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.