Before Fire: The Comedy Cave Dweller Game

Are you a hairless ape that knows 2-4 other hairless apes? 

Do you know at least 30-ish words in your primary language? 

Do you like throwing shiny, polyhedral stones around and grunting in approval at the symbols that end up on top? 

Then congratulations, you’re ready to be a cave dweller!

Before Fire is a comedy RPG designed for "pick up and play" one-shots. During a session, you and your friends take on the roles of Stone Age hunter-gatherers, sent on a great quest to save your tribe. Using your limited vocabulary and teamwork, you must triumph over such terrifying challenges as sabretooth tigers, stampeding herds of megafauna, and the 100% historically-accurate dinosaur riders.

Most of the comedy and the challenge of the game comes from roleplaying like a cave dweller. In Before Fire, the number of words in your cave dweller's vocabulary is super limited. In most RPGs, that would be only a minor challenge, because most of your dialogue is narration (e.g. "I run up to the wolf and hit it with my axe!"), but in Before Fire, your narration is also limited to the words you know (e.g. "Me smash woof-woof!").

Not sure you get it? Maybe the humor isn't for you? You can watch a live playtest right on Twitch, and decide for yourself if all this really does look like a good time.

Just as important as the laughs is that Before Fire is quick and easy to play. A comedy, one-shot RPG should be the kind of thing a GM can pull out of their back pocket when your normal plans are shot. The giant fight versus the BBEG is imminent, but Sandy has to miss the game because their kid is sick? No problem, character creation and the rules are dead simple, and the session itself is all handled by a zero-prep, fill-in-the-blank style Adventure Generator.

One of the best parts of Before Fire is the character sheet and how it plays into every facet of the game. The basic idea is that you know every word written or printed on your character sheet, and only those words. You can say "Me smash," because "me" and "smash" are printed on the character sheet. When you get a spear in character creation and write "spear" down on your character sheet, that means you know that word. Even your character name is just a two-word combo (e.g. "Big Bear" or "Stinky Plant") that helps expand your vocabulary. Even though you'll get a few discretionary free words, you mostly have a shared vocabulary with your cave dwelling buddies.