Born from Ice: Stone Age RPG – A "Deleted Scenes" Interview With Loren Small (Small Cog Creative)

Born from Ice: Stone Age RPG is a “5th Edition Stone Age adventure. Level 1-20 campaign, setting, and player options. Play D&D in a dangerous prehistoric world!” Pre-history Earth, no magic, no fantasy, but using 5e rules, I was intrigued.

At EN World, I interviewed Loren Small of Small Cog Creative about his latest Kickstarter, Born from Ice: Stone Age RPG. The interview went long meaning a great deal of it had to be cut. What follows are those “deleted scenes” which are questions about the free previews, how his game compares with others, what inspired the game, and more.

EGG: You have some free previews, correct? What are you making available?

LOREN: Yes! There are two free previews available on our Kickstarter page (which are also the first public playtest documents).

For players, there is a QuickStart Guide. This has the first five levels of each class, as well as a number of Totem Paths and Feats to build your character with. It also has the basic rules needed to play Born from Ice.

For GM’s, there is a one-shot adventure (Born from Ice: Blood and Clay) designed for four players with level five characters.

Please, download and test these out, and provide feedback! Playtesting is how we can make this game more fun for everyone!

EGG: On the Born From Ice RPG blog, you have a post (which appears to be the first of several) comparing your TTRPG to others from the same genre such as Würm by Chaosium. Which games to you compare Born From Ice to?

LOREN: It is the first blog post comparing Stone Age game, and I am planning on writing more focusing on some of the other games I mention below. The reason I wrote it and my other article on why I chose to go with 5e, is because people keep asking me why I’m making this game for 5e.

And the best way to answer that is to answer your question, Egg, on what games I compare Born from Ice to.

So to answer why 5e?

There are a lot of other Stone Age games. Here is a short list: GURPS Ice Age, Würm, How We Came to Live Here, Land of Ice and Stone, Paleomythic, Pariah, Wolf-packs and Winter Snow. All of these are good games, and none of them use the 5e engine. There are more games in the genre, but these are the ones I’m most familiar with.
For a 5e fantasy prehistoric setting, there is Planegea. But it is really magical, baked into the core. Which is also great, but pretty different from what Born from Ice is doing.
There isn’t a no-magic 5e setting (that I’m aware of, other than something like Everyday Heroes which is very modern-day focused), so it is actually more of a unique niche to build this in 5e than anywhere else.
I think the 5e engine is actually pretty good at the core, and is designed to be modified and adjusted. It is something of a universal game engine everyone knows how to play. It lowers the barrier of entry for most players to use it.
I think it would be disingenuous not to acknowledge that 5e has a large audience. While this started as a personal project for me and so was always 5e from inception, it certainly hit a moment when I thought about it as a Kickstarter project and decided that continuing as 5e gave me the best opportunity to successfully publish the books.

I know 5e isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, and I also think drawing attention to other RPGs and creators helps raise the tide for all ships. I want there to be original systems and B/X stuff and 5e games that all play in the Stone Age, and all do it in their own unique way. And I want people to play Stone Age games, and do it in a system they want to play in. So I think the games I highlight above are probably the games closest to Born from Ice, although I think there are distinct differences.

EGG: In the blog, you dive into your reasons to go with 5e, to forgo magic, and what outside media inspired you. What I find most interesting about that last one is you have what your pulling from (for example, the fun Korg: 70,000 B.C.) and what is the same genre, but you’re not using such as well-known works like The Clan of the Cave Bear. Why divide the room and call out not just the winners, but also those items that won’t be right in this world?

LOREN: I think Clan of the Cave Bear is an influence on the game. Jean M. Auel’s book series definitely is, even if information we have about Neanderthals has moved a lot further than when it was written, or the film was made. As such, it felt important to include on the list of influences, even if I couldn’t exactly recommend the film.

The film, to me at least, really doesn’t hold up well, at least not in the way a lot of the other options I suggest do. There is a lot less nuance than the books provide, and there is a troubling context of the “primitives” who by their nature are lesser at everything than the incredibly talented perfect blond haired, blue eyed human. It isn’t a bad movie, and I’m not even saying it is purposefully offensive, but it hasn’t aged well. Everything else on my recommended list is a better place to start, and since this is often the movie most people think of for the genre, I felt that placing a caution against it might be better than trying to slip it into the end of the recommended as a “kind of ok” option.

Korg: 70,000 B.C., which I do recommend, obviously has some issues, but I think the presentation holds up better than Clan of the Cave Bear does today. Maybe not on production values, but I think it presents a lot of situations and concepts that are closer to where Born from Ice lands. And it does it in a way that is generally respectful of the Neanderthal people, presenting them in a more relatable view, even if the science is dated.

As far as the list overall, it kind of got away from me as I was working on it. I think the big thing at play here is my film school background. I started making a list of movies and TV that influenced Born from Ice, and then as I got into it realized that I had watched a lot of things that had at various times colored my understanding of human prehistory. And once I had that list together, I decided why not explore the scope of how films and TV can portray prehistory, and then relate them back to my project. So, I do call out films with anachronisms but also have some cultural significance (for good or ill) or entertainment value, as well as genre films that have elements that speak to what I’m trying to accomplish.

I don’t know, maybe I need to go revise the blog post and rewrite it so it’s more an overview of Stone Age cinema rather than tying it to the project, or really draw a line between “These are my true inspirations,” and “These are other interesting movies on the topic that don’t particularly tie to Born from Ice.”

To muddy the waters some more, here are some of my favorite pieces of popular media outside of TV and film that have had an impact on Born from Ice (by no means an exhaustive list, and certainly doesn’t account for the scientific papers and reading I’ve done).

Comics: MeZolith by Ben Hagarty (2016), Tiger Lung by Simon Roy (2014), Tuki by Jeff Smith (2021).
Books: Shaman by Kim Stanley Robinson (2013), The Inheritors by William Golding (1955), The Chronicles of Ancient Darkness Series by Michelle Paver (2004), Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari (2011), The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow (2021), The Old Way: A Story of the First People by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas (2006).

EGG: You’ve talked about the media, but what about the Stone Age made you want to game there?

LOREN: I got interested in human prehistory much later in life. I grew up in a pretty strict religious environment, and so things like dinosaurs and human evolution were not a part of my education. It wasn’t until my early 30’s, as I really began to study these areas for myself, that the scope and beauty of human origins really struck me, at a really profound level.

This coincided with the end of a really bad job and me trying something, literally anything else, and becoming a professional GM online (which is a whole story on its own; that would have been around January 2017, before online games really took off and professional paid GM’ing was really a thing). It was during this period that the seeds for what would become Born from Ice were planted. I started crafting this world initially for myself as a bit of an outlet and to test out ideas that would make it into my games, and it just grew out of that.

I’ve worked on a lot of projects in the intervening years, but have always kept going on Born from Ice. It has been my passion project that keeps me coming back. It has a lot of meaning for me beyond being just a game to publish; it is really a culmination of a journey for me. It has helped me understand the world, humanity, and my place in everything. I know this sounds trite and cliché, but researching and working on this project has made me a better person/human, and has really helped me grow and let go of a lot of my past.

EGG: Beyond Born from Ice, what else are you working on?

LOREN: Well, I have my day job where I do video work for the marketing department of a community college. That keeps me reasonably busy, and I love seeing the transformation education can have for our students. It is pretty gratifying to get to do something everyday that truly changes peoples lives for the better.

Creatively, Born from Ice has pretty much been a second full time job for the last few months, and if the Kickstarter is successful, will continue to be for the foreseeable future!

That said, I tend to have lots of ideas, and have a number of other partially developed concepts and projects. If this goes well, I definitely have plenty of ideas on how to follow it up! But one thing at a time.

EGG: Thanks for talking with me. Where can fans learn more about Born from Ice: Stone Age RPG?

LOREN: My pleasure, thanks for having me!

The website, Facebook, and Instagram are all great places to learn more, but the Kickstarter is the best place to come support the project, get the latest updates, grab the playtest files, and join the Born from Ice community!

Born from Ice: Stone Age Role-Playing (5e) from Small Cog Creative

“A 5th Edition Stone Age adventure. Level 1-20 campaign, setting, and player options. Play D&D in a dangerous prehistoric world!”