Fantasy weather/environment

[Pleh]

I was browsing some fantasy landscapes for inspiration and I wanted to ask some other gamers.

What are some of your favorite otherworldy environments? Ones you've used, ones you've created, ones you've experienced in other people's games, ones you've seen in other media?

And what do you love about them?

Some examples from me, I've always loved the environments in Pitch Black (first Riddick movie) with a world ravaged by constant daylight from two suns and plagued with powerful nocturnal predators that only come out during the periodic total eclipse. It's kind of the perfect setup for an adventure going from bad to worse at every turn. First they crash in the desert, then they learn the suns never set, then they learn that the fauna didn't die to the desert, but to the hunters and the eclipse is coming faster than the adventurers can fully prepare for.

There's also a planet in the Mass Effect series (don't remember which) where the sunlight itself is deadly if exposed too long and shepherd must run from cover to cover during live gunfights (the third Riddick movie did something similar, but I feel it may have been a little too dangerous for a good TTRPG). It really adds a new spin on the combat system that makes the player change their habits.

In one of my games, I've created an arctic region that generates natural undeath. Explorers who get lost and die up there naturally continue wandering the snow and ice even after death. Being harrassed by skeletons and zombies through the last days of their life naturally transitions to mindlessly attacking other creatures they come across in undeath.

I've also created (never had the chance to use) of a man eating forest. The entire forest is a ginormous predators, with assassin vines that strangle and drag creatures into acid pits to be digested and flowers and berries designed to paralyze creatures that interact with them. Some natural tree often grow interspersed within the man eating woods as they don't compete for food and help make the predator's extensions harder to detect. At the center of the woods, underground in caves, are the forest's core roots, the only place to kill the predator permanently, which will defend themselves by acting like thorned assassin vines of unusually large size. The forest additionally contains a virulent mushroom spore parasite that is containef while the forest is alive. If the forest is killed, the entire forest turns to a mushroom spore cloud nightmare within a few months.

[MrStabby]

Interesting... some of your environments sound similar to my own.

Others I like are the unnatural ones: the endless bathhouse that melds into the plane of water, still waters but what lurks in the deep end... tides that wash away just a little more of your humanity with each passing. Barnacles that release acid when disturbed, kelp than binds its victims and drags them into the depths.

The forest of the dead where hanged corpses grow on trees. Every death of a blasphemer is said to grow a body, their fixed face on one of the bodies. On a full moon the trees harvest drops and hunts.

Crystal caverns, each Crystal beautiful by itself but strange. Gaze into a crystal and see yourself reflected... but older. Each new crystal you look into shows you older still. The caverns seem to echo voices, just at the edge of hearing although your own speech seems oddly muffled. The whole place is filled with hostile earth elemental and creatures of stone, except for some caverns with a pale ble tint to the crystals. The elemental seem almost scared to enter, but you don't know why.

Or the library of futures. The history of futures that never happened, hunted by the creatures that might have been. The infinite books that line these halls full of secrets and possibilities but also uncertainty - when did a history diverge? When is it not real? Is any history more real than any other, and what does it mean if you find your own life laid out there, in perfect accuracy?

[iTreeby]

A really basic change that I made to my default world is that while there are stars in the night sky, you can also see the planes interacting in the distance in much the same way. I.E. You can see roiling elemental planes clashing together, on a clear night you might be able to tell the time by looking at mechanus, looking at a certain star may drive a person mad, while another might teleport you away to its demi-plane if you say it's secret pass phrase while holding it in the center of your gaze.

Originally I made these type of changes to stymie the efforts of people with real world survival skills from deducing true north with a character who has no ranks in any relevant skills. Basically to emphasize the fact that the game is not on earth.

[MrStabby]

A really basic change that I made to my default world is that while there are stars in the night sky, you can also see the planes interacting in the distance in much the same way. I.E. You can see roiling elemental planes clashing together, on a clear night you might be able to tell the time by looking at mechanus, looking at a certain star may drive a person mad, while another might teleport you away to its demi-plane if you say it's secret pass phrase while holding it in the center of your gaze.

Originally I made these type of changes to stymie the efforts of people with real world survival skills from deducing true north with a character who has no ranks in any relevant skills. Basically to emphasize the fact that the game is not on earth.

With the added benefit of it being a really cool world and the ability to clearly foreshadow events of cosmological importance.

[Wizard_Lizard]

You know, I really like the forest. Just a normal forest.