Stone/Bronze Age help

[bigdamnhero]

So I let myself get talked into writing & running a fantasy game at an upcoming convention. The campaign is set right on the cusp of the Bronze Age; that is, advanced societies have bronze, less advanced still have stone tools. Some magic, but pretty low-level. I've got some general ideas, but I'm having trouble fleshing things out. Partly because I haven't run fantasy in a long time; partly because I'm exhausted from other life events; but also partly because I've never done stone/bronze age fantasy. I know I'm on my own with the first two, but thought I'd see if you all could help me with the last one.

 

Has anyone here run/played in anything along these lines, and have anything you'd like to pass on? I'm less interested in stats and weapons and so forth, as this is for a d20 campaign. (And don't even get me started on how much I hate writing d20 stuff! ) I'm just looking for general ideas & advice to help me get my head in the right place.

 

Thanks in advance!

[McCoy]

Re: Stone/Bronze Age help

 

Ever play Civilization?

 

Agriculture will be very important. Both your bronze and stone age peoples will have pottery. Advances in one area do not necessarly mean advancement in all areas. Would be intereting if the stone agers had domesticated horses, and the bronze agers hadn't.

[Lemurion]

Re: Stone/Bronze Age help

 

I've got a book reference that might be helpful: Stonehenge: where Atlantis Died. Harry Harrison was one of the authors and it's a good novel for covering the interaction between the two levels of culture.

 

One thing to consider is that a character in full bronze panoply is effectively invulnerable to stone weapons.

[War Cry]

Re: Stone/Bronze Age help

 

Ancient Greece is the first thing to spring into my mind when thinking broze age.

 

Agriculture is important, with herd animals and trading supplementing this.

Permanent structures amd settlements are now established - ie, city states and buildings of stone and timber. Governments are more oragnized, either along the lines of a monarchy, aristocracy, or other forms higher than "this is our chief, Bob, he knows how to follow the buffalo."

 

Bronze being the most advanced form of metal, it will have a significant impact on weapons, armor, and war in general. The largest blades are likely short swords and axes with heads about 3-6 inches across. Anything larger has a nasty tendency to bend or break. Helmets and breastplates of bronze will most likely be the toughest armor out there. Most will wear just leather, if any. The vast majority of fighting men will rely on a shield to keep them from harm. (There was a form of full plate armor, called "Dendra Panopoly", but it was so heavy and cumbersome that for the most part, it wasn't practical on the battlefield)

 

A lot of the broze age cultures relied on slavery to help and boost the economy. IIRC, it was estimated that about half of the ancient Greek population was composed of slaves. Corinth was the first city to mint coins, and they actually had banks and moneychangers.

 

The family unit in both the stone and broze age was very important. The head of the family made all of the important decisions - who married who, who did what, so on and so forth.

 

Of course, I'm basing all this on ancient Greece, and I'm sure other cultures have more to offer.

 

ICE produced a book "Mythic Greece", and it has a lot of useful info that may help you out - if you can find it.

[austenandrews]

Re: Stone/Bronze Age help

 

Remember too that far-reaching commerce was not unknown. Just because a culture can't make bronze weapons doesn't mean it doesn't have access to bronze weapons.

[Kristopher]

Re: Stone/Bronze Age help

 

Yes, I know it's Wikipedia, but it's better than nothing.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bronze_age

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beaker_culture

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catacomb_culture

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cucuteni_culture

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funnelbeaker_culture

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallstatt_culture

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maykop_culture

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yamna_culture

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumer

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indus_Valley_Civilization

 

Each of those will have links, and those articles will have links, and...

[Lemurion]

Re: Stone/Bronze Age help

 

Remember too that far-reaching commerce was not unknown. Just because a culture can't make bronze weapons doesn't mean it doesn't have access to bronze weapons.

 

That was one of the things in that novel I mentioned, it was about a resource war between Mediterranean states fought in what is now England. During our own bronze age, Mediterranean cultures had access to resources such as as British tin and Danish amber.

[Lemurion]

Re: Stone/Bronze Age help

 

Yes, I know it's Wikipedia, but it's better than nothing.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bronze_age

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beaker_culture

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catacomb_culture

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cucuteni_culture

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funnelbeaker_culture

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallstatt_culture

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maykop_culture

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yamna_culture

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumer

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indus_Valley_Civilization

 

Each of those will have links, and those articles will have links, and...

 

The thing is, as far as gaming settings go, the inaccuracy of wikipedia is irrelevant. It's a host of information that is generally close enough to correct that you can file the edges off it and use it in a fantasy setting with no trouble at all.

 

Grab each one of the cultures in those links, make up some names and bingo! you've got a culture for a game. No fuss, no muss.

[assault]

Re: Stone/Bronze Age help

 

One thing to consider is that a character in full bronze panoply is effectively invulnerable to stone weapons.

 

Tell it to Goliath.

 

In fact, this statement is not true at all. A club is a club. A sling stone is a sling stone. You wouldn't want to get in the way of either of them, even if you were wearing steel armour.

 

The main advantage of the Bronze users would be that the Stone users would probably have little armour of their own - but that doesn't rule out them having effective shields, and non-metallic armour.

 

As usual, of course, the side with the most troops would tend to win...

[Kortay Mirlor]

Re: Stone/Bronze Age help

 

A bronze weapon is just about a shaped club after about the seventh or eighth *smack*. Bronze armor is heavy, hot, and expensive; elite troops get breastplate and greaves and that's all.

 

Stones are cheap, plentiful, and (some kinds) can be made sharp as hell.

 

Fact is, the fighters are about equally well equipped. Bronze age empires won out by being higher population, because bronze followed agriculture. Also, farmers are used to doing things on schedule, by "the book" and this was reinforced by imperial "bosses". So the bronze-using troops were better organized and better led. That, and that only, is why the Bronze Age empires beat the stuffing out of the Stone Agers.

[austenandrews]

Re: Stone/Bronze Age help

 

Come on, now. They had them beat in style nine ways to Sunday.

[Kristopher]

Re: Stone/Bronze Age help

 

Is bronze really that soft?

[assault]

Re: Stone/Bronze Age help

 

Come on' date=' now. They had them beat in [i']style[/i] nine ways to Sunday.

 

Tell it to the Aztecs.

 

OK, the Aztecs had a bit of bronze, but they mostly used stone... You certainly can't knock their dress sense, though.

 

Incidentally, agriculture and organised states were actually late stone age developments. So even here there isn't necessarily a massive discrepancy between the two.

 

Of course, "Bronze Age" covers a whole bunch of different societies, and thousands of years, in its own right. There was a wide difference between, say, Old Kingdom Egyptians, Mycenaean Greeks and northern European pre-Celtic fleabags, for example. Of these the Egyptians probably had the most organised state(s), but were by far the earliest.

[gojira]

Re: Stone/Bronze Age help

 

Is bronze really that soft?

 

I don't think so, at least not properly made bronze. Don't forget that bronze was used on naval ships as cannon well into the.. well, at least the 19th century, if not even later. If cannon fire didn't deform it, I can see how a human arm could.

[Old Man]

Re: Stone/Bronze Age help

 

I don't think it's soft so much as that it doesn't hold an edge worth a damn. That, and it's heavy.

[Cosmosemeritus]

Re: Stone/Bronze Age help

 

Wow, that's a nifty campaign idea.

 

Some ideas that come to mind:

Village/river-dwelling people depend on agriculture. Many worshipped feminine fertility goddesses and some may have even been matriarchal societies.

Wandering peoples depend on herding. Many worshipped masculine gods that symbolized (or were symolized by) the male herd leaders of the animals they depended upon.

Neolithic herdspeople often invaded the sedentary agrarians, and within a few generations the new composite city-people would worship a divine couple, the bull-headed patriarch and his agrarian wife, or counter-point the river-wreathed queen goddess and her antlered protector-god.

The religions were shaped by their history and visa versa. Perhaps a society's smith-god was a century earlier the fire god of a wandering tribe who conquered a lowland village tribe after bronze (or even just copper) was introduced into their culture.

 

Something else to keep in mind. Concerning technology, copper was used before bronze and so copper impliments should probably play a role. Bronze may have even been discovered when tin bearing ore was accidently mixed into a mass being smelted for copper production. Also smelting such materials doesn't require much; a hot campfire can smelt copper from some ores. So metal use isn't necessarily restricted to the city-dwellers.

 

 

Total tangent:

Depending on the time period, bronze cannons were more predominant, both on ship and on land, than iron cannon because bronze could be cast. Iron casting techniques were generally crude, and with the exception of some iron cast guns made during the reign of Henry the VIII of England, iron cast guns didn't become common until the mid-nineteenth century.

 

On the comparison of metals:

Bronze has a tensile strength of 25-44 KPSI and a Brinell Hardness of 60-110 depending on the alloy and temper. Cast Iron has a tensile strength of 25-60 KPSI and a Brinell Hardness of ~150-300 varying for the same reasons. These numbers come from the American Society of Testing Materials.

 

Edit: (saw Old Man's post right after I posted.)

I don't think it's soft so much as that it doesn't hold an edge worth a damn. That' date=' and it's heavy.[/quote']

Precisely. The large difference in hardness means that iron will hold an edge much better than bronze, but the relatively small difference in tensile strength means that iron is only a little better at withstanding the pressures generated in a cannon. Bronze is also a little heavier, with a density of about 8.7-8.9 g/cc, vs. cast iron with a density of 6.8-7.8 g/cc.

[bigdamnhero]

Re: Stone/Bronze Age help

 

Thanks everyone for the ideas! To give a little more background, this is a collaborative game world run at subsequent local cons, where the actions of the players directly shape the way the world develops. Tech progression hasn't exactly been linear, but most aspects of society are more stone than bronze age. Only a few races have even started building cities yet, agriculture is still somewhat experimental, and the concept of writing is only now becoming widespread. The secret of Bronze was sorta handed down as a gift from the gods (it's more complicated than that, but you get the idea) just a few generations ago, so bronze is still rather rare and expensive.

 

Anyone planning on attending Tacticon 2006 may want to skip the rest:

 

The basic plot so far centers on two neighboring races, who have traditionally been allies. But as their numbers have increased, they have increasingly come into conflict over resources. Many people on both sides have begun to feel the forest just isn't big enough for the both of them. Representatives from both races (the PCs) are meeting together to attempt to resolve the dispute. Meanwhile, another race that lives nearby has been whispering in ears on both sides and fanning the flames, hoping to start a war between the two that will leave both races weak and easier to push around. As the PCs talk, they will hopefully figure out that the third race is using them as pawns. Of course if that happens, the third race will try to kill off the PCs, knowing that each side would blame the other for the deaths.

 

 

Fact is' date=' the fighters are about equally well equipped. Bronze age empires won out by being higher population, [i']because bronze followed agriculture[/i]. Also, farmers are used to doing things on schedule, by "the book" and this was reinforced by imperial "bosses". So the bronze-using troops were better organized and better led. That, and that only, is why the Bronze Age empires beat the stuffing out of the Stone Agers.

I agree that the reasons Bronze Age societies won had more to do with other advances besides metalurgy. But I think you undersell the advantages of bronze. Bronze may not hold an edge very well, but I don't expect a stone knife would survive even one blow against a bronze shield or armour without shattering. After all, if bronze was no more effective than stone, why didn't all those bronze age socieites just equip their troops with stone weapons at 1/10th the cost of bronze?

[assault]

Re: Stone/Bronze Age help

 

Only a few races have even started building cities yet' date=' agriculture is still somewhat experimental, [/quote']

 

Historically, agriculture preceeded cities by thousands of years.

 

Bronze may not hold an edge very well, but I don't expect a stone knife would survive even one blow against a bronze shield or armour without shattering. After all, if bronze was no more effective than stone, why didn't all those bronze age socieites just equip their troops with stone weapons at 1/10th the cost of bronze?

 

"Bronze" shields rarely had more than a thin layer of bronze. It was simply too heavy.

 

Stone knives aren't primary fighting weapons. Think clubs, spears, bows and slings. Bronze armour would obviously be useful against the last three of those, but not necessarily all that much compared to non-metal forms of armour.

 

As usual, bigger armies would tend to beat smaller ones.

 

As for why should a society prefer to use bronze rather than stone: they didn't. The transition tended to be gradual, and often through an intermediate "Copper Age". To put it simply, the differences were marginal, and only built up over time. When Bronze Age and Stone Age societies met, the former were usually the more highly organised societies, and would tend to win out. Then again, it's quite likely that "Stone Age barbarians" beat up various Copper and Bronze age societies on occasions.

 

I would suggest studying Pre-Dynastic and early Old Kingdom Egypt, and their neighbouring societies in order to get a feel for the interaction of these factors. While you are at it, do the same for the Sumerians and their neighbours. Advanced students could consider the Indus Valley, China, and so on...

 

You might want to consider economics as a military factor, too, rather than immediate battlefield utility. Add in levels of social organisation: how big is the community you are drawing your army from?, and so on, and you get a view of technological change that is sadly less heroic, but actually more realistic than a simplistic "Bronze weapons are better than Stone weapons" picture.

 

Incidentally: the (Stone Age) Australian Aborigines were able to succesfully contain the European invaders of their country for several decades. Apparently, flintlock muskets aren't superior to fire-hardened spears as a weapon for fighting in the bush. Eventually, they were defeated by disease, not by military action.

[Markdoc]

Re: Stone/Bronze Age help

 

"Bronze" shields rarely had more than a thin layer of bronze. It was simply too heavy.

 

Actually, that's not the case. Even the bronze skin of a hoplon is amazingly heavy and we have shields (admittedly, not as large) in the national museum here which are solid bronze. I have seen the actual items up clse and hefted exact reproductions. They are astoundingly heavy, but apparently used in battle. A heavy club would still work but any stone-tipped missile weapon would be totaly useless against them - and against the hoplon, even bronze-tipped arrows were not very effective, as witness the many accounts of missile troops being run down by hoplites or being unable to shift them.

 

I would suggest studying Pre-Dynastic and early Old Kingdom Egypt' date=' and their neighbouring societies in order to get a feel for the interaction of these factors. While you are at it, do the same for the Sumerians and their neighbours. Advanced students could consider the Indus Valley, China, and so on...[/quote']

 

I would agree with your general assessment that economic aspects of culture are as important/more important than weapon-making technology. But in an early era where armies were often relatively small, it can still be important: the Hallstadt culture and (in particular) the La Tene culture show how a relatively small group armed with improved military technology, apparently came to dominate existing cultures, who were, if we read the remains correctly, more numerous.

 

Incidentally: the (Stone Age) Australian Aborigines were able to succesfully contain the European invaders of their country for several decades. Apparently' date=' flintlock muskets aren't superior to fire-hardened spears as a weapon for fighting in the bush. Eventually, they were defeated by disease, not by military action.[/quote']

 

This, I think is wrong. I can't think of a single instance where Australian aboriginals were able to successfuly repel (or even significantly delay) European incursions (still less for decades) - indeed, there are reports of settlers hunting them with dogs for sport and for "pest eradication" as though they were foxes.

 

The Tasmanian aborigines did organise resistance against the encroaching settlers from 1826-31 (the only instance I am aware of). It only hastened their destruction. Henry Melville reported, “This murderous warfare, in the course of a few years destroyed thousands of aborigines, whilst only a few score of the European population were sacrificed” - there are numerous eyewitness accounts a one or two settlers armed with forearms killing literally dozens of Tasmanians. The estimated 4-5000 Tasmanians were - quite literally - exterminated in the course of about a decade. Disease finished them off, but it was warfare (or more accurately, massacre) that drove them to the brink.

 

This is not say that it *couldn't* have happened, under some circumstances. I'm just saying that it didn't happen - in this case the settlers not only had superior weapons but also resources, numbers and leadership, so the outcome was preordained.

 

cheers, Mark

[assault]

Re: Stone/Bronze Age help

 

This' date=' I think is wrong. I can't think of a single instance where Australian aboriginals were able to successfuly repel (or even significantly delay) European incursions (still less for decades) - indeed, there are reports of settlers hunting them with dogs for sport and for "pest eradication" as though they were foxes.[/quote']

 

OK, this is a long story...

 

Try: http://www.dreamtime.net.au/indigenous/timeline2.cfm for some details.

 

The whole history is a lot more complex, and, of course, is contested. There are whole schools of history dedicated to the notion that Aboriginal resistance essentially didn't happen at all.

 

The "official" version of why the earliest colonialists took so long to cross the Blue Mountains and move beyond what is more or less now Sydney has to do with geographic impediments. Aboriginal resistance wasn't, apparently, a factor.

 

Tell it to Pemulwuy.

 

PS: Another interesting story. In 1945, the population of the Japanese occupied sections of Bougainville rebelled. While they had managed to steal a certain number of Japanese rifles, and had been provided with more by the Australians, a lot of their fighters were using bows and other traditional weapons, plus the occasional steel axe or machete. The Japanese sent out punitive expeditions. They didn't come back...

 

Apparently, marching along tracks through mountainous jungles and swamps tends to leave you vulnerable to people who know the area...

[Lemurion]

Re: Stone/Bronze Age help

 

I know it's been a while since I posted it, but I am going to stand with my original statement about bronze age vs. stone age warriors, with two clarifications.

 

The first is that I was considering hand to hand combat, and the second that full bronze panoply means (in case anyone doesn't know) the full armor of the Greek Hoplite.

 

Just consider Thermopylae; and then realize most of the stone age troops would be even less well equipped than the Persians.

[Old Man]

Re: Stone/Bronze Age help

 

Actually, that's not the case. Even the bronze skin of a hoplon is amazingly heavy and we have shields (admittedly, not as large) in the national museum here which are solid bronze. I have seen the actual items up clse and hefted exact reproductions. They are astoundingly heavy, but apparently used in battle. A heavy club would still work but any stone-tipped missile weapon would be totaly useless against them - and against the hoplon, even bronze-tipped arrows were not very effective, as witness the many accounts of missile troops being run down by hoplites or being unable to shift them.

 

Does that kind of [neato] information translate well into d20?

[Dale A. Ward]

Re: Stone/Bronze Age help

 

Actually' date=' that's not the case. Even the bronze skin of a hoplon is amazingly heavy and we have shields (admittedly, not as large) in the national museum here which are solid bronze. I have seen the actual items up clse and hefted exact reproductions. They are astoundingly heavy, but apparently used in battle. A heavy club would still work but any stone-tipped missile weapon would be totaly useless against them - and against the hoplon, even bronze-tipped arrows were not very effective, as witness the many accounts of missile troops being run down by hoplites or being unable to shift them.[/quote']

You have to remember the cultural differences between the Ancient Greeks and Modern Man. The majority of the Ancient Greeks hefted that heavy shield on a daily basis...

 

whereas, for most of us modern folk, the heaviest thing we lift regularly is our chubby butts out of the easy chair.

 

[Old Man]

Re: Stone/Bronze Age help

 

I beg to differ. It's an office chair.

[McCoy]

Re: Stone/Bronze Age help

 

I don't think so' date=' at least not properly made bronze. Don't forget that bronze was used on naval ships as cannon well into the.. well, at least the 19th century, if not even later. If cannon fire didn't deform it, I can see how a human arm could.[/quote']

Bronze? Or Brass?