Here I'm going to break a bit more with Dark Sun as published than I have in my previous posts. I'm afraid I don't really like the Sea of Silt. I know realism doesn't really have much of a place in a fantasy setting about sorcerer-kings and dragons, but it isn't very realistic. Also, I think it robs the setting of a bit of it's desert feel because it gives kind of an "out." Travel across the Sea of Silt is more difficult that ocean-going travel, true, but it provides some of the same type of adventuring opportunities. This could be a feature, but I see it as a bit of a bug.
Instead of the Sea of Silt, I'd just like to have a dried up sea. A harsh, saltpan basin dotted with a few shallow, hypersaline lakes where only bacteria can dwell, and tall mesas that were once islands. In other words, something like the Mediterranean would have been during the Messinian salinity crisis of the Miocene.
It would be an incredibly harsh environment, potentially. If the Sea of Silt had anything like the depth of the Mediterranean basin the pressure at the bottom would be something like 1.5 times that of "sea level" above it, and the temperatures might soar to 170 degrees Fahrenheit in the summer according to some models.
Given that salt is a quasi-element in D&D lore you would loose the Silt Sea creatures, but you could replace them with bizarre creatures of the the Quasi-elemental Plane of Salt if you wanted. You can still have giants on the islands if you wish (in an inversion of the tendency to insular dwarfism), but you can also have isolated city states in Planetary Romance fashion.
If one wanted commerce across the expanse, that would still be possible, but likely it would be via flight. If not that, land-sailing across the saltpan. It wouldn't be the most pleasant way to travel, but it could be done (if one avoided the summer months assuming temperatures as mentioned above, but we don't have to assume temperatures so high, either).
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| Once a thriving port, now a dead city on the cliffs |
4 comments:
A setting of planetary romance islands surrounded by a hyper-saline sea that's populated by giant extremophiles and elemental monsters sounds really cool, but I agree with you that it seems out of place in the world of Dark Sun as I understand it.
At the very least, it would be quite a departure from what's been done before!
Well, I probably wouldn't make it a full hypersaline sea--just some lakes here or there. Mostly it would be saltpan desert. Ironically, though, this "realistic" environment isn't as friendly as a sea of magical choking dust.
As a big fan of silt kraken I'm dubious about losing the silt sea as such. I could easily see adding a different salt pan region like the one you're describing, though.
I suppose you could rewrite the kraken into a proper burrower, but somehow it wouldn't feel the same to me.
If you've got the ivory triangle boxed set, you could reuse the encounter tables from the Great Salt Flats.
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