4e / GSL Stone Age D&D

[Doug McCrae]

This would be set in a fantastical version of the stone age, possibly during the ice age. Elves, gnomes and other nature spirits would be the main threat to humanity. Humans would probably be the only viable PC race, possibly half-elves too. There would be the remnants of prehuman civilisations, serpentmen or tieflings. Iron and bronze armaments from these civilisations would count as magic weapons and armour.

My main problem is how to balance the classes when the available armour and weapons would be very limited - leather, hide, spears, axes and shortbows. I don't want everyone to be a warlock. The wizard's spell book is also an issue.

[Furtive Noise]

Wizards could represent more primal spellcasters who use primitive nature magic. Their spellbooks can become big sticks w/ magic runes or ideograms carved into them. Reflavor some spells and you're good. Rituals could be recorded in similar ways on big stone disks or something.

Really, I think most classes with some different flavor and names for powers can work- like you said the hard part is equipment. Maybe the ancient civilizations left behind some form of armor that can use the game abilities of scale or plate, even if its not physically identical.

[Merkuri]

I'm not sure how easy it would be, or how realistic, but perhaps you could go through the list of weapons and armor and rename them so they are more like the stoneage equipment you imagine. Mechanically they'd be the same as what's offered in the PHB, but you're just changing the flavors.

Maybe you'd have similar swords, but you describe them as being made of stone, where the edges were chipped away until they were sharp enough to kill. Leather armor would be treated like plate mail and hide armor would be treated like leather. And anything that was really made out of metal, like you said, would be treated as a magic item.

This way you won't have to worry about rebalancing anything because everything's all there, it's just been re-flavored.

[Ruin Explorer]

The AC difference between a high-level character in heavy armour (who has no dex/int bonus) and one who is in leather-ish armour and has his dex/int bonus is pretty small, usually 2 points, iirc (which I might not).

You could avoid putting in any out-and-out plate, and have scale be like, literally the scales of some mighty beast, and just give, say, Fighters an +2 to AC, and I think you'd be pretty much sorted. You could also allow people who've Feat'd their way up to Scale to buy one more feat (with the pre-reqs of 15 Str and Con) to get +2 AC (call it "armour expertise" or w/e).

Otherwise, sounds like a solid idea. There have been good suggestions for spellbooks already - another one would be an Inca-style "knotted string" spellbook - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quipu

That'd be pretty rocking, I think.

[Alas]

Hmmm... you could replace the metal armors with functional equivalents made from the hides of mythical/paleolithic beasts. Maybe they don't have plate armor, but some tribes can fashion the shell of the still-roaming glyptodon into something statistically similar.

Which is another point-- "Stone Age" just refers to the material technology available. You could still have pockets of advanced societies that have developed agriculture, animal husbandry, complex stonework, art, music...

It does sound like fun.

[Wik]

You should make Neanderthals another PC race. And, "real" neanderthals, none of this quest for fire stuff where they just bang rocks together. Modern Anthropology suggests that Neanderthals (who, after all, had the largest average brain case among humans) had great ability to focus on a single task, and possibly had the same abilities for symbolism (ie, rituals and art) as homo sapiens sapiens.

Really, ice age is the perfect place for neanderthals, who aren't all that different appearance-wise from modern humans.

Also, I have to agree with the "Keep the gear the same, just change it's name". To me, the real problem is in getting the overly fantastic stuff out. How, for example, do you explain a paladin? Some of those abilities just don't seem to fit in with an ice age flavour.

I like the idea of the previous ruins being tiefling or serpentine in nature. It's a cool idea, very H.P. Lovecraft in a lot of senses. As for Elves and Gnomes being the primary threat, why not make the elves sort of like the Sithi in Tad Williams' Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn series? And gnomes, to make them fearful and cool (flavour-wise), why not have them steal human infants, which they raise as changelings? The stolen humans could slowly change into gnomes, which is how gnomes "reproduce". Makes 'em pretty damn scary.

As for races, humans and half-elves (and possibly Neanderthals) is still pretty slim pickings. Why not add halflings, as they are often lumped in with humanity in core D&D anyways?

Originally Posted by Alas

Hmmm... you could replace the metal armors with functional equivalents made from the hides of mythical/paleolithic beasts. Maybe they don't have plate armor, but some tribes can fashion the shell of the still-roaming glyptodon into something statistically similar.

Which is another point-- "Stone Age" just refers to the material technology available. You could still have pockets of advanced societies that have developed agriculture, animal husbandry, complex stonework, art, music...

It does sound like fun.

Yeah. "Stone Age" societies wound up getting pretty complex. Much of Mesopotamia, for example, was "Stone Age" (technically, it was Chalcolithic, as it used copper and later bronze). Aztecs were Stone Age, up until the arrival of the Europeans, and they had all sorts of great inventions (law, farming, canals, huge pyramids...)

Really, though, I think the OP is referring to the "Old Stone Age", tied to the ice age hunter/gatherers.

[Korgoth]

Just make them do without armor. They're cavemen! I'd limit them to spears, clubs and knives as weapons.

Otherwise, I submit that you're not capturing the flavor of the alternate setting; you're just choosing a different skin for exactly the same functionality.

Warlocks are probably self-limiting because of their nature: they deal with powers external to the tribe. This is why even in pagan cultures [not necessarily all of them, though] witches were put to death: their crime is not sacrilege, it's treason (trafficking with entities inimical to the polity). I would imagine that your tribal "medicine men" would be more along the lines of a Cleric. The Warlock would be an outcast (but you can still adventure with an outcast, depending on the type of quest).

I'm not sure if the Vancian/Academic wizard actually fits. But if you want to go with a spell book guy, in addition to the other suggestions you can have the spell book be the wizard's own skin: tattoos. Though in that case prepare for the inevitable jokes.

[Ruin Explorer]

Originally Posted by Korgoth

Warlocks are probably self-limiting because of their nature: they deal with powers external to the tribe. This is why even in pagan cultures witches were put to death: their crime is not sacrilege, it's treason (trafficking with entities inimical to the polity). I would imagine that your tribal "medicine men" would be more along the lines of a Cleric. The Warlock would be an outcast (but you can still adventure with an outcast, depending on the type of quest).

This is utter nonsense as a generalization, Korgoth. Many pagan societies had people who dealt with spirits outside the tribe and weren't outcasts, let alone "put to death". Generalizing about it is pretty silly. There are certainly many societies where you'd be correct, but also many where you wouldn't.

[Korgoth]

Originally Posted by Ruin Explorer

This is utter nonsense as a generalization, Korgoth. Many pagan societies had people who dealt with spirits outside the tribe and weren't outcasts, let alone "put to death". Generalizing about it is pretty silly. There are certainly many societies where you'd be correct, but also many where you wouldn't.

When I said "in pagan cultures" rather than "in all pagan cultures" I guess I thought that "some" is understood in the absence of "all".

In the absence of the word "all", I wasn't intending to make a claim about all such cultures. I was saying why, in those where that was the case, it was the case.

I'll go add an Edit to avoid confusion, though.

[Tewligan]

This of course won't help you with any 4e rules issues, but the article "Thrills and Chills: Ice Age Adventures" from waaay back in Dragon #68 might be an interesting read for you if you can track it down.

[Spatula]

Wizard spellbooks don't actually have to be books (they were not in Dark Sun, where both reading and wizardry were illegal for the common person). Any sort of pattern can store information - it could be formed by letters or runes, but also colors, shapes, notches on a hard surface, knots tied into rope, or just about any kind of set of permanent marks. That's assuming a literal thing that you "read" to prepare spells, but the class feature could just be dependant on some kind of fetish that gives the primitive wizard "special powers."

Armor is a bit trickier. You could call the existing armor different things (plate armor becomes brontosaurus hide or something), which is really easy. You could also give bonuses to heavy-armor classes that only apply when they're wearing armor, but you have to balance that against the fact that they're getting their dex or int mod to AC as well (since they're wearing light armor). Probably not a difficult task, but it would require some thought. Or you could abolish worn armor entirely and give everyone a bonus based on class role, maybe.