I’ve been playing around with the Bone Age by Bill Edmunds. It’s an interesting little science fantasy OSR setting and system. Players are stone age humans, struggling to survive on an strange world where alien races war for dominance..
The System
The system itself is pretty simple. Characters have six stats – Agility, Constitution, Instinct, Intelligence, Strength, and Will. Players roll 3d6 for each one, though only a modifier (-3 to +3) is recorded for each stat.
Based on their stats, level, and the class they choose, the character has a number of abilities. These are the target numbers the players need to roll equal to or above on a D20 to do things. Abilities include Alertness, Technology, Stealth, Survival, Melee Attacks, Missile Attacks, etc.
Bone Age uses a class and level system. There are multiple setting-specific classes – Abnormals, Beast Stalkers, Wing Riders, and others. Each has specific abilities, and the details of each class fill out a lot of the tribal setting that serves as the character’s background. The abilities increase as the characters level up.
The game also uses OSR style Hit Points and Armor Classes.
The Setting
The setting is probably the most interesting part. It’s a planet called Kalsentia, that’s currently undergoing a disaster caused by a war between alien species.
The humans on Kalsentia, have descended to a near Neolithic level of technology, and live in either jungle or mountain tribes. They share the planet with an ancient, decaying alien race called the Eure (imagine the Skeksi from The Dark Crystal) – some who aid the humans, but most Eure try to enslave them. Hostile aliens called Invaders have brought high tech devices and clouds of mutating radiation to Kalsentia, and are trying to destroy everything.
The humans are caught between the warring alien factions, and have to survive, and if possible, fight back.
The planet Kalsentia itself is alive, and occasionally strikes back against any creature, human, Eure, or Invader that causes it harm. Tables are provided to determine how the planet reacts to perceived attacks.
A hexmap of a region of Kalestia, is provided with small gazetteer. There’s also a list of plot seeds and a sample adventure.
There’s a lot of lore here, which may be a hard sell for players. However, I think the setting looks interesting enough to be worth it.
Character Sheet
I’ve taken the 6×9 character sheet page from the Bone Age rule book and made a separate PDF. I’ve also made it fillable.
Playing around with the official sheet, I decided it didn’t have quite enough room, so I’ve made a custom two-page version in the same style. It has a little more room for character description and history. I’ve also added a space where a character image can be imported, just to the right of the stats. You can click there to import an image.
I’ve added this post to my ever-growing list of character sheets.
Original Bone Age Sheet
Polyhedral Nonsense 