please tell me more about ur worldbuilding im so deathly curious
Hohoh thank you for asking!!
This is for my dnd campaign and an aspect that probably wont come up for ages so im happy to ramble about it here.
The setting is a modern middle eastern one, in a fantasy city state country that’s located circa where our Levante area is, so. In the subtropics, bordering an ocean in the west and landmass in the east, and within the “fertile crescent”. So historically theres relatively a lot of rain to do agriculture with.
However significant is that the entire country is surrounded by a wall of high mountains and generally sits pretty low compared to the landscape outside the mountain ring. The climate is appropriately much different than it is around outside the ring as well.
Heres a map I made for the place, im not a topographer or anything but I think it turned out pretty good! I didn’t put the lowered position in there visually but imagine its there. Those 3 islands are actually like. 3 spires that stick out of the water, it’s a land formation called the Trident.
So this is weird right!! How does this happen? The alps took 30 million years to form but if a geologist were to look at this theyd notice that it cant be any older than 10k years!! That’s fucked up and disturbing. Geologists hate him.
Well the explanation comes with the setup and plot!! 👀👀
as my players have found out recently, around every 5k years there seems to be this calamitous event manifesting as a huge deluge that wouldve completely wiped the place off the face of the earth… except it didn’t. its almost like there was a humungous shield or forcefield that upon failing to break under the pressure from above, instead forced the rock underneath to yield instead, pushing huge amounts of earth out at the sides. Add to that the expansive network of tunnels and city structures that they found underneath the modern city… all that earth had to go somewhere!!
Over the millennia, the rocks bordering the ocean have degraded (maybe most of it didn’t survive the initial creation/blast anyway), so now only the Trident is left.
That’s all well and good, very interesting worldbuilding, cool if you like geology I guess…. Except……. Checks calendar, uh-oh. 5k years have passed. What are we gonna do about it?