Freaky In-Real-Life Locations

[Oversquid]

So I've been thinking about where I get a good chunk of my inspiration for quests and locations in my games, and I realized that most of the stuff that inspired me was some of the weirder locales on our rock called "Earth". I think I can speak for most of you about how inspirational those places can be.

This thread is a compilation of all kinds of weird places in the world, be it natural, artificed, or even an odd phenomenon or a major disaster can do. Just compile it here for all of enworld to have an easy reference guide to some inspiration for the games they make.

I'll start with my post:

The Red Forest:

The Red Forest was a forest that was adjacent to the Chernobyl Nuclear Powerplant in The Ukraine that was unfortunate enough to be directly downwind of the meltdown radiation on the fateful day of April 26th, 1986.

When the radiation bombarded the 10 square kilometers of woods directly around the power plant, the trees suddenly died, and turned a ginger brown due to the amount of radiation the trees absorbed.

The area is still deserted of human activity, and because of that, it became an unintentional wildlife refuge. The radiation is still heavily present there, and is shown thanks to higher rates in albinism in swallows around the Red Forest.

Source: Red Forest - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

...

So guys, post some places here!

 

[Tonguez]

Pinnacles Desert, Western Australia - hundreds of sandstone pinnacles sticking up from the surrounding desert

 

[Lwaxy]

Giant Crystal Caves

 

[Someone]

The 5 most spectacular landscapes on earth (that can murder you)

Warning! Cracked link. Do not click if you don't like dick jokes of Batman.

 

[Derren]

There was a thread about exactly this some time ago with many good entries.

http://www.enworld.org/forum/genera...0-strange-real-world-locales-inspire-you.html

 

[Aldeon]

It really doesn't look that different from any other forest, but this is Jukai. It's a forest in Japan at the base of Mt. Fuji, and it's exactly like any other forest. Except people like to commit suicide here.

According to what I've read, some Japanese author wrote a romance story where the main couple commit suicide together in this forest, and since then it's been a popular place for it. Apparently the government sweeps the forest every year for dead bodies and usually finds at least 100 bodies laying around. I think the general idea can be used to fuel some sort of necromancy-related plot hook.

 

[Scott DeWar]

that is giving me evil thoughts already!!

 

[ComradeGnull]

Building on [MENTION=6684394]Oversquid[/MENTION]'s mention of a Chernobyl-related area, the Pinsk Marshes were cool before Chernobyl even existed (truly, they are the hipsters of the Slavic wetlands). Impassible to armies, a place of refuge for guerrilla fighters and people fleeing from bandits. Even before the Chernobyl disaster, the high rate of albinism among inhabitants of the marshes led a 19th Century racialist to propose that Caucasians had evolved there. If you've ever seen the Sean Bean movie Black Death, I always think of the pagan village that they end up in as being in the Pinsk Marshes.

Bialowieza Forest- a chunk of primeval forest along the Polish/Belarussian border that basically looks like Europe did hundreds of years ago, down to containing species that have gone extinct everywhere else. Oh, and there's an abandoned, partially ruined 13th Century tower in there somewhere.

 

[ppaladin123]

A minor contribution:

Shades Of Death Road - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

[amerigoV]

Plain of Jars