[Charnel Gods] Primal Twilight Epoch/Setting

[hardcoremoose]

I just want to point out that Charnel Gods loves pacting!  You can't pact with Nameless, but Ancients and Bygones are fair game, and that's exactly what these legendary Beasts sound like to me.

And remember, Bygones and Ancients (especially Ancients!) have been through this Fell Weapons business before.  They'll have wisdom to share and grudges that might span many Epochs.

- Scott

[Judd]

I just want to point out that Charnel Gods loves pacting!  You can't pact with Nameless, but Ancients and Bygones are fair game, and that's exactly what these legendary Beasts sound like to me.

And remember, Bygones and Ancients (especially Ancients!) have been through this Fell Weapons business before.  They'll have wisdom to share and grudges that might span many Epochs.

- Scott

The Great Boar that remembers former worlds, the Lion whose roar once shattered a Fell Weapon that decimated its Pride and Death's Wolf Pack that hunt down souls who attempt to wait out the world's passing in the guts of an ancient, dead god, hoping none notice them.

Sweet.

[hardcoremoose]

Judd,

Yes!  That's awesome stuff.

Consider these animals, who in a previous time were just regular ol' animals, but somehow survived on the fringes while doomsday came and went.  Now these few have grown in size and intellect and have made it their goal to keep humanity from ever rebuilding, because they've seen it all before...

The Fell Weapons want to destroy man's civilization, and the legendary beasts want to prevent him from ever having one in the first place.  I know that's where this thread started, but I'm just now seeing the symmetry.

- Scott

[Old_Scratch]

Judd,

Yes!  That's awesome stuff.

SNIP!

The Fell Weapons want to destroy man's civilization, and the legendary beasts want to prevent him from ever having one in the first place.  I know that's where this thread started, but I'm just now seeing the symmetry.

- Scott

Yes, Judd, that's some great stuff, just the sort of thing I was thinking about.

Scott, I'm glad you appreciate the symmetry, and I think that is what I want the players to pick up on initially. However, through play, I want the issues to become a bit murkier and more complicated. I can imagine the creatures of the Forest having their own rivalries, with an Old Rat guiding humans to a Fell Weapon to avenge itself upon the other forest creatures. I can imagine a boar, with a Fell Weapon imbedded in its body, stalking the forest for decades, warped and twisted by the Fell Spear's Taint and spreading fear amongst both the Forest and the Humans. Trees whose roots have dug so deep that they reach down to the Carrion Fields and have fed off the dead, and become either so glutted that they are mad or so sickened from the carrion meal that they look forward to the impending doom.

I think a cut and dry "Four Legs Good, Two Legs Bad" can make for an uninteresting game in the long run, but with a bit of blurring between the lines, it can make for some interesting tension between two seemingly different sides.

Someone asked for Descriptors, I'll try and come up with some, but I've been drawing a bit of a blank lately.

Lastly, Scott, while rereading Charnel Gods a few questions came to mind, but I'll only ask you about one...

You state that in some Epochs the knowledge of the end varies, and that in some, the knowledge that they were all merely doomed to die was a common belief... Could you perhaps give a brief example of what such an epoch would look like. The Aztec/Mayan setting I briefly explored here as an alternative kind of vibes off of a lesser version of that, but I'd like to see an example of a full on dark and brooding epoch when their end is common knowledge.

And is anything ever going to be added to the Charnel Gods website? You mentioned contributing some content...

Anyhow, thanks everyone for the great ideas!

===
Garett

[hardcoremoose]

empty post...sorry about the flub.

- Scott

[hardcoremoose]

If you're talking about the Charnel Gods pages at my site, then probably not.  If you're talking about the Charnel Gods Resources page that Bryant Durrell set up, I sure hope to see some extra content there.  I've been kind of lazy about submitting my own new material to the Resource page, but I haven't played Charnel Gods since last year's GenCon.  Even so, I've got Weapons and critters around here somewhere that would be cool to add someday...

In any event, once you've played you should submit this material for posterity's sake, because it's very cool.

As for an Epoch where the people have accepted their own doom, I think I was imagining a Scandinavian culture with a sort of Ragnarok-is-around-the-corner feel to it.  I wasn't that far removed from having written WYRD when I started with Charnel Gods, and I think it's obvious that the former influenced the latter quite a bit.  There's actually a fourth sample setting that never made it into the book, which was the Lands of the Spear Kings, and it's very much Beowulf.  Their whole people were terrorized by a single monster (one of the Nameless), and they turned to the Fell Weapons to fight the beast, even though they knew what the end result of that would be.  I forget why I ended up ditching that Epoch...time constraints probably, and maybe because I didn't have any art for it.  That would be one for the Resources pages, if I could ever find my notes for it (or felt like rewriting it from memory).

- Scott