The second entry in the Best Roleplaying Game category is Paleomythic, from Osprey Games
Set in the Stone Age, Paleomythic is an interesting delve into adventuring in a world where humanity is just starting to discover itself. The book is in near A5 format and solidly bound, production values are excellent, there’s full colour artwork through the book, but more than that, there’s also several flavour pieces of art drawn as if they were markings on a wall. We didn’t think they’d add much to the text, but it turns out that having appropriate art, even when it’s stick figures hunting beasts, all adds to the way the world works.
The game concentrates on the characters making their way in a world that is significantly simpler than other worlds they may have played in. Surviving from day to day is very much a thing, a single creature encounter can threaten the tribe at large or at least cause major problems should another tribe come after them while they are recovering.
The world is covered in light detail, and this also adds to the feel of the game itself, as it would not be uncommon to know the area much beyond where you hunt and forage, but there has to be a sense of a world beyond where you are.
For a small book, there’s a lot of detail added in here, the system is simple to use, single dice with bonus dice for circumstance or tools, but given the lack of constructed tools, the use of them can be a danger all its own. Advancement of characters is simple, with each adventure becoming a “Story” in the manner of things to tell around a camp fire, and those stories being traded to add skills, remove flaws, or otherwise improve. In any other world, it would be too slow to make things work in this way, but for this world, where everything is playing at the speed of Stone, it works and works well.
Judges liked the idea of the world and the way in which it was presented, the price point worked well, with this being one of the cheaper of the main rule book options available, the game system is intriguing and would make for an interesting change of pace.