In essence, this post is a Slush Pile for the stray thoughts I caught these last few days
[mid-August at the time of writing], while driving under the heat in various regions of France I don't cross often. None of them have enough legs for a full blog post (in their present state, at least), so: here they are.
Goofy and weird toponymy (place names and their study), dense forests, old farms lost in the nothing of the countryside, wide horizons, quaint villages full of little secrets and discoveries at each corner, faraway church spires and secluded castelets barely glimpsed behind a hill. It's all there for the taking: let your imagination feed on them. Take notes, pictures, and your time to let them leave an impression on yourself.
1. This road climbs the hill, straight up. It used to be some kind of large royal way, perhaps itself built on the remnants of a Roman (or fantasy equivalent) paved road. Nowadays it's still respectable, but narrower, with little traffic in this region that has mostly returned to the forest. And the trees grow tall here; centenarian oaks, tight chestnut trees, thick underbrush. What little sunlight comes through is tinted green by the leaves. Birds and beasts are quiet here, the forest is grander than that. The trees block the winds and the sounds they bring.
All this composes a striking tableau: you look up the hill and see a narrow way, closely lined by two huge walls of trees — silent cliffs of green shade. As if you were following Moses cleaving in two a solid sea of roots and chlorophylla. Sometimes the trees join, creating a tunnel. Up the hill, the old road only gives place to the uniform sky, with no indication of what's behind.
Walking or riding this road is not difficult, but the eerie atmosphere, the heavy air and the ascending slope all make for a weird moment of your travel.
And you look up once more, noticing an old wooden footbridge drawn across the road, three or four meters over the ground. It's set between fallen trees, big enough to be confused for mossy rocks at first. Unless it's the corpse of a single vegetal giant, and the road cuts straight through it — the trunk has too many rings to count. The footbridge seems seldom used, but might be part of a small forest path between two villages. In any case, a perfect place for a bandit ambush, a lost fairy, or the ghosts and echoes of the hounds and hunters of the kings of old.
2. You finally arrive near the city. You don't know much about it, only that it has a castle and is set around the big river, just like home. Except there's a sign on the side of the road. Two-meter tall wooden sign, on which is painted the sight of a very imposing castle, with several fat towers, and black and white chequered walls like you've never seen. Under the dour painting are written these no less dour, and menacing, words: "FORTRESS OF THE APOCALYPSE"
[The sign was a modern one, but the picture and words are real!]
3. The city is named Angers. "Anger" is colère in French. Thus, a city named Colères sounds cool.
4. Small village on the road named Épinard. That means "spinach". The peasants there might tell you the story of a powerful hero of old whose strength came from eating lots of spinach, and he totally sleeped once in our inn, you see, so don't hesitate to stay there for dinner, and you can even rent the very room he slept in, for a low price of course, good sir/lady/etc.
People here grow turnips.
5. Here the river grows so large it becames a full bay. It's not an inland sea, you can still see the other side, but it's beautiful. The fair hills of woods and vines surrounding the many white-sailed ships travelling between cities, filled by the swift wind, make for a wonderful view. Each year, on the first day of May, a naval race with complex rules is organized in the bay, and the sails become more numerous, passionate and colorful than in a kite competition. People mass on the roads and paths along the hillsides, eager to see the show. Expect picnics, bets, heated debates on this year's rules (they change every year, with rotations and mixes), peddlers of local wines and cheeses, pickpockets, people meeting for business, families, and old timers' anecdotes about that year when winter wouldn't leave and the bay was a freezing hell of ice chunks and slushy waters.
6. Much further up the river, the region becomes wilder, the terrain more rugged, the pleasant hills ceding before dry, craggy cliffs, and sparser vegetation. Here dwell the troglodytes. Oh, they're people, just like you in fact. (Some say they're not exactly like us, but they think and behave the same, and Amélie here has a twice removed cousin who found a wife there and stayed, so they can't be too different, right?) But they live here in the cliffs, where they've carved their homes and watch the river, and those who navigate it. Most of the time, they keep to themselves. But sometimes, the affairs of the world manage to reach them — nosy merchants, an ambitious king, provocative river travelers, weird lights in the sky — and they do not like being disturbed for nothing. Legends circulate: treasures deep in the stone homes, monsters or weird cults hidden in the lower strata of the carved land, paradoxical reverence for the stars and the Milk River, mingling with wolves and ice and fairies.
There is an entire discourse on what we want out of including and playing as various "fantasy races" (ugh), but there is another one much less explored, and that's how cool and weird and interesting it is to have your various options for fantasy people be: sapiens, neanderthal, flores, denisovan, and even erectus or australopithecus, etc. Seriously.
The other option for the troglodytes whose landscape I described is to directly lift the French troglodytes from the Anjou region. That is: regular folks, but who go troglo because of the topography, the soil, the demands of the industry, or evading obscure local regulations. There are entire underground mills, wineries and villages in this corner of France, with their own hyper-local culture, it's fascinating.
7. You see a dead hedgehog on the road. Like most folks, you know it's a bad omen. Why?
Because hedgehogs go out at night. The presence of hedgehog roadkill mean that people circulate at night, and they're probably careless or in a hurry. Shifty people outside at night, trying to not be noticed? They might well be bandits, deserters, troop movement even. Or perhaps lost nobles, knights or people of the cloth. These can all be just as bad.
8. A forest, spreading on many leagues around. A sea of deep green. A hilltop emerges, like the shaven head of a monk over his tonsure. On the hilltop a white, fortified abbey towers proudly.
9. This region around the river is very forested. It wasn't cut down for the kings' warships, like the rest of the kingdom's woods, no, it was their domain. Kings, queens and their courts went there for their decadent hunts, amusements, negotiations. They spent summers there, sometimes even seating here instead of the capital.
And thus, they built castles. There are many different castles along the river, all made of the same white stone, all trying to outdo the others in refinement and originality. Some espouse the shape of the plateauing hills they're built on; another is a small island in the middle of a lake; another is a bridge over an ancient canal.
(Pictured: castle of Chenonceau. It's even better in person.)
Each one of these could be a dungeon, abandoned or still infested with nobility and their ilk. Cities, faction seats, lone lords, all vying for the ownership of one of the white castles.
10. We have no precise idea of where the name of Saumur comes from. It sounds like saumure, meaning "brine". But "sau-" also sounds like a plausible deformation of sel (salt), and "mur" means "wall". Thus, interesting city names: Brine, Brinetown, Saltwall.
11. An unassuming road, and suddenly, a horse statue on the side. It's 5 meters high (that's 15 feet) and is made entirely of metal... bars? threads? something. It doesn't seem to rust. Some villagers nearby pretend it was made from the melted swords and lances of defeated soldiers after a long, terrible battle.
12. Abandoned castle + the vegetal mazes of a French-style garden returning to wilderness make for a great dungeon. If you need something classic, romantic too, that still goes beyond "endless catacombs under the castle".
13. A place bearing the name of Sainte-Thorette. Thorette. Yeah. The name's built exactly like you think: like Thor, but a little girl.
14. This village has a wash house, not much more than three stone walls and a roof, erected on a spring. The wash house has a small sign bearing this inscription: "The Source of Knowledge"
15. Names of smaller streams: the Lathan. The Ardan.
16. Region name: the Morvan, low mountains, more on the eastern side. Reverse it and you get Vanmor, perfect fantasy name.
Reversing actual names, changing letters, translating some parts like I did earlier, or doing anagrams with them: all are good methods to create interesting names, and they're often grounded or believable too! For fantasy, it can be a great quality.
17. Before reaching the mountains, you cross a series of hills, bearing ripe wheat fields, a golden wave undulating with the wind. Some hedges, often tree-high, sometimes break up the monotony of the place.
You notice, here and there, some strange trees — part of the hedges, or alone in the middle of their fields. They are half naked, as if struck by lightning, and half covered in green leaves, as if totally normal. Sometimes the green half is the lower half, sometimes it's a whole left or right side.
And then you notice that those weird trees are everywhere, punctuating the whole landscape.
Perhaps they are the last witnesses of the great Rain of Lightning, a terrible, sorcerous storm that once wrecked the region for twelve days and twelve nights.
Perhaps a strange disease hit all the trees.
Perhaps they are the remains of the work of a plant druid. Seeing all these dead trees, the druid wished to revive them, perhaps to rejuvenate the land, or bring the trees under their control. In any case, most attempts failed, with the trees either staying dead and burnt, or only regrowing in part, regaining a semblance of life that wasn't enough to recover the whole plant.
Perhaps it wasn't a plant druid, but a tree necromancer, trying to raise dead trunks and roots like some raise dead bones. In this case, how did it go? How many trees did manage to revive uncannily to the service of the necromancer? How did it fail, or is it still an active project? And when you rest under the undead trees, why do their trunks look like deformed faces? Why does the wind howling in the leaves sound like mourning? Why is a nap under the trees more exhausting than relaxing? And why do the white-burnt branches sometimes look like crooked hands and their many wooden fingers?
If you take a step back: why did you come to the valley of undead trees?
