Setting Direction¶

The setting is not a direct Altai, Iron Age, or historical reconstruction.

Use those references only as partial inspiration. The stronger direction is a fictional low-infrastructure northern survival world shaped by terrain, weather, animal relations, seasonal movement, handmade technology, and local knowledge.

Core Statement¶

The game is set in a material, pre-industrial world where survival depends on reading land and body before relying on abstract systems.

Technology exists, but it should remain understandable, repairable, craftable, and visibly connected to material processes. A tool should feel like embodied knowledge: something made from wood, hide, fiber, bone, stone, clay, metal, fire, time, and practice.

The player should rely on senses, memory, terrain reading, animal behavior, weather signs, condition, and carried tools more than on opaque infrastructure.

Geography Range¶

The setting should support many terrain types. The systems should work in mountains, forests, wetlands, tundra, cold islands, river valleys, upland steppe, glacier edges, rocky coasts, and transitional temperate regions.

Northern and mountain regions are the tonal center because they naturally support pressure from weather, distance, wetness, darkness, shelter, fire, fatigue, hunger, and seasonal change.

Other biomes can work if they still respect the same material logic: terrain creates pressure, local knowledge matters, and survival depends on concrete relations rather than generic resource collection.

Cultural Inspiration¶

Altai and steppe references are useful as early inspiration, but they should not define the setting directly.

Lean more broadly into northern and eastern European adjacency where useful: forests, bogs, rivers, cold uplands, winter routes, small settlements, seasonal movement, craft traditions, folk practices, borderlands, imposed authority, and local memory.

The setting should be fictional enough to avoid claiming authority over a real culture, but grounded enough that tools, clothing, shelters, food, travel, and social pressure feel materially plausible.

Technology Boundary¶

The key boundary is not a specific era. The boundary is infrastructure.

Allowed technology should be understandable without modern industrial systems. It can be complex, but it should be possible to imagine a skilled person or small community making, repairing, or explaining it with pre-industrial tools and local materials.

Core Allowed Technology¶

• fire, hearths, lamps, torches, charcoal, and smoke
• temporary and semi-permanent shelters
• packs, baskets, cords, rope, nets, and containers
• knives, axes, spears, bows, slings, simple shields, and hand tools
• hidework, tanning, wool, weaving, sewing, bark work, and felt-like materials
• pottery, drying, smoking, fermenting, salting, and storage pits
• traps, snares, fish weirs, fences, markers, caches, and trail signs
• sledges, skis, snowshoes, simple boats, rafts, and animal tack
• herbal preparations and practical medicine based on observation
• bronze or iron tools if the scenario supports the social infrastructure behind them

Careful Technology¶

These can exist, but they imply stronger settlement, labor, and infrastructure:

• blacksmithing and regular metal supply
• larger boats, bridges, mills, roads, carts, and permanent storehouses
• written records, maps, boundary markers, contracts, and taxation
• large herd management, long trade routes, and specialized craftspeople

Use them when the scenario wants to explore dependency, access, power, maintenance, or social organization.

Excluded By Default¶

• guns
• engines
• electricity
• modern medicine
• industrial production
• GPS, modern surveying, and scientific instrumentation as player tools
• modern logistics as the player's normal support layer
• abstract money as the primary progression system

Northern Pressure¶

The northern direction should not be decorative. It should create play pressure.

Useful pressures include:

• cold, wetness, wind, and exposure
• long distances between safe places
• seasonal routes that change with thaw, snow, ice, flood, drought, and fog
• limited daylight and visibility
• food preservation and spoilage
• clothing, shelter, and fire as survival infrastructure
• animal migration, predator pressure, and track visibility
• social dependence on shared knowledge, tools, routes, and stored food

Scenario Use¶

This setting supports scenarios about local material pressure:

• a winter route that is shorter but more dangerous than the long valley path
• a storehouse or iron source that creates dependency and leverage
• a settlement losing practical knowledge after relying on trade goods
• a boundary imposed across grazing, hunting, or seasonal travel routes
• a ritual that works because it focuses attention, encodes ecological knowledge, coordinates a group, or perhaps something stranger
• a broken bridge, missing herd, flooded crossing, failed cache, sick animal, or exhausted traveler changing the local system

Avoid¶

• treating any real culture as a costume set
• flattening northern inspiration into generic shamans, clans, yurts, and harsh winters
• romanticizing mobile or low-tech life as pure freedom
• making technology feel like generic crafting progression detached from material practice
• turning the setting into high fantasy by default
• using modern political language directly when material situations can carry the same theme

Design Rule¶

The setting should keep asking one question:

What does this place make people depend on?

If the answer is concrete and playable, it belongs.