Non-Boring Environments that need Fantasy Representation
Tropical Rainforests
Scrubland/Dry Forests. For extra effect make them the sort that burn very often; some native plants never germinate until after a fire, and some animals not only rely on fire to smoke out prey, but may even start them themselves.
Savannas/Tropical Grasslands
Temperate Rainforests. I almost didn’t include this bc New Zealand is covered in them, and that’s where they filmed Lord of the Rings. But tbh, no one really knows about them, so it belongs here
Taiga Forests
Barren Tundra, perfect for some extreme seasonal dichotomy
Polar Ice Sheets
Desert-Grasslands (arguably the same as Scrubland but Australia’s good at adding its own twists)
Barren Desert
If you like Cacti, look at American Deserts like the Sonoran
Salt Flats
Soda Lakes and Alkaline Lakes
Madagascar’s Karst Limestone Formations
Madagascar’s Spiny Forests
Madagascar’s Baobab Forests
Madagascar’s Subhumid Forests (Madagascar is cool as hell ok)
Danxia Landforms
Badlands/Mountainous Deserts
Steppes and Highland Prairies
Flood Basalts
Newly-Formed Islands, still rife with Volcanic activity
Now for Underwater Environments, sure Coral Reefs are cool.
But there are SO MANY other kinds of environments for aquatic settings, it’s unbelievable:
Seaside Cliffs
Archipelagos. Not just Tropical Island chains like Polynesia (Moana anyone?) but also Coldwater Archipelagos like the Aleutians.
Tidal Flats
Bayous/Cypress Swamps
Tropical River Basins, AKA Seasonally Flooded Rainforests
Mangrove Swamps/Deltas/Beaches
Kelp Forests
The Open Ocean
Coastal Seabeds
Rocky Beaches with Tidepools
And there are a LOT more I could name but this post is already obscenely long as is, if you’d like to toss in your own go right ahead, but my point is if you limit yourself to European Deciduous Forests you’re a wimp.
Because while the world building with @jabberwockypie was fun and awesome, I have entirely too many projects to work on to add this to them. (And now I am going to go nap because tired and ow.)
JabberwockyPie
Also everyone in Marvel seems to have crappy parents, too. *considers* Except for T’Challa, whose parents are apparently awesome, but I haven’t seen BP yet.
Morgyn Leri
*nods*
I suppose the parents of some of the side characters are probably good too, but most of the main characters, yeah.
Certainly almost all the parents we have actual information on.
JabberwockyPie
*nod* The ones we see on-screen or – yes, that
Morgyn Leri
Well, ok. Steve’s mom was a good person, and Bucky’s mom.
JabberwockyPie
I have admittedly not seen the more recent MCU stuff, at least in terms of Age of Ultron or Civil War, just because I don’t really have any motivation to do so
Yes
Morgyn Leri
But they’re also dead, and have been for a while.
JabberwockyPie
*nod nod*
Morgyn Leri
And as for AoU and CW – yeah. Nope.
JabberwockyPie
Frigga was a good mom, I think? Or at least we didn’t have any reason to think she wasn’t, beyond possibly putting up with Odin’s shit a bit too much
Someone – I think scifigrl47? It seems like it would have been her – has a few good rants about how all of the MCU people (and Marvel in general, really) follow this one specific pattern for Terrible Dads (while we are ignoring or fridging the moms)
Morgyn Leri
She’s the kind of mother who tried to be a good parent, but her co-parent undermined that by being an absolute bag of dicks.
JabberwockyPie
Yes,t hat
Like, if Frigga and Heimdell had been co-parenting, I think things would have come out WAY BETTER and WAY MORE EMOTIONALLY STABLE
Morgyn Leri
🙂
There’s an AU to play with. What if more of the Avengers had a better childhood? And in particular, what if Frigga did not put up with Odin’s shit at all, and put her foot down where her boys were concerned?
Steve’s childhood I’ll leave alone, ‘cause it seems decent for the time period (not great, but not horrible because parents).
JabberwockyPie
*nod*
Morgyn Leri
Frigga not putting up with Odin’s crap parenting. Clint Barton’s mom getting out with her boys. Bruce Banner’s mom getting herself and Bruce out of their home situation.
Clint and Bruce could still become superheroes, though their motivations and the how might be different.
JabberwockyPie
Natasha’s backstory is kind of a clusterfuck.
Morgyn Leri
Yeah.
JabberwockyPie
*nod nod*
Tony… maybe if Howard hadn’t been allowed to be such a DICK, and then Obadiah Stane perpetuating shit
Morgyn Leri
Jarvis and Peggy calling out Howard on his shit more.
JabberwockyPie
I mean he’d probably be a LITTLE nuts anyway, because Doing Science and Doing Engineering
Morgyn Leri
*nods* Yup.
But there are things about how Howard treated Tony that other people being a little more “Howard, no, stop” would have helped.
And someone noticing that Obidiah was a bad influence, that would be useful.
JabberwockyPie
Maybe if someone noticed that Obadiah was fucking creepy and it was someone Howard would actually listen to
Morgyn Leri
*nods* Yeah.
JabberwockyPie
*considers* Or Peggy could kill him. IJS
Morgyn Leri
😀
JabberwockyPie
Peggy not liking the way dude acts around Tony
Nope you die now
Too bad
Morgyn Leri
Peggy and Jarvis conspire to get rid of Obidiah and make sure it looks like an accident.
Or that he just up and left on his own, and the body is never found.
JabberwockyPie
He tripped and fell. Onto a knife. Twenty-five times.
That too! D
😀
Morgyn Leri
Airplace accident in a small plane.
*airplane
Or a car crash.
Or a boating accident.
Or he took a trip to Europe and never came home, and who knows what happened to him?
JabberwockyPie
*nod nod* It was Mysterious Circumstances. Conveniently
Morgyn Leri
Or evidence comes to light he’s a spy for an enemy country.
JabberwockyPie
But without him around, Howard isn’t being nudged in certain directions
Morgyn Leri
Because then they don’t have to kill him to get rid of him.
JabberwockyPie
Yes, that would be bad. So unfortunate. Can’t trust anyone.
True
Morgyn Leri
Just. Obidiah gotten rid of, and Howard doesn’t have his malign influence, and improvement of the Stark father-son relationship. o/
And actually, having Obidiah be found to be a spy works better.
JabberwockyPie
*nod nod*
Then Howard has to investigate anything Obidiah told him to do ever
Morgyn Leri
Yup.
JabberwockyPie
And question those decisions
Morgyn Leri
And also, it means that later, Obidiah can still be behind Tony’s kidnapping and his transformation into Iron Man.
JabberwockyPie
Also easier on Tony if his parents weren’t suddenly killed off when he was a kid. Like, I think it’s a little easier to tell a parent (or a parent’s memory) to go fuck themself if they didn’t die suddenly and tragically when you were a teenager?
Morgyn Leri
*nods* That too.
… and my brain just went “so, they make sure the evidence that points to Anton Vanko spying for the Soviet Union points instead to Obidiah Stane, and voila, Obidiah gets to go away, and one Ivan Vanko maybe gets to not grow up in fucking Siberia to hate the Stark family for sending his father back to the USSR to end up rotting in a gulag.”
And then I think about Ivan and Tony growing up together and tossing ideas back and forth together about everything, and just making the world tremble, because two geniuses in one place that could do anything up to and including taking over the world if they were interested in doing so.
JabberwockyPie
FOR SCIENCE
Because they get bored a lot
And egg each other on
Morgyn Leri
Yup!
Gah. And have them get a chance to meet a saner and more stable Loki.
Also, add a Bruce who’s less likely to try to fold himself into as small a space as possible.
Two engineers, a scientist, and a mage who is also the god of mischief.
The universe is going to start worrying about what comes out of that lab.
JabberwockyPie
Saner, more stable Loki, who – while very much a fan of mischief and the specific subset of mischief that is “screwing with his brother” – is not nuts
😀
Morgyn Leri
😀
The universe will never be the same.
It will probably be better.
JabberwockyPie
Watching Thor 3 I was just waiting for them to do like an “I’m not touching you! I’m not touching you!” bit because siblings
Morgyn Leri
*snerks*
JabberwockyPie
Also trying to get Loki to do magic so that they can Do Science To It, until he gets bored and takes a break to poke Thor or something
Morgyn Leri
*nods*
And also maybe, with somewhat less terrible childhoods, the Avengers would be better able to communicate, and there aren’t misunderstandings that lead to things like AoU and CW.
I mean, still there’s probably miscommunications, because those happen even when people are trying, but they aren’t going to get to world-ending levels of horrible.
JabberwockyPie
Maybe they can like, talk about it
Or someone will suggest talking about it
Because they’ve all had less crappy childhoods
Morgyn Leri
*nods* Yup.
JabberwockyPie
And at some point someone might suggest Talking About It
(Even though Talking About Feelings Is Terrible.)
(But Necessary!)
Morgyn Leri
🙂
JabberwockyPie
Whereas when you have the team full of people with terrible childhoods, everyone is kind of like “… I dunno. How do interpersonal relationships work?” and then you get AoU and CW
Fantasy RPG worldbuilding tip #137: mess with what counts as magic.
I don’t mean replicating modern technology with magical analogues – that stuff’s common as dirt. What I mean is taking a step back from the conventional paradigm of starting with a world that fundamentally resembles our own and layering magic on top of it, and asking yourself: what if this obviously non-magical thing is a form of magic in this world?
History furnishes numerous examples. It’s well-known, for example, that the Ancient Greeks didn’t distinguish between pharmacology and sorcery – but did you know that the Vikings considered picking locks to be a form of magic? That it’s demonstrably a mechanical skill that can be learned by anyone is beside the point; that a person was able to learn that skill in the first place was, itself, seen as evidence of consorting with evil spirits!
So run with that: pick a perfectly ordinary skill or pursuit, one that’s integral to our everyday life, and suppose that in your world, it’s a mystical practice that transgresses against the natural order. What does your world look like then?
To pose a common example: literacy. Treating literacy as a form of magic isn’t historically uncommon; the modern word “grimoire” – a book of spells – ultimately derives from the same root as “grammar”. So let’s run with that. The process and mechanics of learning to read are the same as they are in our world, but the implications may be very different. Perhaps knowing how to read books automatically confers the ability to read minds. Perhaps literacy grants the ability to understand the speech of beasts. There’s all sorts of directions you could go with it.
It’s critical to resist the urge to fall back on describing our world with magic laid on top. If you’re doing the literacy-as-magic thing, then you are not describing a world in which a reading-based school of magic exists; you are describing a world in which the acts of reading and writing are and always have been mystical practices, with all the societal weirdness that implies – and further, the mechanics of reading and writing do not materially differ from those of their real-world counterparts, though the outcomes may vary wildly.
The other major trap to watch out for is picking something too esoteric to really dig into. You’ll find plenty of fantasy settings where, say, clockworking or steam engineering is a form of magic – but clockworking isn’t something that ordinary people do in their daily lives. This sort of worldbuilding is much more effective when the practice in question is ubiquitous.
Other everyday activities that might make good candidates for converting into mystical practices:
Cooking or baking
Dressing (i.e., the act of putting on clothing)
Farming or gardening
Keeping pets
Lighting fires
Makeup (i.e., facial cosmetics)
Personal hygiene (bathing, grooming, etc.)
Representational art (that is, drawing pictures of things)
Rhyming (even unintentionally!)
Again, no wimping out; to pick a faintly ridiculous example from the preceding list, if you’ve decided that bathing is magic in your setting, that doesn’t mean that there’s a magical way to take a bath – it means that taking a bath is an inherently mystical process, and there’s no non-magical way to go about it. Similarly, if you went with cooking, what you’ve got is a world in which all prepared food is, in some sense, also a magic potion.
Fandom: Hobbit AU: Northern Night Word Count: 860 Characters: Dazbol (OC), Razul (OC), Thorin Oakenshield
Dazbol is introduced to mead, and shares a mourning toast with Thorin.
“What is it?” Dazbol gives Razul a suspicious look before she peers dubiously at the mug he’s handed her. The whelp is close as a goblin nest to the dwarves, and has been since he was a whelp in truth. She’s not sure she should trust anything he brings her.
“They call it mead.” Razul lifts his own mug, a grin on his face as he takes a long gulp of the contents – no doubt more of the mead he’s given her. “It’s easier to get than Her wine, and tastes better than what Tark brewed back at the First Fortress.”
Dazbol narrows her eyes, sniffing at the mead cautiously. It certainly smells better than Tark’s brew, and sweeter, even, than Cúnessa’s wine had. Not exactly an enticement to try it. Even if it doesn’t smell poisoned.
“Why did you bring me this?”
“Because you’re the General.” Razul rolls his eyes, dropping down onto one of the pelts that softens the ground in her tent. “Because you’re not going to come join everyone else drinking to victory.”
“It wasn’t a victory.” Dazbol sets the mug aside, shaking her head. If that was what Razul thought of what happened at Gundabad, she can’t drink the mead. Cannot toast her own betrayal, however right and necessary it might have been. Cúnessa had gone mad in the years Dazbol had been away from her mistress, and no one had had the strength to pull her back before it was too late. “Get out, whelp.”
Razul frowns, and doesn’t move until she reaches for one of her knives, all but stomping out of the little felt tent. Let him sulk over her refusal to play to his youth and foolishness.
Dazbol leans back against the warm bulk of Shoka, listening to the quiet snores of her warg as she tries not to think too hard about where she is, or why she is here. About what has happened and what will happen.
How long she’s all but dozing, she doesn’t know, though she rouses when there’s a tap at the pole next to the door.
“Who comes?”
“Not the youth you sent running with his tail tucked.” The deep rumble of Thorin’s voice comes through the wall, and Dazbol feels her lips twitch with amusement.
“Then you may enter.”
Thorin ducks through, a mug in hand, the little warg that had taken a liking to him following on his heels. He waits for her to flop on the far side of the tent from Shoka, before echoing Dazbol in leaning against her. A piece of manners that does not fit with dwarven ideals, but that makes Dazbol’s lips twitch again with a smile she isn’t willing to show.
“What brings you to my tent, Galnaunda?” Dazbol shifts her position slightly, giving Thorin an equal space in her tent. It is only polite.
“I would not leave anyone to grieve alone, Commander.” It is a title she does not wish for, but cannot refuse. No matter how empty it seems when she has wrested it from a corpse that she did not kill herself. “Even an uneasy ally.”
“Not an enemy, then?”
“Should you be?” It is a wonder that he does not, for all that they had been allies against Cúnessa only a month past now, and that she had seen to it that he and the other three had been delivered safely to the Dragon-Mountain, and those who awaited them.
“I am uruktar, and I am the Commander of the Northern Night, General of the Second Fortress.” Dazbol bares her teeth, though she doesn’t make any more of a threat than that. Bluster and bluff, for all that it is empty and Thorin cannot fail to know it.
“Perhaps we will be enemies again. But not tonight.” Thorin glances over at the mug that sits alone, untouched, where either of them could reach it. “A drink, to those lost?”
“The whelp called it a drink to victory.”
Thorin smiles, if the bitter amusement in his face could be such. “For him, it is a victory. His friends are no longer under the lash and leash of a woman he feared and hated.”
Friends. Dwarves who should have been killed or imprisoned properly, and not made into whatever it was that Cúnessa had done. Twisting Cúnessa as much as it had those dwarves that Dazbol has yet to meet. “They’re just pups howling because they’re out of the den.”
That draws a snort and a less bitter smile from Thorin. “They’re not free yet. It is no victory when not everyone is free.”
Dazbol feels something relax inside her, a tension across her shoulders easing and only then announcing it had existed in the first place. “A drink, then. To those lost and those not yet freed.”
Thorin’s mug is lifted in salute as Dazbol does the same with the abandoned mead. The drink is as sweet as it smells, with a faint bitterness that any proper drink has. Enough, perhaps, even to allow Dazbol a little of the effects that she so rarely indulges, and kinder in the doing than Tark’s brew.
Notes: Dazbol rarely calls people by the name they bear, using instead epithets that tend to say how she thinks of them. It’s also because for uruktar, it is not polite to use someone’s name unless you’re kin, and even then, it’s rarely used once an uruktar is of age.
Galnaunda is a epithet meaning “Steel-Heart”, in the mix of Black Speech and Quenya that the uruktar learned from the orcs that were in Gundabad and Cúnessa who finished their creation/twisting.
So, I’m prodding at two potential complications of working this out into the future past events of the Hobbit and just after.
One is a plot sort of question – does Bilbo ever return to the Shire? (Which of course needs to know if he survived the battle – yes – and where the fuck is Gandalf at that time – ???)
If Bilbo does return to the Shire, than Frodo is the one bringing the Ring to Rivendell for the Council of Elrond, and the rest of the complications of plot are from other directions.
If he doesn’t return to the Shire, how is the Ring discovered? When is it discovered? And who is the one to carry the Ring to Mordor, because Bilbo is getting old and may not be up to such a journey. Or it would possibly be a one way journey for him.
The other is more a world-building question, but does effect plot – for the purposes of numbers of the Fellowship, do wargs count as people or beasts? Because if people, then no wargs. If beasts, than at least two wargs, and do either of those who have wargs and send people to the Council of Elrond send packs with riderless wargs?
Neither of these questions is necessarily relevant to anything until after I’ve worked out what happens in the aftermath of the Battle of Erebor. (I have some general ideas, and plans, but I kinda want to have things written before I try to plot heavily about things in the time period of Lord of the Rings.)
@lynati@poplitealqueen and @ anyone else who’s interested in Tolkien and/or my massive set of connected AUs with shared world-building.
For the transport of the Ring:
Offering up the possibility of Bilbo not permanently returning to the Shire, but visiting around the time that Frodo gets orphaned and taking him back with him.
Or maybe when Frodo is a little older and the relatives who did take him in are at their wit’s end with his wandering.
If Bilbo doesn’t return, perhaps have Gimli take it, as he’s person that attends the Council.
Or have Bilbo and Gimli take it to Rivendell (though I don’t have a map to hand, the Council may end being held elsewhere) and have adventurous nephew Frodo (who has not been attacked by ringwraiths, and doesn’t know what he’s letting himself in for) who happens to be visiting Rivendell for the first time volunteer to take it? (Maybe he was visiting Bilbo who he has heard so much of, but has only met a couple of times)
I have no thoughts on its discovery at the moment, but I would count Wargs as beasts personally.
I’m leaning toward not wanting Bilbo to raise Frodo himself in this AU, so having Frodo being the adventurous nephew who is finally going on an Adventure like his uncle to go to Rivendell meeting Bilbo there for the first time during the Council of Elrond. And volunteering to take the Ring. Yes. *rubs hands together and grins evilly*
I do think the Council will still be in Rivendell, if mostly because it’s the safest option. There’s protection there that nowhere else save Lothlorien has, and… yeah, I don’t see Galadriel being particularly open to having the Council there. Plus there’s the shared vision/dream thing that Faramir and Boromir have that directs them there.
(Although that’s going to be entertaining. I’m still not entirely decided on if Boromir goes, or Faramir goes, and whichever of them goes, there’s going to be an encounter with orcs on the road north and a meeting with Dazbol, because she’s somewhat important. Also, she will be thrilled to have the chance to make rude gestures at Sauron. Because I have a loudly cranky orc-muse who is quite cranky that pretty much everyone has Opinions on whether or not she should be allowed to exist. And would like very much for people to stop telling her to cease to exist, and leave her be to build her personal idea of a self-sufficient fortress-city, and if they won’t, she will gladly make them dead so they do stop.)
*thumps head on desk a moment* There is a glaring fucking plot hole here, and while I have a fine idea how to fix it, it’s still a month-long fucking plot hole of they’re going to die of dehydration if I don’t plug this damned plot hole, one way or another. Because I did not make any plans for them to have anywhere to top off their water between the Anduin and the Sea of Rhûn. And this is part of why this story is getting rewritten before I go forward. That, and having abandoned it for a few years, and having misplaced any notes I might have made about what I’m doing with the plot.
Time to add wells/oases to the map, because my world building says nomads in this part of the great big massive blank spot that is Rhûn (not all of it can be nomads, but most of the settled parts are where there are rivers, and this part of it distinctly does not). And they’re going to have places where they can camp around a water source, even if they had to dig that water source themselves. *nods firmly*
I am having a hard time reaching out for anything right now, at least anywhere there is an expectation of two-way communication. Here? I can manage the posts talking about how I’m doing. IM or chat rooms I’m willing to wander into? Been avoiding them at least all week. Maybe a bit because I’m binge-watching just about anything that is holding my attention (right now, CSI Miami, because it’s got enough weight to it without doing a bad number on my mental health), or maybe I’m binge-watching because it doesn’t involve interacting directly with people, online or brick-space.
I don’t know. I do know that I cannot leave reaching out entirely for other people, and I need to do that some myself. Even if I can’t manage conversations much right now. Although not in chat, because too many people are… well, right now lots of people in one space would be a hard nope. And for all that it’s text, chat rooms are right now reading as a crowded room to my brain even when there’s only a couple people around, and that’s never been someplace I feel particularly comfortable, and it’s particularly bad right now.
Anyway. I am going to go back to watching CSI Miami and taking notes for writing of stuff in an AU – ok, so technically the only AU I have for that which I am still willing to touch. Still. Writing of notes so I can figure out the timeline of the AU, because I can.
At this point, even if I don’t bother to pick up the AU’s primary plot again, I may just take some of the stuff from the world-building and expand on it. Because I’m finding fun stuff in there as I’m poking through the binder full of paper.
I am working on retyping everything, since I’m pretty sure the original files are on one of the old zip discs that got tossed because I no longer have a drive that will read them. And mostly eliminating the blurbs, because oh, the wincing at the lack of research.
(This was last printed in 2004, in my defense, and I was younger, stupider, and had fewer resources to use.)
Also, a couple author names got chucked because nope.
There's a Mirror on the Wall 