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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Moulin Rogue" data-source="post: 2011532" data-attributes="member: 1192">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.</blockquote>

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