Early Detection
There’s a surprising dearth of “unicorn walks into a bar” jokes online. Maybe my google-fu is weak. Meh.
Serious question though: how does fantasy world architecture accommodate non-human inhabitants? Peter Jackson did a bang-up job making us feel like Bag End was too small for Gandalf, and that The Prancing Pony was more sized for men than hobbits. But what about a truly integrated world? Suppose you’ve got centaurs living alongside humans, or that merfolk regularly interact with land dwellers. What does the resulting city design or interior decorating look like? This question can lead to some seriously cool settings.
You know what did a great job with this? Dinotopia. Just look at this awesome bit of world building. I’ve actually got a dragon riders campaign coming up, and I’m planning to go back and mine my old Dinotopia books for a lot of these details.
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I’ve actually considered a human/merfolk hybrid city before, though it didn’t account for other types of beings. It was somewhat Venecian, with waterways along all the major roads, and smaller canals creating a web not unlike the human walkways. Many public buildings (and businesses with an interest in dealing with merfolk, so nearly everyone) had an entrance from the water, often in a cellar, sometimes even pools and waterways inside the building for merfolk to move around more comfortably, and the building style favored stone as material, since it was less prone to water damage.
High tides and floods were a threat of course, since without our modern knowledge of varnishes and rubber seals you could not completely seal off doors and water entrances, but most buildings were tall enough that the non-amphibious inhabitants could simply escape the water upwards, and the upper levels were connected with additional walkways and balconies (made of wood for weight reasons, coated with tar) to allow them to still move around during floods and keep on living and trading.
The idea is not complete and perfect yet, and I have not yet gotten to run my own campaign (I don’t have enough of a world to run one either) to put it to the test, but I figured you’d find the idea intriguing.
Absolutely I do! Back when we were kicking around ideas for the comic project that eventually became Handbook, Laurel mentioned a Mayan-inspired setting with major aqueduct projects for the aquatic half of the citizenry. A city of humans and merfolk full of fountains and vertically connected water towers would be absolutely gorgeous to draw. In terms of a campaign though? I think it would be great fun to have a mixed party. Half of you struggle in the aquatic encounters while the other half find swimming on land difficult. It could create some exceptionally cool encounter designs.
I just sort of realised that, if lore is observed here and Fighter is allowed to ride the unicorn, he is himself a virgin still….
There’s a reason Lumberjack Explosion needs to absolve himself through good deeds:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/mild-mannered-unicorn
There’s a slice of life manga called A Centaur’s Life, and it goes into a fair bit of detail on how the various species and the society work, including mermaids.
Can I get the cliff’s notes? How do mermaids work?
I’m assuming a complex system of canals and neighborhood pools.
Commenting on this a few years late during a re-read — but I’ve always felt that “sea elves” made more sense as “shore elves”… they’re amphibious, as comfortable with land as with sea, and they’re not adapted to permanent aquatic living the way merfolk are.
So I imagine them building on the coast, building into the cliffs and on piers, connected both to the surface and to the sea. It makes them obvious intermediaries and traders… harbors and havens where the environments meet. Maybe you have a partially-submerged tavern, with dry rooms for human visitors, wet rooms for the likes of merfolk, and the common room where the two groups can mingle.