Thule is not your typical medieval fantasy setting. This is a world of savage tribes and decadent cities, a hard land that breeds hard heroes. Outside the dubious safety of the city walls, you can expect to find the hands of all other men and women turned against you… along with the fangs and claws of ferocious beasts, ancient horrors, and degenerate half-human savages.

In this grim and brutal land, notions such as duty, honor, and compassion have little use. Some heroes fight for tribe or city, and some fight simply to survive, but most adventurers are sellswords and freebooters with no higher ambition than to carve out their fortunes however they can. The prospect of gold and glory is all they need to draw them on, and even though most will die terrible deaths in far-off places, a few may make themselves lords… or even kings.

What Makes an Adventure Primeval?

If you’re hunting Ice Age beasts, battling degenerate cultists, or plundering the ruined temples of serpent-men, you’re well on your way to a Thulean adventure. Set your story in the right locale and populate your adventure site with the right monsters and challenges, and you’ve got most of the ingredients you need to run a game in Primeval Thule. But beyond these straightforward choices of setting and monster mix, the best Thule adventures draw upon common themes and tropes that cater to the mercenary and savage nature of the setting.

Greed or Need: As mercenaries and freebooters, PCs don’t just sit around waiting for noble quests to be handed out. Adventurers in Thule are driven by two primary motives: opportunism or necessity. By opportunism, we mean that the typical Thulean adventurer keeps his or her ear to the ground and is always eager for rumors of lost treasures, unplundered ruins, or brazen schemes for self-enrichment. To some extent, adventures in Thule are self-directed; PCs are always looking out for a promising goal, and when opportunity knocks, they’re ready to answer. When opportunities seem thin, PCs are likely to come up with a scheme and put it in motion.

While adventurers often seek out worthy prizes out of simple avarice or ambition, Thule has a way of smashing even the most carefully laid plans. Heroes setting out to recover a rich treasure from a jungle temple suddenly find that the vicious headhunters in the area are after them—the adventure suddenly becomes a struggle to survive and escape with their lives. A sudden raid of beastmen warriors depopulates a village where the PCs hoped to find crucial directions, and if they want to proceed, they’ll have to rescue the people carried off. Necessity often casts even the most mercenary characters as unlikely heroes.

Episodic in Nature: Thule isn’t the kind of campaign where slowly unfolding narratives emerge over years of adventuring. Its action is more limited in scope, and hard-hitting in appearance. Even the basic geography of the world lends itself to this: Tribes and city-states are insular and isolated by dangerous wilderness, so that no one really knows what they might blunder into in the next valley or a day’s sail further up the coast. Adventures tend to take the form of sharply defined situations and challenges, and once the PCs overcome the situation—or retreat from the challenge—the episode comes to an end.

Survival Comes Up: Thule’s jungles, swamps, seas, and glaciers are full of deadly perils. In many campaigns, travel from one end of the continent to the other is easy and can be glossed over with a few minutes’ narration. In Thule, it’s deadly dangerous to stray far from one of the few established trade routes. Many adventures feature significant wilderness survival challenges or obstacles, often complicated by hostile native tribes and fierce predatory beasts. These challenges may be straightforward, such as not starving or freezing on a trek across a glacier, but sometimes they involve difficult searches for lost cities, races to escape certain death at the hands of a vicious tribe, or hunts of deadly beasts.

Rivals and Villains: Finally, one of the greatest hazards an adventurer might run across in Thule is another adventurer with the same goal. If the PCs have heard rumors of a rich treasure waiting to be found in a lost temple, it’s a sure bet that other adventurers have heard those rumors too—and they might already be racing off to claim the prize. Rivals may be calculating professionals, callous brutes, or black-hearted villains who would delight in the opportunity to arrange the PCs’ deaths. Once outside the city walls, one must assume that any other mercenary or wanderer is a potential foe.