Ice, Jungle, Desert

Among my many sins, I once sat through the complete director's commentaries to the original Star Wars trilogy on DVD. In my defence, these are fascinating artefacts in their own right. Much of the commentary is, somewhat eccentrically, provided by the Ben Burtt - the sound engineer - and he goes into exquisite detail about how many of the sound effects were captured. In between George Lucas himself appears, to offer pearls of gnomic wisdom and litigate old disputes (for example: it was an outrage that they wouldn't accept Frank Oz as a nomination for Best Supporting Actor for his perfomance as Yoda in Empire), and every now and then up pops some other Star Wars luminary - Carrie Fisher, sounding like she's strung out on heroin; Lawrence Kasdan, hoping somebody realises who the fuck he is; Dennis Muren, talking about how it was that they made blaster shots look like they are moving; etc. The sheer amount of thought and effort that went into making the original Star Wars films is hereby revealed to have been extraordinary. It has been observed (I forget where) that the Big Hollywood Blockbuster circa 1980-2000 was a feat of human achievement akin to one of the ancient wonders of the world, marshalling huge amounts of energy, intelligence, craft and logistical energy over the course of years, and while this may be slightly hyperbolic, listening to Hollywood insiders talk about the process of film-making during that era makes you begin to see the point.

But I digress. What I wanted to talk about here was an observation George Lucas makes during the commentary on one of the films (possibly Return of the Jedi) in which he describes the trilogy as being dominated by three geographic themes - desert (Tattooine), forest (Endor), and ice (Hoth). I have always remembered this, as while it initially seemed a very banal point to make, its impact has grown on me. There is something archetypal about deserts, forests (particularly jungles) and icy wilderness. They function, at least to the civilised, developed-world mind, as exotic geographic 'others'. And we see them emerging a lot in fantasy literature and video games, where every setting seems to contain within it a deserty bit, a jungly bit, and an icy bit, alongside the typical, generic, bucolic temperate zone which tends to be where adventure begins.

(Indeed, while I can't think of an example right now, readers will be able to tell me about a raft of old platform games which even contained an 'ice level', a 'desert level', a 'jungle level', and so on.)

The OSR is quite light on straight up icy, deserty, or jungly settings. This is not to say that there are no products which are set in such environments, but they tend to be small-scale hexcrawls rather than deep, detailed settings-proper. 

I think this is for two key reasons. The first is practical difficulty. Arctic, rainforest and desert landscapes are unfamiliar and there is a sense with each that the environment ought itself to be a major driver of adventure and danger. This is difficult to systematise and make interesting (although there have been attempts to do it - The Bitter Reach being an example that pops to mind). 

The second is lack of familiarity. The Tolkienian tropes on which we still tend to rely do not seem to sit comfortably in non-Tolkienian environs. The furniture is just different. And therefore it feels as though the monsters, character classes, races, even magic systems ought to be different, too. This means extra work. 'My desert world is populated by desert orcs, desert dwarfs, desert elves and desert giants!' is boring - granted. So what is it populated by, then?

If I was to come up with such a setting, I think my approach would be to start with those issues in reverse order. What makes a setting really sing is its content, and the building blocks for that content would need to be gathered together first. 

And Step One in that process would I think be to get together the crew - who are going to be the main inhabitants of this world I am making up, and what is the relationship between them going to be?

An initial exercise here would just be coming up with some lists and seeing what fell together. And you could do a lot worse than just looking at what's already there. If one were to create a jungle setting, for instance, what might one jot down as likely inhabitants while flicking through the Monstrous Manual?

A trawl through the 2nd edition Monstrous Manual contains the following, what I would call, exclusively 'jungly' creatures (not including those which can be found 'anywhere', or bog standard things like giant insects and big cats): 

• Bullywug
• Catoblepas
• Coautl
• Black dragon
• Emerald dragon
• Ettercap
• Jungle giant
• Grippli
• Ixitxachitl
• Kirre
• Lizard man
• Locathah
• Weretiger
• Mold man
• Muckdweller
• Rakshasa
• Winged snake
• Tabaxi
• Tasloi
• Wyvern
• Yuan-ti
• Zaratan

Let's now thing about how we might use this list to inspire some setting ideas. I jot down these notes simply as I think of them, as it were in 'real time'; you can of course add your own.

1. Zaratans. Floating island turtles is too good an idea not to include in any tropical setting, and therefore my putative jungle setting would include them - probably within the context of a huge Amazon/Congo/Mekong-style river system which regularly floods. I would want these floating islands to be populated, maybe by Rakshasa sorcerer-lords who have a very decentralised, anarchic union, each family ruling one Zaratan together with their lizardman slaves. 

2. The Rakshasa sorcerer-lords probably I would make ape-like, rather than big cat-like. If they were big cat-like, this would clash with the flavour of tabaxi and weretigers.

3. Weretigers I would want to make more of than just occasional, werewolf-style individual 'baddies'. I would like there to be a weretiger polity in which the nobility can transform into tigers, and the hoi polloi - naturally, when you think about it - do their bidding. Would I reskin them as werejaguars? Very possibly. 

4. Any setting ought to have some region of the map which was once home to a great empire now ruined and debased, and populated by the degenerate former inhabitants. For some reason, I am struck by the idea that the setting once contained a tabaxi empire (think Maya temples and the like), but that this was conquered by a great grippli horde long ago, under the direction of a mighty couatl king. That conquest was short lived, however, as in the long-term the grippli could not be made to cohere into one whole, but split apart into many factions and minor kingdoms. Sooner or later bullywug warlords also moved in, and that entire region is now a very dangerous, chaotic jungle badland with no centralised authority. 

5. The Amazon/Congo/Mekong-style river system would also contain locathah and ixitxachitl polities, probably engaged in internecine warfare. Maybe the rakshasa sorcerer-lords use these aquatic beings as pawns in their own conflicts, playing them off against one another and deploying them where possible to make life difficult for rivals. 

6. Yuan-ti should clearly feature somewhere, but are such a distinctive concept that it almost seems pointless to fiddle with them. There is a Yuan-ti empire; it is hostile to all others. It exists in the background as a constant, looming threat, and it has agents throughout the rest of the setting.

7. Where do humans and jungle giants fit in? Some humans live in the weretiger policy I mentioned earlier. Many others are enslaved by the Yuan-ti. Others still live under the rakshasa. But perhaps also this setting contains a city-state (presumptively where adventurers start off) with a mostly human population but which is ruled by jungle giants. And perhaps the jungle giants are, in fact, akin to Amazons - tall, powerful, female rulers who hold sway over the humans but offer them protection. 

That would do for starters. I haven't really done anything with the tasloi or dragons, yet. Certainly, I could see space for an emerald dragon dwelling in a dormant volcano somewhere in the jungle. Perhaps he or she has a black dragon rival, too. But we see a setting take shape, and this would obviously be a productive way to approach designing icy/deserty settings too.