I do the odd bit of volunteering with a local wildlife conservation trust. A lot of this involves what is euphemistically called "grassland management" - what this typically means is cutting and raking up vast swathes of grass and other vegetation in order to allow tiny and obscure native species of plants to flourish. We arrive at some very remote and windswept location and destroy the peace for a day with strimmers, leaving it looking like a sheep that's been sheared - where once there was a jungle of plant life, now there is an open and empty patch of stubble. Like the deforestation of the Amazon in miniature. (But the main thing is that there's now a bit more growing space for a rare little flower that looks like a blob of moss and which nobody except a few enthusiasts has ever heard of.)
What I've learned from all of this is that, just when you think you have a feel for how much variety there is in the natural world, you find out you don't know the half of it. Grasslands are unbelievably varied. Today I was in a more-or-less unique habitat - a strip of land about a mile long and no more than 100 yards wide along the side of a river. Mine run-off containing traces of heavy metals such as cadmium and lead had been put into the river during the industrial revolution and gradually this had seeped into the banks at various locations up and down its length. While the river is now pristine, the heavy metals have remained in the soil. This was one such location, and it had resulted in a blend of plant life that you would find nowhere else on earth - including a sub-species that you find literally nowhere else other than these slivers of land on the upstream banks of the Tyne.
And that was just in the afternoon. In the morning we had been at an abandoned quarry where the limestone scree happened to produce the perfect conditions for a certain rare alpine flower. The site could have been no more than 400 yards in diameter. Go outside of that limit in any direction and you would be in a different habitat altogether and noticeably so.
The world is a patchwork of different environments so multitudinous it is almost mind-boggling. When creating a hexmap we tend to paint in very broad brush strokes - forest, grassland, desert, etc. This makes life easy, but causes us to miss out on some benefits that thinking in very granular detail could bring. Consider: what different types of grassland might exist in a world where there is not just mine run-off but also materials left over from magical duels? What types of unique habitats might sprout up around the corpse of dragons? What might the existence of a megadungeon do to the area around the entrance? And what kind of druids, treants, and other guardians would exist to protect these unique environments?
It's truly mind boggling (side note, are there other kinds of boggling?) to consider the sheer variety of life on our planet. And how many species have just disappeared without us knowing, simply because they were so isolated to begin with? It also makes complete sense that most people just have no idea what they're really looking at when they do spot some hidden little flower, but for some reason it disturbs me how much exists in the world that we are almost totally ignorant of as a species.
ReplyDeleteI find that in the creation of table top worlds, I always want to invent a bunch of plants and make them really unique with big lists of them for different environments. But then I'm like, wait unless they kill someone or are integral to current events(or worth money) nobody is going to care that much about this and I have things way higher up on my list of shit to do. Also at some point you can just have too much small granular stuff in your world to really keep track of and convey to your players. At best I find you get a couple of interesting unique plants per adventure and people go "neat!" and then you move on unless they're somehow important.
That's why I think you have to try to make it matter (e.g. strange plants growing where a dragon corpse has decomposed - maybe of special value to collectors or having strange magical powers).
DeleteRare herb of the ancients:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.bbc.com/future/story/20170907-the-mystery-of-the-lost-roman-herb
It is amazing the amount of diversity that can be in relatively small places. Where I live in Tennessee there is a lot of hardwood bottom land which, depending on the elevation of the river bank to the river itself, can be typical forest, close to a swamp or anywhere between those extremes. I got caught up to my waist in quicksand once in one of those areas after a particularly heavy rain. Getting out into the wilds or, at least, the country has been helpful for me visualizing what I can actually cram into a hex and get a feel for how often encounters with normal animals should occur.
ReplyDeleteYeah, you learn a lot about the world from hiking.
DeleteThis post is like a microcosm of the things James C. Scott talks about in his book, "Seeing Like a State" (1998), in which small particular details that are the actual reality get lost when trying to abstract "up" to higher maps, i.e. cadastral maps for states concerned about tax revenues, or 6-mile hexes for wilderness adventures.
ReplyDeleteGamewise, I've always wondered how to bring the actual wonder of hiking through a canyon, with all of its fallen trees, switchbacks, and little streams, to a group of table-top gamers. Ultimately I always give up. Perhaps prematurely--but how does one explain to a group of non-hiking individuals at a table what it feels like to walk across a slope of scree, with scraggling pines above, a deadly drop below, and a glacial mountain lake in the cradle of the mountains?
Eh, I need to get back to hiking ... but I'm not sure a game can ever mirror the actual reality of being "out and about" ... of watching an osprey tumble down through the sky to strike a fish in a lake--or later, to fly by so close its wings rustle the wind, and yet, bothered by a crow in its flight, to watch an osprey drop a fish back into a trout. What is it, except to actually see it?
Thanks for the post, though! It's nice to see the little bits of the living world living, even via the medium of written words!
Interesting - I've read that book but didn't make the connection.
DeleteI think you have to make those things relevant by making them encounters. That said, I think I have written before that what the "OSR" really needs/lacks is a book on wilderness exploration.