Things could work better.
Feb. 12th, 2013 12:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethI spent between midnight and about six in the morning being intermittently ill. I finished reading a book, but on the whole I'd rather have slept.
The Minority Council by Kate Griffin was rather good.
Something I ate yesterday was, according to my digestion, very not good.
Now I'll probably remember those two things together whenever I re-read it.
Cleaner is here and cleaner day is happening and I had intended to get food delivered but I forgot. I have some Tesco food from yesterday. Tesco is still not very useful.
I'm really tired. I slept until 1130 so that's like 5 hours sleep but I think my body clock thinks this is the middle of the night. I don't know, I have heard of this sleep cycle thing but I'm not convinced of its personal applicability.
whine whine blah blah whine whine boring.
Okay, my epic fantasy world with the zombies I am making up
I'm pretty confident I know how the city with Tolly in basically works. And I realised last night while watching Game of Thrones that if the steward looks like Sean Bean and gets all hurt looking when someone claims Tolly was cheating on him then there's much more story mileage in it than if he's some boring looking dude who just dumps him.
I reckon with all the Taverns that keep showing up on the Magical Medieval City I either have to cut down the numbers (by a lot a lot a lot) or come up with a Really Good Reason. So: The city has a strong communal dining ethos. Like seriously, they think if you go home and eat alone you're being a weirdo. Eating together is part of being a citizen and how they maintain group ties. That means everybody, for every meal, needs a place to eat, and that being the case then 500 places for 8000 people puts 16 people in the same room for every meal.
Except it's not that tidy because outside the wall has 2K people and a more mixed culture. Visitors stay in the Strangers Field, so there's inns there with rooms to stay in overnight. I don't know why anywhere in the city would need rooms since Strangers get kicked out before sleep time. I guess some people just want to live in a hotel. There's boarding houses already though. One inn in the posh people place would be for visiting diplomats who the curfew rules wouldn't apply to. But I think the other inns need reshuffling so they're all outside the walls and inside the walls are all the kind with no sleep space. Maybe only almost all. There's still a ton of those places.
The military district has precisely as many taverns as Family barracks, so that's clearly one each. I already divided the barracks up so there's one per Family taking up two thirds of them and the other third is divided between the personal guards for the King, Queen, and Heir and the town guards guided by the Steward. Except there are no actual royals around as the story starts. So the Steward is sitting around waiting for the return of the King.
Because I was watching LotR when I started thinking this stuff up.
But, anyway, if each barrack has a tavern of its very own, that's more like having a dining room. Instead of one giant mess hall they have a room each. So there's ... the spreadsheet says < 18 soldiers in each place. That's 660 people living in the military district and 36 places for them to sleep. But there's also 24 Houses, one per Family. You wouldn't get an officer living on his own in there so that's 3 people in a House ready to be the boss of 15 people in the barracks. Only not so precisely.
(There were 24 Houses in the Patriarch district, so I decided there were 24 noble Families, and went and gave them a greek letter each for a family name. Because initially they were divided up for administrative convenience while they were evacuating so they can totally have a nice easy to remember system, and I don't have to think up 24 names. Tolly is Theta.)
So the Family soldiers have a tavern each and eat together and spend all day up in the military district getting good at fighting because sooner or later the zombies will turn up again. Or the dudes across the valley will attack. Which in the minds of most people is the same thing, because if you've got enemies then clearly they would send zombies to attack you.
The royal and city guards don't have taverns in the military district. The city guards would leave the district every day to go guard things in the city, so they'd eat out there and be much more mixed in with the general populace. The royal guards... well, apart from how they kind of don't exist at the moment, they would eat with the royals. They'd be like the Knights, the elite. Or if the royal is of a different sort it would be their way of staying in touch.
You don't just join the royal guards, you get hand picked from one of the other forces for doing something cool or having useful skills. In theory this makes them a professional elite. While the royals are away though it mostly makes them weirdos for accepting. As far as the rest of the military can see the royals have nothing to do. You see a lot of royal guards with one arm or one eye because it's an honorable way to serve out your career without, you know, having to actually do anything.
(Except if you hear said soldiers are called James and Nick respectively, and know my fandoms, the reader may draw a different conclusion. And start wondering what exactly the royal spears and shields do all day.)
(Spears? Swords? I keep writing it both ways. They're divided up though so they have two barracks each, King's Spears and King's Shields, then same for Queen and Heir. The other half dozen barracks are for the Steward and the City Guard, and they're subdivided by which wall and ward they work. Outer Wall is least prestigious because furthest from the centres of power; the Families want to keep the best for their own streets. Except that may feel a bit short sighted when Epic starts to happen.)
So, how the military divide up to eat is pretty simple.
How the rest of town does it, not so much.
Probably there's all the different ways somewhere out in the city. Like a family who keep eating together even when they move out. Or a craft guild would have attached taverns. Apprentices wouldn't eat with their masters in the larger guilds but the smaller ones would only have the one place. The taverns used by the mega rich would not have so much of the welcoming community nature of the more modest taverns, but some of the poorest places would be really unimpressed with strangers trying to get a piece of their limited resources. There'd be a separate pricing structure for any outsiders trying to dine there.
Probably a separate pricing structure for guards too. It would be most fun if a guard could eat anywhere for free, as a way of connecting with the communities they police, but for the bad ones as a way of throwing their weight around. And they could try it in the poshest places, by the rules they'd still get a meal, but it would have a certain impact on their career if they were not willingly invited. Figuring out where to eat would be a whole Thing.
Figuring out where to eat would always be a whole Thing. Eat with your family, your co-workers, your guild, your fellow guards. If Eating With is the basic bond of community then not having come home for dinner would be cause for much more shoutings and Not Talkings. And teenagers would want to eat somewhere new and try and fit in with new groups.
Strangers have to eat in the Strangers Field, even for lunch time, because Eating With is so associated with the bonds of citizenship. Any Stranger with a job who can't be bothered to walk all the way out of town and back again would bring a packed lunch. And this would be considered strange and antisocial. Like sneaking off for a smoke, it's fine for the people who do it, but everyone else thinks they're a bit stinky.
Anyone visiting the city who thinks they can just pick a place to eat is going to find themselves walking in on everything from family meals through office politics to actual cloaks and daggers. Some places would feel like walking into a mafia bar or gang territory. Other places would be very welcoming, as long as you knew something about leather, or steel, or fur. But between the curfew and the general No Strangers attitude it wouldn't be likely to come up twice.
It's like every pub has its regulars, but instead of regular meaning going in every week, they'd be using it as a dining hall.
And this explains also the discrepancies between number of buildings listed as a tavern and number of people with the profession Tavern Keeper. The Keeper is only needed in places which are professional, which try and make a profit. Some around the market places, for instance, or up near the religious sites, or the merchant halls. Or ones which try and attain a certain level of skill. An A Grade place would have a full time Keeper or a Restauranteur. A lot of the other places would just be organised on different lines and not have someone work there full time. They'd be open for meal times and the people who used it would cook there.
... or, obviously, I could just decide the numbers are stupid and make new numbers. But this way I have a whole set of things to know about this community. And one of the ways that inside the wall works very differently to outside.
The Strangers Field has places that conform more to our expectations, a lot more professional places, profit making businesses. Inns selling places to sleep, taverns selling meals. Far fewer communal eating places on the model of the citizens, and many of those would be in the 'religious' buildings and run as charity or spiritual obligation. Citizens could look down on Strangers on this basis, that they do for money what citizens do for love, that they pay for their social connections.
... I already moved all the brothels outside the walls. If somewhat of the same social stigma applies to restaurants, because they're just giving their food to complete strangers for money, that's kind of amusing...
So I know some about Theta religious shrines and how the military district works and what it's like to get a meal both inside the walls and out with the Strangers. There's still a ton of details and I need to figure out at least broadly which crafts have their own guild and which ones have banded together and which of them have the swishest Guild Halls for themselves and what in fact goes on in a Guild Hall building and, well, bazillions of things.
But I pretty much know how High Cup works.
Now I just need to find a lot of blue eyed blond(e)s to live inside the walls there.
(They aren't 100% blue eyed blondes, some of them are slightly brown haired or red heads. But due to the original composition of the Citizens, if someone has brown eyes, they're going to be assumed to be a Stranger, or have the reputation of their ancestry involving a Stranger getting over the wall of a night.)
Helvellyn on the other side of the valley I do not so much know yet.
That's where the Grey Lady lives. I'm thinking minbari at the moment, religious and warrior castes, with culture heroes and philosophy instead of actual gods.
In terms of bits of the marvel universe, this is where the Hulk invents himself.
Helvellyn is stuck between two hazardous zones, the dead valley of Eden on the one side with its zombie hordes, and on the other the mutant zone, where the residual waste of Seascale and the deep catacombs of the Cumbria radioactive waste long term storage twists people and animals into new forms. (Because epic and because dungeon crawl, not because I think radioactive waste is going to make X Men.) (And if X Men are geographically specific then they have a whole different story. But I haven't even vaguely started to think of that stuff yet.)
Helvellyn has specialised in the biological alchemies, primarily in the healing of what is twisted. But that also gives them expertise to twist themselves.
It would be easy to go all Warhammer and make Helvellyn be all about the creeping dread of mutation and the idiots who case it deliberately. Except there's X Men and super soldiers involved, super heroes, so it's not a simple as being destroyed by chaos. But if it's the Hulk's story then there's some of that, of being remade into something you wouldn't want to be, maybe of trying to remake yourself and getting what you asked for not what you wanted.
I got bored yesterday and decided to keep both of Betty and only Avengers' Bruce. So there's two sisters who are slightly different but both love him, and he has these two sides to his nature, the scientist and the soldier basically except Hulk is too angry to be a good soldier. So the sisters can love him for different sides of him. One of them likes the mind that can remake himself and the other loves the protector that'll throw himself into danger. Like one loves Bruce and the other loves Hulk. But that would kind of suck, so the narrative resolution is to make both love all of him.
Also at least one of them follows him, remakes herself to help him.
The sisters are born of the Rose, the thorn side, the military or warrior caste. But they're both researchers, they took to the Grey. Bruce is born of the grey but by his research remakes himself to be more useful to the Rose. Divided society and divided selves.
The threats he was thinking of, was concerned with, were the zombies and the twisted beasts like giant wolves with scorpion tails or whatever seems fun to have. But the threats the General wants to use him against are all those bastards in the other mountains, the ones who control the zombies. Of course they do, they're the enemy and the zombies keep attacking them and that means the zombies are the weapon of the enemy. QED.
(Zombies, on the whole, are the result of weapons, not a weapon-of. They join in on fights because fights result in dead people, who get up again. BUT it's an Empty Child scenario, so if the process makes undead officers, those officers could have loyalties.)
(Whoever initially started the zombies got dead, so there's no knowing which side they thought they were on.)
The twisted humans, the Mutants, that actually manage to survive living in the lowlands... well they're so strong they're clearly a threat.
This is a post nanotech disaster world, where I'm using Magic rules because they have mana zones which can do nicely to model nanotech spills that have locally changed the laws of nature. The Antarctic was an experimental zone so when that went bad the whole thing turned into a Wild Mana zone and anything goes. Also all the ice melted. So there isn't as much of Britain as there used to be and Norfolk is basically gone. I know the Eden valley is for zombies and I was going to have everything below a certain altitude be zombie territory by default, with the line wobbling a bit in different weather conditions, so that storms or mists or low clouds or whatever I decide is most atmospheric can mean the zombies can come after settlements that usually would be safe. But then there's only a few mountain places that are not zombie apocalypsed. So people would try and fight back against that. The Greenwood would be fighting the Mirkwood, the plant mana zones be in a fight with the death mana. But the twisted lands would be full of wild spots and the results of them, and not simply about zombies. Many more kinds of magic available.
If mutant powers are mana dependent then they couldn't leave their own lands. That would be less fun. But if some mutants are mana generators then all bets are off.
I had only thought about the one valley with the two sets of mountains, but I know there's a War aspected mana zone up behind High Cup (Warcop military training zone, where the big explosions still work. I've been thinking maybe explosives stopped working, like someone figured out how to put a safety catch on the whole world, because that way you get bows and arrows even when people before the fall knew perfectly well how to make black powder and more advanced things.)
I also need somewhere to send Tolly to go look for titanium and glowy rocks. Blue glows. He can alchemy more like it later maybe, but I know most of a story about what happens when he and Carry set out to find more titanium. I just need a place to put it all.
I been trying to learn more about metals and resources and what would be available after people stop shipping things globally. The logical best source of just about everything then becomes the post apocalyptic remains of civilisation. The zombie infested post apocalyptic remains. But I don't want to set this particular story among zombies. Not wild ones. They use the blue rocks to make slaves that don't need feeding, but that's okay, it's not like they can come up from the deep mines anyway...
So I need to decide where to put these mines.
Maybe just further up the same mountains? High Cup could theoretically control a bunch of territory around there. Tolly and Carry can set out to trade with people who have unusual sets of shiny metal and end up finding people who mined rather deeper than was wise.
Yes, Moria, but different.
I don't know though, I don't think I want the Steward anywhere near controlling this lot. I want to send Tolly and Longway and Harry out on a trade route and have Tolly keep going to try and find the source of this really intriguing metal. And end up in more trouble than he knows how to get out of. Being set to work in a cave.
... hmmm, depending how much source I rip, that would make the Steward rather belong somewhere near control of it.
If I put it in the same mountains I don't need to invent a new civilisation, just some messed up people. Actually that applies whichever mountain they're digging under. So I could put it kind of near.
It can't be too closely connected though or Tolly wouldn't need an Adventure to go find things they'd just be traded or sent in as tax.
Okay, so, the Moria place needs to be a different set of mountains.
North or South?
I'll have to do more thinking on it.
Cleaner is long gone and I am going to do something that isn't rambling about my made up epic fantasy zombie mutant world.
The Minority Council by Kate Griffin was rather good.
Something I ate yesterday was, according to my digestion, very not good.
Now I'll probably remember those two things together whenever I re-read it.
Cleaner is here and cleaner day is happening and I had intended to get food delivered but I forgot. I have some Tesco food from yesterday. Tesco is still not very useful.
I'm really tired. I slept until 1130 so that's like 5 hours sleep but I think my body clock thinks this is the middle of the night. I don't know, I have heard of this sleep cycle thing but I'm not convinced of its personal applicability.
whine whine blah blah whine whine boring.
Okay, my epic fantasy world with the zombies I am making up
I'm pretty confident I know how the city with Tolly in basically works. And I realised last night while watching Game of Thrones that if the steward looks like Sean Bean and gets all hurt looking when someone claims Tolly was cheating on him then there's much more story mileage in it than if he's some boring looking dude who just dumps him.
I reckon with all the Taverns that keep showing up on the Magical Medieval City I either have to cut down the numbers (by a lot a lot a lot) or come up with a Really Good Reason. So: The city has a strong communal dining ethos. Like seriously, they think if you go home and eat alone you're being a weirdo. Eating together is part of being a citizen and how they maintain group ties. That means everybody, for every meal, needs a place to eat, and that being the case then 500 places for 8000 people puts 16 people in the same room for every meal.
Except it's not that tidy because outside the wall has 2K people and a more mixed culture. Visitors stay in the Strangers Field, so there's inns there with rooms to stay in overnight. I don't know why anywhere in the city would need rooms since Strangers get kicked out before sleep time. I guess some people just want to live in a hotel. There's boarding houses already though. One inn in the posh people place would be for visiting diplomats who the curfew rules wouldn't apply to. But I think the other inns need reshuffling so they're all outside the walls and inside the walls are all the kind with no sleep space. Maybe only almost all. There's still a ton of those places.
The military district has precisely as many taverns as Family barracks, so that's clearly one each. I already divided the barracks up so there's one per Family taking up two thirds of them and the other third is divided between the personal guards for the King, Queen, and Heir and the town guards guided by the Steward. Except there are no actual royals around as the story starts. So the Steward is sitting around waiting for the return of the King.
Because I was watching LotR when I started thinking this stuff up.
But, anyway, if each barrack has a tavern of its very own, that's more like having a dining room. Instead of one giant mess hall they have a room each. So there's ... the spreadsheet says < 18 soldiers in each place. That's 660 people living in the military district and 36 places for them to sleep. But there's also 24 Houses, one per Family. You wouldn't get an officer living on his own in there so that's 3 people in a House ready to be the boss of 15 people in the barracks. Only not so precisely.
(There were 24 Houses in the Patriarch district, so I decided there were 24 noble Families, and went and gave them a greek letter each for a family name. Because initially they were divided up for administrative convenience while they were evacuating so they can totally have a nice easy to remember system, and I don't have to think up 24 names. Tolly is Theta.)
So the Family soldiers have a tavern each and eat together and spend all day up in the military district getting good at fighting because sooner or later the zombies will turn up again. Or the dudes across the valley will attack. Which in the minds of most people is the same thing, because if you've got enemies then clearly they would send zombies to attack you.
The royal and city guards don't have taverns in the military district. The city guards would leave the district every day to go guard things in the city, so they'd eat out there and be much more mixed in with the general populace. The royal guards... well, apart from how they kind of don't exist at the moment, they would eat with the royals. They'd be like the Knights, the elite. Or if the royal is of a different sort it would be their way of staying in touch.
You don't just join the royal guards, you get hand picked from one of the other forces for doing something cool or having useful skills. In theory this makes them a professional elite. While the royals are away though it mostly makes them weirdos for accepting. As far as the rest of the military can see the royals have nothing to do. You see a lot of royal guards with one arm or one eye because it's an honorable way to serve out your career without, you know, having to actually do anything.
(Except if you hear said soldiers are called James and Nick respectively, and know my fandoms, the reader may draw a different conclusion. And start wondering what exactly the royal spears and shields do all day.)
(Spears? Swords? I keep writing it both ways. They're divided up though so they have two barracks each, King's Spears and King's Shields, then same for Queen and Heir. The other half dozen barracks are for the Steward and the City Guard, and they're subdivided by which wall and ward they work. Outer Wall is least prestigious because furthest from the centres of power; the Families want to keep the best for their own streets. Except that may feel a bit short sighted when Epic starts to happen.)
So, how the military divide up to eat is pretty simple.
How the rest of town does it, not so much.
Probably there's all the different ways somewhere out in the city. Like a family who keep eating together even when they move out. Or a craft guild would have attached taverns. Apprentices wouldn't eat with their masters in the larger guilds but the smaller ones would only have the one place. The taverns used by the mega rich would not have so much of the welcoming community nature of the more modest taverns, but some of the poorest places would be really unimpressed with strangers trying to get a piece of their limited resources. There'd be a separate pricing structure for any outsiders trying to dine there.
Probably a separate pricing structure for guards too. It would be most fun if a guard could eat anywhere for free, as a way of connecting with the communities they police, but for the bad ones as a way of throwing their weight around. And they could try it in the poshest places, by the rules they'd still get a meal, but it would have a certain impact on their career if they were not willingly invited. Figuring out where to eat would be a whole Thing.
Figuring out where to eat would always be a whole Thing. Eat with your family, your co-workers, your guild, your fellow guards. If Eating With is the basic bond of community then not having come home for dinner would be cause for much more shoutings and Not Talkings. And teenagers would want to eat somewhere new and try and fit in with new groups.
Strangers have to eat in the Strangers Field, even for lunch time, because Eating With is so associated with the bonds of citizenship. Any Stranger with a job who can't be bothered to walk all the way out of town and back again would bring a packed lunch. And this would be considered strange and antisocial. Like sneaking off for a smoke, it's fine for the people who do it, but everyone else thinks they're a bit stinky.
Anyone visiting the city who thinks they can just pick a place to eat is going to find themselves walking in on everything from family meals through office politics to actual cloaks and daggers. Some places would feel like walking into a mafia bar or gang territory. Other places would be very welcoming, as long as you knew something about leather, or steel, or fur. But between the curfew and the general No Strangers attitude it wouldn't be likely to come up twice.
It's like every pub has its regulars, but instead of regular meaning going in every week, they'd be using it as a dining hall.
And this explains also the discrepancies between number of buildings listed as a tavern and number of people with the profession Tavern Keeper. The Keeper is only needed in places which are professional, which try and make a profit. Some around the market places, for instance, or up near the religious sites, or the merchant halls. Or ones which try and attain a certain level of skill. An A Grade place would have a full time Keeper or a Restauranteur. A lot of the other places would just be organised on different lines and not have someone work there full time. They'd be open for meal times and the people who used it would cook there.
... or, obviously, I could just decide the numbers are stupid and make new numbers. But this way I have a whole set of things to know about this community. And one of the ways that inside the wall works very differently to outside.
The Strangers Field has places that conform more to our expectations, a lot more professional places, profit making businesses. Inns selling places to sleep, taverns selling meals. Far fewer communal eating places on the model of the citizens, and many of those would be in the 'religious' buildings and run as charity or spiritual obligation. Citizens could look down on Strangers on this basis, that they do for money what citizens do for love, that they pay for their social connections.
... I already moved all the brothels outside the walls. If somewhat of the same social stigma applies to restaurants, because they're just giving their food to complete strangers for money, that's kind of amusing...
So I know some about Theta religious shrines and how the military district works and what it's like to get a meal both inside the walls and out with the Strangers. There's still a ton of details and I need to figure out at least broadly which crafts have their own guild and which ones have banded together and which of them have the swishest Guild Halls for themselves and what in fact goes on in a Guild Hall building and, well, bazillions of things.
But I pretty much know how High Cup works.
Now I just need to find a lot of blue eyed blond(e)s to live inside the walls there.
(They aren't 100% blue eyed blondes, some of them are slightly brown haired or red heads. But due to the original composition of the Citizens, if someone has brown eyes, they're going to be assumed to be a Stranger, or have the reputation of their ancestry involving a Stranger getting over the wall of a night.)
Helvellyn on the other side of the valley I do not so much know yet.
That's where the Grey Lady lives. I'm thinking minbari at the moment, religious and warrior castes, with culture heroes and philosophy instead of actual gods.
In terms of bits of the marvel universe, this is where the Hulk invents himself.
Helvellyn is stuck between two hazardous zones, the dead valley of Eden on the one side with its zombie hordes, and on the other the mutant zone, where the residual waste of Seascale and the deep catacombs of the Cumbria radioactive waste long term storage twists people and animals into new forms. (Because epic and because dungeon crawl, not because I think radioactive waste is going to make X Men.) (And if X Men are geographically specific then they have a whole different story. But I haven't even vaguely started to think of that stuff yet.)
Helvellyn has specialised in the biological alchemies, primarily in the healing of what is twisted. But that also gives them expertise to twist themselves.
It would be easy to go all Warhammer and make Helvellyn be all about the creeping dread of mutation and the idiots who case it deliberately. Except there's X Men and super soldiers involved, super heroes, so it's not a simple as being destroyed by chaos. But if it's the Hulk's story then there's some of that, of being remade into something you wouldn't want to be, maybe of trying to remake yourself and getting what you asked for not what you wanted.
I got bored yesterday and decided to keep both of Betty and only Avengers' Bruce. So there's two sisters who are slightly different but both love him, and he has these two sides to his nature, the scientist and the soldier basically except Hulk is too angry to be a good soldier. So the sisters can love him for different sides of him. One of them likes the mind that can remake himself and the other loves the protector that'll throw himself into danger. Like one loves Bruce and the other loves Hulk. But that would kind of suck, so the narrative resolution is to make both love all of him.
Also at least one of them follows him, remakes herself to help him.
The sisters are born of the Rose, the thorn side, the military or warrior caste. But they're both researchers, they took to the Grey. Bruce is born of the grey but by his research remakes himself to be more useful to the Rose. Divided society and divided selves.
The threats he was thinking of, was concerned with, were the zombies and the twisted beasts like giant wolves with scorpion tails or whatever seems fun to have. But the threats the General wants to use him against are all those bastards in the other mountains, the ones who control the zombies. Of course they do, they're the enemy and the zombies keep attacking them and that means the zombies are the weapon of the enemy. QED.
(Zombies, on the whole, are the result of weapons, not a weapon-of. They join in on fights because fights result in dead people, who get up again. BUT it's an Empty Child scenario, so if the process makes undead officers, those officers could have loyalties.)
(Whoever initially started the zombies got dead, so there's no knowing which side they thought they were on.)
The twisted humans, the Mutants, that actually manage to survive living in the lowlands... well they're so strong they're clearly a threat.
This is a post nanotech disaster world, where I'm using Magic rules because they have mana zones which can do nicely to model nanotech spills that have locally changed the laws of nature. The Antarctic was an experimental zone so when that went bad the whole thing turned into a Wild Mana zone and anything goes. Also all the ice melted. So there isn't as much of Britain as there used to be and Norfolk is basically gone. I know the Eden valley is for zombies and I was going to have everything below a certain altitude be zombie territory by default, with the line wobbling a bit in different weather conditions, so that storms or mists or low clouds or whatever I decide is most atmospheric can mean the zombies can come after settlements that usually would be safe. But then there's only a few mountain places that are not zombie apocalypsed. So people would try and fight back against that. The Greenwood would be fighting the Mirkwood, the plant mana zones be in a fight with the death mana. But the twisted lands would be full of wild spots and the results of them, and not simply about zombies. Many more kinds of magic available.
If mutant powers are mana dependent then they couldn't leave their own lands. That would be less fun. But if some mutants are mana generators then all bets are off.
I had only thought about the one valley with the two sets of mountains, but I know there's a War aspected mana zone up behind High Cup (Warcop military training zone, where the big explosions still work. I've been thinking maybe explosives stopped working, like someone figured out how to put a safety catch on the whole world, because that way you get bows and arrows even when people before the fall knew perfectly well how to make black powder and more advanced things.)
I also need somewhere to send Tolly to go look for titanium and glowy rocks. Blue glows. He can alchemy more like it later maybe, but I know most of a story about what happens when he and Carry set out to find more titanium. I just need a place to put it all.
I been trying to learn more about metals and resources and what would be available after people stop shipping things globally. The logical best source of just about everything then becomes the post apocalyptic remains of civilisation. The zombie infested post apocalyptic remains. But I don't want to set this particular story among zombies. Not wild ones. They use the blue rocks to make slaves that don't need feeding, but that's okay, it's not like they can come up from the deep mines anyway...
So I need to decide where to put these mines.
Maybe just further up the same mountains? High Cup could theoretically control a bunch of territory around there. Tolly and Carry can set out to trade with people who have unusual sets of shiny metal and end up finding people who mined rather deeper than was wise.
Yes, Moria, but different.
I don't know though, I don't think I want the Steward anywhere near controlling this lot. I want to send Tolly and Longway and Harry out on a trade route and have Tolly keep going to try and find the source of this really intriguing metal. And end up in more trouble than he knows how to get out of. Being set to work in a cave.
... hmmm, depending how much source I rip, that would make the Steward rather belong somewhere near control of it.
If I put it in the same mountains I don't need to invent a new civilisation, just some messed up people. Actually that applies whichever mountain they're digging under. So I could put it kind of near.
It can't be too closely connected though or Tolly wouldn't need an Adventure to go find things they'd just be traded or sent in as tax.
Okay, so, the Moria place needs to be a different set of mountains.
North or South?
I'll have to do more thinking on it.
Cleaner is long gone and I am going to do something that isn't rambling about my made up epic fantasy zombie mutant world.