I just finished the second season of Genndy Tartakovsky’s Primal, which means two things:
1. I am the last person in that show’s target demographic to watch it, which is a shame because it has pretty much everything I like in it and very little of what I don’t.
2. It’s probably time to do a review of the most recent “cavemen and dinosaurs” RPG product I own.
“But, wait!“ you say, “didn’t that come out in 2006?”
Yes, interrupting reader. Yes. it did. It might be the right time for me to write this review, but it definitely isn’t the right time to publish it. We can’t all be perfect.
So, what the hell is GURPS: Lands Out of Time? It’s the Land of the Lost. The original 1974 version. Though, there are options for the 2009 stoner comedy version too. It’s got a bit of Edgar Rice Burroughs by way of Conan in it too. The book itself is 43 pages long and divided into five chapters.
Characters
There are five sections in this chapter. The first is one page long and covers the kinds of characters common to the pulpy dinosaur-infested world. Your first option is to be a Tribal. That is to say, hunter-gatherer cave-people. Later on, the book will throw out a group for each segment of the paleolithic. These are Cro-Magnon (Upper Paleolithic), pulpy Neanderthals (Middle Paleolithic, and significantly less interesting here than in most caveman media since the 90s at least), and the Protohumans (Lower Paleolithic, pretty much like Cha-Ka from Land of the Lost). There are also occupational templates for the Cro-Magnons, but you could apply them to any of the others: Chief, Shaman, Wanderer, and Warrior. The first three are around 100 character points, while the last is 70.
The next characters mentioned are the Timelost. These are members of the Marshall family from Land of the Lost, the Victorians from The Lost World, or the World War 1 soldiers from The Land that Time Forgot. In other words, they are people from the future, at least one of whom probably has some knowledge of paleontology (which is invariably useless). There are more occupational templates than that here though: in addition to the Scientist, you’ve got the Explorer, Soldier, and Kid. They’re pretty much what you’d expect thematically. Mechanically, the Kid and Scientist are around 50 points while the Explorer and Soldier approach 100.
Third, we’ve got the Advanced Natives. The book says these guys are “rare in the source material,” but that “campaigns often benefit from offering a variety of cultures.” This book might have actually been a little ahead of the curve here — this was before 10,000 BC had Atlantean villains, and certainly before Satan and his armies of bronze-age mercenaries were the villains in Primal. They have one occupational template, which is a slightly higher-tech version of the Tribal Warrior, and clocks in at 72 points.
Lastly, we’ve got the Nonhumans. They’re mostly off-brand Sleestaks (lizard people), called Saurians, but also can also include pulp hominids if you don’t roll them in with the Tribals. There are also got racial templates for every variation of caveman and lizardfolk here. It costs 5 character points to be a standard Cro-Magnon character, and they’re got a bonus to HT but take Innumerate as a disadvantage. For a “primitive caveman,” it’s ten points, and you get increased strength at the cost of a Tech Level lower than 0 (yeesh). It’s -42 points to be a pulp Neanderthal. It could be worse though: the poor Cha-Kas of the world take a -75 point template, and can usually only spend 50 points on skills and advantages. As far as the Saurians go, it’s 17 points to be of the human-parity variety and -45 to be the dinosaur equivalent of a protohuman. And, just like the Sleestaks, they move very slowly.
There’s also a sidebar on how to play Dinotopia, if that’s your thing.
Advantages, Disadvantages, and Skills
This section goes through a fairly random list of advantages and disadvantages from the GURPS 4e Basic Set and says whether and to what extent they’re appropriate for the genre. There are a few joke entries in here, the most notable of which ties into Steve Jackson Games’ fetish for conspiracy theory games (“Illuminated” = DOES THE ILLUMINATI EXIST IN DINOSAUR-LAND?!?). The big quibble I have here is that is totally 1000% appropriate for native characters to have Gadgeteer. The book disagrees. The protagonist in the Clan of the Cave Bear books certainly had it, and (though it hadn’t come out yet) the Neanderthal protagonist in Primal would definitely have it too.
It does the same thing with skills, and it’s a similarly weird grab bag of options they decided to mostly shoot down. Did you know that none of the native cultures have developed martial arts and that Boxing, Judo, and Karate are all martial arts that native characters don’t know? Don’t worry if not. This book will let you know, and tell you three different times.
Equipment
You just can’t do a simulationist RPG without an equipment list, and this book’s got one. In fact, It’s got a pretty good one. Each item not only has a tech level assigned to it, but also (because we’re dealing with gradations of the stone age GURPS normally doesn’t bother with) lists which factions in the setting can produce them. And produce is key, because anyone can use an item, but they might not be able to replace it when it gets lost or breaks. There’s also a delightful section here on how people have repurposed various parts harvested from dinosaurs. The Advanced Natives, for example, make plate mail out of stegosaurus. That’s just awesome.
Bestiary
This is the GURPS 4e update for GURPS Dinosaurs. It hits every kind of classic dinosaur you remember from childhood, plus a few extra. Each dinosaur also has a fantasy name, and these are the best fantasy dinosaur names I’ve seen in any RPG product. Or in general. After all, that’s not an anklyosaurus you are in the process of running away from: that’s a Flat-Back. Tyrannosaurus? Nope, that’s Walking Death. Hadrosaurus? Calling Beast. Absolutely fantastic.
The book notes that people have domesticated three types of dinosaur: the eoraptor, the Pterodactylus kochi, and the Massospondylus. Working in reverse order, the Massospondylus play the role of cattle and maybe also horses, Pterodactylus kochi serve as carrier pigeons, and the eoraptor are dogs. They are just dogs. I’m pretty salty about eoraptor though. The book talks about it in the introduction to the chapter, and a few other places later, but never gives them a write-up, so they doesn’t get a fantasy name. Lame. I went with “Death-In-Numbers,” from one of the minor tribes described in chapter 5.
Needless to say, this book also considers the word “dinosaur” to mean any sufficiently terrible lizard, regardless of its place on the tree of life. It doesn’t much trust the idea that small therapods has feathers, either. Never you mind pterosaur pycnofibers.
Worldbuilding
So how do you build your own Land Out of Time? Well, the books answers that question in three steps. First, decide whether you are playing on a lost plateau/island, in the year 10 Million BC, or on another world entirely. Then, you must understand the tech levels — the differences between the different stone ages, and what the bronze age was. Note that the book only cares about the paleolithic eras, and to the extent that the neolithic exists, it’s rolled into the bronze age. Finally, you pick a theme: Survival, Exploration, or Homesteading. Primal definitely did the first, Burroughs liked the middle one, and Land of the Lost was partial to the last, as some dino-media examples.
There are three sidebars in the chapter. The first answers the question “Does magic exist? And if it does, is it actually psychic powers?” And gives an answer for three scenarios: Yes; Yes and Yes; and No, No, No. The book feels the first answer is out of genre, the second answer is just right, and third answer is also pretty nice, especially if you want your world’s religious elites to all to be frauds.
The next sidebar talks about Cthulhu, and whether or not he wants to party with dinosaurs. Important stuff. The book says that he’s more than welcome to join if your lost world is on Earth, but another planet might be outside his roaming area.
The final sidebar talks about all the silly ways you can integrate dinosaurs into society, and then talks about how to balance a party with both a caveman and an astronaut.
World of Banded-Night
The World of Banded Night is the book’s default setting, referred to throughout but detailed here. It’s the Land of the Lost… if you dropped the city from The Elephant Tower in. The known world is really small: the book only describes the valley of the Slow Muddy River, which flows from the faux-Sumerian city-state of Tarn-Ul through the tribal Valley of Morning Mist, to the Neanderthal-populated Black Sand Beach and the Endless Water. We’re only given two distances here: the edge of Tarn territory is 15 miles from the Valley of Morning Mist, and in the old days it used to take three days to walk to their territory from the Valley, but now it only takes one.
The Tarn as written waver between being designated villains (they’re ruthless bronze-age slavers, the same kind of people as the bad guys in the Bible), a home base (it’s the only city, so if you want to buy something more advanced than a carefully knapped flint speartip they’re your only choice), or the patsies for the real villains (if you add non-psychic magic or Cthulhu to your campaign then these guys are meddling with it, and their Priest-King might be an eldritch wizard body-snatching his descendants to live forever). They’ve also got the fewest options for player characters. The setting’s assumption seems to be that you’re either Timelost or you’re a member of one of the Cro-Magnon groups. Of course, it’s GURPS and you can play a ‘friggin brontasaurus if you want, so it doesn’t matter much, but I think it’s still worth noting.
Continuing on, there’s a brief description of the major Cro-Magnon cultures, an even briefer description of the Neanderthal culture, a section on the history of Tarn, and a thing on the obligatory precursor race. They’re more-or-less the Altrusians from, you guessed it, The Land of the Lost. They’ve even got strange black spheres littered everywhere as a stand-in for the pylons.
There’s all of jack about the Saurians and Protohumans, though. The primitive Saurians like to squat in old precursor ruins, and so do the Protohumans. That’s all they wrote, and nothing on the advanced Saurians. All other information on them comes from Characters chapter. Such is life.
After the broad overview, there’s a spell list (naturally). All the spells require herbs that go bad in 1d6 days, and they can do anything from granting temporary night vision to curing light wounds. They can’t do much beyond that, however: there are less than ten spells here, shamans don’t cast them often, and ignorant Timelost are likely to dismiss them as local superstition. Especially those healing spells. It’s explicitly noted that if you get hurt will probably think you deserved it. If you ask them to patch you up, they’ll just pretend to cast it and say the spirits said to get stuffed.
Finally, there are four quest hooks and a sidebar linking the world to the default GURPS Infinite Worlds Setting. Half the quest hooks tie into that setting too, so if you want to fight Nazi dinosaurs this book has you covered.
The very last page in the book is a short bibliography, which also doubles as a reading list.
Overall? I liked this book a lot. There are a lot of little things I don’t like: how it treats Neanderthals, a lot of little weirdness in the Advantages/Disadvantages/Skills sections, as well as the hit-and-miss interior art. That is more than made up for by everything else. If you want to run a game with pulp dinosaurs, cavemen, or both in any system you could do a hell of a lot worse than picking up this book. Absolutely recommended. You can buy it here on Drive-Thru, or here from Steve Jackson’s in-house .pdf storefront.
