Lost Prehistorica

[Messageboard Golem]

Has your adventuring party ever wondered what was to be found on those parts of the map marked "Here there be monsters"?
Have you, as a GM ever been at a loss as to what to do if they decide to explore these hitherto uncharted regions?

Have you, or your players ever wanted to play something a little more primitive?

Lost Prehistorica could be the answer to your questions! An informative well presented tool-book for the GM who wants to try something that little bit different! Packed full of new playable races, information upon long lost cultures, lost continents, nomadic tribes and settings specific monsters, this book could be just what you need to spark a whole new range of adventures in a land untouched by time where dinosaurs still roam!


108 pages of tools to create a setting like no other.

Features include:
16 new diseases
Over a dozen natural traps
New weapons, armor, and equipment
Nine new races
Ten new divine entities
Extensive beastiary
Guidelines for creating tribes

 

[Crothian]

Lost Prehistorica

Here there be Monsters. That is a clichéd area of maps that have yet to be fully developed or explored. Yet, there has to be something over in these unexplored areas. Is it lost civilizations, unexplored continents or islands, or possibility just a large monster infested area? Obviously the final answer is up to the Game Master but Lost Prehistorica offers a few suggestions to place in these unknown areas and it also offers a look at less civilized places.

Lost Prehistorica is a new PDF put out by Dark Quest Games. Dark Quest Games has been producing quality PDFs for many years now and hopefully soon they will see some of the better works really take off in the eyes of gamers. They have mostly only released PDFs so far though I did see their Familiar book out in print.

Lost Prehistorica is a one hundred and nine page PDF. It comes in a three and a half meg file that has the book and the cover in it in two separate files. The book is a little under three megs and cover is a bit under a meg. The book has a well organized table of contents. This might not seem like something to really note, but more and more I am seeing table of contents that list chapter headers and the occasional appendix. I feel it is very important to have a good table of contents as well as a good index. PDFs should also come with a good set of bookmarks. Role Playing books are manual and people need to find things in them quickly at times. Few things slow down a gaming session like trying to hunt for a rule or passage that one knows is in the book somewhere. Table of contents, indexes, and bookmarks all help to locate things smoothly. While this PDf does not have an index, it does have a very complete set of bookmarks. Bookmarks are the most important of the three for electronic books since a simple click will take one where they want to go.

The book is black and white with no borders. This will make it easy to print out. The art in it is pretty average and there is not a lot of it. The layout is well done with good headers and fonts making this easy on the eyes. The tables are well formatted, there is not a lot of obvious white space, and the pictures and text never collide.

The book starts with talking about the lands of the lost. Exactly what are and how are they configured? The books not specifically define what they are, instead they give the reader chooses listing the advantages and disadvantages of each so that the best for the reader can be chosen and used. While they cover a lot of different types of places like islands, sub continents, other planes, underworld, etc; I would have liked to see more space devoted to each one. Each area could easily have been expanded on and given an example or two to really show why this works. At the very least the few paragraphs each section got really seems to barely touch on the topic.

The next section is the geographic elements. And why they have some good ideas here on weather, diseases, magic, ruins, colonies, fossils, etc; this would have been better served if they tied it into the different setting types above. What types of weather work best for the islands, or what fossils would be interesting to find in the Lost Underdark? These are answers that any DM can answer for their own game but it is always nice to see how options from a book fit together to help guide the DM along.

Survival on any new and potentially different place is always a hazard. They start with listing sixteen new diseases that are fully described and can easily be used. From there they go with about a dozen new types of hazards that can be muck like quicksand to exploding crystals set off by sound. While many of these hazards are for lower level adventures they are well thought out and will defiantly offer a new challenge to an unsuspecting group. The chapter ends with a few types of plants. This again would have been a great section if they would have just listed more plants. The ones here are well described and can be used easily.

All lands of the lost have some sort of tribes on it. They are primitive and different, and this book goes through and makes sure that they are. They start by going through what tribes have like population, governments, religions, dress, etc. Like above it covers the topic but not enough, for instance different samples of dress and types of primitive religions and governments would be a big help here. Then they give a few sample tribes. These are nicely explained and ready to be used. Equipment is also well defined with weapons, armor, and objects of worth.

Characters are obviously important. They have a few feats here that will be helpful like Lava Child that gives bonuses to skills when volcanoes are involved. They also have foe feats that work only against a certain foe. These feats usually provide attack and damage bonuses. It might have been better if they would have just used the Ranger’s favored enemy and turned that into a feat. The book also discusses classes both the NPC and PC ones from the core rules. It mainly suggests weather they make good roles as explores and natives and what role they would play. It again lists the pro and cons of each class with each of the two major roles (explorer and native). The book does the same with races and presents a few new twists on the standard races. They really do not redefine the races in game terms but do place some cool twists on them. There are also plenty of new races presented here as well as good discussion on ancient races and what happened to the civilizations of old.

Lastly, the book covers new creatures and religions. It presents a new pantheon full of gods as well as a wide variety of new creatures many of them dinosaurs and having a wild feel to them.

Overall, the book covers a lot of area. It could use a bit more depth in many of the topics but does start on them well enough. It gives a the DM so good ideas to work with and allows the DM to connect the points together.

 

[Moulin Rogue]

In the interest of full disclosure I will state up front that I recieved this product free.

With the real world offering so much culture and history to draw from to design RPG products, it's not surprising that d20 publishers would eventually look at "turning back the clock" from D&D's default medieval setting to explore earlier eras in history. Green Ronin has given us Testament and Trojan War, while Mongoose has published OGL Ancients. But Dark Quest has turned the dial a-l-l-l-l-l-l the way back, to the kind of place that needs no history at all, with the product Lost Prehistorica.

I should start by clarifying that last statement. Lost Prehistorica isn't a campaign setting in a world of Stone Age technology (though you could certainly use it to create one). Rather, it's a toolbox for designing any part of a campaign world with little to no civilization. It's a big fantasy staple to have a "lost" or "never found" region that is either reached through a "time warp", or has managed to stay completely isolated from the developing world around it, until finally being stumbled upon through expedition or accident. While Eberron imagines dinosaurs and technology co-existing, something still sounds exciting about a party setting foot in an uncharted and dangerous land of giant roaming lizards, wondering if they'll ever get back home...

Lost Prehistorica is a 109-page PDF by Steven Cook and David Woodrum, with additional writing credit to Michael Hammes and Neal Levin. The product is bookmarked and the table of contents is hyperlinked. There is no border art. The interior illustrations are handled by Owen Kuhn and Gillian Pearce - I recognized the latter name from a couple of Mongoose products. Overall I thought the interior art was okay. Steve A. Roberts contributed a very nice cover illustration depicting a female who appears to be a warrior of some sort, walking through a stunning prehistoric landscape. The cover is offered as its own separate file. So now let's go through the specific content.

Chapter 1: The Lost Lands dives right in by getting DMs thinking on how they could go about implementing the ideas that will be covered ahead. I would have preferred a bit of flavour text up front to really grab the reader, personally (there are bits of flavour text opening other chapters). Anyway, the first consideration is: how large will these lost lands be? Geographic issues include weather, disease and any possible sources of magic or technology available through inhabitants both long gone and present. Valuable natural resources are a good potential hook to get the PCs to visit in the first place, so things like petrified wood and fossils are covered as well. This is pretty good but I think I'd have liked a little more; "Lost Plane" gets a short mention for example, but what about suggestions for possible ways that a link to such a plane could manifest itself in the campaign world? The bit on "time wrinkles" at the very very end of Manual Of The Planes is the sort of thing I'm thinking about here.

Chapter 2: Survival begins by going into detail on a variety of unpleasant diseases. Succumbing to jungle fever or paristic worms doesn't sound like a very heroic way to go out, but in a gritty survivalist campaign, or as a tool to keep PCs from striding around carelessly, it certainly has its purpose. An Environment section provides some natural hazards that essentially serve the same function as dungeon traps. Tar pits, quicksand and dangerous gases are just a few of the hazards that characters may have to contend with. Some one-paragraph descriptions of plants and fungi round out the chapter.

Chapter 3: Cultures is the longest chapter yet and looks at sentient inhabitants of these lost lands. There are no game mechanics at all over these ten pages, rather it focuses on forms of substinence, organization of families, interactions with other groups like trade and war, that sort of thing. This is the kind of detail I like. There's a look at cultural reasons for cannibalism, while the problem of PCs from a typical D&D-ish world trying to communicate with primitive cultures is touched upon in Language.

Chapter 4: Tribes looks at actually creating a tribe with write-ups for religion, form of government and so on. A few sample tribes are offered.

Chapter 5: Items looks at the standard equipment of prehistoric societies such as hide clothing, ceremonial items and so on. Only then does it get into the weapons, which are mostly bone and stone variants of simple D&D weapons. I noticed that there weren't any new weapon material properties (like hardness) spelled out for stone and bone, so if you want to use those you'll have to pick them up from another source (and you have some choice there; I know of Mongoose's Quintessential Barbarian, MonkeyGod's From Stone To Steel, and WotC's own Arms and Equipment Guide). There are a few exotic weapons as well, such as the dire claw for anyone who'd like to play a primitive version of the X-Man Wolverine. There's some basic armour too, mostly hide and leather.

It doesn't stop there as some stone altars, idols and even standing stones are statted out. Some semi-precious trading gems are listed with values ranging from a copper or two up to tens of gp. This is low-powered stuff here, there aren't a bunch of fancy gem blades and cool magic items to be had in a world like this. The text does suggest a couple of ways that metals could be obtained if the campaign calls for it.

Chapter 6: Characters is a very long chapter, 36 pages. It kicks off with ten feats. It then goes into a discussion on each core class (both PC and NPC) and race, and how they fit into a prehistoric-themed adventure. It might have made more sense to put this class section in Chapter 1, but it has separate blurbs for native and non-native members of each class and race, so maybe the writers preferred to hold this discussion off until cultures and tribes had been introduced first. There are no new core classes - I was rather surprised that no shaman core class was introduced, rather the adept is expected to fill that role. I have a few d20 shaman classes already so I didn't really miss it myself, but if you were planning to have shamans and spirit magic you'll have to use another source. Just as a semi-related observation, the core classes from the Nyambe setting would port over quite well to Lost Prehistorica.

Similar discussions on each core race follow, with some new subraces mixed in. Flint gnomes, for example, are hunter-gatherers fond of crafting tools. From there, nine completely new races are introduced. Many are of the anthropomorphic sort. Probosin, for example, are a kind of "monkeyfolk". The Later Hominid is in here too, if you want to have a more primitive caveman; he's pretty much a reworked half-orc. Each race even gets a round-up of the advantages and disadvantages of each core class when played by that race (though it understandably strains with certain classes like paladin). There are several references in this chapter and elsewhere to something called a primanid, like the primanid language and primanid blood for the purposes of special abilities. Yet nowhere in the product did I find any hard definition of exactly what this means. It's easy to figure out from the context, but it still seems like an omission to not spell it out.

The chapter wraps up with three more races given as ancient, lost races, prefaced by a bit of advice on how and why a DM would use them. Again, this product is a toolbox and not a setting, so you can easily pick and choose what you want, but there's a fair bit of support for the idea of an advanced ancient civilization that fell long ago and now lies in ruins for PCs to explore.

Chapter 7: Religion lists 11 new deities with write-ups on alignment, portfolios, favoured weapon and so on for each. The flavour text about each deity's personality and followers is at least a couple paragraphs for each. No new domains or spells though. When I think of early religion in fantasy settings, I think more about nature and spirits than temples and gods (yeah, there's my whole shaman thing again), but these deities are easy to take or leave. They're not bad though, a few of them have potential hooks for explaining natural disasters, or why tribes do certain things that they do.

Chapter 8: Bestiary sees the book through the rest of the way with 30 pages of assorted critters and beasties. Some non-combat critters with limited stats such as trilobites begin the chapter, before the monsters proper begin. WotC has been kinda giving piecemeal coverage to dinosaurs with a handful here and there at a time in their official books, so I was pleased to get a bunch of holes filled in one product. Archaeopteryx is here, as are dimetrodon, iguanodon, megatherium, stegosaurus, trachodon (anatosaurus) and more. If you still miss the axebeak from the 1e MM, here's the gastronis. The new races introduced in Chapter 6 get their monster stat blocks here, as well as the Early Hominid to go with the Later one. Some fanciful new monsters are here too, such as the stegotaur (yep, a stegosaurus/centaur) and the hoc (a possible relative of the orc). There's even a "future history" in each write-up where the fate of each monster is laid out. A number of monsters are CR 1 or less, but CRs go up to 16 for the apatosaurus. There's no master list of CRs, however. Quite a few monsters aren't illustrated, which is kind of too bad, but at least with dinosaurs it should only take a visit to a library or the internet to find a good picture.

The chapter, and the PDF itself, concludes with a rundown of standard MM creatures that fit into a prehistoric-themed world. You bet dire animals are going to be a good fit. Certain undead are still viable if the influence of ancient civilizations can be felt. Once again I thought of Nyambe and how a number of monsters would port very well either way between one another's settings.

In conclusion, Lost Prehistorica is a very solid resource for working prehistoric lands into a campaign. This is squarely a DM's toolkit as there are just 10 feats and nothing in the way of prestige classes or fancy magic. It should play pretty well on its own, but I've drawn attention to a couple of places - material properties and classes - where I felt that other d20 mechanics out there could be brought in to make a prehistoric setting more "complete". But for realizing visions of blasting geysers, primal lands of mystery and the thunder of mighty dinosaurs, Lost Prehistorica fills a niche in the d20 market and does it well.

 

[Messageboard Golem]

When I first accessed the demo for Lost Prehistorica, I was excited. The demo portrayed several feats - a few of which covered cannibalism. This was just what I looking for - rules on the more unusual aspects of "primitive" cultures. Lost Prehistorica did not live up to my expectation; rather, it delivered a cursory treatment of primitive cultures in eight chapters over 105 pages.

Lost Prehistorica discusses the use of primitive cultures and lost islands as a suitable setting for a campaign. To that end, it addresses various aspects of primitive life in a D20 context; the chapters include the environment (7 pages), cultures (10 pages), tribes (4 pages), items (6 pages), characters (37 pages), religion (4 pages) and monsters (25 pages). As can be readily seen by the page counts, all but the characters and bestiary chapters are quickly covered. By way of example, the issue that attracted me to this publication - cannibalism - is given but one page. What the book does provide is a plethora of new character races (12 in all), many of which follow in the Arcana Unearthed tradition. Cat people (Felklaw) and newt people (Amphimids) provide good examples. The character section also discusses how the standard D&D races and classes fit into a primitive culture campaign. Other crunchy bits can be found in the various chapters and include 10 new feats. There are, however, no new spells or new prestige classes. Lost Prehistorica provides very little in way of crunch bits with just a touch of fluff.

What I did like about Lost Prehistorica was the bestiary. It presents 45 creatures; many of which are dinosaurs (and how can that be bad). This included a section on common critters which discussed their value in terms of gp, their use, and cultural significance. There is, however, some duplication between this section and the new races section of the Characters chapter.

In hindsight, Lost Prehistorica set out to accomplish a lot in taking on primitive cultures as a viable setting, but it fell short of that mark. It provided little fluff and less crunch. While Lost Prehistorica is a great idea, keep your money in your checking accounting.

 

[JBowtie]

NOTE: I received a free reviewer's copy.

Lost Prehistorica from Dark Quest Games is a 109 page, black and white PDF. The color covers are presented in a seperate, 2-page PDF for those of use that like to print them. The main PDF comes with a good set of bookmarks, going down as far as individual feats and creatures.

The entire text (sans art and d20 trademark) is designated Open Game Content.

As the name implies, this book takes a good look at adventuring in prehistoric settings. If you've read classics such as Journey to the Center of the Earth, The Land That Time Forgot, or Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World then you'll immediately recognize the feeling the writers were trying to invoke (and if you haven't, these public domain texts are freely available on the web from Project Gutenburg).

Obviously dinosaur fans will love this book; the real surprise for me was that a lot of the material is actually quite useful in most fantasy campaigns. DMs will get quite a lot out of this book.

The first chapter launches right into integrating the setting into your campaign world, along with information to help you get the look and feel right. The information is helpful if you haven't thought about this at all, but left me feeling a little rushed and disoriented.

The second chapter, on survival, jumps to diseases and natural hazards. The diseases have silly names (Blue Giggles?) but most of them have a plausible origin and symptoms. For example, "Clammy Crud" comes from eating food that has started to spoil in dungeons or caves. The hazards are well-written and useful, examples include geysers, tar pits and quicksand.

The second chapter also seemed, well, abrupt. Like the first chapter, you jump right into the thick of things with the descriptions of the new diseases. The writer does not establish any context, assuming the reader knows why this section is included or important. If you're not up to speed on diseases, you're out of luck, because there is no reference to the appropriate section of the core rules, no mention or discussion of existing diseases and no explanation of how diseases work. At the end of the chapter, the descriptions of several plants are tacked on for no apparent reason and without explanation.

Chapters three and four are where the book really shines. Here we have a well-written, thoughtful presentation on the primitive society. It touches on every aspect of primitive life, including rituals, trade, clothing, and social organization. The difference between hunter-gatherer tribes and pastoral tribes is clearly explained. The distinctions between a band, a tribe, and a chiefdom are laid bare. And, if that wasn't enough, half a dozen sample tribes, ready to use, are enumerated.

Chapter five covers equipment. There is a range of equipment, weapons, and armour appropriate for a stone-age level of technology; aside from some questionable prices at the higher end everything seemed quite reasonable. Notably, altars, idols, and sculptures are included in the equipment list. In a nice touch, the end of the chapter includes a table of trading gems with approximate values for the raw, unfinished gems as well as small slivers and chips. This ties in with the information from earlier chapters about trading in prehistoric communities.

Chapter six, Characters, presents information useful to players. The chapter opens with a small number of feats; they did not strike me as particularly inspired but felt reasonably balanced. As a DM, I would allow them in my game but think it unlikely that anyone would actually take them. By far the most interesting part of the chapter for me was the discussion of the how the various classes fit into a 'lost world' campaign, both as a members of a tribe and as explorers. No new classes are defined.

A similar tack is taken with the core races, with several subraces called out. In a welcome change from the usual practices, all of the subraces bar one use the regular racial traits. This restricts the changes to description, outlook, and background, making these variants far easier to slot into an existing campaign than is common.

A number of new races have been added specifically to increase the variety of primitive humanoids available to players and DMs, including reptilian variants, cat-like variants, and ape-like variants. I personally did not find any of them memorable or inspiring, but that is likely a matter of taste. Perhaps I'm simply jaded after seeing so many humanoid races over the last couple of years; they all seem to blur together after a while. That said, they all were well-balanced mechanically; as a DM I would allow any of them in my campaign.

I *was* impressed that for each new race, every class was discussed with pointers on leveraging the racial abilities as well as some notes on the advantages and disadvantages such a character would face. This alone makes it far more likely that I will someday end up using these races, if only because it will be much easier to put together NPCs with this kind of forethought.

The seventh chapter is a brief one defining a handful of gods appropriate for a stone age setting. These seemed well-thought out and appropriate, though in most cases only one or two paragraphs are given to description, leaving the DM the bulk of the work if they choose to use any of these beings.

The final chapter is the beastiary. An innovative section at the beginning details several "critters", essentially fine to diminutive creatures useful for flavour and not much else. These are creatures used for food, trade, or pets rather than something to hunt or fight. In my opinion there should be a lot more of these in other products, as they do a lot to add to the feel of a game. There are a reasonable number of new monsters, with many dinosaurs (though less than I expected). Aside from the half-man, half-dinosaur creatures, which I laughed out loud at, they are good additions to your prehistoric jungle.

The book closes with a list of creatures from the core rules appropriate to the setting, followed by the OGL.

Overall, I found the book surprisingly useful, especially the chapters on primitive tribes which will find regular use in my game sessions. The designers showed remarkable restraint, and avoided adding superfluous mechanics; I think this improved both the usefulness and the readability of the resulting product.

The glaring weakness in the book is its poor organization and lack of transition from one section to the next. With a little work, this book could have been truly great instead of merely good.

 

[Old Fezziwig]

Note: I received a review copy of this book.

Lost Prehistorica is a 109 page PDF from Dark Quest Games, and the primary authors are Steven Cook & David Woodrum. The PDF is bookmarked extensively, making it very easy to read in multiple sittings (almost every single header topic in the book has a corresponding bookmark), and the table of contents page links to the rest of the book as well. It uses two columns of text in a clean, readable font with normal margins. The artwork, including the cover, ranges from poor to respectable -- sometimes I felt as though there wasn't enough art in later sections of the book, particularly for the races and monsters. Having pictures of all of these would have been more useful to me than random pictures of hunting and gathering and the like.

The book aims at being a toolkit to allow DMs to run adventures in a "land-that-time-forgot"/quasi-prehistoric area, either as a part of an ongoing campaign or as an entire campaign unto itself. Since this is the stated goal of the book, I'm going to try to judge it mostly on its use as a toolkit -- that is, how much can I or would I consider cherry-picking from it if I were to run D&D in a prehistoric area.

The first chapter, more or less an introduction, suggests ways in which a DM can think about the material presented in Lost Prehistorica to introduce it to his game world and what sorts of geographic elements (things that make the lost world unique, like beds of amber or fossils) should be present. Chapter 2 covers diseases and hazards. From there, we're more or less done with the environment and move onto a string of chapters that cover the peoples -- chapters on cultures, tribes, items, characters (including feats and new races), and religion. The last chapter, chapter 8, covers the monsters of the lost world. Although all topics are proper and expected -- the book didn't lack anything important, as far as I could tell -- the organization felt a little haphazard to me. Chapters 3, 4, 6, and 7 (culture, tribes, characters, and religion) would have better served me coming earlier. Although part of the fun in this type of campaign would be in interacting with the environment, I think the inhabitants are going to be more prominent in many campaigns -- especially in a campaign set in an entirely primitive world. Of course, if the goal is to be a toolkit, then does it really matter how the book is set up? Not necessarily. In fact, one thing I did find was that the book suffered from being read cover to cover, which is partially a function of the organization, but also a function of its aims. It isn't necessarily meant to be used whole cloth, so reading it as though it is, doesn't really make a lot of sense. Aside from these organizational issues, the writing is solid, if a bit dry at times (the only point where I really felt it got off the tracks was when the authors referred to cannibalism as an “unwholesome act of dire evil” -- I'm not disagreeing, but that was a little much, as I didn't think that anyone would accuse them or Dark Quest Games of promoting it as a lifestyle -- it's kind of a given that cannibalism is a bad thing).

Overall, I found it to be worthwhile, if only for the options presented and the modular nature of these options. Things that I could see using right away, without any alterations, included the fossil and natural treasure tables in chapter 1, the natural (but not exotic) hazards in chapter 2, the mandrillions and ancient races from chapter 6, and all the items and monsters presented (chapters 5 and 8). Between the critters (minor inhabitants of the lost world, like trilobites and the exotic geckolisks, that can be used to flesh out the way tribes interact with the world around them) and the section detailing how to use the standard monsters in a lost world campaign, I found the bestiary particularly useful. I don't agree with every choice about using standard creatures, but the effort's appreciated and I can easily modify the authors' suggestions to my taste. These things alone, to me, make the book worthwhile, and I recommend the book if any of those things seem like they'd be useful to you because they can be plucked out and used easily.

A good chunk of the rest of the content, however, is a mixed bag. The diseases are good for the most part, but I'm not always sure what makes them particularly prehistoric -- the authors may have been better off whittling the list down to a few really good, appropriately flavored choices (cannibal fever over blue giggles, for instance). Some of the hazards seemed a little vicious, such as blast crystals, which, at CR 2, do 4d6 damage with a DC 18 Reflex save to avoid. In my experience, this would kill a lot of 1st or 2nd level characters without question, especially if the characters haven't found out that they can avoid them on a DC 10 Move Silently check (and, assuming the PCs are not natives of the lost world, they probably wouldn't have this information right away). Other sections were on the bland side. For instance, the chapter on tribes, including the guidelines for creating tribes (which are probably too loose to be useful), basically presents a number of premade tribes. This is good, in the sense that they can be used immediately and without revision, but the tribes themselves are not terrifically inspiring. For me, they suggested real world analogues too closely (for example, the Coyotarru have hints of South American Indian culture and the Feather Dancers vaguely resemble Northern American Indians). Finally, the section on deities was simply boring -- I could see using Simius (god of apes) in a world, but the rest of them could be replaced by gods more appropriate to the world I was using (for example, a prehistoric aspect of a god like Kord or Hextor, to use the PHB/Greyhawk gods). It's certainly useable and could be pulled right out to use as a pantheon of gods for a lost world campaign, but as a whole, it doesn't do anything that couldn't be done with gods in other sources or in an extra half-hour if you were only going to spend a few sessions in the lost world.

The only two places where I felt the book really missed the mark were in chapters 3 (culture) and 6 (characters). I'll cover chapter 6 first, as my problem with chapter 3 gets at a major issue, I think. Firstly, the feats in chapter 6 use even attribute scores as prerequisites (generally 12+), which is, as far as I've known, fairly unorthodox -- feats generally use odd attribute scores as prereqs. This, though, is easy to fix. The real problem with most of the feats is that they're so specific that they're not really applicable to most characters (Primanid Advocate, which grants a +2 to Cha-based checks when dealing with the various monkey people presented in the book) or they offer too little, as though they were afraid of being wildly unbalancing (why take Cannibal’s Cunning for a +2 to initiative against members of your own race when you can take Improved Initiative and get +4 across the board?). A good bulk of the chapter is presented as how to insert character classes into the lost world, such as "if I'm playing a bard, how should I react?" This could be useful to some players, but the presentation of it (with advantages and disadvantages presented) really jarred with my sensibilities -- I just felt that it was information that I didn't need. A more problematic area in this chapter was the new races, which included a new elven subrace, three types of monkey men, two types of cat-people, a few amphibious/reptilian races, homonids (pre-Humans), and three ancient races. My main problem with most of these races is that they don't really fill a necessary niche in a world, with maybe the exception of one or two of the primanids and the ancient races. The amphimids (bipedal newts) are nice, but bland, and the others are too much of the same thing. I'm not sure that I need two races of cat-people, but more importantly, I'm not sure what make cat-people fit in this supplement. On top of that, the races are mechanically unexciting and similar -- they all have different ability score modifiers, but they all seem to have low-light vision or darkvision, and very little in the way of special abilities (usually +2 to a skill check or somesuch). It's not a power issue I have here, it's just that the races feel slapped together. None of them are terribly unbalancing, but none are, as I've said, exciting either (except for the ones noted above, particularly the mandrillions, which could be wickedly cool in a "planet of the apes" scenario or circumstance, and the ancient races, which could be fun here and there as a change of place).

Chapter 3, on prehistoric culture, is interesting, but extremely dry and covers a lot of material in very little space. It gives notes and descriptions of four cultures: hunter-gatherer, pastoral, horticultural, and agricultural. Although useful, these descriptions could cover civilizations and tribes starting with cave men and working all the way up to the Aztecs. And, on some levels, that brings the scope of the book way too far off the mark -- adventures in a world similar to the historical New World might be cool (and I always liked TSR's Maztica), but I don't consider them to be prehistorical in any sense of the word or to have any sort of lost world vibe. This kind of gets to my biggest problem with Lost Prehistorica, and the only truly damning one, in my opinion: in this chapter, which should be the central piece of this book, the authors aim to include too much, and in so doing, includes too little. It covers a lot of ground and none of it as thoroughly as I would like. Sacrificing the material that doesn't feel prehistoric (as the rest of the book does a generally good job of sticking to its theme) in favor of material that does would be an excellent start here. I'm not looking for the Aztecs or other Native Americans in this book, but dinosaurs, cavemen, monkeys, lizards, fossils, and bugs trapped in amber.

Given all this, how successful is the book at what it tries to do? In aiming to be a toolkit, I feel that it is reasonably successful in that it provides a variety of options for the DM to choose as he creates the campaign and/or adventures, some of which are wicked cool. At the same time, it isn't as successful as it could be because of sections with mechanically awkward or uninspiring material (chapter 6) and a lack of focus in a critical chapter (chapter 3). For me, though, it was worth it for the sections I've outlined above. If you're looking for a prehistoric toolkit, you could do a lot worse than Lost Prehistorica. And in PDF format and at the listed price, Lost Prehistorica is a great value.

Score: 3.75, rounded up to 4.

 

[John Cooper]

Lost Prehistorica
By Steven Cook and David Woodrum
Dark Quest Games product number DQG 1601
109-page PDF, $6.95

I received Lost Prehistorica out of the blue with no prior notice, having never even heard of the work before, which was somewhat of a new occurrence for me. (I guess I'll have to get used to this sort of thing as a staff reviewer.) As a result, I went into it with no preconceptions. As I found out, Lost Prehistorica provides the DM everything needed to run a "lost world" section of the campaign, complete with dinosaurs, prehistoric mammals, and primitive races.

The cover art, by Steve A. Roberts, depicts a humanoid of indeterminate race and gender (it's probably a female human, but it could just as easily be a male elf) carrying a spear into a primordial jungle. There are winged reptiles in the skies, and in the distance we can see a family herd of brontosaurs. Steven does an excellent job with the waterfall in the background, and he does a great job of depicting the "textures" of the various objects: the leaves, the bark, the rocks - everything looks three-dimensional. I also like the use of the rock pattern as a "matte" to capture the central painting; it certainly adds to the prehistoric feel.

The interior artwork consists of 31 black-and-white illustrations by only two artists, Owen Kuhn and Gillian Pearce. However, several of these pieces are actually smaller sections of an illustration that appears elsewhere in the book. For example, the two skulls from page 30 show up all by themselves on page 6, and one of the two figures from the drawing on page 19 shows up alone on page 37. I'm unfamiliar with Owen's work, but he does a decent human figure, and rather nice expressions as well. (I like the happy "cave kid" on page 17.) I'm familiar with Gillian's work over at Mongoose, and while she's improved her craft significantly over the past few years, she still seems to have a bit of a problem when it comes to shading, and in particular contrast. For example, it took me awhile to realize that there's a second humanoid figure hiding from the tyrannosaur in the foreground of page 3; my first clue was that there was an extra hand on the axe, which I had originally assumed was being held by the woman. Still, Gillian does a great job with the monsters towards the end of the book (it seems like her best work of late has been depicting monsters; she has a real eye for detail with them). I just wish - as I often do in works of this type - that she had been allowed to depict each and every monster in the Monster Manual section of this PDF.

Lost Prehistorica is laid out as follows:

• Chapter 1 - The Lost Lands: Different ways to introduce a prehistoric setting into any given campaign (remote areas, islands, subcontinent, continent, lost underworld - AKA "hollow world," as in Edgar Rice Burroughs' "Pellucidar," an entire world, one of a multitude of alternate worlds, or as a lost plane), plus geographic elements such as bitter weather, disease, ruins of ancient civilizations, petrified wood and amber, and fossils
• Chapter 2 - Survival: 16 new diseases, 12 natural hazards, and 10 plants and fungi
• Chapter 3 - Cultures: Sections on different subsistence patterns of primitive societies (hunter/gatherer, pastoral, horticultural, and agricultural), families (including kin-groups and marriage), political organization (bands, tribes, chiefdoms, and states), technology (archaic settlements, village settlements, and cities), trade and commerce, tools and trades, clothing and decoration, warfare, food and drink, cannibalism, and language
• Chapter 4 - Tribes: Rules and recommendations for creating new tribes, plus 5 ready-to-use tribes
• Chapter 5 - Items: 14 items of clothing, 6 decorations, 34 general items, 5 types of food/plants, 14 weapons, 5 types of armor, 20 types of stonework and art, and 53 types of gems for trading (either as raw chunks or shards)
• Chapter 6 - Characters: 10 new feats, a discussion of how the various PC/NPC classes can be used in a prehistoric setting, a similar discussion on the standard races (including some new subraces: creek dwarves, fern elves, feather gnomes, flint gnomes, spear toe halflings, moss toe halflings, and scrapling halflings), 9 new PC races, and 3 possibly-extinct races (although they have everything you'd need to create a PC from one of those races as well)
• Chapter 7 - Religion: 4 greater gods and 7 lesser/intermediate gods appropriate for a prehistoric setting
• Chapter 8 - Bestiary: 8 "critters" - creatures not powerful enough to be used as monsters to fight, but useful as food sources, pets, and the like - plus game statistics for 37 monsters (mostly dinosaurs and early mammals), followed by a four-page section detailing which Monster Manual creatures would be appropriate for a prehistoric setting.

Lost Prehistorica definitely takes the "toolbox approach" - rather than provide a sample "lost land," the authors provide the DM with all of the pieces and allow him to assemble it as he sees fit. While there's certainly nothing wrong with this approach, I would have liked to have seen a sample "lost world," and I'm sure it would have been useful as an idea generator for those DMs who didn't wish to use it as-is. (Plus, a map would have been cool.)

However, as useful as most of these "pieces" are, I question whether some of them should have been included. Lost Prehistorica should, by definition, focus on those things found in prehistory: dinosaurs, prehistoric mammals, etc. Do we really need a cat-humanoid PC race in a prehistoric setting? For that matter, do we really need two? (Both the felklaw and the kifter are humanoid felines.) The early and later hominids are certainly welcome additions, and I don't mind the mandrillion at all (it's a baboon-man, perfectly useable as a type of "proto-human"), but do we then also need another type of baboon-man (the mandreg) and a proboscis-monkey-man (the probosin)? If lizardfolk and troglodytes fit in so well in a lost land setting, do we really need a newt-man (amphimid), reptilian elf (slither elf), or long-haired-lizardfolk-without-a-tail (golgaut)? Likewise, diseases are sure to play a significant role in a prehistoric setting (as they would in any jungle setting, really), and some of them - like the cannibal fever, jungle fever, and clammy crud - fit right in, while others - the blue giggles and green nose, in particular - don't seem to have much to do with the subject matter at all. Even some of the natural hazards are somewhat questionable: the only way I can see blast crystals fitting into a prehistoric setting at all is that I also remember that one episode of "Land of the Lost" where the dad gets hurt testing the properties of the crystals they found in the cave (gosh, a red one next to a yellow one makes noise; a blue one touching a yellow one blows up - or whatever). I'm sure that "Land of the Lost" played a part in the inclusion of the blast crystals, and hey, if you're going to go that far, then where are the Sleestak stats?

As far as the proofreading and editing goes, Lost Prehistorica is at both ends of the spectrum. On the one hand, I documented more errors in this 109-page PDF (both sides of three pages of legal paper) than I have for any of the other 69 books I've reviewed to date, some of them over twice the size of this work! On the other hand, an overwhelming number of these errors were in capitalization (mostly in the new races sections), and even I, anal retentive as I am, am willing to admit that a capitalization error is just about the easiest type of error to ignore while reading. (Still, that didn't stop me from documenting them anyway; as this is a PDF, I'll send my list of errors to the folks at Dark Quest Games in case they want to fix up the book.) Besides capitalization, there were only a few instances of typos and misspellings in the rest of the PDF, very impressive overall. There were a few questionable formatting decisions made, however, like why all but the first two races get sections after their descriptions detailing how the various PC/NPC classes fit in to the race in question. Why were the amphimids and slither elves not given the same treatment? Also, the "feline racial language" is referred to alternatively as "Felklaw," "Felaine," and "Felanid." Which is it?

Still, there is plenty to like about Lost Prehistorica. I enjoyed the discussions about the different types of settlements and clans, and found the section on cannibalism to be particularly well done. The various gods all pretty much make sense for a prehistoric campaign, although some of them did seem rather bland or just out-and-out weird. (For instance, I was surprised to see Quartikos, whose portfolio consists of golems of all things, although I enjoyed the bit about him creating a fully-functioning hand out of a giant ruby for his brother, the intermediate god Dysarkus.) I really liked the "critter" section, as I've always believed that there are more interesting creatures in any given game world than those that you can get experience points for killing. I also thought the monster selection was reasonably broad and well thought out (with a few exceptions, noted later). However, there were quite few mistakes made in the creature stats. I suggest making the following changes:

• p. 83, Amphimid: No Hit Dice are given! As the sample creature is a 1st-level Warrior, and since his BAB is +1, I can extrapolate the following: HD 1d8, hp 4. Grapple should be +0, not -1 (+1 BAB, -1 Str). "Spear melee" should be "Spear +0 melee" in both the Attack and Full Attack lines.
• p. 84, Brachiosaurus: Why is the brachiosaurus smaller than the apatosaurus/brontosaurus? This isn't the case in real life; I believe the brachiosaurus was larger, and thus should have more HD than the apatosaurus. Tail slap attacks should be at +20 melee, not +17 (+12 BAB, +12 Str, -4 size). Tail slap damage should be 1d8+18, not 1d8+16 (since it's the creature's only attack form, it gets 1.5 times its Strength bonus, which in this case is +12).
• p. 85, Dinofelis: BAB should be +4, not +9 (as a 6-HD animal, with the BAB of a cleric).
• p. 87, Entelodont: With 6 HD, it should have 3 feats, not just the 2 listed.
• p. 88, Gastronis: Initiative should be +2, not +3.
• p. 89, Glyptodon: With HD of 6d8+24, its average hp should be 51, not 53. Slam damage should be 1d4+4, not 1d4+6 (it has a +3 Str bonus). It should have 3 feats, not 2.
• p. 91, Hominid, Early: Flat-footed AC should be 10, not 11.
• p. 94, Leptictidium: No touch or flat-footed ACs given; should be touch 14, flat-footed 13.
• p. 94, Magma Brute: Grapple should be +20, not +21 (+6 BAB, +6 Str, +8 size). Slam damage should be 2d6+9, not 2d6+10.
• p. 96, Mandrillion: BAB should be +1, not +0 (it's a 1st-level Warrior). Grapple should be +2, not +1 (+1 BAB, +1 Str).
• p. 97, Massospondylus: Claw damage should be 1d6+6, not 1d6+4 (since this is its only attack form, it gets 1.5 times its Strength bonus, which in this case is +4).
• p. 98, Megatherium: Claw damage should be 2d4+7, not 2d4+5 (since this is its only attack form, it gets 1.5 times its Str bonus, which in this case is +5).
• p. 99, Plateosaurus: HD should be 4d8+16, not 4d8+24 (its Con bonus is only +4). Thus, its average hp should be 34, not 42. (Of course, it's possible that both HD and hp are correct as listed, and it's the Con that's in error - it would have to be a 22 or a 23. Personally, I'd give him the benefit of the doubt and give him a 23 Con; after all, as a Huge animal with only 4 HD, he needs all the hit points he can scrounge!)
• p. 99, Primordial Ooze: HD should be 3d10+3, not 3d10+13. Thus, hp should be 19, not 29. Flat-footed AC should be 6, not 10.
• p. 100, Protoceratops: Grapple should be +4, not +5 (+2 BAB, +2 Str).
• p. 100, Probosin: BAB should be +1, not +0 (it's a 1st-level Warrior). Grapple should be +0, not -1 (+1 BAB, -1 Str).
• p. 101, Pteranodon: Bite attack should be +2 melee, not +3 (+1 BAB, +2 Dex due to Weapon Finesse, -1 size).
• p. 101, Scaphonyx: Bite damage should be 1d6+3, not 1d6+2 (it gets 1.5 times its Str bonus of +2 since this is its only attack form).
• p. 102, Stegosaurus: Grapple should be +18, not +14 (+6 BAB, +4 Str, +8 size).
• p. 103, Stegotaur: Initiative should be +2, not +1. No touch/flat-footed AC values given; should be touch 11, flat-footed 15. Why doesn't it get any weapon attacks, even if it's only with a club (as pictured in the accompanying illustration)? For that matter, since its favored class is monk, what about open hand attacks? Why does its tail provide it with a +2 racial bonus to Jump checks, when the stegosaurus - with an identical body and tail - does not? (Personally, I don't see the four-legged stegotaur as that great of a jumper, anyway.)
• p. 104, Trachodon: Bite attacks should be at +7 melee, not +3 (+4 BAB, +4 Str, -1 size). It looks like the "Attack" and "Full Attack" lines were swapped by mistake. Tail slap attacks should be at +7 melee for Attack and +2 melee for Full Attack.
• p. 104, Tyrotaun: BAB should be +3, not +2. Grapple should be +5, not +4 (+3 BAB, +2 Str).

While I was bothered by the many mistakes in the creature stats, I was also a bit bothered by what did and didn't make the list. The two dinosaur/humanoid hybrids, the stegotaur (stegosaurus centaur) and tyrotaun (top half human, bottom half tyrannosaurus) were, well, just plain silly. The primordial ooze didn't seem to add anything that the standard oozes don't already have. I think some of these could have easily been dropped, to make way for some "standard" prehistoric creatures that surprised me by their absence: the Eohippus, Iguanodon, Moschops, Parasaurolophus, Pachycephalosaurus, and Styracosaurus, to name just a few. For that matter, there's apparently a creature called a "debalka" - it's referred to on page 91 - but where are the game stats for this creature?

Lost Prehistorica is certainly still a good deal at 109 pages for only $6.95 (and a much better deal than the $26.95 accidentally listed on the back cover of the PDF!), but all in all I think it could have been much better had it focused a bit more on the truly prehistoric (as opposed to cat-humanoids!), added a bit more to the bestiary, and cleaned up the monster stats. Still, it's not a bad job, and considering the current competition it's still the best work available on the subject of "lost worlds." I put it at a "3 (Average)."

 

[wocky]

Before the Martians came to earth and taught us how to build the pyramids the earth was still hot, saber-tooth riding savage monkey men escaped from fierce erupting volcanoes (everywhere!) and valiantly fought huge T-Rex dinosaurs. If you disagree then you haven't learned history from comics and pulp stories. Fear not, Lost Prehistorica caters to both those that want a mysterious valley where time stood still, or a more faithful depiction of prehistory. The authors describe it as "a toolkit for introducing exotic lands with a prehistoric flair into campaigns", as it's a very modular product which provides various elements (both the crunchy and the fluffy) that can be brought over to any other campaign. The "Lost Lands" you should be able to create with the book range from the time men lived in caves, to the first city states.

The first chapter deals mostly with different ways in which prehistoric elements can be introduced in a campaign. Not completely exhaustive, it's more like a brainstorm that works as a good source of ideas. Locations, from prehistoric islands to entire planes, are suggested, as well as many geographical elements (ruins, petrified woods, climate, etc.) which can be used for flavor-infusing encounters. More encounters can be designed using chapter two, which deals with survival in a hostile environment. "Hazards", which could be described as "natural traps", are introduced; CR, DCs, effects and all other formal stats are given for quicksand, geysers, gas bubbles and some others. New diseases are also described, with rich descriptions and interesting effects (from deafness or a lower speed to the cannibalistic urges created by the Cannibal Fever). Descriptions of a few plants and fungus complete the chapter.

Chapter three, titled "Cultures" reminded me in its treatment of the prehistorical world to what "Magical Medieval Society: Western Europe" did for the medieval age. It discusses various cultural aspects of a prehistorical society (subsistence patterns, social structures, politics, technology, trade, warfare, food, rituals, etc.) based on actual scientific sources. Nothing is taken for granted here, which is good, since even trivial details like prehistoric diets or family organization are completely unknown to most of us. Using this chapter is not easy, however, since bare information is given with not enough examples. Designing a culture would certainly be a time consuming task that might not be reflected enough in game time, so it might not be for every DM or every campaign. However, every DM would do well in reading this section at least once, to get some general notions of what life was like in prehistoric times. "It should have some example tribes!", I thought while I read the third chapter... I was gladly surprised by chapter four, which includes five ready to use tribes, and some guidelines to create some more. However, all tribes provided are mostly oriented towards a "Grim and gritty" campaign style, and I would also have liked a more modular approach, with examples of each cultural aspect for fast lego-style tribe design.

The fifth chapter is about items. It begins with a large list of standard equipment that includes clothing, decoration, masks, pipes, totems, plants and more. I found it odd that these items all had their price listed in gp. Actually, it makes sense for balance purposes and as a reference for fair trading deals, but I think more should be said here about primitive forms of commerce, and item availability; nobody should expect to be able to buy 'war paints' off the counter. Even stranger, there's a section on stonework and art that includes idols, altars and standing stones, and every one of them also has a price in gp. The flavor text at the beginning of the chapter hints at the rationale behind this, with a tale of explorers trading with inhabitants of the Lost Lands. What would be missing there, is a second column that allows for comparison between the value of the item in the Lost Lands and the value in the explorers' nation, since that difference is one of the defining characteristic of commerce with newfound lands. This chapter also includes prices and stats for primitive weapons (made out of rock or bone), some exotic weapons, and fantasy armors like "Dino Hide" or "Carapace Plate".

The sixth chapter covers characters. It starts with ten new feats, most of them with a "hunter" theme giving various abilities similar to the Favored Enemy of Rangers. Next comes an analysis of what the place of every class (both PC and NPC classes) would be in the roles of either explorer, or native to the Lost Lands. There's even a rationale given for native aristrocrats or monks, which might not be reasonable enough for everyone, but at least tries to keep every option available.

The section on races is the only part of the book I actually disliked. Besides some new gnome, elf and halfling subraces we get nine new races, most of which are based on anthropomorphic animals. These seemed slightly unbalanced (in either direction, depending on which race) in respect to the core races. I found no interesting concepts in their outlooks or societies, plus they seem to be victim of odd mixing of personality traits. For example, the feline Felklaws are described as aggressive, friendly, curious and proud, not the most usual mix, and not the easiest to roleplay. If you happen to appreciate these races, however, you get full stats and descriptions, plus advantages and disadvantages of combining each core class with the race. Three "ancient" races, which could have reigned over the Lost Lands before they got lost, are also provided. The Guzi are planar headhunters which could be called the "fathers of cannibalism". Oolori are called a "race of humans" (a sorry departure from the concept of "race" in D&D) who were seafaring people with great knowledge of science. Finally, Paletyhne were very smart, graceful and well manered goblinoids with a great desire for knowledge.

Chapter seven has four greater gods and seven lesser and intermediate ones designed specifically for a campaign of this kind. Each has a full description plus alignment, portfolio, domains, symbol and favored weapon, plus a number of different denominations.

The final chapter is the bestiary. The thirty seven new monsters include the monster entries for the new races and some new dinosaurs and prehistoric-like creatures like saber tooth tigers. A very nice touch is that each of these monsters includes a "Future history" entry describing whatever will eventually happen to the monster. A useful section I was glad to see deals with the presence of standard monsters in the Lost Lands. This chapter also introduces "critters", creatures that don't justify a full stat block but are relevant in game terms for economic reasons or some other use. This is a good idea, but the departure from full stat blocks was taken as far as not including even the size and type of the creatures, which would be important to see how they're affected by some spells and abilities.

"Lost Prehistorica" has a very clean, uniform and pleasant layout. The format of the core manuals was respected for all stats and rule elements. There are many images throughout; I'm no big fan of them, but I think that they're good enough as to justify their presence. Not all, but many of the new monsters and races are illustrated. The organization of the book is good, though the PDF has some errors with the bookmark hierarchy (some sections seem to be within other sections at the same level). There's a detailed and hyperlinked index, but no glossary (as usual, actually, so no surprise here).

No matter what campaign you're playing, if there's a place for a "Lost Land" then this book will probably be useful to you. No matter the type of campaign you're aiming at, you'll probably find a good source of ideas or knowledge. However, due to varied nature of the material (some chapters more realistic, some leaning towards certain types of fantasy) chances are you won't be able to take advantage of all of it; its modularity, however, allows for a selective approach.

Score: 3.5

 

[GameWyrd]

Dark Quest Games offer us Lost Prehistorica as a toolkit for exotic lands. The supplement isn't an off the shelf campaign setting and it isn't just a splatbook. A splatbook would just have stats and crunchy bits in it. Lost Prehistorica does seem to have a middle ground. There are plenty of stats in here; feats, classes, races and monsters and still plenty of flavour; game world discussions, observations of culture, trade and war.

We have typical PDF value here - 109 pages, new and quality art and Dark Quest's usual professional layout for about US $6.00. Lost Prehistorica has PDF bookmarks and a "clicky contents" page too. It's easy to find what you want if you're GMing from laptop rather than print out.

Dark Quest's authors, Steven Cook and David Woodrum, begin Lost Prehistorica strongly. They dive straight in with an intelligent look at where this lost prehistoric world might fit in your campaign - be it a pre-written world, a game of your own which has been running for a while or something brand new. Here we discuss the likes of hidden valleys or isolated islands and since Lost Prehistorica is a fantasy setting we also discuss the likes of Underworlds and Lost Planes. Like a well written business report Lost Prehistorica spells out the impacts of each choice with a section for Advantages and Disadvantages for each.

Having had a look at the macro geographic factors for the landscape Lost Prehistorica moves in to cover some of the more specific issues for the dinosaur-esq fantasy setting. There are critters. Critters aren't worth XP. You kill them to survive (shocking concept) They're food. Lost Prehistorica provides us with generic critter rules (a group might actually be thankful for a Ranger's trapping skills) as well as random atmosphere encounters. Some of the atmosphere comes from ominous fossil finds.

Then there's the issue (and matching chapter) of Survival. Disease is a real problem; this is a strange land where unpleasant swamps and rotting corpses might be as common as hygiene and medicine is rare. Lost Prehistorica finds room in its 109 pages for a healthy dose of disease. We've such delights as Cannibal Fever and Night Flu. There other natural hazards too and Dark Quest goes to the unusual length of assigning Challenge Ratings to dangerous locations like tar pits and geysers. Never forgetting that this is a fantasy supplement we've also got such alien natural hazards (if that's not an oxymoron) as blast crystals and blood muck for example.

In addition there are all sorts of potential pit traps with the local plants and fungi (not to mention the risk of pit traps actually hidden in the local plants).

On the other hand plants do provide a valuable resource - food. As touched on earlier, food can be very important in a rough wilderness where it's hard to get (or where you might be the easy meal). Lost Prehistorica's chapter of Culture begins by looking at the importance of food. Various cultural settings spring from the way food is got. For example, the hunter and gatherer culture has a very different basis for the pastoral one which is slightly different from the horticultural one.

Also in the Culture trap there's advice and discussion on differing family groups and even on politics. A small simple group of hunters might fall under the cultural category of a "band" where as a larger group might count as a "tribe". If we scale up again we're looking at a chiefdom and then, all of a sudden, I'm getting Civilisation vibes (ah, one of the greatest strategy games EVAR) and this is no bad thing.

The cultural topics covered in the supplement are expensive. I suspect my gaming anthropologist brother would approve. Dark Quest looks at issues like trade and tools as well as clothing. Later on in Lost Prehistorica we've new item lists with costs for suitable equipment in the setting and we discover the prices are relative. A hide cloak costs about 3 gold. For your information - that's the same cost as a shrunken head.

Cannibalism is an interesting issue for Lost Prehistorica. It's not all that uncommon for the prehistoric setting the toolkit is trying to recreate with a fantasy wrapping. It's suggested that neutral tribes might engage in it - perhaps as a death ritual or as an attempt to gain intelligence or the spiritual wisdom of the deceased. It seems like a waste to shrink that head and trade it for the hide cloak.

If you really fancy a bit of brain eating in your d20 game... or really fancy skipping that bit and sticking with the mass carnage of a dungeon crawl as something less icky (heh) then you can always create your own prehistoric. And yes, the PDF has rules for creating new tribes as well as a host of sample tribes.

Do you think of Stonehenge when you think ancient prehistoric cultures? What about the strange faces on Easter Island? There are rules here for stonework and art - samples of altars and idols. Later on Lost Prehistorica looks at the role and importance of religion. This book isn't all "talk" and the religion section is a good example of this. There's a whack of D&D style deity entries here - ranging from greater gods to lesser ones.

In fact if you were beginning to worry that there wasn't anything quintessentially D&D in this d20 supplement or that Dark Quest Games might have been trying to slyly sell you an old university project - fear not. There are plenty of crunch bits.

Lost Prehistorica introduces lots of new feats. The supplement reviews both NPC and PC classes with the setting in mind. There's no shortage of Barbarians or Druids here.

There are new (or perhaps "old") sub-classes of the core races too like the nasty speartoe Halflings and the scraplings. There are plenty of new races as well and many have an ape-like or reptile-like look about them. We've the Amphimids as your expected bipedal lizards/newts. There's Slither Elves for your elf-reptile cross. The Felklaw and Kifter are cat-like humanoids and the Kifter are exceptionally sexy. These are the two races most girlfriends will want to play. There's the bulky fighters of the Golgaut race, Mandreg and Mandrillions. There are Hominids and Probosin too. Unfortunately not all these races are illustrated and I find that leaves certain races a bit hamstrung. Roleplaying is all about using your imagination but for some reason I always seem to "need" illustrations for new races.

I keep on talking about "new" races. I suppose these races are new for players who've just discovered a lost island. There are also "ancient races". One of the suggested shticks for Lost Prehistorica is to have the ruins and remains of a civilization that's come and gone before (and for a spooky touch the GM can make it awfully reminiscent of the player's home Plane or kingdom (those damn dirty apes!)). There's the Guzi, Oolori and Palethynes. With these rules you don't have to have these races confined to prehistoric, er, history if you don't want. You can use them too. The ancient races are different again from the usual prehistoric twist. The Palethynes, for example, are essentially kind and wise goblins!

The bestiary takes up 24 or so pages in the supplement. Here illustrations are a bonus rather than the must-have for the PC races. Certainly not every bestiary entry is illustrated but there are enough new illustrations here to please the eye. In addition to mixing dinosaurs up with fantasy creatures and inventing entirely new fantasy creatures this section runs through the traditional D&D monsters to point out which ones are in-theme with the setting. Of the new monster creations I do like the Stegotaur.

Lost Prehistorica is good. The supplement has everything you're likely to need and more. If you want monsters and feats; you've got it. If you want help and advice then you've got that too. If you're pretty good in the GM hot seat and are looking for an advanced product then you've got that. If you're fairly new and are looking for something which explains itself well and doesn't get lost in jargon or confusing rules then Lost Prehistorica is also for you. That said there are some things I'd have done differently; more illustrations for the new fantasy history races (or perhaps less of the new races). I'm rarely fan of splat but I find myself at a loss to think up suitably atmospheric spells (would they be the same or very different? Detect Cave?) It's a shame there's no animism here either. I'd happily trade four new monsters for a shaman character class or better still an animism domain (we could turn the irony into a d20 cosmology point and avoid the drag of yet another class). In summary, Lost Preshistorica scores far more successes than misses and certainly won't get lost on my hard disk.

* This Lost Prehistorica review was first published at GameWyrd.