What unusual geography exists in your world?

my players recently stumbled on the "valley of Drayne" which is an enourmous valley of red rock made by a constant violent unmoving thunderstorm thrust onto the area to curse the gnomes who lived there who crossed the weather mage Drayne.

the storm has been pounding the same bit of land for eons untold, adn has created quite an impressive valley. it has also spawned a few lakes and a big river.

The Twilight Forest from my old game was always a favorite of mine...

It was a forest of huge trees (Think Giant Redwood size), that grew so thick at the top that no sun (Or damn little) got through to the floor of the forest. They were an evergreen tree, and produced a blue berry all year. The berries were a favorite of the elves that lived there for wine. But the really cool thing was the berries were bio-luminescent (SP?)... So looking up in the forest you saw a sort of sky of blue stars, regardless of the time of day.

The most fantastic and unbeleivable thing I have in my world is extensive cavern networks commonly called the "underdark", but I gather that's not that uncommon.

In the east, there is a region called the blighted lands. About 300 years ago, in the midst of a war, an unnamed wizard emerged and cursed the land, denying it both to the empire and the raiders. Little grows there to this day.

Also, I have ley lines. These ley lines are visible at night. They attract fey creatures and cause random magical effect, so civilization avoids them, but there are few other overt effect there. The nexuses (nexii?) of these ley lines is another matter. Each is eternally suffused in light and a number of bizarre conditions hold sway.

The Dragon Graveyard is analogous to an elephant graveyard. It is an ancient and well-sheltered plateau where dragons go to to die. It is filled with skeletal remains of these majestic creatures, and is a magical place closely guarded by dragonkind.

lol

Originally posted by Mark
"The Hot Pocket Wastelands and Mountains of Dew which lead to the Great Expanse..."

Click to expand...

LOL

The World of Greyhawk is filled with such locales, known as "Mysterious Places". There used to be a link at wizards.com, to the article printed in Greyhawk Adventures, but they seem to have restructured over there and I am having no luck finding it now.

My own campaign has undersea lakes, mountains of glass, living gelatinous tides, and more http://www.lobi.com/bpaa/background

well...

in my campaign, i have a number of oddities.

the tanglebones (yes, i know - but i love the name) are a series of gnarled hills that are actually the remnants of ancient battles between goblins and men. most of the hills are really nothing more than piles of earth-covered bones.

minas ju'raa is a city at the edge of the known world, sitting on a cliff that ovelooks the sea. on the horizon is a rift in reality, a flat band of chaos that runs across the world.

vaa is a plateau ringed by volcanos and home to the vaasha (see vaath - bovd). nearly inaccessible, it is the ancestral home of degenerate humanity - the worst tribe of man. the vaasha have an eastern feudal culture with appropriate architecture - alchemically treated to withstand the cinder & ash in the air.

tir na nog is a demiplane grafted to the world inside of an immense forest.

the underworld is just that. a vast labyrinth exists under the world as well, created by knos, god of the dead. the dead use these mazes unerringly to travel between the worlds, but the living must tread carefully. the labyrinth is accessible to mortals through the underdark.

apos is a burning island upon the saeshella (an inland sea, see below). it is home to a sadistic clan of efreeti who wish to set the word afire.

the saeshella is an inland sea created by an ancient goddess. her chosen people turned from her worship and ventured into demonic patrons. as punishment, she manifested as a woman and wept from the highest mountain near the city (several hundred miles away) for 7 days, drowning her once-faithful people and pouring her divine essence into the waters. the sea is highly magical (being all that is left of aseas, the goddess in question) and home to all kinds of weird stuff.

there is an as-yet unnamed haven for undead. it is a place where undead got to escape persecution and to live all eternity in a city of their peers. there are factions of both good and evil in the city but most are just tired of the long years as behave as they did in life - making pottery, praying to long-dead gods, etc.

tha'zz'a maghil is a lost dwarven abbey dedicated to abbathor, who punished a priest whose greed rivaled his own by crushing the city under golden coin.

there are two great libraries in the world that surpass all human knowledge. the first is in the sea kingdom of the tortles. the tortles are bipedal tortoise-men that cover their shells with runes detailing their lives and travels. as their long lives draw to a close, they return to the sea and their final resting place among the shells of their forebears. think of it like an elephant graveyard, just with thousand of tortoise shells.


the second is moragg kihr, an immense cavern inside of the dwarven kingdom of dwaara rogh. moradin himself first took chisel to stone on these walls and recorded the birth of the dwarven people and the doomtide prophecies of the second armageddon. the dwarves still carve the history of the world on these walls. it is said that moradin himself will carve the last rune on the last day on this world.

there's more but i don't have my maps on me.

Thank you for giving me yet another opportunity to plug Urbis...

Well, here are a few examples:

- The Elemental Storm, a major rip (several miles across at the very least) in the fabric of space that leads to the various elemental planes. Various prospectors roam the region in the search for rare and valuable substances.

- The Shafts of Lûd: Big holes in the ground that reach from the surface to the lowest reaches of the Underdark.

- The Great Southern Chaos: An extremely rough terrain that still bears the scars from ancient magical warfare.

- Magreth: It used to be a major city-state in the Hobgoblin Dominions, but now it's "just" a big sphere of swirling grey colors - about 40 miles in diameter. Nobody knows what happens inside...

- The Rainbow Plains: Fields full of many-hued plants whose seeds are renowned for their halluciogenic properties.

- Tower of Horag: An ancient tower four miles across at the base, and five miles high. It is unknown who built it - and for what purpose.

- Petersberg: A mountain known to be inhabited by a mile-long fish, who can only fit into its subterranean lake by biting its own tail.

- Sarush's Bowl: The place where an ancient psionicist battled an otherworldly entity and ascended to godhood. His descendants, the yuan-ti, regard the place as holy.

- The Star Moutains: An equatorial mountain chain where the stars and planets seem to be twice as big and bright to the naked eye than elsewhere. And indeed, reaching other worlds from here seems to be much easier than in other regions.

- The Steel Archipelagos: These metallic "islands" are actually the shells of gargantuan sessile maritime creatures.


And I definietly plan on adding more cool - and weird - places as I think of them...

Oh, and I haven't even mentioned yet that I've written up some details on the other planets in the same solar system!

alsih2o said:

my players recently stumbled on the "valley of Drayne" which is an enourmous valley of red rock made by a constant violent unmoving thunderstorm thrust onto the area to curse the gnomes who lived there who crossed the weather mage Drayne.

Click to expand...

here is the moran piece that inspired my valley-

The prime that my players live in does not "spin" there fore half of the world is always "light" with about 6 hours of dark (equal to our Early Evening Nautical Twilight) and the other side is always "dark with about 6 hours of "light" (equal to our Before Morning Nautical Twilight).

Other than that the world is billions of tiny islands with the biggest (besides one main content) about 50 X 50 miles.


At the northern pole there is a mountain range that tops out at about 60K feet ASL (above sea level) and the southern pole is a huge depression/pit that goes on seemingly forever (no-one has reached the bottom).


The players don't know.......


The islands are what were the mountaintops of great ranges that criss-crossed the planet before the floods about 10000 years ago. Most of the major ancient cities are hidden under water or accessible only underground. This is a major plot point since they need to find out how to open the conduits to the outer planes (see below) and re-connect the gods to the people. Part of that will be finding out what happened to the ancient civilization that seemed to just disappear 10000 years ago.


The northern pole is actually a physical "ladder" (for lack of a better term) up to the good aligned outer planes conversely the pit is a physical "ladder" down into the evil outer planes. There are no transitive planes and one must walk, fly or swim (as appropriate) to get to the outer planes.

The neutral planes are actually pockets inside the world itself and the elemental planes are reached through an unknown volcano (fire), a deep trench in the ocean (water), a cave (earth) and a high mountain top (air) as appropriate.

Currently the world guardian has shut and locked all of the pathways to the outer planes as a method of self protection (the players are cut off from their gods direct involvement) as the meddling of the gods and the resultant imbalance of good/evil and law/chaos is what caused the cataclysm that wiped the ancient civilization from the planet.

BTW: The planet is actually the moon of a larger planet that has only recently (35 years ago) been colonized by those escaping from a magical cataclysm caused by positive energy as a result of the forces of good tipping the scale greatly in their favor.


The world guardian (the actual living sprit of the world) has locked out the gods since it views them and the fervor of their mortal followers as the cause for the death of its sister.

Hope my players don't read this they aren't real EN World participants...

I like a lot of the ideas here and since I have a world chalk full of islands I can plop some of them in wherever I want. Thanks guys, and gals.


EDITED: for really %*^* spelling

I don't have a lot of fantastic geography, but here goes...

In the World of CITY setting {I wish TM...}, the Great Rift Canyon, also called the The Drag by some barbarian tribes, sperates the Erisian continent from the Lassantes' subcontinent. Its noteworthy because it wasn't formed through watercourse errosion. Legend has it that it was carved by the Giant god of fertility, Mr. Three-Legs, as he stode the narrow strip of land between continents, looking for his perfect mate. Kinda gives a new spin to term erosion {I'm so sorry, but this really is part of my setting...}