After last week's post, James contacted me and said “I am open to the real world. It’s just that sometimes it’s a lot of work for very little return.”
Well, said, James. I couldn’t agree more!
This week I’m throwing reality completely out the window in the name of fun. Hopefully James will approve!
Heating Things Up
The Firelands is a desert. An oppressively hot, mostly lifeless sea of sand and dust. Nothing grows outside the life-giving oases. Without water, a man will perish1 in the unbearable heat.
It’s not a realistic, earthly desert. It’s a pulpy, exaggerated, swords & sorcery desert.
You know how I make a desert even more pulpy, exaggerated, and swords & sorcery-esque?
I add lava lakes. And volcanoes. But mostly lava lakes.
D&D Mumbo Jumbo
When Hume’s “lifeless” body fell to the earth, it created a rupture between the Elemental Plane of Fire and the Prime Material Plane. The lava lakes are actually places where the Elemental Plane is extruding into the Prime Material Plane.
How this Adds Awesomeness
There are monsters from the core books that just feel like they belong in the Firelands, but the book says that they’re from the elemental plane of fire. Monsters like the Efreeti and the Salamander.
It also provides a nice background element. If the Firelands are an intrusion of the Elemental Plane of Fire, does that mean that Okeanos is an intrusion of the Elemental Plane of Water? I think so.
Finally, the great “sea of sand” now has landmarks and obstacles that have to be navigated around. Hopefully this makes exploring and travel more interesting.
Wrapping it Up
So here’s how it looks with lava lakes:
You see that the lakes are encircling an area the includes Crowfield. My thought is that they’re encircling Hume’s impact point.
Now that I’ve come up with a way to add Efreeti, I would really like to add the Djinni, who also totally belong in the setting. But they’re from the Elemental Place of Air. That sounds cool, too, because an air elemental in sand dune is an awesome dust storm/whirlwind. I’m just not sure how to incorporate that. Any ideas?
-
By “perish” I mean that a character will lose 2 points each of Strength & Constitution (save for half damage) if they drink less than 5 quarts of water that day. If the character drinks less than 2.5 quarts of water in the Firelands, the damage is doubled.↩
I appreciate the lore reasoning behind the more interesting environmental touches, and it's nice to have a solid excuse to add more interesting monsters and obstacles!
ReplyDeleteAs for the Djinni, perhaps you could replicate your D&D Mumbo Jumbo logic? If Hume's body falling to earth connected the Elemental Plane of Fire, then couldn't one argue that she was falling through air, that something similar occurred?
Not sure how much water it holds, but could provide an excuse for having the Djinni appear in a number of locations, but perhaps less concentrated than the Efreeti due to air's diffusive nature.