Welcome to the Private Sanctuary Podcast! This week, Alex and Anthony return from an unplanned (and totally Convention-related) hiatus in order to talk about names. What makes a good name? What makes a bad name? And more! Plus the Everyman Gamer and the Man Behind the Screens hash out some important information about the world they’re building, as well as argue about things. A lot.
Stop on by and see for yourselves!
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Thanks for answering my questions for the last podcast. I really got me choked up to get a shout out like that on air, and it also got me thinking.
1. Perhaps this world has a much higher water content than earth has? Perhaps the core of this world (or at least the underdark portions) is porous rock and is permeated with extremely brackish water that remains at a high enough temperature to prevent total freezing?
Imagine something along the lines of a twisting labyrinth of immense salt or crystalline formations as tall as mountains. Inside this region of the underdark, brine dragons rule over nations of merfolk who constantly do battle with lovecraftian monsters leading their own nations of Skum and other dark denizens. A whole world beneath the ice…
2. Perhaps alliances between cities happen only rarely without draconic inspiration, usually when dragons fall in love or join together to breed? The cities unite to celebrate the union and increase trade to prepare for the coming births of their clutches, perhaps with the alliances dissolving over time as the dragons lose interest or decide to split up. The unions would also probably be seen as auspicious times for humanoids to also procreate, causing huge population increases as the cities prosper from the union. As the young age, they will need people to protect them should they decide to split off on their own and this creates a situation where that is more possible.
3. As for the world’s name itself, how about Althon? I can’t seem to find any previous meaning to it in google and it has a faintly icy quality to it.
Floureggburg would be a great name. Work backwards and derive the traits from the name instead of getting the name from the traits.
It could be called Floureggburg because the dragons heat unfroze the gound enough around the city that burrowing parasites started to thrive in the area. These critters were at first cursed because they were inedible and their tunneling lead to entire sections of city collapsing if they got out of hand… But later found to lay huge clutches of eggs in undergound burrows.
These eggs, similar to frog spawn, were glued together with a mucus that hardened to a concrete like substance that is now used to shore up new excavations and gives the area a distinctive grey/green render.
The burrowing critters also have a symbiotic relationship with a fungal growth. The fungus gets pollinated by the movements of the critters and the egg chambers fill with fungal blooms. The critters that emerge from inside the eggs eat the blooms for the first few weeks of development outside the egg. Once fully mature they move off and spread the fungus wherever they go.
This fungus, unlike the critters or their spawn, are edible and can be ground to a meal that substitutes for the grain meals formerly farmed and milled on this world. The skills of milling and farming return to a measure and the critters are kept sow-stall style for the products they produce.
Mining for the egg clutches could become a trade in its own right as the difficulty of replicating the conditons that allow the eggs to hatch is cost prohibitive. So fresh clutches need to be found piriodically to refresh stock numbers.
The flour-eggs become the major product of Floureggburg.
You mentioned the question of why dragons keep humans. I thought about it and the only reasonably simple answer seems to be food. On your frozen tundra of a demiplane a single dragon would have a hard time foraging for the required food to keep itself alive. If they had to they would be forced into competing with their own kind, the older generation beating out the younger one and a kind of survival of the fittest competition between the dragons coming into play. However, wouldn’t it be much easier to co-erce a race that needs heat in a frozen world into being your personal army of hunter/gatherers? Thus creating not only the current state of the world but bringing in the turmoil from other dragons (those without a town looking for humans as a potential food source, or resource for bringing in food), a backstory of dragon on dragon genocide lore for when the world was young, and a transitional period where humans come into play with a wise dragon ancient from bloody conflict looking for alternatives and then passing down the tenants of current dragons. With those that maintain towns and cities as within dragon society and current law and those who choose instead to plunder like their ancient forebears being more of a taboo to deal with for the dragons. All of this playing out subtly in the background while the 15 year old dragon forgets to push back the frost of the surrounding landscape and his town freezes to death.
Hi, Chambow!
Yours is an interesting idea, but one of the things we’re trying to stay away from is, “Everyone eats humans.” At leasts, as much as possible anyway. Having humans be chow is sort of the opposite of a symbiotic relationship, which is more along the lines of what we’re going for. (Although for Evil dragons, anything goes!)