D&D General Neolithic D&D

So neolithic is a setting detail, but what's the game going to be about? It'd D&D, so butt kicking for goodness in a high fantasy setting is a given, but what sets this neolithic world apart from Greyhawk, the Forgotten Realms, or even Dark Sun? What's our hook? Once we have our hook we can figure out the best way to adapt the species, background, and classes to the game.

So what's the hook? What makes this different from other settings? In most D&D settings, it seems to me like you're picking over the bones of long abandoned, ancient cultural sites (dungeons). But in this neolithic setting, everything is new. There are no dungeons (okay, maybe a few ancient Yuan-ti structures or something) and maybe a lot of the staples we've grown accustomed to having just aren't there or are only just appearing. Undead? Never heard of 'em. But Uncle Roger seems to be doing now even after we buried him last week.
For one thing, I don't think butt-kicking for goodness is a given. There are many reasons to kick butt. Fights between communities over territory and resources would I imagine be a big deal, just like in later eras. The scale would be smaller, of course.
 

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I would tend to agree, use a game more suited to the survival mode. There are plenty out there. Probably easier to bring in wanted elements if 5e to some of these games than to hack away bits of 5e.
I would use Level Up or an OSR game. Both tend to have better exploration rules than WotC 5e.
 

If you equate the Downfall of Númenor with the drowning of Atlantis c. 9,600 BC according to Plato, that puts it near the beginning of the Neolithic with the subsequent events of the LotR happening more towards the middle about 3,000 years later. Tolkien is on record as saying his stories are set in our world albeit in a "legendary" time period. I believe his intent was to place them far back enough into prehistory to give him a free hand to describe events on a fairly large scale. The fact that, in his novels, he describes a level of material culture matching more closely with AD 1100 is, I think, part of the "translation" element in his work.
I always assumed Arda was Earth prior to some future cataclysm (which most likely ended the Fourth Age) that left us with the continental configurations we have now, and no standing civilizations of previous eras. Basically the Atlantis theory writ even larger.
 

One hook that arises out of the agriculture/foraging dichotomy in the classes is the idea of the rise of civilization and the problems it causes.

You have things like:
  • A strong law/chaos divide in the setting. Probably good and evil people on both sides.
  • Devils and diabolical cults as encouragers of civilization (and who want the evils of civilization to thrive). Infernal machines tearing at the earth. Well-intentioned diabolists killing river fey and forest fey and seasonal fey to grow more grain.
  • Demons in the darkness. Everything is fragile. Your favorite town can collapse in a season. The forest swallows your megaliths, the desert blows over your tombs.
  • Ancient beings from the Before Times. Dragons and giants as gods or patrons of humanoid effort. You could have dragons as natural destruction (floods, droughts, volcanoes, blizzards, the forest) and giants as Promethean helpers of humanity (stone giants help you build magaliths, hill giants love when the small folk bring them food in the form of vast fields of grain). Elves worrying about the rise of other people, allying with the fey to keep the world primitive, but they are good-hearted, and so try and help the early civs thrive.
  • The Stars and seasonal cycles are critical to understand. The rulers of these early civs desperately need to predict the future. But in D&D the stars also hold alien horrors. Shub-niggurath hides in the woods.
  • Points of Light in the Darkness become Points of Civilization in the Wilderness. But the wilderness also has its defenders and protectors.
  • Early civilizations foster despots and would-be-Emperors. Sudden droughts and die-offs are caused by literal evil supernatural beings, and cities fall regularly since they're not well-connected.
  • The wilderness is poisoned. The rivers dry up. The rats. The plagues. The invention of sewers?
  • The wilderness hides megafauna and monstrosities. Humbaba doesn't accept your authority. There's still dinosaurs and mammoths around. Maybe some people ride 'em.
I would buy this game in a heartbeat.
 

For one thing, I don't think butt-kicking for goodness is a given. There are many reasons to kick butt. Fights between communities over territory and resources would I imagine be a big deal, just like in later eras. The scale would be smaller, of course.
For D&D, I think it is a given no matter if it's a traditional fantasy or neolithic. D&D is a heroic fantasy where player characters are the good guys. At least that's how it is for 5th edition.
 



For D&D, I think it is a given no matter if it's a traditional fantasy or neolithic. D&D is a heroic fantasy where player characters are the good guys. At least that's how it is for 5th edition.
WotC 5e pre-supposes this. Not an assumption I would make about all D&D or all games in the D&D sphere, past or present.
 

WotC 5e pre-supposes this. Not an assumption I would make about all D&D or all games in the D&D sphere, past or present.
So does 4e really. More so even. I didn't play 3e, but that is definitely the assumption we had in 1e too. Though I don't know that it was anything specific from the rulebooks, just the fantasy stories we grew up on.

PS - I miss the lich!
 

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