Thursday, August 10, 2017

d20 Wierd World Locations

From Wayne Douglas Barlowe's Expedition


  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. Blackstone – Wide stretches of barren volcanic rock, carved into strange shapes by wind and water.
  4. 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.
  5. Rustmarsh – Ocher marshes where the water eats through metal quickly. Many of the native species process this rust and waste into their own bodies.
  6. 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.
  7. Angelorum – Temperate forests and plains, home to angels, which emerge from bony tabernacle-cocoons and sing to the sun and wind.
  8. Amber Forest – Ancient trees in autumnal colors. Their bulbous trunks store and release vast quantities of amber, trapping kiloyears worth of life.
  9. Cloud Forest – Temperate rainforests of red-wood trees, moss, and mist.
  10. Sponge Domes – Pale blue domes of living sponge dot the landscape of lightly forested hills.
  11. Bluelands – Deep blue amoeboids cover the ground and nest in white-barked trees. Exceptionally fertile soil - everything grows fast and vast.
  12. Migrating Islands – These gigantic creatures grow miniature ecosystems on their backs as they eat their way across the lush, wet, lowlands.
  13. 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.
  14. Frost Jungle – Thick forests of grey-leaved trees, rimed with ice. Pockets might be found below the snowline.
  15. Coral Hills – Tawny, soft grasses surround ridges of terrestrial coral.
  16. 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.
  17. 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. 
  18. Scablands – Red, scabrous badlands carved out with river channels. Mostly dry, but will flood in the spring.
  19. 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.
  20. Windmill Hills – Between three and five membranous vanes catch the wind on these great treelike creatures.

2 comments:

  1. I can't believe it's taken me this long to find an excuse to reference Wayne Douglas Barlowe.

    ReplyDelete
  2. This would be great for use in Numinera-style game. Also get visions of Moebius’ artwork in my head reading some of these.

    ReplyDelete