Interest Check: Savage Tribes STGOD

[loomer]

This topic is exactly what the name promises - just an interest check, nothing more. In scale, we'd be looking at small tribes (a couple of hundred people) or warbands, rather than huge nations. They exist, but only as NPCs.

For a brief backstory on exactly what this savage tribes setting entails:

Basically, I got rather bored and started creating a fantasy setting inspired by the Orlanthi from RuneQuest, Conan, and a fair bit of heavy metal. You won't find any Elves here, but you will find ancient and powerful dragons, strange hairy men from the Far East who can't talk properly, and brutal, warlike gods.

On the note of brutal, warlike gods, the divine is very much an active part of the setting, with four 'main' gods and dozens of smaller ones, ranked basically as follows:
-The Allfather (more in a moment)
-The Three Children
-The Minor Gods
-The Greatest Spirits/The Smallest Gods (often, they're one and the same)
-The Ancient Ancestors
-The Lesser Spirits
-The Ancestors
-Totem Animals
-Regional spirits

In this setting, the Allfather is literally that. He made the entirety of existence after suddenly developing a body in the formless void that existed before time and thought, eating all the other spirits that were in the void, and then vomiting them out as dust and water, and the Three Children - the Mother Cat, the Dragon God, and the Wise Tree.

Now, unlike most creator deities, the Allfather is rather chaotic and even mindless. He brought the universe forth through his sheer tenacity for eating things and killing, afterall - in fact, it was the Three Children who actually made the world, the stars, and the life (though not in that order). Naturally, the Allfather wants to eat them - in fact, the Allfather is all about strength of arms, the right of the victor to claim the belongings of the defeated, and even the right to feast on their body.

The Three Children are a little different. We'll start with the Mother Cat.

She was responsible for making the first water spirits after the creation of the universe, and later, she made the plants and animals. She's tricky, however, and far from the kind and loving deities you normally see in such roles. You sacrifice to her for the harvest, sure, but you also sacrifice when you want an enemy crippled by bad trading sense, by subterfuge, or just plain bad luck.

The Dragon God is just what he sounds like to these people - essentially, they think he's a giant dragon, flying between the stairs. Meteors are believed to be his eggs, and so forth. In terms of creation, he made the first fire spirits by deciding that plain old dust was boring and that setting it on fire would be fun. He was the one who shaped the still young world with his fiery breath, melting it down like an iron orb and reshaping it with mighty claws and fangs. Ironically, he's the least malevolent of all four 'main' deities - his primary focus is on tending the land and keeping to yourself, but most of his worshippers will snap if you provoke them and have pretty intense tempers, just like their giant lizards.

The Wise Tree had no direct role in creation, except to make the featureless ball that was to become the world from the leftover dust in the void, and convince his brother and sister to help him make a plaything. He made no animals, he made no spirits, he merely watched and approved. His part came later, when the Allfather himself made the first of men to destroy the world out of spite for his children.

He subverted the Allfather by teaching man language, farming, the 'proper' ways of worshipping the gods and spirits, and so forth. He paid for this act with almost complete destruction, as the Allfather ate him and missed only a few fragments, from which it took the Wise Tree six thousand years to regrow. He has the least worshippers of any major god and grants no direct boons, only the knowledge that he's watching and perhaps helping behind the scenes.

Those are the four major gods, but that's not to say that a tribe will only worship one of them at a time. The majority choose one as their 'prime' god and pay partial homage to the rest. Some follow only lesser deities or the ancestors, but since the Allfather can only be held at bay with sacrifices, the majority of tribes will do so at least six times a year just to keep the world alive.

In terms of technology, the setting is generally at an iron age level, with a few exceptions - in the Southern Deserts, for instance, where the Wise Tree was most worshipped, technology advanced into the early middle ages before a great cataclysm destroyed their society. Now the nomads are reduced to the bronze age or a few tribes to the iron, and puzzle over the strange books and paintings left behind.

There's one main species - mankind. There are others, like the Clawers (essentially lobsterpeople. I know, creative in the extreme) or even more primitive forms of man born after the Wise Tree's subversion to take on mankind's original goal, but regular old humanity rules the day.

I'll leave it there for now, but if anyone's interested, I'll expand on it a bit more.

[loomer]

Upon doing some more work on the setting (languages, mostly), it has struck me that this may be better suited as a general RP instead of an actual, factual STGOD. So, same base details, differing game. We'd be looking at a handful of folk, using a 20-sided die but with significant Storyteller and GURPS influence.