Why are there no prehistoric settings?
>>46289123
Because no one has written them.
:^)
>>46289123
Because the typical nerd doesn't know enough about neolithic cultures and tech (read: anything at all, because Tolkien never wrote a book about them) to feel confident trying to kickstart a (magic-, if applicable)industrial revolution in the setting.
And if it's not possible to do that, nerds aren't interested in your setting period.
There's Totem
>>46289123
>time before mankind got its collective shit together
>no flags
>no names
>nothing of worth or note in terms of events until the taming of fire, domestication of animals or the great migration
>stone and leather EVERYTHING
>shoogy boogy oogy
I'm sure you could pull off a prehistoric setting if you're a good GM/player, but I haven't seen one done well yet.
>>46289491
Did cavemen know how to make leather?
>>46289731
Mug'luk here.
Me make leather. Take mammoth skin and leave in sun. Sticky bits dry out. Then me use for GM screen. Mug'luk am cavemaster for Rock 5 game.
Game good except for That Neanderthal. He only play broody man from Eastern Tribe rock paintings. How you deal with TN in groups?
>>46289767
Me bash TN with rock. He stop quick. He be Western tribe person like good Rock 5 person
>>46289491
Why wouldn't there be names? Prehistoric doesn't mean before the invention of language.
>>46290071
This good idea except TN is cave kin with other player. Me no want more drama.
>It's a living...
![Grunting[1].pdf](https://4chanarchives.com/image/image-404.png "Grunting[1].pdf")
>>46289151
There's also Grunting: The Race for Fire
>>46289123
Fantasycraft has a stone agey setting, called Epoch iirc. Maybe it doesn't count since the bad guys are like evil Aztecs, but I'm pretty sure nobody can write.
The Chronicles of Darkness people are bringing out a Neolithic setting for Mage and Werewolf too. I'm sure there are plenty more.
Wurm, kickstarted an English translation a few months ago ago google it
Pic semi related
>>46290202
You can only write if you spend that Interest slot on writing - kinda like a language all in itself.
>>46289491
Unga Bunga!
>>46290307
Oh ok, not prehistoric then never mind. That campaign quality ought to be the default incidentally, for all the tech levels FC covers.
>>46289123
Less heroic, I imagine. Pre-historic you'd have a lot more emphasis on the basics of survival. The world outside your immediate borders would be dark and scary. Tribes would be smaller and more intimate. Things like civilization and a written language add a lot of possibility to a setting. Fantasy era tends to have enough civilization to be interesting but not so much that the wilds are tamed. Many technologies are missing. You could make it work I suppose, but you'd need players willing to scale their expectations down to the basics.
A good compromise might be 'Classical Antiquity' settings where civilization starts getting its shit together. You still have pretty simple technologies, but you also have a broader social scale across countries, trade, a better fit for mythological monsters, and so on.
>>46289491
Just Far Cry Primal it.
>>46290188
Just bash with rocks from ceiling in game
>>46290188
Hm. Try hit TN with stick. Stick not hard like rock. Make less drama?
I don't know what it is, but for some reason players tend to metagame and inject modern knowledge way harder in prehistoric games than in any other setting. I never have this problem in any other setting, but here people just go
>I'll make a wheel!
>I'll make an alphabet
>I'll invent this or that tool
>I'll do metalworking
>I make some motherfucking gun powder
People never do that in fantasy games. Why bere?!
>>46291315
1.making a wheel is really really easy if you know it exists and have access to rudimentary masonry
2.making a combustion engine is fairly complex and requires advanced metallurgy and fuel collection and knowledge beyond that of a passing understanding of it to make
Chronicles of Darkness is putting out a book filled with historical settings, one of which is Neolithic era Eastern Europe focusing on Mages and Werewolves.
It looks awesome as hell.
>>46291372
>if you know it exists
That's the thing, though: In these settings that shit doesn't exist and for some reason people just feel the compulsion to "invent" shit
>>46290202
It's weird how these things work themselves into the public consciousness through popular bits of media.
Now that Falllout 4: Stone Age edition has been released, i fully expect to see two or three of these settings crop up within a year or two.
And that's despite the fact that Primal did literally nothing interesting with the idea.
The settings will probably refer to Clan of the Cave Bear as their source of inspiration, but that will be a lie.
>>46291160
Rehash the same game but placed in a setting that removes the only good aspect of the original?
>>46289123
The OSR thread has that LOTFP hack you could look at.
>>46292209
First of all, that shit is fun in a beer & pretzels one (or two) off situation.
Secondly, if you're trying to run a long campaign and they try that shit, just tell them that using their out-game knowledge is bullshit.
What you can do, however, is allow them to attempt to invent things by investing time into "being curious and trying weird stuff" during periods of downtime or time skips; they can specify a general area of research (sticks, rocks, animals, food) and if they make a successful roll or something, then present the player with a choice of two or three different minor innovations/techniques that their character has come up with.
>>46289123
Well Op, this is the Prehistoric world setting book for Torg: The Possibility Wars
>>46292209
> In these settings that shit doesn't exist and for some reason people just feel the compulsion to "invent" shit
The Living Land takes care of that shit. The world laws say "no technology", and if you try to make some, it will take it away from you and wreck it.
Because there's no armor and hardly any weapons for people with actual autism to fight over.
>>46289123
For the most part it would either be grim survival realism, which has a couple options out there, or padding ti with enough rubber to be something else, like the Flintstones or the handful of comics that have tried out magic, stonepunk, or easily domesticated dinosaurs. haven't seen any RPGs take on the second concept outside of GURPS acknowledging it as a possibility, but no proper settings.
>>46291315
Ugh, I have this issue whenever I want to run anything in an era or setting with matchlocks or flintlocks. They want to go right into making cased ammo and autoloaders. Then they write off guns entirely if they can't do that.
>>46292137
Neat, they give much detail or just field the general idea?
>>46289123
Because the low population, the undeveloped economy and the lower specialization of individual skills means that the settings are boring as fuck to use for anything remotely resembling the types of games people are used to, and once you "fix them" with magic and cool cities and races or items they're not prehistoric any more, they're just regular fantasy with crummier things.
It's not like people get some kind of different or higher amount of enjoyment from playing Thag and Ogg on their vision-quest to slay the thundertusk than they are as Thangor the Barbarian and Orr the Orc on a quest to slay the dragon, the functional difference ends up being that Thangor and Orr get to hang out in inns, wear actual clothes, have metal weapons and a life-experience that the players can relate to, instead of wearing furs, using primitive weapons and living where the population density is lower than alaska.
>>46292859
>Neat, they give much detail or just field the general idea?
It was expanded in wordcount by someone hitting a huge Kickstarter tier.
http://theonyxpath.com/the-end-is-the-beginning-is-the-end-mage-the-awakening-dark-eras-werewolf-the-forsaken/
>>46289123
There’s not enough language, in order to roleplay something more than one’s occupational lexicon and simple, stock phrases common to one’s tribal group one needs to be either able to transmit and receive knowledge via writing oneself or live in a society where this is possible. Prehistoric setting = no writing. No writing means no transmission of ideas other than those carried by an oral tradition of repetition to a small enclosed group. Boring.
Undeveloped industries because of a lack of specialisation, so there’ll be a dearth of objects to interact with and character classes to play. Boring.
Unless you're a trader forget about interacting with anyone outside of five miles from where you were born, live and will die. Boring.
Roleplaying in a prehistoric setting is hard to imagine, harder still to play, probably because you'd need half a dozen anthropology/ archaeology grads in a group just to have enough knowledge to play it in an authentic manner who'd end up arguing over things over which there isn't enough evidence to prove one way or another. Boring.
GURPS has Ice Age, lots of info and adventure ideas for the genre. Useful even if using a different set of rules.
Also, a game running a tribe instead of an individual has potential.
>>46289123
its called the dinosaur section of your favorate monster manual
