Worldbuilding, Day 4--BOOM
Apr. 20th, 2011 10:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kayqyApparently today's challenge is about cataclysms! Whee! (You'll have to excuse me, I'm still on a bit of an epic high from reading Riordan's The Lost Hero today. This may affect my desire for big things to go boom.)
For 15 minutes, jot down some of the Really Big Land Features you want in your story and just think "what if that were made by...."
~Well, there's the mountain range, of course. And the caverns riddling their insides, which are even more important. I kind of picture something like the Cave of Crystals in Mexico, though I wonder about the heat required to make something like that. Probably not as unlikely as I'd think, even in a northern clime, if it's heated geothermally. The mountains would have to be ancient, though, and seismically stable for ages to keep from destroying the caves and their crystals... though there could be some supernatural interference, I suppose....
~A canyon at the edge of a desert; something that may not come in to play in the story proper, but that Vester and Sylver have seen in their travels. And the locals have an old legend about the canyon, how the desert was once green and lush, but then demons or something split the earth open, and the chasm swallowed the river that was their lifestream. And now the land west of the divide is dry, save for the rare storm strong enough to pass beyond the lush coastland and over the canyon... (There are ruins in the desert that locals claim predate the canyon, but I'm not sure if that's true.)
I'm kind of running out of brain and time for the night, but I think I'll tuck away ideas like fires, floods, and meteorites to chew on later. I'd like to make sure they're not too cliche, but my demons do need to come from somewhere... And as a BBC article about the Cave of Crystals said, "We know more about the outer edges of the Solar System than we do about the first kilometre of the Earth's crust." I think under the earth will wind up being incredibly important in this world.
For 15 minutes, jot down some of the Really Big Land Features you want in your story and just think "what if that were made by...."
~Well, there's the mountain range, of course. And the caverns riddling their insides, which are even more important. I kind of picture something like the Cave of Crystals in Mexico, though I wonder about the heat required to make something like that. Probably not as unlikely as I'd think, even in a northern clime, if it's heated geothermally. The mountains would have to be ancient, though, and seismically stable for ages to keep from destroying the caves and their crystals... though there could be some supernatural interference, I suppose....
~A canyon at the edge of a desert; something that may not come in to play in the story proper, but that Vester and Sylver have seen in their travels. And the locals have an old legend about the canyon, how the desert was once green and lush, but then demons or something split the earth open, and the chasm swallowed the river that was their lifestream. And now the land west of the divide is dry, save for the rare storm strong enough to pass beyond the lush coastland and over the canyon... (There are ruins in the desert that locals claim predate the canyon, but I'm not sure if that's true.)
I'm kind of running out of brain and time for the night, but I think I'll tuck away ideas like fires, floods, and meteorites to chew on later. I'd like to make sure they're not too cliche, but my demons do need to come from somewhere... And as a BBC article about the Cave of Crystals said, "We know more about the outer edges of the Solar System than we do about the first kilometre of the Earth's crust." I think under the earth will wind up being incredibly important in this world.
