>>79734708
To get better weapons than flintknapped or polished stones, you rely on long-range trade that can be disrupted or cut off by adversaries.

Even getting good stone for flintknapping (such as obsidian from Ionian islands or Arran Pitchstone) can rely on long range trade as well.

As for what peculiarities there would be... that depends on what sort of society you're talking about.
You could be Steppe Nomads dwelling in tents/yurts and starting to just now get horses and chariots to dominate the fools who settle in only one place.
You could be living in a longhouse with your kin with little protection, farming the land for the local petty king or chief.
You could even have a large scale state with a literate state bureaucracy that wages large scale wars with other polities and forms alliances and sends gifts to other polities so that they hopefully give you that edge you need to defeat your foes.

>>79734708

chipped obsidian is the sharpest blade material on your tech level, even beating out modern surgical scalpels in sharpness levels

>>79734708
I guess you could also have exceptionally rare meteoric iron weapons. Tutankhamun had one, as I guess meteoric iron was easier to work

>>79734821
Native Copper is also a possibility. The Native Americans in the Late Archaic Period (7500 BC) were using the abundant copper in its pure form (or 'Native Copper') to make tools and weapons. Eskimos continued to make tools and weapons out of native copper (along with meteoric iron) even into the 20th century.

>>79734708
Incredible inter-connectivity between civilizations who fight over control of essential resource nodes (particularly tin and copper). There should be a handful of major states, all of which have at least a few petty states as vassals/allies.
And if something major happens to at least one of the major states, then it will affect (almost certainly negatively) the other powers in a rapid ripple effect.

>>79734708

Shortlist?

>Cruel and Arbitrary God's
>Monsters that are often the progeny of said God's
>Remnants of Antedeluvian civilizations (apemen, snake-men, hell even ayyys) think ziggurats, pyramids, golbeki tepe, and fortresses
>Orichalcum
>Using jewels and rare materials (like pearls) as currency. Coins really aren't a thing yet.
>Making sure there is a trade network that keeps the balance of power between nations so that no one ends up with all the bronze, and thus weapons and tools.
>steel and iron weapons should be rare and treated like magic
>oracles everywhere, along with a greater emphasis on Temples as places of administration, economics, and governance.
>lots of ships, being about the size of all pentakonter or bireme. Seafaring and piracy should be common
>chariots. Horses are still too small for riding direct. A larger destrier should be a God's favored animal or perhaps bred by them
>madness and cannibalism should be taboo but still common enough that it requires direct action on part of the party
>warfare is more disorganized but also very ritualistic in terms of rules and what is allowed after a a battle.
Marriage alliances are one of the few ways to make peace, since the basic rules of diplomacy are still being worked out.

EVERYONE is a gay racist misogynist

>>79734882
would an iron wePon be any better than bronze at this time? I thought early iron weapons were adopted cus everyone ran out of tin

>>79735061
Easier&cheaper to produce, not requiring massive trade network to get materials to make. Quality wise early iron weapons mere more or less comparable to bronze ones, with the real big change in weapon quality taking place once people figured out how to make steel.

>>79734708

Every city has a particular deity it venerates, but there are only a few from the great cities of old that make up the big pantheon. This can change, however, should a city assert hegemony over the rest. As brutal and disorganized as war can be, the actual sacking of a sacred city of a major god will be mortifying to all in the region. While this may not work in a more high-fantasy setting, each city also had a statue representation of the patron god that was treated as though it was the god. Perhaps in a more high-fantasy setting, either the gods rule the cities directly, or have great artifacts with which they interact with their mortal servants. Clerics/healing class thing might actually be powerful in a social-standing kind of way, as temple priests were very high, if not at the top, of ancient class systems.

>>79735061
Technological progress up to very late middleages could include individual masters with secret techniques that die with them and never spread widely. It's perfectly possible someone figures out how to make steel and the knowledge never propagates outwards.

>>79735061
Iron also rusts, bronze doesn't

>>79734708
Sexism. Make sure to make it as sexist as possible. Women being kicked and spat on the streets, only used for reproduction then thrown into the pits, while nubile slave boys were the main sources of companionship for the cultured man.

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>>79735043
I presume that you are talking about the Ancient Greeks? What made their culture like that?

>>79737571
Have you tried speaking to a woman?

>>79737597
why would I? I am a gay racist misygonist

>>79734818
The comparison of sharpness of a chipped obsidian blade to a scalpel is so far removed from actual practicality and use of the items as to render your "fact" absurd. Would you want surgery from a rough lined, irregular obsidian blade? Or to use a scalpel as a weapon of war?

>>79734708
No/few monarchies. A tribe might rule but even within that they would choose a successor collectively.
Temple economies/ Palace economies.
Cities are small and collapse into starvation pretty easily.
Priest Kings/ Warrior Kings.
Living gods/demigods.
Copper is the predominant metal, bronze is the steel equiv.

Ignore rulesets that imply bronze blades melt in your hands or bend if you look at them wrong. Its bullshit. Work hardened bronze is as good as early steel. It fell out of fashion because of the price (having to trade for tin and copper) Bronze stayed around in helmets for ages after steel was invented. And Bronze is preferable to iron for a long time too. Have a google around you can find details of these points being argued by history grogs everywhere.

If your bronze weapon does get fucked up you don't hammer it for hours trying to get it back into shape. You melt it down and pour it into a mould. Then work harden and sharpen it. Presto, weapon is back.

All bronze needs to be work hardened (beaten essentially) to get hard enough to make a good weapon. So as you are beating the metal anyway you may as well work it into a cool shape. This is (more or less) the genesis of those ideal male torsos you see in greek armor. Sculpting it into a human shape also makes it impact resistant.

Slaves. Not like the south. But if you are captured as a slave you are just a low class person. You probably never become a citizen, however it was common for slaves to eventually be freed. The more they look like you the better the slave would be treated. But the quantity of slaves was huge.

Bronze age farmers would sometimes have a city that they lived in only during winter. So imagine a city thats essentially a lot of granaries and houses. The farmers show up and its a prosperous metropolis, they leave and its just slaves, beggars and priests.

Lots of other shit. If you are super interested I can dump the text of my bronze age sword and sorcery handout.

>>79734708
A big one- bronze is an allow made of tin and copper. Which are pretty much NEVER in the same place. This meant that you had thriving trade between states that may have had one or the other- but it also meant a precarious situation whenever you were at war- as you needed to keep your trade route open from one of your neighbors in order to produce your weapons.

Unlike medieval fantasy Power was absolute rather than devolved- there were no local lords, just absolute authority of the the king- sometimes you had appointed governors, but power was mostly shared with the priesthood who would be ordered around by the king. This meant that troops were supplied and paid for buy the king, and the king had enough money for public works projects that would help legitimize his rule in the eyes of the people.
>>79735061
Iron is smelted at a lower temperature than bronze- and bronze needs two metals that are never in the same place- bronze is a stronger more durable metal, but iron is cheaper and easier to produce, and so was used more wildly when iron smelting was invented >>79737571
We tend to think of the greeks along 'western' sensibilities, but they were more akin to the Near-East civilizations of their day- think the intense misogynies you see in the bible about men taking their brothers wives and stuff. Women were treated as property and not allowed to leave the house without a male escort. They were largely viewed as cum receptacles- rather than anything you'd want to be a friend with or fuck for pleasure. One Greek Play ends on a happy note- where a mother murders her sons (familiar murder being the chiefest sin in Greek culture after being a bad host) but is let off on the rational that it technically doesn't count as family murder- since mothers aren't 'technically' related to their children, as really children are just clones of their father that incubate temporarily in a mothers womb anyway.
(cont.)

>>79734708
If you aren't American, just brush up what you learned back in school.
If you are American, go to the public library, ask for the pop-science books on the Bronze Age and read them.
In either case, just build from there.

>>79741045
Now exceptions to this attitude existed aplenty- we have plenty of Greek poetry about the love of men and women- plenty of women as tragic figures wronged by the world around them- a good one is Medea- originally a barbarian princess who aided Jason and the Argonauts and became his wife, but was then set-aside for a Corinthian Princess. Jason is clearly depicted as a total dick and in the wrong- and Medea ends up murdering the court of Corinth and her own kids out of spite when she is ultimately set to be banished from the city- and ends up surviving as far as we can tell. Another example is Trojan Women, a famous greek play that depicts all the major trojan figures of the Trojan war as whipped by their various spouses who control the workings of Troy behind the scenes.

That is to say- the Greeks attitude to women wasn't a one-dimensional thing, and culture's often have a stark difference between the things they claim to believe, and how they work in actuality.

>>79739699
>If you are super interested I can dump the text of my bronze age sword and sorcery handout.
Yes

>>79741045
>They were largely viewed as cum receptacles- rather than anything you'd want to be a friend with or fuck for pleasure.
we must retvrn

>>79735523
Bronze rusts, rust just does not damage as much

>>79735061
The biggest advantage of iron over bronze is that iron is much more plentiful than copper and tin. Early iron isn't really any better quality than bronze for weapons and armor.

>>79741045
>Iron is smelted at a lower temperature than bronze
But that's wrong. Iron requires considerably higher temperatures to both smelt and work.

>>79739070
There was a dude who napped his own obsidian surgical tools for an open heart surgery. The surgeon asked afterwords asked if he could make more.
Obsidian tools are actually pretty great, in contexts where you don't need durability. Which is very very few.
Unless you're doing a game set around a greek hospital, like a bronze age MASH, it's probably irrelevant.

>>79739699
>You probably never become a citizen
I'd add that citizenship was a big fucking deal a lot of places. It came with a different set of legal rights and was often as far removed from "resident" as that was from slave.
Like in Athens to be a citizen, and not just a resident, your family had to be free and living in Athens or the area for three generations.

>>79734818
Doesn't really matter how sharp it is if it breaks after a couple of strikes

>>79734708
What was the purpose of the elaborate pommels shown in op's pic?
I feel like they would easily get in the way during combat or impact the weight.
The only things I can think of are resting the sword blade up on a wall or resting your hands on the pommel comfortably with the tip to the earth.

>>79735309
>patron god that was treated as though it was the god
No wonder everyone was so mad when Alcibiades took the penises off of all of the statues of Hermes in Athens

>>79742571
>What was the purpose of the elaborate pommels shown in op's pic?
They look cool.
You could argue it's to counter weight the blade, but mostly it looks cool.

Literacy is basically a magic power. Almost nobody can read or write, and you go to school for ages just to learn it. It takes about as long to become a scribe as it does to become a priest, so if priests have magic powers in your setting, give scribes something comparable and make a big deal about how amazing it is to stare at weird symbols for a while and suddenly acquire knowledge you never had before.

>>79739070
>Would you want surgery from a rough lined, irregular obsidian blade?
Obsidian actually has less roughness to its edge, which makes for less scarring. I don't know if it's still the case, but obsidian scalpels were highly valued by plastic surgeons for precisely that reason.

>>79742357
>Unless you're doing a game set around a greek hospital, like a bronze age MASH, it's probably irrelevant
This is an amazing fucking idea and I'm disappointed that it hasn't gotten more traction.

>>79734818
Huh?
Obsidian is hardness 5 to 6, chert is 7.

>>79734882
>God's
Is there a reason you put that possessive apostrophe there?

>>79743253
Hardness doesn't equate to sharpness in this context.

>>79735401
happened in China. They continued to use bronze.
>>79734708
Early Bronze Age has still many tools made of stone, bone, wood.
No barrels but pottery, amphorae etc.
Not every bronze needs tin, there is also arsenical bronze/copper that appear together in some ores.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arsenical_bronze

>>79743043
That's actually a pretty cool idea. Literacy as literal magic.

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>>79734708
Money does not exist. Merchants barter goods as they go from settlement to settlement, farmers give gifts and do favors for each other and pay part of their harvest in taxes. Said grain is used to feed artisans and workers, who make stuff largely for the government who keep in stores and who use it to pay other artisans and workers.

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>>79734708
What would be some interesting racial choices for such a setting, besides the obvious of course?

What about how these races would handle architectural designs?

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>>79746790
I don't know if I'd go for a distinct set of races beyond people, but rather have the groups of people just get progressively weirder the further you go from centres of civilisation.
So the Not!Fertile Crescent is all humans, the people who live in the mountains to the east are hairier and have weird customs but are mostly recognisable, the people of the northern steppe are more horse than man, and the far north is inhabited by stone-skinned giants and tree people. Or maybe it isn't and that's just what people say?
I'd definitely advise against having a definitive catalogue of races, you want far off places to be mysterious, like *anything* could be out there

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>>79734708
What were Bronze Age religions like? What were some patterns with their gods?

>>79734708
Somemone please replace the casting block with a gondola I have no editing skills

>>79742571
Those two huge horns seem to be casting channels that will be cut off later.

>>79747198
Not a whole lot different to Classical Antiquity.
"Religion" isn't entirely accurate. Your city worships a bunch of gods in it's various temples. Maybe one god is the head honcho of the city, probably because their priests are the most powerful.
The next city over might worship the same set of gods, but maybe in different ways, or might worship some different gods.
Cities that don't speak your language worship different gods entirely, but then again they might just be the same gods but with different names and worshipped in a different way.
Hilarious oversimplification, but that's the short of it

>>79747198
Religion reflected the worldview of the people who practiced it. The best examples are the differences between the Mesopotamian and Egyptian religions- both desert cultures who survived on the banks of rivers that would routinely flood. But while the Nile would flood very regularly at certain times of the year, and had an ordered government of pharoahs only rarely giving way to periods of instability before resuming, the Tigris and Euphrates would flood incredibly irregularly, and Mesopotamia would be split between dozens of warring city-states that would briefly be interrupted by a unified empire (usually by horse nomads invading from the mountains) before quickly collapsing.

So likewise, the Egyptian mythology is all about maintaining order- and the belief that if you follow the rules you take all your earthly possessions to the afterlife, with the gods trusting humanity to maintain order on earth- while in mesopotamia the gods were constantly getting into fights and doing stupid shit that would level the human world, while rarely spending humanity more than a second thought.

In greece we often note how much asshole the gods were, but that's because the greeks were more concerned with depicting what is true- so they depicted the gods as what they believed how gods would actually act- humans given insane authority who then abuse that authority for personal whims and demand constant attention- rather than depict them as how they might wish them to be instead.

>>79747919
I always think it's interesting that apparently the Egyptians were unique among the classical world in having a generally positive world-view.
Especially when compared to the Greeks who were incredibly fatalistic doomers who thought the best age of man was long over. Maybe it has something to do with a "the Nile will provide" mentality like you say.

Also speaking of Greek gods, I think it's interesting that the chief Mycenaean god was probably Poseidon in his role as the Earth-shaker. Greece is a mountainous backwater with earthquakes and yearly sea-storms, no wonder they thought the Powers That Be are dickheads

>>79748089
Egypt was built on stability- the deserts surrounding the Nile meant foriegn invasion was incredibly rare, almost a non-issue, and the routine floods meant that agriculture was very easy and bountiful. At the same time though the floods often brought destruction (flooding homes) and so change was seen as inherently chaotic and bad. The Pharoah as God-King was also seen as the emissary of the gods- the God that was in charge of ensuring humanity did everything it was supposed to so as to maintain order.

In Greece however, you had nomadic horse-raiders (notably the Macedons- who were probably the initial inspiration for Centaurs), rocky mountains, volcano's and eathquakes- and the chiefest way to succeed was by braving the ocean to trade (which was much rougher than it is now- there was an eternal whirlpool called the Scylla thought to be a monster in between italy and sicily). Greece was also divided amongst several city-states who often warred with one another. It's also interesting to note that the Trojan War is the foundational myth of greece, and where it gets it's greek name (Hellas from Helen of Troy) even though there are numerous myths set before that period (such as Jason and the Argonauts)- it was the first time in Greek History/Myth that Greece was united as a single force.

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>>79748178
>it was the first time in Greek History/Myth that Greece was united as a single force
Not contradicting you, but I do think Homer implies some kinship between the Achaeans and the Trojans and Allies. The main and possibly only example I can think of is Diomedes and Glaucas(?) going to duel, realising that they're cousins, and swapping armour instead of fighting.

I do think Herodotus is also a unique perspective on the antique East vs West conflict, as he was a Dorian Atticophile who was born in the Achaemenid Empire during the Greco-Persian Wars. He relates the story of rapey Phoenicians that provoked the abduction of Helen? Or something like that
People who call him the "Father of Lies" are smoothbrains: he always gives his sources. His sources are mostly "I talked to some Athenians/Boeotians/Thessalians and they said x, but I also talked to some Spartans/Corinthians/Phocans and they said something different, but he doesn't pass judgement on any of it.

>>79742637

Indeed. While I'm not as familiar with the intricacies of how ancient Greek Paganism worked, that could be seen as emasculating Hermes. Or just something to incur his divine wrath, either to the invader for doing it or for the defenders for allowing it to happen.

>>79746036
>Money does not exist.
When did money as we know it first appear, then?

Would love to play a wod hunter game set before the deluge. Sadly there's not much material.

>>79742417
Yeah exactly.

You have to think about it all as a closed loop.

Cities were (are) legalized plunder.

The Temple/Palace would round up all the grain and redistribute it in a city to keep everyone fed.

The idea that this system would benefit a foreigner could cause significant unrest.

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>>79741708
Here you go. Its a bit shit. I will text post because the pdf is bigger than 4chan will take.

Core Rules:

Savage Worlds Adventurers Edition. (SWADE)


Setting Elevator Pitch:

Primal Swords and Sorcery where early civilization meets barbaric tribes in the Mythic Bronze Age. Hexcrawl across a Conanish bronze age.


Splat:

1. Beasts and Barbarians (Almost everything here is allowed straight out of the box, with the caveat that its designed for an older Savage Worlds. Theres an upgrade PDF reference it.)
2. Totems of the Dead - Not balanced against BnB so hit me up if you find there's something BnB cant do.


Background:

Brazen Backgrounds - Good primer for Bronze age society and backgrounds. Feel free to use these wholesale or adapt a couple of them (Jeweller Turned Thief, Cultist turned Priest) for your character.

Simple Settings: Savage Lands - 5e setting guide that is somewhat representative of the furthest reaches of the setting. Good for Primitive tribes not covered by anything else.

(BnB supposedly gets killy, and the setting is pretty deadly too, feel free to have a second character ready to go. This isnt a bad idea in general because the other thing Sword and Sorcery characters do if they dont die is retire when it suits them)

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>>79753049


Bronze:


Defining the bronze age is hard and also dumb for a setting like this. I will outline some basic facts and tropes here so that we are all on the same page for character creation.


1. Bronze:

This is the hardest workable metal known to man until Steel was not only discovered, but perfected. Bronze is not soft. Melts at 950 degrees (steel is roughly 1500 degrees) and can be hardened. It also holds and edge. The key differences between bronze and steel are:
A. Bronze is "Work Hardened" instead of Quenched. This means you basically beat it with a hammer until its stiff. This property is what leads to bronze weapons and armour being decorated. If you are going to beat a bronze sheet into a chestplate, why not give it cool circles or a human features.
B. Despite its melting point being high, its still relatively easy to bring it back to molten. Instead of an Blacksmith forge welding broken arms and armour back together on their anvil, they are more likely to melt it and pour it back into a mold or cast, and then sharpen it.
C. Bronze is most commonly an alloy of Copper and Tin (in universe anyway) so despite being the most common hardened metal, its also expensive. Copper and Tin are rarely found close together, so it requires a lot of trade to bring the 2 together.
D. As bronze is expensive, you are more likely to have a weapon made partially of bronze, like a spear with a bronze speartip, as opposed to a massive sword, however both are feasible.
E. Lets forgive ourselves in advance we are probably going to say Steel alot when we mean Bronze or Metallic or whatever. Its cool, this isnt my magical realm and I am not going to get cranky when we mess shit up.

>>79753058

How does this affect the game? Low grade weapons and armor will likely be just copper, which is still hard compared to say, wood but will be relatively easy for bronze to puncture. Other than that, armor and weapons function as normal. Think of Copper as Iron in a medieval setting, and Bronze as Steel and you are basically there. Extremely exceptional weapons might be a more interesting Alloy with lead and arsenic but I don't plan to bore you constantly with metallurgy.


2. Reading and Writing:

Most people cannot do it. The initial setting is small enough that everyone more or less understands each other. If there is writing it will be predominantly onto clay tablets.


3. Money:


There isnt really coinage. A barbarian might carry their wealth as rings of silver around their arms, or you might have a purse full of gold ingots or copper bits. Or however you want to present it. We will likely use money and loot tokens as per the various sourcebooks unless "How am I carrying a horde of treasure" comes up in game.

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>>79753069


4. Temple Economy / Palace Economy:

I might accidentally throw these terms around a bit. So I should explain them, feel free to skip. Both are very early prototypes of modern states. Essentially Temple Economy is where most people pay an enormous tithe to the temple, usually in food, and the temple redistributes that tithe to city dwellers (Because people in the city are not growing food and for the temple/state to have access to those services acts as an intermediary.)

Palace economy is the same as a Temple economy but the king/chief/whatever redistributes the tithe instead.

This setting will probably blur the 2.


5. The Barter System:

First rule of the Barter System is dont drag me into a rant about the barter system.

6. Society:

Going to keep this as brief as possible.


Tribal:

Most people live with their Tribe. Tribe can describe anything from "Ooga booga we live in a cave" to "This is our small village with huge farms and mudbrick walls". Most Tribes/Villages can at best farm enough food for twice their population. So having production tithed to a towns temple is not a good thing. This also means that half to 3 quarters of all people will be farming, few people get experience with more complex trades. However, if possible, everyone farms, everyone fights, everyone helps build your house. The only real division of labour is gendered (some tribes might have women forage or toil in the fields while men hunt and manage livestock) or religious (The village priesthood, such as it is, doesn't necessarily have to participate in day to day work ymmv) so you are likely to learn a wide variety of skills depending on your niche.

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>>79753082
City/Town:

At most 5000 people can live this way at any time without stretching their conquered farms to breaking point. Towns are precarious things always in balance between "Have we stolen and properly stored enough food for everyone" and civil unrest. This is where the religious angle comes in because it is handy to have a god (in this setting often enough a literal dude) to tell you to eat less and stop complaining. There are more failed towns, that might only be seasonally occupied than there are occupied towns. When a town does succeed, its usually filled with art, music, culture, workshops and trade. Towns are where the Division of labour has been at least somewhat successful. Instead of just being a tribesman you might specifically be a shepherd or a metal smith or a brickmaker. In a tribe, property rights are communal, so while some people might use something more than they are entitled to, theres little in the way of theft. Theft requires individual property rights. So thieves tend to come from towns (Thats not to say that you hadnt been kicked out of the tribe for being too greedy but you will get an education in cutting purses and climbing through second story windows in town). Lots of slaves catering to the Temple and rich folk.


Expect:

A marketplace and services.
Gods and Spirits:

Gods and spirits are real things and are treated as such by everyone. Most towns have a unique god or spirit that they worship that might live in their temple, or nearby (Such as a river spirit). Gods range from the super involved (Literally watching everything through their worshippers eyes like divine big brother) to the completely disinterested (Bring me treats and I wont give you the pox). Gods do not seek the company of mortals (generally) and will usually be tended to only by their priesthood. If you see one, either some fuckery is going down, or you are at war and your god wants to fight with you.

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>>79753095
Warriors:

Generally speaking if you reside in an area and you are capable you are expected to defend it. If you are wealthy, that requirement is increased. The richest people form the cavalry (if any) as they can afford a mount. The next most wealthy are expected to be at the front line of the shieldwall as they can afford the heaviest armor. The "Middle Class" will be at the back of the shield wall in common dress with a shield and spear. The poorest people, and often slaves end up as peltasts, either using bows or hurling javelins or stones at the enemy. A city might have a watch/men at arms paid to train and be professional soldiers. Professional soldiers generally will be the front line of whatever force they fit in to.

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>>79753111
Common Tropes of Sword and Sorcery:

• Ambition Is Evil
• Anti-Hero
• Barbarian Hero
• Black-and-Gray Morality
• The Dark Arts
• Deliberate Values Dissonance
• Eldritch Abomination
• Eldritch Location
• Evil Sorcerer
• Good Is Not Nice
• Human Sacrifice
• Humans Are Bastards
• Magic Is Evil
• Proud Warrior Race Guy
• Rated M for Manly
• War Is Glorious


Common Tropes of Bronze Age Settings:

All of the above +

• Warrior Kings
• Warrior Priests
• Priest Kings
• Ziggurats and Altars

>>79748447
Herodotus is Joe Rogan, he's sitting there dazed and confuzed as people of varying levels of sanity keep telling him things, but he's writing everything down.

>>79753141
SWADE Setting Rules in use:


Born a Hero: Ignore Rank Requirements for Edges during Character Generation. All other requirements (Attributes, Skills) must be met as normal.

Seasoned: Characters start at Seasoned Rank. Note: BnB lists this as giving you 20XP. XP isnt a concept in SWADE. So assumed this gives you all the starting stuff + 3 Raises.

Dynamic Backlash: Critical Failures for Sorcery result in terrible consequences. This replaces the Table under Sorcery in the BnB players guide.

5 Attribute Points
12 Skill Points
3 Raises (So Seasoned Rank)

Races: Most playable people are Human, so one free Edge. However feel free to use Saurians (Core Book), Neanderthals, Apemen, Hobgoblins or Cloud Giants too.

Nothing super traditional. No Elves, No Dwarves, No Halflings. Anything else pitch it to me.

Outside of that my only request is a couple points (and geographical location or migratory route/area) of your tribe if you have one.

>>79734708
There is a wide trade network between different civilizations that are unified more by a common culture than by a state. Also the king is also the head priest that talks to the patron deity of his citystate on behalf of the people.

>>79734882
Not everyone rode huge horses. The famed arabian horses were quite small compared to destriers. In central asia people rode ponies.

>>79750908
Coins first appeared in about the 7th century BC. However this does not mean that everyone started using coins, and other equilevants were also used. Such as knife money in china.

>>79754908
The horses/cavalry debate is actually wild.

Apparently theres a huge split with some historians believing that even organised cavalry fought on foot unless caught unaware. And others who think it was more or less our modern understanding of cavalry just limited by the cost and scale of horses.

I tend to err on the side of "horses work how you are used to them working" for 2 reasons.

1. Cavalry minis are much cheaper if you dont need some super specific macedonian loadout
2. You dont need to constantly explain why a character wouldnt use a spear from horseback.

Basically fun should override cool nerd arguments.

>>79755097
but what if the cool nerd arguments are the fun?

>>79755750
Then you are in luck.

Just go on to any ancient history forum.

Tell everyone that Macedonian cavalry would attack while mounted.

?????

Profit.

>>79756828
>Macedonian cavalry would attack while mounted.
I don’t get it.

>>79761353
Supposedly cavalry units worked more like quickly deployable infantry. They would ride to battle, dismount and then fight as infantry.

This is mostly due to stirrup fags thinking that its impossible to fight from horseback without stirrups.

But some of alexanders battles reference cavalry charges.

So Stirrup fags tie themselves in knots going like "nn.nn.no they were ambushed and forced to fight from horseback, its not something they would actually do intentionally"

Its one of my top 3 favourite Bronze age arguments.

1. Who were the Sea People (and what caused the bronze age collapse)
2. Were Corinthian bronze helmets multi piece or cast
3. Did cavalry fight from horseback.

>>79761448
That's insane. You can suggest that they were only mounted infantry in the Bronze Age, but suggesting that Alexander's Companions fought as mounted infantry is on the level of Hollow Earth.

>>79753049
>>79753058
>>79753069
>>79753082
>>79753095
>>79753111
>>79753141
Nice, thanks for posting.

>>79743310
Because, if you were smart, you'd know that apostrophes mean 'here comes an s'. Seriously, tho, it's probably phone posting.

>>79762315
The real argument (as opposed the 4chan caricature version) is a matter of proportion: HOW OFTEN did the companion cavalry

a) charge with their long xyphon spears as knight-style shock cavalry;
b) throw javelins in a drive-by, Persian style;
c) fight up close with xiphos or kopis, but still mounted;
d) dismount and fight on foot, for instance against fortified positions

We're pretty sure all four happened, and that versatility was part of the Companion Cavalry's big advantage in Alexander's hands, letting him directly personally change the course of battles.

But yeah, many claim that direct charges against infantry almost never happened, and honestly I agree with them. Would _you_ run a bunch of non-stirrupped low-saddled horsement straight into a massed phalanx? Xenophon wouldn't. But I'd happily plow them into lighter troops, or other cavalry.

>>79763089
Aren't apostrophes also used to say "here comes a t"? I'd even suggest a "d"

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>>79734708
Well, what were some of their belief and traditions about death and/or the afterlife? I know that the Ancient Egyptians had mummies, what else was there?

>>79763640
>>79761448
A historian friend of mine once wrote a paper arguing that the main thing that Alex tactically did better than Phillip was "horse psychology"
He couldn't remember his exact reasoning when I asked him, so take with a salt mine

>>79734708
Grandson chewing food for his grandmother who lost all teeth

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>>79739070

>>79765999
I presume that he doesn’t have the paper anymore? Shame about that.

>>79734708
Everything smells really bad, the scent of dried feces and urine is everywhere. No one bathes except nobles and then only rarely. Make sure to remind the players constantly about the filth encrusting every corner of their godforsaken bronze age world. Incurable diseases that lead to deformities like pockmarks and scars from blisters are also common in this time (leprosy, smallpox). Most people probably have hair lubricated only by their natural oils, and if its dry out its wire-like and dandruff ridden.

>>79746036
Wrongo. No coinage yet, but money was still exchanged as weights (of silver for big transactions, grain for ordinary ones). Deposit contracts and long-distance money transactions existed in proto-writing before “true” writing (that records general language). Weights even have some advantage; you can make ‘change’ in any fraction you want. The advantages of early coins were convenience and standardisation, but that’s not a huge difference. Even after coinage begins, coins and weights go side-by-side for centuries.

>>79765999
>Alex tactically did better than Phillip
Was Alex better than Philip though? Philip won his battles, he just wasn’t as good at not getting assassinated.

>>79768146
There are big disadvantages to obsidian scalpels too. Much more expensive (steel is easier to mass-produce). Super brittle: if you apply a little too much lateral force or hit a bone it won’t just break but fragment, leaving bits inside the patient. That’s why use is generally limited to surface work like removing moles. Still cool of course.

>>79769420
>What is soap made from Lanolin?

>>79769672
Yeah, i was just thinking that. There's a video of a guy making obsidian knives by taking a big chunk of it and knocking so many sharp little chips off it with just a rock. I'd honestly be terrified if i found out that somebody was gonna be sticking one of those around my insides. Give me the steel any day.

>>79763640
Man I should have saved the link.

But if you want to read some helmet autism I have saved that link.

https://www.romanarmytalk.com/rat//showthread.php?tid=20854&page=5

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>>79734708
>Countries don't exist; most settled peoples live in city-states, or the immediate outlying villages in orbit; a particular region might cultivate a shared language and culture, even religion, but cities are largely self-governing, trading and/or pillaging each other as necessary.
>Rivers are of supreme importance for fresh water, farming, fishing, mills, and transport; most major cities will be built next to a river; rivers bring life (irrigation), but also death (when they flood), and the "Mood" of the river will often determine the disposition of the local gods (compare Sumarian gods, who are pretty capricious - like their rivers - with Egyptian gods, who are more orderly and predictable - like the Nile).
>Gods are understood as having ties to specific people groups and/or locations, like the local river or a nearby mountain; you have your gods and your neighbors have their gods, and just because your two cities go to war and you both invoke your gods and they win and you lose, doesn't mean their gods are more "Real," just that they bested yours for the time being (this is why pretty much nobody who's not already Jewish in the Old Testament converts to Judaism, even when the Hebrew God triumphs over Ra or Dagon or Baal or whoever; a foreign god winning circumstantially is no reason for the Egyptians to abandon their own gods); people tend to invoke the gods in order to placate them, staving off their anger, or entreat them for some desired end; gods are often linked with natural phenomenon; the king of any given city will usually act as its administrator, military leader, and chief priest; some kings will claim divine parentage to justify their rule.
>Bronze is a union of copper and tin (requiring two separate resources, often in separate locations, to assemble) and can be tricky to get right; bronze weapons are small as a result, as are armies (as is the reach of any would-be empire until we switch to iron).

>>79753141
Conan isnt and was never bronze age. Kull wasn't bronze age. Solomon kane wasnt bronze age. Fafhrd and the grey mouser werent bronze age. Kane wasnt bronze age. Elric wasnt bronze age.
Why do pseuds who have never read a single conan tale conflate its setting with the bronze age?

>>79734708
I will tell you one thing and it is the most important thing you will read in this thread. That being a bronze age setting is high fantasy and not grimdark.

>>79748178
The Trojan War is the end of the age of heroes, the last gasp before the current age begins. It's why the Argonauts happened before, Herakles has died and ascended, and so on. Everything is ending, and all the heroes are having one more big dust up before they go home for the last time.

>>79769655
According to the last time I had a conversation about it with Robin Lane Fox, yes. Alex had a good base to build on, but he demonstrated ways of adapting and developing tactics that Philip never did.

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>>79771340
Shut the fuck up. Conan has steel, plate armor, pirate ships, etc. because it's a fantasy settings, not a historical setting. Robert E. Howard was very clearly inspired by Bronze Age people's, religion, etc. in Conan, and the stories and setting reflect that. The presence of iron is simply due to it being a fantasy setting. When people talk about "Bronze Age" settings, they are looking for settings with a bronze age feel, in regards to the cultures, architecture, society, heroes, etc. not the state of the fucking metallurgy.

You're an autistic simpleton

>>79772943
Hyboria isn't bronze age, secondary.
Hyboria is an anachronistic mix of cultures and settings that isn't at all inspired by one age or era but by many.
You've clearly never read a conan story if you think hyboria is inspired by the bronze age. It doesn't have a bronze age feel at all. Please tell me how gaelic cimmerians fighting native american picts is bronze age.

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>>79774036
Seethe cope dilate

>>79742338
Yeah he's wrong about the Greeks too. Funny that.

>>79775113
you still haven't proven how Hyboria was based off the bronze age.
because you can't

>>79774036
I agree with everything you said, but I thought the picts were meant to be Howards (popular at the time) misunderstanding that black people were from scotland.

>>79772943
Eh it has some bronze age cultures but it also has iron age and feudal cultures.

>>79779526
>but I thought the picts were meant to be Howards (popular at the time) misunderstanding that black people were from scotland.
Howards picts are a mix of his fanfiction OC and popular belief of the time, which was that the picts of britain were a medditeranean people. Howard describes the picts as medditeranean looking, small, swarthy, with brown eyes and olive skin and dark hair. They are like that in every one of his stories apart from in his conan tales where the picts are described more like native americans

>>79779559
Hyboria even has renaissance and age of sail pirate cultures, along with plenty of homage and reference to westerns and the american indian frontier
Anybody who says Conan is bronze age is an idiot

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>>79771414
>That being a bronze age setting is high fantasy and not grimdark.
Ask the Assyrians if they agree.

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>>79779952
>adorably simplistic autism
Well, Robert E. Howard himself describes a stone-aged culture of warring picts and atlanteans giving way to hyborian hunter-gatherers and cattle-herders some thousand years later. Five hundred years after that, Stygia as she is currently known is well-established, with shemite tribes on her borders - this of course refers to what we now know as Egypt and the middle east. It is also at this time that the land of Zing valley arises, with advanced agriculture and civilization.
We seem to be treading close to the Bronze Age here, wouldn't ya say, kiddo?
It's also at this point that the northern hyborians begin the Hyperborean kingdom, with its cyclopean fortresses.
Echoes of Mycenae....of the Bronze Age....d'oh!
Hell, REH specifically states that the sumerians are descended from shemites and hyrkanians...

Please, anon: don't for one moment suggest that REH wasn't inspired by and included the bronze age in his stories - it makes you look completely retarded.

>>79780843
Better ask the Shardana, anon...they're the ones who murdered the bronze age, assyrian empire included.

>>79753144

Honestly being called both "The Father of History" and "The Father of Lies" sounds like the remit of a bronze age God. Maybe a Prometheus figure who taught men both writing, that they might have knowledge of the past and learning, and deception that they might never grow too great. Or a God of time by which men are made mortal, and lies, that they might never know their fated hour.

>>79734708
Read a book you dumb nigger

>>79780930
If we're getting all mythopoetic about the Bronze Age, the Mitanni were really the canary in the coal mine about the geopolitical system.
>Edgy bois from the desert decide they want to move past raiding and into long-term bullying of soft, civilized bussy
>Think they're big-dick niggas, start swinging it around everywhere
>Turns out they're medium-dick niggas and Assyrians are big-dick niggas
>Exterminated utterly, never to be seen again, no one even claims to be their descendants

>>79780905
Please explain how aquilonia is a bronze age kingdom. Explain how the aesir and vanir are bronze age, or the cimmerians or picts or hyrkanians or afghulis are at all le bronze age
Hyboria isn't bronze age. It's an anachronistic mix of cultures and societies throughout our own history, most of which are taken from the medieval period. Conan owes more to the middle ages than the bronze age. stop coping and read what howard wrote

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>>79734708
If a Bronze age setting had actual magic, wouldn't it progress past the Bronze Age a lost faster than we did IRL?

>>79782029
Yeah, well, assyrians had their dicks cut off by the sherden, so....

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>>79782147
>hasn't read REH
>spergs out
>only argument is a handful of non sequiturs
Sorry about that, anon-kun. Didn't mean to upset you with facts.

>>79783597
Not an argument, tranny
Aquilonia is a high medieval kingdom and Hyboria takes more from the medieval era than it does the bronze age

>>79783541
Wait, what? That sucks for all of them.

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what were they like bros?

>>79784059
>ad hominem
Thanks for coming out.

>>79786336
I don’t understand what your question is. Please elaborate.

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>>79734708
armor still exists, despite the lack of metal

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>>79786998
Well yeah anon, FULL PLATE armors existed in the bronze age, they were made from bronze. In the Iliade there was autismo about detailing the different armors of the participants even.

>>79742079
>>79741045
>They were largely viewed as cum receptacles- rather than anything you'd want to be a friend with or fuck for pleasure.
You should probably account for authors bias. Most of the texts we have are from Athens who were big on all this misogyny stuff. Other city states had their own laws and traditions in place but either had little in the way of chroniclers, got their libraries burnt or didn't record much at all (Sparta). There is a nice recording where some Athenian fucker seethes over Spartan women during some kind of celebration because they are allowed to wear short chitons that show their legs and are all physically fit and tanned - Spartans demanded even their women to train and work outside the house to see if they would birth good warriors.

>>79784059
>Aquilonia is a high medieval kingdom
It's supposed to be the stand-in for Iron Age Rome.

>>79734882
Nice list anon, I'd love to see you expand on it a bit. I'm going to use all of this in my campaign.

>>79734708

It's a communist command economy that lasted for thousands of years.

>>79788755
With Roman titles like Count.

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>>79788755
>It's supposed to be the stand-in for feudal France
Ftfy

>>79789177
In that a religious organization would redistribute food leading to famines, and extraordinarily common city collapse. This checks out.

>>79779952
Yeah Conan is a pulp hero.

REH might have written a story about him fighting apes on mars had he lived longer.

>>79789202
Not sure if this was supposed to be edgy, brain-dead or it's just American daytime hours already

>>79786671
>>79788755
Aquilonia is medieval france and bronzeagecucks can't cope with it

>>79789187
Count comes from counter, Duke from Dux (bellorum)a kind of late roman general, so yeah.

>>79783474
DESU the bronze age ended because of collapse. Iron was a low grade metal that was harder to extract, harder to shape for a result that was worse than bronze.

If bronze age had wizards, they would be alchemists trying to turn iron into copper and tin.

*Theres one other interesting tid bit here, supposedly some iron age vikings accidentally created a low carbon steel by putting animal sacrifices into the forge with the iron. Not quite steel but the weapons did

>>79789425
Well farming during the bronze age had an output way less than even iron age farming. Like 1 person could feed 2-8 people with their labor as opposed to many more than that.

Cities sort of started as seasonal shelters for farmers, but then temple economies (taking grain from farmers as tax and redistributing it) lead to permanent settlement and the division of labor.

But such things were precarious because if you overtax a farmer who was only producing enough grain for his family, then a few years later the farmer wouldn't have living kids to take over the farm.

City collapse under these conditions (and then following starvation disease) was fairly common, especially towards the end of the bronze age.

DESU the braindead comment is that it was some glorious communist utopia.

>>79746952
>you want far off places to be mysterious, like *anything* could be out there
I think thats a big important part of any bronge age system you wanna do. Shit is wild, untamed and mysterious when you leave civilization. There's people and maybe other shit but as far as you know, it could be full of mystical magicians, monsters and malarky.

>>79780843
I guess the assyrians are fans of quoting adventure time? Though to be fair the lich in that series is unbelievably based even if he is a bit of a jobber at the end.

>>79789751
But it was a relatively functioning communist setup at least. The truth that tankies and commies dont want to admit is that communism only works in small independant states and towns and does not work for an entire country.

>>79790591
relatively functioning doesn't really mean anything. Being permanently only a few bad decisions away from collapse isn't functioning at all.

>>79753058
Yeah to re-emphasize what you said, cold-hammer forged bronze is as hard (or harder) than iron. It's simply that it's a lot more expensive and difficult to obtain the materials for it. I think tin chiefly, but not exclusively, came from Afghanistan and Britain.

>>79790541
Well Assyrians are basically "ragetard the nation". They were smashing themselves into everyone around until they got smashed themselves. They even managed to piss off Ethiopians, even though distances involved were pretty large especially by bronze age standards.

>>79786974
what sorts of people would the outrigger-traveling, amber-trading, petroglyph-carvning, sun-worshiping Scandinavians be?

>>79790847
It would be cool to know this, I'd love to include them in my bronze age game.

>>79790661
Yeah IIRC Tin and Copper come from completely different geological formations.

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>>79734708
What should we consider when designing the architecture for Bronze Age settings?

Would different races have different styles? Also, besides things like centaurs and harpies, what are some decent choices for Bronze Age races?

>>79793893
STACK
ROCKS
Literally all you need.
Sometimes you put nice reliefs on them or carve them into aesthetically pleasing shapes.

>>79786336
Apparently they were very sus. And red.

>>79793893
It really depends a lot about what it can be locally sourced, and the majority of the villages are one or two stories tall. For example lots of brick, adobe, stones with straw tatch... Look at stuff native americans did too, or people like the marsh arabs.

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>>79734882
Based and Howard-pilled.

>>79794462
Hyboria isn't bronze age at all

>>79739070
Obsidian edges are common for single use surgeries, as they're cheap and effective

>>79780843
>all near east cultures
What was bronze age like in america, africa or east asia?

>>79795664
Of course it’s all gonna be near eastern culture, the vast majority of written history of that era was from those cultures. Most of the world wasn't writing things down at the time so we only have a very vague idea what places like the Americas or Africa were like in the Bronze Age.

>>79743043
>>79745754
Something that really surprised me when reading some old Roman accounts was how rare being able to read silently was. Apparently back to antiquity it was really common to only be able to read things out loud, sounding out the words and letters to yourself as you went. One of the Emperors, I believe Marcus Aurelius but might be wrong, was considered a 200 IQ genius for being able to read silently to himself.

>>79794512
Not this shit again

>>79794512
You keep repeating this, and we keep not giving a shit.

killing all the men of an enemy tribe as well as any woman that has been polluted by another man's seed, and claiming the virgins for your victorious war party with first pick of course going to the chief.

god i wish we never left this lifestyle behind.

>>79734708
Something I've picked up on in a bronze age game I've been playing is that you have a completely different standard of Morality in effect.

A Lawful good man in a normal setting would never take battle trophies, but a lawful good man in a bronze age setting very well might.

Sacrificing your enemies to your gods is only expected, the difference between good and evil is whether you're just using corpses you slew in battle vs torturing prisoners to death.

Lawfullness means trying to build up the tiny pockets of society, and is very Civilization focused, not entirely different from the usual conception, but far more constrained. Tyrants are universally lawful, regardless of their disposition.

Chaotic is much more of an Enkidu situation, wild men who rely solely on themselves but are greater and more terrible for it.

Monsters can be anything, but wild beasts are a common pick. A dragon might be a good campaign ender.

>>79796589
>>79796644
Iron and steel are extremely common in hyboria and most kingdoms in hyboria are based off various societies of the middle ages

>>79734882
Please expand on this!

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>>79789441
>>79789192
>>79797430
>>79794512

>hasn't read Howard
>he doesn't know
>can't even make an argument

Read the original stories, anon.

>>79800122
>The king and his allies moved westward at the head of fifty thousand men—knights in shining armor with their pennons streaming above their helmets, pikemen in steel caps and brigandines, cross-bowmen in leather jerkins. They crossed the border, took a frontier castle and burned three mountain villages, and then, in the valley of the Valkia, ten miles west of the boundary line, they met the hosts of Conan, king of Aquilonia—forty-five thousand knights, archers and men-at-arms, the flower of Aquilonian strength and chivalry. Only the knights of Poitain, under Prospero, had not yet arrived, for they had far to ride up from the southwestern corner of the kingdom. Tarascus had struck without warning. His invasion had come on the heels of his proclamation, without formal declaration of war.
b-but conan is bronze age
>The Aquilonian host was drawn up, long serried lines of pikemen and horsemen in gleaming steel, when a giant figure in black armor emerged from the royal pavilion, and as he swung up into the saddle of the black stallion held by four squires, a roar that shook the mountains went up from the host. They shook their blades and thundered forth their acclaim of their warrior king—knights in gold-chased armor, pikemen in mail coats and basinets, archers in their leather jerkins, with their longbows in their left hand.
dude aquilonia may be a medieval kingdom with knights in armour and pikemen and longbow b-but it's totally bronze age

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>>79734708
How might having magic and/or gods who interact positively with mortals more often affect a Bronze Age setting in your opinion?

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>>79802112
>muh aquilonia!
Puh-lease. Aquilonia isn't the world. How does Vendhya fit into your little 'medieval' scheme?
Try again, senpai.

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>>79802732
>dude how does the most imporant kingdom of the hyborian age and the one that conan becomes ruler of matter
Bronzeagefags keep coping. I can list some more nations if you please
Both Asgard and Vanaheim are based off early medieval scandinavia and have nothing to do with the bronze age
The picts resemble stone age native americans and have nothing to do with the bronze age.
Afghulstian is based off historical afghanistan and has nothing to do with the bronze age
Hyrkania is based off mongols and turks and has nothing to do with the bronze age
Zingara is based off medieval spain and has nothing to do with the bronze age
Nemedia is based off the Byzantine empire and has nothing to do with the bronze age
Read Howards works before assuming hyboria is a bronze age setting

>>79761448
Weren’t the sea people philistines?

>>79748178
>It's also interesting to note that the Trojan War is the foundational myth of greece, and where it gets it's greek name (Hellas from Helen of Troy) even though there are numerous myths set before that period (such as Jason and the Argonauts)- it was the first time in Greek History/Myth that Greece was united as a single force.
Nah. Hellenes comes from Hellen. According to myth, Hellen was the progenitor of the Hellenes (Greeks).

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>>79802872
>he's gone full circle
Anon, you can't just repeat your earlier lies...see here>>79780905 for why you are just as wrong now as you were then.

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>>79803367
You haven't disproven any of my points
Please explain how any of the kingdoms i listed are bronze age or inspired by them
What you faggot secondaries don't get is that Hyboria is anarchornistic and takes from a wide range of historical cultures. A few settings are brone age, a few are stone age, a few are renaissance and most are medieval
And keep posting the conan movie which isn't accurate at all to the original stories that howard wrote. i'd be surprised if you read any of them at all

>>79743627
in bugmen defense
they had a pretty solid production system of bronze stuff, changing it to iron didn't make any sense in that time considering that whatever iron stuff you needed could be done easier with bronze

>>79796704
People like you would have been the first to go

>>79803181
The Wettest Boys were from Sardinia and Sicily

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>>79734708
If you read about a theory called the “bicameral mind”, you may imagine the Bronze Age as a time when humanity was very different: everyone in every culture was oriented towards believing the stories they were told, and forming mythologies about their belief systems. Individuality and independence would be alien in that time period.
>the night sky is a complete mystery
>metallurgists were amazing craftsmen/wizards who would use a revered craft passed down by their father’s fathers to turn tin and copper into bronze
>priests were dispensers of both wisdom and understanding, often on a mass scale, and almost certainly the voice of the rulers. No one could possibly win an argument (for example) with someone who could read and speak in public about the gods
>an infection is life threatening
>people have as large a family as they can - security for the town, and a retirement plan for the parents

Here there be blemeyes!

>>79739070
>Would you want surgery from a rough lined, irregular obsidian blade? Or to use a scalpel as a weapon of war?
No, but I think with enough time in the forge your autism could become a terrible sword to lay low the mighty with a single overreaction

>>79803181
It's a good bet that sea peoples were basically anyone who went out to raid their neighbors after being hit by the general economic collapse and neighbors' raids.

>>79739070
>I have no fucking clue whatsoever how obsidian does chip
>I also don't know what are the most important parameters of a scalpel
>Nor do I understand the limitations of pre-industrial, pre-medieval metal smithing techniques
... yet you are voicing your retardation anyway.

>>79743145
Still is, because even as single-use item, they are far more cheaper in the long run than a set of ultra-high quality steel ones, for custom orders. Also, there is never allergic reaction to it, which is pretty fucking important when it comes to cutting someone's skin for aesthetic reasons.

>>79769587
Also there's a linguistic artifact of that in English: a "pound sterling" used to literally be a pound of sterling silver.

>>79795664
>America
Arguably much of the western hemisphere was bronze or stone age right up until contact with Europeans, so like that.
>Africa
ooga booga to the south, Old Kingdom Egypt and early Carthage to the north.
>east Asia
China suffers horrible floods and famines as usual. Much of what is now western China is inhabited by light haired/eyed Indo-European speaking steppe nomads. Japan and Korea are basically grugs.

>>79804719
Barely any part of the americas was even copper age anon, some of the mound people, the aztecs and some other city states in meso-america. The only Bronze age you could call in the americas were the Moche, perhaps the Nazca and the Incas. The rest used native copper and tumbaga (copper/gold alloys, more for ornaments than for tools/fighting).

>fudds shilling muh obsidian
just admit that ur poor

>>79790591
>communism only works in small independant states and towns and does not work for an entire country
Pretty sure it's explicitly stated in Das Kapital

>>79805884
Why was this? What made them stagnate for so long?

>>79809404
They didn't suffer from the sin of greed. Only white men have that.

>>79809404
Stagnation is the natural state of existence. What you should be asking is what made East Asia, Europe, and the Middle East develop.

>>79796464
Yeah I was moved forward into a combined class in primary school and the year 3 kids laughed at me because I only knew how to read out loud. This is absolutely a thing. I didnt know it was even a thing until then.

>>79809404
It's not so much it was stagnata, as they also seemed to be getting worse, Teotihuacan was very impressive, and old, the Mayan cities were everywhere and then declined, the Paracas where miles ahead of the later Nazca... It could be a lot of stuff,climate changing every few hundred years, it's a chore to travel in the Americas in general unless you go be Sea, war and trade are the two major reasons humans inovate, and the majority of the americas the geograpy wasn't the best for that, include a lot of tribes than hate each other wich make trade dangerous and don't have much to offer apart of bodies to settled nations, and the little sentiment of being one (neither religion or anything really united them, the most was a rally vs Europeans, but they also allied with the europeans to end other tribes like the Hurons with the French or the Tlaxcalans with the Spaniards)... Its a complicated topic with lots of blank spots because the vast majority of the tribes where agraphas/didn't have writing, and the ones than did tended to burn them when a dinastic change was produced (something frequent and depresing all over the planet too), the Spaniards also burned mayan codices, but that's only a part of meso america, the vast majority of legends and languages where also writed down be the Spanish/Luso priest, wich were very anal retentive to write down lots of stuff so they could convert them later using stuff like syncretism, and oral records tend to be very unreliable (Scots saying the Adrian walls were made be giants etc only a few hundred years later).

>>79809404
I remember reading something about Copper not just stagnating but being rejected over time. Like there are copper relics but no copper tools were being forged by the time of colonization. I think one of the theories was that copper was an isolated discipline and a set of wars and famines may have killed off most of the knowledge about it.

You have to remember that coming out of a communal subsistence lifestyle is a really tricky balancing act, every person working a specific job isnt hunting fishing or farming. You get too many people with specific jobs and starvation sets in.

Funny story is this is how both native americans and australian aboriginals were generally forced off of tribe land. You dont need to kidnap the whole tribe, just enough workers so that the balance of food production gets fucked up, critical knowledge lost and then the survivors walk into the mission willingly.

>>79809882
Alright then, what made them develop? Please explain.

>>79810433
So no one ever managed to figure it out again? Seriously?

>>79814842
The major weakness of a master/apprentice system is that if the master dies without passing on the full extent of knowledge, everything that is missing has to be relearned by trial and error.

>>79814842
>By yes, I can't imagine a world without common education, libraries, written passage of knowledge and lack of secrecy on technologies
Let me ask you this: can you make cement? It's super easy to do, but can you describe me even what you need to take to make it and how to locate said ingredients in the open terrain?
After all, you should be able to know how cement is made, you come from civilisation that uses millions of tonnes of that stuff on yearly basis.

>>79814952
Oh, and one more thing:
This is a knowledge you should actually posses as an adult person that at least finished elementry education, since "how to make cement" is literally the barest of bones of chemistry that's taught in school. Globally. Even in the States, or at least in the states I've bothered to check for, since apparently each of them has it handled separately.

>>79814990
NTA but they never taught me that and now I feel robbed.

>>79810404
>It could be a lot of stuff
Gradual loss of the civilization that had been imparted by superior white Atlanteans as the locals became unable to pass down the secrets or even maintain what they had been given.

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>>79734708
How common/dangerous should Bronze Age monsters be and why?

>>79803433
Technologically there's nothing in the REH stories beyond IRL 0AD.

>>79821447
Alright, and what was 0AD actually like IRL? Can you elaborate please?

>>79734882
Also women are possessions and gods embody patterns/traits/features in life/people/world. In the Iliad, god's aren't always depicted as humanoid but rather action itself. A 'king' can refer to someone in charge of a couple dozen people.

>>79821989
Not like the renaissance or middle ages, for one
Also there are no stone age REH stories

People are saying conan has a bronze age feel because the societal structures more closely reflect the city states of the era. Technologically, things like olive oil lamps, stirrups, low grade iron and galley ships put the hyborean age close to 0 AD

>>79821447
>>79822986
There's literally full plate armour in the howard stories
>no stone age REH stories
REH's first story was set in the stone age and the picts in conans time are literally native americans with stone clubs and spears

>>79795664
The America's didn't really have a bronze-age- though the pre-columbian era was still pretty similar. The Huron supposedly just got on to Bronze Working just before European Contact (though after Columbus first landed in the Caribbean). A lot of knowledge on the continents was lost thanks to disease and populations being wiped out, but there was a thriving mississipian culture with Cahokia as it's largest city, as populous as Paris, but fragmented amongst tribes and city-states, but all of it save for their earth-mounds (hence the term mound-builders) were wiped out- reports from early explorers also said that American East Coast was incredibly smoky up and down with all the fires being burned by tripes it was so densely populated.

The classic american civilizations, the Aztec, Incan, and Mayan are very similar though- they were in semi-arid parts of the continent, so needed complex governments to manage resources. Originally a series of city-states, the Mayans went through several periods of unification and collapse, the Aztecs meanwhile were invaders from the north (supposedly from the mythical land of Aztlan) making them more akin the Assyrians. The Incan empire was very recent too- only forming 80 or so years before it fell- it nonetheless had a system of emperor worship, mummification, and a complex government that governed the whole thing (made more impressive by their lack of a writing system- they used knots to keep records).
(cont.)

>>79823312
Africa of course had the North African civilizations of Egypt, Numidia, Carthage (though they were Phoenecian Asians), Nubia, but there was also the Aksumite Empire in what is now Ethiopia that was very similar to the fertile crescent civilizations, and the Zimbabwean Empire, a bronze-working civilization that was wiped out and we know little about. However most of the rest of africa isn't conducive to civilization, few fertile river valleys, most of them in West Africa, which had many kingdoms in the medieval period such Mali, Songhai, Benin, Ghana, but they weren't there in the classical or ancient period.

China progressed very similarly to the Fertile Crescent civilizations, but we lack many records. There were two civilizations along the banks of the Yellow and Yangtze rivers respectively, a series of warring city-states. They worked bronze, had pottery, used the precursors to chinese characters, most of which were used on turtle oracle bones which are the only records we have of them.

At some point one power along these rivers, we don't know who, managed to exert control over the entire rivers of the two civilizations, forming a singular civilization in the first incarnation of the Chinese Empire, in the semi-mythical Xian Dynasty (historians are reasonably sure there was a dynasty that owned the two rivers roughly when the myths say, but beyond that we don't know too much).

Lastly there was the Indus River Valley Civilization, but as the name suggests we don't know much about them, even a name. They left no records, but their ruins dot the Indus Valley in what's today Pakistan, and would be the foundation of civilization in India- their ruins show a highly organized architectural system as all their cities were built on grid systems.

>>79823033
Conan as a king had a "suit of armor", the exact make up of which is not described and could be reasoned to be many time periods
REH's first conan story is King Conan. Also, there are tribes using stone weapons now, that does not mean we live in the stone age.

>>79823489
>The Aquilonian host was drawn up, long serried lines of pikemen and horsemen in gleaming steel, when a giant figure in black armor emerged from the royal pavilion, and as he swung up into the saddle of the black stallion held by four squires, a roar that shook the mountains went up from the host. They shook their blades and thundered forth their acclaim of their warrior king—knights in gold-chased armor, pikemen in mail coats and basinets, archers in their leather jerkins, with their longbows in their left hand.
>The king and his allies moved westward at the head of fifty thousand men—knights in shining armor with their pennons streaming above their helmets, pikemen in steel caps and brigandines, cross-bowmen in leather jerkins. They crossed the border, took a frontier castle and burned three mountain villages, and then, in the valley of the Valkia, ten miles west of the boundary line, they met the hosts of Conan, king of Aquilonia—forty-five thousand knights, archers and men-at-arms, the flower of Aquilonian strength and chivalry. Only the knights of Poitain, under Prospero, had not yet arrived, for they had far to ride up from the southwestern corner of the kingdom. Tarascus had struck without warning. His invasion had come on the heels of his proclamation, without formal declaration of war.
Howard's description is CLEARLY medieval. you can cope and say that because he didn't describe his arms and armour in autistic detail that means its totally not medieval but it's pretty obvious that by howard mentioning knights with pennons, pikemen with bascinets and brigandine that he imagined in his head medieval era troops and combat
>REH's first conan story is King Conan.
You said "there are no stone age REH stories" which is clearly wrong since the first story he ever got published, spear and fang, is set in the stone age.you never mentioned conan in your original comment. and the picts in the hyborian age are explicitely a stone age society

>>79823586
Im pointing out the tech level involved, not the whatever aesthetic he had in mind writing, given thats what "bronze age" usually refers to
Also the argument was about whether conan was bronze age, why the fuck would i be concerned with non-conan REH stories?

>>79803646
I don't believe in crap like that for a second. Sure society was very different, and many concepts we take for granted today would be alien to people of the past. But people are all the same throughout location and time, the only real differences are which people are in charge.

I figure that the people who are around today that are the flat-earthers and anti-vaxxers were around back then too, and they were the ones making up all the crazy myths- some guy claims he saw a half-horse-man, and your dumbass aunt who heard about it once is now adamant that centaurs exist and that you need to centaur proof your farm.

It's just without the scientific method, you couldn't disprove the existence of centuars, so the mass of people had to go along with the delusions of others.

Ancient priests also weren't considered infallible- the issue was much more that the priests tended to have a monopoly on literacy and the roles of scribes- so it's much less they speak with the absolute authority of gods (though many did that too) and more that if you are a lower class, they're from an upper class and there ain't much shit you can do about that.

>>79823884
You have no clue of what you are talking about

>>79780843
>high fantasy doesn't have warmongering empires

>>79809404
>stagnate for "so long"
one reason is time - humans arrived in North America around 25,000 BC and in South America 15,000 BC, and they lost contact with Asia.

>>79821997
>Also women are possessions
Cringe.

Also, which passages of the Illiad have those descriptions?

>>79741096
To add onto that, Jason was an idiot for doing that to Medea KNOWING that she was a worshiper of the goddess of sorcery, Hecate, and had helped him get the golden fleece by using witchcraft.
Another play, this one by by Aristophanes; Lysistrata, was pretty funny. It was a comedy about the women of Greece conspiring to end the Peloponnesian War by denying their men sex and constantly teasing and blue-balling them . The play ends with the Spartan and Athenian delegates trying to hide their massive erections under their tunics while negotiating peace.
I'd imagine that, even though it was comedy and thus cannot be taken at face-value, the Greeks still could be quite beholden to their women (at least their bodies), enough that a comedy could be made of it poking fun at the point.

>>79823884
You just posted cringe milord.

>>79824681
Damn, I should read that

>>79823792
>Im pointing out the tech level involved, not the whatever aesthetic he had in mind writing, given thats what "bronze age" usually refers to
Knights in full armour requires medieval level technology, not 0 ad level technology.
>Also the argument was about whether conan was bronze age, why the fuck would i be concerned with non-conan REH stories?
you said REH wrote no stone age stories, retard

>>79821997
I think the humanoid gods were largely for ease of representation, like personifications of countries in political cartoons.

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Did somebody say 'bronze age setting'?

>>79829049
You can't just take a cyberpunk character and make their metal orange

>>79829847
Sure you can. They can be any color that they want to be.

>>79821281
As common as you want in the story.

>>79761448
>This is mostly due to stirrup fags...

No its not, its due to a strong implication in the historial record that horses were too small to carry an armed and armored man into combat. You would have to ride the horse to the place of battle, dismount, don your armor and weapons (Which would be carried in the supply train because the horse can't carry you that way) and then fight on foot.

>>79833303
Doesn't that hypothesis itself carry an assumption that Bronze Age cavalry would resemble Middle Ages heavy cavalry in equipment?

>>79829847
>>79832633
you can but that would make them steampunk rather than... bronze... punk?

>>79824681
>It was a comedy about the women of Greece conspiring to end the Peloponnesian War by denying their men sex and constantly teasing and blue-balling them
I forgot that one! Thanks for reminding me.

But yeah- stuff like that is a good example of how there is a difference between what a culture espouses is their values, and what those values actually are. While ancient greece stated that women had no rights in their society, the reality was women still knew how to exercise power over their husbands to some degree.

>>79734708
Iron exists, and a few people actually know how to work it, but the dominant religion teaches that iron is evil and unnatural. They say they have ways to prove it.

>>79835865
>They say they have ways to prove it.
What are these ways?

>>79753049
Can you post this on a mega?

>>79734708
>>79734708
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4G1vep6rcCI&t=6242s

>>79837961
They stab you with Iron, you die. Clearly Iron is a malevolent metal. Unlike tin and copper, which come together and put aside their differences to make armor and weapons to defend against the putrid iron

>>79829847
that's literally a character from a bronze age setting though.

>>79735820
OP is asking about the Bronze Age, not your fetish & family history.

>>79829049
Anyone who unironically uses that goddamn Skrillex haircut on a character design should be cudgeled.

>>79839379
Okay, that seems like flimsy logic at best. Is stone evil if someone bashes you over he head with a rock?

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>>79748447
Lel

>>79838583
Yeah sure why the fuck not. Or maybe gofile? Whatever it is it will cost me nothing let me get back to you.

>>79833303
found the stirrupfag

>>79838583
https://gofile.io/d/EONmXV

Its also got my atlas and races tacked on to the end. Consider it a bonus/ignore it I am too lazy to remove it.

>>79809404

One thing that people dont realise about bronze is that tin is extremly rare and highly concentrated on Earth. It is actually as rare as uranium. That means that bronze societies MUST trade or they collapse and often they were not even the producers of tin.

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Bumping out of general interest.

>>79850035
I have some houses I am putting together for my bronze age shit and they look similar enough to these that I might actually ape the colour scheme. Thanks for posting.

Not much stuff is locked up. Large animals can really fuck you up. I don’t have much to add... just that I think it would be cool if having trophies like a tiger cloak could boost your rep. Or if you could boast/brag well it would do the same.

https://youtu.be/S1Om2rSQcDE

Related

>>79803181
It’s more that the Philistines were likely Sea People. The group that likely became the Philistines were just a fraction of the many groups coming out of the fuck-ups that were Mycenaean Greece and similar areas, whose shitty social values contributed to the collapse of their lands and then the broader BAC as “le refugees and raiders” spread out and dominoed.
Also when talking about the Philistines, it’s important to say that the Kingdom of Israel i.e. Saul, David, Solomon has no historical basis outside the bible itself - in contemporary records or archeological findings.

Bump

>>79851352
Neat. Do you have any more information on the evolution of money, please?

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>>79734708
What kinds of weapons did Bronze Age warriors use?

Also, why didn't they wear pants?

https://youtu.be/6rn9b7Z1ZnQ

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLObJ0KGDh5_PPOUAqytPgmdEd0-IH-DeE

>>79809404
New world technology was largely horticulturally based, the people of the Amazon basin had a plant that grew perfect arrow shafts, for instance, and that horticultural knowledge was lost because over half of the population of the new world was killed by disease at least 5 separate times between when the Vinlanders spread the Norwegian Plague to the Skraelings and when the 17th century mass settlement of the 13 colonies began in earnest. Despite this focus on growing what twas needed instead of manufacturing it, they still did use a LOT of copper. The peoples around Lake Superior had mines that had been active from less than a thousand years after the retreat of the glaciers until somewhere shortly before the onset of Anglo colonization, when they were driven away from their mines and smelters by invading tribes from the east that were essentially post-apocalyptic barbarians.

Prior to the Spanish importing African tropical diseases to the neotropics, the Amazonian basin was as populated as the subcontinent of India. The Native Americans as first seen by the Anglos were descendants of people who had left society instead of trying to hold onto their culture when their society faced an apocalyptic threat due to disease, and the cultures they fled were also cultures diminished by the fact that they were founded by the people who had fled to the woods instead of trying to save their cultures when THOSE cultures had faced apocalyptic threat due to epidemic.

The horticultural traditions that had grown from the end of the Younger Dryas until approximately 1000 AD were almost all lost by 1500 AD, but you expect that when the population of the new world retracted by at least 70% in that same time period.

>>79810433
>but no copper tools were being forged by the time of colonization.
None were being forged by the 18th century, but by the 18th century, the culture that had controlled the mines for almost 3 millennia (since the end of the "Old Copper Culture") had been ravaged by plague and then conquered and displaced by a wave of immigrants who were fleeing their plague ravaged homelands. We know that mining and smelting was still taking place as recently as the 16th century.,

>>79858152
>Also, why didn't they wear pants?
Why would they wear pants?
I'm not wearing any right now

>>79858152
Trousers hadn't been invented yet. Spears, various short swords, daggers, axes, maces, etc all should be represented. Some things are likely still to be made from stone. Almost all arrowheads, unless you are a fabulously wealthy warrior from a fabulously wealthy city, will be polished stone or polished bone (Antler is ideal). If you aren't wealthy enough for bronze armor, boar tusk, shell, and linen make great composite armors which are nearly as good.

>>79858152
Pants are good for cold weather, skirts are good for warm weather. Skirts create air advection, cooling the air that rises up the skirt.

>>79859203
Why were kilts popular in Scotland then? They were cold.

>>79861376
To be pointlessly different. Kilts aren't an actual historical garment, they're an invention (shortened bottom part of "greater kilt" which is essentially a warm whole body cloak) from 18th century that was turned into a nationalistic symbol in 19th.

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>>79829049
Tyranny was a lot of fun. The continent being conquered due to a magic God King was a nice subversion of the typical small scale Bronze Age setting.
Stuff like being able to outfit a small army with iron weapons due to concentrating magic blacksmiths into a single guild that is under direct control of the Overlord’s legal branch was cool.

>>79864069
Setting is a bit high magic for my taste but i didnt hate the experience of playing it, which is an accomplishment for obsidian.

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>>79734708
What are some common misconceptions about Bronze Age cultures like Ancient Egypt, Greece, etc.?

>>79861376
Kilts are made from thick wool, you ever wear one in scotland, they're very warm, I had to wear one at a wending when I was five. I've also heard it said pants were invented for horse riding cultures, and by the time horses were introduced to Scotland, kilts had become a cultural symbol.
>>79868683
There's been a good deal of historical politicking on how economies were run back then- people assuming that they were feudal not understanding that was a response to the dark ages, or assuming it was capitalist because capitalism is the 'natural' mode for economy (it's a very recent invention).

They were incredibly well organized by centralized states- not quite command economies because nobody had the resources for that, but you'd have a well learned class of scribes, who often doubled as priests, organizing everything on behalf of whoever was king- this is how you got the great monuments like the Pyramids or Hanging Garden of Babylon (try leaving a mighty work that will stand the test of time on a libertarian economy- hint; you can't).

Coinage wouldn't be invented for a while though- most wealth was measured in cattle or bundle's of wheat- such as the Mesopotamian Shekel, coins when they were invented were more a measure of value rather than a frequently used currency.

>>79868683
We probably over estimate the quantity of bronze armor in greece vs the use of linothorax which is like a shit ton of layers of cloth held together with glue (likely made from pig fat)

>or assuming it was capitalist because capitalism is the 'natural' mode for economy (it's a very recent invention).
>>79869330

Ah bro dont reopen this convo. A lot of capitalism had been invented by these cultures. They hadn't enclosed land (mostly) but their town structures were pretty similar. Have a google around for babylonian tablets. "5 bars of silver for your slave" is close enough to capitalism for there to be no difference to a non scholar.

DESU >>79868683 the fact that greeks near perfected colonialism (in the early greek period) lots of towns in the Mediterranean started as greek colonies. They also had strict citizenship requirements so often the locals would have a hard time benefiting from the presence of the colony.

Sometimes greek (or nearby) colonial efforts were "Hey we built a town and we are planting olives nearby" but also sometimes it was "Ding dong your culture is wrong" as city states rolled over local tribes.

>>79869486
If you want to broadly define capitalism as 'people buying and selling goods, and trying to make a profit' sure. But the problem arm-chair economists have is not realizing that capitalism has a much narrower definition than that. I've also seen some such armchair economists try to argue that the Bronze-Age Collapse was the result of kings trying to interfere too much with the economy to the detriment of the merchants who knew better.

Now to be fair this cuts both ways- you had communists who tried to portray bronze age states as being communist command economies when that wasn't true either- that's what I meant when I said there was a lot of historical politicking based on what people assumed was the 'natural' way to run the economy.

>>79869533
People tend to use the vulgar definitions of capitalism and socialism. I recall that the soviets even more or less accepted the vulgar definition of socialism after a point, mostly due to their own failings.

To most people capitalism involves the means of production being owned by private entities, and socialism is where the means of production are owned and managed by public entities.

I understand that the enclosure of the land to drive workers towards the factories hadn't occurred yet (although there are some similar events here and there, temples need slaves senpai) but most people don't give a shit.

>Now to be fair this cuts both ways- you had communists who tried to portray bronze age states as being communist command economies when that wasn't true either- that's what I meant when I said there was a lot of historical politicking based on what people assumed was the 'natural' way to run the economy.

I wouldnt accuse anyone of being this smooth brained unless I saw you make the argument directly. Temple economies were weird and certainly not socialist in any way. It would be like accusing the US of being communist because of food stamps.

I do agree people are trying to fight each other by drawing on historical examples but really there's so much history you can use it to prove anything.

>>79868683
NOOOOOOOO BRONZE AGE HORSERINOS WERE TOO SMALL TO CARRY AN ARMOURED WARRIORINO

>>79869692
Well really what it is is people using history to make political arguments about the economy. This sort of shit happens all the time- I myself use history to inform my political views. but the difference lies where someone cares more about their politics than their history. Like personally I'm pro economic intervention and social services, and there are areas of bronze-age economies I could point to to show how that sort of thing ins't a new foriegn concept and worked in the past- but I care enough about history to admit that bronze age economies (what with the class division and slavery) aren't exactly the models we should strive towards.

The issue is mostly you had the cold-war and you had economists trying to draw lines on who was in the right, and trying to paint history according to their viewpoints to justify their cause.

Funnily enough the same thing happened in discussions about fascist economies- communists claimed hitler was a communist, and capitalists that he was a socialist when neither was true.

>>79869692
How would you define Capitalism and Socialism, if not by the former being MoP owned by private individuals, and the later being MoP owned publicly, either collectively or cooperatively?

>>79739699
Side note: if bronze is still the special stuff rather than the norm, then the norm isn't copper but stone and bone.

There were copper weapons, but they're too flimsy for actual use in battle. Arrow tips are the best you could expect.

Once you get stable and powerful enough to have miners and a decent amount of copper weaponry, then you're just a step away from trading with a neighbor who can get you the other stuff and knowledge you need to make bronze.

>>79734708
Read "The World of Odysseus". Great work on the mentality of the social customs from Greek times.

It's still not bronze era, but it should help you get a lot closer to the bronze times.

>>79734708
Bronze aged swords look really interesting. What is the purpose of that twin armed pommel thing?

>>79870506
Decoration, most likely.
Most of bronze age warfare was highly ritualized including pre-battle sacrifices.

>>79869900
I use all the definitions as they fit the debate. Warring over what the correct definition is will waste your life.

>>79871212
But what other ones are there? The one described is the only one I'm aware of that has any internal consistency.

>>79870205
Copper is the predominant metal in terms of tool use. Tin requirements made Bronze expensive. If something could be done with copper it usually was to save on cost. You want your warriors covered in bronze if possible, but your saws/hammers/loops/whatever else cool shit could be cast you would use copper if possible.

>>79871271
Man.

State ownership of the MOP is used because marxists use the state as shorthand for the worker. Really what socialists want is worker ownership of the MOP, which is a different definition. It also has vulgar/popular connotations with social welfare.

http://www.ozarkia.net/bill/anarchism/SocialismDef.html

Have a read.

>>79869486
>linothorax which is like a shit ton of layers of cloth held together with glue (likely made from pig fat)
This was actually an effective armor? Seriously?

>>79871333
Thank you

>>79874727
>This was actually an effective armor?
You'd be surprised. Go look up tests on YT.

>>79802732
Hyborian Age is a mix of different time periods anon. Hell, bronze isn't even the main metal used for weapons and armor there.

>>79875051
Leave it. Anon is in love with the idea that Conan is bronze age and no amount of fact, logic, direct quotes will dissuade him.

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>>79734708
What did Bronze Age people think about medicines and treating disease? What did they get right and wrong?

>>79874727
Incredibly tight weaves of fibers glued and/or quilted, and stiffened is very good at protecting against slashes and pads against blunt force trauma, it's less effective against spikes and piercing, but it still protects. Cloth armor has extensive history of use worldwide.

>>79876001
A lot of them had some very advanced medicine for their time. The best doctors in the world were of course in Egypt, who had extensive understanding of the human body- no real taboo on disection if mummification exists after all. However- magic was a huge component for Egyptian medicine- not necessarily the main component, but hand in hand with most treatments were various spells meant to make you better or word off illness or curses. All told though- it'd be some of the most advanced medicine in the world up until the advent of the enlightenment.

Greek biology though was much different- egyptians believed in hands on study of the body, the Greeks meanwhile were philosophers- they were the bedrock of western civilization, but not western medicine. As an example- hysteria is Greek for 'moving womb syndrome', cause you know, women are known to have irrational bouts of anger, sadness and so on, because their wombs will randomly mover around to different parts of their bodies. Likewise, they also believed that the testicles acted as a weight on the voice, physically bringing it down when they drop during puberty.

As for disease, they did what most civilizations did- try to quarantine the diseased, and burn the bodies of the infected best they could if it was real bad. The Greeks believed that illness was the result of an imbalance of the 'humors' that is your various bodily fluids, being blood, black bile, yellow bile, and something else I forget- which supposedly also informed your personality (and where we get terms like melancholic). This is also where ideas like bleeding came from- the idea being getting rid of an excess of blood will balance your humors (to their credit, medieval doctors thought bleeding helped rid you of bad blood instead).

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>>79875212
Oh you!
Still thinking REH didn't draw from the bronze age for his stories?
That's adorable!
Tell us more about Aquilonia again...give us more examples from just one story, instead of the entire corpus...show us again the inherent weakness of your argument....

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Why not add the Vashar? The nations of antiquity were often described as the direct descendents of this god or that, why not have the "first draft" show up and ruin everyone's day?

https://dungeons.fandom.com/wiki/DnDWiki:Vashar

QRD:
>gods created First Men
>gods go, "oh shit, Adam & Eve are pure fucking evil"
>gods kill them, go back to the drawing board
>cheeky demon steals their bodies, hides in not!Shangri-La
>revives evil knockoff A&E for the lulz
>centuries later, have an entire race of shitheads

>>79879235
Weren’t the pharaohs believed to BE gods? And what are some other cultures with beliefs like that?

>>79879235
>The vashar were the gods' first attempt at creating humans, albeit an attempt that went horribly wrong. The gods watched as their creation, a male, attacked and violently killed an animal, feeding on it in brutish fashion. The gods were first impressed as their creation immediately began to fashion a tool from the animal's remains, then horrified as he used it to try and attack them.

what an incredibly based lad

>>79790847
I've included not!scandis in a story I wrote. In that they have "recently" (as far as timespans go back then) transitioned into an early iron age using bog iron. The main reason why is because they used to be ruled by tyrannical wizards and dragons during their bronze age. Iron is pure anti-magic and the subjugated non-magic users used it to overthrow and kill the old elite.
They credit their "new" (again, as it goes) underground craftsmen and warrior gods for teaching them how to create and work iron and are slowly abandoning or downplaying their old gods like the sun.
Still they manage to cause troubles as far down as the not!Mediterranean and have on occasion sacked the cities there (which are often ruled by wizard-princes and/or magic-using priests who are weak against iron).

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>>79880087
Egyptians, yes. Persians saw their emperorsas living gods, and I think some Celt druids were seen as immediate children of their gods. I was mostly thinking of Greek nation-states, where a peoples were descendants of a specific god within their pantheon.

>>79881489
>where a peoples were descendants of a specific god within their pantheon.
That’s news to me. Sauce?

>>79878007
Why are you so obessed with conan being bronze age? Every example you've given you seem to ignore and keep pushing the idea that its totally bronze age
Howard took some inspiration from the bronze age but far more from the iron age and medieval periods. Taking a little bit of inspiration from the bronze age doesn't mean hyboria is a bronze age setting
keep seething though

>>79795664
>>African Bronze Age

Besides Nubia and Punt, Subsaharan Africa skipped the bronze age. They went straight to Iron around 1,000BC. This was the Bantu expansion, a completely different age of high adventures where the Bantu wiped out weird races and conquered half the continent.

>>79882692
I don't know about other pantheons, but there was a myth that for a brief period Typhon overthrew the Olympians, and they had to shapeshift into animals and flee south before they fixed things. This was the explanation for the Egyptian gods according to the greeks, literally 'your gods are just our gods in funny hats'.

>tfw we will never get an Age of Sigmar that is actual bronze age barbarians fighting orcs and demons

Why even live

>>79823368
>>Indus left no records.
They left plenty. We just can't translate the script.

>>79734848
That was probably more as because copper can be good for fishing and stuff as it doesn't rust.

>>79884657
Was that due to trade? Or did they just have so much fucking iron that they figured they didn't need to bother compromising with bronze?

>>79874727
One of the researchers who helped create a modern version of it based on some of the process recorded on paintings found on greek pottery, wore it while someone shot an arrow at him. It stopped the arrow and he didnt take a scratch.

https://hackaday.com/2014/04/11/the-ancient-greeks-invented-kevlar-a-over-2-millennia-ago/

>>79874727
Oh and the other thing to consider is that an effective fighting force still had huge fuck off shields and bronze helmets. So the reduction in quality of a soldier was negligible.

>>79734882
>>Using jewels and rare materials (like pearls) as currency.
Rope and bolts of cloth are pretty good as currency as well.

>>79823312
The tarascans also had bronze by the time of contact. Apparently it used to be thought it was copper, but metallurgical analysis shows it’s a mix of bronze and copper tools. They used bronze axe heads as currency

>>79885076
>huge fuck off shields
Why were they so big?

>>79885051
Alright, besides weight, what were the pros and cons of using it via normal armor?

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>>79882692
Off the top of my head, the Spartans were said to be the sons of Herakles, the Trojans were descended from Apollo (?), the Macedonians were descended from Zeus AND founded by Herakles.
There was a lot of interesting shit about people back in the day. You might also want to read a cliff notes version of the Odyssey or the Illiad. The Olympians were all over the Trojan War something fierce. Blessings, quests, curses, visions, artifacts, sacred beasts (why'd you have to fuck with the boar, Agamemnon? WHY'D YOU FUCK WITH THE BOAR?).

>>79887010
It was easier to make a huge fuck off shield than a set of armor. And they worked with hoplite/phalanx maneuvers. Imagine you and your boys all armed with fuck off shields, each shield is interlocked, and you advance in one single line. This means each of you is providing a unified defense as you advance, meaning all of you will be reasonably protected.

>>79887617
Oh, yeah, I can't remember his name but there was one poor bastard who was supposed to fight with the Greeks. Story has it, he gets bit by a snake but still tags along, thinking it'll heal. However, the guys on his ship hate the smell of the wound so they detour and strand the motherfucker on an island, but they leave him a bow so he can fend for himself.
Fast forward to the Trojan shores, where the Greeks realize "oh, shit, that bow was blessed we need it or we can't defeat Troy," go BACK to the island, and have to awkwardly request/demand/steal the bow from stinky, who's mad as hell and in serious need of medical assistance.
They "tactically acquire" the bow, return to the host at Troy, and one poor bastard dies of venom cold and alone.

tl;dr the Greeks were the original murderhobos

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>>79884968

Tin is as rare as uranium.

>>79887979
>Tin is as rare as uranium.
Wow. Why exactly is that?

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>>79889091

Tin is generated via the long s-process (slow neutron-capture process) in low-to-medium mass stars (with masses of 0.6 to 10 times that of the Sun), and finally by beta decay of the heavy isotopes of indium.

Tin is the 49th most abundant element in Earth's crust, representing 2 ppm compared with 75 ppm for zinc, 50 ppm for copper, and 14 ppm for lead.

Tin does not occur as the native element but must be extracted from various ores. Cassiterite (SnO2) is the only commercially important source of tin, although small quantities of tin are recovered from complex sulfides such as stannite, cylindrite, franckeite, canfieldite, and teallite. Minerals with tin are almost always associated with granite rock, usually at a level of 1% tin oxide content.

Because of the higher specific gravity of tin dioxide, about 80% of mined tin is from secondary deposits found downstream from the primary lodes. Tin is often recovered from granules washed downstream in the past and deposited in valleys or the sea. The most economical ways of mining tin are by dredging, hydraulicking, or open pits. Most of the world's tin is produced from placer deposits, which can contain as little as 0.015% tin.

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>>79889091

>>79889301


The mass-abundance of the nine most abundant elements in the Earth's crust is approximately: oxygen 46%, silicon 28%, aluminum 8.3%, iron 5.6%, calcium 4.2%, sodium 2.5%, magnesium 2.4%, potassium 2.0%, and titanium 0.61%. Other elements occur at less than 0.15%.

The graph >>79889316 illustrates the relative atomic-abundance of the chemical elements in Earth's upper continental crust—the part that is relatively accessible for measurements and estimation.

Many of the elements shown in the graph are classified into (partially overlapping) categories:

1- rock-forming elements (major elements in green field, and minor elements in light green field);
2- rare earth elements (lanthanides, La-Lu, Sc and Y; labeled in blue);
3- major industrial metals (global production >~3×107 kg/year; labeled in red);
4-precious metals (labeled in purple);
5- the nine rarest "metals" – the six platinum group elements plus Au, Re, and Te (a metalloid) – in the yellow field. These are rare in the crust from being soluble in iron and thus concentrated in the Earth's core. Tellurium is the single most depleted element in the silicate Earth relative to cosmic abundance, because in addition to being concentrated as dense chalcogenides in the core it was severely depleted by preaccretional sorting in the nebula as volatile hydrogen telluride.

Oxygen and silicon are notably the most common elements in the crust. On Earth and in rocky planets in general, silicon and oxygen are far more common than their cosmic abundance. The reason is that they combine with each other to form silicate minerals.Other cosmically-common elements such as hydrogen, carbon and nitrogen form volatile compounds such as ammonia and methane that easily boil away into space from the heat of planetary formation and/or the Sun's light.

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>>79882784
>seething
>strawman
>admits its inspired by bronze age
Oh, anon! You truly must cope harder if you want to play on these latvian prepubescent broads!

>>79889559
Its partly inspired by the bronze age, which i never denied. Its majorly inspired by the iron age and the medieval era
keep seething though. keep posting images of movie conan which isnt even accurate to what howard wrote

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>>79753049


Source of comic???

>>79800122
i've read the entirety of howard's original conan stories and the picts are the most bronze age shit in there

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>>79734882
>Marriage alliances are one of the few ways to make peace, since the basic rules of diplomacy are still being worked out.

expanding on this, diplomacy was pretty dependent on the idea of familial relationships between sovereigns either tangible (through marriage) or otherwise. a lot of surviving communications between relatively friendly rulers expressed ideas of kinship. the marriage of your sister to another ruler would establish a fraternal bond with that guy, your daughter to another a paternal one, and that would be reflected in diplomatic communication in which you'd be calling your sister's husband your brother, your daughter's your son and so on

that wasn't the absolute extent of bronze age diplomacy though; there was plenty of gift exchange and payment of tribute

the crucial thing to remember is that bronze age 'nations' (a modern term) were not at all insular. there's tons of evidence that there was a complex interdependent trade network in the eastern med and a hell of a lot of contact

>>79894092
Picts are stone age not bronze age oh no no no bronzeagefags are delusional

>>79796860
in short, it's a setting that runs on master morality instead of slave morality.