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Summary

Stories like Scavengers Reign and Fantastic Planet show alien worlds where survival depends on understanding strange ecosystems. These settings are alive and full of danger, making the environment a key part of the story. Hard challenges help make these worlds feel real and memorable.

Highlights

In old school D&D, making an environment feel real is a solved issue, as long as the environment is a dungeon or can be navigated using the dungeon exploration rules. Movement speeds, 10-minute turns, and random encounter procedures are like the enzymes that turn grid-paper maps and sparse room keys into vivid, realized locales—it’s the magic trick that gets so many people hooked on the OSR.

But dungeons aren’t the same as full settings, and the deeper layers of abstraction used to map and explore an overworld make it harder to bring outdoor environments to life. This is especially the case with imagined environments that have only loose connection to the real world.

Scavengers Reign and Fantastic Planet are both survival narratives, and it’s specifically the survival aspect that makes the ecology of the setting hit harder.

In other words, each work uses the context of survival as a framework upon which elaborate, imaginative settings are built; the settings convey meaning by way of ecological interactions. Because survival fiction inextricably ties plot to the basic facts of the environment, the genre conventions are well-suited to bring to life fantasy environments in ways no other genre can quite accomplish.

This tension around what is and isn’t a threat is central to the flow of the narrative, which simply wouldn’t work if everything was overtly dangerous. The point is not that Vesta is dangerous but that it is alien—everything has its own logic, which can only be discovered through observation and experimentation.

More importantly, this experimentation and observation in a survival context is key to making the world feel vivid and distinctive. If the alien world was a setting for a different sort of story to take place, say like Pandora in the first Avatar film, Vesta might be remembered only as a series of lush backdrops with maybe a familiar merchandise-friendly animal popping up here and there, as opposed to the layered, puzzle-box ecosystem it is given the space to be. The workings of the planet are not set dressing, they're the source of conflict and driver of change in the narrative.

Unlike the world of Scavengers Reign, with its sort of naturalistic indifference, the world of Fantastic Planet is overtly hostile. The sparse, brutal locales of the film’s setting are home to nightmarish flora and fauna, each designed to feel as cruel and inhospitable as possible. They clamp, whip, and slice senselessly as fragile humans scurry through the narrative.

The lingering on the corpses subtly demonstrates that Fantastic Planet should be understood as a film about its setting, with the plot simply there to justify moving from one ecological scene to another. Whereas in Scavengers Reign human stories are told through how survivors interact with alien ecologies, the alien organisms and bizarre natural scenes cover far more of what Fantastic Planet is as a work of art than the plot or characters.

Human characters are depicted as tiny ants against harsh barren landscapes, fragile as paper dolls when they are pulled and plucked by curious Draags or hungry predators. This use of scale and severity highlights the hostility of the world, amplifying to a grotesque degree what is at bottom a very basic story about how humans use ingenuity to overcome our status as squishy subjects in a dangerous world.

The 2022 slapstick comedy Hundreds of Beavers represents a third approach to worldbuilding through survival. The film follows Jean Kayak, an applejack brewer whose life is upended after beavers destroy his home and farm.

The film differs from the previous two examples as Hundreds of Beavers take place not on an alien world but right here on Earth, though a black-and-white comedified version. The looney-tunes logic is essentially as novel to Jean as it is to the viewer, who despite inhabiting the setting prior to the events of the film still must learn the workings of the environment through observation and trial and error.

Much of the film's comedy and worldbuilding comes from introducing a phenomenon, such as a bird that attacks Jean early in the movie, prompted by him whistling when a nest full of eggs is within reach; reintroducing the phenomenon in a new context, such as when Jean, later in the film, is attacked by the bird who appears from seemingly nowhere when he makes the same whistle in an unrelated circumstance; and then reinterpreting the phenomenon into an exploitable facet of the world, such as when Jean, late in the movie, puts his distinctive hat on an unsuspecting target and then issues the now-familiar whistle, summoning the bird to attack the disguised victim.

These three survival stories tells us what any OSR person already knows, which is that it is the constraints inherent to an environment that makes the environment feel vivid.

By putting difficulty first, we establish impediments to survival which in turn help players build meaningful relationships with the setting.

A good rule of thumb for challenging regions is that they should have clear answers to about two or three of these questions. Any more and the area risks becoming prohibitively difficult, (which is not always a problem but something to keep in mind).

  1. Why is resting is difficult?
  2. Why is finding food is difficult?
  3. Why is travel difficult?
  4. Why is not getting lost is difficult?
  5. Why is fighting difficult?
  6. Why transporting cumbersome goods or treasure is difficult?

I'll lay out a pair of rough lists of biotic and abiotic factors in an ecosystem with baked-in difficulty. Consider these as levers to pull to answer the above questions.

Biotic factors

  1. Large territorial predators
  2. Coordinated pack hunters
  3. Camouflage or mimicking predators
  4. Mesopredators or prey with deterring, fear-inducing, or hypnotic self-defense mechanisms
  5. Habitat-modifying (i.e. burrowing, dam-building, etc.) creatures
  6. Behavior-altering parasites or pathogen vectors
  7. Swarming insects
  8. Plants with harmful self-defense mechanisms
  9. Carnivorous or trapping plants
  10. Highly active decomposers

Abiotic factors (you probably want no more than two of these per region)

  1. Extreme temperature (intense heat or cold, sudden swings, microclimate pockets)
  2. Extreme wind (gales, tornadoes, downbursts)
  3. High water variability (drought, flash floods, ephemeral rivers)
  4. High terrain instability (tremors, rockslides, fissures)
  5. Toxic or corroding chemicals (hazardous soil minerals, acid pools)
  6. Combustion (wild fires, flammable peat)
  7. Low visibility (haze, fog)
  8. High verticality (cliffs, overhangs, ravines, sinkholes)
  9. Anomalous weather (icicle-knife hail, magnet storms, rain of frogs)
  10. Harmful air (poison smog, spores)

As a fun exercise, you can quickly hack together a rudimentary system of ecological relationships by explaining adaptations the biotic factors have as a response to each other and the abiotic factor.