariot of the Gods style aliens studying early hominids.
I ran a couple "Neanderthal vs Cthulhu" games, and they were an absolute blast. We spent a decent amount of time having fun just looking for shelter, finding something to eat, fighting of Cro-Magnon attacks, etc. I heartily recommend the Pulp stone age, I think it's a blast.

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Hold up, is that a gold cock-cap?

I guess the discovering the secret of magic has its own appeal. Sort of like a Promethean myth.

Small swamp settlements forming, tons of nomads wandering around, so many languages and dialects that pointing and facial expressions get you further than any writing could

Sure is!

Little skirmishes over shit. Launching a few arrows, some curses, choice words about their mothers, and maybe somebody gets snagged by a slinger's stone. Intimidation was the best form of war for small communities.

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That settlement right there is already too advanced. Sumer and tech on it's level is chalcolitic(copper age) or really early bronze age already.

With more food coming from farming, some communities would be flooded with population growth. That might be a neat detail for your wandering band. Perhaps they are only children or the surviving sibling of two from a hunter-gathering group. Farmers had 4 - 5 kids so their villages must have been full of em

Oh for sure, a lot of the Fertile Crescent exploded with tech

That still doesn't mean it can't be used as an example of a more civilized Stone Age settlement. Copper and bronze didn't become omnipresent or even cheap just because some people learned how to make them

>Would roleplaying in the stone age be any interesting?
The heroes could be defenders of a nomadic tribe. Their "shop hub" travels with them, all the NPCs and associated hooks. The end goal is to settle somewhere. The next campaign is 1000 years later, in which even minor and silly details became the basis for cultural values.

>Could an adventure during the period do anything better or different than standard medieval fantasy?
I actually wondered about the "sames": items and magic. Equipment can actually be varied, using bone, sinew, obsidian, flint, stone, wood to make javelins, woomeras, bows, slings, bolas... For melee we have clubs, swords, punxós/mazas, axes. I recall flint arrow-heads were called elf-shot in the Middle Ages.

Magical items would be crafted through the Hunt: rituals of sympathetic magic using rare dyes to draw powerful beasts. Then said animals have to be tracked, caught and slain. If this goes well, the hunters acquire the essence of the beast into a specific body part. Then you can have a horned club that hits like a charging auroch, the thick megatherium hide coat, the many-holed mask full of small piranha teeth in each hole that causes dread and bleeding upon your enemy.

An important NPC would be the Ancestral Shrine. Something like a painted mammoth skull carried by four people, the ashes of dead tribe members housed inside. It requires sacrificial food and drink to grant boosts, healings and assorted magic usually given by clerics and mages. It also provides mythical information.

Also, can you imagine being possessed by your descendants for resolving a feud between rivals through a dance duel? Parlaying with local nature spirits for information on food sources and migration routes, or even convincing them to provide testimony in the judgement of a murderer?

Those weird orcs whose scar tissue is made of iron and bone could be recurrent enemies. Someone posted them once or twice.

Expanding, the nomadic tribe aspect of this could be quite like King of Dragon Pass quests and events. Even the triceratops taming.

Those are the orcs I mentioned. They metabolize the iron they eat into their bone tissue, which also includes scars. So any non-fatal wound makes them stronger. Other than that, they don't even use fire, tools or want any precious metal.

>Sure is!
But why? And does it have a fancy archeologist name?

Gotta say, this looks really comfy. No traffic, no pollution, no massive population, nice temperate weather judging by the homes and clothing. Wake up to the sun. People in those days had a lot more leisure time before labor became organized.

Sure, no modern conveniences. Shorter lives. Real risks at things a modern lifestyle barely considers a threat. But all the simple things that provide contentment are there.

Bitches love gold.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varna_Necropolis
Here is the info. Penis sheathes are common. It shows status in his burial. They are ornamental and ceremonial. Europeans had codpieces for a while. We like to bring the focus to our junk and make it look as big as possible. Something we've been doing forever

As hard as the labor would be, difficult the weather might make life, dreading the loss of one or more of my children to random shit, and the constant risk of some hungry nomads rolling in with clubs and torches trying to get at our grain... yeah. I agree with you. It'd be nice to live in a time where if the rain did not come for a month... it's just the magical will of gods. Magic was real. A beautiful but ignorant life

It's probably not gold, more like bronze like the rest of the stuff, the color looks the same

>It's probably not gold, more like bronze like the rest of the stuff, the color looks the same
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varna_Necropolis
>The high status male buried with the most remarkable amount of gold held a war adze or mace and wore a gold penis sheath.

user, don't tell me what's gold and what's not gold. I've got a racial bonus to identifying precious metals.

>user, don't tell me what's gold and what's not gold. I've got a racial bonus to identifying precious metals.
Okay then, Moses

Oy! Gekhapt in der mayse.:(

The ape feet on those fuckers.

Have you seen "Quest For Fire"? "Valley of the Dinosaurs"? read any fiction set in the stone-age? There's lots of fum to be had, defending the tribe, hunting big (and I mean BIG) game, finding mates, opening up trade routes (surprisingly, stone-age folk traded across ridiculous distances).

If the pdf I'm trying load goes through, it has an article on Ice Age adventuring.

If it doesn't, try googling Dragon Magazine #68 IIRC, it's mostly ideas, rules-light.

Something I like to do with prehistoric and post apocalypse games is having the players start at with very basic weapons and then giving them damage bonuses for upgrading them by figuring out ways of making them worse (to be hit with).
In a Polynesian game or ended up with a guy having a staff full of shark teeth, poison fish spines, and scorpions tied to the end

Play Wolf Packs and Winter Snow

An evil campaign.
The pc's are raiders attacking the Flintstones.

There, done.

What do you need for an adventure?

Group of adventurers? Members of the same tribe. Check.
Classes? Warrior, Shaman, Hunter (Warrior, wizard, rogue respectively). Check.
BBEG? Enemy tribe. Check.
Big monsters? Literally tons animals. Mammoths, Sabertooths,fucking WOLVES would be a serious problem. Throw in magical beasts for even more fun. Check
Loot? Pic related. If you want something more 'historical' perhaps they find bronze weapons and armor left by travelers from a more advanced civilization. That stuff might as well be enchanted when the enemy is hitting you with wooden clubs, and stone tipped spears. Check

Npc's are npc's. Have friendlier tribes for less combat heavy interactions. Throw in whatever kind of magic you want. If I missed something, I'm sure there's a way to have it work in the stone age.

Aw man, Farcry primal was SO much fun!
Is it Stonepunk? Cavepunk?

>Yeah we got a few thicc fertility statues
Current theories on those fertility statues say that those statues are so fat because women carved those statues based on their own body, and without mirrors, the only way to see yourself is by looking down on your own body, and when you look down at your own body, you always look fatter than you are.
Archeologists came to this theory seeing how nowadays we have dug up thousands of Stone age Venus statues and most of those statues are as skinny as you'd expect a Stone age woman to be.

That's wrong. Farming didn't produce more food than hunting-gathering.
Hunting-gathering was the superior way of living up until far in the Iron age. The advantage of farming was that it allowed society to advance, it was good for the shamans and the chieftains and the warriors. It was bad for the farmers themselves.

Very survival heavy. There's also something comfy in the simplicity of being Ooga Booga tribals making simple tools and doing hunter-gather stuff.

I would love to run a game like that, heavy on monster races too, as natural weapons are quite useful in such setting.

>stone age
>dinosaurs

No. can we please not.

It's how your feet naturally form if you go through your formative years with a deficiency in shoes and an abundance of uneven ground.

>Current theories on those fertility statues say that those statues are so fat because women carved those statues based on their own body, and without mirrors, the only way to see yourself is by looking down on your own body, and when you look down at your own body, you always look fatter than you are.
Why not post a citation

Can magic work in a stone age setting?
Even if you tone the power level down to that of the technology wouldn't it ruin the feel? Like it might come off as more generic? I think things like throwing animal bones into a fire to produce visions might work, but what about actual combat magic? I would really like it to work, mind you.

/k/ sporadically have Og the Rock brand Rock conceal carry threads.

That pic gives me an idea that could work. Tribal tattoos that are enchanted or something? Maybe the tattoos are made from the ash of your ancestors/family. That's time-period appropriate, right?

Cannibalizing your enemies for magic effects?

Gaining the strength of animals you eat?

I think magic would be more primal. You work with spirits/elemental beings/primitive gods to call on magic but they must be pleased in certain ways.

>Primitve Gods

Sounds interesting. Like idols they made?

No don't you see, they're actually like proto-dragons

Chrono Trigger

>The personality and power of the idol depends on the materials used to make it.

Sounds nice.

What would your interactions with elemental beings look like? Are the elemental beings demi-gods or of a similar power level?
Are they manifestations of nature? Are you going to remove a dam to save a river spirit who's river became stagnant? What would they reward you with? Faster swimming in rivers? Water walking? Clean water? It's fun to think about.

Though these boons are more like traditional magic (such as in epics) in acquiring them the exact effects don't feel quite right.

Think I'll try making a CYOA on this.

Would animal companions fit?

For al its flaws, I actually loved WoW's design when it came to Proto-drakes, and I'd probably go for a similar one in a stone age game. Could have them smart enough to work together in family units, and possibly befriend humans, but stil bery much be wild and unpredictable.

Farming did produce more food than hunting and gathering for the same territory. It was more time and labor intensive though, true.

those are some teeny peens

also lol on that first guy with the dick holder

Farming allowed populations to explode as technology to improved, it did not immediately have this effect in any way that could cause a drastic change in a single lifetime.

Do keep in mind that hunter-gatherers lived in much bigger territories than farmers.

Just combine Jund and Naya.

How else do you expect someone to hold up their penis?

>The classic 'bbeg wants to destroy the world, go stop him' story is completely possible in that setting.

Totally possible.