On Worldbuilding: Mountains in Fantasy Maps! [ ASOIAF | Dune | Stormlight ] 

Wow

Bad. The accent was bad. xD

I'd say New Yorker, French and New Zealand simultaneously. However that works... And great to see another video Tim (and it was a nice surprise to hear you on the OSPodcast) hope you're keeping well :)

sounded to me kinda like a russian immigrant with a brooklyn accent

Can I use campfire to build and keep track of an galaxy? Something like Star Wars.

Tim I have a question. Does the local ground temperature affect the settlement of mountains? My teacher said that in tropical climate people tend to settle more on mountains like the Incas and Ethiopia. Do you think this is a factor or are there other causes for these cities?

Same works for ecosystems as well, mountains have incredible diversity.

Another is the Basque region. Spanish on one side, French on the other, and ancient Basque in between

Papua New Guinea, tropical mountains, highest language diversity in the world, the language changes every few miles/kilometers.

The alps are also a good example. I'm from Innsbruck, Austria (4:36), the town is to big to have much of a special accent - apart from the harshly pronounced "k"-letter, but every village around has it's own, and people from the next valley are usually hard to understand. For example the term "downwards" means "hinunter" in standard german and austrian german, but in Tyrol it can be "abi", "obi", "oi", "achn", "owi, "awi", "achi" (and probably a few more). Another alpine example is the survival of the Rhaeto-Romanic language, which exists nowhere, but in a small part of Switzerland...! Edit: 4:36, 4:59 and so on :-P

Hell yeah, brother

That's an awesome idea. I try to watch and read stuff about different nomadic people for my own worldbuilding, but Hello Future Me covering that topic would SAVE ME.

@@CharlieCaw look up a collection of unmegtaed pegatry he explains it very well

Yes!!!

I would love an episode on nomads.

bada bing badinga

I think he was trying for a Russian mobster

Him is my sponsor, campfire. Hims is pain in my assholes...

@@Keyce0013 I thought he was going for Italian Mobster

I think he was trying to sound Italian, but he’s British

Yes!!!!!! 🥰

Hey what's up check mark

Who

Oh shit. It's The Dom.

Why do you just randomly show up in comments so often for me?

I was thinking the same thing. There are also a lot of regional berries that only grow in mountain areas like huckleberries, saskatoon berries, etc. Go to a mountain town and they will likely have a local wild berry that you’ve never heard of before.

Isn't there a type of berry that requires such a specific climate that it is hard to near impossible to farm them? Looked it up, it's Huckleberries

I live in an area where we're super dependent on the water from mountain reservoirs and the snowpack. Droughts aren't determined by how much it rains throughout the year, it's determined by how much snowpack the mountains got the previous winter.

Not to mention active volcanoes like Mt Vesuvius, that fertilise the soil and make it ideal for vineyards and other farmlands - ultimately very risky as Pompeii and Herculaneum found

@@Doublemonk0506 huckleberries are very popular here in Idaho

Yeah I forget the next couple of lines, but uh then it goes... SECRET TUNNEL!

@@groofay *SECRET TUNNEEEEEL!*

@@puddlel1ama327 THROUGH THE MOUNTAIN

@@nucleargandhi2709 SECRET SECRET SECRET TUNNEL

Can anyone explain? I don't get the reference 😅

You really found the weirdest way to spell Graham, didnt you?

@@milospollonia1121 it was RU-vid's auto generator :)

Tim I have a question. Does the local ground temperature affect the settlement of mountains? My teacher said that in tropical climate people tend to settle more on mountains like the Incas and Ethiopia. Do you think this is a factor or are there other causes for these cities?

We need a dnd campaign where he plays the wizard as his character

@@thefolder3086 Temperature is very important. It changes what diseases you can get and how often, what plants can you grow, what type of homes is it better to build and it also influences mindset of people a lot. Close to equator it is hot so diseases run rampant. Those are the places that are underpopulated which means that the land can feed a lot more people than the number that lives there. There is so much diseases around that this locations are the rare places that never got fully populated. In the mountains there are less diseases so death rate is lower which translates to higher population density than the one in the plains below. Those places are still underpopulated. People are seeing subsaharan Africa as overpopulated which is not true. They are blaming overpopulation for hunger while the real cause of it are wars and neocolonialism. Do you have more questions? I know a lot about this kind of things because I studied environmental science at college and would gladly answer your questions.

And if someone is attacking you from the other side, the mountains are a barrier limiting the possibility of retreat, migration, though they can be used to hide in for a time.

@@MDP1702 yeah

They may also just be poorly lined up with cultural boundaries over time- whilst most people have a clear understanding of Italy's land border being the alps, the Appennines were historically the harder to cross, but due to sea trade and being a peninsula (meaning that the easiest routes of navigation for traders only got you to more italy) there was still enough cultural exchange that it would eventually unify. But generally, Italy's mountains were horribly bad for it's defense, as they mostly prevented it re-assembling itself after it lost the political power of the roman empire and got divided up by a series of incomplete conquests. Similar issues can be seen in poland's history, though not with moutains, as it's only natural east-west border is in the exact middle of the country, being the river that the culture established itself around, which means that it has repeatedly suffered from 'get invaded from both sides' as a political issue, given 'the middle of poland' is that natural boundary between German and Russian forces historically, at which point it was difficult to successfully defend, despite being distinct culturally. I could imagine a similar thing with 'lonely mountain' style mountain kingdoms in fantasy, in that a good natural fortification is pretty useless if it's so centrally located it is the natural boundary between the nations further away whilst not on the boundary of your own kingdom at all.

@@reganator5000 very interesting

See : Zhuge Liang seething after his 199th attempt to conquer Wei (Northern China) failed due to overextended supply lines from Shu (Sichuan) in Romance of the 3 Kingdoms. Explaination - The man suggested the place as a base to Liu Bei due to it being a very fertile valley surrounded by mountains on all sides in the first place. Look at the map of Sichuan in China and Shu-Han's borders and you'll see.

Came here to say that. Brooklyn's loaded with Russians these days though so he's not far off.

It was beautiful. Made me giggle when I needed a good giggle

Your comment says it's been posted 6 days ago but the video was posted like an hour ago. 😱🤔 Not sure if it's really interesting or really weird.

@@anthonydavis5288 He’s a patron who got it released early probably

Very cute puppy indeed ☺️🐕💕

The terrible New York accent you mean? 😂

Building flatland that you have to maintain every year to prevent it crumbling is always more resource intensive than just having flatland.

Yeah. You only do this is if you don't have readily accessible flatlands.

Translation, they're turning the mountains into several small sections of flatland.

There are flat parts in the mountains too. He did not tell that those are the most populous places. Quite high population density. Higher than the one in flatlands. This is where the cities are. Trade rutes are going thru those places even if there is a quicker way thru the mountain. Travelers need to eat too. It is better to travel a little longer than it is to carry twice or trice the amount of food for you and your donkeys.

Also guys, bear in mind he's speaking about mountains, not uplands in general, there's a significant difference

Mountain = metals therefore dwarves love mountains

It still all comes back to purpose and culture. Where did the underground species and peoples come from? Why did they settle in/under the mountains? What resources do they value? How does living underground affect them and their culture? How does it affect trade? What about physiological adaptations over time and how do those affect all of the above? And so on and so forth- -signed, an amateur worldbuilder who is still learning but hopefully can help a little bit

Perhaps I'm dumb, but I always thought that vast underground civilizations in a medieval-inspired world was a bit of a stretch. As far as I know, there is nothing comparable in our history (at least in scale). Without some type of magic (like Tolkien), I find it hard to believe that it could happen.

@@j.g.9045 Well, it's one thing when we talk about humans who need sunlight both biologically and psychologically (just look up how coal mining affected workers that were underground from sunrise to sunset), so a fully underground civilization is not exactly feasible in our world. But if we're specifically talking about dwarves, then we're talking about fantasy creatures that might not require sunlight, simple as that. Other solutions could be a sunlight crystal, or a material so valuable/powerful it drives people to suffer underground for it, or a futuristic technology that allows underground living - think a world in which the surface became hard to inhabit, so humans used daylight lamps to create great underground cities.

@@j.g.9045 well, it certainly wasn’t physically impossible for civilizations at that tech level to enlarge and improve natural cave systems. Natural cave systems can be quite extensive: Lascaux is a good example. Cliff face dwellings were also common, and demonstrate how people were able to carve buildings out of the rock. While humans need sunlight to grow food and also to not go insane, it is worth pointing out that we are a tropical species who evolved at our planet’s equator: so it’s no wonder we need sunlight so much. A species that could eat mushrooms we would find poisonous and which evolved in the arctic region of their planet would have a much easier time living underground. Humans are also uniquely good at thermoregulation, so we can tolerate the extremes of temperature on the surface more easily (although even we have built cities into cliffs to avoid temperature extremes: see Petra). If a species was not able to endure the day-night temperature variation on their planet, living underground would be a viable solution: especially if they also needed a humid environment.

An amazing way to flip resources on their head. Metal and biofuel coming from animals.

One of the few recent examples of a post-post apocalyptic world building. Where new, fully developed civilizations have formed from the ashes of the old. I find this much more compelling than post-apocalyptic, where humanity is is barely surviving digging though the scraps and trash of the pre-apocalypse, a la Fallout.

Yes!! The best game I have ever played! Horizon Zero Dawn is such a perfection for me! I love everything about it. Music, gameplay, narrative, theme... etc. 🥰

@@TheNinjaDC I'm currently playing around with something similar, but without telling the reader. Like giving hints here and there, but the full picture only gradually developing. I'm not sure about that setup. Like, would people feel cheated by it? "Bruh, why is this post-apocalypse all of a sudden? I sold me Mayapunk!"

Horizon's lore and worldbuilding has some impressive depths - particularly around how the faiths, customs and environments of the game's present-day are revealed to have come about. There are some pretty solid foundations beneath the surface. From why some (and specifically only some) of the robot dinosaurs look like dinosaurs, to why the Nora's warriors are called 'braves'... the more you chip away at the story and the world, the more you find. Love that game.

Bruuuh that why I clicked!!!

If you don't have an independence day, then every day is independence day.

The legend of timestamping is here as well!!!?!?!

Considering that he's not even American, it's spectacular. Better than some Americans I know could do.

That's exactly why I clicked on this video

Same

I really enjoyed the game, But it felt way to railroaded.

Environmental determinism is only lazy world building when it's the *sole* determinant that explains everything or almost everything about a part of your world. The environment has an enormous impact on the way civilisations and nation states develop that shouldn't be discounted outright. Just make sure that the environment is tied into the culture, language, politics etc of the world you're creating and make sure that there's adequate nuance, and that there are other extraneous forces that are also shaping that workd

I imagine it would be inundated with ants.

The candy mountain that yearly melts in the heat of the summer and sends waves of thick, sticky nectar like a lava flow over the surrounding villages, carrying with it the eggs of flies the size of dragons and maggots so large that their lumpy white bodies resemble covered wagons? The candy mountain that, despite going stale and sickening, never becomes fully rotten nor allows to rot all those people, animals, and older, more terrible things that have all been trapped beneath its crystalline, cherry-flavored surface? The candy mountain in which the mad Mellified Men make their homes, burying themselves over centuries in service of their dark god the Candy Man? The candy mountain that is the infernal origin of the phrase "The sweet embrace of death"? The candy mountain that contains twenty percent more of the vile Mr. Goodbars than any other single type of candy? THAT candy mountain?

@@nobledamask if you made this up yourself just for a RU-vid comment, you deserve a Nobel Prize.

A WIZARD DID IT

Mountainous Islands for combo points, though they tend to be volcanic

@@geraldgrenier8132 you just described the main island of my setting lol.

Flood, strong winds, sinkholes the size of cities

You don't have more than one currency?

You know, thats a really good point! The majority of commerce is done via Bartering with a value system placed on different items. (The main story only takes place in a single country) though having multiple forms of currency does make more sense…youve given me much to consider! Thanks!

Mhm

Sure

With mountains that large you would no longer be able to consider gravity to be constant, nor radial likely.

@@matthewparker9276 the planet would have to be like as large as jupiter or something but even then...

In greek myth it is sometimes said that to fall from earth into tartarus (the underworld) it would take a large block of Iron seven days and seven nights to reach the bottom

It's a factor but not the only one ; for exemple you have less or even no mosquitos in mountains, which means no malaria or others illnesses

@@jordicanals6246 thank you. So tropical cities are more likely to be on the mountain ?

@@thefolder3086 Not really, the city would often be near river, mountain are not really a good location to live if you ask me. They are only good for tourism, weather forecast, mining, finding rare plants and animals. The soil suck, so agriculture can't produce much, thus can't supply for a big city unless the travel system is really good . The higher the city, the colder the climate, so mosquitoes won't survive, but so is humans and other tropical animals who are used to the warm and hot climate. The native to mountain region are only some tribes and ethnic groups, some of them lived there not because they wanted to, but because they are forced to retreat to the mountains after fighting with the people who lived in the flatland.

@@ucnguyen6375 how about highland valleys? They have fertile soils

@@thefolder3086 yeah, but it is not that common, and most people don't want to waste time finding a rare place like that when there are still many available option to choose

Same hahaha

Interesting. I'm also canadian, but I live in Quebec, so the moutains we have here aren't exacly impressive. Well, in the south, anyway.

Possible, vulcanic activity also bring with it good nutrition, but i imagine not liked minorities would gt more likely to get that territory and be exploited economical.

Here's mine: A volcanic eruption saves the losing side of a war by blocking off the river used to supply their opponent.

Yeah, I had a similar reaction. 😂