/tg/ - Traditional Games

>>205554

You know, that would be cool. I wouldn't even need orcs because I can play as a caveman.

Maybe it could be even set in a pre Prometeus age in some sort of grecoroman setting, with huge as fuck monsters, tricking gods and naked people because they had no civilization.

>>205554

> How come? It's not like there was no appeal to it:

I think paleolithic fantasy is missing from the cannon of fantasy due to it's "unremarkable" nature, that isn't to say it isn't bad-ass or uninteresting but rather, at a surface level glance there isn't much "fantasy" to it so much as brutal reality. Survival is the main theme rather than heroism or some abstract philosophy over the nature of civilization. Most of those abstract themes would be inappropriate to port into a paleolithic context.

It's also inherently masculine and right-wing at a fundamental and subconscious level. There is no room for ideas of social progress, for equality and tolerance, for the expansion of ideas or the abandonment for traditions for a brave new world. There is the man, his needs and the ever-present threat of nature-itself which rather than something man must preserve is a constant enemy which he must destroy and manipulate to survive. There is no economy of right and wrong only of sweat and blood. You want to live in that cave? You must kill the bear and steal its home. You want to eat, you must kill the elk and steal its flesh. You want companionship, you must kill those men and steal their daughters. You can make peace with your neighbor and trade some of your goods for some of theirs rather than killing them but those goods are only acquired by killing and stealing from somewhere else.

Law is cruel and primitive and mercy extends only to those in your immediate family. There is no being nice, only being alive.

Sometimes you will have plenty, most times you will not.

And in an age where most fantasy is written by women and leftists, a world like this is more horrifying than romantic.

> If not, then I'd actually consider writing one with you guys.

I was working on one a little while back called Golgotha (the place of the skull) set in the valley of a large mountain range. I'll post a picture of the primitive map I was working on after I get back from Christmas lunch.

A basic run down as that the players would play a tribe of paleolithic men, all outcasts from the surrounding tribes coming together in a Romulean way to form their own vagabond clan. At the foot of the fountains and across the valley were deep forests full of all manner of wild and unfightable dire-beasts that of course, there was no choice but to fight. A race of man-eating elves inhabited the deepest parts of the forests, they were advanced only in magic which would be shamanistic, orgiastic and unpredictable. The elves had a distinctly esoteric mystery religion of having to be initiated from one level to the next to learn anything about how the world and spirits worked and how they could be manipulated.

Human religion was more traditionally minded with a great spirit who gave bounty to the honorable and courageous and gave hardship to the cowardly and undeserving, forbidding magic as the work of evil spirits that would as soon betray you as aid you, and so not to be trusted.

I didn't go anywhere with it because I couldn't nail down the tribe mechanics (making it feel like you actually operated as a unit) and once I started getting into the exchange rate of food for a woman I felt like pursuing it would get me accused of trying to go full magical realm rather than realistic about how women would be treated in a paleolithic setting.

>>205574

Work on it again, but instead of using elves I'd say use the different species of homo sapiens, erectus (us), neanderthals, and whatnot, then differentiate them the way you were going to differentiate the elves or whatever other races you were going to use.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo

Also merry christmas

>>205554

I remember some pdf floating around, for a game (so setting and rules) entirely set in the stone age. I can't find it now.

>>205574

>>205578

>It's also inherently masculine and right-wing at a fundamental and subconscious level.

>And in an age where most fantasy is written by women and leftists, a world like this is more horrifying than romantic.

That's not so bad now, though, is it? Not like we have to go all MRA on this. It'll be masculine, yes, but that doesn't mean women can't be awesome, even in a "manly" way, if they are special.

>Law is cruel and primitive and mercy extends only to those in your immediate family. There is no being nice, only being alive.

Also means that acts of kindness carry a lot more weight, which could be nice.

>A race of man-eating elves inhabited the deepest parts of the forests, they were advanced only in magic which would be shamanistic, orgiastic and unpredictable. The elves had a distinctly esoteric mystery religion of having to be initiated from one level to the next to learn anything about how the world and spirits worked and how they could be manipulated.

I like that idea. Sounds scary as hell, actually.

I like your entire project. It sounds pretty damn cool, and like what I had in mind.

>>205583

>That's not so bad now, though, is it?

It means if you're conservatively minded and male then there really isn't anything being produced in science-fiction or fantasy that will appeal to you. We're stuck reading Heinlein, Tolkien, Howard and Lovecraft. As great as they are these authors are half-to-a-full century old. There are some left leaning folks producing good literature, don't get me wrong, but sifting through sjw propaganda (which has been in fantasy and sci-fi since at least the late 70's) and thinly veiled romance novels that are pretending to be fantasy adventure books gets wearisome, very quickly.

> It'll be masculine, yes, but that doesn't mean women can't be awesome, even in a "manly" way

Are you some kind of misogynist who wants women to be nothing more than a man with ass and tits? Women have their own strengths and assets apart from what men have. Feminine strength is vastly different from masculine strength. Motherhood/wifeliness, social acuity, empathy and support are all things women can master and utilize as tools to gain advantage in their lives, but these skill sets do not translate into the world of hunting mammoths. Woman could easily dominate in the tribal, inter-personal sphere or even in the craftsmanship of tools, clothing and other necessities but that's not where the action is and is more suited to settings where civilization actually exists as the responsibilities and consequences of the government of ones household become more pronounced.

> Also means that acts of kindness carry a lot more weight, which could be nice.

> everyone should get along and appreciate one another

You're telling me that in a situation where it's me, my brother, maybe a close friend and all our wives and kids in a cave in the woods and some stranger shows up and starts offering us gifts it wouldn't be the natural response to view that person with the utmost suspicion? He might murder us in our sleep and take our women. Respect is built on mutual recognition of worth. People recognize you as honorable after you have dealt fairly with them, exchanging a mutually beneficial relationship with them, where neither becomes reliant on the other but they make life easier for each other. "Kindness" ignores honor in favor of nice-feelings. Even in the best case scenerio where innocence of intent can be presumed if you let that person in close they might show their kindness to someone who might not have good intentions for you. Kindness to a threat is as bad being an enemy yourself. No there is no place for kindness in the primeval world, again except for within the close-bond of the family. This is why treason has and always been a capital offense because it is the deepest kind of betrayal.

> I like that idea. Sounds scary as hell, actually.I like your entire project. It sounds pretty damn cool.

Thank you very much for saying so

Dark Sun has metal as very rare but doesn't seem paleothic to me.

>>205578

The thing is though, even though it's set in a reality base, it's still going to have a fantastical edge to it. You have cannibalistic elf shamans? Look through the different species and mold one of them into it, I'd go for homo nadeli. They were only recently found in a shallow cave this year, in what was we call the "star chamber." Sounds like a nice ritualistic slaughteroom to me.

The Neanderthals would obviously be a bit of an orc stand-in. Homo floresiensis remains are hobbitlike in stature, they'd easily fit into a tribe or race of nimble/sneaky cavemen. Homo habilis had a much larger cranium than others and are thought to have created many fossils of stone tools, they could be crafters/dwarflike in culture.

And then you could have the mysterious daunting Homo erectus, a new tribe that stands tall and has harnessed the use of fire, shaking things up in Golgotha with their arrival.

>>205591

*remains of stone tools

>>205587

>Are you some kind of misogynist who wants women to be nothing more than a man with ass and tits?

Nope, I'm a misogynist who assumes that women can get good at fighting. They'll have a harder time getting good at it, they will never be as good at it as a man who trained as long as them, but they can pull it off. Most won't, and that doesn't mean they are worthless, you're correct about that.

>>205598

> Nope, I'm a misogynist who assumes that women can get good at fighting.

Women can, with training get good at fighting other women and with the help of (relatively) advanced technology and animal domestication can become competent hunters but we're talking about a paleolithic context here where people aren't "getting good" at fighting they simply are fighting. There are no martial arts, no strength training or weight lifting. Your muscles will be as big as the calories you can find will support and whatever little further than that genetics can get you.When an "axe" is a stone in your hand and the only common ranged attack is a thrown spear (or a very a primitive bow) nobody is going to be handing them off to women except to defend the cave while the men are hunting. there is a much more important duty to be found in raising children, preparing food, maintaining clothes and equipment and processing raw materials (such as making rope from plant fiber).

> they will never be as good at it as a man who trained as long as them

> peleolithic

> training

There is no training, there is learning to hunt the elk from your father, hunting the elk to live and fighting off lions that wants to eat your children. The skills you pick up are only the natural ones you develop over time doing this week in, week out. Fighting other humans is something you would avoid except where it is necessary for your own survival because unlike a mountain lion, that can be ambushed and trapped before it kills you and your loved ones, they have tools which they can manipulate in unpredictable ways, they can outsmart you and if they're playing the long-game they can outbreed you and hunt to deny you resources. the only thing about as dangerous as fighting humans is fighting a wolf-pack. There just is no context here for developing any kind of fighting technique outside of general tactics for tribal warfare that might be passed down orally from a grandfather to a grandchild.

On another note, requests for fauna in the game, maybe?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megatherium

Badass sloth the size of an elephant.

>>205685

>perhaps i am misreading this but you seem to equate a masculine wold to one that would repressed women.

Problem is, you can ask five people what they regard as a masculine world and you'd get ten answers. I guess three of these answers would be reasonable.

>Also are you a left pollack

Nope, libertarian. We're big on this whole opportunity-thing, and we seldomly rule out that someone can achieve something, against all odds. We don't give them affirmative action until they succeed in becoming the world's first armless piano-player, unlike dirty, deceptive leftists.

>Woman hypothetically could fight like any psycho monkey but strictly speaking they would be greatly less effective because differences in muscle mass and adaptation.

>Also why would say a woman or any person for that matter, choose to hunt or fight if there was no need to, it's an unnecessary risk.

One word: Outliers. Sexual dimorphism or not, I don't rule out that somewhere, a girl is actually born strong enough to compete with some guys. I also don't rule out that sometime in the paleolithic, some crazy guy started hunting wolves for fun. If these outliers are conceivable, then I think they should be playable, because face it, we all want to play outliers, not the average berrypicker.

By the way, I'm doing strength sports. I know better than most people what women can achieve. Outlifting a guy is possible for a women, but outlifting a guy who actually trains is hard as fuck, even if she's taking steroids. None of that is applicable to the paleolithic, for a few reasons, but yeah.

>>205698

>applicable

Directly applicable, I mean.

>>205663

I'd be happy to make a few pieces, Although given how the set in stone Idea hasn't come out yet I'm assuming /tg/ has these situations:

1. Europe transitioning into the Neolithic with the Arrival of wheat farmers from the south and the beginning of trade

2. The era that we Homo Sapiens fucked the Neanderthals into extinction

3. Not a specific time period but just a fuckton of Hominid species but no modern Humans

As for Fluff #3 doesn't really allow that because all those Hominids could barely make grunts to indicate mood.

So allow me to increase on OP's Idea with this other situation, probably one of the most badass period of Human development, the migration from a warm comfortable tropical climate to a Harsh unforgiving Cold environment on the onset of the Ice Age (The different quotes are different tribes/ viewpoints):

>Life was good in the land for as long as it was; but the droughts came and we migrated North so the elders say. The new land was cold and learned from the Ugly Men we put furs on ourselves to protect against the great white beast, the Red demon was the only other way to protect ourselves from the Great White Beast.

>The Great river of such size you cannot see the other bank had fat beasts in the waters our men hunted, the Fat beasts were more numerous than the Horned Wanderers. But one of the Hunters came back with news of a new land to the west along the Ice sheet with many Beasts a plenty for out people to live on.

>We had learned to hunt the Giants, they proudly marched with their Tusks the size of trees but by the Spirits we had stricken them down. But the Giants have left the Land, and many other large beasts. Our people starve and the other tribes who we exchanged mates now steal from us what little we have, by the spirits of the North lights we cannot allow this to happen. Our spears for beasts now kill whatever they find be they Cave Beast or Man, our hunger is great and we will consume whatever the spirits guide to us

probably shitty and not official but meant to give general Ideas.

>>205736

Now that I think about it a Neolithic china with the Mountainous west parts being the hubub with the settlements being introduced later would be neato.

To add a little more fantasy to it, what about introducing werewolves and wendigos? Werewolves could be shamans who put on a talisman to transform, and wendigos can be safely copypasted from native american mythology. I think both could fit in nicely.

>>205554

Because the concept's viability dies almost instantly. Seriously, now, try to think up an entire campaign's worth of paleolithic adventures. No distinct kingdoms or nations, no politics, limited stealth, no ruins or dungeons to delve through, very little treasure worth having, no economy which means your default reward is gone and there's another subset of stories you can't tell, no guilds, no governments, no organized warfare, and none of it is replaced by anything. The staples of encounter, adventure, and campaign design haven't been replaced by new and more interesting, or at least more novel, things. They're just gone. You'll struggle to reach even one campaign's worth of interesting plots, and a good system should be able to support more than just one campaign.

>Erectus characters who are faster, more skillful and more intelligent

Homo erectus was so stupid that modern humans (i.e. our players) would have difficulty dumbing themselves down enough to portray them. We're talking people with a 100-word vocabulary who cannot, even after one million years, figure out how to make anything more complex than a chipped rock tied to a stick. Any homo sapiens player can, in a year, become as effective a toolmaker as a homo erectus genius became through their entire life. And you want these to be our smart race?

>>205979

Well then let's think of replacements. Or at least that which won't make us miss the original stuff.

And by us, I mean you guys. I'm not clever enough to help.

>>205984

You can make replacements, but you won't be making a paleolithic setting. A paleolithic setting is defined by lacking all of these things.

>>205979

What if it further into the stone age, with mostly hunter-gatherer tribes and maybe the odd (rare) city-state or town? That way you have plenty to work with, while still keeping the Conan.

>>205995

If you wanted to go that route, I'd recommend taking inspiration from the Native American tribes. Pre-Columbian tribes never advanced beyond Neolithic levels, but still managed to build vast societies.

The Iroquois negotiated a loose confederation of tribes, almost a stone age United Nations.

The Anazazi sat in the middle of a massive trading empire so prolific and populous they permanently altered the ecology of their region.

The Aztecs founded a bloody empire based on human sacrifice and expansionistic warfare

The Peruvians erected towering stone cities on the tops of mountains, all without a single decent pack animal.

Now tell me that shit doesn't seem ripe for adventure.

>>206020

And just for that, archived.

https://archive.is/doard

From Europe, we have plenty of strange groups too.

Like these guys, for instance:

http://www.ancient-origins.net/ancient-places-europe/cucuteni-trypillian-culture-and-mysterious-burning-buildings-002807

One of the most striking features of this culture is the manner in which they constructed sophisticated, organized, densely-populated settlements - only to burn them to the ground every 60-80 years to relocate, and rebuild the same settlement as before.

You could make much magical (or eldritch) hay of their gods and practices.

You could set the place in something like primitive North America if you wanted primitive technology but more knowledge about the culture.

Also, you could have lots of drugs but it might get a bit weird. For example, magic mushroom high reindeer piss drinking Russian Eskimo are a real thing.

>>205995

This sounds like a good idea to me.

>>206037

Gotta say, this has some interesting mechanics.

>>205995

Late-Neolithic society is viable, as >>206020 demonstrates, and it would be an interesting setting idea to explore. It does mean we basically have to chuck out everything about it being a MAN'S world where only MEN are MANLY enough to survive, because we're in an era where every clan too braindead to understand what a numerical advantage is and how you secure one has been wiped out.

Family ties are the most prominent unit of social organization (as they are throughout most of history), but the notion that people outside the family are your enemy by default has died. Not just in the cities, everywhere. Even the wilderness is owned by tribes hundreds or thousands strong who are either a pack of a half-dozen or more allied clans or else a clan that's grown so large that nobody can remember how they're related to anyone else and the only knowledge of common ancestor they have is the name of one, possibly legendary, badass from whom they're all supposedly descended. And it's damn easy to fake your way into that since all you have to do is know what name is supposed to be at the top of the lineage and how many hops down the family tree someone your age is supposed to be and you can make up fully 100% of the intervening steps and the tribe is too disorganized and too vast to know you're bullshitting, which means in the centuries-long history of the tribe that has absolutely happened and there are several clans with completely fabricated family ties to the rest of the tribe.

Cities haven't necessarily fully migrated away from the idea of being a ridiculously enormous super-family either, but their supposed common ancestor is clearly mythical and the inhabitants' belief in him (or her, the lack of writing makes it nearly impossible to tell for certain how gender roles worked, but probably they weren't that different from the Ur-era civilizations that followed) is a tent of proto-national identity completely disconnected from verifiable facts. Most people don't know their exact lineage, they just know vaguely that Gilgamesh is in there somewhere, which theoretically makes them like ninth cousins to the city's king, who is the direct descendant from Gilgamesh (or whoever).

Writing probably doesn't exist. If it does, it's very basic, largely for accounting and not flexible enough for detailed historical records, and knowing how to write is a specific career, not something that everyone in the upper classes learns (let alone the peasants).

Empires uniting multiple cities together don't exist as we know them. What does exist is one city-state or tribe being consistently badass enough to run around to all the other tribes, beating them up and taking their lunch money, until the other chieftains agree to just give their lunch money to the "conquerors" whenever they show up without first getting lots of people killed in a futile battle. However, the victors do not occupy enemy territory, make no policy changes, and indeed cannot make any policy changes except to kill the current king and replace him with another, because there aren't really any laws, just the word of the king and an oral tradition of best practices handed down through their lineage.

>>206179

No, thank you. Thank you for the offer, but we're already on our way.

>>206181

You can homebrew all you like without touching those books. It was asked in the OP if I knew any settings and I merely answered.

>>206143

I don't really feel the need to have all the stock fantasy races in a setting like this since there could be plenty of different hominids and mythical beasts to spice things up and give it a unique feel. It could be neat to play in the prehistory of a stock fantasy world though. The dwarves could be either goat herders and cave dwellers of the mountains or already advanced and civilized, or even gone.

They could be mysterious and a rare sight, not really caring about the primitive humans living in the valleys of their mountain fortresses. Maybe they deem humans annoying pests at best. Or if they are waning or gone they could fill the mysterious ancient race niche. Instead of fully kitted out adventurers you could have stone-age spearchuckers seeking shelter in an abandoned dwarven hall.

>>205698

You all were arguing about a fantasy setting in the distant past and you go all

>hurr wymmynz can b gud 2!

>durr dey only needs to b men

Short, thin, weak men

>>206192

Did you miss the rest of the thread? We've moved on from that. Try to keep up.

>>206227

Political correctness is fightan words 'round these parts, so it's easy to understand how easily most can be goaded into battlemode by the merest whiff.

>>206245

>Political correctness is fightan words 'round these parts, so it's easy to understand how easily most can be goaded into battlemode by the merest whiff.

Yeah and it is really fucking annoying when retards decide to derail threads over /pol/ vs /leftypol/ shitposting.

>>206227 is right

What I'm interested is the more exotic races and how they would fit in a stone age setting. Thri kreen seem like them would seamlessly fit into a Stone Age setting while maybe Yuan Ti could be terrors lurking in the jungle. You could even have branching evolutionary paths with them like Thri kreen with two pairs of fully developed arms but are dumber than other Thri kreen. Obviously this all would make the setting more fantasy but it could be interesting to explore conceptually. You could even have a Neolithic space opera where a tribal chief or a king of one of the new cities tasks a group of heros to explore the world and bring back treasure and knowledge while spreading word of his greatness. The players find strange beasts unlike any back home, intelligent species of varying hospitality and levels of technology and maybe a phenomenon natural or magic that would terrify and inspire those of their people who saw it. It could make for a really great Hero's Journey story, or crazy imperialistic shenanigans, either way good times.

The primary issue with a campaign based around a small group of hunter gatherers, as I see it, is a total lack of any kind of overarching THING beyond survival, and beyond a certain point you either achieve it or you don't.

Like either you get the tools and skill to consistently bring down the elk and gather the roots, or you don't and you just starve. So after a few sessions hand to mouth won't work. Since surplus can be dried for later.

You also don't have any kind of convenient army of doom, because armies aren't really much of a thing. So any overarching threat can't be good for 20 sessions of encounters because nobody has 100 men to spare throwing at PC's to die.

>>206591

There are also things of magic which could make your lives easier, perhaps even allow you and your tribe to take a land for your own. Leading the group to safety and possible power.

Also, bartering materials.

>no convenient armies of doom

Perhaps not, but you do have swarms, packs, herds, hives, schools, flocks, and the like, together with other tribes and possible precursor minions. Oh, and possibly the raiders and thugs of the few city-states. Plenty of enemies to go around.

>>205574

Actually this is one case were GURPS does it right with the Ice Age supplement. The magic system is subtle and you are advised to use trickery and lies when playing a shaman.

http://docslide.us/documents/gurps-ice-agepdf.html

The low key actually works for the GURPS system rather than against it.

And you can add fantastical elements, prehistoric creatures are monsters including dinos if you want to go full pulp.

Snakemen/Lizardmen in decaying civilizations are also options.

>>205587

There are the first couple books of the Black Company. Were the only "strong" women are all sorceresses and total bitches. Unless you have magic women are just there to get raped and killed in war, the characters don't like this but are mercenary hardasses and don't obfuscate the truth. They neither approve of nor condemn rape and pillage. And they serve the evil queen sorceress under one of her 10 sorcerer minions who were enslaved by her far more powerful husband who she betrayed and left to rot in the earth.

It's basic and generic as fuck but it works.

>>206591

Pure survival becomes trite pretty quickly, true. How about these scenarios:

>You have to save members of your tribe from slavers

This could be a great way to set up a journey, too.

>You have to defeat a monster that's plagued your tribe

This is better suited for a single adventure, and even then, it would need some padding. Still, could work.

>Pass a number of trials to become the next chieftain

>Prove your current chieftain achieved his position by betraying the last chieftain

>Break a curse that has turned the lands you roam infertile / made your females infertile / dick cancer

What stands at the center of every great story is human conflict, and that existed in any time and age.

>>206591

These are issues with a paleolithic setting, which is why we've already decided on a late neolithic setting.

You wanna know MY primitive fantasy : ] ?

What kind of stats would we have? I have the following in mind, but just now came up with it:

>Strength

Physical prowess, pretty self-explanatory. A warrior or a hunter would have lots of this.

>Nimbleness/Dexterity

Allows you to sneak, use ranged attacks and so on. What a scout or a hunter would have.

>Cunning

Thinking on the fly, problem-solving and so on. Pretty much helps any class.

>Wisdom

It makes sense to have two stats for intelligence in our setting. In the modern age, the smart, logical thinkers will usually end up being the most knowledgeable, too. In an age without written records of pretty much anything, knowledge and experience come through hardships and old age, and both don't care how smart you are. Shamans, elders and chieftains would be wise characters.

>Toughness

How easily you are wounded should be dependent on your strength, but not to a large degree: Muscle helps you a lot in a fistfight, not so much against a knife or a spear. What you need for these occasions is the power to fight through your wounds. Toughness allows you to resist wounds and their effects, environmental hazards like coldness or extreme heat or simply intimidation.

So, where does charisma fit in? To be honest, I don't want to have a separate stat for it. Think about a character who's strong, skilled, cunning, wise, and the toughest motherfucker in the tribe. Would it make sense for him to also be the least popular, boring, trite preson in the tribe? Fuck no! Likewise, would it make sense that a weak, useless, dumb little pussy was well-liked? Nope, unless that person had something special to them, which is something much better modeled with special abilities or traits.

Having charisma as a separate stat makes no sense. What about incorporating it in a single other stat? Still makes no sense. A cunning youthling will have an easier time getting the girl than an elder, for obvious reasons, but when it comes to chastising a child, the elder's word will carry much more impact, him being simply more experienced, even if he's slow of mind. So, incorporate charisma into both cunning and wisdom? Nope, because the best boasts will come from Strong Tongo, who can kill a sabretooth with his hands but is immune to anything resembling logic.

What I'm proposing is to give every charismatic skill one particular stat. This has the nice side effect of preventing one character from dominating the party once they arrive in a foreign city, which is something every other system I've ever played achieved. Outside the city? You all can fight. Inside? Let the ambassador talk, the rest can sit down and watch.

Here's a thread on stats in general:

>>203142

>>206020

Taking from native american tribes also helps eliminate the problem of underdeveloped language.

Sure, the injuns didn't write much but they had the words to convey complex and abstract thought well enough that the players won't have any problem dumbing themselves down.

> Here's some flavor I've written

In an age far-off, beneath stars unknown, the handicrafts of civilization slumber yet in dreams undreamt. The change of time has stayed its hand, the course of progress remains ever yet in its most primeval state. Rule nor law is neither found, wisdom veils her face, peace is lost and even the high-arts of war retire their cause for a violence more base and cruel. Below saber-toothed mountains and shaggy leaf trees, between the swamps of ancient things the name of life is the name of fear. In the age of first days only strength can bear unsteady the wand of right and in a time far-off, beneath stars unknown there is strength alone in the place of the skull.

Cold, weak, frightened and dwelling in the endless confusion of the untamed dark apromethean man struggles to survive against a world starving for his completion, it thirsts with a thousand mouths, ten thousand fleshrending fangs – his prospects are grim. In the mountain jungle brash and violent ape-men whoop and waller to the drum of ultra-violence, bashing and smashing and gnashing and gnawing any creature cursed to come upon them. In the plain of the valley the kingly hunting cats stalk unseen under a pale-green sea of primitive grains, playing the cruel shepherd over herds of fearsome bovides, large and lithe – antlered strength crowning their heads. Beyond the green-grass plain the tangled woods rise out of the earth, home to the dire-beasts and mega-predators of this unwritten age – elephant-bears and arch-wolves and deeper yet in the unfathomed swamps darker things lurk yet to eat and consume and destroy. In this world man lives and carves out his home, naked and unknowing of what the day might give or the night will take. He paints himself with runes of courage and prays to his nameless god and hopes in vain hope not to be overthrown from his unsure throne.

With stick and stone, clad in modest cloth he bands cautiously with other man-beasts. With his talents and theirs maybe, just maybe the deep earth-sleep can be staved off and the growl of hunger lulled to its satisfaction, with them he can wife a mate and have a son to pass what life has taught him so that when he dreams, when the owls cry and the pale moon shines and he closes his eyes, never knowing if the day will find him once again, all he's dreamed will not be lost to the place of the skull.

>>205995

>>206167

>>206020

The problem I would have with moving into a state of cultural advancement that would produce primitive societies is it doesn't really do anything to distinguish itself from classic sword and sandal setting. If it's bronze age in all things except the presence of bronze what reason do you actually have for not just setting it in the bronze age?

A straight paleo/neo-lithic setting distinguishes itself in it's primitive social structures. It emphasizes nature itself as the antagonist rather than it being other men (though they may get in the way).

>>206697

> we've

Speak for yourself, You might not think having to lure a bear out of its cave so the three only friendly humans you know can throw rocks on it from above and hope you don't get mauled to death in the process is a fun adventure but I sure as hell do. Or when a lightning storm sets your forest on fire and you have to escape your whole world burning up around you and then deal with the aftermath, or having to carefully track the migration of a herd of antelope over miles and then stage an ambush when they come upon a place to water themselves and hope you don't get gored on their antlers. These all sound like great adventures that you don't get to explore in later time-periods and pushing the time-setting up into those later periods removes the uniqueness.

>>206759

>Stoning women in Saudi Arabia?

Feminists in the west don't give a shit about that or genuine cases of rape.

>>206760

I think I've heard of one or two feminists who do that. No idea whether they are still alive, or if they have all been shot by a gang o pink-haired college students with retarded glasses.

>>206766

Calling someone an asshole is not an argumentum ad hominem, it's an insult. Ad hominems are fallacious and intellectually dishonest, insults are merely rude. Learn the difference.

>>206768

The following are ad hominem seen here >>206759

>>Victim complex

>>Usually complete failures at life

The implication is that these make MRAs wrong. It's not just calling them an asshole or comparing them to feminists, because this description is used to characterize them and then followed up for contrast by:

>Both make a good point, once in a while.

The clear implication of these statements is that they're usually wrong.

Consider this for a second - if the system sometimes fucks people over wouldn't you expect those people to be failures and have a victim complex? If everyone is used to seeing nothing wrong when there actually are problems, wouldn't somebody usually have to get shit on to realize there's a problem? Also, feminism refers to an ideology, and MRA referst to an activity. Using an acronym is a real fuckin' neato way to hide the "activist" part of that phrase, but an MRA is someone who is an Activist for Men's Rights. A feminist is someone who believes in a particular ideology, like a communist, a Democrat, or a Baptist. If you "reverse the polarity" of MRA, you get WRA or Women's Rights Activist. That's not the same thing as a feminist, but feminists would like you to believe it is. It's not too hard for them either, since there aren't a lot of WRAs working in the West. The reason is that women are more than caught up to men in terms of what rights they have. Go ahead, name a right that Western women don't have that Western men do.

And last but not least

>Ad hominems are fallacious and intellectually dishonest

>therefore I didn't do it

But strawman arguments totally aren't and/or you're happy to ignore claims of that kind of intellectual dishonesty.

>>206768

>>206766

>>206760

>>206759

>>206757

>>206772

Oi, faggots there's actual content >>206756

above you.

Just remembered something from a good while ago…

Fiend Matador Slayer of a Thousand Noobs 2 years ago

This sounds like it couldve been the final boss of a tribal-RPG

Dragonzzilla 1 year ago (edited)

Damn straight. It sounds epic without using traditional final boss tones. This is like the grand confrontation at the end of a play or tribal reenactment.

Now putting aside that these are youtube comments, this gives me an idea for a mechanic when dealing with the politics of the tribe(s): Ritual and Ceremonial combat-dance.

Big idea is that it's like Black Crusade's Social Combat in some ways in that specific moves and choice of words are given power depending on the circumstances, but without physically damaging the opponent. It's a matter of knowing (from memory) the right steps and acting in a timely way, all to please the gods/ancestors/spirits/gribblies/et cetera and bring their medicine/blessing upon you.

Is there any other sort of precedent for this kind of thing?

This is one way I propose we differentiate from Sword & Sandal.

>>206760

>>206766

>>206772

niggas, there's something you missing.

>off hand jab at a group of faggots that have been most been mentioned a total of 5 times.

>1 was talking about /pol/ hating them, this instance here and like a couple in the half chan is bullshit threads, usually quoting them

>Why iz dey doing dis

>>206759

> I'd say women are generally fucked over much more than men, on a worldwide scale, but considering feminists don't give a shit about anything happening outside of NY these days, I don't think that's a point in favor of the

How do you determine that?

place that fuck over women don't usually treat men well either, proving that women have definitively worse treatment would be rather difficult no?

>>206772

>The implication is that these make MRAs wrong.

There were no implications anywhere. It was clear I was merely insulting MRA's.

>Also, feminism refers to an ideology, and MRA referst to an activity.

To be honest, I don't see the practical relevance of this distinction. If you're saying that MRA's don't follow an ideology, then you're wrong. Most activists do.

>Ad hominems are fallacious and intellectually dishonest

>therefore I didn't do it

Maybe - just maybe - you shouldn't read so much into posts. When I call someone a faggot, I really just mean that they liek teh cock.

>>206775

>place that fuck over women don't usually treat men well either, proving that women have definitively worse treatment would be rather difficult no?

This is actually a coherent, logical argument. Determining which group of people has it worse is usually a waste of time; I have realized that a while ago, but it wasn't on my mind when I wrote my post.

>>206715

The thing about something like this is how we even understand attributes needs to be reavaluated.

I think, in order to create the proper atmosphere and life or death dynamic attributes should be a sign of what your limits are, not a sign of how powerful you are. Something that makes it clear you might be able to survive under your own power but to thrive you need assistance.

Furthermore in a traditional role playing game each individual having a specialty of skill is to be expected, as societies develop you can afford to not have certain basic knowledges or skills because labor in general is divided across society. The miller doesn't need to be a profficient or even a passable farmer, there is a social class of farmers who will raise the crops he can trade for in order to work his mill and in exchange the farmers don't need to own or operate a mill to have their crops processed, the miller will take care of it.

In a Paleolithic era every individual needs to be able to process raw materials into basic tools, every individual needs to be able to skin an animal and tan its hide because there is no social infrastructure providing a division of labor beyond the 4-10 people that might be in your clan so everyone needs to be able to do almost everything to carry their own weight. Of course Og might be the best skinner in the clan and Ur might be especially gifted at hunting deer but Og is still going to have a basic hunting ability and Ur is going to have a basic tanning ability.

I think therefore abilities should be less specific, reflecting thematic characteristics rather than specific gauges of power.

Maybe have challenges have predefined success numbers, then roll a dice based on their ability score (so scores would be valued at 1, d2, d3, d4, d5, etc). They have to reach the target number or they fail. So if something requires a roll of 10 but a character only has a d8, it is absolutely impossible for them to succeed on their own but other players can help them out and roll their own dice and so long as all players involved can add their rolls up to a 10 then the action succeeds.

Attributes could thus be things like, Strength, Courage, Craftsmanship, Cunning would work since you would have multiple people trying to solve one problem together.

> which is something much better modeled with special abilities or traits.

I think these are a must, In fact I think they should actually play a more important role than ability scores. For those who've played Crusader kings I think a character creation system not much unlike their custom ruler creator would be something good to model ourselves after.

When making a character you start at say 16 years old and with predefined base attributes. Each trait is then worth a certain number of years (negative traits add years to your life) So if you want to be an excellent hunter you take the Hunter trait for 4 years, you now start with a Character that's 20 years old and he gets a +2 (or whatever) for an ambush roll, (or whatever) Through out character creation you add up your traits until, uh oh, now your character is 60 years old and because of his advanced age he takes all kinds of penalties and will die very easily, so you take negative traits, like being afraid of heights or being unable to swim which would subtract from your age.

I would almost want to steal something from Mouseguard where they structured game sessions around seasons, so there is a clearly defined Spring, Summer, Fall and Winter phase, each with it's own types of hardships and challenges. We could break gameplay into two stages, Tribal, where internal clan politics happen and all the boring book keeping is done, rolling for if anybody gets sick or if a respected elder dies or if a new clan shows up across the river, and the adventure phase where players take their characters out into the wild world to deal with things like killing bears and hunting lions and eating snakes and what not.

It would be cool to be able to play the clan across multiple generations with some kind of eugenics system where traits and attribute points pass on to a characters child so the players can feel like they're growing a clan they're making as they go along.

>>206772

>The implication is that these make MRAs wrong.

There were no implications anywhere. It was clear I was merely insulting MRA's.

>Also, feminism refers to an ideology, and MRA referst to an activity.

To be honest, I don't see the practical relevance of this distinction. If you're saying that MRA's don't follow an ideology, then you're wrong. Most activists do.

>Ad hominems are fallacious and intellectually dishonest

>therefore I didn't do it

Maybe - just maybe - you shouldn't read so much into posts. When I call someone a faggot, I really just mean that they liek teh cock.

>>206775

>place that fuck over women don't usually treat men well either, proving that women have definitively worse treatment would be rather difficult no?

This is actually a coherent, logical argument. Determining which group of people has it worse is usually a waste of time; I have realized that a while ago, but it wasn't on my mind when I wrote my post.

>>206836

>>206845

FIX YOUR SITE YOU FUCKING CRIPPLE!

>>206844

I love it. Would developing a society/proper tribe be some sort of endgoal? Or just another big one?

>maybe this thread isn't lost after all

>>206836

>>206845

Use sage if you're going to post off-topic shit.

>>206852

>I love it. Would developing a society/proper tribe be some sort of endgoal? Or just another big one?

In a campaign that lasted enough generations it could be.

The flow of play in mind goes something like this

> Initial characters are made

> pre-game Tribe phase, Season is determined

> It's autumn

> roll for weather

> rainy

> roll for resource gathering, bonuses because fruit and berries are ripe in this season

> roll for health, bonuses because of the plentiful food discovered in the previous roll

> because of the rain and the fact your new clan lacks shelter your characters are all weak and sick, penalties to all actions

> roll for random events

> a stronger clan than yours is spotted settling across the river

> check for pregnancies, it's a new clan, no women so no ones having any kids

> check for deaths

> all characters make a death roll modified by age, health, injuries they may have and any other modifiers

> players can now choose if they want to do anything special as a clan/tribe such as greeting the new tribe they spotted, ambush them and take their women, if they are going to decide who amongst themselves gets to be clan chief, etc.

> Adventure phase

> DM runs the main player characters through whatever adventure he's designed for them.

> Adventure ends

> Season ends

If there is still time in the session the players can then advance to the next season which would be winter and do all of the above with all of the winter modifiers and play through a winter adventure, next session or whatever they move on to spring and do likewise. Until the next Fall season at which point it's a new year every characters adds 1 to their age, including any children that may now be in the clan.

When the first generation reaches a certain age they get retired into a class of npcs called Elders that provide their own modifiers to the tribe phase and the players take up the role of their children.

Of course player characters can have more than one kid so keepin gtrakc of a family tree might be a fun part of the game too, if families become unmanageably large they simply split off and become an npc clan in a near by territory that the players clans can have contact with and treat as allies or enemies.

>>206858

I forgot to add, What I really like about this kind of a game would be that the players aren't going to change, just the characters so when the players are talking to each other about "remember that time we lured that bear out of it's cave and it got it's teeth around your characters shoulder but he made that impossible roll and grappled the bears mouth open and off him?" And it's three generations down the line and that character is playing the grand son of the bear wrestler his previous characters actions have become a legend within the tribe.

The often time repeated inside jokes of the play group "all -hail the slimey green stone" or whatever silly things the players latch on to become in a way a part of the clans culture. The players aren't going to play their multiple characters that much differently from one another, usually, so it creates a kind of pseudo-cultural identity based around the players personalities.

>>205574

I think the idea that paleolithic fantasy isn't "remarkable" is bullshit, just look conan the barbarian. it has ancient demonic gods, chaos-weilding shamans, civilizations that were lost to time, and giant monsters, everything a fantasy setting needs. As for the masculinity aspect, I agree in that it is totally not a bad thing at all

>>206868

> I think the idea that paleolithic fantasy isn't "remarkable" is bullshit,

Then we agree, that's good.

> just look conan the barbarian

Conan is not paleolithic, Metallurgy and advanced civilizational infrastructure are clearly developed and widespread.

>>206877

I'll give you that, but elements from the hyborean age could definitely be incorporated, plus the whole "antediluvian" aesthetic is way underdone

>>205979

Then exchange skillpoints with evolution points.

Even back then you had variations. Maybe one bonga was able to plan ahead better, the other loved climbing on trees. The other had sharper vision, another one still had a lighter frame, for sneaking. Denser bones.

Think shadowrun with cyberware, only with perks.

Maybe you can't even take them for your own character but can only get them for your offspring and you choose a very limited set of perks at your first character creation. Making it a succession game with all the challenges of one.

>>206756

Go back to your grave, Howard.

>>206969

Not until I complete my quest of destroying every last copy of The Whole Wide World

>>206756

>Speak for yourself,

Significantly more than just myself has expressed this opinion. You, personally might be satisfied with a disconnected string of episodic adventures that meander around with no greater point than just staying alive (how entrepreneurial of you!), but most people want to actually achieve things. When presented with your setting, the very first thing someone asked was how to get rid of it and make a proper tribal society.

Also, the paleolithic did not work that way. There was no point in trying to ambush a fucking bear, because neither you nor the bear actually want this fight. Unless you're doing it just to prove you're badass, which people did sometimes, but that wasn't a struggle for survival, that was glory-hounding because survival is completely locked down outside of infrequent periods of disaster. You had way more than just three friendly humans that you knew, because clans grow to include thirty-place people within like two generations, so if you only have three friends that means you just barely got off of a disaster that nearly killed your entire clan, which does not happen often. Throughout most of the paleolithic homo sapiens hunters were able to walk right up to some unsuspecting giant sloth and spear it from thirty feet away before it even know it was in danger, because it had no idea that ranged weapons are a thing and had never developed the instinctual knowledge that any human in line of sight is dangerous before they were completely exterminated. The paleolithic wasn't a desperate struggle for survival. Homo sapiens has always been devastatingly more capable than the other animals on the planet, and back in the day the population density was low enough that our only genuinely capable opponents - each other - mostly stayed out of one another's way because there was plenty of unoccupied territory to expand into. The idea that nature is some remorseless killer before whom primitive humans had to constantly struggle against for survival is the opinion of someone so urbanized that they've become completely disconnected from the natural world and just how incredibly easy it is to survive there when other people aren't getting in your way. You can learn how to survive in the wilderness indefinitely in like two years. Tribal humans who learned that and almost nothing else for the first twelve years or so of their life are so good at it that basic survival is literally child's play to them, and they go around killing apex predators they don't even eat just to prove that they can. The only things that threaten a primitive clan are the things that also threaten neolithic or bronze age population centers: Natural disasters, famines, and so on.

>>206912

>Then exchange skillpoints with evolution points.

This does nothing to solve the problem that homo sapiens (i.e. the players) are too smart to grasp how incredibly stupid early hominids are. People are not going to be able to get into the headspace of a guy whose vocabulary is barely 1% of the average modern day English speaker.

>>206996

>The only things that threaten a primitive clan are the things that also threaten neolithic or bronze age population centers: Natural disasters, famines, and so on.

Or, in our case, magical/divine/demonic/gribbly things what stalk the primordial world. Thus, we still have to fight hard, but perhaps for different reasons.

the most dangerous of which are things just as smart if not smarter than homo sapiens. A battle for the beginning.

Also, what do you say in response to these?

>>206858

>>206860

I don't think it should take place on Earth, I think it would be better if it took place on a planet similar to Earth, but not actually Earth, so you don't have to abide by actual Earth history and geography.

I also think the man-eating elves, the Wendigo and Homo Nadeli should all be merged into one creature, that is immortal unless slain. What if they are a species, but it can also be contracted as a curse, that causes the afflicted to turn into a thin lanky yet wide faced ashen skinned beast with a maw of jagged teeth, more and more and more frequently, often over the course years, before the transformation becomes permanent?

>>206996

>When presented with your setting, the very first thing someone asked was how to get rid of it and make a proper tribal society.

No you dishonest faggot the first thing anyone said when presented with my setting was

> Work on it again, but instead of using elves I'd say use the different species of homo sapiens, erectus

The second thing that was said was

> It'll be masculine, yes, but that doesn't mean women can't be awesome, even in a "manly" way, if they are special.

and

> I like your entire project. It sounds pretty damn cool, and like what I had in mind.

The third thing said was

> On the off chance that you need a fluff writer or similar I'd be happy to pitch in - would need a bit of time to get my head around the setting but that would be an awesome project.

It wasn't all the way down until

>>205979

That anyone wanted to move it out of the Paleolithic period.

there was clearly a strong interest and when I returned to this thread after a couple days away from the computer that interest picked back up and people stopped talking about moving away from the paleolithic period.

> Also, the paleolithic did not work that way. There was no point in trying to ambush a fucking bear, because neither you nor the bear actually want this fight

1) If you need his cave, then yes you would want this fight.

2) It's a goddamn fantasy roleplaying game it doesn't have to be hyper realistic. From my very first post it's been clear I've had a very pulp edge to my idea of paleolithic fantasy, what with the cannibal shamen elves. Criticizing me for not being realistic is like criticizing me for not setting it on a space-ship, it was never the point.

> The paleolithic wasn't a desperate struggle for survival.

And the medieval period never functioned as medieval fantasy roleplaying depicts it, does this mean we throw the whole thing away or we accept it's tropes for what they are because they lend fun to the game.

You're sitting here telling me Paleolithic roleplaying would be boring but you're the one refusing to try and make it fun and interesting.

If you want to make an early bronze age roleplaying game go right ahead, nobody is stoping you, this thread is about a stone-age fantasy setting, the OP is clear about this, if you don't like the idea of that kind of thing why bother posting in this thread. I've tried across multiple posts to develop the framework of what a setting and system set in a pulp paleolithic fantasy setting. I've posted a map, I've posted paragraphs of fluff and setting description, I've posted ideas for basic dice mechanics, I've posted an example of possible gameplay structure and how to control the flow of a campaign so as to make it about developing a small clan into a functioning tribe.

I've actually been producing something related to the OP, you seem to be the one interested in running away from the OP, so why not, and go make your own thread?

> You can learn how to survive in the wilderness indefinitely in like two years. Tribal humans who learned that and almost nothing else for the first twelve years or so of their life are so good at it that basic survival is literally child's play to them,

And I brought that up in one of my posts which is why I felt that ability scores should be thematically structured and measures of limitations rather than measures of power or of what skills they posess, even directly bringing up that all people in a tribe would have a basic knowledge of all necessary skills.I brought this up as something to consider before you did here, so why are you repeating it to me like I'm somehow unaware of it?

There difference is I'm trying to work with it and find solutions to problems and you're just bitching about it and how this time period doesn't seem fun to you.

>>206860

>>207091

>No you dishonest faggot the first thing anyone said when presented with my setting was

This:

>Would developing a society/proper tribe be some sort of endgoal? Or just another big one?

Even people who support your ideas ultimately want to get rid of it. Okay, sure, you posted some shit earlier, then you left for several days and since we're all anonymous you're not easily distinguishable from that.

>If you need his cave, then yes you would want this fight.

Making shelter is easy. You do not need his cave.

>It's a goddamn fantasy roleplaying game it doesn't have to be hyper realistic.

Then ditch the bullshit about playing shit-for-brains proto-humans. And also shut up about how women have to be treated as property because #1 you can't use that excuse in some places and then demand artistic license with others and #2 that isn't actually how primitive societies work anyway. Times were not so hard that people abandoned empathy for the mother(s) of their children in order to survive. Times were so abundant that matriarchies were created because the competition was too lean to punish inefficient societies.

Also, the differences between the bronze age and the neolithic are pretty significant (for starters, a neolithic society may or may not even have a city nearby, whereas bronze age is expected to have multiple city states or an empire or similar) and if you can't distinguish between the two then you don't know enough about the time period to even have this conversation. Something which is frankly evident from all the "content" you're so proud of producing. And if you'd pull your head out your ass, you'd notice that people are in fact fleshing out the neolithic angle.

>>207007

A world stalked by primordial horrors still has the longterm problem of being unable to actually go anywhere. There's nothing you can do with a paleolithic society that you can't do with a neolithic society. Neolithic opens doors without closing any others. As for the posts you linked:

>>206858

This is mostly bullshit. Partly because Anon really should've fucking listened to that little voice that told him he was doing magical realm bullshit, partly because it's incoherent (a "new" clan? Where did it come from that it doesn't have any women? Why, when brought into contact with other human beings, is the only presented option to attack and abduct their women? That's like the least efficient possible way to build a clan) but mostly because there are like five dice rolls made completely independent of character abilities before they even get to start taking actions, with negative consequences for their abilities. And then the adventure is referred to as "designed" by the GM, rather than generated on the fly by players pursuing their own objectives and overcoming randomly generated obstacles. So the point of all these die rolls isn't to create a dynamic world, it's just to fuck players over for giggles. No doubt this is one of the moments when the game is supposed to be realistic instead of pulpy, but give it five minutes and that'll flip flop. Obviously what you actually want to do is go full-in on pulp, which means random events and the like must either be there to provide opposition to be overcome in the adventure while the players pursue their own objectives or else they come at the end of the adventure and are strongly influenced by the results of that adventure. Or both.

If you want a stone age campaign, what you're looking for is a hexcrawl: A great big expanse of wilderness that you explore bit by bit looking for valuable resources and the source of threats that need extermination and so forth. You'll also want seasonal shifts and those resources will be things like herds of elk that move around and need to be followed.

One of the first rules of the hexcrawl is that you shouldn't have a single blank hex. Every single hex should have enough content to make for at least one encounter, preferably one or more complete sessions. This presents a serious challenge under any circumstances. Every potential angle you cut out by pushing the timeline further back makes it harder.

This >>206860 is just talking about generational gameplay in general. Which brings lots of problems. Firstly, switching characters every four or five sessions puts a serious strain on roleplay. People end up playing the exact same character over and over again, and contrary to the poster this won't create a cultural identity because there will still be significant distinctions between player characters. So you'll get lineages where every generation is a carbon copy of the one before, which completely destroys the entire generational concept, because really all the characters from that legend of four generations ago are still here in the form of their clones, which are as distinct from one another as they are in Paranoia.

The advantage of the generational approach is that the players can completely reshape the game world overtime without having absurdly powerful magic or an absurdly pliant world. But another thing with pushing the timeline backwards is that the fewer entrenched organizations there are stomping around, the easier it is to rapidly rewrite the nature of the world. If the only enemies are lone predators or small packs suitable to being confronted by a party of 4-6, then one lifetime really can be enough to change everything, by virtue of the fact that you can murder everything dangerous and then the world is yours to do what you want with. You can't settle a tribe to build a city that serves as foundation to a world-conquering empire in one generation, but if step one of that process is off the table then we don't have to give a shit, and if we're neolithic we still aren't getting much farther than founding the city since cities aren't common enough for there to be any others in conquering distance, so we still don't give much of a shit.

>>207014

WEW BUTTHURT xD

Keep your sperglording in your containment board please:

>>>/leftypol/

Or stay here and keep crying, bitch nigger. It's really funny.

Also, you put "sage" in the wrong field.

>>207109

> This:

> get's exposed for being either woefully wrong or a liar

> instead of admitting error doubles down on the error

What's the first rule of SJW's, they always lie

What's the second rule of SJW's they always double down.

> Okay, sure, you posted some shit earlier,

Where it received praise and I was encouraged to continue that line of work, completely contrary to your claims. It's nice to admit you're wrong.

> Making shelter is easy. You do not need his cave.

If the players decide this then they decide this, if they don't they don't.

> Then ditch the bullshit about playing shit-for-brains proto-humans.

Where did I say they were shit for brains? I've been operating under the assumptions the players would be acting like pulp action heroes in a primeval context.

> And also shut up about how women have to be treated as property

This is how I know you're an SJW. You tell people who have ideas you disagree with to shut up and unlike you, functioning human beings can seperate a thematic setting elements from reality.

> #1 you can't use that excuse in some places and then demand artistic license with others

Yes I can, that's exactly what artistic license means, the ability to freely alter what might be true or accurate for the sake of communicating themes and messages.

> Times were not so hard that people abandoned empathy for the mother(s) of their children

Where did I say they did?

> Also, the differences between the bronze age and the neolithic are pretty significant (for starters, a neolithic society may or may not even have a city nearby, whereas bronze age is expected to have multiple city states or an empire or similar) and if you can't distinguish between the two then you don't know enough about the time period to even have this conversation.

Or I am trying to develop a setting where cities don't exist and will not for a very, very long time. I've been very consistent about the level of social infrastructure I want to work with.

> And if you'd pull your head out your ass, you'd notice that people are in fact fleshing out the neolithic angle.

Okay, but are they shitting on the paleolithic angle like you have been? Am I responding to them or to you? You made claims about how people were receiving my ideas, they were demonstrably wrong, I demonstrated it.

>>207110

> Where did it come from that it doesn't have any women?

Read my earlier posts, the idea would be they started out as outcasts from surrounding tribes. Just because you refuse to read a thread before you post in it, that doesn't make your hang ups my problem.

> Why, when brought into contact with other human beings, is the only presented option to attack and abduct their women?

Demonstrably false you liar, I said "such as greeting the new tribe they spotted", before I presented the option of abducting their women, why, because I wanted an example of both a friendly and hostile action the players could take. You say I'm the one up my ass, but you can't even read a single sentence honestly.

> That's like the least efficient possible way to build a clan) but mostly because there are like five dice rolls made completely independent of character abilities before they even get to start taking actions, with negative consequences for their abilities.

That's a valid criticism of my idea, maybe you could have led with this instead of getting triggered.

> So the point of all these die rolls isn't to create a dynamic world, it's just to fuck players over for giggles.

Or to create a timeline of "this was the really rainy year" or "this was the harsh year where food was scarce" to create overarching narratives. I haven't even made any of the rolling tables, you've assumed they are unfairly harsh base don nothing other than your desire to just make shit up.

>>207119

Nice buzzword.

>>>/tumblr/

>>>/reddit/

>>>/thefuckouttahere/

>>207116

Okay, so you do something like fifteen fucking times here where you shift the goalposts. I'm not going to bother detailing every single one because it's basically all that you do here and pointing out all of them would get boring. But here's a couple of examples:

>Where did I say they were shit for brains?

When you said they were homo erectus.

>Or I am trying to develop a setting where cities don't exist and will not for a very, very long time.

No. You have explicitly claimed earlier that a neolithic setting would be mostly indsitinguishable from a bronze age setting (>>206756):

>If it's bronze age in all things except the presence of bronze what reason do you actually have for not just setting it in the bronze age?

This demonstrates firstly that you don't know how the neolithic works and secondly that when caught out being wrong you lie and double down. What an odd coincidence.

>Where did I say they were shit for brains?

When you said they were homo erectus. That is what homo erectus means. Again, you get caught out saying something factually wrong and you try to pretend you never said it.

>You tell people who have ideas you disagree with to shut up and unlike you,

I'm telling you to stop being a stupid hypocrite. You engaged in a multi-post back-and-forth about how women can't be viable characters in the game because of realism, then when it is explained to you that your view on women in tribal societies is completely unrealistic you immediately switch to saying that it's artistic license because you want a pulpy action setting. Your desire to see women as literally bought and sold property has nothing to do with realism or artistic license or else you would've consistently stuck with one or the other while defending them, it's magical realm bullshit.

>Where did I say they did?

You don't sell someone you have empathy for to another tribe for a lump of food, dumbass.

>Okay, but are they shitting on the paleolithic angle like you have been?

What you said was this:

>There difference is I'm trying to work with it and find solutions to problems and you're just bitching about it and how this time period doesn't seem fun to you.

And this is wrong, because I and others are in fact building ideas around an actually viable setting. Once again, you get caught out being demonstrably wrong about something and you try to shuffle it around to pretend that I must've been referring to something else, despite my not providing any quotes or the like to demonstrate this. At best you're making assumptions and then refusing to accept that your assumptions were wrong. At worst you're lying to cover up your repeated demonstrations that you lack any knowledge of the time period you're trying to work with and are trying to shove an unpopular fetish in sideways using any excuse you can get.

>Read my earlier posts, the idea would be they started out as outcasts from surrounding tribes.

That doesn't explain how they don't have any women, unless they're losers who had between them not one single woman willing (or required by virtue of being their property since you won't let that bullshit go) to follow them, in which case why the fuck are the players required to play losers and how are they going to survive as a band of fuck-ups?

And so on and so forth. This post is quite long enough already and I've only gotten to the half of them that immediately caught my eye, I'm not going to continue unless someone really wants me to.

>>207109

anon format your shit better

> And also shut up about how women have to be treated as property

property doesn't really exist in this time, you want woman, you take woman, you want food you get food.

>Times were not so hard that people abandoned empathy for the mother(s) of their children in order to survive.

Isn't it reported that at times cave folks would eat children's brains to survive.

Like other animals eat their kids to survive

Also life expectancy is about 30s to 40s at the absolute best if i am not mistaken, so the issue of the parents wouldn't be coming up all that much.

> Times were so abundant that matriarchies were created because the competition was too lean to punish inefficient societies.

what?

where is this leap in logic coming from

also how would that even work in a pre-speech display species.

While there are matriarchies that occur,, they are so woefully ineffective that they don't expand.

>>207176

>>This demonstrates firstly that you don't know how the neolithic works and secondly that when caught out being wrong you lie and double down. What an odd coincidence.

I read through:

>>206756

and it seems that dis anon is talking more about the issue of making the system feel right rather than just be a stone age re-skin of something else, but I haven't read through what he was replying to enough to be absolutely certain,

> explained to you that your view on women in tribal societies is completely unrealistic you immediately switch to saying that it's artistic

I was one of the guys that were arguing that from a Darwinian perspective the view is technically correct and while I have not been made up to date on the threadI would be willing to concede if the argument is made well enough. From what I remember it pleading through outliers

>Your desire to see women as literally bought and sold property has nothing

see the funny thing is that this was what seemed to be a very minor thing that faggot mentioned, if he did actually say that he's a dumb bitch as you cannot buy or sell things, maybe trade but good luck not killing the other tribe when you meet because your language skill suck ass.

>has nothing to do with realism

you have not demonstrated that to the best of my knowledge, neither the desire to see it.

>magical realm bullshit.

>that next paragraph, makes the post too long

that's a tall order there anon.

all of this is predicated on women being roughly equal within a palo-neolithic society yeah?

More importantly the assumption you have proved that it women were treated equally, and for it to matter in a majority well.

>You don't sell someone you have empathy for to another tribe for a lump of food, dumbass.

you don't sell things to other tribes, full stop.

one of the problems here is human tribes could go a generation without meeting another.

The human population was dreadfully small and spread out as roaming nomads and more over they lacked language skills to actually communicate in such a way.

>That doesn't explain how they don't have any women,

there are more modern tribes that from what I remember engaged in seeing children off to join others to prevent inbreeding. And while I don't see trading being capable men going off and joining another tribe at the start of the fertile age wouldn't necessarily be wrong. or simply raid another one and steel their shit and take their women when the men are out hunting, starting a new tribe effectively if the cards of integrating are off the .

alternatively they come from a defeated tribe without any women folk.

Pack of hunter lost from tribe because nature.

Imagination nigga use it.

cont

>>207191

> unless they're losers who had between them not one single woman willing (or required by virtue of being their property since you won't let that bullshit go)

Now use that brain of yours anon, outcasts had to be forced out yeah? Now why would the winning force ever let them keep anything of theirs? Ever?

If they got out it's because they were able to fit off the rest of the tribe long enough to leave, grabbing your lady friend wouldn't be a priority nor would one be feasible able to do so.

And given the mentality of the world (both the internal logic you are arguing about and likely in the reality what ever it may be) I don't think the tribe would have much qualms about killing a member to get at an enemy.

> required to play losers and how are they going to survive as a band of fuck-ups?

Losers, in a state of nature and losers in the modern day are vastly different.

Losing is dying and failing to pass on your genes. Surviving is prolonging the struggle.

Even then someone argued with me earlier suggesting people want the weird, the aberrant, the "outliers" are the things people want to play as.

You know what fuck it I'm pretty sure all of this can be solved easily.

Neanderthal splat book.

>>207188

>family unit

>importance of community

Both are represented very well in the proposed setting. Two other, important right-wing ideas that you failed to name were strength and meritocratism, and these two are represented extremely well in a neolithic setting.

>>207195

I just looked up Homo Erectus a bit, and it depends entirely on where and 'when' the setting took place because some excavations showed signs of higher form of organization and Homo Sapiens is only a couple hundred thousand years old while erectus was around for much longer so by the time the modern human appeared the basis for things like complex language was most already set.

As far as other things like property of women goes I'd just look to what humans do when living through extreme hardship and base the society of this era on that.

So women who were captured and kept as prisoners and outcasts would be treated as property while the family unit and group of families living together are much more caring and not treat their family as property.

Kindness would not be charity, that kind of thing gets you killed in a Darwinian scenario since people talk and people think you "have a lot of nice things", although ugging around a cave seems like there wouldn't be that kind of gossip I'm pretty sure one of the first sentences that's fully developed is telling your dudes this guy has lots of nice things. However you can make generous offers or give the other guy a chance if your capable of doing so, how effective it would go would vary a lot but hey that's how it would go.

Trade would be extremely limited, on a case by case basis of barter and trade between individuals. Do it too much and it could be lethal the same way selfless charity is lethal.

Gossip and stories would be a thing obviously, if it wasn't then all those wall paintings must be vandalism limited though it may be.

Finally magic and not-magic is irrelevant and through this players can have special skills because the very concept of magic is irrelevant. Your rain dance isn't a ritual spell, you dance so hard you make it rain or something like that. This way players can be more then four different types of Barbarian.

>>207191

>property doesn't really exist in this time, you want woman, you take woman, you want food you get food.

This is a myth. Human beings have always understood the concept of property.

>Isn't it reported that at times cave folks would eat children's brains to survive.

This is a myth. Anyone who eats human brains is probably just going to die of horrible diseases, because humans eating the human nervous system is an extremely bad idea. Also, any clan that eats their own children is going to face population issues for extremely obvious reasons.

>Also life expectancy is about 30s to 40s at the absolute best if i am not mistaken,

You are. Life expectancy outside of violent death has been about 65 all around. Life expectancies are sometimes dragged down by an abundance of violent death or plague, particularly amongst children 0-5 who are especially vulnerable to both. Lethal plagues are almost non-existent in tribal societies, and violent deaths are not especially more common than most of history.

>also how would that even work in a pre-speech display species.

It wouldn't. What made you think I was referring to pre-speech hominids? I was referring to paleolithic homo sapiens.

>While there are matriarchies that occur,, they are so woefully ineffective that they don't expand.

Yes, exactly, that's the point. Matriarchies were semi-common at the time, which demonstrates how incredibly easy it was to get by.

>I was one of the guys that were arguing that from a Darwinian perspective the view is technically correct

It is. The thing here is that the anon is saying that when it comes to whether or not we can have female PCs we need to be absolutely realistic, but when it comes to how female NPCs are treated he's suddenly all in favor of tossing realism out on its ear in order to have a women-as-commodity society. If we're going for pulpy unrealism, we don't have any reason not to have female PCs. If we're going for realistic accuracy, society is not going to treat women like that.

>Now use that brain of yours anon, outcasts had to be forced out yeah?

This punts us straight into the "doomed losers" problem. You try to semantically dance around this in the next paragraph by redefining the word "loser" but what matters here is that the game's premise is that the party consists solely of people who just lost. So how are they supposed to then win? There's no vorpal swords to loot and no forbidden sword techniques to learn. If you lost the fight against the nearby tribes once you are very likely going to continue losing. These guys will, if they're lucky, persist until their natural deaths and leave no descendants. If they're unlucky they'll come into renewed conflict with nearby tribes and be exterminated.

>>207191

Oh, also, there's a couple of things that are just completely incoherent here. Like this:

>More importantly the assumption you have proved that it women were treated equally, and for it to matter in a majority well.

This is just gibberish and I don't know what you mean.

>>207014

> tolerant

> progressive

> being this much of a /pol/ false flag

Nigger there are no feminists here. Not wanting nazi cock in our asses =/= sucking Sarkeesian's greasy teat, as much of a convenient narrative as it is for stormcucks trying to build a hugbox.

>>207243

>Human beings have always understood the concept of property.

Evidence?

>any clan that eats their own children is going to face population issues for extremely obvious reasons.

What is birth control?

>Life expectancy outside of violent death has been about 65 all around

What?! At birth? More like 20-30. Dying at 60-70 wasn't rare, but of all people born half would die before 10 years, and of those who survived half would die before 45. This is considering violent death, but those times were pretty violent. And it's not like we live in Eden today.

>Matriarchies were semi-common at the time

Evidence?

>when it comes to whether or not we can have female PCs we need to be absolutely realistic, but when it comes to how female NPCs are treated he's suddenly all in favor of tossing realism out

It's called picking and choosing, anon.

>If you lost the fight against the nearby tribes once you are very likely going to continue losing.

Yeah, I'd love to play a game in which who wins can't ever lose afterwards. Surely bad luck, cunning and betrayal didn't exist back then.

I don't know what you guys are shitflinging about, but you man are full of shit.

>>207243

>This is a myth. Human beings have always understood the concept of property.

outside of a collective/communal understanding.

the Privateness of which would be necessary for women to be property of a man?

>This is a myth. Anyone who eats human brains is probably just going to die of horrible diseases, because humans eating the human nervous system is an extremely bad idea. Also, any clan that eats their own children is going to face population issues for extremely obvious reasons.

I was basing this off of the discovery in England, the two child skulls.

Now i'll admit they could have been another tribe's children but cannibalism from what I understand was not unheard of

And while it is true that it would reduce population, Donner parties exist for a reason, not every paleolithic tribe was well off, which ever form of hominid they were.

>>You are. Life expectancy outside of violent death has been about 65 all around. Life expectancies are sometimes dragged down by an abundance of violent death or plague, particularly amongst children 0-5 who are especially vulnerable to both. Lethal plagues are almost non-existent in tribal societies, and violent deaths are not especially more common than most of history.

>outside violent death, plague, etc.

this seems to go outside of intuitive logic, to argue that the aggregate life expectancy would be greater than 30-40

at the very least, this sort of leap in logic is something I'd actually care to read up on, otherwise it's a bit too far of a leap of faith for me.

More importantly where in the world would life expectancy not include violent death, is it not a mean.

>It wouldn't. What made you think I was referring to pre-speech hominids? I was referring to paleolithic homo sapiens.

it was my assumption that the paleolithic hominids, in large part lacked language skills.

At the very least lacked higher language skills to communicate with other tribes in order to engage in trade.

you haven't to my satisfaction addressed

>Yes, exactly, that's the point. Matriarchies were semi-common at the time, which demonstrates how incredibly easy it was to get by.

Where?

Common perhaps in India, where the only 2 of them to my knowledge exist to this day.

It likewise goes against intuitive logic

> when it comes to how female NPCs are treated he's suddenly all in favor of tossing realism out on its ear in order to have a women-as-commodity society.

I see this claim as a bit sketchy, for two reasons, one because he claims that cities would dumb down the feel and because I have not actually seen him claim that.

That being said it seems that the first does decrease the chance of the second.

Less cities, less societies.

and no societies no women as commodities so to speak.

to be absolutely clear one does not have to necessitate the other and I would relent with the production of full quotes and perhaps the context that display anon did directly argue this.

>This punts us straight into the "doomed losers" problem.

and outcasts are not that?

>You try to semantically dance around this in the next paragraph by redefining the word "loser"

you were calling them losers in the modern sense,and frankly it was sort of stupid.

>what matters here is that the game's premise is that the party consists solely of people who just lost

Yes and no, they lost their place in a tribe but this was a more, admittedly dramatic rendition of the concept

>So how are they supposed to then win?

I provided you examples of this.

Finding or founding a new tribe or otherwise surviving.

>If you lost the fight against the nearby tribes once you are very likely going to continue losing.

wouldn't that be up to the pcs to fix.it's a lot easier if they are near Neanderthals

but anyway nature ain't fair.

Nor should it be anyway people will play games that kick the shit out of them, be it Dorf fortress or CoC it's the faggot's choice to make

>>207244

>>207244

Forgive me, I'm still nursing a hang over.

Two things the first one is you still haven't provided anything that proved that women would not be commodities as you argued for, aside from saying matriarchies were semi common. Now i do not believe that this is entirely true but you never proved it to what appears to be satisfaction.

Nor did you prove that magical realm was the anon's actually motivation aside from saying he slips between artistic license and realism. Even if i were to assume the anon flip flops between those two points like a politician run pancake house then it is a very tall order to say that this is his motivation.

>>207248

Hi! You seem to have wandered off your home board! Let me help you find your way back:

>>>/leftypol/

There! Now you don't have to be triggered when someone doesn't believe you're really a tri-gender werewolf. :^)

>>207280

>>207248

>>207014

I am almost entirely certain you guys are the same person

>>207281

>>>/tinfoil/

>>207253

>Evidence?

The specific myth of "Native Americans had no concept of private property" has been debunked to Hell and back. Here's the first article on the subject I found on Google: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1154231

I haven't read that article specifically, but there are dozens others like it. The broader category of stone age humans in general receives less study because there's no specific story ("Manhattan was sold for beads") to debunk, but the notion you're positing, that the idea of "my spear" doesn't exist, or that "I'll trade you this spear I made for those fruits you gathered" doesn't exist, beggars belief. It's an extremely basic concept and it is the assertion that humans ever didn't understand it that requires defense, not the contrary.

>What is birth control?

And literally your very next sentence is a claim that humans suffered incredibly steep attrition. So are cavemen so overpopulated that people are eating their own fucking babies to reduce the population or are they losing population at such a prodigious rate that most children have only a single grandparent remaining by the time they can walk?

>What?! At birth? More like 20-30.

What exactly do you expect is killing all these cavemen? Do you think wolves are laying ambushes for packs of apex predators? Do you think human hunters just went wandering off alone for giggles and get picked off by the wildlife? The statistics you're quoting are even more bleak than that of the middle ages, an era during which both war and plague were massively more common. They sound like the fabrication of someone who's extremely married to the idea that history is a constant march upwards towards technological progress, but it really, really wasn't. There have been times when social order decayed but our impressive killing tools and populations reaching far past the natural saturation point remained, and the results of those times are much, much worse than our tribal origins.

>It's called picking and choosing, anon.

Dear God you're actually dense enough not to realize how stupid this is. Of course it's picking and choosing. That's the point I've been making. He started with the goal of reducing women to being exclusively a commodity and has been picking and choosing setting elements to make that happen. But why the fuck would you want to make that a design goal? Is this a stone age setting or Gor?

>>207255

So I began writing a response to this but gave up because about half of it was just stating that various lines are incoherent. To keep things brief, here is just one example:

>one because he claims that cities would dumb down the feel and because I have not actually seen him claim that.

So…Did he claim that or not? First you say he did, then you say he didn't.

The other half of your post is coherent enough to respond to but also frequently extremely stupid, and I don't know how much of that stupidity is because of missing context from the incoherent half of your post.

>>207256

>Two things the first one is you still haven't provided anything that proved that women would not be commodities as you argued for

The burden of proof is on the person making the assertion. If you can deliver a single source other than feminist hysterics that the commoditization of women was considered generally acceptable in any era, you'll have done more than anyone else has been able to in years. Stockholm Syndrome exists for a reason. Captured women integrate themselves into their captors' families very quickly, and you don't trade your wife around.

>Nor did you prove that magical realm was the anon's actually motivation aside from saying he slips between artistic license and realism.

He's definitely changed gears based on whatever suits him. First arguing for realism:

>once I started getting into the exchange rate of food for a woman I felt like pursuing it would get me accused of trying to go full magical realm rather than realistic about how women would be treated in a paleolithic setting.

And here is his immediate response to someone demonstrating actual knowledge of the stone age:

>It's a goddamn fantasy roleplaying game it doesn't have to be hyper realistic.

So one moment he's lamenting how he has to abandon the entire project because people are reacting to one part of his realism (not that selling women for food is actually realistic, but that's besides the point right now) and a couple of days later he's saying that just because a scenario is so unrealistic that it makes the protagonists look like morons to anyone who knows anything about stone age survivalism doesn't mean we shouldn't try to hang entire campaigns on that kind of scenario anyway.

It's true that the specific ulterior motive of magical realm is an assumption I'm making based on the fact that he already brought it up in the earlier quote, because it doesn't actually matter what his ulterior motive is. What matters is that he's using any excuse he can lay his hands on to force his stupid gender politics into the setting.

>>207327

>The specific myth of "Native Americans had no concept of private property" has been debunked to Hell and back.

That doesn't prove anything about early early humans.

>The broader category of stone age humans in general receives less study because there's no specific story ("Manhattan was sold for beads") to debunk

>proving anything so immaterial about those times

As with matriarchy, birth control, and life expectancy (also dude illness, murder and old age killed those people, http://www.anth.ucsb.edu/faculty/gurven/papers/GurvenKaplan2007pdr.pdf ; nice "if it doesn't agree with me it must be a fabrication" attitude), you seem to think you can just logically disprove such things, ignoring the incredible variety of human history and sometimes evidence or the lack thereof. You don't like the idea of babies being eaten so you make that "impossible". >what is Moloch? Why can't you kill a child that's visibly not going to survive? Or, dunno, the children of another tribe or whatever? But no, it must be impossible.

>He started with the goal of reducing women to being exclusively a commodity and has been picking and choosing setting elements to make that happen. But why the fuck would you want to make that a design goal?

If that's your problem then why spout inane bullshit? And what kind of problem is that? Maybe to depict a more savage age where the weakest have no rights? To make a grrl power adventure with cavewomyn breaking their chains and challenging the patriarchy? I have no idea, but you're just dismissing what you don't like as absurd.

>>207353

This, also Fire And Ice by Ralph Bakshi and Frank Frazetta.

>>207328

> What matters is that he's using any excuse he can lay his hands on to force his stupid gender politics into the setting.

Your doing the same thing faggot. Whether or not your the same Anon who kicked the whole thing off with that non-nonsensical MRA accusation your entire reason for being against it boils down to hurting your feelings and that it doesn't appeal to you.

>>207332

>That doesn't prove anything about early early humans.

You, meanwhile, have provided no evidence whatsoever except a study you didn't understand. The absolute lowest of the range of tribes studied is not the average for all tribes, dipshit. One tribe had attrition rates on par with what you described, and even then it was overwhelmingly child mortalities, not adult. The study doesn't even cover mortality rates between 5 and 25, it only deals with below 45 and over 45.

>That doesn't prove anything about early early humans.

This is technically correct, because the burden of proof is actually on you from the beginning and I can't dispute evidence until you provide some.

>Maybe to depict a more savage age where the weakest have no rights?

Oh, god, so your justification for having a poorly thought-out, internally contradictory setting is that you want to be an edgy tryhard? That's got to be the worst possible reason to sacrifice-

>To make a grrl power adventure with cavewomyn breaking their chains and challenging the patriarchy?

No, good job, you've thought of something even more stupid, bravo.

>>207333

>I believe I'm asking you for your proof and not the other way 'round

You are, but what you're asking me to prove is that early humans behaved the same way as modern ones. We're the same species and it's not like early humans were going to go around making cave paintings to the effect of "we don't sell the mothers of our children to other clans or anything, seriously why would you even think that" lying around. The anon's proposed stone age deeply contradicts human bonding instincts, so it's on them to justify why that would ever happen.

>>207372

>Your doing the same thing faggot.

Can you substantiate that accusation? Can you find the slightest shred of proof that suggests my stated motivation is dishonest? Do you even remember what my stated motivation is? Considering the amount of reading comprehension you've demonstrated so far, I'm guessing not.

>>207452

>Can you substantiate that accusation?

This is yours right >>207109

>And also shut up about how women have to be treated as property because #1 you can't use that excuse in some places and then demand artistic license and #2 that isn't actually how primitive societies work anyway.

And this

>It is. The thing here is that the anon is saying that when it comes to whether or not we can have female PCs we need to be absolutely realistic, but when it comes to how female NPCs are treated he's suddenly all in favor of tossing realism out on its ear in order to have a women-as-commodity society. If we're going for pulpy unrealism, we don't have any reason not to have female PCs. If we're going for realistic accuracy, society is not going to treat women like that.

Combined makes it clear your stance, which is pretty much the exact opposite of his with some "it's unrealistic" thrown in too. Noting treating women as property being a point on it's own as if that even matters and making it first before the actual point that's worth noting and constantly throwing both together speaks for itself.

I call it as a see it.

>Can you find the slightest shred of proof that suggests my stated motivation is dishonest?

As far as dishonesty goes your just pulling whatever shit you can to get other people to agree with you on making women as PCs and by proxy on equal footing so pretty much the same thing you accuse the other Anon of doing.

Amongst other things you try to force a perception that there is a consensus

>These are issues with a paleolithic setting, which is why we've already decided on a late neolithic setting.

>

>we've

>Significantly more than just myself has expressed this opinion. You, personally might be satisfied with a disconnected string of episodic adventures that meander around with no greater point than just staying alive (how entrepreneurial of you!), but most people want to actually achieve things. When presented with your setting, the very first thing someone asked was how to get rid of it and make a proper tribal society.

>

>Significantly more then just myself expressed this opinion.

A vague number higher then one to imply it's a lot regardless of how many actually agree with you.

Oh and this one is an outright lie.

>When presented with your setting, the very first thing someone asked was how to get rid of it and make a proper tribal society.

The first post >>205566

>You know, that would be cool. I wouldn't even need orcs because I can play as a caveman.

>Maybe it could be even set in a pre Prometeus age in some sort of grecoroman setting, with huge as fuck monsters, tricking gods and naked people because they had no civilization.

The first post recommending a change >>205575

>Work on it again, but instead of using elves I'd say use the different species of homo sapiens, erectus (us), neanderthals, and whatnot, then differentiate them the way you were going to differentiate the elves or whatever other races you were going to use.

>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo

>Also merry christmas

The first actual question pertaining to the setting >>205591

>You have cannibalistic elf shamans?

>>207497

*continued

This is just false

>Even people who support your ideas ultimately want to get rid of it. Okay, sure, you posted some shit earlier, then you left for several days and since we're all anonymous you're not easily distinguishable from that.

>

>Even people who support your ideas ultimately want to get rid of it.

I count only about two to three expressing a desire to actually get rid of the setting and/or replace it. Everyone else is either expanding it or hammering out mechanics.

Finally in your own question Y\your implying I'm the same Anon(s) your arguing with or that I've been around throughout the whole thread. (Hint: I haven't.)

>Do you even remember what my stated motivation is? Considering the amount of reading comprehension you've demonstrated so far, I'm guessing not.

By the way nice personal attack, you don't like being called a duck then stop walking and talking like one.

>>207497

This is another one of those long, rambling, mostly dishonest and/or stupid posts that I don't want to waste people's time responding to in its entirety, so here's a quick example of the kind of dishonesty this anon is working with and then I'll call it a day:

>As far as dishonesty goes your just pulling whatever shit you can to get other people to agree with you on making women as PCs and by proxy on equal footing so pretty much the same thing you accuse the other Anon of doing.

What I actually said was this:

>If we're going for pulpy unrealism, we don't have any reason not to have female PCs. If we're going for realistic accuracy, society is not going to treat women like that.

So I've explicitly stated that having women as PCs is one of two options. And this is something he himself quoted, but then ignored the actual implications of because it didn't help him push his narrative.

This thread reminds me of minmaxboards or tgdmb.

>>207452

>You, meanwhile, have provided no evidence whatsoever except a study you didn't understand. The absolute lowest of the range of tribes studied is not the average for all tribes, dipshit.

I quote the study:

>Among traditional hunter-gatherers, the average life expectancy at birth (e0) varies from 21 to 37 years,

I said 20-30, you said 65.

>Infanticide is fairly high among Ache and Yanomamo,

[…] Infants most susceptible to infanticide include those born with obvious defects, those

perceived as weak, twins, and those of questionable paternity. […] violent deaths decrease with increased state-level intervention and missionary

influence […] (e.g., […] Ache, Yanomamo).

You said Paleolithic humans couldn't afford killing babies.

>we see that on average 57 percent […] of children born survive to age 15 years among hunter-gatherers […]. Of those who reach age 15, 64 percent of traditional hunter-gatherers […] reach age 45.

As you see, it deals with ages other than "below 45 and above 45", as you'd know if you had actually read the study. And the statistics are pretty bleak, especially considering the ultraviolence of Paleolithic humans.

And I have to fucking quote it verbatim, because you prefer to lie and tell me I don't understand it instead of admitting you're wrong.

>This is technically correct, because the burden of proof is actually on you from the beginning

>to include something in a setting you have to prove it actually happened irl

I understand not admitting blatantly impossible things, but you have to prove something is absurd, not the other way around. I want a world where people kill each other all the time, you have to prove it's not possible. Got it?

>Oh, god, so your justification for having a poorly thought-out, internally contradictory setting is that you want to be an edgy tryhard?

You keep saying it doesn't make sense yet you have no problem with lying and ignoring logic and anthropology, hypocrite. And the whole "you can't like what I don't like" argument is pretty weak.

>>205554

Are you kidding? Some of the best classics are set in the stone age or equivalent (ie Hyborian Age).

The problem is that modern authors just don't give a fuck about telling a story, they're in it for the money, which means formulaic storytelling. And Tolkiens formula or semi-medieval settings is the most common.

If you want quality fantasy start reading shit written before The Hobbit was written (40s?). Some shit written in America during the 60s and 70s is good, because Americans were ignorant of Tolkien, and they were high enough on LSD to write good fantasy.

>>207625

I'd like to believe that interpreting maps is where abstract thought came from. Niggas have to be able to extrapolate that shit.

There was probably paint or other things that didn't make it through the ages or the stone eroding away from the elements is fucking it up.

>>207529

I will walk you through this.

I stated there are two options: Either we can go for a pulpy angle where women are commodities for no other reason than because it's pulp, but that also means you can't ban female PCs because of realism. Or we can go with a more realistic model where female PCs are banned but women are not treated as commodities. In the second quote, I was explaining to the other anon the consequences of one specific route (as it happens, I did get things backwards and should have been telling him to shut up about how women can't be PCs, but what the fuck, the overall point that you can have one or the other but not both still holds).

>>207565

>I said 20-30, you said 65.

Meanwhile, in reality:

>Life expectancy outside of violent death has been about 65 all around. Life expectancies are sometimes dragged down by an abundance of violent death or plague, particularly amongst children 0-5 who are especially vulnerable to both. Lethal plagues are almost non-existent in tribal societies, and violent deaths are not especially more common than most of history.

I said that life expectancy holds steady when factoring out violent deaths, and then also that violent deaths were not especially common in the stone age as compared to the rest of history.

>You said Paleolithic humans couldn't afford killing babies.

I said they couldn't simultaneously afford to kill babies while suffering the mortality rates you claim they do. And hey, it turns out you're quoting the study in a misleading manner: The primitive societies studied are split into three groups and you're quoting the statistics from the worst of them. If I wanted to play the same game I could claim that 80% of people who reach age 15 will reach age 45, and since the category with good mortality rates has far more data points than the other two categories put together, I would actually be less dishonest in claiming as much. The actual figure is north of 70%, and far above the one half that you initially claimed.

Now I'm leaving something out here, mostly because I'm waiting to see if you'll blunder right into what you think is a gotcha but what is actually a point in my favor. We'll see.

>I want a world where people kill each other all the time, you have to prove it's not possible.

No, I don't. If you want a pulpy, unrealistic world, you can just have that. The technology in Star Wars makes no sense and nobody cares because that's not the point. If you want a stone age setting that is inexplicably populated exclusively by tribes that are violent to the point of self-destruction, you can just have that. It means that you can't use realism as an excuse to defend limiting player options, but you can go ahead and have your ultraviolence. What you claimed here >>207191 was not that pulpy ultraviolence is cool, but that it's realistic. And it's not. Two tribes out of two dozen studied does not a pattern make.

>>207642

>

>>Life expectancy outside of violent death has been about 65 all around. Life expectancies are sometimes dragged down by an abundance of violent death or plague, particularly amongst children 0-5 who are especially vulnerable to both. Lethal plagues are almost non-existent in tribal societies, and violent deaths are not especially more common than most of history.

>

>I said that life expectancy holds steady when factoring out violent deaths, and then also that violent deaths were not especially common in the stone age as compared to the rest of history.

>

nigga why would you ever factor out violent deaths

>Meanwhile, in reality:

i don;t think you are allowed to say that

>>207643

>nigga why would you ever factor out violent deaths

If you would learn to read complete sentences, you would realize that I did not. I used the figure without violent deaths as a starting point, then said that after factoring in violent deaths the stone age are not any worse than most of the rest of history, and in fact are better than large chunks of it.

>>207625

> the maps were ABSOLUTE SHIT.

This is something I actually noticed while experimenting in photoshop with photos of cave-walls. When I tried to make it look like the map was carved in, I could hardly tell what it was I had drawn, when I just filtered color over it and draw landmarks and what not, using the caves location as the orientation I realized you had very little scope or scale which I guess could be beneficial in it's own way, you could hide whatever you want in the lack of accuracy.

What the one anon said about exploring and revealing hexes while not super-immersive might just be the smartest way to go. If you're just going to abstract the map anyway might as well abstract it so the players can understand it.

>>207328

> trying to go full magical realm rather than realistic

Wait a minute, that's what you've been hung up on? I specifically said that's why I ended my project when I was initially working on it, none of that is relevant to what I've been doing in this thread since I've only been fleshing out setting flavor and basic game-mechanics.

You've imported something from one context into a completely different one and are acting as if that's directly relevant to the new context.

Yes I've changed gears to what suits me, from however many months ago to now. That's not moving the goal-posts that's called reprioritizing.

> So one moment he's lamenting how he has to abandon the entire project because people are reacting to one part of his realism

I wasn't lamenting it, I was saying I recognizing it would be seen as magical realm and so pursuing it wouldn't be fruitful for me.

> not that selling women for food is actually realistic

In the ancient world people sold their family members to be slaves commonly. If you were starving it was beneficial to your family members to both give them over to a master who could provide them basic amenities as slaves.and to lessen the burden of having to support an individual the resources simply didn't exist to support, marriages were sometimes arranged for similar financial reasons. Is there any reason to believe that similar transactions wouldn't occur in the Paleolithic period?

The reason I focus on women in this respect because like we see in certain species in nature, men who burden the group are kicked out to fend for themselves and are afforded, even if by way of exile, agency in their survival. I took that as a granted, I'm sorry if you were unable to recognize that.

> What matters is that he's using any excuse he can lay his hands on to force his stupid gender politics into the setting.

I think sexual dimorphism is an important consideration for the time-period. You can disagree, but you can't sit there and say I'm trying to force it in when it's not the only thing I've talked about in the thread. What I see is there are a few people like you who are triggered by it so I'm going to stick by it just to spite the triggered.

when you started quoting half-sentences and misrepresenting what I've said, misrepresented the contents of the thread and refused to ever acknowledge any error on your part you revelaed yourself for what you are, a butt-blasted SJW.

>>207642

Let me walk you through how that's bullshit.

The simple fact is I used one of two quotes and the primary quote is the one above it. Together they are why your a hypocritical faggot, by itself the way you claim it means what you intend it to mean falls flat on it's face when looking through your entire stated points on your stance.

You trying to clarify and whatever else you can try to dismiss this by concentrating on one quote while ignoring the other resolves the whole thing is bullshit.

Again your only doubling down on that one quote and not addressing all the points. I take it you don't have a leg to stand on to address it so your just conveniently ignoring it and hoping I don't notice. You don't even have a solid argument against the second question I addressed to link back too

Face it your a duck.

>>207328

>The burden of proof is on the person making the assertion.

He asserts that women have been traded; you assert they haven't. Both of you have asserted something, so don't give us this burden-of-proof-bullshit. If anything, the burden of proof lies on both of you, and at this point, it stops being a meaningful rule.

Seriously, this rule is often more hindering than helpful. We all have our preconceived notions of how the world works, and invoking the burden-of-proof frequently glosses over them instead of addressing them.

>>207372

I'm that guy you talked about. Sorry if it came across that way, but I really didn't intend to accuse anyone of being an MRA.

>>207654

>I'm that guy you talked about. Sorry if it came across that way, but I really didn't intend to accuse anyone of being an MRA.

why did bring up the MRA movement at all?

>>207636

>>207646

Maps from that period probably weren't meant to be read by other people, they were just positions jotted down for the drawer himself.

>>207654

>accuse anyone of being an MRA

Why are you using that as though you think it's a slur? WTF? Men shouldn't have rights?

Better question is why my ID+ block didn't work on your ass.

>>207655

To relativize how "bad" what he had already was. Women mostly being cooks, caretakers of the family and so on is both sensible and pretty harmless in a paleo- or neolithic setting. It's on a wholly different level than the faggots who keep citing Schopenhauer despite never having read any of his works, only his quote about women being infantile. These guys are shit.

I also mentioned it as a caution, but that was a secondary concern. You know, so no one comes up and begins citing Schopenhauer thinking he's in good company.

>>207660

that was before the women being traded for food shit.

>>It's also inherently masculine and right-wing at a fundamental and subconscious level

Was the quote if i am not mistaken

which sounds solid.

"chopenhauer despite never having read any of his works, only his quote about women being infantile. These guys are shit.

smells like mygtow, but even then their main thrust is there is some magical entity that oppresses men by favoring women, gynocentrism is the term i fink

>>207661

This is /tg/, I didn't use an ID block because you btohered me, I used it because I had to press the down arrow too many times to get to on-topic stuff that interested me.

Why are you even here? We have no centralized body or rules structure you can use to bully people, we don't even make the news.

You'll never come close to meeting the lifetime commitment to be recognized as one of us either.

Go bother someone you can actually affect, you're wasting your time here.

The black lives matter thing was a bit obvious. Future tip: you can't virtue signal your way into a community who don't care about virtues, and self organize based on liking a genre of entertainment.

>>207670

I don't think he understands that stone age was peaceful in the sense that the distance between tribes was measured in weeks, even months of travel. And no one invented the military logistics train yet. In that sense, it was easier to trade than kill.

The few times that tribes were close neighbors, meaning a few days travel, they always had conflicts. Often they ate each other if there was a famine.

Besides distance, another reason for peace was that wasting manpower on an attack is often very dumb.

Remember no tribe would send their females out, which were needed to tend children. No one too young or too old, as they might not even be able to make the trip to the next tribe. This leaves maybe a sixth of the strongest men in the tribe, and some need to stay behind to guard the tribe. Lets say eighth of the men are the expeditionary force.

They're going to be attacking an enemy tribe with all the men and women there, and they'll all fight to the death. This is the era when an infected cut can bring a strong man down and there's nothing they can do to stop it.

So think of the scale difference, the attacking tribe would have to be a dozen times bigger to start with, and even then it's a ridiculous risk with grievous casualties on both sides.

I'm sure war still happened, but it was rare simply because it was so difficult. Aaand that's why we survived. Distance and basic difficulties of war.

>>207646

>Is there any reason to believe that similar transactions wouldn't occur in the Paleolithic period?

Firstly, back in ancient days there were social institutions that would return your slaves if they ran away. In the stone age, if one of your women just walks away while you're out hunting, what are you going to do about it? The only way to enforce your claim is if you were powerful enough to take her by force in the first place, and if you were able and willing to kill the other clan and absorb their women, why not just start with that? A difference in power between stone age clans such that one has a decisive advantage over the other is rare, but in the event that it exists it's not likely they wouldn't take advantage of it. And if it doesn't exist, you can't enforce your claim. There's no institutions to actually enforce the transaction and the commodity has legs and will, so you can't just stick them in your hut and expect them to stay there.

Second, under what circumstances would one clan be starving while another thrives in the first place? They're neighbors, one is unlikely to be hit by a famine when the other isn't, and there's no way to store food long term which means it's impossible for a clan to build wealth. The entire point of being nomads is that when food runs out in one place you can move to someplace else where there's more. If a stone age clan is starving, it means there's no food anywhere nearby they can get their hands on. So where did this other clan get theirs? You can rely on contrivances to come up with a specific situation where this would actually happen, but #1 there wouldn't be anything approaching an exchange rate for such rare circumstances in the first place and #2 why would you completely abandon a project because of an extreme edge case like this?

>The reason I focus on women in this respect because like we see in certain species in nature, men who burden the group are kicked out to fend for themselves and are afforded, even if by way of exile, agency in their survival.

What the fuck does this have to do with anything?

>you can't sit there and say I'm trying to force it in when it's not the only thing I've talked about in the thread.

This is a non-sequitir. Nothing about talking about other things means you can't be trying to force something that doesn't fit into the setting.

>when you started quoting half-sentences and misrepresenting what I've said,

The purpose of quotes is to make it clear exactly what portion of a post I'm responding to. Quoting complete paragraphs is unnecessary bloat on the post. I assume that people have already read your complete post, since it comes before mine. So far as misrepresentations go, if you're going to back away from all of the dumb shit you've said then sure, whatever, I don't give a fuck if you want to pretend that you never said it in the first place. What, do you think I'm trying to run a character assassination campaign on a fucking anonymous poster?

>>207653

>The simple fact is I used one of two quotes and the primary quote is the one above it.

Uh, dude. Read my response again. I addressed both the quotes.

>>207670

>Source?

Well, there's the study we've been talking about in this thread, which confirms it.

>And why do you arbitrarily exclude violent deaths, that are omnipresent and unavoidable?

I didn't. Try reading the entire sentence you're quoting a fragment of.

>And you were proven wrong.

Incorrect. Read the study: The two of twenty-one tribes who practice child-murder are horribly underpopulated compared to others.

>Now you tell me why, speaking of Paleolithic, I should include the latter two groups.

Once again you are using a vanishingly small amount of data and ignoring anything that doesn't conform to what you want. You have four fucking data points that give you the results you want, and you've decided to categorically exclude the others. Note that one of the two child-killing tribes in the study is also not a hunter-gatherer tribe, so you're happy to include them when it helps make your point and then exclude them when it doesn't anymore.

The reality is that you can't exclude the acculturated hunter gatherer tribes just because you don't like the data they represent. Without those data points, you don't have a big enough sample to draw any conclusions from at all. That's why they were included in the study in the first place, something which the study itself goes out of its way to state.

>That's not me.

Well, it's the origin of the argument. Whether it's you or not, it's the position you're defending.

>>207675

>I don't think he understands that stone age was peaceful in the sense that the distance between tribes was measured in weeks, even months of travel.

Not only do I understand that, that's my entire argument. The biggest source of human deaths is and always has been other humans. Back when there was plenty of unclaimed territory to expand into and populations were very sparse, wars were relatively uncommon.

>>207509

>Uh, dude. Read my response again. I addressed both the quotes.

Oh really? So when you said second quote you meant this one?

>And also shut up about how women have to be treated as property because #1 you can't use that excuse in some places and then demand artistic license and #2 that isn't actually how primitive societies work anyway.

Let's see what you have to say about that.

>In the second quote, I was explaining to the other anon the consequences of one specific route (as it happens, I did get things backwards and should have been telling him to shut up about how women can't be PCs, but what the fuck, the overall point that you can have one or the other but not both still holds).

>

>I was explaining to the other anon the consequences of one specific route (as it happens, I did get things backwards and should have been telling him to shut up about how women can't be PCs

You claim you did the opposite of what you actually did. You didn't explain the consequences of anything and only to told him to shut the fuck up.

And I'm still waiting on your response to the points for your dishonesty.

>>205554

Why is it that no one is pointing out that you have a man choking a fucking bear. Id rather have a fantasy where you have to kill things with your bear hands if anything.

*gets another bucket of popcorn*

>>207706

Wars would have been uncommon, but the people were ten times more aggressive and violent than today.

Prehistoric murder rate is estimated 15%.

Neolithic to ancient word was 4-5% on average.

Medieval murder rates were 3% during wars.

Modern murder rate is 0.075%.

So understand that in a tribe of <100, a few people got murdered every year by fellow tribe members, a few got murdered by drifters or outcasts raiding the settled tribes 24/7, and about as many died of murder as preventable disease.

These people lived in constant violence, fear for their life, and lost friends and family members all the time. Coupled with high infant mortality, their women had to be pregnant every year or the tribe shrank, and women were protected like precious jewels. Their lives were short, brutal and dictated by survival strategies, little else.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malazan_Book_of_the_Fallen

http://www.historicalnovels.info/Prehistoric.html

I take it we've fully returned to the notion of making a Primitive Fantasy now.

>>208005

Bout time, now then considering the fantastical elements just how fantastical are we talking here? Everything is dire or just packs of dinosaurs or just very lite on the fantasy and everything being low key.

>>208005

Sadly I'm a scientist, I have no idea how to make a primitive fantasy.

>>208008

Well, I'd like to see far more primitive and brutal takes on the Dorfs and Fair Folk, while also have tribes of antediluvian horrors gibbering and meeping about. I'd think a race similar to ghouls would fit in marvelously here, what with the lusting for hot flesh to consume.

Perhaps this is also the age when dragons are about to reach (if not already at) their prime. Perhaps they are the first natural civilization, and theirs is a rule of tyrants with a bit of "it's safer in here" rhetoric.

>>208039

Australopithecus, maybe? Some kind of Ogre? please don't hurt me if that's not even an ape Is there any kind of thing which we could mutate into the predecessors of the "godly smiths" type of Cyclopes?

And no, I'd put Flore down as something else. Primitive Elves as I see them… they don't look human yet. Three routes I'm thinking with this:

1) Energy beings of raw, snarling, tittering magic. Looking at them directly can burn out eyes and make men speak in tongues.

2) Chittering wood-and-flower blossom things based off Magnolia trees.

3) Living ore deposits which haul themselves out of crevices in the ground along leylines. They have slow reaction-times, but can reach logical conclusions quicker than good ol' sapiens can yet.

All of these are sapient, but in the case of the first two at least they are prone to mirroring and imitation. …Mind, even if we pick one for "standard" Elves, we get two other races out of the bargain (maybe even a third).

>image

I applaud your autism, scientistfag. It also delights me to know that such a weird creature exists in the world.

But this thing about Dragons being the only fully intelligent race of the setting strikes me as iffy, especially if we want to make games of things. Fully-developed, perhaps?

>likes the idea of proto-dragons being player characters, as they're yet to be the broken engines of destruction we know so well

>>208025

>Perhaps this is also the age when dragons are about to reach (if not already at) their prime. Perhaps they are the first natural civilization, and theirs is a rule of tyrants with a bit of "it's safer in here" rhetoric.

You have my attention.

Especially the last sentence.

>>205554

Google "chronicles of ancient darkness".

It's a stone age fantasy setting that might give you ideas.

>>205736

>Great White Beast

>Red demon

I assume that these are inferior out of Africa humans encountering Aryan superiority for the first time, and falling back on Communism to protect themselves.

>>206912

Isn't that Spore?

Wasn't Spore terrible?

>>208082

looks like this Ug is a few chromosomes short.

Obviously white beast = snow and red demon = fire

>>208083

Not the concept.

>>208083

The game was fun, just didn't fulfill even half the potential it had.

>>208083

The idea behind spore was amazing, even the programming was ok, but the final execution sucked.

I played one completely through and it just felt like whoever was in charge simply went "this is taking too long" and cut the detail level and the plot 100x shorter than it should have been.

I want to see what a huge studio could do with spore II.

>>208025

keep dinosaurs to a minimum, essentially have them be terrasques, wandering beasts of a primordial age, that live deep within the earth but emerge to wreak havoc on early man.

as for other races, just use actual other human species. Homo Neanderthalhensis, Homo Habilis, Homo Sahelanthropus, Homo Florensis, Homo Denovian, etc.

exaggerate divergences in evolution, and you have tolkien on crack and mushrooms.

Ice Age megafauna is prevalent, as well as other extinct creatures or predecessors (note, most animals were far larger before the age of man, we simply hunted them all to extinction or they evolved to be smaller in response), you could potentially do whatever you want as long as it sticks to the mammalian dominated ecosystem.

Magic is just shamans calling upon ancestors and spirits, with any sort of proto-pantheon of god-like beings you want to mix in, as long as it stays primitive and not fully formed or codified.

As for weirder things, this is where we get into weird fiction territory. without dropping the big L, lots of writers and even historians believed in the idea of a global flood (to describe plate tectonics before anyone knew it existed) and that there could have been any number of weird shit before this essentially apocalyptic event. Aliens, ancient civilizations, lizardmen from the center of the earth, all accumulating to lovecraft's antediluvian old ones and star-spawn from beyond the stars. basically anything that came before man that even WE can't explain, like the proposed hyperborian civilization from before the Ice Age, or the giants and extraterrestrial-looking remnants of some strange super-men, or even survivors from the cambrian and pre-cambrian eras, stalking the deepest abysses of the earth and sea, waiting for hapless surface dwellers to find themselves in their hellish domain.

>>208236

>demand hardcore evolution simulator

>market it three year old demographic

Some board members should be shot.

>>208239

Aaaand archived.

Ohh, this gives me a great deal of pleasure.

It also gives me an idea: How would you do mammalian abominations? And no, I don't mean something like a spectral wolf or something like that.

>or even survivors from the cambrian and pre-cambrian eras

Immediately, you reminded me of these things.

http://tardis.wikia.com/wiki/Permian

>>208246

>>208236

>execs

No, there were also people on the team like that. You practically had two camps. Anyway yeah, the wasted potential of spore, all the shit they cut, is staggering.

Absofucklinglutely staggering.

>players receive vision from their tribes god telling then to build the first walles city and usher in the Neopaeleolithic Era

> this is there only instruction, build Sumer and don't die from the otherwise entirely primitive world

Could it work?

>>206653

>>206599

>>206653

>total lack of any kind of overarching THING beyond survival

I can think of a few ideas…

>The party must set off on an adventure leaving their tribe behind because they need / want an ancient relic

>Steal the secret of fire / metalwork / agriculture from the gods / other tribes / civilized peoples

>There's not enough food in this area / you have committed a crime / you have been framed for a rime - your chief exiles you. You must now build up a tribe elsewhere / find a new sourcce of food / redeem yourself / clear your name

>There's not enough food here - lead your family to the promised land.

>Mystical vision quest deal

>The party are just adventurous and want to see what's beyond the horizon

>You return from a hunt to find your tribe slain / missing

>Conflict with another tribe / family in the local area

>Conflict with monsters / demons

>Your fishing canoes are blown far off course in a freak storm can you survive / explore this new land and prosper / conquer the local tribes / return home

>Unite all the families in your area to fend off a far worse threat / because you want to be the king / because gold told you to

>A section of the local forest has long been TooDangerous due to MagicalThreat - can you b the first to hunt there / clear the threat

>This new cave your tribe has sheltered in just seems to be a lot deeper than any you havee entered before - how deep does the darkness go? Are those whispers you hear? Where's little niece Ugg got to this time?

>Those darn fey / rival tribe / orcs / civilised slavers have Taken little niece Ugg - get her back / get revenge.

>You been kidnapped by another tribe - escape and seek revenge

>You've been kidnapped by civilization - rise to glory in the gladiator pits / cotton farms and proopser in this strange new land with abundant food

>You've been kidnapped by fey - shit's getting surreal

>A giant gleaming rock has fallen from the sky. WHat are these strange devices throwing spears of light you've found. How can you use this to your advantage? What's this strange fungus growing in all the bodies on board? Why do they look like they've killed themselves? Is Gur acting odd now?

And plenty of these tie together well enough for a campaign.

>You also don't have any kind of convenient army of doom, because armies aren't really much of a thing

Goblins / kobolds always occur in greater numbers than people do.

Golems / constructs of some sort

Summoned demons

Undead

>>208274

Cute sells ad much as sex does. Can you blame them?

>>208374

Yeah it sells to kids. But then you have to make it a popular fad like Beyblade, or kids will never bother their parents for it.

A far better market strategy would have been to market to 20 year olds and make it a social game like farmville, they have disposable income and are usually into that sort of shit.

>>208374

This was Will Wright's love child, and the team for a cutesy game with dumbed down mechanics won and gutted out everything, they also permanently removed the stuff Will's side was working on so it's gone forever.

>>208374

not when you market your game as a fucking GOD SIM

>>205824

Paleo-Indian aesthetic would work well, plenty of ice age beasts, with dinosaur stragglers as the mysterious dragons

Has anything among this stupid arguments been useful to anyone seeking to make a prehistoric fantasy

>>208429

Already moved on from that, kiddido.

>>208353

All of those sound fun. Though the scenarios you're making, alongside one of my ideas for Elves, makes me think that this is a world where magic is abundant and wild.

>critters

Schools of migratory fishmen, giant swarms of insects, hiveminded fungus victims, mind-controlled tribals, ravenous scouring landstars…

>>208278

Ah, I have that book somewhere. Yes, we've got a whole host of weird things we can monsterize.

>>208441

you also have to consider the mindset behind lovecraft and his contemporaries when imagining ancient things. We take a lot for granted because we assume everything's already been discovered, yet it's actually far from it. The fossil record only represents a tiny fraction of creatures who managed to be under the right conditions to fossilize, and even then many creatures from the pre-cambrian era simply couldn't fossilize due to lacking any kind of hard body. For all we know, vicious sky-jellies that could harness cosmic rays could have feasted on giant mushroom-creatures before the first insect or plant ever reached land.

>>208446

Is it any wonder that both fungi and jellyfish are the oldest and most expansive multicellular lifeforms in their respective environs?

>>208387

>Yeah it sells to kids

Last I checked, it wasn't kids wearing t shirts of Angry Birds, SpongeBob, and Hello Kitty.

Also note that the typical example of seinen anime/manga is k-ON!.

>>208374

The dumb things some people pull.

It seems to me that nobody wants to make something they're proud of anymore.

>>208624

Why make great when good sells more, and mediocre with a cheap gimmick even moreso?

>>208779

The problem is that good doesn't actually sell more, it just gets hyped more because the money that doesn't go into making a great thing goes into marketing.

Which is stupid. Not only is it stupid, anyone who falls for it is stupid. There are thousands of examples of overhyped, tied-in, marketing swan dives that turned into belly-flops. It happens repeatedly. And nobody stops to think long enough to stop it.

Fuck this shit, I'm gonna go play Quake 1 some more.

>>208542

>>208624

>>208779

>>208782

Ehem.

>>208787

Apologies. The thread seemed like it was too far gone.

That having been said, eldritch horror and cavemen would go together pretty well. Shamanistic magic isn't that far off from the stuff you find in eldritch horror.

>>206996

Holy shit are you retarded. No, ancient man weren't retards who could barely speak their own language, they were intelligent beings who were you ancestors. The reason they didn't have writing, didn't have as many words as modern man does is not because they are idiots, but instead because it simply wasn't developed enough. Place yourself in a world where everything wants to survive, where you have no knowledge of your past life and is doomed to survive for no reason other than following your instincts. Would you have the vocabulary of a fully fledged man of this era? Fuck no, you would grunt and wave your arms around to try to communicate.

You also believe that it is easy to survive in a cold harsh environment? Try doing that while others want you dead for taking up space and the ground beneath you is a freezing land of utter FUCK. Sure, you may have a very basic food chain going on with a good chance of survival, as long as nothing changes, but once things happen you're dead. Only either the strongest or the smartest will survive, and most times it would require the both working together to make it through disasters. You weren't strong enough to spear a mass of meat struggling to survive? Well shit, worst case you're dead and best case you wasted energy. Shit, you didn't prepare enough food to survive the winter? Tough luck. Not to mention that even the smallest of cuts can mean death if you aren't careful enough. Combine that with the inherent fragility of man, you'd be hard pressed to live long enough to have children, and even if you do it's a whole other thing to have to take care of a near newborn in which would absolutely die if left unattended for even a few seconds. Have fun surviving then you autistic fuck face.

>>208821

>Complaining about bigotry and hatefulness, with a tumblr gif

It's probably bait.

>>208809

One thing I've always thought odd, is that for at least 190,000 years before recorded history as we know it, is we were roughly as intelligent and capable as we are now.

Think of all we've accomplished in any 50-100-year span for the past 10,000 years.

I have a very hard time believing for 190,000 years beforehand, we all just say around campfires and grunted at each other.

>>208892

Well, look at Moore's law. It isn't a perfect scale looking back, but it does show that technology tends to beget more tech. Also many things only seem simple once already understood, and are much harder to figure out the first time.

Also don't forget how hard it would be for ideas to propagate for these people. Essentially you'd have to come up with all the basics on your own until you got far enough, and even then it is just better, not nearly to where we are today.

There also is the fact of how to preserve information, before writing was common in everyone (i.e. the 1800s I believe?) it would be very hard to keep information you weren't using regularly everyday, and most people really don't need to remember or care how physics works most of the time, honestly. So knowledge would get lost and have to be rediscovered all the time in communities. Sure the elites may, big MAY, have the more advanced stuff saved in like the library of Alexandria, but there wasn't much they could DO with it. Until the industrial revolution, I remember reading that you needed something lime 80 FARMERS for everyone who was not one. This means you've only got a small portion of the population that can be really working on theory or improving our understanding. With hunter-gatherers it drops to almost nil.

One last point for how long it took people about as smart as us to get technologically advanced, they really weren't quite as smart as us. Evolution is a continuous process, that is retarded by improved medical knowledge, but is never completely shut down, even today. This is especially true once you account for sexual selection. Smart people tend to get more likely chances to end up with kids who survive in turn, so over time humanity's intelligence has been slowly going up, in general.

>>208895

>This is especially true once you account for sexual selection. Smart people tend to get more likely chances to end up with kids

I just heard some faint REEEE'ing over the horizon, from virgins who somehow think they're smarter than "normies".

>>208895

A few thousand years is but a second if you were to consider time itself.

>Smart people tend to get more likely chances to end up with kids

There are many things that give man leverage over another, I will list the three most commonly known

Looks

Charisma

Intelligence

This is in, what I consider, most important to least important. A fat man, no matter how intelligent or charismatic, will never bring as many children as a man with good looks and charisma. No, women aren't above their natural instincts and do not care about intelligence in general. It should be stated that before sexual selection begun, there was natural selection, in which the strong and the smart (or quick-witted) survived. Out of these people the women had the choice, or not, of which children they will carry. Once natural selection is taken out of the picture women are left with the choosing of the most good-looking over the fit. Intelligence doesn't need to play into this.

A child born of idiots will not die in this day and age, for they have everything they need to live to see another day for as long liberal civilization exist. You're in an era in which the retards are taken care of and praised for being retarded, where even they can have children if they search long enough. Our intelligence average has no need to go higher, nor does it have anything against it going lower.

>>209365

I'd put Charisma over Looks, and introduce Status as top dog.

>>208895

>One last point for how long it took people about as smart as us to get technologically advanced, they really weren't quite as smart as us. Evolution is a continuous process, that is retarded by improved medical knowledge, but is never completely shut down, even today. This is especially true once you account for sexual selection. Smart people tend to get more likely chances to end up with kids who survive in turn, so over time humanity's intelligence has been slowly going up, in general.

You're not accounting for the fact that as civilization progressed, the stupidest, dumbest, most useless fucking wastes of space suddenly became capable of survival. If that didn't drive IQ down by evolutionary mechanisms, it definitely did make the average member of society behave much dumber.

>>209424

Ah, I forgot about popularity. Thanks for reminding me.

>>205554

>that I don't know a single fantasy setting set in the stone age, or the fantasy-equivalent of it.

Just in *D&D≤2 alone: Living Jungle, Maztica, partially Dark Sun.

>>210065

>central asia (lots of steppes, and deserts, so temperatures would range from 120 F to -30 or -40 F

Do they ever measure in F in Central Asia?

>So it wouldn't be so much "primative" fantasy as much as it would be ancient Eurasian fantasy with the addition of dinosaurs.

In other words, vaguely medievil with dinosaurs as substitute "dragons" and "questing beasts"?

Hey anons, found something you might like. https://wurm.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders

>>214353

http://www.editions-icare.com/docs/WURM-sneakpeak.pdf

Boosting.

Less politics this time, let's hope.

>>206179

>>206640

There is also GURPS Low Tech, which covers technology from the stone age until the medieval period.

>>205554

This might be off-topic, but I'm in the middle of constructing a setting loosely based on bronze age Mesopotamia and its surrounding environs. All of the races are variants of humans, and most of the civilizations have a historical analog (i.e. the settled farmers in the central river valley are based off of the Sumerians, the nomadic herders up north in the large mountain range are a combination of proto-Armenians and Akkadians, etc.).

What matters, though, are the themes I'm exploring with this setting. Of special interest is the magic system in my setting, and specifically the way unsettled or nomadic people experience religion and spirituality versus the way settled and urbanised people experience it.

Basically, all magic comes from the gods in my setting, but the northern herder-nomads have a very different understanding of what the gods are than the urbanised southerners-they believe more in abstract concepts up to personal interpretation, such as "The God of the Sky". As such, their magic is unfettered and ever-evolving as the specific person's connection with that "god" evolves over time. The southerners, on the other hand, use writing to codify discrete ways of interacting with their personified gods as represented by the God-Kings of each city.

With the magic system, the cartography, the research, and the linguistics, this setting is a joy to build and will be a joy to play.

>>213667

>There existed a beast in australia that basically fits the description of the medieval dragon quiet nicely

4 appendages, 0 of which are wings.

But both critters look like potential mounts.

>>222943

>>222890

>>208045

>Primitive Elves as I see them… they don't look human yet. Three routes I'm thinking with this:

>1) Energy beings of raw, snarling, tittering magic. Looking at them directly can burn out eyes and make men speak in tongues.

>2) Chittering wood-and-flower blossom things based off Magnolia trees.

>3) Living ore deposits which haul themselves out of crevices in the ground along leylines. They have slow reaction-times, but can reach logical conclusions quicker than good ol' sapiens can yet.

>All of these are sapient, but in the case of the first two at least they are prone to mirroring and imitation. …Mind, even if we pick one for "standard" Elves, we get two other races out of the bargain (maybe even a third).

Forgotten Realms have a few primitive sub-settings.

The Great Glacier involves dwarves in furs with bone spears, and Chult has the same plus were-pterodactyls.

And those Wood elves are always primitive (may have something to do with pyrophobia).