Ice Age campaign

[Ashtagon]

I'm doing some preliminary work for an Ice Age campaign, trying to stay reasonably close to historical accuracy for a game set in Europe about 50,000 years ago, at the height of the Ice Age.

For playable races, I expect to have humans (stats are obvious), Neanderthals, and Denisovans.

I know there is a Neanderthal race in Frostburn, but how close is that interpretation to "real" Neanderthals? What changes might need to be made?

As for Denisovans, my first choice would be to treat them as "half-Neanderthals", but is there enough archaeological/palaeontological evidence to suggest something else?

Are there any other races that might work? All my research suggests that other hominids were either too far geographically or chronologically to work for the planned setting.

[Metastachydium]

Denisovans were closer to Neanderthals than to modern humans, if I'm not mistaken, and interbred with them quite a lot. They were definitley not hybrids of the other two species, though.

As for the Frostburn Neanderthals, their traits are really trying to hammer home the idea that they are dumb brutes, but archeological evidence does not really suggest that this was actually the case.

[Palanan]

Originally Posted by Ashtagon
I know there is a Neanderthal race in Frostburn, but how close is that interpretation to "real" Neanderthals? What changes might need to be made?

If you really want historically accurate Neanderthals, your best bet is to close Frostburn and keep it closed. Their version of the Neanderthals is a sad caricature at best, and not worth a moment of anyone's time.

In terms of mental capacity, real Neanderthals were very close to humans, although they seem to have been much more conservative in terms of lithic technology. Their basic toolkit remained the same for over a hundred thousand years, so they weren't innovators in the same way that AMH were.

As for Denisovans, much less is known, but Metastachydium is correct that they were a coequal species to Neanderthals and humans, although likely closer to Neanderthals. There's at least one known Neanderthal/Denisovan hybrid, but there's also some thought that Denisovans may have contributed genes for high-altitude tolerance to early human populations in the Himalayan region.

[Notafish]

Given that there's evidence of interbreeding between the various prehistoric hominids, it might make more sense to have "race" represent more cultural and physical differences due to family heritage/lifestyle than deep biological differences. I'm not sure how prolific early hominids were, but I'm sure they were much less dominant in the ecosystem than today, even at the point where the societies were large enough to hunt species to extinction. Nomadic tribes could plausibly go for generations without meeting or competing with other tribes for space or resources, especially colder regions.

[Ashtagon]

Given that there's evidence of interbreeding between the various prehistoric hominids, it might make more sense to have "race" represent more cultural and physical differences due to family heritage/lifestyle than deep biological differences. I'm not sure how prolific early hominids were, but I'm sure they were much less dominant in the ecosystem than today, even at the point where the societies were large enough to hunt species to extinction. Nomadic tribes could plausibly go for generations without meeting or competing with other tribes for space or resources, especially colder regions.

Sure, but given that D&D humans breed with anything, and given that Denisovans and Neanderthals are different races (species) in both D&D terms and biology terms (and yeah, sociological terms too), I have no problem with defining them as different races for game purposes.

[Palanan]

Originally Posted by not_a_fish
Given that there's evidence of interbreeding between the various prehistoric hominids, it might make more sense to have "race" represent more cultural and physical differences due to family heritage/lifestyle than deep biological differences.

Interbreeding among species doesn’t invalidate the species themselves. And the physical differences between AMH and Neanderthals were indeed deep enough to qualify as species-level.

[Notafish]

Sure, but given that D&D humans breed with anything, and given that Denisovans and Neanderthals are different races (species) in both D&D terms and biology terms (and yeah, sociological terms too), I have no problem with defining them as different races for game purposes.

Right, I guess what I'm saying is that if +2Str/-2 INT (or whatever) isn't treated as a description of biological capacity but rather an abstraction of different cultural heritage (of which genetics is just a part), I'm not sure there's an issue with using Frostburn Neandrathals or Orcs and Half-Orcs as templates for non-human hominids if the setting has most Homo Sapien societies as having more social structures that are recognizably human in contemporary times, like chiefs, an oral tradition, or agriculture and Neanderthals, etc. being odd-by-modern standards (pride/pack social structures rather than tribes; exclusively herbivorous gatherers , etc.), or different from the human tribes in the campaign setting (e.g., hunter-gatherers vs. pastoralists). If all the races in the setting have roughly similar lifestyles, I'm not sure that D&D-style race-associated stat modifications are particularly compatible with with what's known from the archaeological record.

Put another way, if I were a paleolithic hunter-gatherer, I wouldn't likely think about a tribe of Neanderthals living in the neighboring valley as "Neanderthals", but "the short-armed people" or "the guys with the weird axes that we fought with last winter", or "the Boar tribe". I might be xenophobic about them, but I don't think that anyone in the time period would have the geographic knowledge or experience with multiple tribes and languages to even conceive of "race" as a framework for describing peoples.

[Palanan]

Originally Posted by Ashtagon
All my research suggests that other hominids were either too far geographically or chronologically to work for the planned setting.

Out of curiosity, what sources are you using for this?

[Maat Mons]

If you're only going to have 3 playable races, it's pretty easy to adjust the baseline for power to be whatever you want. For example, you could adopt the Pathfinder standard of a net +2 to ability scores. This could allow you to have differences in their stats without needing to assign penalties. Which means you wouldn't have to, for example, make one races "the dumb ones."

The only info I can find about Denisovans that seems helpful in assigning game traits to them is vague indications that they may have had physical adaptations to high altitude and cold. Though it seems, lived in jungle regions too, and you might want to make Neanderthal "the cold-adapted ones," so leaning too much into the cold thing with Denisovans might not be the best move.

For Humans, maybe throw out the normal D&D stats and brew up your own Human race. In 3.5, Humans is generally considered the most powerful race, so leaving it as-is might disincentives players from trying the other races you make. For Human traits, I'd be tempted to assign us some sort of social benefits, since we're the ones who ultimately wound up forming big complex societies. Maybe also some disease resistance, because living in big complex societies kind of exposes you to lots of diseases.

Crafting is probably going to be a big deal in an ice-age game. I think it would be interesting to give every race some sort of crafting-related benefit, but give Humans something that encourages a wider variety of different crafts than the other two. From what I understand, we were the ones who tended to experiment with different things.

[Palanan]

Originally Posted by Ashtagon
Are there any other races that might work? All my research suggests that other hominids were either too far geographically or chronologically to work for the planned setting.

If you want a Small race, you can add an equivalent to Homo floresiensis. They were extant at the same time that you’re setting this, and while Flores is a long way from Europe, there are a couple plausible ways for a similar population to exist in your game—either a parallel case of insular dwarfism, or a closely related species that reached Europe via the Sahara Pump.

Either way, I’d say it's the easiest and most plausible option for adding another species, and it also fits nicely into expectations for the fantasy genre.

.

[Metastachydium]

Homo heidelbergensis might also be on the table. Many argue that H. h. populations probably survived in Europe for long enough to coexist with the other three.
Also, while contact between modern humans/Neanderthals/Denisovans and Homo erectus probably never really happened, H. e. still existed in Southeast Asia for a while after the "big three" appeared.
How interesting/viable these would be as bases for races, I don't know. But there's that.