Prologue and Table of Contents

Table of Contents  
Round 1 and 2:  The Paleolithic
Round 3:  The Interglacial Period
Round 4:  The Supervolcano Extinction
Round 5:  The Copper Age and Bronze Age
Round 6:  The Iron Age Begins

The first principles with which we began this role-playing game were simple.  My friends and I generally play using the GURPS rules, which enables our games to encompass a diversity from zombies to pirates to ninjas to zombie pirate-ninjas.  In spaceships.  With dinosaurs.  Oddly, however, the one genre to which we never applied the versatile GURPS rules was to high fantasy.

Why bother? we asked.  If we wished to play high fantasy there is a pre-made world and rules all ready to go.  But I have given up on Dungeons and Dragons as being too pre-fabricated, too pat; I didn't want to lurch, yawning, back into the tedium of Elves, Dwarves, Gnomes, and the cut-and-dried alignment system.  Still, fantasy had its attractions.

Let's make our own world, said my friend Joe.  We can make it whatever want.  Without Elves or Dwarves.

Mind you, I like Elves, at least the noble Eldar as envisioned by Tolkien.  Not so much the smorgasbord of red elves, green elves, gold elves, dark elves, purple elves, sky elves, underpants elves, leather elves, vampire elves and other varieties of Elf™ stamped and approved by either TSR or Wizards of the Coast.  I like the Dwarves, too, even though they've always made very little sense to me, evolutionarily speaking.  How did the underground Dwarf races get their vitamin C?  How did they acquire agriculture or domesticate plants?  How did they become proficient at mining technology without first developing food sources?  Did Tolkien imagine that the Dwarves migrated into the deep places of Khazad-Dûm and adapted to the local environment, or did he imagine they were created by the gods in situ with all their adaptations intact?

It wasn't long after I had made a list of the evolutionary adaptations required for a race of human-sized above-ground agrarians to develop into a short, strong, bearded race of subterranean tunnelers — let's see, they would need lactose tolerance and a supply of dairy to meet their needs for Vitamin D — that I hit upon the idea of developing our high fantasy world from scratch.

We would begin in the Stone Age, I decided, at the start of hominid migration.  In the history of the real world, of Earth, it would be the equivalent to 100,000–120,000 years ago, by which time when the Neandertals had completely developed into the proto-humans we know today, and the races of homo sapiens had migrated out of Africa to compete with them.  The era would parallel the last dying millenia of Earth's Pleistocene epoch.  We would embark upon the building of a civilization from a point before the first bronze was smelted, before the first cuneiform letter was written in the first proto-alphabet, before the first crops were deliberately planted, before the first wild wolf was tamed, before even the beginning of the last Ice Age.  We would give the proto-humans language, flint, and fire.  And we would start to build a world.

Think of it:  it has only been twelve thousand years since the beginning of the Holocene, during which we as a human race went from scrabbling together our first farms and wading rivers, all the way to Archer Daniels Midland and the moon landing.  Twelve thousand years.  And yet I hoped to cover eight times that span just to get to the Chalcolithic Era.  In the hundred thousand years that it would take for the Pleistocene to play out, languages would shift, cultures would rise and fall, whole races of humankind would become extinct, wars would be waged and and be by then so thoroughly forgotten that even the discarded stone speartips strewn on the battlefield had been eroded into shapeless lumps, or crushed into gravel by glacial action.  No single individual, however powerful, would be remembered for anything he had done; no tradition and no law would persist in any recognizable form.

Because of the far distance into the past that we began, I decided that the first rounds of the game should be about differentiating between races rather than inventing cultures.  In thirty thousand years, humans evolved from lantern-jawed cave dwellers into the likes of Ron Perlman, and yet I needed more.  I needed faster evolution, or more time.  The answer, of course, was magic.

Magic, I ruled, would enable the rapid evolution of the races of this world.  Both magic and specialized humanoid races were part and parcel of high fantasy.  Tribes who stayed in one place would quickly adapt to local conditions.  Tribes who interacted extensively with certain living things — predators, prey, pets, or plants — would begin to assimilate some of those characteristics.

Magic itself was a problem as well as a solution.  Before we began, I established a few ground rules.  Magic was simply a means of accomplishing work through other than tools.  It should be treated like any other technology; it should develop only when the timing was right, or when the civilization had advanced enough to grasp the concepts at play.  A wizard could hardly invent a spell for telling time down to the nanosecond — not before the development of the atomic clock.

Why did I deliberately constrain the growth of magic?  Consider for a moment how much of our technology is devoted toward food.  We grow it, we plant it, and we harvest it; we preserve it; we deliver it; we trade with it.  We invent governments to manage the distribution of food and food-related tools; we invent infrastructure to protect and power our farms and herds; and we create weapons of war to steal the farms and herds from other cultures.  Civilization is, as they say, two meals away from barbarism.

Because a simple spell such as Create Food could derail the technological development of an entire civilization, I had to delay its development as a magical invention until after the invention of agriculture.  Yes, I certainly could have permitted the full unrestrained development of an entirely magical world, but I felt that it would be so very different from our own that it would strain the imagination of the players (and me) to identify with it.

Even after spells were invented in their proper time, I kept magic further at bay by limiting the ratio of wizards to non-wizards within every society.  For instance, a village with 1 wizard in every 100 people cannot easily ask that wizard to feed everyone, to conjure for the other citizens every house, every road, every knife and fork, every hat and every dress, every sword, every fence, and every temple in addition to protecting the village, watering the villagers' crops, putting out every fire, salving every wound, herding every goat, and delivering every crop to every distant market with his magic.  One wizard's talents can only be stretched so far; he could not be at everyone's beck and call, and even were he treated so, how does one shackle a super-powered slave?  With magic, one could do work much more rapidly than any other single person, it is true; but there must be a point at which the work of one wizard could be outstripped by a number of non-wizards working in tandem.  The other 99 people of the village would simply need to earn their daily crust.  Magic could not be the answer for everything.

So I adapted the grimoire of magical spells available in GURPS Magic to approximately keep pace with the cultural development encoded in the Tech Level chart.  At Tech Level 0 — the Stone Age — developments would be sparse.  There would be spells for tracking game, masking a hunter's scent, finding water, and igniting fire, just to name a few.  Even the introduction of these were staged carefully to allow the development of non-magical technology.

I intertwined the resulting magical development flowchart with a similar flowchart outlining the history of invention.  The Stone Age saw the development of counting, the oral story tradition, fishing, the wheel, the domestication of plants and animals, the invention of archery, the creation of polytheistic societies, and the first horseback riding.  In the Stone Age, we mined in for flint in beds of chalk using antlers as picks; we developed beer, bread, cheese, and wine; in some cultures, we first established the value of metallurgy with the use of copper tools.  Importantly, we also first developed the kind of tribal cooperation required for massive engineering projects.

Imagine Stonehenge — but rather than imagining bluestone trilothons on the green, rolling sward of Salisbury Plain, I ask you to imagine it in the parched hills of Eastern Turkey.  See the megaliths carved with images of hands, serpents, and birds, the illustrations of a people who had not yet even invented the rudiments of the written language.  Now realize that the megalith structures of Göbekli Tepe predate Stonehenge by seven thousand years.  The end of the Neolithic.  The very start of the Agricultural Revolution.  The birthplace of domesticated wheat.

We started a hundred thousand years before that.