Friday 12 August 2011

Puritans &... Pleistocene?

A half-formed thought inspired by notes on The New World for SBVD, by re-reading Marvel's 1601 comic, and by a thread at alternatehistory.com entitled No Megafauna Extinction (in between threads entitled "Cato's Cavalry" and "A Long and Flowing Whig" - those AH guys are nuts. Erudite, but nuts).

So Daniel Boone crossed into the bluegrass country of Kentuckee. 
Only to happen upon...


From the originating thread:

I see there being a market for Glyptotherium and D. clavicaudatus shells as curios in europe, along with Ivory, utterly massive furs, from Arctodus, Castoroides ohioensis and C. leiseyorum, and various fibers from all the different Camelids. F***! It'd be like a treasure trove for anyone stupid or desperate enough to try and set up shop there.

Hell, in the Caribbean, where things aren't as deadly, you've still got miniature ground sloths, Flightless Owls and rather interesting parrots (that might revive the fashion for parrots among the nobility back in Europe,) plus all the stuff that drove settlement IOTL.

We have scads of Pleistocene beasty stats in B/X; we have our grungy, low-powered D&D modcops; and between ckutalik's Hill Cantons Domain Game and Autarch's forthcoming ACKS we have our colony-builder systems. This is just crazy enough to work!

And lo! The gods did look upon the ravings of the fog-addled bogmonkey, and decreed that Mammoths and Muskets (or Brutes & Buckskins? or Settlers & Smilodons?) was a stupid idea, but one that might have legs, so don't knock it on the head just yet. :)

Edit: You know, I should probably split all this non-Vaults stuff off into another blog. Or would that just be annoying and fiddly?

Pic Source
Frank Frazetta (of course), found in the Comic Art Community Frazetta gallery.

10 comments:

  1. When was the last time you did a Vaults post? I don't think you need another blog for this stuff, and I say that as someone with two blogs and the constant annoyance at having a divided online presence.

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  2. The native americans would be living like the unfortunate inhabitants of Kong's Skull Island!

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  3. You're either a madman or genius. I'm willing to go 60-40.

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  4. I would play that setting in a heart beat. That's simply brilliant.

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  5. I would buy that gaming supplement in a heartbeat, and use it to flesh out a parallel-worlds campaign I keep meaning to run.

    And keeping everything on one blog, with edition tags, makes for wonderful cross-pollination of ideas :)

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  6. One vote for "annoying and fiddly". One blog and people can skip stuff of no interest.

    - Neil.

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  7. Alternately, the First Nations would be living like Haradrim.

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  8. I love the alternatehistory site, though have not been there in a while. Re: annoying & fiddly - not Vaults detracts in no wise from the blog IMO. :)

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  9. Run with it like a pair of scissors on fire! This is a great premise and sure to lead to all sorts of fun gaming-stuff. Just tag it and provide a nice link to all the entries in the side bar. Works just fine.

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