From Dying Stylishly:
This is a time before writing, money, walled settlements and the many other comforts of civilization. The ice-age wilderness is harsh, and filled with dangerous beasts. In dark forests and the depths of caves, there exist other, stranger creatures; mad beasts that are the products of magic.
The ice age is coming to an end. Retreating ice-sheets reveal tracts of land unseen for millennia with each spring, and in their wake leave the environment in turmoil. As the snow withdraws, modern humans follow, and every year new tribes of humans enter the Neanderthal‘s ancestral lands.
Against this backdrop, magic begins to emerge as a force in the world. Driving the rise in art – jewellery, cave paintings and figurines – that will fascinate later historians, some humans begin experimenting with the supernatural, learning to shape the wild forces of the world into controllable spells and items of power.
Strange Prehistoric Roleplaying
A revised and expanded version of Wolf-Packs & Winter Snow. Now with double the page count, glorious full-page illustrations, and huge piles more content to allow you to run the game straight out of the book with no preparation time.
Included in this book is everything you’ll need to run or play in games set in the fantasy ice age. Inside, you’ll find-
- Quick character generation, with classes for human hunters, skilled experts and magicians, and for the race of Neanderthals.
- Optional rules to play as lurking mutants, unnatural morlocks, orphaned children, neanderthal alchemists, mystics worshipping strange powers, or cannibalistic wendigos.
- Systems for food, weather and sickness that drive home the struggle for survival.
- Quick, dirty, brutal combat.
- Rules for gathering and leading a stone-age tribe.
- A magic system that combines familiar Vancian casting with the dangers of experimentation in a time before spellbooks.
- Guides to running a game of exploration in the wilderness or deep underground, including procedures to generate landscapes and cavern complexes as you play.
- Systems to create unique monsters on the fly.
- Optional rules to hack your game with, such as a system of brutal permanent wounds.
- Various post-human beings for PCs to work towards becoming.
All in a rules system that will be familiar to any fan of the OSR. Stripped down, streamlined, and customized to match the stone-age setting.
