From Wayne Douglas Barlowe's Expedition |
- Swordlands – Wide savannahs with metallic blade-plants poking up above the grass. The blades curve in the same direction, as if bending in the wind. Acacia trees with metallic thorns.
- Firelands – Blackened, brackish swampland. The water is oily and slick, casting rainbows in the light. Wildfires are common and will-o-wisps endemic. Safe enough when it freezes into a slush in winter, but just as miserable.
- Blackstone – Wide stretches of barren volcanic rock, carved into strange shapes by wind and water.
- Wormings – Hot, humid jungles where the parasitic worm is king. Their hives draw war-lines over the red flowers that flourish there and nourish them.
- Rustmarsh – Ocher marshes where the water eats through metal quickly. Many of the native species process this rust and waste into their own bodies.
- Ossuary Plains – Stiff, ivory grasses rattle in the breeze between ribcage copses and vertebral hills. Skulls fill the soil, working their way up to the surface.
- Angelorum – Temperate forests and plains, home to angels, which emerge from bony tabernacle-cocoons and sing to the sun and wind.
- Amber Forest – Ancient trees in autumnal colors. Their bulbous trunks store and release vast quantities of amber, trapping kiloyears worth of life.
- Cloud Forest – Temperate rainforests of red-wood trees, moss, and mist.
- Sponge Domes – Pale blue domes of living sponge dot the landscape of lightly forested hills.
- Bluelands – Deep blue amoeboids cover the ground and nest in white-barked trees. Exceptionally fertile soil - everything grows fast and vast.
- Migrating Islands – These gigantic creatures grow miniature ecosystems on their backs as they eat their way across the lush, wet, lowlands.
- Carpet Heath – Poor-quality soil with little large vegetation. Rival flower species have cut the hills up into a patchwork of color, as if a quilt. Each patch is its own ecology, perpetually competing with the others for territory.
- Frost Jungle – Thick forests of grey-leaved trees, rimed with ice. Pockets might be found below the snowline.
- Coral Hills – Tawny, soft grasses surround ridges of terrestrial coral.
- Anvil Mesas – Flat-topped blocks of iron rising up from a layered desert of multicolored clay. Their cliff-faces are pockmarked with caves and roosts.
- Tesla Desert – Breathless pockets of below-sea blast-furnace where the humidity is unbearable but the rain never breaks and the air never stirs. Gigantic metallic trees attract and feed on lightning.
- Scablands – Red, scabrous badlands carved out with river channels. Mostly dry, but will flood in the spring.
- Paradox Ice – A form of polymorphed water that melts only at very high temperatures. Possesses a notable bluish tint, which grows deeper the further one digs beyond the crust – core samples might be entirely blue. Home to a native ecology that cannot survive outside of the ice sheet. Paradox Ice is not safe to ingest, and will swiftly cause death by means of freezing from the inside out.
- Windmill Hills – Between three and five membranous vanes catch the wind on these great treelike creatures.
I can't believe it's taken me this long to find an excuse to reference Wayne Douglas Barlowe.
ReplyDeleteThis would be great for use in Numinera-style game. Also get visions of Moebius’ artwork in my head reading some of these.
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