Creating the Setting
The setting isn’t just backdrop. It’s womb, scripture, threat, and chorus. It shapes the language your people will use, the rituals they depend on, the fears they inherit, and the symbols they make sacred.
This is the only part of the game where you can’t roll dice. You must speak this place into being. Together.
Think with your body, pull from your dreams. What smells rise from the dust? What does the dark feel like? What happens when the sun disappears?
Setting Elements
You can roll 2 6-sided dice and go with what you land on below, or you can choose or make up your own.
RITUAL NOTE
Once the setting is chosen, everyone should add something to the map : a symbol, a scrawl, a scratch. You now share not only a world, but an emerging memory of it. A memory that will change.
This is the land that holds us.
It teaches us how to kneel, how to speak, how to die.
02. A wind-carved cliffside riddled with tunnels
03. The submerged bones of a dead beast
04. A dark coastline where stars fall into the sea
05. A roving city stitched together from scraps
06. The shifting edge of a fungal bloom
07. A deep canyon where sound bends and vanishes
08. The hollow skull of a mountain, where rain sings in the bone tunnels
09. A salt plain etched with circles no one remembers drawing
10. Beneath the dreaming roots of a forest that hums when no one listens
11. In a crater lake filled with mirrored water that forgets your reflection
12. On the frozen skin of a long-dead ocean, where breath crystallizes mid-sentence
WHAT SUSTAINS US?
This is what we gather, grow, consume, invoke.
It shapes our tools, our speech, our prayers.
02. Salt scraped from the backs of sleeping leviathans
03. Goats whose breath is believed to carry prophecy
04. Rain harvested from the shadows of sacred trees
05. What few drops of sun leak through the forest canopy
06. Mycelial threads traded in knots and braids
07. Mossmilk from blue lichen growing on ruins
08. Dream-fruit harvested only during eclipses, bitter and bright with memory
09. Silt filtered from the riverbed, ground into ashcakes and eaten in silence
10. Moth-honey
11. Glowing reed-marrow, boiled for warmth and prophecy
12. Sacred texts consumed one page at a time in ritual meals
WHAT DO WE FEAR?
These are the things we do not name lightly. They move in the dark behind our stories. They give our symbols their teeth.
02. The forgetting of sacred names and their correct pronunciation
03. The sky cracking open again, like it did before
04. The laughter of children born with deep memories
05. The Cold
06. Being seen by the watchers beneath the sand
07. The return of the Language That Was, spoken by the dead
08. That one day the symbols will mean nothing, and we will not notice
09. The echo that answers back in your voice but isn’t you
10. The Hollow Ones that take our skins
11. That the oldest stone will turn over and reveal our true name
12. That we were wrong about what the ritual was keeping out
OPTIONAL QUESTIONS
If your group wants to dive deeper, consider discussing:
- What marks a life well-lived here?
- What is done to the body when someone dies?
- What color is always painted on sacred doors?
- What animal is never named?
- Where do you go when you need to remember?
- Where are you forbidden to look?
For each section and Age, we’ll share a GAMEPLAY EXAMPLE. This one is called the Dust Cycle.
In the Dust Cycle, the settlement of Oru’Tesh lay on the salt border of a fractured desert. It was sustained by wind, goats, and reverence. It feared the return of Fire, an ancient storm that once consumed everything that could not kneel.