The Earth 100,000 years ago

[Tom Kalbfus]

This would make an interesting fantasy setting. Instead of dwarves, you have neanderthals, instead of halflings you have homo florensis, for some monsters you have gigantipithicus, you have a land crocodile that can run fast. Some interesting creatures existed in this world.

[NigelWalmsley]

I think if you're going to use "Earth, but in the past" as a setting, you either want to go further back than that, or not as far. Neanderthals don't have the cachet of dinosaurs, and we don't know enough about them for you to be able to use Wikipedia to pick up setting information effectively.

[Lvl 2 Expert]

There is an interesting attempt at this sort of setting in the The Hobbit sort-of-ripoff from The Asylum. It's a ****ty movie even by their standards, despite on paper having everything: a gorgeous jungle, Flores hobbits vs cro-magnons vs Java men/Homo erectus, prehistoric fauna, relatively biog name actors and two types of dragons plus giant spiders thrown in for good measure.

As a game setting I feel like one of the limitations of it is the technology. Weapons wise you're pretty much limited to stabbing spears and throwing spears, although you could "there's no evidence against it"-style throw bows, slings and atlatls in. There are no domesticated animals, and in this case there actually is plenty of evidence against it, from DNA analysis of present day animals.

But maybe you could throw in a little bit of alternate history? Have a world where multiple human species survived a bit longer and while influencing each other all made it to the edge of the late stone age or so? More tools, more weapons, more semi-tame animals, larger settlements, different types of societies. (You'd have traveling hunter-gatherers (or even just mostly hunters in the Neanderthals case), nomadic pastolalists/livestock herders, "fire and forget" farmers who plant crops and then basically live as hunter-gatherers until it's time to return to the same spot and harvest, full-time farmers, maybe some fishing based villages?) A bunch of animal species made it a bit longer as well, they were a good disaster-free 100.000 years, so you have mammoths, cave bears, sabertooth cats, whooly rhino's, gigantipithicus is a very good idea, onagers and basically everything modern as well for good measure. You could even have a few mystical figures working on the secret knowledge of metals. If the evil chief Grok gets their hands on that he could gather an army of hundreds or even thousands willing to follow the tribe with the pointiest spears! Depending on how fantasy you're willing to go maybe even throw in some stuff that could have formed a basis for ancient myths. But the main thing is that this might give the players a few more options. A party of four might be a clever toolmaker fighting with an axe and throwing clubs, a hunter and tracker with a bow and a stone dagger as backup, a big strong warrior and cattle guard from a herding tribe who has slain many lions with his trusty spear but is also good with a sling and a handy rope maker with a lasso or some bolas and a warclub with a big pointy piece of flint embedded in it. It's a bit easier to find diverse equipment and skill sets.

[Tom Kalbfus]

If you watched the 2003 Battlestar Galactica series, that series ended with them landing on Earth 150,000 years ago, about the same time period as I'm talking about here. What if we had an RPG setting that continued where BSG left off. The BSG fleet starts with a technology much higher that that of the stone age, about equal to our own. They send the fleet into the Sun, but what would they be left with? It would be easier for a small population of tens of thousands of humans to maintain a medeaval level of technology rather than a modern one. They could set up a bunch of kingdoms across the planet in a few thousand years, the setting could end up looking very much like the D&D setting if given enough time. What do you think?

If not the above, we can go with a colony of time travelers traveling through a wormhole, or maybe we can send some piece of real estate back 100,000 years, an example of this would be the novel Island in the Sea of Time by author S.M. Stirling. In that novel, the island of Nantucket goes back to 1250 BC.

[Quizatzhaderac]

So I see two problems.

1) Those interesting things were in different places. You could maybe set it at the boundry of sapiens and neanderthals lands, but then you wouldn't have florensis or turbo crocodiles.

2) Paleolithic era. No cities. No recognizable crops (basically everything we eats has been selectively bred for many generations, like dogs versus wolves). Even with modern knowledge, farming is an inefficient way to get 100% of your food and there's no really a good way to feed a medieval style city.

Adding some advanced predecessors could explain alot of this. But if the appeal is supposed to be that this is "our world" you'd have to explain why civilization went away. Maybe set it somewhere that's turning into dessert? That way civilization hasn't actually ended, but the explanation is there.

[Tom Kalbfus]

So I see two problems.

1) Those interesting things were in different places. You could maybe set it at the boundry of sapiens and neanderthals lands, but then you wouldn't have florensis or turbo crocodiles.

2) Paleolithic era. No cities. No recognizable crops (basically everything we eats has been selectively bred for many generations, like dogs versus wolves). Even with modern knowledge, farming is an inefficient way to get 100% of your food and there's no really a good way to feed a medieval style city.

Adding some advanced predecessors could explain alot of this. But if the appeal is supposed to be that this is "our world" you'd have to explain why civilization went away. Maybe set it somewhere that's turning into dessert? That way civilization hasn't actually ended, but the explanation is there.

If you send a small island with modern technology back in time, there will be enough gardeners with modern seeds to grow crops, you can multiple the seeds until you can do large enough scale farming to feed the population, and the technology they have will break down because the population is not large enough to support or maintain it. Lower technology is easier to maintain with a small population.