A Bronze-Age Post-apocalyptic Football Game Featuring Giant Carnivorous Ducks
So I watched the movie Early Man and, quite unlike the ordinary viewer, I thought "Hey, this might be a fun D&D game." To make a long pretty funny story very short: a stone-age tribe takes back their ancestral home from a bronze-age civilization through a game of what we North Americans call soccer and what everybody else calls football: the Beautiful Game. Indeed, football is of great religious significance to both peoples. The first football was the meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs. It fell in the laps of a bunch of cavemen, and, finding that it was too hot to hold, they kicked it around, accidentally inventing the game. They taught it to others and the bronze-age people use it as a regular religious ceremony and civil event.
Outside, these small bastions of humanity are the Badlands: a place crawling with life that is all springing up to fill the power gap that the dinosaurs left behind and human are quickly on their way to claiming.
A few features that draw me to this as a setting for adventure:
Outside, these small bastions of humanity are the Badlands: a place crawling with life that is all springing up to fill the power gap that the dinosaurs left behind and human are quickly on their way to claiming.
A few features that draw me to this as a setting for adventure:
- Badlands full of prehistoric monstrosities, including giant toothed ducks.
- A bronze-age civilization that has discovered how to make incredibly advanced and intricate devices out of bronze.
- Bronze currency.
- Intelligent rabbits outsmarting their cavemen hunters
- Messenger birds that actually mimic in exacting detail the voice and posture of their senders
- A world where large-scale conflicts are solved with sports
- GIANT CARNIVOROUS DUCKS
I filled a table out for it. Perhaps someone can come up with rules for playing soccer in OSR games. I don't know enough about the Beautiful Game to make them myself.
Encounters in the Badlands (1d12):
- A group of 1d4+1 Armored War Mammoths and 2d6+2 Bronze Warriors escorts a bronze aged noble to a cite where bronze ore has been discovered to claim it.
- A Giant Furry Spider spins its web in a dinosaur's half-buried ribcage.
- 3d6 Giant Hermit Crabs in spiraling conical shells look like the tips of a mostly buried monstrous ribcage, waiting for unsuspecting prey.
- A Gigantic Hermit Crab, using a dinosaur skull as a shell is ridden by a group of cavemen exile-bandits, ready to attack anything with a hint of bronze.
- A group of adventurer bronze-seekers, search the Badlands for precious ore, guided by the mysterious magnetic devices of a Bronze Priest-Referee.
- A tired Messenger Bird on its way to deliver an important message to a noble in a bronze city rehearses its message and delivery while it rests on a dinosaur leg bone.
- A nearby volcano sends a wave of lava rushing down from its peak.
- A Swarm of Minigators crawl their way towards a source of water but will stop if they find possible prey.
- An Intelligent Rabbit seeks shelter from 2d6 Cavemen hunters and their 1d4 Boardogs. Their oasis-crater home must be close.
- A cave opens its maw to the surface, concealing bronze and ancient cave-paintings, depicting famous football matches.
- A pond of green goop bubbles and glows. Interaction reveals that this is a Living Goop and is has many hungry eyes.
- A Giant Carnivorous Duck stands a ways off. It looks like a normally sized duck from here. That illusion is brutally shattered as this apex predator approaches.
Very cool! It reminds me a bit of the How to Train Your Dragon series. In the third book, some of the Vikings get captured by Romans and have to fight in a gladiatorial arena. If you end up running a pre-history or Thundarr-esque campaign, be sure to let me know!
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