Vivid Worlds Will Kill You

The question “How do I make a fantasy setting feel real?” is one of those people will never really ever stop grappling with.

There is a lot of good input on this topic: have things change over time, create interactions between aspects of the world that don’t involve the players, borrow judiciously from the real world, which everyone has had someone tell them is stranger than any fiction. 

 

In old school D&D, making an environment feel real is a solved issue, as long as the environment is a dungeon or can be navigated using the dungeon exploration rules. Movement speeds, 10-minute turns, random encounter procedures are like the enzymes that turn grid-paper maps and sparse room keys into vivid, realized locales—it’s part of the magic trick that gets so many people hooked on the OSR. 

But dungeons aren’t the same as full settings, and the deeper layers of abstraction used to map and explore an overworld make it harder to bring outdoor environments to life than interiors. This is especially the case with imagined environments that have only loose connection to the real world. 

In thinking on this topic recently I’ve reflected on two non-game works that prominently feature settings of particular vividness: Scavengers Reign, the 2023 sci-fi HBO show known by many of you to be a rare mainstream cultural product inspired by Jean Giraud that has merit beyond just being inspired by Jean Giraud, and Fantastic Planet, a 1973 French and Czech animated film that most of you probably first watched stoned and/or in college.  

If you’ve seen both you probably came to the same conclusion I did that the latter almost definitely served as a source of inspiration for the former, not so much in terms of plot but setting: they both take place on alien worlds where the worlds themselves, specifically the interactions between organisms and their environment, are more distinctive and memorable than the plots and characters. 

In watching Scavengers Reign when it was airing, and then rewatching Fantastic Planet more recently, I kept asking myself why these settings worked so well. Sure, the camera lingered on weird creatures and landscapes long enough to fix themselves in you mind, but the same can be said for, say, the Star Wars sequel trilogy but not nearly to the same effect.

It turns out it's not the settings themselves but the kinds of stories their in. Scavengers Reign and Fantastic Planet are both survival narratives, and it’s specifically the survival aspect that makes the ecology of the setting hit harder. 

In other words, each work uses the context of survival as a framework upon which elaborate, imaginative settings are built, settings that convey meaning by way of ecological interactions. Because survival fiction inextricably ties movement of the plot to how the characters navigate the basic facts of the environment, the genre conventions are well-suited to bring to life fantasy  environments in ways no other genre can quite accomplish.  

Let’s take a look at how. 

Scavengers Reign

Scavengers Reign follows survivors in the far future shipwrecked on an alien planet. When the show begins, separate groups of survivors are each eking out meager existence on the planet Vesta after their ship, the Demeter 227, experiences an ambiguous disaster. In the first episode a pair of survivors activate the Demeter’s emergency landing protocol, and the disparate survivors witness it slowly make its way to the surface of the planet. For various reasons each group decides to journey to the wreckage, and their adventures through lush vivid environments make up the substance of the show.

Much of the series is spent detailing the complexity and interrelationships within Vesta’s ecosystems. Character moments and plot beats are interspersed with brief scenes of symbiosis, parasitism, and predation, portrayed in such a way as to highlight the rationality of flora and fauna’s adaptations while underscoring the alienness of the environment. 

In one episode, a brief montage shows the lifecycle of a species of a sort of tree, beginning with DNA extraction of a creature through hypodermic tendril, then gestating a vegetal simulacrum which joins up with the herd and detonates in an explosion of spore-like seedlings, producing a new stand of trees fed by the bodies of the exploded herd creatures. All of this is shown as lead up to a main character getting stuck by the hypodermic tendril, leading to a tense scene later where the characters’ traveling companion is confronted by his plant clone. 

While much of the ecology the characters encounter is incredibly dangerous in horrifying and elaborate ways, the show makes explicit that not all flora and fauna pose a direct threat. Some instances depict the environment as wondrous and even beneficial to the characters’ survival. In one scene, a character suffering from a skin disease seeks respite in a pool of water. Suddenly, the viewer sees a pack of large dark fish approach from the depths, and there’s an “oh shit” moment as it’s unclear why they are moving toward her with such grim purpose. But the tension is immediately resolved once the fish begin harmlessly nibbling at the infected flesh, assuaging the character’s ailment. 

This tension around what is and isn’t a threat is central to the flow of the narrative, which simply wouldn’t work if everything was overtly dangerous. The point is not that Vesta is dangerous but that it is alien--everything has its own logic, which can only be discovered through observation and experimentation. 

This experimentation and observation is the key to every character’s survival, which they go about in different ways: each must adapt to the environment by learning how they may integrate themselves into the ecosystem—figuratively for the most part, as most characters navigate various hazards, but literally in the case of one character who physically and mentally merges with a psychic predator, and also literally in the case of a robot who experiences a strange one-ness with the planet when mysterious golden mold grows on their circuitry. Those that fail to integrate perish.  

But this experimentation and observation in a survival context is also key to making the world feel vivid and distinctive. If the alien world was a setting for a different sort of story to take place, say like Pandora in the first Avatar film, Vesta might be remembered only as a series of lush backdrops with maybe a familiar merchandise-friendly animal popping up here and there, as opposed to the layered, puzzle-box ecosystem it is given the space to be. 

Fantastic Planet

As mentioned above, immediately noticeable to anyone familiar with Scavengers Reign and Fantastic Planet, is their shared fixation on showing the natural workings of their respective alien ecologies. 

Fantastic Planet takes place on an alien world dominated by a race of giant blue humanoids called Draags. Human beings, brought from earth some time in the indefinite past, are treated as animals and sometimes kept as pets. The story follows a human pet who escapes his home and joins a community of wild humans who eventually rise up against the Draags, voyage to the “fantastic planet” orbiting the Draag world, and win freedom for all humans. 

Unlike the world of Scavengers Reign, with its sort of naturalistic indifference, the world of Fantastic Planet is overtly hostile. The sparse, brutal locales of the film’s setting are home to nightmarish flora and fauna, each feeling designed to be as cruel and inhospitable to humanity as possible. They clamp, whip, and slice senselessly throughout the film as the humans scurry through the narrative. 

One scene that’s particularly illustrative of this hostility: the protagonist and another human are making their way through some tangled overgrowth. Looming above is some sort of plant or creature that looks like a pumpkin-shaped head supported on several stalks within an organic cage, with a long branching nose. A bird creature flaps toward the head and lands on one of the nose-branches. The branches then close around the bird, shake it violently, and then toss it to the ground where the camera lingers on dozens of other bird corpses littered about. 

This particular ecological mean-spiritedness is everywhere, but more importantly, this lingering on the corpses demonstrates that Fantastic Planet should be understood as a film primarily about the setting. Whereas in Scavengers Reign human stories are told through how survivors interact with alien ecologies, the alien organisms and bizarre natural scenes cover far more of what Fantastic Planet is as a work of art than the plot or characters.

One of the most important ways Fantastic Planet establishes itself as a survival story upon which such a distinctive, resonant setting may be built is how it features humanity in relation to the environment. Human characters throughout the film are depicted small, ant-like against harsh barren landscapes, fragile as paper dolls when they are pulled and plucked by curious Draags or hungry predators. This usage of scale and severity highlights the hostility of the world, amplifying to a grotesque degree what is at bottom a very basic story common to many American and European survival narratives about how humans have used ingenuity to overcome our status as squishy subjects to an uncaring natural world. 

What else? (SURPRISE it's Hundreds of Beavers)

A third work, much different from the previous two, brings home the point I’m trying to make. 

The 2022 slapstick comedy Hundreds of Beavers represents a third approach to worldbuilding through survival. The film follows Jean Kayak, an applejack brewer whose life is upended after beavers eat through beams supporting his giant kegs, which leads to the destruction of his home and farm. Jean finds himself alone and naked in the wintry wilderness, where over the course of the film he develops the skills and wherewithal to become a legendary trapper.

The film differs from the previous two examples as Hundreds of Beavers take place not on an alien world but right here on Earth, though a black-and-white comedified version. The looney-tunes logic is essentially as novel to Jean as it is to the viewer, who despite inhabiting the setting prior to the events of the film still must learn the workings of the environment through observation and trial and error.  It is exactly this sort of logic that establishes the character of the setting, and that Jean exploits to go from incompetent to a master of his world.

Much of the film's comedy and worldbuilding comes from introducing a phenomenon, such as a bird that attacks Jean early in the movie, prompted by him whistling when a nest full of eggs is within reach; reintroducing the phenomenon in a new context, such as when Jean, later in the film, is attacked by the bird who appears from seemingly nowhere when he makes the same whistle in an unrelated circumstance; and then reinterpreting the phenomenon into an exploitable facet of the world, such as when Jean, late in the movie, puts his distinctive hat on an unsuspecting target and then issues the now-familiar whistle, summoning the bird to attack the disguised victim. The bird example is only one instance of many of these phenomena constantly being iterated upon and intersecting in novel ways. 

Though Hundreds of Beavers has different aims as a work of art and as a speculative setting than Scavengers Reign and Fantastic Planet, the ecology is foregrounded in the same way. The work is not as focused on the environment as such, rather on the comical interactions between Jean and the wilderness’s inhabitants, but the way these interactions are mediated is through a similarly “alien” set of rules and sideways rationalities. In this way, Hundreds of Beavers shares a common thread with Scavengers Reign and Fantastic Planet in how they both focus on people reduced to a primitive state, Scavengers Reign in particular how survival is secured through observation and experimentation with the local ecology and Fantastic Planet with protagonists’ drive to transcend through knowledge their circumstances as subject to the whims of a world they are not suited for. 

Putting this to use

These three survival stories tells us what any OSR person already knows, which is that it is the constraints inherent to an environment that makes the environment feel vivid. For dungeons we already have darkness, traps, stuck doors, and the like, but for some reason it has been much more difficult to apply these same principles to overworked exploration. 

The closest I've seen anyone come to this is Ms. Screwhead with the excellent laws of the land. 

By putting difficulty first, we establish impediments to survival which in turn help players build meaningful relationships with the setting. 

A good rule of thumb for challenging regions is that they should have clear answers to about two or three of these questions. Any more and the area risks becoming prohibitively difficult, (which is not always a problem but something to keep in mind).

1. Why is resting is difficult?
2. Why is finding food is difficult?
3. Why is travel difficult?
4. Why is not getting lost is difficult?
5. Why is fighting difficult?
6. Why transporting cumbersome goods or treasure is difficult?

Instead of trying to invent a new system to generate survival ecosystems, I'll lay out a pair of rough lists of biotic and abiotic factors in an ecosystem with baked-in difficulty. Consider these as "levers" to pull to answer the above questions. 

Biotic factors

1. Large territorial predators
2. Coordinated pack hunters
3. Camouflage or mimicking predators
4. Mesopredators or prey with deterring, fear-inducing, or hypnotic self-defense mechanisms
5. Habitat-modifying (i.e. burrowing, dam-building, etc.) creatures
6. Behavior-altering parasites or pathogen vectors
7. Swarming insects
8. Plants with harmful self-defense mechanisms
9. Carnivorous or trapping plants
10. Highly active decomposers

Abiotic factors (you probably want no more than two of these per region)

1. Extreme temperature (intense heat or cold, sudden swings, microclimate pockets)
2. Extreme wind (gales, tornadoes, downbursts) 
3. High water variability (drought, flash floods, ephemeral rivers)
4. High terrain instability (tremors, rockslides, fissures)
5. Toxic or corroding chemicals (hazardous soil minerals, acid pools)
6. Combustion (wild fires, flammable peat)
7. Low visibility (haze, fog)
8. High verticality (cliffs, overhangs, ravines, sinkholes)
9. Anomalous weather (icicle-knife hail, magnet storms, rain of frogs)
10. Harmful air (poison smog, spores)

As a fun exercise, you can quickly hack together a rudimentary system of ecological relationships by explaining adaptations the biotic factors have as a response to each other and the abiotic factor. 

Here's an example: 

I rolled 9 and 2 for biotic factors and 8 for an abiotic factor: 

• Carnivorous plant
• Pack hunter
• High verticality

Specific adaptation the carnivorous plant has to living in a region with high verticality: 

Long, corded tendrils that dangle over ledges, contract when agitated. Unsuspecting creatures are constricted and slowly pulled up to the plant to be consumed for nutrients. 

Specific adaptation the coordinated pack hunter has to surviving in spite of the carnivorous plant:

Bipedal hunting lizards with two edged spines protruding scissor-like from their tails. Use their spines to shear through the tendrils otherwise too thick to claw or chew apart. 

You can layer in more biotic and abiotic factors as you please.