It's a Jungle Out There

Question: how many bad artists does it take to draw a hippocampus?

Answer: apparently, all of them.

I did not have much fun finding a good picture for the hippocampus entry below.  Nor was it easy to find good material.  The hippocampus has largely disappeared from D&D, and was never well covered back in the day.  There are almost no legends about the beast, except about it's shape; if you look it up on wikipedia, you get a litany about where it's been depicted and how, but nothing about the nature of the beast.  Ultimately, I had to dig up the Dragon Magazine #273, The Ecology of the Hippocampus, by Margaret and Ramsey Lundock (one of which is, or was, a terrible fiction writer), which gave some meaty information, most of which I disagreed with or ignored, but the structure of which gave me ideas to write.  As far as I know, this page on the Authentic Wiki is now the only extant, freely available description of hippocampi that is not mostly about what they look like or where they live (hint: in the water).  Enjoy.

This is not how I spent most of my day.  Creating monsters creates a need to discuss where those monsters live, pages which I am calling "ranges."  Today's page to be created was Jungle, which proved difficult because I like to include details about what sort of features one is likely to encounter in these landscapes.  Jungle is, unfortunately, rather devoid of these features.  I read through several book descriptions that waxed on about the unchangeableness of the jungle, and how this is one of the characteristics that drive people mad when they're forced to live in them for weeks or months at a time.  Much of the description of the jungle came from a book on "military geography" which was quite useful to steal from, because I'm a completely human without any compunctions or shame where it comes to good, solid plagiarism.  I'd feel a little worse about it, if it didn't come after searching for texts about jungles all day only to find source after source plagiarizing one another.  Why should I hold myself aloof?

The quest got so extensive that I learned there was an escape-from-the-worst-conditions-possible Australian movie made in 2017, called, sensibly enough, "Jungle."  With Daniel Radcliffe.  I watched it between other duties this afternoon, having plenty of time for some reason, and it follows the pattern of most such movies that have been made in the last ten years.  Person drops into environment, gets into trouble that really ought to mean their death, person survives when they absolutely should not.  The film is ... dark ... which should be expected.  It is a true life story, that apparently remains honest to the facts, if the internet is at all trustworthy.  Radcliffe clearly suffered to make it and the film deserves more attention than it received.

That said, with a strong desire to squeeze as much drama out of a jungle as a film can, the results were that jungles are devoid of features and are horrible because of their unchangeableness.  Oh well.  I managed to contrive a very short list of "interesting" stuff to see.  It would be hard to run a jungle effectively, with players sitting around comfortably drinking pop and coffee.

Each page is a hill to climb, but I feel good at the end of the day.