Looking to start up a campaign/setting set in a Prehistoric/Early-Man Fantasy setting. I’m thinking of focusing on the darker, savage aspect rather than the goofy cave-person with a club look. Had a lot of success over the years leeching off /tg’s collective creativity, so with that in mind:
- What Prehistory tropes do you guys love/hate?
- Which classic fantasy tropes can be morphed to fit a prehistoric vibe?
- Which systems work well for running this kind of low technology setting?
>What Prehistory tropes do you guys hate?
The idea that prehistoric societies had gender equality because somehow christians invented gender roles at the start of the middle ages.
Posting images to set the tone.
>Which classic fantasy tropes can be morphed to fit a prehistoric vibe?
Dragons are dinosaurs that somehow survived.
Dwarves are a race of Pygmy headhunters who dwell deep within the caves.
Replace wizards and sorcerers with shamans and druids.
I agree, if only because it makes those few lone warrior-women characters stand out as total badasses.
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Yes, yes, yes.
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Another trope i dislike
>prehistoric tribes are very spiritual and live in harmony with nature
I'd say Barbarians of Lemuria would work well with this kind of setting, even if it is more bronze-age oriented
It's simple, while it has the potential of being pretty gritty, does have magic but not loads of super-powered sorcerers and deals well with strange prehistoric beasts
Then again, I love BoL, so I might be biased
Ouch. *Some* form of what would nowadays be considered spirituality is very likely, but the "harmony with nature" people don't seem to realize that nature rarely gets along with ITSELF. Living the natural way means engaging in a daily war for survival.
This, I picture settlements as being set within the middle of boggy, blackened wastelands. Hundreds of tree stumps and discarded animal carcasses that have been stripped of all useful materials.
Exactly. Prehistoric hominids were "in harmony with nature" in the sense that they killed and ate almost anything that was unfortunate enough to cross their path, and they were very knowledgeable about their environment by force of habit and necessity. Basically, just evolved primates inside a greater ecosystem (as opposed to modern humans that shape and create exclusive ecosystems for their use and benefit)
Humans hunted mammoths and probably other megafauna to extinction.
Would be easy to call them shortsighted from a human perspective, but when there's a strong competition for hunting grounds, your tribe keeps growing, you're not gonna let the children starve, so you just keep going until there's nothing left.
Well, one thing to keep in mind though is they didn't have a big population compared to sedentary civilizations. Cutting down entire forests would be difficult.
> from a human perspective
I mean from a modern perspective
I honestly have 0 experience with the game, what sort of system is it?
Sure, not entire forests, but I like the idea that you’d know you were approaching a camp due to the trail of destruction emanating outwards.
>What Prehistory tropes do you guys love/hate?
That they were not as smart or resourceful as humans are now.
>Otzi the iceman master race in the house.
I think you need to do tech levels in your game within reason of course but the characters with time should be able to become quite elite.
A progression system based on technological advancement could be fun, or at least an “innovator” class that outfits and equips the other players.
You should do a little survivalist study like what kind of stuff works best at doing things like best wood to burn and what wood is best to make bows and arrows out of. It would help flesh out the world the setting is in.
They lived IN nature, rather than in harmony with it.
That said, you'd recycle metal, cloth, pottery and all those sorts of things as much as you could because of how labor intensive it was to make them.
Oh god no, the idea of some cunt acting like a genius because he watched primitive technologies on YouTube and is now the smartest caveman is unbearable.
Never let your players be 'Inventors' because they're not actually inventing anything. It's as unbearable as that guy who decided to 'invent' guns for your fantasy setting, who thinks gunpowder works like fucking c4 and wants to build a machine gun.
Hah agreed, but if it was class feature based and all the “innovations” were layed out in advance you could curb that kind of behaviour.
Guy who played in one of my campaigns a while back bought 100 bags of cooking flour, because he’d heard that it was flammable. He wanted damage bonuses to his fire magic whenever he threw a bag into the flames as a move action...
That’s a great idea, I’d maybe change the name of reaources to match the primiritive language as well. Black Rock, South Stone, Ghost Bark etc...
I discovered something really obvious but also totally interesting when I went to Stonehenge visitors centre.
Different types of stone are valued differently for their different properties. A boss stone king might have beads and tools made of a rarer stone as a symbol of prestige. The Stonehenge rocks are notable because that kind of rock isn't found in the area.
It's weird because to mist people rocks are rocks. A primitive game might get really in depth about different materials - animal hides having different uses, ritual and practical. I'm not saying it should be mechanical but knowing those things would help you to flavour the setting.
Did not know that about Stone Henge, that’s pretty incredible.
With the fantasy element you could lean into that “different materials have different properties” vibe as well. Perhaps certain rocks resonate with spiritual energy as well as having different mundane properties. That way different party members would place alternate values on resources.
do people actually think that? I know the belief that hunter gatherers were perfect gender equal and classless utopias and that agriculture brought forth the patriarchy and economic inequality is relatively popular, but I've not heard what you described before. then there's also Gimbutas' gynocentric "Old Europe" idea which is also quite popular, but that's very specifically about two agrarian European cultures from a few thousand years before Christ
this is honestly quite understandable, even if it is annoyingly overused and oversimplified. we take the truth of them being less destructive towards nature than us and conflate it with them actively trying to be that way when in reality they were likely doing their best to tame nature as much as possible. I mean hell, pre-agricultural hunter gatherers burned down woodlands as well. the two main differences being they didn't then turn it into farmland and deplete it of all nutrients, and their numbers were small enough that they didn't leave much of a permanent mark when doing that.
Hunter and gatherer are really two roles that require focus to complete. You can't stroll around hunting and gathering at the same time, odds are you won't find what you're looking for. So you need hunters and gatherers. Or if you're going by gender based skills, men and women.
>do people actually think that?
I've never seen a single example of it. I assumed user was just trying to start an argument about females reee.
Cool praxians bro.
>Or if you're going by gender based skills
Gathering is compatible with carrying babies, hunting is not. It's really that simple.
>What prehistory tropes do you love?
I love the freedom of it. We don't KNOW what happened then, so speculation and fantasy can leach their way in without ruining the setting
>What trope do you hate?
Ooga booga, rocks n shiet
>Which fantasy tropes can be morphed?
The idea of earth magic or alchemy being very real. Like they knew how to make healing salves and potions from the plants, understood how to nurture a wound or animal in ways we could never now, etc.
>Which systems work well for this kind of low tech?
No clue, friend. Sorry
If you've never heard of this battle, look into it. Early Bronze Age civilizations gathered to fight using large armies
sciencemag.org
Forgot to post the link
Early villages seem comfy
There is actually a rpg about this theme. Its called Wurm, I think.
The Fuck is the deal with the R1b people.
They carried big swords
A love of Mustaches seems a constant.
Any systems you can recommend for prehistoric games?
>I honestly have 0 experience with the game, what sort of system is it?
Not that user, but it's a very rules-light system that runs on 2d6.
Here's a copy if you want to check it out.
mediafire.com
Bumping for interest, I could use more stone age/ice age/prehistoric stuff
no reason why men cannot carry babies.
with many modern hunter gatherer tribes men and women hunt.
Pygmies for example sometimes just drop the baby were they stand and run to attack with their spears.
This is a very good system for stone age games.
>do people actually think that? I know the belief that hunter gatherers were perfect gender equal and classless utopias and that agriculture brought forth the patriarchy and economic inequality is relatively popular, but I've not heard what you described before. then there's also Gimbutas' gynocentric "Old Europe" idea which is also quite popular, but that's very specifically about two agrarian European cultures from a few thousand years before Christ
The idea that humanity once lived in a state where they lived in harmony with nature, didn't have to work hard, and spent all day enjoying the fresh air in Miyazaki paintings and eating fruits and berries is OLD AS FUCK. It's basically what the Garden of Eden was. It's what Greeks called the "Golden Age" before human civilization, greed, ambition, etc came and ruined everything.
>- What Prehistory tropes do you guys love/hate?
Pretty much anything and everything as long its humanly possible to keep it consistend.
>- Which classic fantasy tropes can be morphed to fit a prehistoric vibe?
I like that the social hierarchy is much flatter and you don't need to visit every ruler in his manor and it's more of a part-time job, even more so for smaller clans.
Meeting "Rolaf the strong" for the second time as wandere, but now you don't get invited to the clan hall because you are no longer strange wanderes, the farmer just points up a hill and says something a long the lines "dude is in his stable and checking his cows".
- Which systems work well for running this kind of low technology setting?
If you like balls to the walls fantasy there is heroquest glorantha which comes with a bronze age setting.
Personally i would prefer more narrative systems, like HQG, because i can't be bothered for the party to find a "bronze dagger +2", just feels like it kills the magic.
>- What Prehistory tropes do you guys love?
Very different cultures coming into conflict with each other and the exchanging of very different ideas.
>hate?
That just because you don't have a particular technology (wheels or paper) or work with a particular material (like iron/bronze), that your culture/politics/trade/craft can't still be rich, complex, creative, beautiful, etc.
>- Which classic fantasy tropes can be morphed to fit a prehistoric vibe?
The unique village/town/city-state of the week. Since the setting lacks nation-states, you don't see as large a swath of land with a singular people, history, language, etc. Many populations living in close proximity to one another may very well have very different traditions, languages, etc.
>- Which systems work well for running this kind of low technology setting?
I like the Silhouette System, but that's because it's the system for Tribe 8 which is basically a neo-primitive post apocalyptic setting. The best way I can describe it is Clan of the Cave Bear meets Mad Max with a hint of Hellraiser.
Yeah but that's bronze age not neolithic.
Pretty sure those are the Proto-Indo Europeans, the ancestors of near all the western world.
still prehistoric in a sligthly broader sense.
I got you senpai. they were the Indo-Europeans. quick prehistory of Europe. pre-agriculture Europe was a collection of homogeneous darker skinned and blue eyed hunter gatherers. people from Wales, Spain and Finland would all be more similar genetically than they are today and they'd have overwhelmingly blue eyes and dark skin (as an aside, not black skin like that recent "reconstruction" of Cheddar man, there were already some light skin mutations that had happened 10s of thousands of years before him, but still darker than the darkest ethnically European today)
then agriculture happened in the Levant and spread through Anatolia to Europe at a currently estimated rate of 1km/y taking more than 3,000 years to make it to northwest Europe. in much of southern Europe the hunter gatherers were completely replaced by the Anatolian farmers, while elsewhere they mixed with them. modern day Sardinians are the most similar genetically to the Anatolian farmers with almost 90% of their dna coming from them (the Anatolians brought another light skin mutation with them since grain based diets didn't provide enough Vitamin D as pre-agricultural fish heavy diets)
then enter the Yamnaya around 3,000BC. a nomadic horse based people living on the steppe of modern day Ukraine and southern Russia. they likely domesticated the horse which helped them spread quite far. they spread both R1a and R1b, their language and their religion through Europe to the west and Iran and India to the east. they were genetically quite similar to the other Europeans, but they had a slight east Asian component that still sometimes pops up in modern day Europeans. that Asian component was related to the ancestral population of the Native Americans, and that sometimes leads to modern day Europeans having some Native American ancestry on dna tests.
well they didn't have to work as hard as farmers. the benefit of farming wasn't less work or more nutritious food, it was more food per acre
There's actually a middle ground period at the end of the neolithic where people had small amounts of bronze and copper to work with.
>That just because you don't have a particular technology that your culture/politics/trade/craft can't still be rich, complex, creative, beautiful, etc.
There's evidence that neolithic tribes traveled as far as from Germany to stone henge to trade.
>perfect gender equal
Lolwhat?
>Yeah let's send our women hunting too, not like we need them for sustaining our community or anything
>and classless
People shitting on each other isn't something that started to happen with the coming of currency.
Pretty sure that even stone age tribes had memes about the Chad Hunter and the virgin berry picker.
There is a prehistoric RPG I've seen but not played where you speak in character using grunts and etc. Not called Wurm though. Sounded like a fun beer kind of game.
here it is
>Rhino cavalry
All my boners.
>Native American people’s
>African rhino cavalry
This triggers the autism
a shame this was never made...
Harmony with nature = Work smarter not harder
Why waste your precious calories building something from scratch when you can look around and find something natural that's already usable?
Also, its harder to claim "HFY!" when you're not at the top of the food chain.
I've actually been toying with a racial mentality aspect of this.
Humans
>"How can we modify the local environment to better suit our preferred lifestyle?"
Elves
>"How can we modify our preferred lifestyle to better suit the local environment?"
Dwarves
>"We agree with the humans, but we prefer quality>quantity. Let's take one small area that's already predisposed to suit our lifestyle and modify the heck out of it."
I also remember watching some show about pre-contact America that speculated about the different strategies for land-management. Basically, while old-worlders domesticated animals and modified the land to support their livestock, the Americans, failing to easily domesticate animals, resorted to modifying the land to support more wildlife for hunting. (including controlled fires, erosion prevention and timber management)
Thus we have the native nature-lover stereotype because they literally depended on maintaining a healthy ecosystem in order to support their own populations.
So what you're saying is we contract humans to lay the groundwork then contract dwarves to make the improvements all while the elves become on-site entertainment for the crews to survive?
How would you have a Neolithic or near Bronze Age people but still in a typical Late Medieval fantasy setting?
I would assume with the elves it's less that they care about their environment and more that they care about having lots of beautiful natural Vistas surrounding their stuff. It's like those Japanese villages where they have lots of modified and sustained ecosystems around them. In this case though it's done purely for vanity.
I would also assume that elves fall closer towards dwarves in that they will make the most efficient and best use of a given thing. Considering how long they live in most settings in some cases even being immortal, they probably prefer to make things that last. If there's one thing people hate its change lack of reliability.
>the most efficient and best use of a given thing
But that's what it means to modify your lifestyle to suit the environment. The end result is similar, but the mindset and methodology is different. Instead of being all, "Yeah we're totally gonna dominate this landscape!" they'd say "Hm, lets see what we've got to work with here."
Why waste time and effort turning the tundra into a forest, converting all our favorite crops into cold-hardy varieties and retrofitting our old treehouse designs for the cold, when we can just adapt our lifestyle to the environment, efficiently utilize the resources that are already here and enjoy the new scenery?
Another way of putting it:
Humans >"When life gives you lemons, declare war on life and burn all the lemon trees."
Dwarves >"When life gives you lemons, build an anti-lemon barrier and live safely in your lemon-free utopia."
Elves >"When life gives you lemons, make lemonade."
There's a LotFP based game called Wolfpacks & Winter Snow made by a local ca/tg/girl. It's an old school styled homebrew thing, so I realize it's not to everyone's taste, but it at least's got some good prehistoric based rules. It's also the best morphing of an osr ruleset into another genre.
>Thus we have the native nature-lover stereotype because they literally depended on maintaining a healthy ecosystem in order to support their own populations.
Mostly they didn't really think about it. They just didn't have the means, like the population and technology, to affect the environment as heavily as the colonists.
This. If anything the prehistoric man hates the nature or at the very least is full of his shit while trying to not complain for fear of being bullied.
Nothing about a prehistoric style Society has to be primitive and under developed when fantasy is involved.
If things like monsters exist with potentially superior materials equal to or even possibly better than steel... why wouldn't they take those things and learn how to refine them? I always pictured such a society looking awfully similar to Monster Hunter.
And even ignoring fantasy animals, things like ironwood or other naturally-occurring magical phenomenon would provide a host of different elements these people's could use during their development.
>like the population and technology
How can one man be so wrong
If society consists of hunter-gatheres it is bound to be primitive.
If they are not primitive they do not fit label of pre-historic society.
Hunter gatherer still made tools, weapons and most likely had forms of armor made from leather or hide as well as shields of a similar nature.
You can't make sweeping generalizations like that. Primitive in what way? They were certainly capable of carvings and art and other things.
Yeah, yeah. Every culture is beautiful. We all are advanced in our own way.
Basically this. I mean, every successful society had classic gender roles!
devil's advocate: if we're talking in a specifically roleplaying setting, having a more gender equal society makes it easier for women to play
it's fantasy anyways
Here's an idea. In the prehistoric era, there are multiple tribes, but there's a tribe called the Blood Men who are incredibly, insanely cruel. They practice cannibalism, and their evil might actually be caused by kuru or other diseases picked up from their obscene practices.
To a Early-Man-era tribesman, the Blood Men would basically be demons. (They might be slightly more advanced, having crafted armor from bone and so on.) The PCs are either captured, or must gather an army to venture into the heart of darkness and kill these fuckers.
You could leave it ambiguous as to whether there's a biological explanation (they're insane from cannibalism or something like a precursor to syphilis), a magical explanation (they worship demons and are in thrall to the devil) and so on. Remember, in this era, a weapon made of crude metal is basically a magic sword.
Hell, fearsome predators like rhinos, tigers and so on are effectively boss fights.
Well actually, the Australian aboriginals lived exactly like this, only hunting what they needed and migrating from place to place to not exhaust resources. Of course, not every culture is going to be like that, besides, your not gonna get those nice bronze respecting the environment are you?
>Primitive in what way?
>Lol there is no such thing as progress.
What a lame argument. It's not unpopular though.
Do you really believe it user? Its the Same the Jibaro culture to the Nazcan or Moche one for example?
Races are different proto humans
Dwarves > H. Heidelbergensis
Halflings > H. Floresiensis
Orcs > H. Neanderthals
Elves> H. erectus
Humans > H. sapiens
Wait. By carry baby do you mean in their arms or in their belly aka pregnancy?
>muh dung covered anglo sheepfucker ancestors couldn't possibly be worse than anyone else's
R1a predates R1b.
Look up Ainu. Guys were hunter-gatherers chilling it out with the Japanese. They were selling hides for rice and metals for centuries until the Russians came along and Japan decided if they didn't colonise them, Russians would. Which happened in the 17th century.
So yeah, you've got a a stone-age hunter-gatherer group in obvious contact with feudal society spanning centuries.
Their numbers remained small and Japanese didn' go there because they knew that even if they went there, they'd only be able to support a similarly small population. The island couldn't grow rice. That spelled the end of population expansion and everything that went along with it. Stuff like mining metals is nice and all and they knew! what those were, but they simply couldn't provide food for people who'd spend their time bashing on rocks instead of hunting and foraging.
>nd spent all day enjoying the fresh air in Miyazaki paintings and eating fruits and berries is OLD AS FUCK
Well, yes, but it was actually Rousseau who first actually claimed it being rational knowledge, until then it was always seen as a purely symbolic, mythological imagery.
Rousseau, being an absolute fucking drooling retard, actually pushed the idea that it actually did happen, and what is worse, that we are actually obligated to renew such state of "primary happiness" again. Thus setting the ground for all absolutely retarded ideological utopias - particularly Marxist ones.
You might be a LITTLE over-idealizing the relationship between the Ainu people and the Yamato people. Also, Ainu sure as fuck weren't hunters-and-gathers exclusively. The main reason why we see them as hunters-and-gatherers is because they were pushed into the highly inhospitable environment of Hokkaido and Sachalin islands where - at the time - you did not have that much options BUT to hunt and starve.
Thanks, user, it's very informative
Wait, do Hungarians are not the same haplogroup as Finns?
Magyar tribes were a nomadic civilisation. The Slavs all around the place were all agricultural civilisations.
They were assimilated with some tiny pockets of insular communities here and there. It's a touchy subject for them, but the modern Hungarians are indistinguishable from the groups on their periphery.
>because they were pushed into the highly inhospitable environment of Hokkaido and Sachalin islands
They reached outwards, yes. However, I'm pretty sure the ones on Honshu were assimilated into Yamato while the ones on Hokkaido and what-not are native to the island.
>it's fantasy anyways so lets throw all logic to the bin
The whole point of fantasy is to be able to throw any piece of logic into the bin. Doesn't have to be all of it, but it can definitely be.
this book should be some great inspiration for anyone in this thread
They produced the Emeshi which were driven to cultural extinction as more Yamato pushed them into the highlands.
By just having them?
Mostly like it happens and happened in real life, they life somewhere where the lager civilizations don't (jet) bother to go because it's far away or just a shitty place for them.
>If they are not primitive they do not fit label of pre-historic society.
Those are fighting words son
Also bronze and early iron age still count too prehistoric.
It's not like it was super rare and basically witchcraft for women doing jobs considered to be manly, mostly just unusual and/or temporary.
Kinda annoying if people try to push the gender roles from the industrialization onto everything.
I mean, those roles exist for a reason. Can't exactly run around stabbing elk when you're 8 or 9 months pregnant.
Although, it's been theorized that they burned pretty much the entire continent to the ground to exterminate the 20-foot-long death lizards. Might just be meme science, though.
>Pretty sure that even stone age tribes had memes about the Chad Hunter and the virgin berry picker.
kek'd hard
More about the subject, I think the relationships between the tribes would be very interesting. They would be all pretty far away from each others, but probably still with some exchanges. Like, a handful of travelers travel two hundred kilometers or so every month to trade with the nearby tribe. That makes for a nice quest.
Also, domesticated dinos