A Primitive Campaign: Anyone have some good resources?

[inuyasha]

Hi all! I'm gonna be running a primitive (stone-age) campaign for Pathfinder using Spheres of Power and Spheres of Might. The system's not quite as important though for the purpose of this thread, because I'm wondering if anyone here has any good ideas or resources for a stone-age D&D game in general. I've looked at a couple of old Dragon articles, and I'm not entirely looking to be... prehistorically accurate in every regard, but being close to reality is probably a good idea.

If there are any other cool resources like articles, splatbooks for any particular system, or anything like that you feel like sharing, I'd appreciate the contribution : )

[RazorChain]

This might help. Gurps Ice Age.


http://www.sjgames.com/gurps/books/iceage/

[Yora]

Wolf Packs and Winter Snow is a neat little stone age game based on a D&D framework. It's either cheap or free, something I think worth checking out.

(It was cheap (https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/219259).)

[DavidSh]

Were you thinking Neolithic (agriculture, domesticated animals, pottery), or Paleolithic (like the Ice Age setting previously mentioned)?

Not that I have any good resources for either.

[inuyasha]

I'm thinking about leaning towards Paleolithic with some artistic liberties. It'll definitely lead to some interesting shifts in how cultures work.

As for the sources listed above, I want to thank you two so much! I haven't seen those before, and I think they'll help out a lot! Wolf Packs and Winter Snow is kind of sweet, and I'm glad to support anyone who puts out niche, fun content like that, and as for the GURPS book, I should have known that GURPS has a supplement for everything, haha!

[lightningcat]

Dark Sun articles in Dragon would have some things that may be useful. Although I think Ultimate Combat has more complete stone age weapons.

[inuyasha]

I'm using those weapons and materials for sure : D

I almost forgot about Dark Sun, there may be a few good things in there for me. I think the hardest thing to figure out will be how to structure adventures beyond "here's survival, and then here's a random encounter," especially since I can't really use Dungeons and big structures like that.

[Mechalich]

I think the hardest thing to figure out will be how to structure adventures beyond "here's survival, and then here's a random encounter," especially since I can't really use Dungeons and big structures like that.

You can't use big man-made structures, but you can certainly use large natural structures. Paleolithic cultures in many areas had a tendency to use natural caves as sacred sights, and many of these locations were sufficiently large (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rouffignac_Cave) and twisty to serve as proxies for dungeons.

Raiding sacred sites belonging to the enemy - whether that's rival tribes, dangerous humanoids, or something more mysterious - to deface their idols, take their stuff (and their women if you're going the grimdark route), and drive them from your territory is a perfectly reasonable objective. In a Paleolithic hunter scenario you can have territorial conflict over specific land areas where the herds congregate each year and where ideal kill sites - for something like mammoths this is represented by cliffs convenient to drive them over - are present.

The tricky part is that, given any sort of reasonable population growth scenario, it would only take a few adventures to secure an appropriately productive territory and eliminate local threats. As such, you probably need a reactive impetus for adventuring. migration is one option - you can have waves of immigrants threaten the territory that have to be continually repulsed by finding and destroying their camps. Eventually, the heroes have to hunt down the source of this disruption far away and crush it at the root.

[Yora]

I think the hardest thing to figure out will be how to structure adventures beyond "here's survival, and then here's a random encounter," especially since I can't really use Dungeons and big structures like that.

The main question is why you think playing a paleolithic game would be fun in the first place. Then build on that.

[Thrawn4]

Every mountain has walls, natural obstacles, passages you cannot climb without modern gear, creatures that only live there... you do not need dungeons.
Same for every other terrain like the distant forest/swamp/have...

edit: also, human emotions are the same, so you can have betrayal, heroism, love and so on, which makes for good social adventures.

[awa]

you dont need dungeons to have adventures
for instance
you can be the one migrating
lets say a natural disaster is pushing every one in one direction, a big powerful tribe is pushing you out so you both have to deal with human bad guys at the back as well as moving into a new area with all the threats that entails.

Likewise the supernatural creatures might change things maybe humans dont build "dungeons" but do mind flayers? what about giant ants?

[Kiero]

If you've read the Malazan Empire series, the pre-Ritual Imass (http://malazan.wikia.com/wiki/Imass) were a magically-empowered stone age culture. There's lots of inspiration available there.

[Milo v3]

One of the settings (https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/202272/Dark-Eras-The-Sundered-World-Werewolf-the-Forsaken-Mage-the-Awakening) for Chronicles of Darkness is Neolithic with a lot of plothooks which I used for inspiration when I was planning a PF neolithic campaign. Some sections of it might not make sense though if you aren't passingly familiar with mage or werewolf though.