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Here are some new terrains to sprinkle around your maps or elaborate fisher-king fantasy life 
BRAMBLE HELL:
Like a tangle of blackberry but with canes girthing in metres. The underlayer is passable , the ancient bottom canes arching at about 2-4 metres above you.
It's very dark , dusty , with a few patient lichens, eldritch fungus and ghostly ferns. Moving vertically is an engineering project, with metres of wood, sword length thorns (technically prickles) , and eye searing sap. The middle layer has a bit more light, weird dirt pockets with bizarre microbiomes , and bird nests. The top layer is a violent sea of green and crimson waving thorn cane. And birds. And insects. Violently territorial birds and insects.
RESOURCES:
unique fungus, herbs. Emperor bramble sap. Bird eggs of some obnoxious fairy tale quest variety.
HAZARDS:
Occasional cane collapses (see Rocs below), thorns, sap, cordyceps fungus.
BEASTS : Weasel like elegated pangolins of a variety of sizes; The smallest slinking around the tops eating birds the biggest slinking around the bottom and eating you. Rocs like to make their nests in the middle layer , sometimes causing collapses. Dali Stilt mini elephants that migrate vertically as they grow. Spiders. Mites. Ticks. Beetles etc. Spiders that make themselves bird costumes to get birds to try and fight them. Giant red-eyed vorpal Kiwis.
OTHERS: Dueling ant knights sculpting the throne bases like ant castles , beetle grumble men, dancing fungus, millennium seeds , thorn entombed castles (maybe the cause of cargocult ant people behaviour) ,
FROZEN SKY TIDE LAND:
Underneath frozen sea ice somewhere where the tide goes out for half a year at a time.
The drowned can fake their lives better when it's out and will trade for props for their sad mummery. Most things hunker down or wander out with the tide. The crustaceans mainly rule but it's the perfect place for spirit world diplomacy
RESOURCES:
wrecks, shellfish (pearls), anything that otherwise would require going underwater to get. Corals.
HAZARDS: collapsing roofs, lurking anemones like an anus rock for your foot to enter. Ghosts. Spirits of cambain dead. Dream eating coral.
BEASTS: crustaceans (fortified tank like lobsters, long legged hair stealing crabs , eerily bone scrying isopods ) scythed beaked penguins sliding on their bellies to murder you , spirit court fox courtier. Polar bear mercenaries seeking work in the spirit worlds.
OTHERS: A shipwreck trapped in the ice above accessed from the gash in its belly. Isopod fortune teller. The drowned that are forbidden the afterlifes of sea or land and make fake ones.
Nice and evocative, and I totally mine these for random table content. :-)
ReplyDeleteAnd now have to rant a little bit, ignore if you don't like a good rant from time to time, and it has nothing to do with the content. In fact, I was distracted by the (technical prickles) comment. Does this failure in biological definition exist in the English language as well? Roses have thorns, dammit, if you want to define two different spiky parts, start by the most commonly known plant with thorns and call the other ones prickles or whatever. Else your definition is flawed from the beginning. Sorry for that rant, but that bugs me a lot... Almost as much as vague laws. :-P
Yeah I would def agree the definitive thorn is that of a rose., shitty overrated things that they are.
DeleteLooking at the etymology of the word thorn seems maybe it had previously more connotations of stem, branch and wood though?
So it made sense to call a modified stem or branch a thorn because of these lost connotations?
The hawthorn (Crataegus monogyna) prob being the most familiar example of that to historical europe and it has thorn right in the name.
(for anyone else wondering about this :
a thorn is a modified stem or branch , it can have leaves growing from it or be branched. It wouldn't snap cleanly off from the attached branch like a prickle would
A prickle is a modified section of the epidermis layer; the plants "skin" .
A spine is a modified leaf (or leaflet); see cactuses for example
while a leaf with spikes on the edge (e.g holly) would have those known as spinous margin
If the leaf has spikes growing from it like hairs, they would be bristles. Nettles are most attention getting example of this
I wrote all that out more to help myself remember it than anything, y'all capable of wiki-ing
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