Why does fantasy have to be medieval? It doesn't, and our hobby provides numerous examples (Call of Cthulhu comes immediately to mind). Great stuff; but why not shine that light backwards towards a prehistoric world complete with enormous dinosaurs and our ancient ancestors? Ridiculous, we know. They didn't coexist, and that's the epic fantasy part of this primal experiment. And keeping that going, let's add archaic shamans with genuine magical powers (and animal totems) waiting at their command...
The result would be Epoch: A Game of Stone and Spell, inspired by actual history but suitably embellished with a combination of human misunderstanding, including the fanciful dinosaurs of B-movie fare, and the magic our progenitors almost certainly practiced for a game unlike any previous offerings. It's a system years in the making (but only very recently possible), and we're delighted. Readers can expect our customary d6 simplicity, although minus the mechanical safety net for the OSR's famously greater lethality.
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Everything's dangerous. The characters are dangerous. Their enemies are dangerous. Even the earth below (and sky above) is dangerous, but have courage. Clever parties can work together to survive, leveraging their skills against dinosaurs and megafauna, cunning humans and powerful ravaging spirits. Advancement enables greater challenges, which sometimes includes intelligent saurian foes and/or advanced time travelers, although individual referees can decide for themselves the trajectory of their personal campaigns...
Anyway, there it is. A childhood assembling Aurora Prehistoric Scenes models and admiring the stop-motion artistry of the great Ray Harryhausen got us here. But so did roleplaying dragons and wizards. Fortunately, prehistory, with its evolving human lineages and enormous foes to challenge fantasy's deadliest, delivers similar, and arguably more heroic, results as humanity's first-ever struggle to survive. With a few creative liberties, Epoch, newly available from Drive-Thru RPG, has everything needed to make its world your prehistory.
