Survival-Action Setting Creation Yhread

>fire, when it can be made and maintained, is quasi-spiritual.

This could tie back into the magic. Shamanistic Fire/water magic, and dark blood magic. Something more difficult and unreliable to sustain, the other much easier but comes with drawbacks.

>Where's the big revelation?
As much as I feel these are unnecessary in settings, a primal world like this needs something more to it.

I don't have an answer at this point but I would look at the magic and spirituality of the world.

The magics you get from fire are hard to maintain, but fire is life and light and change, and it can help fight off encroaching ice, but it needs fuel to happen and work, and that eats up precious resources. How desperate are you to keep the fire going?

Water magic is much easier, more powerful, but capricious. Water is also life, liquid water is precious, but it's also the deep, the dark and the cold, it's stagnation. Water doesn't need anything like fuel to keep it going, but consumes even quicker than fire if you're not careful.

What if the overarching plot is Religion. The Great Spirit, a conglomerate of the spirit of all living things, Constantly in combat with the Dark, a realization of Man's Primal fear, similar to how the Boogeyman was in Terry Pratchett ' s Hogfather, or in The Rise of the Guardians.

This.

Seconding this one.

So, everyone agrees that it should be more primal and less about technology, so how about there are different tiers for behemoths?

Like, you have the cosmic near-lovecraftian beasts, but wouldn't be cool to see even bugs and crap like that to have blood you can use for magic? Like, imagine this:

>tier zero: aforementioned bugs. Blood magic is not very effective, and therefore not very damaging to you.

>tier one: mice to dog sized... things... where blood magic is kinda effective, and kinda damaging.

>tier two: big dogs to bear sized, where they are now somewhat dangerous when alive and blood magic is effective and damaging.
>tier three: elephant sized. They are in smaller numbers, but low level players will be very much advised to gtfo when they see one. Blood magic is pretty darn effective and pretty darn damaging.
>tier four: whale sized. Only a fool with time to find one would consider taking one on alone, even at a high level. Blood magic is very much effective and very much damaging.
>tier five: moon sized. There is no hope against fighting a god. there are about 6 in existence, and it's going to stay that way (unless you can use blood magic on it, then there might become another one...)

What if the great spirit was a single being with a 3 dimensional personality.

Its virtues and strengths highlighted by the light of fire magic. Positive traits people strive to embody, however hard or challenging that may be.

Its negative traits, fears, and insecurities found in the darkness of water/blood magic. The things everyone everyone feels and can easily succumb to.

The battle is something it eternally faces, much like inhabitants of this world.

Another idea could be a neutral spirit that represents the freezing.

Using this, if no one has any objections.

This works... rather well. Very primal, very in theme with the setting.

Elemental and spiritual magic is a major part. Blood magic, living sacrifices. I'm loving this.

I'm thinking Savage Worlds for this setting. Any other suggestions?

Are you going to make a doc for the GM's guide? I would totally run this with my friends.

Sure. I'll mostly just take a few pages out of the available supplements, throw them all together as they fit the theme, and create a bunch of stat blocks for monsters. Anyone have any further suggestions for the setting?

I do enjoy the original picture as the main setting. Maybe there are warmer areas, but it gets to that part in spring where everything is thawing but there is still slush everywhere and it's still cloudy and miserable (pic related)

Of course. There needs to be Forest areas, ice floes, and other areas where fishing, foraging and hunting can be done. OP Pic is gorgeous, but it's probably at the edge of civilization, not the center of it.

Thank you for liking where I live.

But yeah, there definately has to be variety.

I misread your post. is NOT op.

You're good bro. Where is that? Looks like Utah or Wyoming in winter.

North eastern Utah, so it's very close to Wyoming.

Tell me about runes, OP. What kind of powers? Does it vary from behemoth to behemoth? Does the power depend on the shape of the rune? If so, how did the tribes learn what shapes bestowed power and which ones were just cool tattoos?

Properties of blood vary not from the type of creature, but the type of blood they have. Some bugs may have the same color of blood as a titan, but not the same Purity. Tougher beast = purer blood. Shape of the rune is determined by number of lines you uses, which acts as an analogue to SW character Points in said abilities.

Orphans of the Sky style, the people arrived at this place on a generation ship. On the generation ship, all memory of what the ship was and why they did what they did there was forgotten.

So you've got a primitive man happening upon a primitive, mysterious, magical world. And on this world, behemoths. Maybe each of these things is totally unique from the other. Maybe they've only killed one, and it has powered so much magical advancement, but they're running out of blood and the population is growing. This stuff is the most valuable thing in this society.

The most riches you could ever obtain would be in the defeat of another behemoth, but these things are on a totally different order than all the other animals of the planet. They're truly behemoth.

What is the name of Behemoth everybody thinks is going to be the next one to get taken down? Why are they targeting that one? Why, maybe, do the players actually have a totally different behemoth in mind, one much farther away and much scarier but with weaknesses only the party knows about. How do they go about keeping that secret while also getting a company together to take it down? What are the social implications of openly seeking to slay a Behemoth? Is it naive? Is it seen as not pulling your own weight? Is it sexy?

Interesting... however, this goes against the grain of what we've established so far. The setting is very much man in his natural state, without some hidden backstory. They're tribal, they're on this planet, and that's good enough. Introducing Sci-Fi elements subverts the Primal concept.

As for the rest... that's very likely a decent plot hook.

Id just use Wolf Packs and Winter Snow with some changes for flavour/magic shit.

Man can and will revert to a primal state if you take away all his technology and learning and even memory that such things ever existed in the world where his great-great-great-grandfather lived. I don't think it's contradictory at all to have everyone on the planet being the descendants of failed space colonists, with nobody knowing a thing about it and the space ship being totally beyond repair, unrecognizable, and possibly even its scant remains being unreachable. Honestly, I think if done well, it could make for a neat sort of red herring reveal as a sort of easter egg if the players happen to stumble upon a (useless) piece of the ship or something: Yep, your ancestors were space colonists, but you know what, it doesn't make any difference and your character doesn't even have the capacity to understand it.

Anyway, I've got some random thoughts for this thread:
Fighting a Behemoth should require great strength in every sense, but moreso great wits and resourcefulness. Man must cheat as hard as he can to even imagine surviving an encounter with such a terror. You cannot just throw a bunch of badass dudes at the monster and whittle it down. To begin with, getting 50 badass dudes together is a legendary feat by itself. The largest collection of people you've ever heard of is maybe a hundred. The concept of not knowing a person's name is foreign to you, unless they're a stranger, you know, like those two guys who joined the tribe ten years ago from across the mountains, we didn't know their names when they came from the mountains. The concept of people being hostile to each other should be not unheard of but definitely unusual, since not having the support of the tribe is almost certain death.