Preliminary Turn 1 Design Phase
Proposal: Lightning WhalesDifficulty: Normal (Note: This is not a good basis to use for estimating difficulty - Bay12's and BPL's were compared to one another to provide a baseline to the baseline by using the baseline proposals and were equivalent)
Result: 2+2=4,
PoorAs the tribe migrated north, they were incessantly assaulted by the rains from the sky above and the beasts in the wilds below. They were driven to the northern extreme of the continent in their efforts to find somewhere they could settle down, at least temporarily.
The first Lightning Whale the tribe encountered came in the form of a massive, glimmering collection of broken bones half-buried on the beach. The bones were hastily taken and used to create basic shelter off of the beach, providing some solid cover against the wind and rain that they could lash branches and brush to. The bay the villagers set themselves on was part of a lagoon formed by barrier islands and reefs, with the relatively shallow waters absolutely brimming with life. The tribe soon found themselves capable of braving the storm, and more, sustaining themselves.
The second Lightning Whale encounter came soon afterward as a pod of the whales passed by the lagoon in the distance. The storms seemed to concentrate on the Lightning Whales when they'd surface, lightning arcing between sea and sky until the massive beasts slipped back beneath the waves. It was an awe-inspiring sight.
The third encounter was somewhat more inspiring, and incredibly more painful for everything involved.
During the peak of the stormy season, the seas are high and rough enough to entirely overcome the lagoon's barriers. These windows of time can see Lightning Whales carried into the lagoon where they either get stranded in the shallower waters or manage to follow a deeper channel until they can beach themselves. The tribe, eager to cut into what they saw as a very large fish, approached a still-struggling Lightning Whale. The beached animal, with a bony ridge along the head unlike any the tribe had seen before, was not conjuring lightning from the skies. Instead, as it opened it's massive maw the bristly teeth it used to filter feed crackled and arced lightning violently between them. But still, there was no discharge.
Then the tribe took their crude (for modern tastes) stone tools to the creature's flesh. Once the thick outer hide was hacked through, the wound ruptured and exploded violently, frying the nearby tribesfolk with a devastating chain of lightning. The beast died from the trauma immediately, and the tribe was able to harvest the creature's carcass without further incident. The tribe attempted to wait out the next Lightning Whale (with one pair of forward and one pair of side-facing eyes), but after it died on it's own the meat rapidly became rancid, the bones brittle, the blubber watery. Another enterprising but unfortunate villager confirmed that the Lightning Whales needed to die in some physically traumatic manner in order to leave usable remains.
Willing participants sacrificing themselves to feed the growing tribe quickly informed the rest on how to safely deal with Lightning Whales through their own mistakes. While tools made of Lightning Whalebone did little more to ensure the surge of lightning focused through one person before blasting outward, the
hide proved to be marginally useful. Lightning Whaleleather, when wrapped around the handle of the tool used to kill the Lightning Whale, somewhat reduced the chances that the wielder would die and limited the reach of further discharge. They also learned not to stand in the lagoon and to try to dry themselves as much as possible before making their attempt.
The Ritual of Harvest evolved from these practices as the tribal society developed further, with the WhaleSlayer being considered the most highly regarded position in the entire process. Those who survived the ritual were taken care of for the rest of their (often poor-quality) lives. Due to the method of hunting (waiting for the weather to do all the work for you), Rituals of Harvest occur very infrequently, making
Lightning Whales and their various "products"
[Very Expensive].
Were the villagers able to head out into deeper waters and observe the Lightning Whales, they would have been able to watch them use the discharge from their teeth bristles to stun prey as they filter-fed larger fish than one would usually attribute to being filter-food.
At least, that's the story anyways.
Krkut eased himself over the walls of the sandpit where his role in The Ritual of Harvest would begin. He was young, but old enough to care for himself, and had felt the call of the Lightning Whale much like many of the volunteer WhaleSlayers before him had. The Whalebone roof and sandy pit served as ample protection from the elements - a key factor for the blubber-slathered wood fire crackling at the center.
Krkut dried himself by the fire, left alone to prepare himself to weather the storm that'd surge from the Whale. He tightened the WhaleLeather wrappings around his hands and the handle of the stone axe, binding the weapon to himself in the process. Given time to dry and then contemplate his next actions, Krkut eventually emerged from the covered pit. As was tradition by this point, he burst from the pit in a sprint, crossing the beach in great strides to reach the beast trapped by the surf. He approached the Lightning Whale, its eyes locked onto the strange small thing running at it, and slid to a stop as he used the momentum to swing his axe down in a powerful chop. A surreal moan and crackling erupted from the whale as it struggled to understand what was happening. Krkut followed up with a half dozen merciless strikes before finally breaking through the beast's body enough to cause the death blast.
Krkut would be missed.
----
It is now the Revision Phase, and will continue to address the same prompt. Your design is not your past set in stone - you can utilize your Revision to advance something within the results/armory, but if there is anything specific about the given backstory that the team would like to address or modify, that is also allowed. For example, you could decide the bone housing is a more central pillar of society, or that your hunting methods have always been slightly different than already described. The ultimate timeline of your actions isn't determined until the "combat" phase.
Revisions, unlike Designs, have to be based in previous work in some way. The further the revision strays from the source or the more intense the demands, the higher the difficulty will be.
Lightning Whales: Massive physiologically unique beasts that can be found migrating through waters off of the northern coasts. They build static through their teeth as they filter-feed, using the constant discharge to stun their wide range of prey. Excess buildup is discharged when they surface. When unable to process their buildup normally, such as when they are beached, the body builds up a potent amount of energy beneath the insulative skin. If allowed to continue without a "forced discharge", the buildup ruins the chances of any usable parts being harvested. The bones are large and strong enough to provide some shelter, the meat nutritious and ample enough to feed entire villages for weeks at a time, and the blubber a means of maintaining that ever-evasive but equally necessary fire.[Very Expensive]
The key defines the borders of the map first, then the river, and then describes each region North to South and East to West, like reading a book.
The Ice Wall (Eastern Barrier): While borders can be quite fluid in nature, the easternmost extreme of the land is harshly cutoff by a monolithic wall of pure ice, 3000 meters tall. The surface of the wall contains somehow fewer features than the barren cliff face: an everstretching plane of blinding white. No plant or animal dares to brave the blisteringly frigid, cutting winds driving ice and snow constant off the wall and toward the continent below.
The Desert of ‘Amit (Western Barrier): The desert of 'Amit shrouds the west in heaps of dazzling white sand. The evening winds stir up sharp, stinging sandstorms which scatter the light of the setting sun and blast the young Cholades Mountain Range separating it from the rest of the continent. Through the heat haze, you can sometimes glimpse the peaks of the Anti-Cholades mountain range, grasping at the far horizon and further reinforcing the rain shadow cast over the desert.
The Interbarrial River Network: The Interbarrial River Network is birthed from two points: the geysers and healthy water table in the Wild Savannah and the runoff and melt flowing off of The Ice Wall. These networks of streams join together to form large, slow moving rivers that steadily meander toward the center of the continent. A veritable (relatively shallow) inland sea forms where the rivers meet in the Vale of Waters and proceeds to divert both toward the north and south. Tributaries and distributaries line the entire calm, slow-flowing river, providing the only real navigational issue along the equally calm riverbanks. The arterial river flowing north and south empties into the Northern and Southern Oceans. The Great Lake manages to regulate flow during the wetter northern seasons, providing a steady and reliable flood pattern across the continent and keeping the extreme wet or dry seasons from impacting the reliability of the River Network throughout the region.
THIS IS YOU Monsoon Point (North Capital/Bay12): This area point is bounded by its impressive coast containing multiple natural harbours. Monsoon Point is so named because winds that come off of the coast, off of 'Amit north of the Cholades, and off of the Icewall contact to create a spectacularly broad storm network which ensures Monsoon Point is constantly lashed with rain. An extremely rainy season dominates nine months out of the year, followed by three months of the year that can't accurately be called a dry season as much as a "less rainy season". The landscape in Monsoon Point itself is surprisingly dramatic as a result - a hilly region has been carved out into a land of beautiful red cliffs, with intense and verdant greenery blooming across the slopes - the sole exception being the incredibly wide Interbarrial River Network and the gentle, flat lands that follow it.
Choladaic Rainforest (West Front, North): This region is absolutely dominated by a tropical rainforest. While most definitely less waterlogged than the areas to the northeast and east, it is still a rainforest - you can still expect to get soaked. The tropical rainforest rolls across gentle hills, fed by the Monsoon Point rainstorms which gather here and bowl against the Cholades. While the rain is certainly an obstacle, the unsettling nearly endless twilight beneath the canopy should not be underestimated.
Evergreen Riverway (Center Front, North): The hills in the surrounding regions flatten immensely within the Riverway. The Evergreen Riverway is a temperate pine rainforest - unbelievably lush, unbelievably green, fed both by brunt of the rainstorms coming down from Monsoon Point and the wide, fast-flowing arterial continental river flowing up from The Vale of Water, central Evergreen Reach is... well, it's wet as hell. The riverine environment leads to plenty of mud, fallen logs, ponds, small lakes, and streams, but other than that it's actually quite a pleasant place to be in, if humid.
Frosthollows (East Front, North): Temperatures drop dramatically in this uneven, rough, but beautiful alpine forest terrain. Bitter snowstorms hamper that beauty, driven west by the powerful and biting wind blasting off of The Ice Wall. The deep valleys in this region tend to catch these winds, creating absolutely unbearable conditions within the crags and ravines that crop up in the area. These ravines open up into the foothills and lowlands that dot the area, pummeling them with frigid temperatures rivaled only by the surface of The Ice Wall itself. These Frosthollows, open areas where even the pines refuse to grow, are treacherous, but often the safest and most direct way geographically to navigate the region.
Wild Savannah (West Front, Center): Resting against the shadow of the Cholades and ‘Amit, the land is a savannah of tall wildgrasses and scattered acacia copses. The climate is warm here, but not prone to drought due to a high water table fed by geothermal heat. When one spots a little hillock on this savanna, it is a geyser as often as it is a termite mound. The biodiversity in this region is staggering: giraffes and dwarf elephants in the patches of thin forest, great wildcats and wildebeest patrolling the grasslands. A river cuts this land too, fed by the water table and rare torrential downpours, flowing west to east. The geological activity here has left behind kimberlite pipes, the source of elusive diamonds and other precious gemstones, as well as a fair few rare earth metals.
Vale of Waters (Center Front, Center): The Vale of Waters is where the fresh waters sourced from the east and west join to run north and south. A great lake sits here, relatively shallow but broad. Its waters are flush with freshwater fish and waterfowl. The terrain beyond the lakeshore of brown sand and clay beds is some of the most supremely fertile earth in all the world, a temperate country of low hills and beautifully green grass. The summers are warm but mild to crops, the winters thinly blanket the land in snow for a month or so before melting. Little of the wildlife is dangerous; foxes, burrowing rodents from shrews to beavers, hares and the like.
Glacial Taiga (East Front, Center): The freshest remnants of The Ice Wall’s glacial activity can be identified here; gravel beds, moraines and the like. This land is a taiga of warmly-colored shrubs and sedge grasses intermixed with the occasional copse of spruce and birch, grazed by herds of caribou that alternately can be found migrating to the Evergreen Riverway. In summer, multicolored wildflowers blossom from the earth, areas of which are warm enough to tolerate agriculture. The morning sun lights the crags of the Ice Wall like a bonfire, and sends a glut of meltwater to swell the banks of a river heading west. Beneath the permafrost are vast beds of anthracite coal and petroleum.
Great Dry Sea (West Front, South): Once an ancient inland ocean, the Great Dry Sea is a massive salt flat that exists in a depression stretching from the edges of the Painted Land outward toward the 'Amit desert, where the ground begins to elevate once more and transfers from salt into sand. While outwardly unremarkable, the Great Dry Sea holds a unique characteristic of a deceptively active groundwater environment, forming and dissipating subterranean rivers at will. This results in turning the Great Dry Sea into an invisible minefield where one false step can send a man plummeting into a thick brine pool if he's lucky, or a many dozen foot drop to his death if not. The reprieve for these hazards is the rises in the flats that ages ago were once islands surrounded by water but now are encased in salt, dotted across the Dry Sea like freckles.
Sandoras Thornsea (Center Front, South): This entrance to the Painted Lands is host to a myriad of cactus families and hardy flora that take advantage of the presence of running water - thousands of species ranging in size from a child's fist to taller than a man, interspersed among a splattering of cork oaks and stunted juniper trees. The cacti mainly stick to the banks of the river and the distributaries that break off from it, creating thick bands of cactus that form the main hazard in crossing this region.
Motoro Conelands (East Front, South): Volcanic energy in this region is just powerful enough to breach the surface before running out of energy and forming the squat towers of basalt known as “splatter cones”. Ranging from only one meter in height to over twenty, these miniature volcanoes pocket the land in the thousands. Many of them are still active, needing only a slight disturbance to ooze molten rock from the ground. Despite the danger, the Conelands have long been a source of intense mining efforts - splatter cones contain high concentrations of metals across the entire range of metals available beneath the surface. In the areas populated by inactive or dormant vents, there is a large coverage of greenery that feeds off the rich volcanic soil and the Interbarrial River Network.
Painted Lands (South Capital, BPL): The riverway flowing south from the Vale reaches its southern terminus in the Painted Lands. What began as a clear flow of babbling water has been transformed into an even wider, slower thing laden with sediment. Millions of years of river action have carved a canyon through the country's soft rock strata, sharp and jagged at first but growing as broad as the horizon by the time it reaches the sea. Wandering distributaries branch off of the river, leaving winding shallow bands of fertile soil behind when they inevitably wander off again or dry up between flooding seasons. The land takes its name from the bands of rock exposed by the river to form a panoply of color: white limestone, black shale, and sandstones in pink, red, yellow, and every color in between.
The fertilized highlands beyond the water-carved walls (a distinction less marked as one proceeds southward) are relatively arid, with hot summers and cool winters. Groundwater is exposed to the highlands by limestone sinkholes, or cenotes. Papyrus reeds and olive trees grow in abundance and alligators sun by the riverbanks with regularity as one travels further south. The coastal bay experiences a cooler climate, with sea breeze coming off the ocean to regulate temperatures year-round and provide gentle winter rains.
The sedimentary rock of the Painted Land bears countless karst caves, connected by underground rivers and home to strange species of eyeless fish and cave-adapted lizards.
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