Old-School Roleplaying at the Dawn of History: First Principles

In this post, I'll be sharing some thoughts on running an old-school campaign set in prehistory, about participating in the very beginning of a people's cultural memory and guiding it forward. In a few words, I would describe the main design goal as follows: a game that feels like a deep dive into the first 10 turns or so of a game of Sid Meier's Civ. I want a game that plays like how the opening cinematic of Civ 5 made me feel when I was a kid.

Civ 4's opening is strictly better because of Baba Yetu, but doesn't evoke the feel of this view.

Maybe You Don't Need a Character Sheet

Last night, I ran an introductory session for a pair of players at my Friendly Local Game Store. Both had experience in Fifth Edition Dungeons and Dragons but were unfamiliar with the OSR. They were great players and rapidly learned the lessons of the False and Upper Tombs of the fantastic and free Tomb of the Serpent Kings. It took only the first few rooms for them to become wise to the kind of dangers they would face, a credit to TotSK's utility as a teaching tool. What took longer was filling out their character sheets. This was through no fault of their own, they were great players. It was also through no fault of the system, Old School Essentials[1], which is light enough that making a character should be a brief affair. The issue was that the sheet had enough differences from a 5e sheet that many simple boxes needed explanation.