Isolated Setting: Tepuis (Tabletop Mountains)

[a humble lich]

Explorers visiting them might be attacked by giant, flightless birds with a dinosaurian appearance, or meet a lost civilization, cut off from the world for millennia

So this was basically the plot of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's novel Lost World.

A civilization on a tepui made up of waged humanoids could be interesting in a fantasy setting. Would the tepui people get along well with the humans in the low lands? Would they ignore them or rule them as literal overlords?

[evileeyore]

This is pretty familiar to a D&D setting I read about a while back (maybe a decade?).

It wasn't tepuis, but just mountain top civilizations that lived above poisonous (or maybe demon infested? Both?) clouds. Involved steampunk and zepplins/hot air balloons and sky pirates... so... I was pretty meh about it.

Can't remember the name anymore.

[thorr-kan]

Originally Posted by evileeyore

This is pretty familiar to a D&D setting I read about a while back (maybe a decade?).

It wasn't tepuis, but just mountain top civilizations that lived above poisonous (or maybe demon infested? Both?) clouds. Involved steampunk and zepplins/hot air balloons and sky pirates... so... I was pretty meh about it.

Can't remember the name anymore.

Zeb Cook's website, and my google-fu is failing me.

[evileeyore]

Originally Posted by thorr-kan

Zeb Cook's website, and my google-fu is failing me.

I'm pretty sure it was a more 'modern' game designer. Not knocking Zeb, he's a legend.

[thrash]

Originally Posted by evileeyore

It wasn't tepuis, but just mountain top civilizations that lived above poisonous (or maybe demon infested? Both?) clouds. Involved steampunk and zepplins/hot air balloons and sky pirates... so... I was pretty meh about it.

Sounds very similar to "Victoria," a Traveller setting from JTAS #2 (pp. 14-25). That planet, in turn, "is loosely based on Durent in the novel Prisoners of the Sky, by C. C. MacApp...." (ibid., p. 20).

Something similar happens in southern Arizona, where the mountains have "island" forest biomes separated by stretches of desert.

[dcarson]

Originally Posted by thrash

That planet, in turn, "is loosely based on Durent in the novel Prisoners of the Sky, by C. C. MacApp...." (ibid., p. 20).

Doesn't seem to have been reprinted as a ebook but I have it and it is a good source of ideas for that kind of campaign.

[dcarson]

Originally Posted by a humble lich

So this was basically the plot of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's novel Lost World.

He wrote that shortly after tepuis were discovered by European explorers. So the first post here recreates his reaction.

[Bruno]

A very extreme version of the concept is in Larry Niven's Known Space series, on Mount Lookitthat (the name of the planet, the name of the mountain, and the name of the colony, and for good reasons...). Mount Lookitthat (the planet) is otherwise about as friendly as Venus, but the Olympus-Mons scale Mount Lookitthat (the mountain) protrudes out of the hellish atmosphere and has a reasonably flat top (several different plateaus, technically). Naturally, Mount Lookitthat (the colony) is on top, where the air is sane.

IIRC the habitable area is something like a quarter the area of Rhode Island. The first generation of planetary survey probes had a notorious software limitation [1] and must have been procured from the lowest bidder :P

Spoilered for being somewhat irrelevant to the thread:

Spoiler:  

[1] They were perfectly good at identifying a habitable area, but didn't have a minimum area, didn't distinguish areas that were only really habitable sometimes, and didn't take into account gravity. They only sent back a "go/no go" signal, instead of survey data. And based on this incredibly tenuous data, the rather draconian planetary government packed people into slowships and sent them off. Two planets were reasonable (Home was virtually an Earth clone, Wonderland was light gravity but otherwise nice) and the rest were terrible for one reason or another.