Tell me about "weird" lands in your world

[fredramsey]

I'm playing around with designing a homebrew world for a future campaign. I love some of the strange lands in AEG's Wilds book, such as a fire-based forest - sort of a burned out forest that is always smoldering and has fire-based creatures in it.

Do you have any really strange areas of your world that you would like to share?

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[Desdichado]

I have an area that's always dark; it's perpetually under two layers of cloud, one of them a massive storm system. The food chain is based on massive fungus; giant mushroom forests and the like, and there's a higher than average level of nasty predators. I borrowed a lot of traits from the Plane of Shadow for that area as well.

 

[der_kluge]

Anyone have a link to the old Plots and Places weird locales thread?

 

[Henry]

In my homebrew, I've had:

- An enormous Pit some 75 miles wide, caused by magical devastation
- A canyon rift that magically tosses boulders at random locations and intervals
- A forest that cannot be cut down without it re-growing within days

I didn't put in many, because too many magical or weird locations will spoil the geography. It's no longer special if you're always noting weird locales; Dungeons and Dragons becomes Candyland when that happens.

 

[John Q. Mayhem]

In my homebrew that I haven't really had a chance to run much, the south pole continent is the lands of a powerful extraplanar creature who commands hordes of elemental creatures-fire types live in volcanic caves.

 

[fredramsey]

I was thinking of an entire continent, actually, where some huge magical devistation (or divine curse) took place. The effect was actually felt all over the world the day it happened. Now the continent is known as the "Cursed Lands". Every place is now a strange mockery of what it was before.

I think that could be a cool destination for adventurers, and they could always return to the "normal" lands if they wanted to.

I know this may sound like the Mournland from Eberron, or the Sea of Dust from Greyhawk, but this would be a variety of strange places on one continent...

Just something I'm thinking about.

I didn't put in many, because too many magical or weird locations will spoil the geography. It's no longer special if you're always noting weird locales; Dungeons and Dragons becomes Candyland when that happens.

 

[Chimera]

Well, no one has ever gone there, but...

In the tropics, there is The Living Forest.

The entire thing is filled with barely aware plants and trees living in a vast sybiotic relationship covering hundreds of thousands of square miles. As a whole, it might be considered self-aware.

It's hemmed in on several sides by the sea and on the landward by a desert and a mountain range.

But....there are species of plants which are slowly breaking down the mountains and moving the debris (in sediment sized pieces, ie very very slowly) down the mountain toward the sea (creating new land there).

Very few creatures actually live there - only those which can serve a purpose within the overall symbiosis.

 

[derelictjay]

Well I have land of reptiles (called the Kingdom of Scales) that is in the middle of an otherwise normal High Fantasy campaign setting. Now this isn't the Burroughs's Pellucidar, a highly sophisticated and advanced empire of kobolds controls the land, but they are kept from spreading by barbarian troglodytes, marauding dragons, and invading yuan-ti. Did I mention that the land is a giant depression some 100 ft. below sea level and extended out to the ocean. It doesn't flood because of a magic barrier preventing the depression from becoming a gulf.

I always wanted it to be a place of adventure for a campaign or maybe a campaign setting in of itself, but alas, the party always died or the group fell apart before I could get that far.

 

[mythusmage]

On Dragon Earth they are known as The Dead Lands. Spots on the world where nothing lives. Where nothing can live, for swiftly and steadily all life is leached out, until the organism expires; and sometimes arises again as undead.

There are magics against this, but even the most puissant fail under the eldritch assault.

The largest of the Dead Lands is found in Southeast Asia. It encompasses the old republics of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Plus about half of the Kingdom of Thailand, the northern third of the Malaysian Penninsula, and the southern third of the Empire of China.

Elsewhere Dead lands take up a few hundred square miles at most, with the great majority spread across a few acres. In each case staying in the area of a Dead Land without protection is fatal at best.

In the United States probably the largest stretch of Dead Land is found along the Mississippi River, where the city of St. Louis once stood.

It is possible to bring the land back to life, but it is hard work, with lots of set-backs. At times a Dead Land can even expand its boundaries; but with the destruction of the Lich King this happens less and less frequently as time passes.

Currently the U.S. and the Chinese Empire are making the most progress against the Dead Lands. Officially the Russian Republic is also making strides, but reports are coming out of Russia that the Dead Lands there are actually expanding at an increasing rate.

Then you have the ghost lights of Chickamaugua. When the stars are right the spectral sounds of ghostly armies can be heard fighting in a Chickamaugua suburb. Which puzzles people no end, since the Dragon Earth version of the United States had no Civil War. Slavery was abolished in 1820 and the former slaves, human and non-human alike, either moved away, or integrated into local society. (The last city to have segregated facilities was Boston MA, and those were done away with under the administration of President Jefferson Davis (1857-1865). The current theory is that it's some sort of 'bleed over' from an alternate Earth.

 

[Turanil]

Long ago I had a part of the setting which was weird and under Chaos curse:

- Rivers were flowing backwards (water was going up toward mountain peaks then vaporised into the sky forming a perpetual mist, instead of going down toward the sea as normal).

- Inside the central mountain, was a giant tree, like a huge root of titanic proportions that arose from the depths of the world up to the mountain top. A giant staircase had been carved all around the trunk, and there were factions, communities, etc. of monsters at various points. The PCs did climb up the stairs and had various adventures before reaching the top where grew some magical fruits extremely large and heavy.

- Many inhabitant of that place were cursed and affected by schizophrenia. For example, the PCs encountered an ogre who thought of himself as being the Lady Duck, a queen of birds of some sort...