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#1 |
Join Date: Dec 2012
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OK, first, here's a link to a helpful article on Amusing Planet; the wiki article is also good. To summarize, a tepui is a tall, very steep-sided mountain with a flat top. On our Earth, there are a bunch of them in South America, mostly in Venezuela. Due to their isolation, there are species that are only found on a single tepui, or on two close tepuis that were once connected. From above, they sometimes look like islands in a sea of clouds.
Getting to or from the top of a tepui is often massively difficult, to the point that I wouldn't be surprised if some had never been visited by modern humans. 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, or the survivors of a plane crash (or they may be the survivors of a plane crash). Creatures with strange abilities may dwell here (catalyst creatures, Horror monsters, et cetra), or strange artifacts may be found. Also, in the absence of the paranormal, it makes for a great 'cozy mystery' setting, though a very different one from the traditional English cozy mystery. Thoughts?
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Warning, I have the Distractible and Imaginative quirks in real life. "The more corrupt a government, the more it legislates." -- Tacitus Five Earths, All in a Row. Updated 12/17/2022: Apocrypha: Bridges out of Time, Part I has been posted. |
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#2 |
Join Date: Feb 2011
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I'd like to do the opposite. A tribe has lived on top of a Tepuis for "ever --" or at least, long enough to come to the conclusion that they have lost all knowledge of the outside world.
They know that dangerous spirits live in the outside world, and merely climbing down is itself a danger, and so they live simply there. When the spring which is the source of most fresh water starts to run slower and slower, it is clear that something will have to be done in the strange underworld, and so a party is assembled.... |
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#3 | |
Join Date: Jun 2017
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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? |
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#4 |
Banned
Join Date: Jul 2006
Location: 100 hurricane swamp
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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. |
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#5 | |
Join Date: Sep 2008
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#6 |
Banned
Join Date: Jul 2006
Location: 100 hurricane swamp
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#7 |
Join Date: Mar 2008
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#8 |
Join Date: Sep 2004
Location: Canada
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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:
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#9 | |
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: traveller
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Something similar happens in southern Arizona, where the mountains have "island" forest biomes separated by stretches of desert. |
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#10 |
Join Date: Mar 2008
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Tags |
setting, worldbuilding |
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