"Hey your prehistoric is in my fantasy..." Topic

hey your fantasy is in my prehistoric.

That classic mix of cavemen and dinosaurs comes to mind.

Do you prefer any fantasy elements with your prehistoric gaming?

time separated prehistoric men perhaps…allowing for a range of sizes/form from the very small 100-105cm to the quite large 190-200cm (325-350lbs+ muscle…think great ape)

sleestak or other reptile/amphibian/dino-man

time separated dinosaurs and paleolithic mammals

time displaced human settlement New Mexican USAF base transported to the distant past, dropped down with buildings, people, etc. right in the heart of it all…due to a black hole experiment

or other?

Shoots, bra, gotta get 'um all, or no can…

In my very best caveman game, Napoleon was eaten by dinosaurs while escaping from his alien captors. Elvis looked on.

It was historical gaming in about five different periods.

Plus, we used squirtguns to replicate alien firepower versus crumpled paper for the cavemen.

Sure. Atlanteans, Martians. The New Mexico AF Base idea is a good one!

yeah…I always liked that one…used it several times for many different settings.

post apocalyptic…lets the players deal with an alien world with equipment/skills they are familiar with…especially one that is way out of the box…last one had a handful of city sized floating automated factories that were cleaning the Earth after a nuclear war, scouring the surface and leaving pristine ground cover planted with fast growing plants and seeded with fauna that is needed for propagation (bees, ants, etc.)…smaller units add and maintain the flora/fauna on a quarterly basis…which is all good and well except mutants are not recognized by the sensors as human, so they get scrubbed if caught.

pure prehistoric…no sleestak or dinosaurs, just paleolithic era flora and fauna…you are there, deal with it (there was an arms race of sorts with Russia and China setting up mirror experiments…they show up also, within a certain range to make meeting them quite likely…certain science of solar alignment and other pseudo science to explain why they would be close :)

and a far flung future where man has left the Earth but there are working elements…I kept the "gate" open with regular cycles; once a month for 39hrs…we try and follow the trail…some things are better left alone…touch of Lovecraft and let the fungus glow

I once set a 2nd ed. D&D campaign on a Ringworld, left all the african herbivores and omnivores (including humans) but replaced all the predators with dinos. No metals on the ringworld, so everything was stone age technology. The elves were like 40K eldar with organic technology and had flying cities. I had the players take their favorite characters of 4-6 level from any campaign background, and I dropped them in. We had a blast!

Did they get to keep all their equipment? Or dropped in naked and whining like freshly sheered sheep?

I let them keep everything. They weren't quite ready for the first velociraptor attack… This was pre-Jurassic Park, so no one really thought much of dinos outside of swamps except me, and I was already on top of warm-blooded, feathered, chase-the-party-down-and-eat-them. Coupled with the natives' shamanistic approach to magic ("Sure, your fireball went off last night, but her summoned spirit still seems to be in your dreams *tonite*") and a few other interesting twists I can't quite remember right now, we got a good year out of it.

Cavemen and Lizardmen both trying to throw off the technocratic rule of the advanced Atlantean Empire…needs fleshing out but it sounds like a cool place to start.

"In my very best caveman game, Napoleon was eaten by dinosaurs while escaping from his alien captors. Elvis looked on."

What a load of tripe!

As if Elvis wouldn't have at broken into "Are you Toothsome Tonight."

Nah! Elvis would have been singing "Funny How Time Slips Away"

I think anything goes for this.

"Cavemen and Lizardmen both trying to throw off the technocratic rule of the advanced Atlantean Empire…needs fleshing out but it sounds like a cool place to start."

Perhaps Atlantis did not sink but rather phased out of time and transported itself to a paleolithic setting?

Causing some other issues…letting a few cross sections of other dimensional exchange…Lizardmen and Parrotmen from Venus…orcish fell men from an alternate Earth…Lovecraftian squid faced men from a dark past that Atlantis would rather forget…

Yes indeed fun times to be had by all!

My backstory ran thus: The Atlanteans had access to strong metal from a meteor that had fallen near the main island. With better weapons and training than the other tribes, they conquered a good deal of the coastland. Their attempt to call down another meteor, using some kind of meteor-dance, went horribly wrong. Instead, a MiGo hive meteor launched from Yuggoth smashed into the capital, sinking the island of Atlantis and leaving the rest of the Atlantean empire on the coast to fend off the attacks.

Oh, and the Laputians are floating around torching things and trying to find a way to power their city enough to reach space.

Poor Cavemen, caught in the middle of it all…

Dude…Migo are welcome in any time setting, period…and the Laputians, I assume you mean the Castle in the Sky ones link

One of these days I'm going to get going on my Atlantis army project. Basic concept is that Atlantis was a 'bronze age' island power that existed before the last ice age, but they did have access to magic/weird science. It founded colonies all over the world, but it's civilization collapsed due to the ice age. Some magical or scientific attempt to reverse the ice age went catastrophically wrong and resulted in the island sinking and most the surviving colonies being wiped out in the ensuing tidal waves…. I'd probably sprinkle liberally with Cthulhu and REH references- Dundan's ideas are intriguing….

One nice thing about it being on an island is I can add all sorts of crazy flora and fauna- surviving dinosaurs populations, earlier mammals, entirely new species, etc. War Stegosaurus, anyone? :)

-Will

Does an entire RPG setting count?

I have been developing what I call a "paleofantasy" setting that takes a lot of the classic tropes of fantasy games and puts them into an evolutionary spin where magic is the untapped resource much like fire was and where a warming cold world waits in fear for the reaturn of the saurians.

I know, it sounds a bit over the top but it is fun and is a cool blend of evolution and fantasy. It tends to feature more mammals and such as I really think dinosaurs have enough spotlights and the big fuzzies need more air time.

-Eli

and the Laputians, I assume you mean the Castle in the Sky ones

Definitely the castle and it's lazor, but could anyone stand a chance against the robots? Perhaps they are trying to collect enough Etherium/Volucite to activate their robot army so that they can conquer the earth with ease. And the Lizardmen just so happen to be sitting on a nice big mine full of it….

I need to game some of this with SBH…Anyone know good sources of Lizardmen and Cavemen in 25/28mm?

Lizardmen there are many choices but my current favorites, savage and reeking of stone age DBM039 – Troglodytes of the Sunless Forest link and DBM008 – Lizardman War Party A link Dragonblood miniatures now being sold by Cavalcade.

As for cavemen (some nakedness follows), I would have to start the search from ground zero other than Pulp Figures link a list of available choices link and Copplestone Castings link link link (boobies) link

Julian May's "Pliocene Exile" and Randall Garrett's Gandalara Cycle are both good fodder for this sort of thing.

Turtledove's "Beyond the Gap" and related titles is a fantasy setting with prehistoric mammals everywhere.

-Eli

@farstar…wow…this looks excellent…I am hunting the lists looking for copies in the area.

link

The 'Saga of Pliocene Exile' (known as the 'Saga of the Exiles' in some markets) is a narrative surrounding the adventures of a group of late 21st and early 22nd century misfits/outcasts who travel through a one-way time-gate to Earth's Pliocene epoch, in the hopes of finding a simple utopia where they can finally fit in.

However, the reality is far removed from the dream. The time-travellers arrive to discover the Pliocene is already inhabited by a dimorphic race of aliens ('exotics'), the Tanu and the Firvulag. The exotics, who have fled their home galaxy because of religious persecution, are marooned on Pliocene Earth as well.

The Tanu exotics have difficulty reproducing on Earth due to the high terrestrial and solar radiation, relative to their homeworld, and so have enslaved many of the humans in an effort to overcome this problem, interbreeding with the more robust humans. The Firvulag exotics are, in the main, unaffected by the higher levels of radiation and have no reproductive challenges.

Understandably, relationships between all exotics and the humans tend to be somewhat strained, although this manifests in different ways, and is complicated further by the exotics' metapsychic powers.

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@emu2020…Opening of the World…dude, I will be buying this series this week no doubt.

link

The Opening of the World Series is a trilogy of novels by Harry Turtledove set in a fantasy world.

In the trilogy, the Raumsdalian Empire is the dominant political entity, which shares ties to a loose collection of barbarian tribes with a common ethnicity, known as the Bizogots. The known world had always been bounded on the north by a massive glacier, but at the beginning of the series it has melted through, allowing contact with lands to the north. The series details the exploration of these northern lands and combat with the people who live there, an aggressive race of fierce warriors and powerful sorcerers known as the Rulers.

The Pliocene Exile is an early mega-novel. Not quite the logarhea of later authors, in that the four fairly thick books never stand still, it is still a bit daunting to start, knowing you have a couple thousand pages to plow through. It is an easy read, though.

Julian May also wrote other books in support of these (or the other way around, depending on how you look at it) that go into the history of some of the characters and why the Pliocene Exile was begun in the first place. I found those a bit less approachable than the original four.