Fantastic Terrain

[drawingfreak]

I am trying to plan a 4th edition campaign where the world got seriously EFFed up. Thusly, I need examples of fantastical terrain. Such as:

* Floating Mountains ala Avatar
* A massive wound in the earth leading down to the Elemental Chaos or even the planet's core

Help please?

[Platinum_Mongoose]

How about a rocky area where whatever "EFFed" the world up fused the souls of people there at the time into the very rocks themselves. (Sorta like blast shadows after an atomic blast.)

So the rocks are twisted and people-shaped, and maybe give the PCs some advice or something.

I like this thread. More as I think of them. :)

[Mando Knight]

Go play some Metroid and Mario, then come back and talk to us again.

[Platinum_Mongoose]

How about glaciers of something less ordinary than frozen water? Tree sap, perhaps? "Let's go walk across that glacier. Ooh, it's sticky!"

Also, remember the hydrogen trees in Titan AE? That was pretty awesome.

Another fantasy classic (and Mario): solid clouds. Always fun, especially if the solid parts look the same as the not-solid part.

[BobVosh]

Awakened Ghost Forest. It can move, possess, and whatever 4ed ghost do...and they are trees ^^

That one isn't mine, someone posted something similar a day or two ago.

[Platinum_Mongoose]

A city perched on a lava flow, slowly gliding across the landscape.

[Serpentine]

A forest of something not normally known for forests. Fungi are a popular one, though towering blades of grass or land-dwelling sea anemonies could be fun.
Also a petrified forest - all the trees and plants, maybe even animals, are stone. Maybe even something other than the old run-of-the-mill grey rock - crystal or diamond or marble, perhaps.
The fireswamp.
Or, finally, my former DM had an idea going... I can't remember it exactly, but it involved eucalyptus-like fire-dependent trees, and shocker lizards. I think the ecology was something like this: The trees secreted a flammable gas. The shocker lizards, when threatened or just because, would cause a spark which caused a fireball and/or bushfire. The fire would crack open the hard seed pods of the trees. The lizards would eat some, and the rest would make new trees.
Something like that.

[bosssmiley]

@^: That pyrotic forest idea has a lot of sci-fi/pulp antecedents. "Hyperion" (Dan Simmons) and "Player of Games" (Iain Banks) both seasonally self-immolating forests as plot points and thematic elements.

• The Chaos Wastes/The Cacotopic Stain
• The Scar (from the eponymous Mieville book)
• The Edge of Reality (Moorcock's Earl Aubec stories)
• Dead/Wild magic areas
• Fungal Forests and Amoebic Seas
• Predatory plantlife (Aldiss "Hothouse")
• Petrifaction (Ballard's "Crystal World")
• Bizarre giant things half-creature and half-terrain feature that squat malignantly in the landscape (see Hodgeson's "The Night Land")
• Great Rifts (Grand Canyon + dungeon gribblies)
• Weird Storms
• The Hollow World
• Shattered Moonfalls that unleash alien beats on the land (I think Dragonmech did this one)

Saturday morning fantasy cartoons, and post-apocalyptic settings are your go-to here. Gamma World/Mutant Future, Nemesis the Warlock, Slaine and the like.

Incidentally, there's a whole sub-genre of weird fantasy gaming out there. Google "Savage Swords of Athanor", or "World of Thundarr blog", or "Planet Algol" for freeware science fantasy setting info.

A city perched on a lava flow, slowly gliding across the landscape.

Hah! Fantasy science sneers at your primitive concepts of 'convection'.