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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Cassandra" data-source="post: 2961196" data-attributes="member: 18157">Your comments generated further information from Dr. Keeler, which I pass along here:Antra     You can certainly use the mixed prairie kit if you prefer.  Steppe and mixed prairie  in fact blend into each other in the real world (where development has left them intact, that is).     The height of grasses and other herbs that die back to the ground each winter is set by the length and quality of the growing season.  In our world nothing can grow while water is a solid (ice/snow).  Only when the temperatures top freezing is growth a possibility.  If the plants have plenty of water and months to grow in they will get taller than if they quickly run out of water or have only 2 months with above-freezing temperatures.  The main complication and one reason your system does approach mixed prairie is that at cooler temperatures, water evaporates more slowly, so from the same amount of rain, more water is available to the plants.  The other high latitude complication is that if the summer has 24 hours of sunlight, plants can grow 24 hours a day, so the two month growing season may produce much taller plants than a two-month growing season where the summer days never get longer than 16 hours.     This is a good point.  Tabletop wanted generic places to fit diverse games.  Making it general means it doesn't fit any one place all that well.  Writers and game masters for whom the environment is an important part of the story will want to make changes from the kits.  The kits, and Into the Open as a whole, could give the GM a quick set of answers for the players who are just passing through.  Or it could be a starting point for creating an environment for a particular game, in which case drop whatever doesn't fit, add more appropriate local animals, plants and indigenous tribes. 10-foot grass forests are (kind of ) the moist prairie of ItO.  There are also bamboo forests of SE Asia. (Bamboo is a grass. The reason most grasses don't get 10' tall are a combination of growing season length and support issues.  Bamboo solved the support problem.)</blockquote>

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