kukuruyo

This may contain minor spoilers about setting details that are told during the comics.

The setting takes place on an area of the world known as Robukan; the specifics of the zone will be explained later on the geography section, but for now let’s say this is an area geographically isolated from the rest of the world. This area is completely populated by monsters; huge, dangerous, predatory monsters on the overall scale of a T-rex, some of them reaching colossal scales.

This world has no magic on it, there’s no way to create magical runes or change reality. Instead, the world is filled with a misterious energy called Essence. This essence fills the monsters and, with the pass of generations, it allows them to gain affinity with an element, usually related to their environment. This way many creatures have elemental skills like a fire breath or an ice chill, etc, making them even more dangerous. Humanoid creatures and humans are too bathed by this energy, but they are relatively “new” species with short life spans and their essence affinity is still too weak to awaken their power without training.

Technology is mostly medieval but there’s some steam punk technology, like crude guns and canons, etc; people live on villages situated on easily defended areas, the bigger of them have walls and canons and thousands of people, but they are still called villages. Most society is built around “hunting”, people hunt monsters and make equipment with them, and the more powerful the monsters they kill, the higher they get on social status, controlled by an organization called “Guild”.

The Guild has presence in every village and controls all the official huntings, job offers, requests and legality. They have a control on monster population and decide when a kind of monster can be hunted or not, when it must be hunted to control it or when there’s few of them and is forbidden to do it. Hunters cannot kill a creature unless they are allowed to do so by the Guild, or in self defense, but several cases of self defense may promt an investigation; there’s a lot of tools for a hunter to make a creature leave or to escape from it, so killing several creatures without any valid excuse causes the revocation of hunter title.

The hunter title talks about that hunters position in society. There’s not any position or title acquired with money or nobility, but with hunting skills. The most powerful the monsters you kill, the more you go up the chain, and it’s the Guild who decides on that. Also they act as a de facto government on many villages, so basically, the Guild have the power in Robukan.

Strangely enough, that doesn’t means there’s a tyrannical dictatorship, there’s always some cases of corruption and mischief, but as a whole, the Guild members come from ancient servant families who pass the job generation from generation and are very proud of their heritage and reputation, of a job well done and clean on the service of the hunters, and are also very respected by those. Most of the internal activities of the Guild remain secret, but aside of guessing what happens inside their walls, most people doesn’t have any problem with them and the hunting system is pretty fair.

Also, many creatures are allowed to freely kill, breed or trained for food, domestic or commercial activities.

There’s no religion or belief on a god or creator; people in the past revered monsters as divinities, but that went in disuse when hunters came to be and monsters stopped being unstoppable forces. As today, some people still consider monsters or some humanoid monsters as spirits and make offerings to them, especially on the east, but on most areas people doesn’t really believe on superior forces, even if some expressions are still used. Being capable to kill what you considered divine usually changes completely your vision about those things.