My contribution to this thread on the pub:
Things I think would be interesting.
- Messed up geographies. Not necessarily Skyrealms but I based the design of Viride on a diagram of proteins floating in lipid layers (cell membrane).
- An assumption is a planet – much like Earth. Maybe or maybe not one ecology but what if you break that assumption. Maybe the world isn’t a globe, maybe it’s a fragment of the planet held together with indescribably powerful magic powered by the living souls of mages. Maybe the forces holding the planet together kidnap magic users and insert them into the “integrity web” holding the fragment together. They’re kidnapping and dooming people on a small scale just to keep everyone else on the planet alive.
- Messed up weather. Storms or quakes, rains of glass or acid, lightning that is super attracted to metal armour and can chain.
- Messed up flora and fauna. Like “durlig” in Jorune – people have to eat emergency food. There’s also a lot more consumption of things that would have been “vermin”. The killing of a large “dragon” is a celebration not just because it’s a dread beast but because it’s a lot of food.
- The Integrity Mages are the bad guys. So we give them an evil name. We then discover they’re them only reason everyone is alive.
- Delving too deep in mines can bring you to open space. That’s very ungood. Limits metal and gem mining. And a mine turns into a vacuum hole until sealed by the magi.
There are other fragments out there and the magi can visit them. They have devices. The laws out there differ depending on which magi faction rules the fragment.
That’s a riff on breaking the geographical assumptions. Shards. Fragments.
