Cavemaster

Cavemaster is a serious Stonepunk tabletop fantasy role-playing game of Pleistocene adventure using the Habilis game system. It's the RPG that cave-men played!

The Habilis game system is an archaeological re-construction of the role-playing game rules first used by our Homo Habilis ancestors approximately 2 million years ago. Habilis requires no components that can’t be found in nature: rocks, sticks, and bits of animal hide rather than paper, dice, or plastic or metal miniatures (though you certainly MAY use modern components). It requires no written language or detailed record-keeping either, and its mechanics are simple enough to have been passed down verbally from each tribe’s Cavemaster to his (or her) apprentice.

Abilities are represented by groups of small stones on your ‘character skin’. In a challenge, you pick up the relevant stones and secretly divide them between your two hands. Your opponent (or the CM) does the same. Each participant picks one of the other person’s hands, and the stones in that hand are revealed. If you reveal more stones, you succeed!

In the tradition of Cyberpunk and Steampunk, Stonepunk is an exercise in speculative fiction. Stonepunk turns the clock back to the end of the Pleistocene Epoch (approximately 10,000 years BCE), and asks what might have happened if the culture and technology of that age had developed further, or in exciting new directions!