In a high magic setting...

Since tribes are usually in the wilderness a lot more, they could have access to more primal forms of magic never seen by other civs. They could even have a few golem protectors or elemental they created to protect the tribe, whereas the kingdom could only have guards to protect their own citizens.

Herbal medicine is a great idea. Although I've always figured that herbal remedies are only made better or at least better understood with research. The idea of using fringe herbs and flora gives them something that separates them from medicinal practices in the city. I know I already said it but this is all great stuff.

I was thinking that. Druidism and the like. I was also thinking of a sort of "physical" magic. As if training your body was a divine act in and of itself. And surpassing the limits of your body was only possible in the wild or something like that.

What would primal magic be? Would it be less bound by rules than other magic? Would it be more powerful but harder to control?

It could be part of their trading system with more civilized people for things they can't normally get out in the bush. Every now and then someone from some college or university comes along asking the tribe if they have ever encountered a certain kind of illness and what they used to combat it, and how effective it was. etc. etc. etc.

Basically, think sidequest/tutorial tier missions to find that one plant that healed that one uncle that one time.

So druid shaolin monks?

Their gods are pleased with tribal living?

Yes they are.

Yeah. That's exactly it.

Sounds awesome OP.

High fantasy means that there is bound to be nature magic and nature god.
So tribal people should, traditionally, have a mastery over the natural world and the blessings of one or more god(esses).

That's a good idea, but if OP is planning to use it in D&D 5E, it won't work because non-magical treatments for diseases don't exist.

No king demanding you pay his taxes or die in his wars.

I never understood the purpose of the Medicine skill if you aren't allowed to actually do anything with it. I just rule it so you automatically get the healer feat with proficiency in the herbalism kit and you can treat diseases.

That's all nice and good, if you have been trained to use magic. But what is the average NPC going to do if they are a dirt poor uneducated peasant? They drink a fucking cup of willow bark tea. That's what.

Your logic is as stupid as saying, "hurrr durrr food doesn't exist because magic, so you can't starve to death".

Let the NPCs in the background trade for shit, like rare and valuable plants, while your party uses healer kits.

>They drink a fucking cup of willow bark tea.
1. Show me in the rulebook where it says non-magical treatments for diseases exist.
2. The mechanical options given to player characters by default are not intended for dirt-poor uneducated peasants.

The rulebook also doesn't specify non-magical diseases such as the common cold, a sore throat, a fever, or anything like that. Only extremely debilitating diseases that would require magic are listed so how to treat normal diseases is open to interpretation.

There's some evidence that early hunter-gatherers had a higher standard of living than pre-modern agricultural societies (keeping in mind that the people enjoying the high life in medieval society were a small fraction of the overall population). It's just that hunter-gathering is less productive and doesn't support as many people, so agriculturalists pushed them out of the best land.

>Life spent hunting and gathering, while occasionally trying, was not a tale of constant toil and privation. Food could run short during droughts or annual lean periods, but reliance on a broad range of food sources typically afforded such tribes a reliable, well-balanced diet. Even around the arid Kalahari food is plentiful (at least when the tribes are not forced to share the land with farmers and ranchers)—so much so that the typical adult need work less than 20 hours per week.

>The contrast with farming societies, which dominated history after the domestication of plants and animals about 10,000 years ago, is stark. Farmed land is more productive, which allowed the more populous farmers to push hunter-gatherers off all but the most remote or inhospitable land. But farming societies depend heavily on a few staples, leaving them poorly nourished and vulnerable to crop failure. That high productivity also took endless, mind-numbing work: to prepare and tend the fields, keep up the homestead and defend the surpluses needed to feed everyone from one harvest to the next.

economist.com/news/books-and-arts/21725276-living-land

So the main problem is being able to keep hold of their territory. Magic is an obvious solution but they could also just live somewhere secret or isolated, like many of the tribes that still exist IRL.

Pathfag detected.

That's a surprising read. I always thought that farming was more reliable than hunting and gathering.

If you're trying to support a thousand people? Definitely. You can't support a lot of people with hunter/gatherer nomadism.

If you're trying to support forty people? Hahaha, I bet all that backbreaking labor sucks!

If you want something that plays with this, Terry Prachett and Stephen Baxter have a series called Long Earth where people develop the ability to basically planeswalk to adjacent earths in other dimensions, identical except without people and infinite in every direction. One of the things they explore is the possibility of returning to hunter-gather living in a modern society- by dint of having so much more wilderness suddenly within 'convenient' distance to support, say, a city.

>If you're trying to support forty people? Hahaha, I bet all that backbreaking labor sucks!
I completely forgot about how the size of a tribe is much smaller than that of a small town or village. And that comes with a whole different social environment.

>One of the things they explore is the possibility of returning to hunter-gather living in a modern society- by dint of having so much more wilderness suddenly within 'convenient' distance to support, say, a city.
Even with an abundance of resources wouldn't there be too much conflict over people trying to gather the easiest to reach resources?

This is less a useful discussion on the topic, and more you just shoehorning in an excuse to bitch about a game that nobody's forcing you to play.

The presumption is that with literally infinite earths, if you're willing to walk half a mile to [food], every step of that can be taken sidereal, or taken through planeswalking. At which pointinstead of a one-mile-diameter circle of terrain that's convenient' for you, you've got a couple hundred of them. Pretty accessible.

And yeah, that's the point.
Also to note; genetic engineering- the boring, old-fashioned kind, where we let plants or sheep we like reproduce the most- has done a lot to increase the returns on crops and domesticated animals. Three thousand years ago, the average potato was walnut-sized.
I find it really interesting all the stuff that had to be developed just to get something as on-the-face simple as a population 1,000,000 city.

>giant stone buildings in the background
>tribe

hmmmm

There should be power-gaining methods through ancestral worship/sacrifice or both to receive their strength/wisdom/etc. Ancestors should be alot more willing to give you some rad skills/powers/enhancements than some foreign blood god.

Probably lower power, but much more consistent in responding and aiding.