Stone Age Domains?

[HyperionSol]

I've been wondering with the various cultural levels of the domains, are there very many of them set in the stone age, the Cultural Level of 1?

I can see some difficulty in a stone age horror type of domain. It may end up being mostly slasher horror or creature features. Still, it would be kind of interesting to see dinosaurs and cavemen in some hidden spot in the mists. One where the civilization player characters are used to being stripped away and being forced to survive where they are so far from the top of the food chain, it's beyond merely being hunted by wolves or vampires.

Are there many domains, or even ideas for domains, like that?

[The Lesser Evil]

There's not a whole lot of them. The Abber Nomads of the Nightmare Lands are described as CL 1. Saragoss is effectively a CL 1 level due to lack of stable resources. The wild children of Sebua live at a CL 1, though ruins of the Sebuan past show CL 2/Bronze Age ruins.

Of known CL 1 monstrous cultures/domains, both the broken ones of Markovia and the goblins of Tepest are CL 1.

The case of the forced meager survival in highly hostile conditions/squalor could apply to escaped subdweller/shattered brethren/humanoid slaves in Bluetspur, having to exist in the nooks and crannies of the domain while escaping the watchful eyes of the illithids that dominate the domain.

[Five]

Survival horror and cosmic horror (ancient/unknowable and monstrously supernatural misunderstood mundane) are two flavours that come to mind when I think of stone age horror.

As well as stone age variations of Mad Max, and a quasi stone age setting (disaster-survival horror mix; technology taken away from higher CL lands) created by either natural, (demi)human-made, or devine version of an EMP; or an apocalyptic event that turned steel or all metal to rust/dust...

Great potential with a stone age domain, IMO.

Those seeking inspiration for Dark Lord, antihero, or setting trim, find a copy of The Goddamned and see what it seeds: https://imagecomics.com/comics/series/the-goddamned

[alhoon]

There is always the horror of the other guys: You're with your extended family in that 40 people village with the other country being a whole mile away with their 50 people village when... people with real armor and swords show up. Or simply, numbers.

Another option is always Aztec-like civilizations that have a lot of horror there, with cannibalism and bloodthirsty gods that demand human sacrifice. If you want, you can have such a culture demanding human sacrifices from your 120-person tribes.


Last but not least, most things that work for middle ages horror work for stone age horror. A ghost is a ghost whatever tools you use. Same with human hubris.
Speaking of hubris: Go ancient Mediterranean and remove the bronze. Greeks, Etruscans, Hittites, Egyptians etc. There are a lot of examples of mad priests and prideful chiefs/kings

[HyperionSol]

Hm, interesting.

Part of me was hoping to see a dinosaur or caveman domain. My first idea is to have almost Jurassic Park or dino crisis-theme domain. An island of mages studying dinosaurs, or hoping to monopolize them and the leader's recklessness, greed, or all around disiniterest in the safety of their followers see the dinosaurs they so admire to kill people. The domain is where the dinosaurs rule and the Darklord is constantly being hunted by the creatures they thought were so magnificent.

Or perhaps...a sentient dinosaur is a darklord, although this may be a reskinned wildlands.

Maybe a caveman domain would be based off the neanderthal society from the Hollow World setting. A savage darklord who laid waste to other tribes because they did not want to embrace new ideas. In their domain, they see all kinds of prosperity for other tribes, but their own tribe cannot understand them, leaving them with scraps since the more advanced tribes can fight them off.

Just scribbles of ideas, but kind of fun to think about.

[Mephisto of the FoS]

Maybe a caveman domain would be based off the neanderthal society from the Hollow World setting. A savage darklord who laid waste to other tribes because they did not want to embrace new ideas. In their domain, they see all kinds of prosperity for other tribes, but their own tribe cannot understand them, leaving them with scraps since the more advanced tribes can fight them off.

Or something more close to what probably happened... a neanderthal extermination by homo sapiens or bred out into extinction.

[Muggs]

“I do not know with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”

Maybe instead of a 'Caveman' the Darklord of your stone age Domain could be from a super-advanced race, a warlord or wizard who used 'The Ultimate Spell' to win a war, only to find that in the ruins the land they now rule had been reduced to Technology 1:

They are now the king of the ruins, all technology destroyed, all magic gone and those that remain are all under the 'Feeblemind' spell unable to talk or do anything above the most basic tasks on par with your cliche Caveman and having to survive in something more akin to Dark Sun?

Think something like Karsus's Folly.. in fact Karsus might be perfect for this domain or another Netherese like high-epic magic society?

I agree we do need more time-periods in Ravenloft, the Mists can create Domains of any era, any technology level so it's a great place to mine for new stories

[alhoon]

Muggs: That's a version of Markovia though.

I would stop at "Metalworking destroyed, magic teaching gone"
The big spell caused metal to vanish. The big spell killed the illustrious wizard's circle that has through the decades consolidated all magic teaching in its now ruined halls. The big spell killed most aristocrats and priests (literate people) in that big climatic battle, so writing is effectively lost.

And for what? The greedy priest of Tiamat (godess of Greed and Envy) saw the spell he thought would make him damn rich ... evaporate gold in his vault too! Tiamat doesn't work for free.
He became penniless like the people he rules over, in a domain without gold and silver. Sure, he tries to re-introduced obsidian as a form of proto-currency, but it doesn't stick around. People trade for food, they have little time for luxuries. Few accept shiny black glass for services or goods.
Fast forward 40 years (He ages at half rate). As one of the few literate people, he hoards his power to teach literacy to just a few of his acolytes but they are envious of him and he's disappointed with them. In this post-apocalypse world he created, where people reverted to hunter-gatherers or use proto-agriculture for lack of tools, literacy is not valued.

And without literacy? You can't tax effectively those damn hunter-gatherers that run around the ruins or the sparse villages of fishermen and farmers.

Metal introduced in the domain rusts or starts losing substance. Weapons need very frequent sharpening and become brittle with time, armor loses 1 AC per 1d6 months till it crumbles. Coins lose weight fast, disappearing in a year or so.
The touch of the Tiamat priest dude acts like a rust monster's - including gold and silver.
The complete opposite of Midas.

[Muggs]

Muggs: That's a version of Markovia though.

I was thinking of it as more the opposite? - instead of the Darklord creating the twisted humans it's more a case of it being a unexpected side effect - the demi-humans are 'natural' here - the Darklord is the one that doesn't belong! - maybe they were meddling with time travel and got stuck in the past or long future ala Twilight Zones Time Enough At Last?

The horror isn't the mutated or feebleminded demi-humans, the horror is isolation, being a genius yet having no-one to have a intelligent conversation with and none of the magic/technology that they relied on.

To know that all around them is savages and being forced to submit to becoming a savage themselves to survive or perish - because while they might have been a epic level wizard here they're just food!

[Pizza]

Muggs: That's a version of Markovia though.

I would stop at "Metalworking destroyed, magic teaching gone"
The big spell caused metal to vanish. The big spell killed the illustrious wizard's circle that has through the decades consolidated all magic teaching in its now ruined halls. The big spell killed most aristocrats and priests (literate people) in that big climatic battle, so writing is effectively lost.

And for what? The greedy priest of Tiamat (godess of Greed and Envy) saw the spell he thought would make him damn rich ... evaporate gold in his vault too! Tiamat doesn't work for free.
He became penniless like the people he rules over, in a domain without gold and silver. Sure, he tries to re-introduced obsidian as a form of proto-currency, but it doesn't stick around. People trade for food, they have little time for luxuries. Few accept shiny black glass for services or goods.
Fast forward 40 years (He ages at half rate). As one of the few literate people, he hoards his power to teach literacy to just a few of his acolytes but they are envious of him and he's disappointed with them. In this post-apocalypse world he created, where people reverted to hunter-gatherers or use proto-agriculture for lack of tools, literacy is not valued.

And without literacy? You can't tax effectively those damn hunter-gatherers that run around the ruins or the sparse villages of fishermen and farmers.

Metal introduced in the domain rusts or starts losing substance. Weapons need very frequent sharpening and become brittle with time, armor loses 1 AC per 1d6 months till it crumbles. Coins lose weight fast, disappearing in a year or so.
The touch of the Tiamat priest dude acts like a rust monster's - including gold and silver.
The complete opposite of Midas.

You could even grab some established place from the Forgotten Realms wherein the bad guy wins in the first Baldur’s Gate video game only he also screwed up magic as well as metal to get his war. Maybe have an established good wizard go evil as a result. Too bad it is too late for someone to write this up for the book this year. Things going differently was the theme right?

[Pizza]

Maybe a caveman domain would be based off the neanderthal society from the Hollow World setting. A savage darklord who laid waste to other tribes because they did not want to embrace new ideas. In their domain, they see all kinds of prosperity for other tribes, but their own tribe cannot understand them, leaving them with scraps since the more advanced tribes can fight them off.

Or something more close to what probably happened... a neanderthal extermination by homo sapiens or bred out into extinction.

So I read a story once along these lines. Soldier volunteers to go back in time with like a Stargate type contraption. He ends up in Ukraine 10000 years ago and can’t return because the return gate is 10 feet off the ground. The meat of the story starts 6 months later. He’s fallen in with a small tribe. They have all sorts of taboos and talk about magic, the supernatural, and sorcerers all the time though none of them have ever witnessed it only heard of it. Then one night they all start talking about having seen a ghost down by the nearby creek, and they give him a knife so he can go kill it the next day. He thinks they’ve all lost it, but says sure he’ll go kill the ghost. He spends all day down there and before he heads back to lie about killing the ghost an old Neanderthal wanders by, and he realizes this is their ghost. He tries to sneak up and stab it in the back, but as it turns around he realizes this is a person completely cut off from his kind just like himself. He decides he’ll take it back to the group, try to make that case to them, and face the consequences rather than become a murderer. Turns out the whole thing was the final test of whether to take him into the tribe because no one was really sure what kind of person he was.

Now how you adapt that into Ravenloft I don’t know because there’s no Dark Lord or domain, but done right the emotional weight would land somewhere are horror.

[Muggs]

Another way to flip it is to use The Inheritors by William Golding as a basis.
it's fantastic and tells the story of a tribe 'cavemen' but they have really complex lore and stories and are afraid of the 'new humans'.
One twist is to look at what 'primitive' and 'savage' means. You could look at things like the way Aboriginal Australian's were treated by westerners who considered them savages because their culture was so different.

It could well be that the 'modern' person is considered a savage by the 'cave people' because they don't know how to live in this world and are focused on fighting/war and taking over.. when the 'primitive' people are peaceful, they may not be 'smart' but maybe they are the superior people after all?

[Goobs]

Check the Wildlands. intelligent animals with evil tendencies powered by the dark powers.

[Daisu]

Theka from Qtr22 pg148 is domain with a spelljammer vampire darklord stuck in a stone age land. Any vampire created now by T'Lann becomes feral and eventually attacks him. When he drinks the blood of those native to
the land, he goes into a feral rage for an hour, leaving him no knowledge of what
happened in that time other than destruction as evidence. The vampire so powerful that he once threatened the cosmos. Now he cannot get the most simplistic magic devices to work properly. Stuck in a prison that threatens to eat itself out of existence, T'lann must protect its ecology and his blood supply.
Because spells and technology seem to break down all the time, he is unable to fix the spelljamming vessel that he believes can take him away from this land. You do not need to know anything about spelljammer since the technology does not work.

[Rock of the Fraternity]

I am in the process of putting together a Stone Age domain for the Wartorn Cluster. I'm using a lot of megafauna, including dinosaurs, so it has a feeling of "Ravenloft meets the Lost World".
Yes, I know humanoids and dinosaurs did not live in the same era; it's meant to be over the top.
Humanoids mostly exist at literal Stone Age level; there's plenty of ore, but they need to keep on the move in order not to lose sight of their migrating prey and not to become prey of the land's predators - or each other. They don't have time to settle down, mine and smelt; it's just too dangerous.
Every time human population rises to an unsustainable level, the elders assemble raiding parties that cross the domain borders and assault the neighbours for all available resources. Sheer numbers and ferocity - in some cases desperation - have made them boogeymen of the Cluster's more developed lands.

The Darklord actually idolizes the barbaric lifestyle of might makes right and survival of the fittest, but is unable to participate in it for reasons I'm keeping under my hat for now.