I love it when a plan comes together.
Although in this case I’m talking about when three little ideas you’ve had bouncing around in your head for a while suddenly coalesce into one bigger awesome one, rather than a surprise tank.
(If my players are reading, please look away now.)
Idea #1
A prehistoric campaign. No civilisation, society extends no further than friends and family. Everything you own you made. You live in the wilderness and are surrounded by monsters. But how do I keep it interesting, desperate survival can get repetitive.
Idea #2
From this article in the New Scientist: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23631462-700-the-real-roots-of-early-city-states-may-rip-up-the-textbooks/amp/?_utm_source=1-2-2)
It would seem that there were many more intermediate steps between nomadic tribes of hunter-gatherers and the first cities of 4000ish BC. Perhaps civilisation wasn’t the requirement for humans to settle and huddle together behind walls, perhaps they just had to be scared and desperate.
Idea #3
World of the Lost is excellent isn’t it? A large, interesting and random city surrounded by loads of interesting hexes with a few plot threads and a dungeon to boot.
***SHAZAM*** Waitaminute…
Idea #Awesone
Re-purpose the World of the Lost setting as a setting for Wolf Packs & Winter Snow. They are both basically Lamentations so the systems would fit. The detailed hexes of World of the Lost will keep the campaign exciting and the desperate survival of WP&WS will make the exploring in between tense and awesome. If possible repurpose the city in WotL to be like one of those early settlements in the New Scientist article, but massive.
Best of all, when the players start finding the aliens, we get cavemen with laser rifles.
(Note that I haven’t read a lot of World of the Lost yet, just enough to get my brain going, so there might be parts that won’t survive being set 8000 years earlier, but I’ll deal with those as I come to them.)
Ominosity 