Me and my brother were going on a 4 hour walk for some Real-Estate deal, we were bored and thought, what they hey, why don't we try to run an RPG by writing on our arms and using a rock-paper-scissors derivitive?

I had this vague idea for a setting for Sword & Sorcerer, set in the Ice-age. Course, wouldn't be able to run a "real" sorcerer game what with no prep and distracting circumstances. My brother Chris told me that he wanted his character to be this old shaman that communes with dark-sorta animal spirits, and his bound demon is a bloodthirsty giant water snake that's something of a water-spirit.

Growing from that, I decidided on defining Humanity as that which is seperate from Animals, and that acting animistcally calls for Humanity loss rolls. Demons are Unreal creatures.

Chris's kicker was that he had stumbled upon a group of his tribe's foragers, mutilated upon some rocks. Their feet had been bitten by Wolves, who turned on his entourage.

A few frantic rounds later, his enterourage and the wolves were dead, and he had to resort to holing up inside one of the wolves body to survive, which prompted a Humanity-loss roll.

Chris's character returned home to the funeral rite for his neice, a strong warrior and leader of the tribe. With her death came the threat of a hostile Neanderthal tribe no longer warded off by the army. Against the wishings of his brother the death shaman and his husband, he decided on trying to communicate with the neanderthals to see if they knew who had mutilated those men.

The neanderthals told him via drawings in the dirt(The fun thing is that me and my brother were conveintly on dirt with which to draw diagrams.) that the one who mutilated him wore some sort of cloak and a mask of bone shaped in a broad beak.(I just decided at this point that necromancers wear dinosaur bones.)

The find who this was, the Shaman Contacted a swarm of insects known for their gregerarious gossip. They were more intereasted in petty humour that giving infromation, but they were nice enough after some Will rolls to tell him that the man they were searching for was in his own city which was being invaded.

About that time, I was too tired and parched to really continue it further, but it was really fun anyway so I might pick it up again. The system held up considerably well with the RPS variant(Basiclly a karma system, winning the RPS gives +1 and losing gives -1.)as all the different roleplaying bonuses provided variety in effectiveness.

Hope you got a kick out of the story.

sirogit wrote: Growing from that, I decidided on defining Humanity as that which is seperate from Animals, and that acting animistcally calls for Humanity loss rolls. Demons are Unreal creatures.

The idea of an ice age era game is tantilizing ,especially if it's set in the future! Take a look at the page for the upcoming movie The Day After Tomorrow. Imagine of some of the demons your shaman commands were the ghosts left over from our own civilization! Wonder what Humanity would be in a setting like that?

Bryan, it could be avoiding the call of technology. A Luddite wet dream would be to say that if you used technology too much that you eventually lose your humanity.

I really like the concept above, and have wanted to play something very similar where the PCs are inhabited by the spirits - essentially werewolves. We even got to the point where the game was set up and ready to go online but then dissappeared. But the animalism as counter to humanity is really cool, IMO. You can very much do W:TA themes right this way.

Have you noticed that often humanity is defined as a negative condition. Just as often as somebody says that humanity is empathy or something someone else's definition is that humanity is not using tech, or not succumbing to animalism, etc. Interesting.

Mike