Pre-Human Civilizations

DON'T WORRY ABOUT IT.


NOTHING THAT CONCERNS YOU.


EVERYTHING IS UNDER CONTROL.
... I'm sorry Hanat, my mind is too twisted for your feeble attempts at mindcontrol to work.  :twisted:
 
HO is giving me a hand with some reading.  


I got the initial comments.  I'll drop Chapter 4 off later.  


FC, QC, HO--that's what happens when you go for the compound names.  I fully expect JB.  Rather something else with similar initials, but I'll survive on just camaradarie.  


In either case, either you is a 'ho or you ain't a 'ho. Ain't nobody can change that, one way or t'other.
 
In either case' date=' either you [i']is[/i] a 'ho or you ain't a 'ho. Ain't nobody can change that, one way or t'other.
Personally, I think that Streetwalker MA style should have the dread "Bitch-My-Man-Ain't-Yo-Baby's-Daddy Attack" from Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back.  But I didn't invent the shit.


HORRIBLE JOKE TIME (turn away if you hate stupid-ass ignorant jokes).


Q: Why were there only 49 contestants in the Miss Ebonics USA pageant?


A: Because none of them wanted to wear the banner that said, "IDAHO."



ZING!
 
There's a hipster t-shirt with an outline of Idaho that says "Idaho? No, you da ho!"


-S
 
Wait, so have any of you played Pokethulhu?  


that was the first gaming book I received as a gift.
 
You know i have Read Journey to the west, and Romance of Three Kingdoms. I also have dabbled on the the works of the good ole' H.P. Its funny, cus alot of the books that were recommended in exalted to read i already owned and had read them. But anywho i am aware that their were things that were trully grotesque and weird back then, but i am more interested in the civilizations of that period.


I donno i just think it would be sweet to find an artifact thats not really powerful, but i mean its unusual and made of a weird material or something. Its somehow exotic and for this reason the character holds on to it. I kinda get Peeved how in D&D games i have played everyone is always selling their old and dated equipment. I know you can only carry so much, but i mean your first sword will always be special even if its not a Artifact 4 blade, or a +5 unholy ,life drinking blade.


I like to play like the character is a real person you know? And just the fact that his weapon or gadget/artifact he found is so unique makes it interesting for him to keep.
 
yeah i had bad grammer, typing skills. but in my defense i am not wearing glasses or my contacts, so i cant see the screen as well. So i may have more errors then usual.
 
Lotus said:
You know i have Read Journey to the west, and Romance of Three Kingdoms. I also have dabbled on the the works of the good ole' H.P. Its funny, cus alot of the books that were recommended in exalted to read i already owned and had read them. But anywho i am aware that their were things that were trully grotesque and weird back then, but i am more interested in the civilizations of that period.
I donno i just think it would be sweet to find an artifact thats not really powerful, but i mean its unusual and made of a weird material or something. Its somehow exotic and for this reason the character holds on to it. I kinda get Peeved how in D&D games i have played everyone is always selling their old and dated equipment. I know you can only carry so much, but i mean your first sword will always be special even if its not a Artifact 4 blade, or a +5 unholy ,life drinking blade.


I like to play like the character is a real person you know? And just the fact that his weapon or gadget/artifact he found is so unique makes it interesting for him to keep.
Easy solution to this. Let them sell their outdated stuff all the way and as soon as they want to craft an uber daiklaive of awesomeness you make their very first blade an essentiel component of it... fun chasing an old blade over creation.
 
Lotus said:
I like to play like the character is a real person you know?
Hey, man, take your hippy, art-I'm uncultured ideas somewhere else. This is a forum for roleplayers.


-S
 
Human civilizations were pretty much what the DK's made them out to be.  


Earlier than that, it's anyone's ballgame, and the weirder, the more alien, in my book, the better.  


Human history is pretty much already written in the AoS.  DKs helped them along, humans got drafted in the war against the Primordials.  Solars ruled for a while before getting thrown down.  Chaos and pain with the surge of the Wyld and the Great Contagion.  No mysteries there.


Before the DKs?  That's some mystery, but not with humans.  Dragon Kings were early models of grafting Spirit and Matter--or soul and flesh.  Not quite either, not quite both.  Think the same thing for the critters that came before them.  


So, if you want pre-human civilizations, you need to think about what the heck the critters were, and then think long and hard about what the heck a critter like that might build--and if you're talking a civilization, they were building something, otherwise they were just organized tribes or groups, and while intelligent, they wouldn't have been a "civilization" in a recognizable sense, and thus wouldn't have left any trace behind--and as far as the sweep of history goes, they didn't really exist, would they?  


Or maybe they did.  But they didn't leave traces.  


I did a story a while back where I based it on the fall of the Neanderthal civilization.  Psychics, they didn't have a material technology.  Telekinesis, telepathy, pyrokinesis, cryokinesis, and the like, pretty much eliminated the need for an evolving technology.  When the conflict arose between their hunting pets--humans--it got ugly fast.  The Neanderthals never guessed that the mouth noise that the humans used was a form of communication--and if you're telepathic, why would you?  


But be that as it may, if you want a grand civilization, and you want links to it in your game, it's got to have some material basis for carrying over and leaving signs.  Thus, a wholly biotic technology might not be the best, unless there are going to be petrified or preserved bits.  


It's got to leave a trace, otherwise it's just faded.  So, you've got to either find a way to preserve the ephemeral bits--be it some kind of soulcrafting, some kind of spirit weaving, some kind of masterful shaping of Essence, or you've got to have stone, metal, crystal, resins, something durable enough to last to see the light of the AoS.


So, what kinds of critters did the Primordials banish away, to give dominion of the Creation to the Dragon Kings?  What forgetten Gods raised up their own people?  What critters did the Celestials banish away to make room for the newer models?   And did these critters last long enough to leave any traces, even if the subsequent critters tried to erase the evidence?


Think Picts and the subsequent invasions of their lands.  The British Isles are full of tales of older civilizations, because the lands were invaded, over and over, and over again, and the natives retreated, but they left signs, and the subsequent people either took over the sites that were left to them, or left the hell alone, afraid of the bad mojo that might accrue.  Same in the AoS, maybe?
 
I did a story a while back where I based it on the fall of the Neanderthal civilization.  Psychics' date=' they didn't have a material technology.[/quote']
Interestingly, from what I know of Neanderthals, while not exactly psychic, they were far from stupid. It seems that they were, however, highly adapted for the climate of the Ice Age, and relied heavily on food sources (such as mammoth) that were similarly adapted. When the planet melted, they were pretty much fucked.


That, and we H. sapiens, moving into the (now warmer) areas they inhabited, most likely butchered the fuck out of them.


-S
 
Neanderthals had larger brain pans than we did, with some areas concerning what is thought to be the seat of our more artisitic and creative impetus much more developed.  


So, I ran with that.  Stronger. Smarter.  Possessed of a higher life of the mind than our forebears, but nowhere near as mean or duplicitous.
 
I can see where meanness and duplicity might seem like the defining characteristics of the species, sometimes...


See also: Agent Smith speech re: viruses.
 
one thing.


Why is it that the lintha survived the first age?


You'd have thought that just about anything in creation proper that the Solar deliberative could call "evil" would have been utterly exterminated.
 
one thing.
Why is it that the lintha survived the first age?


You'd have thought that just about anything in creation proper that the Solar deliberative could call "evil" would have been utterly exterminated.
 I don't have B&S with me, but the original Lintha--direct descendants of Kimberry--were wiped out, iirc. The current (and much weaker) strain was cultivated post-Usurpation.
 
i wonder what Lintha first age artifacts would have been like. Also if they have charms equivalent of Solar charms wouldnt it mean that they may have been just as powerful?


I like to play like the character is a real person you know?

Hey, man, take your hippy, art-I'm uncultured ideas somewhere else. This is a forum for roleplayers.
Your jokin right cus i mean i'll go if i aint wanted, i dont want to intrude.
 
Lotus said:
Also if they have charms equivalent of Solar charms wouldnt it mean that they may have been just as powerful?.
Not quite. God-Blooded of any stripe will never be as powerful as Solars. They cannot learn Combos, Celestial Martial Arts, etc.


-S
 
right of the top of your head could you design a like artifact around 2 dots in power. nothing fancy, something cute. Weapon perferably. off the top of your head?
 
Lotus said:
right of the top of your head could you design a like artifact around 2 dots in power. nothing fancy, something cute. Weapon perferably. off the top of your head?
Me? I suppose I could.


-S
 
Homo Sap Sap, that's us folks, is a hybridization between Neanderthals, Cro Magnons and Archaic Homo Sap.  That's why anyone of European ancestory is so mean and nasty, because we are the purest mix of Neanderthal and Cro Magnon, and we have very little Archaic Homo Sap in us, unless we have ancestors who bred out.


Before any objects, we have no archealogical evidence of Hominid on Homonid violence before 7000 years ago.  War did not exist and, as far as we can tell, neither did famine or plague.  All three are relativily recent phenomena in the two million year history of the human race (our species actually began with Homo Erectus, our distant ancestor, who evolved into Archaic Homo Sap, Florincias and Gigantus [medium, small and large]).  To counter to bigoted crap that was shoveled into most people's heads in high school, Neanderthal was as intelligent and as capable, if not more so, than modern humans.  They were a robust evolution, about 40 to 50% stronger than modern humans, and did not go extinct because of the end of the last Ice Age.  Contrary to popular belief, their main source of protein was small game, such as rabbits and ducks, not mammoths and rhinos.  They lived in the small settlements as Cro Magnon (in Europe and the Middle East) and Archaic (in North Africa and the Middle East) and interbred fairly frequently.  As their genetic differenences were so minor, like .01%, they would have produced fertile offspring, meaning that Neanderthal, Cro Magnon and Archai were subspecies of Erectus, not different species.  You can blame the Victorians for any misinformation from high school.
 
Well, there is still some debate about how much interbreeding there was, if any.  


While OS' theory has some proponents, it is not the most popular or best accepted theory.  


And while I do put some weight to sociobiology, I, and most scientiests and anthropologists put Europeans' behavior more to do with opportunity, iron deposits, terrain, and language dispersal, than it does with their blender full of genetic anomoly.  


Neanderthals weren't brutes and beasts.  Larger brains, more robust physique, they were well on par, if not better equipped than their neighbors, in theory.


As for the lack of "war"...


Chimps regularly hunt their neighboring species, for food.  They also occasionally hunt one another.  They certainly do wage battles, troupe versus troop, as do baboons.  Troupe based primates regularly compete, sometimes violently, sometimes not so much, but the idea that conflict between social groups is only a recent phenomena...that's just silly.


Famine and plague...that's not quite true.  Civilizations changed conditions, but not quite in that idyllic sense.


Now then, our forebears were a nomadic species, and that was, in part, to avoid the consequences of shortened food supplies and make us less dependant on one territory for our food sources.  It wasn't until we settled into one area, and lost the ability to easily move, that we suffered from local conditions, but when conditions change over a wide area, the entire area suffers.  


On the other hand--abundant food sources with the domestication of plant and animals species allowed people to settle down, and build a culture, as well as sous out resources and apply themselves to more stable and less portable technologies.  It was a trade off.


Disease has wiped out small populations in the past.  Luckily, we were seperated by distance, and when a population got hit, neighbors weren't affected.


When we started to settle into communities based on agriculture, and started sharing our quarters with livestock, we then encountered diseases that we had to get some resistance to.  If anything, the settlers grew impressive immune responses.  So much so, that the bugs had to compete pretty hard to get a toe hold.  The war raged in these early communities, and the less "developed" people who didn't have a lot of livestock handy, weren't challenged on this level, and when they were exposed to some of these impressive bugs, it had catastrophic results--same as when bugs that were pretty much under control in their home territories were introduced to areas that didn't have them.  


Enter the plague.  Populations that were exposed to livestock got themselves boosted immune systems, and when they moved to new areas, they took those diseases with them.  It helped pacify a new area of locals more efficiently than guns or arrows.  


When local populations were just as inundated with disease, from their own livestock, then not so much.  Then other means were neccessary.


Not quite as smooth and not quite as idyllic.
 
I'm late as per usual, but as Jakk stated a long while back, CoC works wonders for me, seeing as I've read a lot of Lovecraft and several times at that. I plan on incorporating a little bit of H.P. into my new game that I've talked about a bit online here in the ST area. The mind destroying wonders one can create ^_^
 
Jakk, I am an archaeologist and an anthropologist.  I know that my ideas are not accepted by the general community, but that is because it usually takes forty to fifty years for a new idea to be accepted by the community.  Look at how long it took for us to get rid of the stupid European superiority ideaology.
 

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