Has anyone homebrewed a Paleopunk Fantasy or SciFi setting /tg/? Care to share the details?
>>98639467No. That sounds awesome. I've been trying to come up with a world that's Stone-Bronze age inspired.
Isn't that kind of the Conan Hyboria sword and sorcery type setting? I know a lot of sword and sorcery seems to be either the cusp of the neolithic and bronze age or the dark age between bronze and iron. It's possibly my favorite settings because the women from sword and sorcery or neolithic art have the most slamming bodies. Their tight toned waists and powerful thighs mess my head up like doing whippits and bluechews together. Even the OP image makes me want to murder a cavecuck and take a warbride home to breed furiously. People probably don't play that setting much because it always ends in a line at the bathroom door would be my guess.
>>98639611
>>98639467What makes it punk? What system are the characters subverting or rebelling against?
>>98639921The Dinocracy, obviously.Maybe the vast empire of the Priest Kings and their limitless system of sexual slavery?
I was throwing around ideas for this, something like a Sword and Sorcery version of Dinotopia or Dino-riders.Psionics is the main mahic system, you had humans who can form a bond with a particular dinosaur/prehistoric mammal and they work to overthrow some oppressive overlords and protect against dangerous megafauna. But I haven't developed it much further than that.
>>98640231>with my superior speed I'm sure to win!
>>98639467I shared one here on /tg/ years ago. Came really close to just hashing out rules for a whole system for it.Its not quite paleo, but its got its own weird mythology & tech development. Look it up in the archives if you're curious. Lamplighters.Ive added some thing since then, but I havent shared it
>>98639921>>98639940You could riff on the war between the spawn of Cthulhu and the Elder Things, humans caught between two races that see them as nothing but beasts, trying to topple the old order as the sides punch themselves out and establish an Age of Man.
>>98639467Do you want like...hard paleo? Nothing but stone, bone, and rare ore-derived tools of copper or iron? Or something more like Fire and Ice, with stone age primitives between great cities using Iron or bronze?
The concept quickly falls apart once you actually make a game out of it>Ok! So we are cavemen riding around on dinosaurs, now what?>uhhhhh, hunt other dinosaurs i guess?
>>98641041Definitely going for the Fire & Ice vibe.>>98641062We could introduce more fantastical races and elements.
>>98641170If the other races aren't just cavemen then it stops being a paleo setting, if the fantastical elements aren't just druids and stone-age barbarity then it also stops being a paleo setting
>>98641062You could extrapolate an entire setting by ripping off the first season of Primal by Gendy, & adding more Fire & Ice/Conan stuff.Sorcerers, monsters, & men will always have enough going for it
>>98639921Listen grandpa, we know the etymology is retarded, but in genre fiction context that's just not what it means anymore.
>>98641062only the hereditary priest class is supposed to have the power to tame dinos, though. you're supposed to be a lowly incel laborer but you discovered the power to command the dinos and now the priests want you dead so they put out a bounty on you. you want to overthrow the priests and seize power (and women) for yourself or free the people from the theotyrants if you're a lame-ass goody two shoes. there's some kind of fabled promised land that's relatively safe and abundant but the theocrats have kept it secret or something to maintain power. if you lead the people to the promised land will they become weakling vegetarians? is it better to force them to struggle to survive? there's some moral shit going on, too.
I'd include dino-men like in Turok. Maybe even give them high tech weapons from their alien masters. That may be beyond what you want to do, though.
>>98641672You could also go the route of Pellucidar with evil Psychic dinosaur people.
The tag for this is stonepunk.
>>98639467What would you call the opposite: a full civilization with corporations and baronies but set in a Pleistocene world?
>>98642326Dinotopia the Mini Series
>>98642388No dinos. Think Stone Age fantasy Americas with lots of megafauna like mammoths, giant sloth, terrorbirds, that sort of thing then add humans colonists and a couple thousand years. It's decidely a magical-futuristic setting but with the backdrop of a primitive world.
>>98643085>It's decidely a magical-futuristic setting>a full civilization with corporations and baroniesis hard to line up with there still being megafauna given humans without magic took care of that with fire, sharp sticks, rocks, loud noises and pits. You'll need some intermingled reason for an amaricas cultural milieu to industrialize and that industrialization somehow preserving megafauna. It can be magic, likely your best bet, something like corporate mystical magical identities tied to specific creatures might work or they recreated the creatures for ritualistic reasons.
>>98639467The diet makes your farts and poo smell really bad
>>98639467Kinda. Less a setting than a campaign concept though. The idea would be that things are kept largely grounded except for some stuff like Miocene megafauna sticking around. However PCs can go on spirit quests to effect the world around them, these start off as small symbolic reenactments of the natural cycles around them but grow over time as each adventure takes place generations apart. Rituals begin to involve retellings of their own previous adventures.Though wildly unlikely 2 separate groups of players would be best. That way a game of telephone is enforced, at the end of each adventure a song or cave painting is made and passed to the other group, their interpretation of it becomes the basis of future empowering ritual. "But the actual adventure went like this" is less relevant than the cultural reality of is, players have to actually dig into different tellings of the myth across descendant tribes to find the most appropriate retelling.The encroaching Eldritch antagonist may be writing, infesting the ambiguity of stories with sterile fact and bootstrapping inhuman an system of systems ever further back into the past.More generally I'd recommend cribbing from Tiger Lung. Simon Roy is GOATed, especially when it comes to paleo.>>98640272Sounds cool, I'll check it out.>>98641062Maybe if you're an imaginationlet. Society being less entrenched means man is more at the mercy of nature. Survival and crafting mechanics are far more emphasised as simply existing when you can't outsource labour to proles is a challenge. It's not a game for everyone but there's definitely room for complexity in a way that's not usually relevant to other games.
>>98639467Pariah is a pretty cool concept too. I like that there are not one but several spirit world, each travels to via different rituals and entheogens. As OSR hexcrawl it's cool that each is its own "overlapping" terrain to reflect that the spiritual was just another facet of the real according to the animist worldview (yet another thing I dig in Tiger Lung).https://aloneinthelabyrinth.blogspot.com/search/label/Pariah?m=0>>98639507I've been on a Forsaken Gods (pic) kick lately. Dude's got a nice mix of cultures going (Haida-viking sea peoples may be my favourite so far).>>98639940Personally I like combining this with Hyperborian >>98639611 Serpent worship. The dinosaurs are gone yet simultaneously here and doomed. It's trippy shit and the lizard men don't like smelly monkeys even trying to understand how.https://goblinpunch.blogspot.com/2013/10/dinosaur-clerics-new-class.html?m=1>>98641025 is cool too as is >>98641634.
Couple of shoutouts btw. Habitat is also Simon Roy, stone age barbarism aboard a failing space station.
>>98643590Prophet also has elements of "Conan IN SPACE" which is predictably primal (and bloody).Zeno Clash is a little like >>98642326, a Flintstones sorta advancement sans tech except in service of MMA beatdowns instead of parodying modernity.
>>98643085Id rather have Flintstones. Your thing just sounds like boiler plate scifi
>>98641597Just use core. Cottagecore. Paleocore. You don't have to use punk wrong.
>>98643605In fairness The Clockwork Girl resembles >>98643085 (though more through modernity regressing than the primitive advancing) and was neat. tldr is we're out of oil and muscle converting calories into force is the main engine propping up civilisation again. Unfortunately the same GM that got us mega-mastodons to wind the springs gave agribusiness a stranglehold on food and blights to kill off competitor crops.
>>98639611Not really. Conan's full steel age, I'd even say medieval tech. You're thinking shit like Ice and Fire, if anything. Solid movie, but hardly represenative of SS in general.(yes, I do realize Conan has savages like the Picts, but I don't feel that counts, WE have stone age people right now but I don't think we count as paleopunk. Oh and unbelievably cool take on dinos in Red Nails, but I'm not sure if that counts as a lost world either, altough it's certainly fitting to make one)
>>98643724The actually civilized peoples of Conan are all high medieval, with some anachronism among the Latins and the Stygians lagging far behind (but making up for it with black magic).Plenty of stone age and bronze age savages, though. But yeah you're broadly right.
>>98644015>among the LatinsI'm picturing Conan as a stereotypical mexican gangbanger right now. Anyway Stygia doesn't seem behind, it has (apparently cheap) steel and shit. Probably lesser military prowess but I don't think there is any suggestion of a tech lag, I assume this notion stems from from the old Conan Gazeteer which had supposedly bronze age nations vs dark ages and roman nations, as far as tech levels went. Or maybe even before that?
>>98641025Maybe rather than doing it directly, riff on them. A race of pelagic creatures that are just the instantiated thoughts of a malignant dreaming god (stirred by all these thinking minds on the surface resonating with it). Maybe instead of the usual "they want to wake their god up" thing you get with Cthulhu and other Yog-Sothery beings, they're trying to keep him ASLEEP (since him waking will wink them out of existence, and they instinctively know he wants to keep snoozing). All the war and ritual sacrifice is to shut up noisy minds.The elder thing knockoff, if you ditch the shoggoths, need not ditch their fleshcrafting. Might be they spawned all sorts of horrible things and races to keep their fishy foes from advancing past islands and littoral regions. Hell, maybe the pelagics used magic to call an extinction-level asteroid, and the fleshcrafters went into deep slumber in relatively secure places to avoid extinction. Big rock hits, lots of shit dies, what survives of, say, a clever race of hairy apemen become humans. You end up with a world mostly of nomads and hunter-gatherer tribes, some settled agriculture, with a handful of "higher" civilizations built in the ruins of elder race cities, foolishly aping their magic and perhaps mistaking them for things to be worshiped and sacrificed to.
>>98643724Conan rules a kingdom with full on knights in plate armor & everything. He just was in savage barbarian lands most of his adventures
>>98643636Then we'd have to call Blade Runner Cybercore, which just sounds wrong.
>>98644465>>98643636Core isnt the right termThe right term is "inspired".>How do I run a Paleo inspired gamePeople just dont know how to fucking communicate these days without relying on verbal shorthand. But on the other hand words only mean what we agree on them to mean. So if punk gives you the idea of what hes going for then mission accomplished. Read the book "Frindle" its like 1st grade level reading & can explain it to you.
>>98644248I like the idea of a race just trying to keep their annoyed god asleep, it explains lots of unreasonable and aggressive behavior from them.
>>98639940Mahars?
Okay, but if the serpent men have dino men as their soldiers and middlemen, what do they even want from humans?
>>98639921Rebelling against modernity and globohomo
>>98646404Sacrifice them in nefarious rituals
>>98646442I mean, fair.
>>98646442Warm blood courses with vitality, ectotherms get theirs from the environment.
>>98646404They fear mammals replacing reptiles as the dominant species.
>>98646404Milk.
>>98639611Secondary detected.Conan's Hyborian age is not a "paleopunk setting" in any way. As anons have already said there are steel clad knights. 90% of people in that setting are at a medieval technology level.And none of the other big sword and sorcery settings are stone age in any way.
I keep thinking of doing a wuxia story set in a prehistoric world, where the four (or five) god-beasts of Chinese mythology are dinosaurs and other extinct animals, like Bai Hu is a sabretooth tiger and Xuan Wu is an ankylosaur and shit, but I dunno where to go from there.
>>98647891Well, cultivation's power level autism imply a culture that's had long enough to fellate itself. Maybe cultivation in a dawn age is more freeform or inspired by imitating convoluted patterns found in the world itself?Cool idea though. Given there are often rare "dire" counterparts to regular already menacing beasts in fantasy a sort of natural cultivation could be said to occur among them.
>>98647735What’s the context here?
>>98648380It's from Edgar Rice Burrough's Pellucidar series. Pellucidar is the name that the inhabitants of the Earth's core call their hollow world. It's a prehistoric setting with plenty of large mammals that are extinct on the surface. Of sentient species, one rules above all: the Mahar, a race of telepathic pterosaurs.
>>98643361>dragons run major enterprises>some of the megafauna is sentient and/or magical - mammoth shaman, talking rattlers, etc.>humans and humanoids are late comers to the worldIn local terms, it is easier to negotiate with some of the wildlife than it is to hunt it. The world's industrialization has actually preserved large tracts of land as farmland and wildlife by moving some significant portion of industry into pocket dimensions and using magic to enhance transportation. Still working on making it work right.Man, I miss 2000AD. Dredd, the soldier with the talking gun and helmet, the cute pixie girl, all that British sarcasm.
>>98643605>boiler plate scifiIt's heavily influenced by Midcentury pulp and noir with some tongue in cheek fan service. Flintstones is cool, too. >>98643636>you don't have to use punk wrongOr you can use it the right way in a paleolithic context. >grug, lead these warriors to the settled people's village, bash heads and destroy their canal headgates, return for reward>grug, drink this, enter the spirit world and avoid every spirit searching for you, enter the tower of light and steal the flame of everything from them>grug, jam this magic crystal into your broken eye socket to see again>>98643649>The Clockwork GirlCool, will check it out.
>>98644167>I'm picturing Conan as a stereotypical mexican gangbanger right nowOr a raging Comanche considering it's all based on Texas.
>>98647924>>98647891How are you gonna have cultivators before you have cultivation?Trade them out for will to power demigods
>>98648476Considering Conan comes from a dull joyless uncivilized hard people, hes more likely to be some dude from Dakota who then when on adventures & ended up the Mayor of New York/LA/Chicago/etc.
>>98648471>It's heavily influenced by Midcentury pulp and noir with some tongue in cheek fan service.Yeah thats boiler plate scifi
>>98648426Magical intelligent megafauna gives it a lot more legs. Could do with humanoids being integral to industrialization because they're small and dexterous enough towork with, install and maintain the technomachine internal components compared to the construction of the cyclopian machinery. Makes it a lot more cooperative or small scale corporate espionage based than direct violent conflict. >Man, I miss 2000AD. I hear you brother. If you haven't seen it, this anon's suggestions >>98643509are some great comics, Prophet especially, for some of that feel.
>>98648718>Magical intelligent megafauna gives it a lot more legsThanks, it's one of the things that ties the mythical and realish aspects together.>humanoidsYeah, can't have industry without fingers. Gnomes make up a significant part of that labor force. >small corpsThey are spinoffs of baronies and Great Houses so are relatively small and it makes it look like Renaissance intrigue instead of Neo haxxin' teh mainframe. The machinery of industry is mostly magical in power source. >Tiger Lung, ProphetWill check out.>>98648702Trying to keep it somewhat relatable instead of Carcosa levels of weird. That stuff's in other star systems for jammers to explore.
>>98647891>>98648662I mean, you could lean into the prehistoric aspects with the idea that any cultivation techniques would be less refined or well-understood. That could keep things more relatively grounded, if nobody has enough pieces of the puzzle to reach the upper levels of what's possible. Or they might be powerful in one way, but completely lacking in another. Though it sounds like if the selling point is on the various animals being prehistoric versions, the focus would instead be on the types of animal-themed martial arts. Mantis style, snake style, etc.And that could blend together the idea of dojos that have a particular style of kung fu with primitive tribes that have totems/spiritual beliefs about a particular kind of animal. You've got a leopard clan who wear leopard pelts but also know leopard kung fu. And maybe there's a leopard spirit/demon your clan is allied with in some fashion.
>>98644465the word core is not to replace the word punk in entirety. punk is generally about anti-establishment themes. I think it is good to have that when using the word punk. Blader Runner is cyberpunk.>>98645064Inspired is good. Also themed. Paleo-themed story. Core seems to be mainly used as a descriptor for aesthetics. I think about all the subgenre of music like metalcore, deathcore, even hardcore etc. Lines get blurry on whether it's just about how stuff sounds or the topics of the songs themselves. Etymology is weird, but it's fun for peeps to categorized stuff. >>98648471Hell yea, cavemen rebelling vs their dino-riding elite overlords while stealing advanced technology(fire) or powerful effigies.
>>98645064>>98643636Wrong and retarded, there's a reason punk is used that way and it's that there is no other word that doesn't make you sound like a blithering retard.
Here's an idea if you really want to use the themes of the "aesthetics"-punk format.Flintstones but its a little more like the weird comic they made that explores the cultural upheaval of the "new" man. Marriage instead of the sex cave, etc. But really lean into using dinos as technology, & as an expression of freedom & change. Dinos are how you get ahead. So maybe you go & graffiti "new age" rebelous cave paintings on a cave wall & before Oog & Boog can grab you, you leap off the ledge & use your pteradactyl to glide to safety.>>98650303Fuck off dude. Punk is still a controversial suffix. It is still synonymous with rebellion & it is not out of pocket for people to not use it the same cavalier way you do. Better to use the full spectrum of language given to us
>>98650303Using the word themed to describe a setting? Punk does sound cooler ill give you that. Even if its not really punk
>>98639467Both, but it's now roughly on part to 1940s through 70s tech wise. Long running game.
>>98650094Revolt against the Neolithic age. Retvrn
>>98639467>PAleopunk.You mean pulp? The hell does punk even mean anymore.
>>98650345That comic has some great stuff in it.
2part post:For over a year I've been running a weekly campaign (5e) for a group of friends (this is the second dnd campaign I'm running for this group as well as many one-shots and a side call of cthulhu campaign). I love dinosaurs and the neolithic tribal aesthetic so I wanted to use it.I thought the best way to implement it into gameplay and setting was to make it the source of adventures and also for it to not stand in the way of classic fantasy adventuring concerns (one will quickly run out of creative ideas if the world is JUST troglodytes and dinos).So, in my current campaign the world is a late medieval setting but with a twist: primitive neolithic tribal races (kobolds, kuo-toa, orcs, goblins, lizardfolk, etc) are JUST coming out of their caves (triggered by the events of the previous campaign that ended at level 20 and a lot of world cataclysms). The playable space is an archipelago: very coastal aesthetics, with dinosaurs everywhere as acknowledged part of the animal kingdom.So now all of these primitives become hordes and they terrorise the world above, populated by classic PHB races (like: here's a dwarven village, here's an elf town in the woods, here's a city on a bridge populated by mostly humans and half elves). Savages start to build camps and settlements in the wilderness, in mines, etc., so whenever the party adventures they constantly see the tribalistic aesthetic with dinosaurs involved a lot of the time (the primitive races are surprisingly good at taming dinos for their needs: goblins build mobile war fortresses on top of brontosauruses, orcs using dinos as battle mounts, etc).
The final thing I did to make it work IMO is to make PCs all part of the same primitive race: the party are all goblins whose shaman sends them on a "pilgrimage": go into the world of hoomans, steal their shinies, learn their secrets, their technologies, their battle strategies, their ways of life, then bring it back to our Cave so we could learn how to better raid and harass them.This framework and setup made it so easy for players to get engaged in ALL content I throw at them because I can do medieval fantasy, coastal dinosaurs, or the mix of the two, without breaking the setting apart, and without causing cognitive dissonance. Everybody at the table thinks: "we are goblins on a quest to get treasures and learn as much as we can about the hoomies world", so they engage in every adventure, narrative, regional plots, dungeon delves like a normal group of adventurers would, but with a lot more humour (misunderstanding how most of the things work) and a lot of theft, etc.
>>98650825It could be hit or miss, but I think people gave it too much shit when it was running.
>>98648426New 2000 AD progsare not that bad anon, sometimes there's even really good stuff in them
>>98650944That sounds like a blast. Reminds me of that reddit post of the guy pretending to be a goblin to blow off steam.
>>98648471One thing I love about it is an intact seed bank (and the trove of untainted genes within) is the treasure that has corpo sharks circling. It's the sort of dystopia that doesn't seem too far off. The opening of Echopraxia comes close for that sort of unsettlement. The exiled biologist protagonist is sampling wildlife in the middle of nowhere in the hopes of finding something without GMO overspill that can be used as a control group.>>98648718Glad you like 'em. Tough it falls short of the inspiration imo Humanity Lost scratches that Prophet itch really good. Also it's less pulpy ship-design wise if you're into that sorta thing.The dude also has a neolithic setting on the go called Concavia that also rocks. Really nailed the Indo-European "ur-myth" feel imo.>>98648842Ah, Spelljammer is it? desu this >>98643578 is a snippet of an Undead Space thing where where necromancy is the backbone of starfaring (no life support needed save negative energy). Twist is that the best sources of thanatic energy are mass extinctions and as such space dragons (the dinosaur equivalent of transhumans) are the precursor-hegemons.How far do your other worlds differ from the paleo-modern you describe in terms of tech and sophistication?
>>98651785Not Spelljammer but there are Jammers, if that makes sense. An entire flying naval architecture for war, exploration and some commerce. The worlds inside the solar system have been colonized, in some ways more extensively than the homeworld which is full of competing orcs, hobs, humans, dragons, etc. It's easier to start over on a gas giant's moon. A coalition of exploration ships have been seeding interstellar colonies and doing Star Trek for about 100 years. Worlds in other systems are sometimes inhabited by fantasy races, sometimes by baryonic aliens like Greys, chthonic horrors, psionic octopi or devolved humans. Full range from some fungi to other stellar empires in conflict.All that aside and bringing it back on to the topic, it's still a universe in which a man in a loincloth with a sword and magic amulet can actually make a difference, see my comments on pulp and noir.
>>98641062Yeah but that goes for any setting/era?>Ok! So we are peasants in the middle ages that farm wheat, now what?>uhhhhh, hunt other people's wheat I guess?The setting doesn't hand you the conflicts, you just ya know, have to think about what problems there would be?
>>98650825>stone age tribe>californian demographicsAmerica delenda est
>>98656624There's some funny shit in there about what they did with the previous ethnogrouings in bedrock.
>>98656624...Are you seriously mad about anachronism in the Flintstones of all things?>>98653270Nice. System-bound space opera is top-tier and the micro-worlds of the gas giants are always fun (bonus if some chuckle fucks plot to ignite any brown dwarfs into a second sun, locals be damned!). What does baryonic aliens mean in this case? You have photino birds swooping around in the background?>>98656280In fairness prehistory is as distinct from most pre-modern settings as those are from post-industrial ones. That what's difficult simply can't be done remains an utterly retarded conclusion though.
Opinions on "The Flintstones and The Jetsons live on the same planet" theory?
>>98657272>Are you seriously mad about anachronism in the Flintstones of all things?Who said anything about anachronism?
>>98657362>stone age tribeThe Flintstones are anything but and your pic ignores their defining feature: having cars beside dinos as absurd contrast. Does this really need explaining?
>>98657383The latest fad in trolling is to pretend to be a crazy racist and derail every thread into "culture war discourse" at the slightest opportunity. You'll know I'm right when two people come out of nowhere to argue with me pointing this out, one that LARPs as a "concerned gamer" about "leftist overreach" or some tripe like that and another one that just that behaves like a child hurling insults. I don't know if these two are buttbuddies or the same guy or what, but I recognize their posting styles in almost every thread on this fucking board at this point.
>>98657446I guessed as much but felt it uncharitable, my bad. Do you have any on topic observations to share?More general thread question: How do you feel about mixing ancient aliens up in the adventures of Grug (tm)?
>>98657383>The Flintstones are anything butkek ok brostill doesn't justify time-travelling californian demographics>>98657446yes, every anon you disagree with in any thread is indeed the same anon (me)
>>98639921>characters subverting or rebelling against a systemNever what any _punk genre ever was about. No, not even cyberpunk
>>98657495>>98657314>"The Flintstones and The Jetsons live on the same planet" theory> How do you feel about mixing ancient aliens up in the adventures of Grug (tm)?I've done post apocalyptic sword & planet with this. It gave me a lot more to work with creatively and lean into the pulp side while letting player input about their tribe fit more easily without having to worry too much about stone tools only final destination realism.
>>98657789The man character of Neuromancer was a punk. In a cyber tech level world.Fuck yourself with a rusty rake
>>98657272>What does baryonic aliens mean in this case?Baryonic as in from inside the same universe/prime. The human societies make a hefty distinction between offworlders(aliens) and outworlders (planar travellers). At the same time the elite are all educated offworld, usually in pocket dimension academies for safe keeping.>You have photino birds swooping around in the background?Not yet but there are eldritch horrors lurking in the depths of space.
>>98639467>>98641597There's no such thing. In fact, you're not even using the term "genre" correctly here. Because there's no collective body of work that you're referencing in a commercial capacity. Why pigeonhole yourself needlessly? Just make a world, setting, and game surrounding it all. You can define it later.
>>98639467>Has anyone homebrewed a Paleopunk Fantasy or SciFi setting /tg/? Care to share the details?Around 2020 an anon made a Mini Six setting that got called D6 Stone.gofile.io/d/if5qS1Fg
