A Cozy, Creepy, Winter Campaign

>Your PCs are a team of couriers and mail-carriers tasked with delivering supplies and communications between remote mining and fishing communities in the frozen northlands.

>Together, you crew a large crawler vehicle, designed to haul cargo through the snow and provide comfortable if cramped shelter for its operators as they make their appointed rounds.

>As the government's presence and ability to respond to incidents and accidents in this region is tenuous at best, the PCs are often asked to help with a wide range of situations.

>Most of these are mundane in nature, like delivering a time-sensitive letter to the next town along their route, checking in on an elderly prospector or repairing a faulty generator.

>Sometimes though, the situation is more creepy, like running across a "cursed" unfinished rail line, like investigating mysterious disappearances or sighting otherworldly creatures.

What are some potential cozy or creepy quest hooks, happenings and set-pieces for the crew of a roving snow-crawler to come across as they traverse the great white north?

>What is radio

Wireless communication has been around for a very long time.

Barring radio, pigeons.

Magnetic interference.

>devolves into the Thing by 5th session
>TPK

That thread was great.

Tie in Tunguska event somehow.

You're riding through the snow, 500 km from the nearest notable town and suddenly something massive crashes just over horizon with earth-shattering impact. As you approach closer, you see the nearby tundra forest knocked down by the explosion. Mutilated bodies of reindeer caught unaware, all over the place. A massive smoking crater...

An alien ship crash site? Or a strange metallic meteorite. You can just fit a small piece into your cargo hold, for proof, as you note the location and proceed to the nearest city to relay the news.

Strange things start happening... A creature may follow you, barely visible at night in the snow. Or the rock may begin to affect the crew in some way.

Or, by the time you get back to civilization you hear of a massive military operation that cordoned off the crash site and removed all the evidence. An official story is spread everywhere, and you can't help but notice some discrepancies. The thing you picked up from the site... is it dangerous?

You should use the crawler picture next thread. This one isn't as recognizable.

Yeah, that's why the post office went out of business in the 1900s, because everyone was using radios to communicate with their loved ones across the country.

Don't be a wet blanket
I'd imagine rural Russian Siberia is still in the 1940s technologically.

He'll, this game setting could be run during the cold war in Siberia! All to add to the ffect

Because you can transport physical goods by radio right? Just send some fuel and replacement parts flying through the air.

>airplanes

Sometimes yes but bad weather is a frequent occurrence.

May I suggest you try using background ambient music. When their tredging through the snow have and ambient loop of a blizzard sound effect

When they're inside the crawler, there's a second loop of a muffled engine running and the blizzard loop is quieter.

Outside of the crawler, just blizzard loop.

bumparoni and cheese

Once during the campaign, have santa claus show up and give everyone a gift. Make it really ambiguous if it's fsther christmas or just a dude in a sleigh.

For creepy, have the crawler run out of fuel on a shipping route, forcing the party to spend a few days in an empty hunting lodge until another crawler can give them a lift. The lodge is comfortable, but they keep seeing someone lurking near the crawler when they look out the window, who runs if the party goes outside. See if the players try to communicate with or catch the person, really build their paranoia.

Another creepy plot hook can involve someone stealing a key piece of cargo and fleeing into the woods. The players track them and find some kind of primitive nest. Better grab the package and flee before the Yeti shows up.

I like the last one. Even better if the GM foreshadowed it by mentioning how several years ago another crawler on the same route had some important component stolen and the crew died while trying to recover it.

That's when they notice the bones and old parkas.

So if I wanted to do this, is there a system that suits it or am I making up a rule set as I go? There was something I saw called Small Towns that I think would work, but I don't have the damn thing

>go to 4plebs Veeky Forums archive
>search for filename small towns.pdf
>question marks
>PDF!

>This thread again
>With my webm
Daily reminder you are doing it wrong, if you are not having a blimp

Um... don't want to be a wet blanket (even if I am), but do you know where Tunguska even is?
Having there snow or being 500 km away from anything is near impossible there. 100 - that's more likely.
The only reason it wasn't surveyed instantly was because there was a fucking revolution going in Russia.

Russian revolution (the big one, anyhow) happened like 10 years after Tunguska event.

The previous one was over 2 years before it.

Like, if you're going to try to tie in RL history you might as well be correct about it.

Getting to a place in the middle of an uninhabited frozen forest in the middle of Siberia (a huge place where nobody lives) using 1908 level of tech might be more difficult than you think. There are no roads, planes were invented ~5 years ago, railroad hasn't been built and having hundreds of kilometers of unsettled wilderness is what Siberia is all about.

So you get a dog sled expedition from the nearest largish town and ride for 2 weeks.

You need crawlers, OP.

>Like, if you're going to try to tie in RL history you might as well be correct about it.
>Getting to a place in the middle of an uninhabited frozen forest in the middle of Siberia (a huge place where nobody lives) using 1908 level of tech might be more difficult than you think. There are no roads, planes were invented ~5 years ago, railroad hasn't been built and having hundreds of kilometers of unsettled wilderness is what Siberia is all about.

What made you think that a setting featuring made-up countries, made-up technology, and made-up supernatural beings would perfectly emulate our world?

Stop fucking back-pedalling - yer retarded. You claimed folks couldn't get to tunguska due to revolution - user pointed out that your grasp of history was wrong.
And you never ever stated this was pure fantasy.
Quit being retarded, or quit trolling. Whichever.

Hello, friend! You seem agitated, so take a breath and let me "lay it all out" for you:

This is my second post in this conversation.

This is not the first thread we've had on this topic.

You should lurk moar before posting.

I've been in all those thread, asshat - you're the fag who luvs tha cumfy, and hates tha realism and crunch. You're the stain that kept fucking up them decent threads, apparently. You're the fag who luvs da feelz and hatez da roolz. You make shit up for the sake of 'cumfy' without any regard to logic or reason. You were rightly lambasted before, because you deliberately behaved like a simpering child throughout real meaningful discussions; and all because reality was too 'harsh' for your delicate sensibilities: you just wanna comfy snow trek! No bully!! No nasty realism!!! Just comfy winter snugliness....
You should think moar before postan, friendo.

i know all those lovely grammatical errors and lovely spellings are (hopefully) intentional, as a form of satire, but the over use just undermines it and makes you look pretty retarded. cool it

I did basically this for five years working on the North Slope in a warehouse. My first winter out there was eerie as hell. No snow cat but still.

Beware the Yeti.

Bunp

Looking good, but you forgot to call me a numale or a cuck.