I spend a lot of time thinking about this kind of thing, which is to say proc-genned "lands," dungeons, (cities/towns/villages/hamlets), the eternally Lost Oppo

I spend a lot of time thinking about this kind of thing, which is to say proc-genned "lands," dungeons, (cities/towns/villages/hamlets), the eternally Lost Opportunity which has given economic viability to the great and unwholesome Wheel of Pain which is rulechurn for Dungeons and Dragons and so many other properties (probably worthy of some long-form rants thinly disguised as essays). Imagine yourself playing a character in a simulation, walking through across a harsh desert plain. No sand, no hard-pack soil crazed with cracks, just weathered rocks and eternal wind. The horse has died some time back and only ominous constitution checks have kept you propelled across this near-featureless vista. A rock at your feet is interesting enough, but you discover it has three sides aside from its bottom. Does this startle you out of your gameplay? Most people would say, "Hey, it's a rock." But if you're a geologist, and especially a student of ventifacts, you might recognize the dreikanter, a three-sided rock so formed by wind. Is the simulation so good that it produced this kind of rock purely from repeated applications of The Math? Or you might come across a cave system. You ready your weapons, and for what? Why, an encounter. Now, in actual spelunking, what you want at hand is rope, not a sword, because most dwellers in caves tend to look like little white shrimp, tiny translucent spiders, patches of a very thin fungus, or eyeless fish little more than water themselves. Caves just don't support a lot of life, at least, not for permanent dwellers, and yet we have our monster hotels. Fortunately DMs have, chastened by the term, at least stopped stuffing some lonely red dragon in a cave where it can't ever actually leave. Now, it's easy enough to say that we expect a kind of exaggerated reality out of our games and our maps, and it's almost true, but it isn't sufficient. Our expectations include these odd little rocks, too. Sure, we expect our mountains to be taller and our gorges deeper, our volcanos hot enough to melt the One Ring, much less tungsten (a block of which would simply indignantly sink without melting once it punched through the caldera's crust leaving behind poor Gollum). However, we expect even our exaggerated variations to vary, so we can't simply apply some multiplicative function across the whole of our heightmap like a lazy creator. No, we must have relatively staid areas, as well. More normal. Bearable. And then it is back to having unlikely geological features in a little much abundance. Just as we have had some posts on "random" when it comes to musical playlists not actually being random, we want something out of our fantasy maps which isn't quite reality, but in a way which is almost ineffably fanciful.