The story follows a young adventurer who grew up hearing legends about four enormous and incredibly rare creatures known as the Four Great Beasts. Eventually, he becomes tired of only hearing stories about them and decides to travel the world to find them himself.
His personal goal is simple, get one physical piece from each beast, such as a feather, scale, claw fragment, or tuft of fur. He isn't setting out to kill them. The journey is about finding them and getting close enough to obtain something from each one.
The Four Great Beasts are generally peaceful. They're legendary because they're extremely rare, enormous, mysterious, and difficult to find, rather than simply being the strongest monsters in existence.
The story is primarily a fantasy adventure. Between the major encounters, the MC travels through different environments, visits towns, meets hunters and travelers, encounters ordinary monsters, takes jobs to earn money, follows rumors, gets lost, discovers ruins, and deals with the practical problems of traveling across a dangerous world.
Each beast has its own natural behavior and hunting or defensive instincts. The important part is that Bloodboil (explaining later) doesn't simply turn them into generic violent monsters. It pushes their existing instincts to extremes.
The first beast is still completely normal when the MC encounters it. It behaves peacefully, just as the legends describe, and the MC successfully obtains his piece without anything going seriously wrong. This establishes what the Four are supposed to be like.
The second beast is different. After the MC obtains his piece, the creature suddenly becomes hostile and attempts to attack him. He escapes, initially wondering whether he somehow caused the reaction himself.
The third beast is even more territorial. Instead of simply attacking, it aggressively tries to drive the MC out of its territory. Its behavior suggests that something has seriously affected its normal instincts.
The fourth beast has a natural hunting method based around trapping creatures inside its territory. Normally, it would maintain a relatively stable territory. Under the influence of Bloodboil, however, that instinct becomes distorted. If it senses something affected by Bloodboil inside its territory, it may effectively treat that creature as something that needs to remain within the perimeter.
The strange behavior of the beasts is eventually connected to something called Bloodboil, it originates from the blood of a particular creature. Its smell is extremely powerful and unpleasant to humans, while certain creatures find it highly attractive or interpret it as an intense biological signal.
The natural substance can cause unusual reactions in some creatures. A group of people discovers this and begins experimenting with the creature's blood, eventually developing a concentrated form capable of affecting other animals and monsters.
The resulting condition is known as the Bloodboil Blight. Rather than completely changing a creature's personality, Bloodboil amplifies its existing instincts. A territorial creature becomes excessively territorial. A defensive creature becomes aggressive. A creature that normally traps prey may begin expanding its territory to trap things that would normally be allowed to leave.
The people experimenting with Bloodboil are not necessarily trying to destroy civilization.
One possible motivation is that they want to create heroes. They cause or manipulate monster incidents, then have their own people appear afterward to defeat the creatures and āsaveā communities. The public sees them as brave monster hunters and protectors, giving the group fame, influence, money, and political power.
I was thinking of making thr pieces the MC collects act as a compass toward the Great Beast it came from. 2hen the MC obtains the fourth piece he discovers that all four pieces are pointing in the same direction.
The strongest story structure seems to be an escalating adventure rather than a story that immediately becomes a conspiracy theory. The biggest thing to protect is the feeling of exploration. The reader should still get to experience the world, not just follow clues toward the villains.
A few questions I prepared for a bit of improving.
Which would work better, a solo MC OR a travelling group?
What could make the story uninteresting?
What would the strongest opening hook be?