Does this seem a reasonable way of handling malnutrition?

[Aotrs Commander]

I am doing some ground work for a campaign that I intend to run eventually, which will be a sort of X-Com-ish-surivival sort of game (wherein the PCs will basically be in charge of a migrating neolothic tribe).

As a consequence, I am taking a good look at the rules for food. 3.x and pathfinder have both had different standards for meals, but aside from a single line about "decent food" in PF, it has never been specified what the difference is. I have always said to my players that I expect adventurers to be eating a Good quality meal per day (i.e. 5sp's worth/ trail rations), but I want to make some attempt at actual quantifying the rules for not eating enough, as in the proposed campaign, it may come to a point where food needs to be rationed1.

So here is a first pass, presented for thoughts and feedback. This is intended to function on top of the standard rules for starvation. (Notably, this means a creature suffering for severe malnutrition is likely to dide from stravation much faster, which makes sense in my head because such a creature is already unhealty).

Malnutrition2

A character must eat a Good quality meal per day to remain healthy. A creature that does not eat a Good standard meal will slowly begin to become weakened and more subject to disease, poison and environmental stresses.

Every day in which a creature does not eat a Good quality meal, it gains 1 point of malnutrition. When a creature’s malnutrition points exceed the its Constitution score, it takes a –1 penalty to all saving throws against disease, poison, fatigue or exhaustion effects and saves to avoid nonlethal damage from environment, starvation or thirst. When the malnutrition points exceed twice the creature’s Constitution score, the penalty increases to –2, when they exceed three time to –3 and when they exceed for times to –4. A creature that

A creature eating a common meal and only undertaking light activity (not working or travelling by its own power or mount) counts that day as ½ day for the purposes of malnutrition.

A creature that only eats a poor meal and undertaking normal (working activity) counts that day as 2 days for the purposes of malnutrition.

For every two consequective days in which a creature eats a Good quality meal, its malnutrition points are reduced by 1. A creature whose malnutrition points are more than double it Constutition score and which eats a Good quality meal every day for 1 week can make a Fortitude save (DC 10+ (malnutition points/ Constitution score)) to reduce its malnutrition points by its Constitution score.



(I have um'd and ah'd about more of a permenent penalty for a player trying to game the system and save themselves some silver by trying to optimise the amount of food they eat, but I think, for my group at least, the threat of a rocket-launcher bashing following a "dude, no," will suffice.)

I have not even attempted to account fior weight loss in this system as I wouldn't even know where to begin with that, and it's probably a step beyond what is sane for even me to attempt.

Does this seem reasonable?




1Said camapign will be based around PF/3.5, but essentially its own thing. I plan to have Forage/Hunt/Fish as seperarte skills (the PCs will be given a lot more skill points than for a regular game, since this will be a lot more skill-based, but the numbers such that it makes Rolemaster unsuitable), which will garner raw food, which Cooking will transform into meals (1 raw food => poor meal, 2 food => common meal, 3 food => good meal, ostentibly).

2Yes, quick research says that "malnutrition" technically covers overnutrition as well as undernutrition, but I guess in that case there's no reasons you could just have that work the same way, but at negative Con scroe and it probably sufficies in any case for these purposes, I'm a necromancer, not a doctor, dammit!

[Saint-Just]

Sounds unrealistic and somewhat unnecessary to me.

First of all, your system inflicts malnutrition damage for people who eat common meals. That definitely should not happen - common meals are adequate, or they wouldn't be common.

Next - settled people who have been growing what they are growing for some time usually do not suffer from significant nutritional deficiencies. Potatoes and milk, or nixtamalized maize will go surprisingly long way. It's when agriculture patterns shift and something providing more calories but less micronutrients (rice, maize) gets introduced into new area you see common people getting malnutrition. On the other hand costly food is no guarantee against malnutrition if you are confined to a very narrow range of foods - British sailors definitely ate more meat than average British peasant (in fact hardtack and salted meat is a good example what exactly travel rations may look like). Or look up "rabbit starvation".

Finally - travel rations are probably equivalent to a common meal, not a good meal. They are compact and non-perishable, and that is likely to command some increase in price.

Now, in the city (unless it is besieged\in a middle of a plague or famine) I'd assume that Poor standard of living (4 sp\day) allows you to live with no malnutrition (presumably once per N days you eat common meals and that is enough). But if we're talking about people living off the land: unless environment is extreme (like desert or tundra) hunter-gatherers actually eat more varied diet than any other humans. If you eat everything edible you can find in the wilderness you'll end up eating scores - if not hundreds - of different species which will provide you a balanced diet with no additional effort on your part. Getting enough to eat should be a hard part, getting a balanced diet should not be.

[Clementx]

Rather than invent a new system, extend what we have already. StarvationAndThirst (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/environment.htm#starvationAndThirst)

For malnutrition (which should be common meals, not good), just remove natural healing after a given period (X), until well-fed for another given period (maybe 0.5X, or whatever your research on recovery indicates). Removing healing makes three things much more dangerous for 1HD tribespeople:

1) Every day injuries are nonlethal and gone from even a child peasant after a few hours of natural healing. Without that, a fall or heatwave will make you pass out.

2) Common scrapes and falls deal 1-2 hit points damage, fine if you recover one every night. Without that, you are a few days away from dying from infected wounds (dropping to -1).

3) Most diseases take weeks to kill even commoners and poisons are rarely debilitating, because they are restoring ability damage each night. Without that, a fever or look-alike berry is a death sentence.

Rather than develop a new mechanic, assess a chance of minor injury, major injury, and disease exposure per week or month, times the size of the tribe. Dial in the damage rolls or DCs so that a fed community's average saves and healing only allow 5% a year to die, moreso if you have a specific birthrate/want a greater challenge. Now look at those same damage rolls and diseases without healing.

Lastly, give your players a heads up. The tribe will have X losses per month if fed. They will have, say, 3X losses if poorly fed. They have 10X if starving. After all this math, your players will never let it reach the point where you have to actually roll on these tables.

[frogglesmash]

I'm gonna be pretty harsh, I don't like most of your system, the general gist of it is fine, but the specifics are lacking. One of the big problems that pops up right away is that your system allows for someone survive for an average of 100 days, or more without food, but in reality people can typically only survive 20-40 days. The penalties are another problem, penalties can't reduce your Con to zero, so starvation can never kill you outright in your system, personally I suggest a system that inflicts fatigue, exhaustion, then regular Str and Con damage.
As for the recovery time, if you follow my suggestions, then I'd say that removing the fatigue/exhaustion should be relatively easy, but the ability damage should probably not be directly affected by food intake. My final suggestion would be to reduce the types of meal to good and poor, with a poor meal being half a good meal. This is just for simplicity's sake.

[Aotrs Commander]

I'm gonna be pretty harsh, I don't like most of your system, the general gist of it is fine, but the specifics are lacking. One of the big problems that pops up right away is that your system allows for someone survive for an average of 100 days, or more without food, but in reality people can typically only survive 20-40 days. The penalties are another problem, penalties can't reduce your Con to zero, so starvation can never kill you outright in your system, personally I suggest a system that inflicts fatigue, exhaustion, then regular Str and Con damage.
As for the recovery time, if you follow my suggestions, then I'd say that removing the fatigue/exhaustion should be relatively easy, but the ability damage should probably not be directly affected by food intake. My final suggestion would be to reduce the types of meal to good and poor, with a poor meal being half a good meal. This is just for simplicity's sake.

These rules are intended to go on top of the existing thirst and starvation rules (so three days without food and you start starving properly (and you can absolutely die), with the intention if you're already undernorished, it'll hit much harder). I.e., an expansion of those rules, not a replacement.




Rather than invent a new system, extend what we have already. StarvationAndThirst (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/environment.htm#starvationAndThirst)

For malnutrition (which should be common meals, not good), just remove natural healing after a given period (X), until well-fed for another given period (maybe 0.5X, or whatever your research on recovery indicates). Removing healing makes three things much more dangerous for 1HD tribespeople:

1) Every day injuries are nonlethal and gone from even a child peasant after a few hours of natural healing. Without that, a fall or heatwave will make you pass out.

2) Common scrapes and falls deal 1-2 hit points damage, fine if you recover one every night. Without that, you are a few days away from dying from infected wounds (dropping to -1).

3) Most diseases take weeks to kill even commoners and poisons are rarely debilitating, because they are restoring ability damage each night. Without that, a fever or look-alike berry is a death sentence.

Natural healing will be the ONLY way of healing, though, since this will be a paleolithic society - there won't be any spellcasters, like, at all. (Gaining those abilities will be important plot events.) (I mean, for one, if there's magic healing, there's Create Water, which sort of starts to defeat the point of this being survival and stuff.)

Though there is some merit in the idea of slowing the rate of natural healing if not provided with sufficient food, that and fatigue/exhaustion I don't want to be the only effects.

(As for poison and diseases, well, I'm not limited by D&D existant poison/diseases, so virulence can be modified to whatever level is necessary; much easier to change them to fit the system than fit the system to that.)




Rather than develop a new mechanic, assess a chance of minor injury, major injury, and disease exposure per week or month, times the size of the tribe. Dial in the damage rolls or DCs so that a fed community's average saves and healing only allow 5% a year to die, moreso if you have a specific birthrate/want a greater challenge. Now look at those same damage rolls and diseases without healing.

Lastly, give your players a heads up. The tribe will have X losses per month if fed. They will have, say, 3X losses if poorly fed. They have 10X if starving. After all this math, your players will never let it reach the point where you have to actually roll on these tables.

That's too abstract; this adventure is ABOUT being the quartermaster, for once, and playing city-management (well, tribe management), so I want clear and nonabstracted rules. This is intended to be X-Com'd, in that the tribe will all, at the very least have names/genders/approximate ages (and the ability to be promoted to, Important Characters potentially), not an abstract population figure.

So when someone dies, it's not just "three tribes people die over night" it's "Ug, Thog and Kug die," and you, know, make it count. In short, no-one dies "offscreen."

I want them to be at the point, if things go badly, to be making the decision about which named NPCs get short rations and thus might die, and not "if we don't attain thus number of [stuff], this other number [tribe people] gets lower."

I'm looking at something on the order of fifty, maybe, to start with? (As a ball-park estimate to be further considered when I actually sit down and start doing it.)



So, let me take a step back (and let's just concetrate on the tribe bit, and once that's sorted, I can back port it to my own satisfation to regular rules) and lay out exactly what I intend to happen, and then we can see what mechanics can be fitted best to it.

Let me explain the overall concept. It is something I have wanted to forever - a completely alien campaign world. Like, no humans, no nothing (there's only a high probability, not a certainty, the tribe will even be humanoid), definitely no besitary. (I spent quite a long time taking to Physics People and doign research to get something that is mostly astronomically possible, if highly unlikely1. The world itself is tide-locked very distant from a (fantasy) variable star; vairable stars basically have their light obscured by dust clouds and the light levels drop. The conceit here is that this happens on a star which for Unspecified Mystery Reasons has a long enough life for life to develop on said planet, and said periods are long enough to allow civilisations to arise, have no idea what happens, get quite far into pre-FTL tech technology sometimes, and then the sun goes dark and there is, essentially an extinction of civilisastion.

There is room for lots of parties and campaigns at different periods in history (in fact, the world has had its first debut in the first quest of my Aotrs-Magical-Space-Liches-Does-Stargate-SG-1 party.)



This the primitive tribe - perhaps the remnants of a civilisation reduced to barbarism - are very localised and know little beyond their own tiny corner of the world. They will be forced out by a natural disaster (essentially, the swamp/lake they live by is below sea level and finally the sea break through (this is also not an incident without geological prescedent).

The tribe, then, has no option but to travel down The Long Road, an ancient roadway bilt by a civilisastion beyond their knowledge until they can find a new place to make their home (and all thje adventures along the way).

(The specific campaign idea for the world came to me while walking aong the raised cycleway that used to be a railroad, the road on its embankment snaking through the hills, with potential adventure locations off all over the place.)

Starting from such a low level means that basically everything they find is Treasure. (Less the trasure is a Bag of Holding, the treasure is literally A BAG.)

And, this being a world where magic exists, the superstitions of the tribe might not be actually unfounded fear; so if the PCs find and object that the players realise is a sword, they will not be able to just go "it's a sword!" and be able to pick it up and use it, because it might actually contain evil spirits or something. (I'm intended to actually have them find a sword early on, and it actually be of a material the race is highly allergic to (as if they were fey and this is Cold Iron or something) to hammer the point home. And so when I can't play on the player's actual ignorance of the world making for good explorative and investigative gameplay, I can play on their paranoia verses theit meta-knowledge a little bit as well. Investigation and survival are the aims here, rather than particularly combat2.

(I very strongly considered whether Rolemaster would be a better fit for this - it's works much better for the Aotrs-exploration party, being fundementally skill-based), but eventually elected that doing something X-Com-like (to the point of breaking down level progression such that there are maybe four or five steps between levels) would be easier to manage at the size of characters involved, as RM would become too cumbersome at those sort numbers; it's just quicker to do it in 3.x (well, modifed 3.Aotrs, anyway)).



Thus, I intend to have Food be a reward resource, basically, a bit like gold would be normally (except obviously, it gets used up). So if our tribe find some berries, or kill A Thing, instead of getting useless shiny metal, they get, like, 20 Food for a cow-equivilent or something. I am shamelessly nicking the idea from Frostpunk of having to process the food to make it better. I was just going to have food as a single resource, but Saint-Just convinced me that I ought to have rather several food resources, which must be combined (by the people with Cooking skill - the finite number of potentially kill-able people with Cooking skill!) to make a meal.

This is important, because carrying capacity is at a premimum. What kind of long-term carrying ability did neolithic peoples have?Good question, but not a lot (and will require research). These people don't have carts, nor beasts of burden (the tribe is essentially fishers/foragers, without farming, not that they would be in place to do that anyway) anyway; bags and sacks are something that they haven't, like invented. They'll have to carry water (I am cutting a break here and am going to say they will be able to carry that in natural goards they had at the village.) I think from vaguely looking up there is there are those poles you carry across you shoulder that you tie, like game or buckets or little sacks too maybe (I cannot for the unlife of me remember the proper name to look it up), if they're not too modern.

So, the idea is that food preparation essentially increase the amount of food units carried, and also rewards being smart about what is carried along.



So, nominal possible system.

Assumption based off of the meal costs (becaus it is as good a starting point as any) that proper food intake is 5 meal units containing 3 food resources.

A food resource on its own is worth 1 meal unit (of one food type)

So, you would need two different type of Food resource points ([animal] and [plant]?) to make 3 meal units (of two food types)

Three different food resources could be combined to give 5 meal units (of the three types).



So, with that system in place, the question becomes then (bringing us back to the topic of the thread) what happens when a character in the tribe doesn't sufficient meal units per day, and how does it affect the tribe and how are the PCs going to distribute the food points (because I want them to be making those decisions) with that in mind?

(Do they keep the good food for themselves and/or the foragers to hoepfully keep them in better shape for finding more? Do they give it to the children or the weak and infirm so they don't die? That sort of Hard Decision with No Right Answer which is always the most fun one.)

The aforementioned was the first pass at that.



1Have had to hand-wave why the solar winds from the star haven't blown the atmosphere off, but without being able not find a way to even begin Maths how solar wind works, "exotic atmospheric elements" was my fall-back.

1For example, if I tell the PCs that to get the Hot Ghost (which makes things burn) - with the appropriate [craft] skill which is going to be a thing - by rubbing sticks together (plus some other stuff) while doing a chant, it might just be primitive superstition on making a fire or they might actually be summoning some form of fire elemental every time they make a torch, sorry, I mean "club where a hot ghost lives." A level where neither PCs nor the players can be entirely sure whether something is ACTUALLY magic or not. (As a counter to meta-knowledge, since even with the best will in the world, it's much easier for the purposes of experimentation and exploration and discovery is you're genuinely ignorance, not just roleplaying it.)

[Hellpyre]

How much experience do you have with other rules systems? It seems like at this point you've gone far enough into wanting something different than what the d20 experience will provide that it will prove more of a handicap than a help. Unless this is intended to be a fairly short campaign (or campaign arc), it seems like the growth in power that the d20 system provides will probably end up fighting with the sense of struggle for survival. This honestly sounds like a place where maybe a Cypher sytem game would do more to help drive the game in the ways you seem to want.

(All advice given with the caveat that you know your group better than I do.)

[Missing]

Sounds like an interesting world/campaign idea.

A couple things jump out at me though.
-No Bags? I feel like if the tribe has been settled for long enough that their starting area is all they know, suggesting a few generations if not longer, they would have developed some methods of storage/transportation. Sure no pack animals but animal skin bags, bags woven from reeds/vines etc. They would have some way of carrying goods/tools/food

-On the food types I agree that three is a good idea. Maybe
[Protiens] - meats, fish, eggs, nuts, insects etc
[Vegetation] - Fruits and vegetables, fungi, edible grasses etc
[Carbohydrates] - Starches (potatoes etc), wild cereals etc (there is evidence that many nomadic tribes made use of flours too)


Just my 2cp

[Pugwampy]

I think you are overthinking and adding too much admin .

I say if players eaten and drank once a day that should be fine .

[Aotrs Commander]

How much experience do you have with other rules systems? It seems like at this point you've gone far enough into wanting something different than what the d20 experience will provide that it will prove more of a handicap than a help. Unless this is intended to be a fairly short campaign (or campaign arc), it seems like the growth in power that the d20 system provides will probably end up fighting with the sense of struggle for survival. This honestly sounds like a place where maybe a Cypher sytem game would do more to help drive the game in the ways you seem to want.

(All advice given with the caveat that you know your group better than I do.)

It is far easier to take a hatchet to a system I'm intimately familiar with to make some modifications, especially since the campaign world (and monsters) will have applications outside the campaign. As I say, I did consider Rolemaster as my other go-to standard, but the scale would mean just as much modification. 3.x/PF/3.Aotrs will make it somewhat easier to handle the tribe. (Just in that it is so much quicker to generate the stats.)

As I say, I nominally intended for this to be a bit more X-Com-like than D&D in feel, so I will likely be futzing with the advancement anyway, such that full level increases will be spaced apart. (This stuff WILL be specific to that campaign.)

Rules-smithing is something I naturally do as a matter of course, so I have no problems with sinking all the work in (else I wouldn't start major projects like this in the first place).




Sounds like an interesting world/campaign idea.

A couple things jump out at me though.
-No Bags? I feel like if the tribe has been settled for long enough that their starting area is all they know, suggesting a few generations if not longer, they would have developed some methods of storage/transportation. Sure no pack animals but animal skin bags, bags woven from reeds/vines etc. They would have some way of carrying goods/tools/food

Well, that's the big question, isn't it? DID they have such things that far back? The sort of period I'm looking at (actually, neolithic might even be too late, epipaleolithic or even upper paleololithic might be closer) is well-past recorded history and thus far, I have not been able to adequately date when bags were invented yet (though I have made only curosory efforts and not a concerted effort yet). If I can find some reasonable estimation (at the moment, 2500BC for certain and some suggestion of neolithic), then they will have sacks or something of some sort (seems likely they will, though they are unlikely to be very effieicent). (Yes, I know this being an alien world I can say what I like, but that cuts both ways and I could say there was nothing suitable to weave from - so as is so often the case with my worlds, alien or otherwise, a good look at history will serve as the basis to jump up from.)



Edit: Aha! (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96tzi) Information.

Okay, I feel like, while this is really at the late end of the period I'm looking at, it seem very much like there isn't likely to be a much better source of data than Ötzi the Iceman to base around, does it? So, can't look that gift-horse in the mouth, can I?

So, this would suggest that (assuming that the tribe could find appropriate leather equivilents, so I could afford maybe a step down if I wanted), cloak, belt, shoes, pouch, leggings, loincloth... Huh, flint-tipped arrows (in a quiver) and a longbow (wow), copper axe, stone knife; baskets with rations (berries and dried meat), firelighting kit... Something that was either a backpack (dammit) or part of his snow-shoes....

Dude was practically an adventurer, wasn't he?

So, there we go. Bags and maybe EVEN really primitive backpacks might be in. Along with bows. Huh.



Thank you for spurring me to that little search Missing, as finding that is going to be pretty much the most useful source I data I could reasonable expect!





-On the food types I agree that three is a good idea. Maybe
[Protiens] - meats, fish, eggs, nuts, insects etc
[Vegetation] - Fruits and vegetables, fungi, edible grasses etc
[Carbohydrates] - Starches (potatoes etc), wild cereals etc (there is evidence that many nomadic tribes made use of flours too)

Just my 2cp

I would reckon on about four types of Food, which would be nominally enough to craft a good meal with one type spare. Names have to be simpler, though, one of the things I want to do is try and use as many very simple, one-syllable terms, just to try and keep some of the primitive flavour, which is why my first pass included [animal] and [plant].

(In brackets currently, because at the moment, this being rather alien, I don't want to commit necessarily even to that in terms of psyisology until I get down to actually starting to fully populate with species. (As it is a given there are ambulatory creatures [animals] and static life [plants] (which will use photosynethesis), but, sort of beyond that, it's still a bit of an open book as to what kingdoms there are (there may not be just the main three like on Earth - and yes taxonomic classification is something I consider when doing this, it's all part of the fun!)

The following the the entire list of concrete Stuff That Exists at the moment officially - which is not much.


Domain: “EM insubstanitals”

Kingdom: ??


Phylum: ??



Subphylum: ??




Class: ??





Order: ??






Family: ??







Genus: ??








Species: “shadow creatures”
Domain: ??

Unranked: “fungi-equivilents”

Kingdom: “primative plants/algae”


Unranked: “dark side surface psuedo-algae”

Kingdom: “plants”

Kingdom: “Animals”


Phylum: ??



Subphylum: “vertebrate comb jellies”




Class: “marine forms” (multiple?)




Class: “magic floating forms”





Order: ??






Family: ??







Genus: ??








Species: “demon brains”





Order: ??






Family: ??







Genus: ??








Species: “ghost jellies”





Order: “shelled flyers”


Phylum: ??



Subphylum: “vertebrates?”




Class: ??





Order: ??






Family: ??







Genus: ??








Species: “plateau city near-humanoids”

Now, I'm working on the basis there will be some sort of fish-analogue in the swamp, some sort of grasses/shrubs (though what form they take might not be so terrestrial) and the PC's tribes race, which may be humanoid, and only porbbaly vertebrates, but beyond that, I'm not ruling anything out if inspiration strikes me...!)




I think you are overthinking and adding too much admin .

I say if players eaten and drank once a day that should be fine .

The admin is the whole POINT, though. Which is to deliberately and explictly NOT mostly hand-wave away the stuff D&D and RPGs in general hand-wave away as unimportant to the murder-hoboing and make it the central focus, around which the exploration aspect is supporting. You're not exploring the Bad Rock Scary Place looking for shinies, you're entering it to try and find food, potable water and/or stuff to help the transportation of stuff and only at the bottom Better Spears.

[Hellpyre]

Perhaps as food groups, something like [meat] [grain] [roots] [fruit] as general categories, with the description being simple but broadly applicable? It might also be helpful to develop a system for water contamination to go the whole distance, as that's a big concern for any group on the move in unfamiliar territory. Figure on disease like penalties for non-potable water, and try and contrast them with malnutritiin by being a concern that is less certain, but quicker to harm. You may also need to figure out what level of access they have to basic tools - a stone water vessel is labor- but not industry-intensive, but a clay jug is simple if you know clay hardens from fire. Either one would be the first priority for a leader, as a way to boil water is quite possibly the difference between survival and death by dysentery for the entire tribe. What level of innovation are you willing to let the players engage in? Do you need a quick and dirty way to judge micronutrients in gathered food to see if someone gets ill from that, or is that too far involved to help with engagement?

[Aotrs Commander]

Perhaps as food groups, something like [meat] [grain] [roots] [fruit] as general categories, with the description being simple but broadly applicable?

Seems like a good basis to start with (subject to actual flora!)


It might also be helpful to develop a system for water contamination to go the whole distance, as that's a big concern for any group on the move in unfamiliar territory. Figure on disease like penalties for non-potable water, and try and contrast them with malnutritiin by being a concern that is less certain, but quicker to harm.

I had not considered that (partly because I'm still in the early stages), but I will put that on the to-do list.


You may also need to figure out what level of access they have to basic tools - a stone water vessel is labor- but not industry-intensive, but a clay jug is simple if you know clay hardens from fire. Either one would be the first priority for a leader, as a way to boil water is quite possibly the difference between survival and death by dysentery for the entire tribe.

I am intending to have craft skills (not necessarily by the PCs, though they will also be used in an analytical fashion) play an important part, and I've nominally assigned them to Toolmaking (Metal) - which would apparently be copper, thanks Ötzi - ([Plant]) - fibres and such - ([Animal]) - hides, sinew, bones etc - and (Stone) - knapping and pottery and stuff. (Plus, of course, "summon hot ghost...!") I think that the downtime system in Pathfinder can be turned towards some of ths purpose, with a few tweaks.

(My nominal plan is that the PCs and the tribe will be having to evacuate in a hurry when the hungry swamp (which they will see as a sort of deity, because animisim) rises to eat the village, so I should be able to control to some extent what they start with and go from there. But I suspect like with a lot of things, exact number will be required to be played with when done in anger.)

Pottery will require some research into what they could actually make with it, I think, since obviously on the move, they won't be able to make kilns, and finding suitable clay (assuming that there was clay where they started to use) might be itself a task. (I had already sort of decided that water was going to be transported in a type of wood-ish naturally-occurring gourd, rather than in pots before I'd looked into stuff like how far back pottery went. This will be better for the PCs to start with, I think, since it'll be less frangible and easier to transport.)

(Though the article I ust looked at on the oldest pottery discovered mentioned that cooked food contains more energy than uncooked food, so its nice to have my idea about meal-making be genuinely justified!)


What level of innovation are you willing to let the players engage in?

Some degree, of course (part of the point), though the whole "it might actually be fire elemental summoning not mundane starting a fire" thing exists so I have a potential response if they immediately try to "invent" things that would be massively out of line for the time period using their player knowledge. (If I run this for my Monday group, he majority of them are engineers and technical types, which might make it... Interesting... in that regard!) I mean, using stuff they have in a creative way, fine, trying to "invent" gunpowder or the wheel (having just looked that one up - 3500BC, well ahead of where I'm aiming for), not fine, if you follow my reasoning.

As and when they find (not if, they definitely will) futuristic technology (like wheels or iron pots...!) then some sort of back-engineering will of course be allowed and indeed expected. (It is likely how I will have them learn magic and such.) One of the reasons I want to keep them very low tech to start with is that means there's more to reward them with.


Do you need a quick and dirty way to judge micronutrients in gathered food to see if someone gets ill from that, or is that too far involved to help with engagement?

I think the level of technology is too primitive for that to be something they could do (on top of the entirely alien environment). Skill checks will suffice, I think to get them the 90% of the way as far as "it seems edible," at which point, there's experimentation.

I also only intend on Bad Food Stuff et al to be, like, basically scripted, like an encounter hazard, rather than just something they would pick up from a random forage check, if that makes any sense - it will always be something the PCs will be deciding to try or not.

(On consideration, even if I did something for when someone rolls a nat 1 on forage checks or something (under our usual skill rules, nat 1 merely counts as -10, though), I'd allow other characters to check first and maybe bring it to the PCs before deciding to eat it.)

[Missing]

Well, that's the big question, isn't it? DID they have such things that far back? The sort of period I'm looking at (actually, neolithic might even be too late, epipaleolithic or even upper paleololithic might be closer) is well-past recorded history and thus far, I have not been able to adequately date when bags were invented yet (though I have made only curosory efforts and not a concerted effort yet). If I can find some reasonable estimation (at the moment, 2500BC for certain and some suggestion of neolithic), then they will have sacks or something of some sort (seems likely they will, though they are unlikely to be very effieicent). (Yes, I know this being an alien world I can say what I like, but that cuts both ways and I could say there was nothing suitable to weave from - so as is so often the case with my worlds, alien or otherwise, a good look at history will serve as the basis to jump up from.)



Edit: Aha! (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96tzi) Information.

Okay, I feel like, while this is really at the late end of the period I'm looking at, it seem very much like there isn't likely to be a much better source of data than Ötzi the Iceman to base around, does it? So, can't look that gift-horse in the mouth, can I?

So, this would suggest that (assuming that the tribe could find appropriate leather equivilents, so I could afford maybe a step down if I wanted), cloak, belt, shoes, pouch, leggings, loincloth... Huh, flint-tipped arrows (in a quiver) and a longbow (wow), copper axe, stone knife; baskets with rations (berries and dried meat), firelighting kit... Something that was either a backpack (dammit) or part of his snow-shoes....

Dude was practically an adventurer, wasn't he?

So, there we go. Bags and maybe EVEN really primitive backpacks might be in. Along with bows. Huh.



Thank you for spurring me to that little search Missing, as finding that is going to be pretty much the most useful source I data I could reasonable expect!




Happy to help and thats what i love about archeaology, so much information from one site, in this case one individual.

Also if you're looking at ~2500 B.C.E. be aware that the Ancient Egyptians had unified Upper and Lower egypt and had begun thier first period of dynastic rule so you may want to look at going even more ancient. Maybe ~4000BCE?

EDIT: That article on Otiz (Ice Man) you linked is super interesting too :smallbiggrin: