Game: Lost Prehistorica
Publisher: Dark Quest
Series: d20
Reviewer: Wyrdmaster
Review Dated: 9th, December 2004
Reviewer’s Rating: 8/10 [ Really good ]
Total Score: 10
Average Score: 5.00
Dark Quest Games offer us Lost Prehistorica as a toolkit for exotic lands. The supplement isn’t an off the shelf campaign setting and it isn’t just a splatbook. A splatbook would just have stats and crunchy bits in it. Lost Prehistorica does seem to have a middle ground. There are plenty of stats in here; feats, classes, races and monsters and still plenty of flavour; game world discussions, observations of culture, trade and war.
We have typical PDF value here – 109 pages, new and quality art and Dark Quest’s usual professional layout for about US $6.00. Lost Prehistorica has PDF bookmarks and a “clicky contents” page too. It’s easy to find what you want if you’re GMing from laptop rather than print out.
Dark Quest’s authors, Steven Cook and David Woodrum, begin Lost Prehistorica strongly. They dive straight in with an intelligent look at where this lost prehistoric world might fit in your campaign – be it a pre-written world, a game of your own which has been running for a while or something brand new. Here we discuss the likes of hidden valleys or isolated islands and since Lost Prehistorica is a fantasy setting we also discuss the likes of Underworlds and Lost Planes. Like a well written business report Lost Prehistorica spells out the impacts of each choice with a section for Advantages and Disadvantages for each.
Having had a look at the macro geographic factors for the landscape Lost Prehistorica moves in to cover some of the more specific issues for the dinosaur-esq fantasy setting. There are critters. Critters aren’t worth XP. You kill them to survive (shocking concept) They’re food. Lost Prehistorica provides us with generic critter rules (a group might actually be thankful for a Ranger’s trapping skills) as well as random atmosphere encounters. Some of the atmosphere comes from ominous fossil finds.
Then there’s the issue (and matching chapter) of Survival. Disease is a real problem; this is a strange land where unpleasant swamps and rotting corpses might be as common as hygiene and medicine is rare. Lost Prehistorica finds room in its 109 pages for a healthy dose of disease. We’ve such delights as Cannibal Fever and Night Flu. There other natural hazards too and Dark Quest goes to the unusual length of assigning Challenge Ratings to dangerous locations like tar pits and geysers. Never forgetting that this is a fantasy supplement we’ve also got such alien natural hazards (if that’s not an oxymoron) as blast crystals and blood muck for example.
In addition there are all sorts of potential pit traps with the local plants and fungi (not to mention the risk of pit traps actually hidden in the local plants).
On the other hand plants do provide a valuable resource – food. As touched on earlier, food can be very important in a rough wilderness where it’s hard to get (or where you might be the easy meal). Lost Prehistorica’s chapter of Culture begins by looking at the importance of food. Various cultural settings spring from the way food is got. For example, the hunter and gatherer culture has a very different basis for the pastoral one which is slightly different from the horticultural one.
Also in the Culture trap there’s advice and discussion on differing family groups and even on politics. A small simple group of hunters might fall under the cultural category of a “band” where as a larger group might count as a “tribe”. If we scale up again we’re looking at a chiefdom and then, all of a sudden, I’m getting Civilisation vibes (ah, one of the greatest strategy games EVAR) and this is no bad thing.
The cultural topics covered in the supplement are expensive. I suspect my gaming anthropologist brother would approve. Dark Quest looks at issues like trade and tools as well as clothing. Later on in Lost Prehistorica we’ve new item lists with costs for suitable equipment in the setting and we discover the prices are relative. A hide cloak costs about 3 gold. For your information – that’s the same cost as a shrunken head.
Cannibalism is an interesting issue for Lost Prehistorica. It’s not all that uncommon for the prehistoric setting the toolkit is trying to recreate with a fantasy wrapping. It’s suggested that neutral tribes might engage in it – perhaps as a death ritual or as an attempt to gain intelligence or the spiritual wisdom of the deceased. It seems like a waste to shrink that head and trade it for the hide cloak.
If you really fancy a bit of brain eating in your d20 game… or really fancy skipping that bit and sticking with the mass carnage of a dungeon crawl as something less icky (heh) then you can always create your own prehistoric. And yes, the PDF has rules for creating new tribes as well as a host of sample tribes.
Do you think of Stonehenge when you think ancient prehistoric cultures? What about the strange faces on Easter Island? There are rules here for stonework and art – samples of altars and idols. Later on Lost Prehistorica looks at the role and importance of religion. This book isn’t all “talk” and the religion section is a good example of this. There’s a whack of D&D style deity entries here – ranging from greater gods to lesser ones.
In fact if you were beginning to worry that there wasn’t anything quintessentially D&D in this d20 supplement or that Dark Quest Games might have been trying to slyly sell you an old university project – fear not. There are plenty of crunch bits.
Lost Prehistorica introduces lots of new feats. The supplement reviews both NPC and PC classes with the setting in mind. There’s no shortage of Barbarians or Druids here.
There are new (or perhaps “old”) sub-classes of the core races too like the nasty speartoe Halflings and the scraplings. There are plenty of new races as well and many have an ape-like or reptile-like look about them. We’ve the Amphimids as your expected bipedal lizards/newts. There’s Slither Elves for your elf-reptile cross. The Felklaw and Kifter are cat-like humanoids and the Kifter are exceptionally sexy. These are the two races most girlfriends will want to play. There’s the bulky fighters of the Golgaut race, Mandreg and Mandrillions. There are Hominids and Probosin too. Unfortunately not all these races are illustrated and I find that leaves certain races a bit hamstrung. Roleplaying is all about using your imagination but for some reason I always seem to “need” illustrations for new races.
I keep on talking about “new” races. I suppose these races are new for players who’ve just discovered a lost island. There are also “ancient races”. One of the suggested shticks for Lost Prehistorica is to have the ruins and remains of a civilization that’s come and gone before (and for a spooky touch the GM can make it awfully reminiscent of the player’s home Plane or kingdom (those damn dirty apes!)). There’s the Guzi, Oolori and Palethynes. With these rules you don’t have to have these races confined to prehistoric, er, history if you don’t want. You can use them too. The ancient races are different again from the usual prehistoric twist. The Palethynes, for example, are essentially kind and wise goblins!
The bestiary takes up 24 or so pages in the supplement. Here illustrations are a bonus rather than the must-have for the PC races. Certainly not every bestiary entry is illustrated but there are enough new illustrations here to please the eye. In addition to mixing dinosaurs up with fantasy creatures and inventing entirely new fantasy creatures this section runs through the traditional D&D monsters to point out which ones are in-theme with the setting. Of the new monster creations I do like the Stegotaur.
Lost Prehistorica is good. The supplement has everything you’re likely to need and more. If you want monsters and feats; you’ve got it. If you want help and advice then you’ve got that too. If you’re pretty good in the GM hot seat and are looking for an advanced product then you’ve got that. If you’re fairly new and are looking for something which explains itself well and doesn’t get lost in jargon or confusing rules then Lost Prehistorica is also for you. That said there are some things I’d have done differently; more illustrations for the new fantasy history races (or perhaps less of the new races). I’m rarely fan of splat but I find myself at a loss to think up suitably atmospheric spells (would they be the same or very different? Detect Cave?) It’s a shame there’s no animism here either. I’d happily trade four new monsters for a shaman character class or better still an animism domain (we could turn the irony into a d20 cosmology point and avoid the drag of yet another class). In summary, Lost Preshistorica scores far more successes than misses and certainly won’t get lost on my hard disk.
