Stone Age

[MintyThe1st]

I'm planning on putting together a 3.5 game set in the stone age of my world (FYI: it's a fairly generic fantasy world with all the bits and pieces you'd expect from one). I've been pondering what races and classes would be present in such a setting, and weather or not to restrict arcane casting to wild magic only.

here's what i've thought up so far:

Elves: Wild and Wood Elves make up the vast majority of the Elven race.

Dwarves: Dwarves would be mostly the same as I believe they wouldn't have changed much over the years.

Humans: Neanderthals, as in the Frostburn race, standard humans haven't evolved yet.

Orcs: mostly unchanged as orcs tend to live in tribal societies anyway.



Classes:

Arcane: only sorcerers, and only wild magic.

Divine: Druids and Spirit Shamans.

Psionics: NO

Martial: Barbarians, fighters, rangers,



Help is most appreciated.

[raygun goth]

Modern humans and Neanderthals were contemporaries, that is, they lived at the same time. The big question you have to ask yourself is if you want this to be like the stone age that way it really was, or how popular culture thinks it was, because they are two entirely different animals.

The neolithic period (what most of us are thinking of when we talk about "the Stone Age," even though that's only really applicable to a period of time in a small region of the middle east and Asia) was the time of the great builders - these people constructed mounds, lived under kinds, built megalithic structures such as Stonehenge, massive underground tombs, and potentially even some of the chambers in Derinkuyu. This was a period when farming was already old, when the developments of the period were not marked by advances in tools, but changes in social behaviors that led to the foundations and even the partial construction of cities like Ur, one of the oldest extant cities in the world, if not the oldest. As agriculture becomes more and more common, settlements get larger and require actual governing bodies, "paperwork," often in the form of marked stones or fired clay tablets. Jericho was already a well-developed city.

Some stone age societies even have identification cards in the form of carved stone or even copper rolls they use to press patterns into clay. Some of our oldest written records are from the stone age and tell stories of not tribal chieftans, but of kings - the latter end of the stone age was Dynastic Egypt (the stone age ended around 2000 BC and Egyptians are writing things down 1500 years before that). The most common domestic animals are dogs, sheep, and goats. What we would nowadays call "cows" are still the mighty aurochs, a terrifying beast left alone in the wilderness unless it is being captured for the purposes of killing captives in an arena for entertainment. Horses are still wild, but the first of them that would become domesticated are being hunted on the Russian steppes. The first large-scale inequalities of wealth are developing, as families with access to large herd animals become rich.

Most clothing is leather or woven cord held together with antler pins. Some of the very first schools begin to appear in cultures around the world, especially as agriculture spreads (mathematics, especially theoretical mathematics, becomes vital to survival).

While most other human species are extinct by the end of this era, at the beginning there were several - erectus, sapiens, neanderthalensis, and heidelbergensis the most commonly accepted.

Are you using 5e? 5e's mystic/psionics is much closer to how I'd imagine neolithic peoples would approach magic than anything else in D&D. Dragon magic could exist, too. Some Australian aboriginal groups believe that people were made by a pair of lizards trying to copy someone else's idea. The eastern half of the Americas shares legends about a dragon's forehead crystal that eats deer blood and can make you a powerful magic-user.

It was believed by some that Hammurabi's code, when it was written down, physically altered the world - it could be that druids and wizards share an origin and there are some interesting stories that could come out of that idea. One speaks, the other writes.

[MintyThe1st]

That is very useful info.

I'll be useing 3.5 most likely, unless i can pitch 5th to a hardened group of 3.5 players well enough.

i wanted something from the far flung past though, way back in time to when mankind was naught but hunter-gatherer tribes fresh out of Africa. I might end up working the legacy weapon Ur into the story.

[raygun goth]

Knowing that definitely helps.

The first art objects begin to appear about fifty thousand years ago - and we're not talking about tools with designs or anything, but actual separate art pieces. Venus dolls, as one example. This period is marked by knapped tools, rather than carved or sanded ones. Clothing is leather and vegetable fiber, and consists mainly of simple pants and jackets - though some of it could get quite complicated with the addition of antler pins used as buttons, extendable hoods, woven geometric designs, and dyed bone beads.

Most humans (and other hominids) appear to have lived in light forest areas while avoiding denser regions. The trees provided cover from the things wandering the open plains, but the dense forest made security difficult. There is a large amount of leisure time available to almost everyone - hunting and gathering, then picking up and moving on, is a very efficient living method when your population is low. Gatherers are the most important members of the traveling group, since they bring in almost 9/10 of what the group eats. Hunting does not tend to bring in a lot of food, even if you bring down something like a mammoth, mostly because there is no reliable way of storing the remains. What you eat when you kill it is what you get to keep.

Rafts were common, and hominids were settling the hell out of every island they could reach as an anti-predator strategy. The prepared-core knapping technique allowed for the invention of the bow and the tipped spear. Cooking and fire use were already widespread. Dogs were well on their way to being domesticated. The current evidence on social structures seems to suggest polygonous groups and possibly bonobo-like social behavior. There's no formal division of labor, no "chief" in the sense of "leader," but more in the sense of "tiebreaker," as most decisions are made by the community. There is a lot of egalitarianism - divisions between gender and sex are somewhat meaningless until agriculture begins to overtake the hunter-gatherer paradigm. Most descent factors were matrilineal and ambilineal rather than patrilineal - people were more worried about who your mother was or what group of wanderers you were from than your father. The earliest known religious leader was female.

[Belac93]

You can include wizards, with their spellbooks as cave paintings. Maybe they have a smaller book that is a bunch of tattoos on their body or something.

[raygun goth]

You can include wizards, with their spellbooks as cave paintings. Maybe they have a smaller book that is a bunch of tattoos on their body or something.

Whittlings, scrimshaw carved on monster bones, qipu, eccentric flint, maps on specially tanned hides (early and even medieval maps are meant more as spiritual guides than physical location finders), zoomorphic art on river rocks, "spellbooks" can be almost anything.

In D&D it can get weird, you seen the Dragonshard spellbooks from Eberron? Imagine carved magical crystals that can show the designs of an artist when oriented in a particular direction.

[TripleD]

The prepared-core knapping technique allowed for the invention of the bow and the tipped spear.

Don't forget atlatls. They and boomerangs (the hunting kind. which is really just a club designed for throwing) would probably be more common than bows and arrows, although this would vary based on the region.

[raygun goth]

Don't forget atlatls. They and boomerangs (the hunting kind. which is really just a club designed for throwing) would probably be more common than bows and arrows, although this would vary based on the region.

Atlatls and other spear-throwing devices appear around the exact same time that bows do; they're not any more primitive than bows. They tend to proliferate in regions where there is a lack of large game and thus very little reason to move to the bow, because they tend to be more effective at killing people.

Also, while the recurve bow might not exist yet, arrow fletching is actually rifled to produce spin in the arrow in almost every stone age arrow we've managed to find.

[Rainbownaga]

Have you got your eye on a specific part of the age, or are you thinking more of a "kitchen sink" approach? The stone age covers tens of thousands of years and all continents but Antarctica, so it's a pretty broad scope.

One fun idea is to have it set 5000 years ago and have paleolithic hunter gatherers stumbling across the advanced trade routes of copper age civilisation.

[Mechalich]

If you're doing this in 3.5 you need to consider what you are doing with magic. Magic massively overpowers all technological capabilities in straight 3.5 even with a High Middle Ages technology level in most areas. When you drop down to the Stone Age in technology the power of magic becomes utterly overwhelming. In order to make a Stone Age setting that retains elements of the period and feels meaningful you pretty much have to limit magic, by a lot, and that includes magic-using monsters.

[Solaris]

The current evidence on social structures seems to suggest polygonous groups and possibly bonobo-like social behavior. There's no formal division of labor, no "chief" in the sense of "leader," but more in the sense of "tiebreaker," as most decisions are made by the community. There is a lot of egalitarianism - divisions between gender and sex are somewhat meaningless until agriculture begins to overtake the hunter-gatherer paradigm. Most descent factors were matrilineal and ambilineal rather than patrilineal - people were more worried about who your mother was or what group of wanderers you were from than your father. The earliest known religious leader was female.

Interesting. Where'd you turn that up? I haven't seen much anything on 'lithic cultures, which has left me stuck with using modern hunter-gatherers as proxies.

[raygun goth]

Interesting. Where'd you turn that up? I haven't seen much anything on 'lithic cultures, which has left me stuck with using modern hunter-gatherers as proxies.

Stuff I remember from college and the textbooks themselves. Looking for specific references could take time, but The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Hunter-Gatherers, this study, and Frank Marlowe's Current Anthropology are some sources.

As a cool side note, the Aeta are an example of a hunter-gatherer society where women to most of the hunting.

[DuctTapeKatar]

What I'd do for races is make it so that, instead of playing with their species, mess around with their backgrounds. Human civilization was established through small farming villages, so maybe dwarves were originally cave-dwelling hunter-gatherers until they discovered ways to grow food inside their caves (I want to say mushrooms, but breeding small cave-lizards or something for meat might be interesting).

[Vogie]

If you're doing this in 3.5 you need to consider what you are doing with magic. Magic massively overpowers all technological capabilities in straight 3.5 even with a High Middle Ages technology level in most areas. When you drop down to the Stone Age in technology the power of magic becomes utterly overwhelming. In order to make a Stone Age setting that retains elements of the period and feels meaningful you pretty much have to limit magic, by a lot, and that includes magic-using monsters.

I would expect something like this would fall more into a "Far Cry Primal" version of the Stone age, which is far more modern than the "real" stone age. At the same time, limiting magic to lower levels could make some really interesting characters. Sorcerer bloodlines chosen for their natural weapon generation for example. You could even start the game with everyone falling into the Gish style - Everyone is multiclassing, one magic using class, one martial class.

[raygun goth]

I would expect something like this would fall more into a "Far Cry Primal" version of the Stone age, which is far more modern than the "real" stone age. At the same time, limiting magic to lower levels could make some really interesting characters. Sorcerer bloodlines chosen for their natural weapon generation for example. You could even start the game with everyone falling into the Gish style - Everyone is multiclassing, one magic using class, one martial class.

I'm looking around at screens of Far Cry Primal and aside from some ridiculous outfits, like that bone armor, I don't see anything that Stone Age central Europeans couldn't have made. So, essplain in more detail?

[tantric]

first, which stone age, the paleolithic or neolithic?

During the Paleolithic period, humans grouped together in small societies such as bands, and subsisted by gathering plants and fishing, hunting or scavenging wild animals.[3] The Paleolithic is characterized by the use of knapped stone tools, although at the time humans also used wood and bone tools. Other organic commodities were adapted for use as tools, including leather and vegetable fibers; however, due to their nature, these have not been preserved to any great degree.

Traditionally considered the last part of the Stone Age, the Neolithic followed the terminal Holocene Epipaleolithic period and commenced with the beginning of farming, which produced the "Neolithic Revolution". It ended when metal tools became widespread (in the Copper Age or Bronze Age; or, in some geographical regions, in the Iron Age). The Neolithic is a progression of behavioral and cultural characteristics and changes, including the use of wild and domestic crops and of domesticated animals.[a]

The beginning of the Neolithic culture is considered to be in the Levant (Jericho, modern-day West Bank) about 10,200–8800 BC. It developed directly from the Epipaleolithic Natufian culture in the region, whose people pioneered the use of wild cereals, which then evolved into true farming. The Natufian period was between 12,000 and 10,200 BC, and the so-called "proto-Neolithic" is now included in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic (PPNA) between 10,200 and 8800 BC. As the Natufians had become dependent on wild cereals in their diet, and a sedentary way of life had begun among them, the climatic changes associated with the Younger Dryas are thought to have forced people to develop farming.

check out GURPS Ice Age - the PDF is only $3. GURPS Dinosaurs has all the ice age animals. you can see the ToC of the 3rd edition Low-Tech - pdf is $8.