I had a thought I wanted some options on. I want to create a swamp in the middle of the plains. I assume I would need a few decanters of endless water to keep the swamp swampy. So I have a few questions.
Would I need anything else to magically maintain an artificial swamp in the plains?
What other artificial environments could I create with magical items or spells?
Has anyone ever done this before?
I do know that if I am creating an artificial environment my players could destroy it and that is fine with me. And on that note if they put an end to the magical effects creating said environment how long should it take to return to normal?
Thank you in advance
Thank you the altar is a brilliant idea and think I will use that. A Black Dragon would do this right?
bump because I am curious
I'm not sure you really need to be able to quantify why there is a swamp in the middle of the plains using magical means, when there are such things that occur naturally in the real world.
Terrain, plus weather, plus time, equals land type. If you've got a lot of rolling plains and all kinds of rich, fertile soil, and you have rivers, and you have aquifers, and you have animals and plants and things, you can have a large swampy, boggy, nasty place right in the middle of a bunch of fields and sparse trees and the like.
All that really needs to happen is that the water table in a particular area needs to be closer to the surface than it is in other areas, there needs to be a landmass that would cause the surface water to move more slowly than other areas, and there needs to be a way to get that typical fantasy-swamp overgrowth of trees and vines and things - all of which are things that naturally occur. The Midwestern North American continent is FULL of places like this, despite the "amber waves of grain" photography that would have you believe otherwise.
Really, there's no reason to magically explain a swamp in the middle of a grassland.
Now, the things that naturally want to move into that swamp could magic it up for you. Black Dragons and Trolls and Hags DO love such places, after all.
I want this to be a magically created swamp. This is important to my mind. The swamp wasn't there 50 years ago. And yes I will be having many things move into the swamp.
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I had a thought I wanted some options on. I want to create a swamp in the middle of the plains. I assume I would need a few decanters of endless water to keep the swamp swampy. So I have a few questions.
Would I need anything else to magically maintain an artificial swamp in the plains?
What other artificial environments could I create with magical items or spells?
Has anyone ever done this before?
I do know that if I am creating an artificial environment my players could destroy it and that is fine with me. And on that note if they put an end to the magical effects creating said environment how long should it take to return to normal?
Thank you in advance
A wish permanent gate from the plane of water will get you the lake.
Had a wizard use wish permanent gates from all four planes to create an island from a volcano.Animals and birds show up looking for water with seeds in their poop. A swamp in twenty years. A forested swamp in fifty. Parasites, monsters, invassive killer plants.
that's kind of awesome Duiker. And yellowdingo can I know why your wizard did that?
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that's kind of awesome Duiker. And yellowdingo can I know why your wizard did that?
Plot related reasons in the campaign. Over in my mystara campaign the Continent of alphatia sank so bargle the infamous proposed the thousand wizards of the alphatian council each gate to the plane of fire and create wish permanent volvanoes on the sea floor marking the boundary of the continent. To create a new alphatia. Then he screwed them over.
Bargle was questing for immortality.
That's interesting. Thank you.
I could make the GM of Skulls and Shackles crazy with that, so crazy.
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Honestly all you need is a beaver infestation and in just a year or two the area starts to turn marsh like. Much of western Illinois and eastern Iowa were swamp and marshland until French and English trappers arrived and started trapping the beaver. Then American settlers started moving in and draining the marshlands for farmlands. It took us about 150 years to undo what a crap load of beavers had done over the previous 2 or 3 millennia. Beaver will build woodland dams anyplace water is capable of pooling if you block or restrict the drainage. And once they block up the major rivers the bottom silts in and the water spreads out and the water table rises to ground level. This type of marshland was very common across the central part of North America until the arrival of European settlers and can still be seen in large portions of Canada and parts of the US.
Drive through the American Midwest some time and all you see is farmland, but if you know what to look for you can still see hints of the old marshlands in a lot of places.
Edit: As an interesting game concept a green dragon that could charm animals might just have beaver and other animals doing something like this. A Black dragon that is powerful enough could do it too with big reptiles building the dams. That would freak somebody out. Gators building beaver like dams.
Beaver like gators my group will love that!