Ordinary things not found in Ravenloft

[cure]

"Steaming Lands", actually, according to DoD. Wonder where "Verdurous Lands" came from? Canon, non-canon, my mistaken memory?

Well, "Steaming Lands" is not a particularly dread inspiring term, but is properly descriptive of the heat and brings nothing of the geographical baggage that "Tropical Lands" would.

"Verdurous Lands", for that matter, would not be dread inspiring either, save perhaps in the absence of a dictionary.

[Rotipher of the FoS]

Symmantically 'tropical' makes sense, via its parasitic relationship with the real world, but etymologically it does not make sense in Ravenloft, and so a more fitting way of saying hot and suffocating within the Lands of the Mist would seem to be more atmospheric to me.

I'm not sure it's necessary, or even appropriate, to excise etymological roots of words that refer to off-Ravenloft concepts. If we get started doing that, we could lose so much day-to-day vocabulary that it'll be difficult to write text that's free of such references! Avoiding such terms is hard, however atmospheric it might be -- see? Ravenloft doesn't have an "atmosphere" (= spherical gas envelope), just a sky! Yet how else can the concept of "atmospheric" be expressed so clearly? -- and we shouldn't be making it harder to write about the Ravenloft setting, if we want to keep seeing great articles and netbooks about it.

Granted, native linguists in the Land of Mists might be puzzled by how a word like "tropical" originated, but OOC we know that Ravenloft's languages were imported from other worlds. Unless we're assuming the Material Plane world which, say, Mordent was taken from also had no "tropics", there's no reason why the term's climatological meaning couldn't have survived in Mordentish, even if its topographical meaning was forgotten.

[Rotipher of the FoS]

"Steaming Lands", actually, according to DoD. Wonder where "Verdurous Lands" came from? Canon, non-canon, my mistaken memory?

Maybe the realization that Saragoss isn't particularly "steaming", but does have a lot of vegetation (algae)?

[Matthew L. Martin]

"Steaming Lands", actually, according to DoD. Wonder where "Verdurous Lands" came from? Canon, non-canon, my mistaken memory?

Well, "Steaming Lands" is not a particularly dread inspiring term, but is properly descriptive of the heat and brings nothing of the geographical baggage that "Tropical Lands" would.

"Verdurous Lands", for that matter, would not be dread inspiring either, save perhaps in the absence of a dictionary.

Verdurous Lands was a change mandated by the 3E developer, because of what he considered unpleasant associations of "Steaming".

[DeepShadow of FoS]

"Verdurous Lands", for that matter, would not be dread inspiring either, save perhaps in the absence of a dictionary.

The cluster's name is about as dread inspiring as the names Valachan, Lamordia, Scaena, Vechor, Vorostokov, or...the Core. Not everything in RL has to inspire dread.