A roleplaying game of myth and survival at the dawn of history.
Paleomythic is a roleplaying game of grim survival and mythical adventures in the land of Ancient Mu, a harsh prehistoric world full of mysterious ruins and temples to explore, huge and terrible creatures that roam and spread fear across the land, and nefarious mystics and sorcerers who plot dark schemes from the shadows. It is a world of biting cold winters, of people hunting and foraging to survive, and tribes that wage relentless war.
Taking on the roles of hunters, healers, warriors, soothsayers, and more, players will navigate a world of hostile tribes, otherworldly spirits, prehistoric beasts, and monstrous creatures lurking in the dark places of the world. Players have huge scope in sculpting the game experience that best suits them, whether it's a gritty survival story without a trace of the mystical or a tale of grand adventure and exploration in a mythic setting.
Graham John Rose was a British gardener and influential gardening writer best known for his long association with the Sunday Times. Renowned for his outspoken style and irreverent wit, he brought originality and curiosity to horticultural journalism, often challenging orthodox views. Trained as an entomologist, he worked internationally before turning to writing, where his wide expertise ranged from agriculture to garden design. A prolific author and editor, he produced acclaimed books that blended practical knowledge with personality. His writing celebrated independence, experimentation, and a deep enjoyment of both gardens and people.
I’ve had this book on my reading list for a while. It’s pretty, it’s prehistoric and it’s a game. Three strikes and I’m out.
Well, it’s most definitely beautiful looking. The universal mechanic is once again a brain-dead dice pool however. I recently posted on a reddit “bad mechanics” forum about what a bad mechanic dice pools are and the message got DELETED by the moderator for starting a flame war! So I give up explaining the probabilities and bell-curve that make dice pools the death of roleplaying in a game.
Character Creation provides convenient name tables.
Characters start with Talents, Traits and Flaws. Traits correspond to Attributes in most games but they are not numeric. Only a description that gives you an advantage. Talents give you abilities and equipment. Unfortunately Flaws and Talents are traded for each other which means that every talent should be equal to every other talent and every flaw should be roughly equivalent to every talent. Of course, this is almost impossible to make works. Some talents will be better than others and some flaws will be less impactful than others, and it won’t take long for players to find out.
Though the character Talents often feel as if they are just disguised Classes (see OG, p.9; Thief, Adept, Barbarian, Beast Tamer) they are described well and not burdened with dozens of ‘class abilities’, which is nice. As a caveman game should be, this is very low-power.
It is just me or does the Osprey Games logo look like “Og”? Is this style of logo seen anywhere else?
While I do appreciate the wide variety of talents, in the end they’re all the same. You get a bonus die when doing this. It’s not very exciting and it not very interesting. Many also have a special ability die that gives you a bonus when you roll a 6 on it and stops working for the rest of encounter if you roll a 1. It’s certainly simpler, not especially reliable.
That’s another thing I hate about dice pool systems. Since everything is a dice roll, your character isn’t the “one who does this”, but rather “the one who might…”
Talents can also be seen as ‘Classes’. Giving starting equipment and special abilities.
They are actually close to D&D Feats in a way that they are quite powerful. The game is intentionally mystical, but these talents give you no real choice. There are many more mystical than there are practical talents. I don’t dislike it myself, but it will definitely shape the way you play the game.
Character Improvement is done in ‘stories’. When an adventure is complete, the numbered of stories you have accumulated can be spent to increase abilities and gain new talents. I think it’s been called ‘milestone’ experience. I find this a little troublesome. The mighty warrior is going to have exactly the same number of stories as the quiet gatherer. The biggest problem being what denotes the end of an adventure? If that’s okay with you then you might like this.
Aging (misspelled as Ageing) is an optional rule that essentially says characters will die or retire at a maximum of 15 stories.
Movement and weapon ranges are handled in a very nice abstract manner. It’s still playable at the table, but no rulers needed (only hands and figures). One of the best attempts at abstract movement I’ve ever seen.
Chases are a roll off. Escape is a ‘free hit from behind’ proposition.
Injury means that all weapons only cause one wound. Each wound temporarily negates a Trait. Ugh. This goes back as far as the original Traveller and didn’t work then either. Nothing breaks immersion like everyone being less charming after they have a battle.
Armor is also pretty bad. It only projects if the attack does 2 or more damage. Then it removes the first point. If an attack (as most weapons and attacks) does only 1 point of damage, the armor is useless. Yeah, this could’ve been thought out better.
The Activities section is great however. Giving examples of many different types of activities: Bribery, Climbing, Crafting (excellent), Repair, Escape, Foraging, Hunting, Leaping, Load (carrying), Locks, Performance, Scavenging, Swimming, Theft, and Trading. All things that could be used a lot and the rules are very simple and common sense!
These are uncomplicated, sensible rules that could be used by any prehistoric game!
It’s neat that the have a random food table for foraging, but I find it odd that it doesn’t include things like eggs, frogs, lizards and other such things I would think count as food.
Hazards are next and again combine breadth with simplicity for really useful bunch: Disease (greater and lesser), Exposure (cold or heat), Fear, Fire, Poisons, Starvation, and Traps (with examples)
The World of Ancient Mu is a very slight overview of what is possible in the ancient world in terms of Environments, Societies, Customs, & Laws. These are incredibly generic and give you only the widest possible guidelines to go on.
The Otherworld is much more interesting, dealing with the afterlife. The ability to enter the Otherworld and take someone with them is a god-given right for a Shaman. I really like the way they’ve done this. You go to the Otherworld to ask questions of Ancestor Spirits. The wraiths might also posses ‘forbidden lore’!
The Tribes section has some neat tables for a Tribes Beliefs and Customs. You can also roll for the Dwellings and the type of Leader. It even has a sample tribe with fully fleshed out NPCs. Very cool stuff!
Settlements tables expand the Tribes idea even further and are also very welcome. There are also tables for Settlements, basically larger tribes and an example settlement.
There is also a cool place name generator: Mad Marsh, Lost Jungle, Dying Hills, Dark Island, Lizard Island, Dying Forest, etc.
The 7 descriptions of stranger places of ancient Mu.
”The Gods of Ancient Mu” came as a surprise but a good surprise, outlining 20 gods suitable for worship by cavemen!
The gods are quite interesting - much more than just ‘good’ and ‘evil’.
”Adversaries in Ancient Mu” starts with human foes and a set of random tables for them. Then it goes on to Beasts.
Here is where a flaw in the rules comes into play. They have to make weird exception rules for beasts. They allow them to have ‘double’ traits. This allows them to have take more wounds than normal (as wounds remove traits). It doesn’t make any more sense than it does with humans.
Armor also has to given to beasts as well and they have to give them a ‘suit’ of armor to account for all the armor they may have. Lame.
Beast Men adds a whole new dimension to Mu (the planet) and is a welcome addition. It starts with Ape Beast men. Boar Brothers and Tail Sisters are basically Boar-Beast men. I don’t recognize the inspiration for them like I do for Ape Beast men. Primitives appear to be Cro-Magnon. Snake People are of course, the ancient masters of the earth. Troodon people are dinosaur men.
The Dead adds spirits, ghosts, shadows, wraiths, undead and skeletons, including Ape-spirits, Bat-spirits, Bear-spirits, Boar-spirits, Cat-spirits, Dog-spirits, Lizard-spirits, Rat-spirits, Scorpion-spirits, Snake-spirits Spider-spirits and Wolf-spirits.
The animal spirits are somewhat disappointing. I’m glad they’re here, but I feel they could have been more than just other bitey things.
Weather is a very welcome and versatile set of tables. Unfortunately it gives no mechanical effects.
Adventure Types provides some handy tables for creating adventures. Very nice to have for any caveman game!
There is even a section on ‘Paleodelving’. Dungeon crawling for cavemen. On the idea that these will be easier for GMs and players as they are familiar in role-playing.
There are even 5 pages of dungeon tables! They will require some major filling in to work but it’s impressive they are here at all!
”Game Variants” presents optional rules, including adding Neanderthal and Floresiensis.
It also has a section on turning the game into ‘Classic’ Sword & Sorcery which seems absolutely pointless. There are hundreds of better suited games than this.
”Adventure: Captives of the Beast Men” is a simple rescue scenario with two pages of excellent maps. I’m always amazed at the games that have so little faith in their creation that they don’t bother to include a starting adventure!
The adventure is a ‘cave-dungeon’ and assumes members of your tribe have been captured. It’s actually pretty good - scaled for a regular party of characters and the treasure is not excessive at all.
”Appendix” has name creation tables. For example “Hin” or “Hinea” if female. There is also a Random Talents table and six pre-generated characters. A blank character sheet and an index follow.
Wow! Same backwards as forwards. There are very few things wrong with this game and very much that is right. Even if you don’t like the game there are enough good ideas for use in any caveman game and frankly, this is the best I’ve seen since “OG: The Unearthed Edition” and I think these two would make a good pair and create some great memories together.
If you have any interest this genre, I’d recommend this without reservation (except those I’ve said above).
How? Another Round Rock Library find. They're open on Sundays and it's close enough to be a nice little drive, plus the kiddo loves the library since they've opened the new location.
What? In bullet-points: * first edition was self-published (I think), but what's available now is from Osprey -- which means that, what, someone at Osprey in the RPG line saw the 1st edition and thought, "we should do this!" I really wonder what those conversations were like. * stone-and-sorcery RPG, so: you're stone age people, with tools of bone and stone that have a 1-in-6 chance of breaking; you live in the land of Mu, which is young, but which maybe still has ruins from previous civilizations, which feels like an odd nod to classic D&D stuff; and there's magic and monsters. * the character creation involves describing your character through a bunch of traits (strong, agile, aware) and flaws (ignorant, weak) and talents (hunter, simian, shaman). * the resolution mechanic is: add a d6 for each trait, +1d6 for each relevant trait (like "I'm strong and I'm trying to lift something"), -1d6 for relevant flaw, +1d6 for relevant tool/weapon, plus maybe some special rules for the talents, plus some special rules for the situation. 6s are successes. * If you take a wound, you lose a trait -- so those are both your dice pool to do something and your hit points. * There's like ~20 pages of combat rules and options, including moves like "take" and "strangle" -- and for a pretty rules-lite game, combat seems like it would really bog down a bit (though mitigated somewhat by the fact that the more wounds you take, the fewer dice you roll). * Osprey does nice art and this book is helped by interspersing full-color RPG-style illustrations with cave painting-style swipes and silhouettes.
Yeah, so? I'm ... more confused than anything. Author Graham Rose is clearly interested in paleohistory; and there's some choices made here that feel like reasonable attempts to make the world gameable, like having beast monsters and cave/ruin delving. (The included adventure is a really nice little cave-dungeon where you're supposed to go to rescue captives from the beast people; it's also nice as it follows from the previous pages system of random delve-development.) All in all, stone-&-sorcery seems OK. The fact that the magic here is more shamanic, mystic, ritualistic -- more curses, less fireballs -- seems like a good distinguishing mark: this is fantasy, but it's not D&D.
But I think where the game started to lose me was in the proliferation of talents -- there's 36, many of which provides some special ability or subsystem. Like, it's easy to remember that a barbarian causes one extra wound on attack or a brawler gets an extra die on some attacks. It's less easy to remember that a simain has brachiation, a brawler rolls a special "brawler" die to avoid unarmed damage, a shaman can repel, an effigy maker has one of six effigies that they can craft, etc., etc.
And where it really lost me was when I realized that the same rules-lite approach to characters (traits are hit points) was also going to be applied to NPCs, so anything with more than one combatant would involve multiple changing dice pools, and potentially multiple special dice to record if this or that combatant with this or that trait got to take the special effect, or if this or that weapon broke. (I do like that weapons break though.) Once you get enough characters all using the same rules-lite systems, the aggregate is no longer rules-lite.
I think this might be solvable for me, though, by changing combat from round-by-round actions, to something more abstract like the Yellow King's combat: a single roll to describe an entire combat encounter. (Maybe play around with only having the players roll and having the enemy dice serve to reduce (or increase) the players' dice pool?) I guess what I'm really saying is I want less combat, more story-telling in my stone-and-sorcery game.
I LOVED running this system. A lot of my friends at the local game store love that genre of swords and sorcery but got a little tired of D&D 5e. Because of this we played other systems but wanted to get back to some type of fantasy, and on a whim I picked this up.
Paleomythic is rules-lite with the PCs having a good chance of winning due to the d6 based system. We had a lot of fun talking about technology we “invented” during out play through like bridges or pry-bars. Playing during a Neolithic time period with a bit of fantasy was extremely fun! I’m not sure if I’d ever run a long-term game of this, but I’ll definitely be playing around with it in the future
Its well written and nicely illustrated with a lot of flavor and nuance. While I'm not compelled to run a game with this book in the immediate future, I definitely enjoyed it and will keep it in my back pocket for one-off games.
I really enjoy this straightforward, intuitive system, appropriate to its theme. I had run a 5E DND Stone Age style campaign some years ago and wish this had been around back then instead!