Fun thing I've been doing this bank holiday weekend; starting work on the next Journal of Video Game Botany I'm making with my partner in botanical SciArt-crime, Dr. Maria Christodoulou. We've finally made up our minds to head to ancient Greece. I've been putting off doing an Assassin's Creed Odyssey zine because Maria 1) is Greek, and 2) has a botanical PhD. So... I have some anxiety that my part of this better be good, or she might not forgive me and her mum might never send me food again. Yikes! I think we finally have a plan, though.
AC Odyssey is one of my all-time favourite games, and I will never not love Kassandra. But working out how to botanise the world of this game was trickier than expected. Partly because we want to make each issue of JVGB different to the last, instead of just making it into a series of field guides. And partly because of our expectations of what we'd see, based on Greece IRL and what we know about its history....
Initially we thought about looking for plants in the friezes at in-game locations that have real-life equivalents with ancient wall art featuring plants. For example some of the Knossos friezes - one shows a blue bird on rocks surrounded by wild roses, lilies, vetch, and other flowers. But that didn't fly - most locations depicted in AC Odyssey have just 2 or 3 repeating murals throughout.
Wall art from Agamemnon's palace and tomb in AC Odyssey - based on art from real historical sites, but only a small number of the designs are repeated throughout the location.
The Cup-Bearer frieze - Reconstruction of frescos from the South Propylaeum of the Palace of Knossos
The same frieze in AC Odyssey is repeated across walls and rooms.
It's understandable that the complete body of known wall art for somewhere like Knossos wasn't replicated in its entirety! The game isn't intended as an ancient art tour, after all. Temple artwork was another source of botanical imagery in game, but suffered the same problem. Still, that's fair enough for a game not centered around botany. So we considered plants left as tributes in temples. But again, the items left in different locations were often generic and repeating. Although there are differences between temples to different deities in the game, the fruits and flowers we find in them didn't vary much. We needed a different kind of plan.
This temple from the Heraion of Argos in AC Odyssey has pomegranates and flower petals in the offerings... But so do many other temples in game.
The spring biome
Finally, we turned to the structure of the in-game world for inspiration. The landscape of ACO is designed as various 'biomes'. Some of the biomes are habitats, some are seasons. Think of them more as themes than biomes in a strict technical sense. Each region in the game had been designed to fit one biome/theme; spring, summer, deciduous forest, arid, volcanic, paradise islands, and underwater.
Unidentified seaweeds in the underwater biome.
So for each biome, we're going to choose a plant that exists both in-game and IRL, and explore its links to Greek mythology and culture. The drawings for each will be in the style of a particular type of ancient greek art - red and black figure potteries, mosaics, fresco, sculpture, etc.
Red figure pottery - Wedding of Thetis and Peleus. Attic red-figure pyxis, ca. 470–460 BC. From Athens, South side of Mouseion Hill.
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That's the plan, and for this project I'm gonna write some posts and take you along with us. We haven't done that since looking into Medicinal valley's blush for HZD!
Choosing the plants is our first challenge. Some in-game flora are easy to line up with real species. Others... Not so much. Stay tuned.
The journal of video game botany, mycology and lichenology : issue 1 - the fungi of AC Valhalla
This is a guide to the 5 fungi that players can interact with, and some of the other fungi and lichens found in the landscape of the game. It's got my ink illustrations inside, and a detailed pencil illustration on the cover. The first few copies come with a mini-print of 6 different drawings I made of one fungi, blackish-purple russula. I live in the UK so the species in this game are familiar to me.
Find it in my store at lycomorpha.etsy.com
Issue 2 will be on HZD, and the process Maria and I used to botanise the flora there. It's nearly ready, so it should be out this month!
Issue 3 might be on the weirdly fun mixture of real and imaginary flora of Baldur's Gate 3. There's so much seemingly familiar botany there that turns out to be anything but, and I kinda love it
Finished my Leicestershire/Ledercestrescire fern page for Eivor's herbarium after the WIP I posted last wkend! Will tidy up the scan and write the things later. Just glad to have finished somthing tbh... Life is a bit fkd up rn. So I am taking comfort in video game botany as always :)
It was kinda hard to pick words (I ain't no poet) and to keep the lettering consistent on this page. The pressed fern was large and didn't fit in one piece either. But it still made me happy to do.
Other plants I want to include for this county are flowers from Skari's island at Repton, and wood avens from the ruins at Venonis
Getting back to my ACV video game botany today. Mostly creating carnage trying to outline things in pencil on my Ledercestrescire ferns page tbh, but still, having fun relearning the way I wrote on the other pages!
Maria decided what I needed for Christmas was another game to fixate on, so I've also been sketching plants, lichen and fungi as I come across them in BG3. And Starfield. And started getting our HZD art back together ahead of HFW coming out for PC soon. So now I have soooo many video game botany things to not have time to finish 😂😂😂😭🙃🤣
Sketches of all the interactable fungi in ACV, with their in game and IRL counterparts (for the fungi I see locally.)
Been going through my video game botany drawings. Thinking of collecting these sketches, making 3 more of non-interactable common fungi we see in ACV - tinder fungus, turkey tails, birch polypore - & putting them in a zine. (I've been going through my 'moths of Ravensthorpe' drawings too. Getting my 💩 together so I can finally take these zines to my next fair!)
If I can do 8 fungi I can easily make a zine with fungi art on one side and some species info on the other.
Eivor's herbarium: Page 5 - grasses and yarrow from a cursed zone meadow
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“From a hill-top meadow west of Grantebridge, where the land breathes again”.
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Before changing county, I've been thinking about meadows and how agriculturally important they would have been to settlements like Grantebridge or Ravensthorpe. Handily there's a meadow not far from our previous stop outside Soma's longhouse, on a cursed hill-top just west of town.
Cursed zones are small areas on the map where a black roiling fog gathers, horses freak out, and Eivor talks of malevolence and cursed troll magic.
This horse is questioning its life choices...
To dispel the curse you need to find and destroy a skull covered in glowing symbols. Shoot it and the dark fog dissipates, with Eivor saying that the land can breathe again.
The cursed troll magic symbol
Cursed zones are a slightly odd feature, in that it’s not clear how the ‘magic’ of the curse works. There isn’t an obvious link to Isu tech. We find some notes/snippets of story around suggesting they’re being placed there by Saxons in an attempt to hex away the Danes. In the Wrath of the Druids DLC, the druids are using a recipe that creates hallucinogenic vapor to induce visions of werewolves etc, so the cursed zones could work in a similar way, with the fog being part of the mechanism. But it’s not clear to me unless I’ve missed something.
However they’re supposed to work, cursed zones are good places to find fungi, plants, and honking great big trees. So I quite like them. (I know some gamers hated them and felt they were pointless collectibles; if that’s you, maybe some video game botany will improve them?!)
Aerial view of the hill-top cursed zone west of Grantebridge
The hill-top cursed zone west of Grantebridge has a particularly nice view from above and is surrounded by meadow. Since Eivor is helping run a settlement with farms, I’m sure she’d appreciate the importance of hay meadows to agriculture, and as a source of herbaceous plants for medicinal uses.
In the long grass
What is a meadow?
A meadow is an area of grassland where the vegetation is allowed to grow tall and isn’t cut in spring and summer. In late summer/autumn, the meadow is mowed to make hay, which then feeds farm animals over the winter. Until then, cut meadow is grazed by animals (sheep, cows, maybe goats) which poop as they go, dropping some handy fertiliser around the place. When gets too cold and wet for livestock to be out grazing, animals are brought in and fed on the hay, with the meadow left until spring for the cycle to start over again. This is in contrast to pasture, which is grazed in the growing seasons rather than allowing grasses to get long.
The un-cursed meadow, ready for hay-making
Hay meadows are full of diverse grasses and wildflowers. In AC Valhalla we particularly see yarrow, ox-eye daisies, and grasses like Yorkshire fog (4th pressed grass from the left) and meadow foxtail (2nd from left.)
On this page I’ve centred yarrow, mainly because I’m saving the daisies for another page! The grasses are from a couple of square metres in my back garden that I keep as a veeeery smol meadow. I’m lucky enough to have some outdoor space, and my priority in life is generally insects. So I leave some grass to get tall, and encourage a range of local wildflowers and grasses that serve as food for bees, moths, and beetles. In the un-cursed meadow, Eivor might have also seen clover, yellow rattle, lady’s bedstraw, and I’d bet on sweet vernal grass and crested dogstail too (3rd grass from the right.)
Ox-eye daisies in my local cemetery meadow
Hay meadows are an amazing reservoir of wild plant and insect species, but are now a rare habitat. Apart from the obvious changes in agricultural practice, capitalism doesn’t value biodiversity in spaces it could build on, extract from, or intensively farm the crap out of. But hope is not lost for meadow species. Many conservation organisations here work with farming communities to restore former meadows or to create new ones. Churchyards and church lands that haven’t been developed are also important spaces for meadow preservation – and in AC Valhalla we see meadows around the monastery at Meldeburne.
Meadow grasses and flowers around Meldeburne monastery
Yarrow (Achillea millefolium)
Super-common and very tough, yarrow is a component of meadows but is found anywhere grassy – it’s found in lawns and verges all over the UK. In my area you'd be hard pressed not to see any in summer.
Yarrow in my backyard
Feathery, finely divided leaves gave it another common name, milfoil or millefoil, meaning 1000 leaves. It has clusters of small white or pinkish flower heads with an interesting structure. The flat-topped clusters of flowers look like they’re made out of daisy(ish) shaped individual flowers...
...But take a look at those daisy shapes and you’ll see that each is actually a cluster of many smaller tiiiiny flowers that just LOOK like a daisy. The centre is made of a bundle of tube-like ‘disc’ flowers that have 5 petals fused together. These are surrounded by a few ‘ray’ flowers, each with one large petal. So cool!
Yarrow: flowers inside flowers
Ecologically, it’s an important source of nectar and pollen for bees, and a food plant for many other insects, including moths and beetles. Some cavity-nesting birds use it as lining material. I encourage it to grow in my lawn along with clover, self-heal and black medick, because it’s a lot hardier and more drought tolerant than any lawn grass.
Historically, yarrow used to be used medicinally to staunch bleeding, but weirdly was also called ‘nosebleed plant’ because of a myth that it caused nosebleeds. It also used to be used as a good luck charm.
Yarrow and ferns
I'm going to move onto the autumnal ferns of Ledercesterscire for page 6, but I'll probably come back to Grantebridgescire for some of the other mysteries.
This is 120x timelapse of pressed grass & yarrow going into my ACV book herbarium. It's a slow thing to do but just what I need after a ridiculously busy month or two 🌿💚
This is the last page for Grantebridgescire - the meadow around the cursed zone on the hill. The grasses I pressed came out so well, they're so ✨prettyyy✨. In the end I decided not to trim them to be the same length, though. Like... If this was Eivor's herbarium, I can't see her giving AF about that over getting at least one of each kind of grass. & I imagine she'd know the value of the un-cursed area as hay meadow or pasture for tasty cows.
Ngl I'm looking forward to starting Leicestershire pages though, because the bracken I pressed for that in the autumn came out sooo fkn well 🪴💚🪴
The Flora of AC Valhalla: The beginning - Karmøy, Norway
I've just started a new play through of AC Valhalla from scratch, because I'd forgotten some of the plot points I need for this book herbarium. But I realise it's easier the 2nd time around to take in the plants we see in game... So I've been having a closer look at species we see, how Eivor might have used them, and how they relate to plants found in present-day locations that appear in game. & Because I'm a massive nerd I'm gonna burble about here....
Firstly, I noticed plants appear from the first scenes with young Eivor; as soon as she opens the door to the hall her & Sigurd's clans are celebrating in... There are flowers hanging from the beams and scattered on the floor.
Technically you could nitpick & argue they would be out of season vs the weather we see outside, blah blah... But it still tells us something about the role we ascribe to flowers as symbols of celebration or ceremony. Their presence means it's An Event - and that plants are with us from the starting scenes.
The island we find ourselves on next is called Karmøy in the present day - I don't think it's named in game. I've never been there (the only place I know IRL from this part of the game is Stavanger.) Handily, iNaturalist gives me some botanical pointers to what we could be seeing, and I've used that to interpret both expected and unexpected plants I see. We start on the southern end of the island.
The first things you notice (once you've smacked away Kjotve's arsebarnacle-henchgoons) are:
Coniferous trees - spruce, pine
Deciduous trees - birches, weird-ass out of place beeches
Shrubs - Cloudberries, billberry/bearberry or similar
Let's do easy things first... Norway spruce - the pointy classic christmas-tree conifer - is the most obvious plant to me. (& have I mentioned how much I love the sky/light/treescapes in this game? Lovelovelove.)
Big and small, this spruce all over the place (and exists on present day Karmøy too, no surprise.) Norway spruce has been used as timber, medicine and food for generations. No doubt Eivor would be very familiar with it - maybe she used vitamin C-rich shoot tips as a tea, food, and medicine. Possibly she'd take it to prevent scurvy on long voyages.
There are also classic pines - Scots pine is the most obvious candidate for the puffy-topped pine shapes we see in-game. In Scandinavian countries pine tar extracted from it has a loooong history of use - in preservation and waterproofing for wood and fabric, and in medicine as an antiseptic. In fact we still use pine tar today - there's an interesting review here, which the pharmacologist-part of me enjoyed a lot. Maybe the ropes we see in camp and on Eivor's longship were waterproofed/preserved with pine tar?
Some of the bare-looking conifers could also be larches, although I don't know when in history the deciduous European larch became naturalised in Norway.
We see plenty of silver birches like the ones below - since I covered those for a page of Eivor's herbarium, I'll just say here that it also has a myriad of historical uses that Eivor would be familiar with, from tar and timber to sap syrup.
We also see what looks for all the world like beeches but growing in a manner I'd expect of brambles (below.) I noticed this playing the first time around too, where you'd expect to see brambles we see things that look like beech saplings. So I think I'm going to go ahead and say that they're a weird interpretation of some kind of bramble. We wouldn't expect to see beeches here with leaves on in the snow. I see adult beech trees around as as well - so just want to note this isn't what I'd expect IRL.
In the same family as brambles are the cloudberries we can use as rations. If you've never eaten cloudberries or drunk them in liqueur/tea/etc, let me assure you they're fucking delicious.
But they're also a smol plant, and do not grow in gigantic bushy clusters. The difficulty in this and other games is that when you design a resource plant, it has to be large/obvious enough for players to interact with. So I kinda get why. But sadly we do not find monster cloudberries IRL. They're also hard to cultivate so I'm envious of Eivor's access to ginormous monster berries.
We also frequently see a low-growing shrub with reddish leaves that reminds me of bilberry or bearberry. Both are common in Norway and the UK, where I am rn. Both have leaves that turn red. The plants here are again a bit oversized, but I'm still gonna go with those two as my best guess. Both have edible berries, and bilberry jam is also fucking delicious.
They also both contain a range of interesting phytochemicals including tannins and anthocyanins, and have historical and present medicinal uses that have been reviewed by the European Medicines agency here and here. It's not a glamorous use, but Eivor might have used bilberry or bearberry medicinally if she got the squits while traveling, or picked up cystitis - their traditional uses include treatment of diarrhoea and urinary tract infections. (I mean... A vikingr had to deal with downstairs problems like any other human I guess, heheh.)
Speaking of berries... Crowberries are also found in the same region present-day, but their leaves look different - and to be honest I know less about them. But I suspect they're something Eivor might have been familiar with.
Other botanical stuff...
Lichens and fungi are my main botanical thing so I'm going to shoehorn them in there because we do at least see a few - on the rocks near the first sync point is a good place to look. Around Europe including Scandinavia, various lichens have been used in antiseptics, cold medicines, cosmetics, dyes, and crafting material. I can totally see Eivor using hair rinse containing usnea or using it dried as a firestarter.
Lastly I noticed this unseasonable yellow flower in my trade goods. Looks a lot like the yellow wood-sorrel we see elsewhere that would not have been found in Norway or the UK in the 9th Century, so lets say maybe it's a cinquefoil, or buttercup, or something. *shrug emoji*
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Playing this game again, I feel like I have time to look around instead of being super-focused on the plot. It's a different experience to stop and think about how the developers have reflected the flora of Norway and what uses Eivor might have for the species we see. I even like what's surprising, out of place or out of season. I don't often play a game more than once tbh, but maybe I should, it feels like having new eyes.
