If the Xulgaths don't understand the PCs, have them TAAAALK. VEEEEERY. LOUUUUUUDLY. AAAAAAAND. SLOOOOOOOOOOOOOOWLY to them.
I really like the idea of primitive games. This was a character I made for one. The idea was one of the initial classes had to be an NPC class. I chose expert.
Any chance the Grippli live nearby?
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
I like Grippli, but I must say that whenever I imagine one, all I can think about is a Grippli Mesmerist. All glory to the Hypnotoad!
|
How about instead of "wizards" you call them "whittlers" - almost the same mechanics just reflavoured. Have them craft beads to use as spells instead of using books and scrolls. To create a bead, they must whittle a copy of an existing bead in their possession (unless they have spell perfection or similar). To use a spell, they simply throw the bead and the spell takes effect.
When making a homebrew setting, there's no need to jam every available class in--not even every core class. You're obviously not going to have gunslingers in this kind of a setting. Why insist on wizards?
If you're worried about party balance, a party of barbarian, sorcerer, oracle, rogue is just as able to take on expected challenges as paladin, wizard, cleric, rogue. There's nothing wrong with saying, no. In fact, it can be essential to giving this kind of campaign its flavor.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
When making a homebrew setting, there's no need to jam every available class in--not even every core class. You're obviously not going to have gunslingers in this kind of a setting. Why insist on wizards?
While I agree with this sentiment wholeheartedly (and have more-or-less recommended something similar upthread), there's also the issue of player expectations. I have had, for example, one player who insists on playing a spellcaster in every campaign he participates in, and another one who insists on playing a catgirl. Needless to say, these demands-masquerading-as-requests created some intense nights of rewriting my Three Musketeers campaign. ("All right, so we have Athos, Merlin, and Nekomusume, all members of the King's Elite Musket-and-Wand-teers, and you are all trying to defeat the evil Cardinal Optimus Prime, and his henchwoman the Wicked Witch of the West.")
Well, I know it is a radical statement, but just because a player wants a certain character doesn't make that character a necessity. I am happy for you that you enjoy playing campaigns with Nekomusume waving her umbrella at Optimus Prime, though.
I'm trying to customize and fit this towards them. Whatever they want, I'll make it work. So I have the first Xulgath soldier, but so far I need five more enemies. (Might up it if I get more ideas. I like the idea of them escaping sacrificial capture). Any ideas for good troglodyte enemies? This is CR 4 again.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
If you insist on bending to your player's every whim, then you may not be able to run the campaign the way you want to.
|
|
Player expectations/demands will limit the kind of campaigns you can run. That's a given and it works in terms of tone and story as well as available classes. If players players aren't on board for an evil campaign, Way of the Wicked or Hell's Vengeance aren't going to work. If players aren't on board for limited options, something like this primitive campaign won't work either.
That doesn't always mean that they're bad players (though someone demanding to play a wizard and not being satisfied with a sorcerer or witch is pretty close to that line IMO) or that it's a bad campaign, just that the campaign won't work for the group. Or at least that it needs some adjustment which may or may not be possible.
Yeah, a good GM or DM should always work with the players to co-create a campaign that is fun for everyone.
I've never understood that attitude where people put the DM on a pedestal and have him boss the players around. I've usually played in more collaborative groups. When I DM, I enjoy coming up with appropriate challenges for my players. I don't try to force them to do anything they don't want to do.
When I ran my primitives campaign, I used Neanderthals to replace humans (as they hadn't evolved yet) and shuffled about the alternate race traits to make the common elf/dwarf/etc feel more wild, elves didn't have Elvish Magic yet, they had one of the replacements. It really gave the races a different feeling
I also denied an class that required formal training, Wizards, clerics, Paladins, etc, but let the innate versions, as cultures weren't that refined yet. Druids of all races were the first organized force really, as shepards of the land. They advised all races/tribes and caravans.
It depends on how you define primitive.The big issue I see with most of the classes in a primitive setting is, literally, calories. As in, who the hell feeds the person who is going to grow up to be a wizard or a paladin?
All of the "primitive" groups we know about are generally only a few meals away from starvation all the time, which means that hunting and gathering are a full-time job for anyone who wants to be a full-time eater. What does a wizard-in-training offer the rest of the group that's as valuable as the 1500 calories a day she's eating but not finding?
Hunter-gatherer.
Since the OP is defining "advanced" as Aztec-level technology,.... well, the Incas you mentioned weren't actually "primitive" in comparison; in fact, the Incas were better at metalworking than the Aztecs, and still were largely working native metals like copper nuggets with hammers. (The height of American metallurgy was basically smelting metallic copper from its sulphide. No one managed bronze before the arrival of the Europeans.) So anything substantially less sophisticated than the Aztecs is basically neolithic, and probably hunter-gatherer.
Yeah...agrarian culture is rather much the prerequisite for having specialized careers that do not directly produce food. The surplus of food from crops allows people to specialize on a craft and then trade for food with that. Also, in means larger settlements, which could lead to larger demand for such services (ie- no room for a book keeper in a tribe of 10... but a village of 150 with large stores of crops?)
Now for classes- Barbarians? They can use bows, and kill mammoths with pouncing rage spear. Rangers are obvious. Fighters... hard sell, but sure, spear into mammoth (easier if you have someone like a ranger with tracking skills for you, and you just provide the extra muscle).
Paladins? Rather specialized, if you ask me, and often not applicable. A lot of opponents are wild predators and large prey- all neutral. Even when someone attacks you, it might be tribal warfare, and not within the realm of morality (ergo, neutral again). So you would only really see paladins in areas with specific threats (ie- the good old favorites of dragons, undead, and demons). Even then, you will not find many of them- maybe 1 per generation in a tribe.
Sorcerers don't need to wait for training and can immediately aid with magic, so no problem there. They can start shooting rays of frost without having a bachelor's degree.
Druids have animal companions, and kind of fill in for ranger up until they can dominate with wild shape. And here is where we see the problem of wizards- you are not likely going to find a 'pure' wizard, but rather a fighter 1/wizard 1. Because everyone has to contribute, and if you aren't randomly shooting magic from the start, then you have to learn other skills to help hunt and gather. Since we tend to look for single class things in this system, lets say that there are more bards (who fill in for a ton of roles beautifully- minor arcane help, minor healing, melee, buffing the strong hunters, etc.) than wizards.
If you insist on bending to your player's every whim, then you may not be able to run the campaign the way you want to.
It is, however, usually difficult to get Nekomusumes to GM the campaign they'd prefer.
First off: neat.
I'll second dropping the "broken" English when the humans are talking to each other.
Pre-literate people would've sounded just fine to each other.
"Broken" dialect results from people speaking in an unfamiliar tongue, not in their own.
So it would make sense for it to happen with the Xulgaths (or even better, the Xulgaths just using the wrong words sometimes, because they don't give enough of a damn to learn Human properly).
Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeell...
That's not really true.
See, the earliest of languages would sound extremely broken to a modern tongue. Especially an English speaking tongue. Remember, English is a very, very complex language. It's been palling around other languages, beating them over the head, and stealing their words for a very long time. By comparison, an early language would have very few parts to it. You wouldn't have a lot of words for some things.
For example, instead of plant and tree it might just be plant and bigplant. The classic Russian accent in films sounds broken because they skip words they do not normally have words for. Dropping words out of English sounds broken to us, but would not sound broken to them because they just never had those words! It's more a matter of perspective than being truly wrong.
On another note, if there are spells as a factor I favor taking a number of the typical pathfinder spells and just removing them to be "discovered" using the creating a new spell rules. What player doesn't want to create the first fireball? :p
Sounds interesting!
I think there was a chapter in the GM guide where primitive races were modeled--can't find it in the PRD, though.
You could also re-model the wizard class as a variant divine caster (similar or detrimental to the AD&D Lankhmar setting where there was no cleric class): have the original cleric be priests of the good-aligned gods and the wizard are priests of the evil-aligned gods.
Ruyan.
|
|
Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeell...That's not really true.
See, the earliest of languages would sound extremely broken to a modern tongue. Especially an English speaking tongue. Remember, English is a very, very complex language. It's been palling around other languages, beating them over the head, and stealing their words for a very long time. By comparison, an early language would have very few parts to it. You wouldn't have a lot of words for some things.
For example, instead of plant and tree it might just be plant and bigplant. The classic Russian accent in films sounds broken because they skip words they do not normally have words for. Dropping words out of English sounds broken to us, but would not sound broken to them because they just never had those words! It's more a matter of perspective than being truly wrong.
On another note, if there are spells as a factor I favor taking a number of the typical pathfinder spells and just removing them to be "discovered" using the creating a new spell rules. What player doesn't want to create the first fireball? :p
That sounds like just so story reasoning. What evidence is there?
A. Russian accents and second language speakers skipping words that Russian does not have a use for.First, these are speakers of a modern language, not a primitive one.
Second, it sounds broken because it is broken english. If they were speaking Russian, it wouldn't sound broken.
Third, the words that English has and Russian does not have are a function of grammar, not "never having words for things." I'm sure I sometimes sound the same way when speaking German. They have three genders for nouns (masculine, feminine, and neuter or der, die, and das) while English does not generally have gendered nouns.
B. While it may sound plausible that later versions of language have more words and more complex structures, that is not true of English. English does have more words now than in 1611, but the structure of the language is actually simplified in a number of ways. For example, English used to have formal and intimate forms of address like German, Spanish, and many (if not most) other languages. "You" was the formal form of address while "thou" was the intimate (for close friends, social inferiors, etc). If you re-read Shakespeare or the King James bible with that distinction in mind, there are a lot of nuances that you miss if you take a Renaissance Faire "use thou for you because it sounds olde fashiondee" approach to the language.
C. For that matter, the extant sources of ancient language such as the Illiad, Oddysee, Pentatuch, etc do not seem broken or less complex than modern forms. In fact, ancient poetry is more complex and formal than modern poetry which often operates without any rules/forms at all (free and blank verse, etc).
Other than an increase in words to describe newly encountered things like potatoes, firearms, and nuclear weapons, and technical language to describe scientific and engineering concepts, there does not seem to be much evidence for language becoming more complex with time. If anything, the evidence points in the other direction.
Well, those languages you are talking about are not remotely early languages. "Ancient poetry" to us is still, in the scope of earth's history, after a long time of language development with a very rich history to draw on. Comparing it to the theoretical sounds of a truely early language seems difficult.
However, there are elements of their language that could be more complex than English. That's certainly plausible, even likely. Maybe they have a lot of words for rock or something. It's entirely feasible.
Of course, if you believe in the tower of babel language did not develop in the theoretical way I am describing.
Well, those languages you are talking about are not remotely early languages. "Ancient poetry" to us is still, in the scope of earth's history, after a long time of language development with a very rich history to draw on. Comparing it to the theoretical sounds of a truly early language seems difficult.
Oh, Frith on a rock, language complexity again.... John McWhorter has done some work on this, along with others.
All (modern) languages are about equally complex with the exceptions of pidgins and creoles, and one can actually confirm this mathematically. English looks complex when you look at the rigidity of its syntax, until you realize that it has no morphology to speak of; Russian can get away with "missing" all of those words because their function is handled morphologically, and Finnish is,.... well, Finnish, where it's all in the agglutination.
English actually does have a large vocabulary/lexicon (by comparative standards) simply because it has so many French-German word pairs or even French-Latin-German word triples (e.g., "royal," "regal," and "kingly").
I don't think anyone actually knows what "the earliest languages would sound" like. The oldest language that we know of is probably Sumerian, and we have little idea what it sounded like (we have some educated guesses about what its consonant inventory was, for example), and of course, Sumer was already much more advanced than the neolithic hunter-gatherers postulated by the OP ("The PC's have never seen farming or advanced construction. No one has seen metal yet.")
But given that a few hundred years are enough to add all the complexity of a "traditional" language to a creole, I'd be very surprised if the language the PCs spoke was substantially less complex than English, Italian, or Icelandic. Hunter-gatherers today speak languages that are every bit as complex as those of modern societies.
Remember, English is a very, very complex language. It's been palling around other languages, beating them over the head, and stealing their words for a very long time. By comparison, an early language would have very few parts to it. You wouldn't have a lot of words for some things.
For example, instead of plant and tree it might just be plant and bigplant.
By the way, this is almost certainly wrong. A hunter-gatherer culture needs more words for plants, not fewer, because you need to be able to be extremely precise about exactly what plants are which. (Similarly, Eskimos don't actually have a million words for snow, but skiers do).
By the way, this is almost certainly wrong. A hunter-gatherer culture needs more words for plants, not fewer, because you need to be able to be extremely precise about exactly what plants are which. (Similarly, Eskimos don't actually have a million words for snow, but skiers do).Remember, English is a very, very complex language. It's been palling around other languages, beating them over the head, and stealing their words for a very long time. By comparison, an early language would have very few parts to it. You wouldn't have a lot of words for some things.
For example, instead of plant and tree it might just be plant and bigplant.
I will confess, that was a poorly thought out example for the concept I had in mind. Plants are of course, a likely canidate for more words.
What I was trying to distinguish is that a "purer" language will have more words based off their root forms and vocabulary than one with multiple origins. English is muddied. I was not trying to impress there would not be a word for tree, but rather the tree word is more likely, but not nessicarily, attached to the core roots. But regardless, for hunter gatherers tree and plant is a terrible example.
Consider pretty much any of the latin we still speak today as an example closer to what I was trying to get at. Words are formed up of their roots. Pyro into pyromania. It's basically the same as saying "firecrazy." But sounds right purely because we associate it with being correct.
EDIT: I think this comes in a muddying in terms of my own expression. "Complex" was a poor word choice. There are many different forms of complexity. Syntax, grammar, phonology, morphology... what I was directing my comment at is that English is a mixed language, and one with a lot added to it. Trying to translate any language one to one to it won't have the same wildly different forms.
While I agree you shouldn't use "broken" English to sound like hunter-gatherers. It's offensive and inaccurate. In general, languages are as complex as their speakers need it to be.
That said, there is anthropological and linguistic evidence of less complex languages having smaller vocabularies, particularly when it comes to colors. For example, some just have words for dark/black and light/white. Almost invariably, the next color word is red, followed by a fourth color word for grue/bleen (blue/green). After that, there is a progression of color words.
While I agree you shouldn't use "broken" English to sound like hunter-gatherers. It's offensive and inaccurate. In general, languages are as complex as their speakers need it to be.
That said, there is anthropological and linguistic evidence of less complex languages having smaller vocabularies, particularly when it comes to colors. For example, some just have words for dark/black and light/white. Almost invariably, the next color word is red, followed by a fourth color word for grue/bleen (blue/green). After that, there is a progression of color words.
This is more accurate to the concept I was trying to get at. Though, I did mean that any simple language would sound "broken" to us because of our preconceptions of what a language should sound like.
Interestingly enough, Japanese is an excellent example of the grue/bleen concept. They had a word, Ao, for both for a very long time and only recently introduced Midori to distinguish the two.
That said, there is anthropological and linguistic evidence of less complex languages having smaller vocabularies, particularly when it comes to colors.
Not really. For one thing, no language has actually been shown to be "less complex" than any other (with the possible exception of creoles and pidgins).
For another, you're somewhat misinterpreting the Berlin/Kay findings.
For example, some just have words for dark/black and light/white. Almost invariably, the next color word is red, followed by a fourth color word for grue/bleen (blue/green). After that, there is a progression of color words.
But this doesn't mean that that the color terminology is less expressive, just that the terms used for colors are more metaphorical. Berlin and Kay (who did most of the work in this area) were studying "basic color terms," where "basic" excludes color terms that are names for other things.
For example, if you look in the paint aisle of the local Home Despot, you'll see surprisingly few non-metaphorical terms. "Green" is non-metaphorical and a basic color term in English, but "forest green" is not, nor is "avocado," nor "lime" (both of which are the names of objects used as a color reference). Similarly, "white" is a basic color term, but not "cream," "eggshell," or " bone." "Pink" is a basic color term, but "light blue" isn't.
Japanese is generally considered to be a language "lower" on the color scale than English, largely because there is no word for green separate from blue. But of course, if anyone on the forum speaks Japanese, they'll know this is wrong -- it's simply that the word for "green" is a metaphor ("midori," meaning "[honeydew] melon") . Even the languages that have only two colors (black and white) have words for all of the colors you'd see in the paint aisle -- yellow is simply "white-like-a-banana," green is simply "black-like-leaves," and red is "bright-like-blood" or whatever.
And, in turn, what this really means is that the languages with more transparent etymology are going to have fewer basic color terms. Even "black," in English, is really not a BCT, since it (probably) derives from "burnt" in Proto-Germanic and is hence every bit as metaphorical as "eggshell."
I seem to have opened a can of worms here... Firstly, some of the first languages would actually be something along the line of, Abyssal or draconic. This is a fictional seeing after all. Xulgaths aren't really setting us back. (bit of a joke. Don't want to open another can). I'll see what my players think. For now I just want to improve and develop the story and encounters. While some may disagree on having my friends decide, I believe this is our game, and the fun is all of us creating a story. I'm not giving into their whims, I'm making a story. I do appreciate how much you all care though.
Even further off topic, but how has nobody seen metal? Gold doesn't need smelting, you just find it.
This is actually a good point. The Aztecs did have gold, so the Xulgaths might have it for ceremonial reasons. They could take it from the tribes for themselves which is why they don't have any. Also, as nomadic tribes gold is useless. It's quite malleable, and heavy. In a tribe there wouldn't really be that many practical uses.
This is more accurate to the concept I was trying to get at. Though, I did mean that any simple language would sound "broken" to us because of our preconceptions of what a language should sound like.
But it won't be broken to the native speakers of the tongue, which was the point. Presumably the PC's would all be native speakers since they are after all.. native to the campaign setting, not stranded time travelers.
That said, there is anthropological and linguistic evidence of less complex languages having smaller vocabularies, particularly when it comes to colors.
Not really. For one thing, no language has actually been shown to be "less complex" than any other (with the possible exception of creoles and pidgins).
For another, you're somewhat misinterpreting the Berlin/Kay findings.
For example, some just have words for dark/black and light/white. Almost invariably, the next color word is red, followed by a fourth color word for grue/bleen (blue/green). After that, there is a progression of color words.
But this doesn't mean that that the color terminology is less expressive, just that the terms used for colors are more metaphorical. Berlin and Kay (who did most of the work in this area) were studying "basic color terms," where "basic" excludes color terms that are names for other things.
For example, if you look in the paint aisle of the local Home Despot, you'll see surprisingly few non-metaphorical terms. "Green" is non-metaphorical and a basic color term in English, but "forest green" is not, nor is "avocado," nor "lime" (both of which are the names of objects used as a color reference). Similarly, "white" is a basic color term, but not "cream," "eggshell," or " bone." "Pink" is a basic color term, but "light blue" isn't.
Japanese is generally considered to be a language "lower" on the color scale than English, largely because there is no word for green separate from blue. But of course, if anyone on the forum speaks Japanese, they'll know this is wrong -- it's simply that the word for "green" is a metaphor ("midori," meaning "[honeydew] melon") . Even the languages that have only two colors (black and white) have words for all of the colors you'd see in the paint aisle -- yellow is simply "white-like-a-banana," green is simply "black-like-leaves," and red is "bright-like-blood" or whatever.
And, in turn, what this...
Oh, cool. That makes way more sense. I have a hard time believing any one would call a red bird, a blue bird, and a green bird a white bird, a white bird, and a white bird. A white-like-blood bird, a white-like-sky bird, and a white-like-leaves bird makes a whole lot more sense to me.
:-D
I was (mis-?)remembering an old anthropology reading from 20 years ago.
I seem to have opened a can of worms here...
Let's go fishing...
Even further off topic, but how has nobody seen metal? Gold doesn't need smelting, you just find it.This is actually a good point. The Aztecs did have gold, so the Xulgaths might have it for ceremonial reasons. They could take it from the tribes for themselves which is why they don't have any. Also, as nomadic tribes gold is useless. It's quite malleable, and heavy. In a tribe there wouldn't really be that many practical uses.
Metal was used back in the Bronze Age which starts about -4000 BC. The Iron Age goes from about -1300 BC to 700 AD. Per this text copper fields go to -5000 BC.
The question is not was it around, but who had it and how much.
/cevah
Not really. For one thing, no language has actually been shown to be "less complex" than any other (with the possible exception of creoles and pidgins).No language spoken by humans, sure. But what about American Sign Language as spoken by chimpanzees, you know Pan troglodyte?
It seems worth considering.
It's hard to make the time line work out properly. If we're talking about Pan level linguistic proficiency, then we're pushing "human" (PC) development back at least four million years, possibly 13 million, depending on which anthropologist you read (and believe).
To put this in perspective, this is before the earliest stone tools (3.3 MYA), before the domestication of fire (400,000 YA), before the earliest known development of manufactured weapons (300,000 YA), before the earliest art (no bards!) (c. 100,000 YA), before the development of religion (no divine casters!) (c. 70,000 YA), before the development of weapons (c. before the domestication of dogs (30,000 YA), and so forth.
So, yeah, it's a fantasy world, and if you want the PCs to be coelacanths or mammal-like reptiles, that's the GM's call -- but my reading of the OP is that he's looking at a (very interesting) conflict between Neolithic hunter-gatherers and Chalcolithic (Copper Age) farmers. I don't think that the Aztec expys would be bothering to "abduct" and enslave chimpanzees or anything that primitive -- or make "agreements" with them. If the Xulgaths are treating the PCs as people instead of simply as herd animals, the PCs would need to be recognizably sapient -- talking, building fires, making artefacts, and so forth.
In d20 games like d20 Modern, Wealth is an Ability Score, and purchases are like Skill Checks against a given item's Purchase DC.
Yeah, this seems a reasonable way of doing things, and I was going to recommend something similar.
Well, there is lots or precedent in human history for people dealing with other people who are considered sub-human. In recent (past 1000 years) history, skin color seems to have been a common way to organize people in a superior/inferior framework. We used to enslave some of them, make alliances with others we had no intention of honoring, commit genocide against others, sometimes intentionally, sometimes not. We do that sort of thing much less than we used to. The PCs could easily be seen as sub-Xulgath in any number of ways.
I think you have grabbed exactly the wrong end of the stick. It's not a question of treating people like animals (which God knows we have done enough of and continue to do), but of treating animals like people, which to the best of my knowledge has never been done on larger than an individual scale anywhere or anywhen in human history.
One doesn't, for example, make "treaties" with buffalo -- one hunts them. Or perhaps one is enlightened and refrains from hunting them. But that's as far as it goes.
So for the world to be as the OP described, and for the Xulgath to have the sort of relationship with the human tribes as described, the humans need to be something the Xulgath recognize as "people."
I'm going to be running a campaign that is pretty much the opposite of this: quasi-Victorian steampunk sky pirates dealing with post-apocalyptic Stone Age/Bronze Age Lovecraftian cultists.
This discussion that everyone is having is interesting, but I think it's time we stopped making Linguistics and Knowledge (History) checks and started getting back on topic.
I just said oogah because I didn't want people to be too stupid, like stereotypical cavemen.(I know they're not really cavemen, but one can at a time). For the moment I'm more concerned about having more encounters for PC's.
What types of creatures are you focusing on?
Primitive demihumans, troglodytes, and megafauna? Dinosaurs? Giant birds? Any magical beasts or stuff like that in particular?
What about non-combat encounters? Wildfires, rapids, sinkholes, mudslides, Pre-troglodyte ruins? Primitive troglodyte offshoot cave dwellers? Because troglodytes. ;-) Traps to capture demihumans for sacrifices?
Will there be rival up-and-coming "primitive" or monstrous societies? Gnolls, lizardfolk, kuo-toa, sahuagin, or grippli?
Dragons?
Or will the troglodytes be worshipping ancient aberrations, like aboleths and other things with tentacles and eyestalks?
So as someone that does run a more stone-age, tribal style of game, here are some ideas from my game.
Economy: Many people believe that barter economy is the common ancestor to our modern day currency economy, but more anthropologists are finding that a favor-based economy is much more common in old times. Essentially, you do something for someone or give them something and they owe you a favor. This is a gross oversimplification, but one you can use in game, in addition to bartering.
Endemic Warfare: Violence is the everyday life of a tribal hunter-gatherer, though generally not for ideological reasons. Large scale warfare of agrarian city states were preceded by raiding parties where one tribe would attack another, stealing supplies that they want. This could be food, tools, and women for marriage. There really isn't peace time or war time, but rather endemic raiding as a way of life. This would help hunter gatherers access more tools and calories, especially from newly formed city-states. Especially since the skills that make a great hunter make a great warrior, which cannot be said about farming.
Religion and Culture: It is true that many tribes started off without written word, but there are still languages that they would speak and art they would create. Religion is more basic and animistic. Spirits and shamans play a large role, as do the creatures your people hunt (or are hunted by). Look at animals they would admire, fear, or depend upon, and make cool myths about them. Tribal culture tend to oral history, but also the usage of pictograms. And don't forget ancient burial barrows, mounds, and stone monoliths.
I like watching Crash Course World History. The first episode talks about hunter gatherers and is a good watch.
Especially since the skills that make a great hunter make a great warrior, which cannot be said about farming.
And it isn't like early cities were a nice place to live in. Heck, they weren't nice up until about the late 19th century really.
It is comparing a hunter-gatherer with a varied diet (cause you can't reliably find the same thing in a row many times) with a lot of meat versus an agrarian farmer that mostly eats the exact same radishes every single day. It is certainly would not be unusual for an early agrarian city state to have a lack of variety in crops (relying on one 'good' one for the climate and soil).
And then you get into the problem of 'peeing upstream from where you draw water'... the classic hygiene problem. For hunter gatherers, they usually don't stay in one place long enough for this to be a lasting problem. But a village is pretty much stuck where it is built. Everyone is pushed into the same small area and forced to work on the same general work together- plague spreads well in those conditions.
Overall, huntergatherers were usually better fed (... in part due to the raiding of food from agrarian villages), had light exercise with travel (great cardio!), and less likely to suffer diseases. So it is no surprise that the big boogieman of the ancient world were the 'barbarians'. Why the Mongols could make it all the way from China to the point that they were knocking on Rome's doorstep.
At the risk of a derail... Why is the caveman seen as realistic? Sure, caves are shelter. They have been used. Stuff in them has remained, so there are many archaeological finds in them.
But. There really are not that many caves. It seems unrealistic to me that there was ever any significant part of a population living in caves. And yet, "caveman" is a historical theory of where we came from???
Before agriculture, there weren't that many people, either. Like, less than a million for a few million years. Probably less than 100,000 on the whole planet.
And before people could build shelters, they had to live somewhere. Caves are great shelter. Especially in temperate and colder climates.
Also, non-cave residences don't survive into the archaeological record. So it doesn't mean they didn't happen, it just means their remains didn't survive into the modern era.
They ARE great shelter. Probably the malibu beach condos of the time. They still could not all have lived in caves.
Not all. Just lots and lots. There are lots of caves out there, and there were hardly any people walking around.
And folk like to get out of the rain. And snow. And noonday sun.