Delving Wolf

This week's post is, in a couple ways, a follow-up of one I made a few weeks ago . First of all, a bit of backstory: the idea for this post first sprang during my honeymoon cruise, a little more than a week ago. We were in Barcellona, doing a guided tour to the Sagrada Familia, and the guide's English was...let's say less than perfect, but because it was a mixed Italian/English group I could still follow. At one point we get to one of the entrances and, in front of it, there are two turtles supporting columns: The guide says that the turtle in the direction of the coast is a water turtle, while the one in the direction of the mountains is a tortoise, or as the guide put it, an earth turtle; her accent, though, made it sound like she was saying "Air Turtle". Instant ispiration. My mind, as it often does, started thinking about what an Air Turtle would look like, where it would live, and other possible details, and as I was voicing some of these ideas to my wife she...

In  last week's post I talked about the ways I find inspiration when it comes to settings and descriptions in TTRPGs, and today I want to provide a practical example of this, using an idea I had last Sunday.   I went to visit Mont Blanc, which with its 4809 m stands as Italy's tallest (and Europe's second tallest) mountain for my and my partner's anniversary (even though we got up to 3466m), and as the cableway was bringing us up we went through the clouds, and as soon as we got above them I saw this:     Something instantly clicked in my mind.   Maybe not the most original idea in the world (it must have been done before, even though I'm not aware of it), but I immediately pictured a world with a few tall mountains, maybe distant from each other, so tall that people from the surface can't see them all, and on top of each there is a city. These cities would not be reachable from the ground just by climbing and would trade with each other using airships ...