For the many unnamed mountain-ranges, this is what they might be like:
It’s a video of two hiking on the Great Basin Ranges around Nevada and Utah.
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This definitely would resemble Athas, as this is the area used by the creators to base their original map. To the southeast of this area (Ipabah Peak/Red Mountain) you can see the lake that becomes Makla and Castle Dale (Urik) and just south of that you can see the Dragons Bowl depression.
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Yeah … I’ve always thought a lot of Athas’ deserts and mountains are strongly inspired by the US Southwest. That might just be my bias since I’ve never been to the Sahara or Australian Outback, but I think there are some real connections, like the abundance of cactus (which is pretty much a Western Hemisphere thing) and the Forest Ridge/White Mountains as “sky islands” of forest above the desert below.
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I’ve been to the Patagonia; it looks like the Nevada-Desert, but next to a giant ocean.
I have to remember, in Dark Sun, there’s a bright, red-star illuminating the desert which, makes it different than any desert here on Earth.
Also, I like this mountain range because I am toying with the idea of mountain-oasis; high-land mountains with forests and vegetation, in a desert; they’re like islands in the desert for a map.
I’ve got American-Conquest and it comes with a really detailed map-editor; I could make this mountain-range, but, I kinda suck and making mountains in that editor; I have to get better compared to what the developers could make.
And just so you know, Arizona was once connected to Australian about 750 million years ago and a piece broke off, so, there’s a little bit of the Outback in Arizona.
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My mental image of the Forest Ridge is very much that of the forested mountains of the US southwest, or of some parts of Mexico.
However, the description in Wanderer’s Journal is quite different than the one in Verdant Passage. Wanderer’s Journal says “a jungle of tall fir and birch trees”, which sounds very much like real mountain forests, but Verdant Passage has weird jointed-trunked conifers and spherical-trunked palm trees.
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I also occasionally work in eastern Utah and Northern NM. Lets just say I can describe Athas fairly wel…
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The Forest Ridge, and among the mountains particularly, there is enough space and physical separation to have multiple micro-biomes or even separate biomes across the mountain range
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Oh yeah. Been there, done that.
I miss hiking the Wasatch Mountains…
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Good point. There’s room for both types of forest in the Forest Ridge.
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Yeah, the placement of the Forest also tells us the predominant winds are West → East on Athas given the rain shadow
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Yes, definitely. Which leaves the Tablelands a far less suitable place for settlement than they were in the Green Age/Time of Magic, since they now don’t have a seacoast on the other side either. I imagine they were probably vaguely Mediterranean ish - though probably less seasonal? - during the Green Age, a good place for agricultural civilizations to develop.
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I’d also note that the Tablelands are definitely in the tropics, and probably not too far from the equator, given High Sun as a major point in the year, which reinforces the idea that it would be more Mediterranean than Baltic.
Wait, what?
What’s your reasoning for High Sun being more important to people in the tropics than at higher or lower latitudes?
…I swear I had some, but my brain is not conjuring it right now.
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Well, color me curious.
Its my understanding that the difference between the longest and shortest days of the year is greater as you move AWAY from the equator, so Highest Sun would be the least obvious and impactful in the tropics. But, that’s not really my field.
The difference in sun angle is less significant in the tropics, yes; but we are told that the Tablelands/Tyr Region area doesn’t experience meaningful seasonal temperature or weather variation*, so the seasons are defined by the sun rather than clear weather distinctions temperate zone style.
This could be evidence that the area is far enough from the equator for the sun angle difference to be noticeable, but tropical enough to avoid major seasonality.
Lost Cities of the Trembling Plains shows that the Trembling Plains/ Forgotten North area, immediately north of the Tyr Region, does have meaningful seasonality. So this may suggest that the equator is somewhere well south of the Tyr Region, and the Tyr Region / Forgotten North area is somewhere near the tropic line where seasonality increases significantly. Athas’ northern tropic line (equivalent to our Tropic of Cancer) might be somewhere in the northern part of the Tyr Region, or just north of it. Maybe between Tyr itself and Kurn.
Very speculatively, maybe the Calendar of Tyr became used (despite Tyr being one of the smaller cities) because Tyr was astronomically significant - maybe Tyr is directly on the tropic, and so Highest Sun in Tyr itself is the summer solstice?
*Rise and Fall of a Dragon King suggests that rains in the Ringing Mountains west of Urik are seasonal, but this is a questionably canon source. Even if true, it seems to apply only to the Ringing Mountains not the Tablelands … and Urik is at the north end of the Tyr Region, so if this is taken as true alongside the less-seasonal-sounding Wanderer’s Journal description of daily rains, it could further support the idea that seasonality kicks in at a latitude around the north end of the Tyr Region/southern end of the Trembling Plains.
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Well reasoned! I think we could also take a page from ASOIAF and GRRM that seasons could be destabilized pretty significantly, a pattern Hamanu recognizes even in its disturbed state due to his long centuries of witness which the Wanderer while old isn’t *that* old afaik and so may miss
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Destabilized seasons are absolutely a possibility in general, but what RAFOADK describes isn’t something subtle - in that book, Urik’s agriculture is based on it.
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The Trembling Plains seasons are due the a unique situation with the 5 major spirits of the lands of that area iirc. So being supernatural in origin I wouldn’t try and infer anything from it using real physics
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Hmm, I was thinking the spirits were that way because of natural seasons, which they represent, but it could be the reverse too.
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