Shadowbringers is a ghost story, it's a love story, it's a post-apocalyptic horror story, it's a high fantasy that turns the genre's notions of light and dark and hero and villain inside-out and upside-down. Fitting with the whole light and dark schema it's FF14's writing at it's darkest and edgiest, and most optimistic and hopeful at the same time. It's about the struggle of finding and protecting whatever hope you can in the most painful of situations, about how even the strongest of us have to rely on one another, and it's an allegory about healing from grief and trauma on a grand scale. It's about choosing an imperfect present, a broken world, over a false promise of a utopian past.
Most importantly it's a story about the universal human experience of trying to kill evil angels while being lied to by wizards who are weirdly obsessed with you.
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Geology of Natural Disasters and How to write them into your fictional universe.
So, you want to write about a natural disaster to advance your plot and torture your players/characters even more? Let me tell you how, accurately.
I feel like unless it is a volcano, natural disasters are a pretty slept on plot drivers, and some of them are really cool and unique! Today, I will talk to you about land slides, earthquakes (And earthquake related disasters), and volcanoes.
Landslides: Probably one I see the least in stories, but one that would be incredibly interesting to write into a plot where they believe in curses. Landslides can happen along ocean bluffs, slightly hilly areas, and highly mountainous areas, this means it is something that can happen in most landscapes. But what can trigger a landslide? Mostly all you need to trigger a landslide could be just abnormally large amounts of rain, excessive deforestation (with a little bit of rain), or an earthquake. If you don't want to use deforestation or an earthquake as a catalyst, a really cool indicator that the land is slipping and may be prone to a collapse is J hooked trees.
This indicates that there is soil creeping slowly over time, and it may lead to a major landslide.
2. Earthquakes: Probably one of the easiest things to write, earthquakes can happen anywhere, but they are most common in places that are tectonically active areas. There are about three types of environments you can expect earthquakes to be common. The first is just rugged mountains, if your landscape looks like this, you should write in earthquakes. Associated hazards could be landslides, avalanches, and large falling rocks.
The next landscape could be a thin mountain range, next to the ocean, very scenic, but very dangerous. Essentially, I am describing a subduction zone environment.
Earthquakes in these areas could equal a couple different associated disasters. Scenario one: A very large earthquake happens, and the ocean begins to recede. This is a tsunami, enough said. If you are writing a tsunami though, please, please, do not write it as a large wave, thank you. Also, a common way people are hurt by tsunami's are from them going into the ocean because they don't understand a tsunami is going to happen.
Scenario two: A large earthquake happens, your characters are in a valley and suddenly the ground begins to liquify as the ground shakes, once the shaking stops, the ground becomes solid like nothing ever happened, except everything has suddenly sunk into the now hard ground. This is called liquefaction and it typically happens in areas that have loose dirt or lots of saturated soil.
Scenario three: There are a lot of small earthquakes, they do not cause a lot of damage, but you begin to notice that one of the isolated mountains has a plume rising. Earthquakes can indicate lava moving underground and the filling of magma chambers.
The next environment that can host lots of earthquakes would be regions that have a lot of really deep valleys and small mountain ranges (not cone volcanoes), but overall seems pretty flat.
This indicates a transform fault like the San Andreas. If you want to hint at there being earthquakes in the area, you can show fence posts that are suddenly several feet out of line at a dilapidated farm or something similar.
(These earthquakes are different because they are cased from sideways movement, not an up-and-down movement this hint can only be used for this environment). Volcanoes would not be found here, but liquefaction and landslides could still occur here.
4. Volcanoes: If you thought earthquakes had a lot of information, volcanoes do too. First you have to ask yourself, what kind of volcano you want to have, what kind of eruption style? So lets break down the kind of eruptions you can have and what their landscapes look like. Hawaiian Shield volcano: This will produce a smooth fast lava, the landscape typically is pretty flat, but there will be small cones and the rocks can have a ropey or jagged texture and the rocks will be almost exclusively black to dark red.
Stratovolcanoes: These will be solitary mountains, typically, that look like perfect cones (Picture shown in earthquake section). These will have large ash cloud eruptions and pyroclastic flows, they may have some lava, but typically most damage is done from the pyroclastic flows (think Pompeii). Some hints of these, other than describing the cone features (which can be hidden by other mountains), would be to talk about petrified wood! Trees can get fossilized in the ash and I imagine it would be very strange to find this rock that clearly looks to be a piece of wood, but its a rock. Subcategory- Calderas: Used to be a large stratovolcano, but they erupt so explosively that the entire cone collapses and creates a basin.
There are a lot of kinds of volcanoes out there, so forgive me for just putting an infographic and then talking to you about these really rare types of eruptions that I feel like people should know about.
Okay lets talk about blue lava (kind of) and black lava
You will notice the lava is still red in the middle of this image, during the day these would look like a normal eruption, but at night the burning sulfur would make it appear blue. Some cool features other than this, would be that any water in the area would become very acidic and burn the skin due to sulfuric acid. This would again be really cool if you are trying to describe a 'cursed' land.
Black lava: This happens only in the east African rift I believe, but it is a carbonatite lava, but if you are writing in a rift valley (where the continent is tearing apart to form a new ocean) this might be a cool feature. The lava will cool white and will quickly erode, it makes for a very alien landscape!
Anyway as always, this is supposed to be an introductive guide for the basics of writing geology to create cool landscapes/features into dnd or fictional universes, if you are a geologist please understand my oversimplification of tectonics, I didn't want people to run away.
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Ok but like. What the fuck is there to do on the internet anymore?
Idk when I was younger, you could just go and go and find exciting new websites full of whatever cool things you wanted to explore. An overabundance of ways to occupy your time online.
Now, it’s just… Social media. That’s it. Social media and news sites. And I’m tired of social media and I’m tired of the news.
Am I just like completely inept at finding new things or has the internet just fallen apart that much with the problems of SEO and web 3.0 turning everything into a same-site prison?
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Writers Truth & Dare Ask Game
🎱 ⇢ post your AO3 total stats
🍓 ⇢ how did you get into writing fanfiction?
🌵 ⇢ share the link to a playlist you love
🕯️ ⇢ on a scale from 1 to 10, how much do you enjoy editing? why is that?
🛼 ⇢ describe your latest wip with five emojis
🥑 ⇢ you accidentally killed somebody, which mutual(s) do you text for help?
🥤 ⇢ recommend an author or fanfic you love
💌 ⇢ how many unread emails do you have right now?
🌻 ⇢ tag someone you appreciate but don't talk to on a regular basis
🐇 ⇢ do you prefer writing original characters, reader inserts, or a mix of both?
🧃 ⇢ share some personal lore you never posted about before
🎲 ⇢ what stops you from writing more in your free time?
🍄 ⇢ share a head canon for one of your favourite ships or pairings
🧸 ⇢ what's the fastest way to become your mutual?
🪐 ⇢ name three good things going on in your life right now
📚 ⇢ what's the last thing you wrote down in your notes app?
🍬 ⇢ post an unpopular opinion about a popular fandom character
🔪 ⇢ what's the weirdest topic you researched for a writing project?
🦷 ⇢ share some personal wisdom or a life hack you swear on
❄️ ⇢ what's your dream theme/plot for a fic, and who would write it best?
🌿 ⇢ give some advice on writer's block and low creativity
🥐 ⇢ name one internet reference that will always make you laugh
🏜️ ⇢ what's your favourite type of comment to receive on your work?
🍦 ⇢ name three good things about a character you hate
🥝 ⇢ do you lie a lot? what's the most recent lie you told?
🦋 ⇢ share something that has been on your heart and mind lately
🦴 ⇢ is there a piece of media that inspires your writing?
🍅 ⇢ give yourself some constructive criticism on your own writing
🐚 ⇢ do you like or dislike surprises?
🪲 ⇢ add 50 words to your current wip and share the paragraph here
☁️ ⇢ what made you choose your username?
🐝 ⇢ tag your biggest supporter(s) and say one nice thing about them
🌸 ⇢ do you have any pets? if you do, post some pictures of them
🎨 ⇢ link your favourite piece of fanart and explain why you like it
🧩 ⇢ what will make you click away from a fanfiction immediately?
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