Wednesday, January 12, 2022

Worldbuilding 3b: Flora

This post is part of a series on worldbuilding; links for the whole series can be found on this page.


From our discussion, we have a firm grasp of the lay of the land.  Oceans and seas delimit the edges of the continents or wide areas of habitation.  Rivers form troughs and are divided by high plateaus, hills, ridges and mountains.  By defining the headwaters of the rivers, we can see how these troughs split and cut the mountains into "ranges," lines of peaks that form barriers against travel and trade ... this last being the all-important motivation for the presence of ports, towns, cities and roads.  It's just a short hop from there to understand that gaps in mountains and hills, where roads would go, also create towns that straddle borders between two peoples.

We can talk more about towns and their purpose later on.  First, we have to discuss the relationship between climate and continents, and that's vegetation.

At the beginning of this series, I decided not to skim over bits and pieces but to get to the root of things, letting the reader understand how each part of the setting relates and feeds other parts.  And why understanding things like climate, hydrography, people and even the shape of the planet builds the world into a cohesive, rich fabric.

Much of the problem comes from know-nothings rushing to get into print ludicrous "game worlds," purely from uninformed, uneducated imaginations, before there was a chance of someone doing so competently.  Thus we're stuck with crap examples that have become dogma, encouraging other ignorant worldbuilders to steal and copy the mistakes, without knowing they are mistakes.  Tolkein was very good at a great many things; and his artwork of Middle Earth is oh-so-fanciful and compelling, but one thing Tolkein was NOT is a geographer.  Nor did he give a damn about becoming one.  That's obvious from every page of every description of every physical feature he presents in his writings.

Thus, when Greyhawk stole it's fantasy template from Middle Earth, once again no geographer was consulted.  Hell, it's a map.  What do we want a geographer for?  The image showing is what we got: a geography and vegetation that corresponds to no place on Earth — an illogic we're supposed to ignore because, "Fantasy!"

Skipping the details for the moment, the worst part is that its so boring.  What am I, a DM, to do with these cookie-cutter stretches of empty green hexes, where the towns don't sit on roads and the rivers are all neatly spaced equidistant apart, like rows in a garden?  It's painfully obvious the map was made to impose days of travel upon players through empty countryside, where some of these hexes are hundreds of miles from the nearest place where a farmer might sell grain, so the players can get to the next dungeon.  And that is the point.  The world isn't made to be a "world."  It's made as a measuring tool between dungeons.  So it doesn't matter what anyone does here, or how any of it fits together politically, or any other element of sociology, anthropology, meteorology or geography.  It's not "real."  And every line, every bit of detail, every dot and even the colour scheme, is meant to emphasise that it's NOT REAL.

That's fine for some people.  But like the doctor who can't watch doctor shows on television, I'm too familiar with geography and these other subjects to swallow my bile when told this atrocity above is "fantasy."  It's not.  It's crud.  "Fantasy" is meant to be compelling and fascinating; it's meant to push the boundaries of human imagination to the limits of possibility; it's NOT meant to reflect the work of a 3rd-grade science fair contestant. 

Forests form when the atmosphere transports warm, wet air over a cool, elevated continent — such as the northern trade winds gathering air from the Pacific as they move east so they can dump rain on the east side of the Nanling highlands all over southern China.  Or the way those same winds gather air from the Atlantic and dump it up and down the Appalachians, especially from the Carolinas south.

In China, those winds eventually strike the Qinling Mountains, 22,000 feet or so, losing all of their water in the form of snow, so they have very little left to drop on the arid Tibetan Plateau; whatever moisture might remain in the atmosphere is left on the Kunlun Mountains, on the north edge of Tibet, and so there's none at all for the bone dry Takla Makan.

In Georgia and Carolina, the Appalachians aren't very high; and the trade winds rolling through the Gulf of Mexico skirt around the mountains and into the Mississippi basin.  There the warm wet air meets cold dry air coming down from Canada — and where the two air masses meet, they create spectacular amounts of energy in the form of thunder storms and tornados.  "Tornado Alley" forms a NE-SW line that lies just behind the Appalachians.  The overall result is a wavering front rolling north and south, dropping inconsistent but sufficient rain for farming from north of Edmonton down into Texas.  We rarely get tornados in Alberta, but they happen; caused by the same phenomenon that causes tornados in Kentucky.

This is why southern China is thick with jungle like mixed broadleaf and deciduous forests, while the north of China is dry.  These are not diddly patches of forest, either; they are a thousand miles in diameter, north to south, east to west, all along the coast and up into the highlands of Yunnan.  In America, the thick forests make jungles in Florida and mixed pines and deciduous forests on the Appalachians, and a huge deciduous forest that reaches from Alabama to Wisconsin.

And lest one imagine that some immense forest in Greyhawk was "cut down," leaving only these patches left, let me remind the reader that we've been cutting forests with heavy equipment for two centuries and there's still a lot of forest in Eastern America.  Forests grow; they replace trees that are cut down, unless you cut them down fast enough ... and there aren't enough people in Greyhawk to cut those forests down.

Name any place in the world where winds blow from the sea onto the land that isn't drenched in forests.  The northern westerlies hit the Cascades and Coast Mountains in the 'States and Canada and produce a cold, wet forest.  The same westerlies push over Greenland, full of water from Canada's northern seas, and make it an ice cap.  They push over Scandinavia and Scotland and create another wet forest.  They pick up moisture from the northern seas of Russia and spread it over the Taiga ... which also gets swirling, cold polar winds which cover all of Siberia in a thick blanket of snow for six months of the year.  Moisture from the Okhotsk Sea makes trees in Kamchatka.  Moisture from the Chukchi and Barent's seas are blown eastward to make trees in Alaska.  That's going right around the globe.

For Greyhawk's eastern shore to be mostly empty of trees, the wind would have to blow from the west ... and since there's mountains on the west of the map, and a great deal of continent, this would make the east side of Greyhawk very, very dry indeed.  Sahara dry. 

 Consider: the Sahara desert has two thousand miles of coastline upon the Atlantic Ocean.  Yet it's so dry, the shore of the Sahara is as destitute as any other part.  Why?  Because at the Sahara's latitude, the trade winds blow west, not east.  Those trade winds have to cross the whole African continent before reaching the Sahara on the eastern boundary; and before they can do that, they have to climb over the very high Ethiopian plateau — a geologic extrusion of the earth's crust associated with the African Rift Valley, where tectonic plates are moving apart.  Which is a whole other subject.

By the time those winds pass Ethiopia, they enter Sudan and Chad — the latter having another plateau for those winds to climb over.  By the time they reach Lake Chad, in the middle of the continent, there's no moisture left ... and much of the wind force is diminished.  Dry winds drift from the north, where they come from the Mediterranean after crossing over the European continent, or from the south, influenced by the southern trades in the Bight of Biafra and the South Atlantic ... but the prevalent winds blow dust and sand westward, into the Atlantic.  This ensures the coastline is always dry.

If the winds in temperate Greyhawk came from the west, the map above would be a complete desert.  If they blew in from the east, the map would be a single monstrous forest, like China and America.  BOTH of which would be more interesting than the huge replication of parkland Wisconsin that's represented on a grand scale.

Woodlands, steppe, jungles, savanna, deserts and so on aren't topographical features, though fantasy maps treat them as though they are.  Forests aren't a kind of mountain; a grassland isn't a kind of sea.  These are vegetations that have taken advantage of physical formations and the climate, which dictate how much water they will have upon which to thrive.  No water and we get a desert.  Very little water and we get an arid highland, like the American Chapparal, or a semi-desert basin, like eastern Oregon.  A little more water and we get a breadbasket like Kansas or the Ukraine.  A little more water and we get pine trees and aspens; a little more and we get oaks and elms.  WATER dictates vegetation, not "where a forest would look good" on a map.  Forests cram themselves against the water shed that makes them, climbing up mountain slopes until the altitude creates too much frost.  Forests don't grow in non-sensical copses in the middle of a plain, surrounded by hundreds of miles of open plain.  Why is it raining enough to make a forest here, but not enough to make a forest there?

What the hell?

Dry country forms in the lee of mountains; on the other side, after the winds are denuded of rain.  Not in random patches around the bases of mountains or with some ad hoc line separating them from green farmland.  Rivers don't form on dry, flat country.  They form where rain falls, where there's a catch basin for the rain and where the amount of water is so much, it has to run off where its fallen and go somewhere else.

Okay.  I'm going in circles now.  Let's shelve this.

7 comments:

  1. Really digging this, and learning things too!!

    Unfortunately, the thing to remember is that fantasy maps are there for the players to interact with the world. They are truly all player-facing. Logic and geography has little or nothing to do with it. And when given the choice between 'realism' and 'good for gaming', the rpg must go with the later.

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  2. Except that you're completely wrong, ThrorII.

    Players are PEOPLE. And being PEOPLE, they automatically view things in terms of logic and believability. If the game world has nothing to offer the players who are interacting with it, because it's more kindergartenish than they're used to, then the game's resilence and continued gravitas will fail. Next thing, the DM's online crying, "But why don't my players stick around? Why are they bored all the time? What am I doing wrong?"

    They're failing to treat their players as PEOPLE. They think they can treat their players like applications, and it fails every time.

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  3. The longer answer is this: humans build games to challenge their humanity; the substance and substrata that makes them human beings, offering problem solving, emotional satisfaction and joy, uncertainty, escape and opportunities to show off what they can do.

    D&D is rich enough in content and structure that it doesn't have to adhere to the normal simplification demands of old-style boardgames and parlour games. Like video games, it can push the boundaries of what's possible, so that what the players find in it is more than a reflection of their base wants, but a vehicle with which to explore their higher consciousnesses and selves. D&D is not merely creative for the DM. It can be creative for the players, too! But only if it provides TOOLS that allow infinite possibilities and infinite rewards. That's not possible without some meaningful degree of "realism."

    I, for one, refuse to dumb down my D&D game just because some people are only interested in having their feathers stroked. Those are not my players. My players want what I want ... and they're thrilled to see it happening.

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  4. I think you’ve long ago moved away from D&D as a game and turned it into a rules based simulation of medieval Europe if magic and orcs were real. It’s amazing. Your attention to detail is impressive. Rain shadows! That’s impressive, Alexis. I haven’t thought seriously about long term weather in my game worlds for a long time. Thank you for that.

    That map, though, is not a map per se. It’s a game board. You play differently than those map makers did. That map is useless to you because your D&D is not an extension of a war game campaign wherein players compete with one another for territories. Your game is something beyond that. You see it as silly because it bears so little relevance to what you do. That map is shaped like that for gaming reasons. Poster #1 is right. They were making a game, and that is the game board.

    You are developing a simulation. That map you show is for a game that you haven’t played in many years, if ever. I’d wager it has about as much relevance to your D&D game as a Backgammon board would — a thing with which that “map” has a lot more in common than a map trying to depict a real world, as yours does.

    How do you think your map would hold up to a group of war gamers? Would it be balanced for all sides?

    Happy New Year, Alexis.

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  5. Thank you for the praise, Carl.

    Poster #1 didn't make the argument you're making, so, uh, still wrong.

    "Simulation" is a dangerous word. Yes, technically, I'm making "the imitation of the operation of a real-world process or system over time," as Wikipedia defines it. However, I'm NOT doing it to performance tune, test, train, educate or model natural systems in order to find out how they work or can be made better. I'm DEFINITELY making a fantasy world. Characters in my game are free to act as though functioning in a high-performance "fun house;" that's all. I've patiently taken it to a degree that most TTRPG designers claim, or argue vehemently, is "impossible." As such, "simulation" helps them minimize what I've done, by arguing, "Oh, he's just doing the real world," which defacto ignores endless non-simulative adjustments and changes I've made over the decades.

    Rain shadows and other details covered in this series thus far are JUST THE BEGINNING. They don't remotely address thousands of problems that will arise having to do with non-realistic elements and pure fantasy. Those things, however, must be put into a solid foundation or the whole acts like a pound of water without a bowl. The game world must be engineered; and the things I've talked about so far act as the struts; but there's more to it than this. I'm taking my time.

    With regards to what I have serving as a game map for war gamers: of course, it wasn't built for that purpose; and it certainly isn't built for "balance," any more than any two places with different areas, topographies, natural resources or cultures can conceivably be said to balance.

    What's interesting about real life war, however, is that while we can plainly say that 1935 Russia and Germany don't balance each other, there was every reason to believe - prior to engagement - that Germany MIGHT have won that contest. And there are those who argue that if Hitler had left it in the hands of his generals, they WOULD have succeeded.

    To me, wargames are best when the stakes aren't balanced - and when we cannot know for sure which is the stronger. My game map provides for many of those situations ... BECAUSE the fog of war provided by the depth of complexity makes certainty impossible.

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  6. And for the record, Greyhawk is a very badly designed "game board."

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  7. For you, yes, Greyhawk is absolute shit.

    For me, it's OK, but I cannot imagine using that much territory. That map assumes a 20 year game with a 100 players or more. I cannot conceive of having that much free time unless I win the lottery.

    Who used simulation as a pejorative to describe what you're doing? Show them to me so that I may point and laugh.

    If you haven't done so, I think it's worth finding and reading Dave Arneson's The First Fantasy Campaign. It answered many "why" questions for me about D&D. Warning, though, it reads like a bunch of unedited notes from someone's old D&D campaign. Think of it as a proto-web-log.

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