Stone Age d20?

[Sanackranib]

B.C. game

> If you get this all writen up do you plan to post it for the benifit of the rest of us?

Sure. I'll PDF it up, post it somewhere and put up the link.

Regarding magic, there will definately be no PHB-style magic slingers. (Based on my current reckoning) Lore Keepers can delve into the living memory of the Tell to inspire their tribemates and do limited augury. Shamans can bind animal magic into tattoos, body paint, cave paintings, and fetish items. Medicine women can heal the body and soul using natural lore.

Definately no fireball spell. You want fire? Do you have the Fire Keeping feat? Oh, you want to light your own fire? That's the Fire Starting feat, and is a lore known only to very few.

that sounds cool Im interested in it all over again. IMO druidic shamens would be the most powerfull spellcasters. My origional Idea was to not allow any PC to start as a spellcaster. I really liked the "keeper" and "starter" feats, wicked cool!

 

[Moulin Rogue]

Shamans can bind animal magic into tattoos, body paint, cave paintings, and fetish items. Medicine women can heal the body and soul using natural lore.

Have you had a look at the two shaman core class books put out by Green Ronin and Mongoose? (Shaman's Handbook and Encyclopedia Divine: Shamans, respectively)

 

[johnsemlak]

From Stone to Steel by MonkeyGod might be worth checking out

http://www.monkeygodenterprises.com/stone.htm

 

[BV210]

You may want to check out the Nyambe hardback (Atlas Games) as it has the non-human races presented a bit more "primitive" than the PHB. It also has humans divided into 12 different "sub-races" or "sub-categories" for lack of a better word.

I'm interested to see what you come up with. Sounds neat.

[Edited for spelling]

 

[s/LaSH]

The question is, Is this prehistoric D&D with cave elves, or prehistory using D&D rules? There's going to be a difference. It could be interesting to have elves and humans and dwarves not as sharply defined in this era; perhaps they're just different tribes at this point, and their current specialties will later become wholesale speciation.

Another interesting thing is that archaeologists keep finding these idealised female figures carved from stone or bone or stuff. They think that primitive cultures followed a mother goddess, in more or less monotheistic fashion. Oh, and let's not forget the use of red ochre in burial customs of Homo neanderthalis.

Speaking of nonhuman cultures, H. sapiens isn't the only species to make tools; prehuman species did, too, although they were very not intelligent. Try reading Stephen Baxter's Manifold, third book in the Manifold series; that's got some good ideas. (I think he's the fellow.) Oh, and Jean M. Auel took what, ten years to write the latest book in her series? That's got to be some good research.

 

[Sanackranib]

Jean M. Auel

the clan of the cave bear series is full of inspriation on how homo-erectus (neanderthalls)and homo sapiens (semi-modern man)would interact. I would recomend breaking sapiens into Tribes & villages and neanderthals into Clan. this setting has a lot of potential and is more likely to keep most players closer to home. Don't forget to include Dinosaurs and lizardfolk.

 

[Tonguez]

Re: Jean M. Auel

the clan of the cave bear series is full of inspriation on how homo-erectus (neanderthalls)and homo sapiens (semi-modern man)would interact. I would recomend breaking sapiens into Tribes & villages and neanderthals into Clan. this setting has a lot of potential and is more likely to keep most players closer to home. Don't forget to include Dinosaurs and lizardfolk.

Neanderthals are Homo Sapiens-Neaderthalis not Homo Erectus (which is another subspecies entirely). Modern Humans (Cro-Magnon) are Homo Sapiens-Sapiens.

I once imagined a setting in which Austrolipithicus (Halfling stats) survived alongside Homo Erectus (Half-Elf), Homo Robustus (Half-Orc), Neanderthals and the newly emerged Cro-Magnon (Human).
Cro-Mags were starting to establish permanent settlements but all the others were nomadic. Austrolipithicus lived in small family groups and roamed the scrublands and forest margins, Homo-Erectus lived in the forests and Homo-Robustus up in the hills. Only Nenderthals and Cro-Mags were brave enouh to actually go out onto the plains and camp

Gigantipithecus (Ogre/Bugbears) roamed the mountains and the Jungle-dwelling Yuan-Ti and Plains-dwelling Lizardmen were the most advanced races!

Unfortunately I never did develop it too much beyond this point (although I do have a Gigantipithecus-like monster race in my games)

 

[Jake_Baker]

Clan of the Cave Bear is one of my strongest influences at this point. I haven't read it personally yet (I'm planning to, after finishing LotR), but my wife has, and she loves talking about it. Oh, did I mention, my wife's an anthropologist.

In the meanwhile, I now have an armful of books on the stone age from the local public library I'm happily plowing through. The culture will be roughly late Paleolithic.

Answering s/Lash's question re "DnD prehistory or prehistory d20": it's neither, really. The focus is on how prehistoric man might have lived, with certain fantastic elements thrown in to make it a more interesting game. The PHB core races are present, but are presented as competitors to homo sapiens, much in the same way Neandertal man competed with sapiens. Their cultures are radical departures - cannabalistic halflings who sharpen their teeth and ritually rip out their fingernails and replace them with sharpened flint "claws", for example.

I'm actually trying to avoid putting canonical dinosaur references into the setting bible. They're left in in the "appropriate monsters" section, but with a sidebar called "reality check - dinosaurs."

Thanks for the encouragement all. Nice to see that other people would be interested in it.

 

[s/LaSH]

Just to clarify matters:

Human evolution has recently been revised (and we still don't know precisely what happened; we're just guessing from the shape of half a jaw bone found in a jungle somewhere, disclaimer, I'm not necessarily right, blahblahblah). The important bits I learned in school that some people may be confused about were:

Neanderthals were Homo neanderthalis, not H. sapiens neanderthalis, a separate species from us. (And it's pronounced nee-an-der-taal, not -thal. It's from Neanderthal in German, which I believe means 'new man' or something.)

Australopithicenes split into two branches, the omnivorous Homo genus and the herbivorous [/i]Paranthropus[/i], who were noted for their big jaws for grinding roots and stuff; some of them got very big. No paranthropes survived into modern times; can't think why. Excuse me, I have to go sharpen my spears.

Oh, and has anyone else heard the rumours that the Spanish wiped out the last neanderthals in the Canary islands a few hundred years ago?

 

[Jake_Baker]

"Neandertal" (the modern German spelling drops the h in "tal") means "Neander Valley", and was the region the first Neandertal bones were found.