Fossilized Violance

Then you realize to your horror that you have asked James Hutt, designer of Fossilized Violence. He begins to respond, excitedly, and you find yourself trapped by the terror of social convention to hear his rambling answer…

Fossilized Violence is a TRPG where you and your friends are cavemen who fight dinosaurs. You choose one of four allied cave civilizations to play as. Will you choose to join the Heartlanders, a jungle community of feather-taking warriors where only the strong survive, the Ocean Kings: A democratic commune that gathers yearly in the desert to vote on laws, the Thixi, A secretive people in the frigid tundra, changed by drinking from the Pool of Mystery, or the Volcano Men: A giant family who drape themselves in obsidian and feed the Great Volcano?

For your civilization and the benefit of allied cave-humanity, you’ll journey your way across the primeval supercontinent Pangeon’s 58 distinct regions, fighting dinosaurs for the benefit of humanity as you go completing regional and settlement quests to unlock new weapons, armor, charms, and gear (140+ in total) for all of your civilization’s future cavemen. All 50+ unlockable weapons are illustrated by Dolan Pondsmith herself!

Pangeon’s dinosaurs are deadly, and not all of your cavemen will survive to reach old age. Those that do become Elders, retiring as NPCs in a manner you choose, each of which provides a unique permanent benefit for all future generations. Of course, whenever you return to the settlement where your former character retired, the GM is required to force you to roleplay as your previous character, to set the new generation of young warriors straight!

But let’s be real, in Fossilized Violence, Dinosaurs are the real stars of the show. I hope you liked Critical Injuries from Cyberpunk RED and The Witcher TRPG, because Fossilized Violence takes them to a whole new level. The book contains 28 Critical injury tables, and one Super Critical Modifier Table that lords above all of them. (FV has 460% more critical injury tables than Cyberpunk RED and The Witcher TRPG do combined) Don’t panic, let me break it down. Three are for humans, the one you use is based on which weapon you wield, and the remaining 25 are for the dinosaurs. From Allosaurus to Velociraptor, each dinosaur gets its own unique critical injury table, statistics, abilities, natural weapons, and place of honor in a huge EIGHT PAGE super-dino-panorama art piece in the middle of the book! But we’re not done, because on Pangeon, dinosaurs are evolving in fifty different strange and terrifying ways. These EVOLVED DINOSAURS… must be killed on sight, before their evolutions spread and all of Pangeon is threatened by a repeat of the carnivore evolution outbreak of the distant past…there’s a reason every dinosaur on Pangeon eats meat…

You get to play with plastic dinosaurs when you play Fossilized Violence! You use your hands and fingers to measure distances, too! As for what dice we’re rolling, let’s talk about the game’s system. In Fossilized Violence, resolution is as simple as rolling a stat die (which is bigger the better your stat is) and a d4 to try and beat a difficulty value or an opponent’s roll. Every time a d4 rolls a 4, it explodes, and you roll another. While attacking, when you beat your opponent by 5, you cause a Critical Injury, and if you beat them by 10, it becomes a combat-warping Super Critical Injury! You can attack and defend with style by using risky Fossilized Moves, which award Violence Points when you succeed them, which you can cash in for various one time enhancements to attacks or defenses. Do you want to play aggressively or defensively? In Fossilized Violence, the choice is yours. It should probably start with how you want to outfit your Caveman – you’ve got 140+ options to choose from, and every piece will change how your character fights. You are what you wear!

We’ve got some amazing people that have put their absolute heart into this book.

Our cover is by nine-time Hugo Award–winner Bob Eggleton, who you might know for his work on Godzilla. Our massive and functional map of Pangeon was done by Kyle Latino, the TRPG Map Youtuber Map Crow. It’s being laid out by Layout Artist Nicholas Nacario, the man responsible for Call of Cthulhu’s finest layouts. Interior Art is also a star studded affair, with Runequest alums Mark Smylie and Lionel Marty bringing their talents to the book and making the cave civilizations and dinosaurs come to life off the page. Dolan Pondsmith has completed a herculean task of color illustrating every single weapon in the book in a consistent oh-so-stylish style – when you get this book in your hands, you’ll appreciate just how hard it may have been to concept and illustrate from scratch weapons like the “Rotund Rock Ring on a Rope”, “Mosasword”, and “Stegosauraxe”. All writing and design has been done by me, James Hutt, senior game designer of Cyberpunk RED. It’s been playtested for 2+ years. It’s so ready.

Go find your plastic dinosaurs, and please prepare your game table for Fossilized Violence!