Pre-History?

[DragonLancer]

Did your D&D campaign or setting, have a pre-history? I don't mean a glorious Age of Dreams or anything, but a proper neanderthal type era?

When the races were created by the gods (or however it works in your game), did they create them as they appear currently in your game (medieval level) or did they create them as cavemen?


Heres the basis of the idea that I'm working on for my homebrew.


The world/universe comes into existence via big bang (much like our own), and evolution follows a similar path execpt that there are no mass extinctions so there is a pre-history that has cavemen and dinosaurs.

As the neanderthals/cavemen become more sentient and create superstition and gods to explain things, those belief's create the gods who then create the planes and there inhabitants as a place to live.

One of the gods is seen as a deity of magic, and so in order to ensure that he survives the human evolution (and the transition from superstition to logic & science) alters physics to allow magic to actually exist. This jump starts evolution in a different direction, allowing the monsters of the D&D world to exist.
Dinosaurs evolve into dragons, and the neanderthals evolve into the various humanoid races of the world (Humans, elves, halflings...etc) each depending on their environment.
Monstrous humanoids such as orcs, hobgoblins and ogres, are actually the naturally evolved apes (as though neanderthals had prospered rather than cro-magnon man).


Thats the idea that I'm tying with.

 

[Turanil]

There is always some type of Neandhertal pre-history in my settings, but they never come into play in any way.

Never such things such as a world suddenly populated with a civilization of medieval level.

My next campaign, humans were cavemen when serpent folk ruled the world (I will use Serpent Kingdoms for that, when I get it). These serpent races themselves evolved from basic snakes in eons long forgotten.

 

[Tonguez]

During the Age of Dreams the 'gods' gave form to mortals, young and yet untried
this Age ended in the first cataclysm. When the mortals awoke into their new world they were without wisdom -this is the 'Prehistoric' period IMC
It follows then that after a few aeons Lawgivers arose and taught the mortals the divine Wisdom.


Once I had the idea of running a campaign were the races were Austrolipithicus, Homo Erectus, Neanderthal and the newly emergent Homo Sapiens Sapiens all alongside dinosaurs, Gigantipithecus (sp) Ogres and Hairy Rhino's oh my!

PS Neanderthals were actually very advanced (almost as good as us Cro-Mags) - the most primitive 'Human Cavemen' were Homo Erectus and their ilk. Austrolipithecus and their ilk were the earlier 'apemen'.

 

[pensiv]

there is a prehistory in my game, and in it is an intelligent progenitor race.

 

[Chris Tavares]

A friend of mine ran a Villians & Vigilantes game in school every other week. The ancient history of his V&V world was his D&D campaign that he ran the opposite weeks. Kinda fun, that.

 

[The_Universe]

There is a definite prehistory IMC, although to get to the point where it's a pre-civilization "caveman" level would be extraordinarily long.

IMC, God doesn't dream, but men do--and out of man's dreams came the world of aeres, with mountains raised and seas dug out by the fancy of millions--perhaps billions.

As the world of the dreamers moved on, God took pity on Man. Man's fancy (both fear and hope) were given sudden, inexplicable form as the last men of the old world set foot (for the first time) on a new one...

stuff like that.

 

[demiurge1138]

I ran a campaign for a while that served as a sort of prehistory to the rest of my games- the PC species were kobolds, lizardfolk and the like, and dinosaurs roamed the earth. It was a lot of fun, especially making them panic when they saw what they thought was the Asteroid.

Demiurge out.

 

[Alzrius]

I read an article in an old Dragon quite a while ago on PCs who got sent back to a pre-history era, and ever since then I've always had one in my campaign worlds, though I've never used them as of yet.

To me, it'd be great fun to (as that article talked about) have some sort of temporal accident drop the PCs off there, as it becomes a great blend of fighting off the native monsters, but also surviving the environment.

For example, divine spellcasters have to deal with the fact that their gods don't exist/haven't come to this world yet. Essentially, since there aren't humans yet (there might be some proto-humanoids, but nothing even close to a true civilization for them), there are no gods among humans, or even relatively close deities for them to draw power from. The absolute closest that there might be would be demigods (who are physically present on the world) who are little better than animals themselves, representing aspects of nature, such as survival, death, hunting, etc. That old Dragon article on the demigods of the Primal Rage video game was a great idea in that regard.

Likewise, arcane spellcasters have it a little easier, but spells with material components can be harder to use, since gathering those components can be a lot more difficult now.

Repairing weapons and acquiring new missle weapons if existing arrows and such break is much more difficult. Gathering food can be harder since rangers and druids weren't trained in this environment, so Survival checks can take a penalty.

In terms of monsters, I prefer to focus more on "natural mutations" than things like evil Outsiders, since the latter are so timeless that they go against the grain of the alien, isolated feeling I'm trying to create. Rather, the PCs will meet things like proto-dragons, gigantic sea monsters, huge burrowing worms, walking carnivorous plants, etc. Basically, monsters that are natural products of a world where nature is still wildly experimenting with creating new lifeforms.

 

[Aaron L]

I'll have to think about this, maybe incorporate some of it. The races of my world were either imported from outside or formed out of elemental forces. I may have to put in some evolutionary creatures side by side with the created and imported races. Natively evolved humans and those from outside, elves from Somewhere Else, dwarves and gnomes formed from elemental spirits, and halflings from somewhere. But there were a lot of wars fought between demons and devils and elves during prehistory, so that could lead to some VERY interesting evolutions.


Wow, rad, I have to make up some humans that evolved with magical and elemental resistances, thanks for the idea!

 

[Kaleon Moonshae]

My world is bit different. It was once the moon of high technology world (which had a prehistory) which tried to summon their god in an act of hubris. They instead summoned an idiot god who became trapped in the core of the moon and caused it to explode. The raining debris destroyed teh civilization of the planet and left a ring of islands rotating around the god. The god was a god of creation so he began unintelligably messing with creation and finally created the modern races who revere him and fear him at the same time. His power drew together three sibling gods, one of chaos, one of order and one of balance who have done their best to limit his influence on the lives of the people circling him but he still managed to create life (usually monsters in recent history) which runs rampant on the surface of the islands.