Fantasy Geography! Please share ideas

[Hand of Evil]

Look at real places and make them fantasy!

The Painted Desert - The sands and rock painted by a god, it has illusions/gateways painted on rocks and the sand itself.

Crystal Lake - known for its gaint cyrstals and...

The Black River/Red River -

 

[spunky_mutters]

While not exactly geography, I hightly recommend Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities as inspirational reading. Definitely a great book.

I also like the mushroom forest in Nausicaa.

My own worlds do tend toward the mundane geographically (at least as far as the prime). I usually leave the whacked out stuff for the planes.

 

[LGodamus]

well I have:
flying islands
god carved mountain
an underdark
a magic draining desert
a sundered land where magic is unreliable
pillars that supposedly hold up the sky
just a few examples ...nothing too weird, but it is the prime

 

[drnuncheon]

An oasis, watched over by the stone statue of a forgotten god. The fruits are made of glass, but do not cut your mouth when you eat them. The water is dry, like crystal dust, but it still quenches your thirst.

 

[The Goblin King]

How about a place where everything is normal but scaled for Storm Giants? Impossibly huge plants and bugs, stuff like that.

Or a what about a city made entirely of gold? This never works out well for the heroes so they should be cautious.

Stolen from the Brak Show:
In the land of Yarr lies the River of Heads. This is an actual river of heads. Mostly animals but the heads of humanoids and monsters can be found floating there too. The heads are still alive somehow. Probably magic. The decapitated heads spend most of the time screaming or crying, again by magic. Should you be unfortunate enough to fall into the river you can expect to be chewed to pieces as the trapped heads take out their pent up frustration on you. Except for your head which is immune to the attacks. Your noggin then joins the River of Heads for all eternity. The heads can not leave of their own will but can be removed by outside parties. Lacking a body there is not much a head can do but hop around and gnaw at ankles. Only a Wish can restore a severed heads body. The Guardians of Yarr use the river as punishment for those whom they have judged guilty.

 

[s/LaSH]

Hm, one of my worlds was dominated by a fjord that ran through a couple of dozen rather large kingdoms... a big, big fjord. There were also pits that ran down to Hell itself - pits the size of kingdoms. And every geographical area had its own day/night cycle - in the main land, the sun rose from the side it had set on the previous day, and in other places it was eternal day or eternal night.

The other thing that every high-magic or forgotten-past world needs is circles. Plot out where every important city in the Golden Age was, and then draw a big circle around it and fill it with ocean to represent the time it got blown up real good (as they are wont to do). Look at the maps in Holly Lisle's Diplomacy of Wolves (and ensuing books) to see what I mean. You look at them, and you go, "I know what happened to this world and man was it unpleasant!"

 

[I'm A Banana]

I love that Brak Show idea! *yoink*

Sadly, most of my Material Plane weirdness comes from videogames....stuff like from Final Fantasy X:

*There's a river that once a year is host to a swarm of migrating buggies that light up, much like fireflies. The effect is not unlike a starry night sky. This is the Moonflow.

*There is a place that the dead go to when they die, and where you can go to see them. The actual truth is that it's just ihabited by slightly psychic insects (pyre flies) that read your memories of the dead ones, and manifest their image to you.

Cool locations are always welcome.

 

[magnas_veritas]

How about the countries' inhabitants and topography are influenced by the king?

After all, the King is the Land, and the Land is the King.

Brad

 

[beta-ray]

Yellow snow in giantland!!!


Uhmm... that is a natural occurance right?

 

[Chauzu]

Well, in my setting there's the Forest of Never's End, which is a forest where people who travel off of the trail is stuck in the forest forever, and there's the Northern Wall, mountains that must be travelled through to reach the northern continents and is higher than Mt. Everest. On this mountain is a road made of golden bricks, and as long as they stay on this road, they are safe from the mountain's weather and its undead. There is more, but I'm too lazy to type more.