wildermods | THE WILDERLANDS

THE WILDERLANDS

The Wilderlands were once home only to the Green, the conglomerated spirit of nature from planets all over the multiverse, and it was a metaphysical space where the soul of the Green could live in peace. For unknown reasons, the Wilderlands is now a physical place that contains the Green, and chunks of the worlds the Green exists in have been pulled into it, piecemeal, leaving the inhabitants in those lands bewildered.

It is unknown how far back the Wilderlands started pulling in the chunks of many worlds, as new lands keep appearing all the time, but the conquest Sauron and the Unfinished Princess have managed so far suggests that it's been at least several years for some of the chunks of worlds pulled in. In the face of finding themselves in a new land, with new allies and enemies, the peoples of the Wilderlands have had to adapt, survive, and try to find a way to restore their worlds to their old form.

The Wilderlands is mostly comprised of forested land and natural wonders, but there are some settled lands, villages, cities, and other forms of habitation spread throughout it. Travel through the Wilderlands is strange and difficult, as the landscape sometimes morphs and shifts as one walks through it.

There are many lands contained in the wilderlands, and each plot and camping rest stop will get detailed writeups on the changing landscape during the game, but the following are a few of the most notable ones.

THE CEDAR FOREST

The Cedar Forest comprises much of the Wilderlands, acting as the glue that holds many of the other lands together. This part of the woods is a mostly gentle place, filled with towering moss-covered trees and watery glades. In these woods, one can often hear the gentle rattling of tree spirits known as kodama. These spirits cannot talk and are benevolent enough, wandering through the woods and leaving travelers alone.

The Forest Spirit that is responsible for these woods is deer-like being with a human-ish face, a mute god of life and death, capable of healing or killing anything. For the most part this spirit is benevolent, but it's not above killing those that would do the forest harm. At night, this spirit turns into the Night Walker towering over the dark woods as it walks in the starlight.

There are worse dangers in these gentle, misty woods, however. There are occasional demons, created by the destruction of the forest, as well as sentient creatures like the giant boar, who resent encroachments into their lands. There are also the wolf gods, giant, white, ferocious wolves that who are rumored to have a human girl who fights alongside them.

DISCWORLD

Originally from a flat world on the backs of four elephants, who are in turn on the back of a giant turtle wandering the cosmos, the landscape of the Discworld is dramatic and doesn't seem to do anything in half-measures. Its mountains are craggier than their non-Disc brethren, its rivers are wilder, its plains are (somehow) plain-ier.

Much of the Wilderlands is touched by the Disc's "gnarly ground," reality that has been folded into deep troughs and ridges of compacted geography and magic. Gnarly ground can be very deceptive, making two points seem close when they're actually miles and miles apart, or vice versa. "Gnarly Ground" can be detected by those with magical senses, or those with keen eyesight who observe how clouds and shadows appear to fracture as they pass across it.

The landscape can also echo the state of mind of those who pass through it, leading confident travelers to find babbling brooks while, in the same place at the same time, disheartened travelers find deep valleys and raging mountain torrents.

Most important of all is the nature of the Disc's magic, threaded through the land. This a place where there is magic in the bones of the old hills and where narrative causality reigns. On the Disc, narrative laws might as well be physical laws like gravity.

MIDDLE-EARTH

Middle-Earth, a section of the world known as Arda, has many of its lands scattered through the Wilderlands. Middle-Earth is a world that was once filled with splendor, from golden ages in its past, but now much of that has fallen to ruin, and its more glorious days have been left far behind.

This means that there are many places in Middle-Earth where the ruins of once-beautiful civilization have been overtaken by time and nature. The inhabited places that are left, however, are filled with life and culture, and settlements like the Elven "homely house" of Rivendell are a safe haven against the wilds and evils outside. Middle-Earth is not a dead world, rather it's more just...faded.

While most of Middle-Earth is wild and most of those wilds are beautiful, a few of its lands are sinister, like the Dead Marshes, where the spirits of dead Elves and men and orcs can be seen under the water, or the ash-choked, dark lands of Mordor, home to Sauron's forces.