World Building: Mountains & Highland Civilizations

I am a dwarf and I’m digging a hole welcome to Stoneworks World building today we’re gonna learn everything about how mountains work in real life and in Fantasy World building so that you can hopefully leave this video with more realistic and inspired ideas for your DND games storybooks and Minecraft

Civilizations I’m your radio host Stoney Stoner the mountie mounter don’t forget to like And subscribe and this video was prompted by the request of one of my Elite patrons so join my patreon and message me your deepest darkest desires You know what a mountain is unless you live in my home state of Rhode Island where they call this Mount Hope nah but it’s actually really hard to find a good scientific definition for mountains because like it’s either high elevation or it’s rugged and it sticks out these Grand beautiful landforms have massive

Implications for how our world works so today let’s talk about how mountains form and where they go on your world maps their environments resources civilizations and their effects on war and religion if you want to skip around to your interests or you get bored with one topic I added chapters to the bottom

Of the video right here on the scroll bar so you better have liked and subscribed or I I’ll be mad I’ll be angry and I get hungry when I’m angry the map is often the first place World builders start with their projects so where on our Maps should Mountains go

Usually we just kind of eyeball it with intuition and that’s like 50 of the way there right honestly I’ll take a map that feels good with its mountains over an awkward but scientifically accurate one any day so take this info mostly As inspiration mountain range is mostly form from the

Earth’s tectonic plates moving around and interacting with each other like how the Continental Indian plate is crashing into the Eurasian plate to form the Himalayas yes that is how it is correctly pronounced in Sanskrit I had a teacher who insisted on calling them that so I’m passing that pedantic pain

Onto you the land on the tectonic plate deforms and pushes up to form mountains or how the oceanic Pacific Plate is crashing into the Continental South American Plate and it’s sliding underneath which pushes the land upwards and makes volcanoes that further build the mountains this is how the Andes were

Formed so if you want realistic mountains in your fantasy world the biggest ranges will be in the lines that are on the edge of continental plates take a look at what’s called the Alpine belt a line of multi-layered mountain ranges from France to Indonesia that sit all along with a Eurasian plate

Interacts with its neighbors it’s also responsible for the splattering messy shape of a land mass that is Europe so if you’re one of the million World Builders out there who wants to add a Mediterranean Sea analog to your map listen up because it has to do with the mountains Europe’s funky peninsulas

Exist because the Eurasian plate is actually split up into a bunch of micro plates that are part of it but still interact with each other Spain turkey Hungary the Adriatic Sea and the Aegean Sea are all their own little micro plates and on the edges of these plates

Where they interact you get southern Europe’s mountains like the Pyrenees Alps the aponines dinner rides pindus carpathians pontics Taurus which all make these peninsulas in southern Europe so if you want a bit of your map to look like the Mediterranean draw some real funky looking blobs in an area and put

Down down some mountain ranges on the lines then make those blobs consist of mostly Lander sea and then fill in some regions to account for things like erosion I came across all this after looking at the Carpathian Mountains and thinking to myself how the did this random squiggle get in the middle of

Europe now tectonics are weird because the plates can break apart or suture together into new plates this is why the Ural Mountains randomly cut through Russia in the middle of the Eurasian plate because they’re super old the mountains here outlived the tectonic plates that smushed together to make

Them the same goes for the Appalachian mountains which during the supercontinent Pangea were formed together as the same range as the Scottish Highlands and part of the Atlas Mountains in Morocco so now we need to get the triumvirate of Appalachian bluegrass music Moroccan chabi and

So you can straight up just add a few random mountain ranges outside of tectonic plates and it’ll be realistic especially if you have a few older more worn down mountain ranges on either side of the ocean or sea that information is all for the big lines of mountain

Systems and ranges though so how do you get the more cluster-like places like the Ethiopian Highlands the Adirondacks and Upstate New York the Black Hills in South Dakota and the central Australian mountains whether you have an interesting kind of uplift where sometimes magma from the mantle Rises up

Into the continental plates which cools into rock and then thickens the plate increasing the elevation of the land above it over time the softer Rock of the land gets eroded away and those big hard magma intrusions stay put forming high elevation Hard Rock mountains this can happen in a lot of places almost

Anywhere but it is often associated with tectonic plates these mountains tend not to be nearly as large as tectonic ranges but they can be put nearly anywhere on your map and they create some really really cool landscapes for this example I absolutely love the Ethiopian Highlands and its geomorphology wow I’m

Really a dirty tectonics formed mountains where today’s Arabian and African plates were joined together over hundreds of millions of years these mountains eroded down somewhat and then that magma uplift thing happened and made these Highlands but then the Arabian plate split from the African plate cutting the mountains

In half and creating the Red Sea this is why the coastal areas around the Red Sea are all mountainous in the Arabian Nubian shield and down south in Yemen where these mountains were part of the younger Highlands they’re taller and more rugged now today Africa is actually

Being torn apart by a couple of things one the French and two the Great Rift Valley which has East Africa peeling away from the rest you can literally see the rift happening in the Uplands it rips this mountain cluster in half and the land erodes away into a new Valley

So my world building projects always have a place like this now it’s really cool then there’s volcano mountains they could stand either alone or create full volcanic mountain ranges you either put them on regular tectonic boundary areas like how Mount Fuji in Japan formed from a triple boundary of three plates or

Where rifting occurs into those stresses in the land allow lava to rise up like how Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania formed or you could create a hot spot that can really show up anywhere in the world from making the islands of Hawaii and the Azores to the middle of the Sahara

Desert in the volcano Mountain emikosi but there’s also a few other ways that mountains can hypothetically form face if a planet is struck by a giant asteroid it’ll create a giant crater with a little mountain in the center from the like Aftershock now if that planet is spherical then the shock waves

Of that giant impact will Ripple through the planet’s surface and push material to the exact opposite end of the planet making mountains appear there this happened on Mercury and lastly if the planet is cold enough like on Pluto you can have cryovolcanoes where water erupts and forms ice mountains I’m using

That last one in a setting that I’m working on now now I’ll warn you that if you take this information and just stick lines of mountains on your map that is lame as hell think about adding mountains to your map more as regions with mountain ranges clustered in Associated features like plateaus large

Valleys canyons and sub-mountain ranges between the Rockies and Sierra Nevada lies the Great Basin which formed out of erosion from the surrounding ranges and the rising and expansion of the crust that makes it Ripple with mini mountain ranges and Rolling Hills that’s why it looks like this on the map or you’ve got

Things like the tarim and panonian basins which are still lowlands because they’re mini plates that refuse to conform to the poser uplifting mountains around them or the Tibetan Plateau which exists because once mountains get too big they can get weak and flatten out over space it’s more interesting to

Think about mountains as inhabiting both positive and negative space on your map and leaning into the gray areas of these Associated features far too often I’ve Just Seen World Builders Place mountain ranges as simple lines down the very middle of their land masses when in reality mountain ranges appear on the

Place’s edges and have random smatterings around but don’t forget looking down on the mountains from a God’s perspective or satellites is very different than walking through them and experiencing what they’re like part 2 climate and Hazards if you or a character in your story were to walk through the mountains that your world’s

Building what will they see are they Rolling Hills like the Appalachians or big Rocky out jutting tips like the aponines and pindus does it literally look like someone just crumpled the land like tin foil to make it all rugged some mountain ranges are Big Blocks of rock

That get eroded down into Peaks valleys out juts and strange shapes if you told me that the Devil’s Tower in the Black Hills was Part of Your World building project I would spit in your mouth and you would get turned on by my dominant personality or like the fairy Chimneys

In Turkey penis rocks this is a good time to figure out the general shape and The Vibes of your mountain range how steep and rugged is the entire landscape are the mountains just giant rocks that stick out or they Continental sized formations in the land do they gradually

Go up and take a lot of space or are they super steep with ups and downs and ridges and cliffs are there places with Peaks are those Peaks all along one Ridge or are the mountains all more discreet from each other with valleys in between is the base of the mountain

Covered in jungle trees or is it all Barren Plains and desert these questions are a bit easier to answer if you have have experience hiking through the mountains which is an awesome adventure that I recommend doing if you can but as you climb the mountains they get colder

As you go up if you were to hike up the Himalayas it’ll go from subtropical Forest to deciduous forest to taiga forest to sparser and sparser trees and shrub till it’s all rock and ice and Glaciers on top of this at different patches on the mountain you’ll have

Areas that have different conditions for sunlight temperature wind nutrients pollinators and water all of these things can be difficult for plants on mountains depending on where they live these factors make it so that a single mountain is a patchwork of tons of different microclimates for plants and

The plants will adapt to these niches I talked about this a little bit in my video about forests but these unique and isolated niches are why Mountain trees can get incredibly strange and alien looking especially on the more ISO related land masses of the Southern Hemisphere like look at the Giant

Groundzles on Mount Kilimanjaro which are essentially giant roses that adapted to this climate or the hearty and twisting pencil Pines of Tasmania in my opinion fantasy mountains are best if they have some alien and unique trees on them but like I said as you go up the

Air gets colder and also the winds get stronger at some point there will be a tree line where trees thin out in patches and can no longer grow some trees up here will have to adapt to the strong winds growing out in crevices or being shaped like Flags it’s pretty cool

The small plants which can live further up than the trees start getting pumped full of more wacky chemicals so that they don’t freeze up here this makes Mountain plants especially good for medicine perfumes and drugs when people say oh this is a mystical healing root gathered from the Andes mountains yeah

That’s a real thing even though they’re selling you on some in Tibet there’s a fungus that takes over Mountain caterpillars and has their zombie bodies burrow down so that the fungus can grow out and reproduce Tibetan people are increasingly trekking up the mountains to collect these fungus stalks because they’re worth more than

Gold because a bunch of Chinese dudes are buying them to help them get boners y’all are around over there in China too much I don’t want another pandemic with zombie boner fungus way high in the mountains these adaptations for pollinators have to be weird because usually it’s just a few flies and bees

My favorite example of this is the sasiora gossip feral which makes itself cushy and sheltered so that bees come in and they take a nap which ends up pollinating them but things aren’t all Rosy and cute up here in the mountains when you get to altitudes high enough

The Snows will pile up to form glaciers now I used to think that glaciers just sat like big ice cubes on mountaintops kind of like the big thick ice caps that you see at the North and South Poles but no they’re actually more giant really slow-moving ice rivers in the valleys

And basins now you can get something like the big ice caps in the mountains but that’s just if there’s a basin that’s big enough to form a big relatively flat ice field usually though there are Valley glaciers flowing out of the ice Fields so little did dipsh 12

Year olds me know that mountains are covered in giant ice snakes I really like the idea of having an undead Mountain King living in an ice castle here on an ice field way high up in the mountains and the only way that your characters or DND players can get up to

Them is by tracking up the glaciers that snake off of it because then you get a ton of environmental hazards for them to deal with things like big chasms ruptures and flooding yes flooding from Mountain glaciers is a very very big problem for the people living in the

Mountains when glaciers melt it usually creates a stream down the mountain and ends up in your overpriced Poland Springs water bottle but the water also forms large glacial lakes right at the foot of the glacier these Lakes are usually blocked and held in place by more rains of rock and dirt but these

Can break and then all of that water comes flooding down the mountain and destroying a bunch of imagine with me you’re walking up a mountain valley things are peaceful and you start to notice that the stream gets a bit stronger and you look up to the mountain tops while you’re think fast chocolate

Nuts ah if you got hit by that flashbang at full force congratulations a mountain flood would wipe you out with a wall of water now here’s a key point of this video most World Builders see mountains as a big permanent stoic part of the landscape I think it’s why people often

Put dwarves hollowing out mountains and making a big city there because it’s seen as a stable and Hardy place no not really mountains are some of the world’s most actively dangerous areas especially the higher you get because then there’s more potential energy with which gravity pulls you down ah Speaking of gravity sorry my mic fell so mountains are super risky with these flash floods landslides avalanches and also the earthquakes from tectonic plates plus volcano stuff this is why a lot of mountain faring religion consists of hey Mountain here’s a sacrifice please do not kill me today so

With that in mind my headcanon of the dwarves Mountain City is specifically built to address this problem their lone carved out Mountain City called sukuti devotes a lot of resources to cushioning itself from these cataclysmic dangers the walls are all curved hard rock with many support beams to the ceiling and

The floor and the large rooms especially are insulated with soft cushiony wood imported up from the highlands kind of like how a woodpecker’s tongue protects its skull by wrapping around it sometimes the rooms themselves shift or crack in the middle so the dwarves will just add Bridges or floors over the new

Cracks or they’ll use the space that’s tilted for shelves and storage it makes the layout of rather unpredictable there’s oh he knows where her shelves are to indicate that you know people have been sleeping together now of course these dwarves like their shinies and mostly live off of mining so let’s explore that

Further in Mountain part three economics so mountains are good for mineral resources for three main reasons they simply have more surface area to expose mineral veins than regular Flatlands erosion can expose old mineral veins and the tectonic and magmatic activity that builds the mountains also makes more valuable Minerals and Gems within them

So Miners and mountains May dig tunnels straight into the Mountainside and they’ll bring the product out in carts and down a trail and they’ll dump all the excess tailings down the hill on one mountain that I was hiking in in New Mexico there was an old collapsed tunnel

Of a copper mine and there was this big pile of teal blue rocks right next to it and it was really cool or you could just cut the top of a mountain off like West Virginians do when digging up coal but beware lots of mining creates toxic junk

Rock that needs to be dumped somewhere that could be a cool environmental activist DND Quest that’s all I’m saying all those college game Masters out there I’m sure there’s a cute girl who’s an environmental activist she might want to role play that but medieval mining is actually way more small scale difficult

And expensive than fantasy dwarves make it out to be those tiny little lying bastards so most Mountain communities end up practicing pockets of agriculture in valleys or grazing I’ll get more into agriculture later in an example but grazing is the livelihood of tons of traditional Mountain communities as long

As you have animals which can survive at these altitudes like the alpaca Tibetan the Highland cap yak then they just have to feed on the shrub in the mid and upper vegetation zones of the mountains but nowadays for example Tibetan villagers are having a hard time convincing young people to carry on this

Traditional grazing because young people are all turning to the cities and tourism industry white people love to climb and slide down tall in other countries so there’s a lot of money to be made in tourism as well but that’s just the resources for people in the mountains themselves mountains are also

The lifeblood of a lot of civilizations because they have Tinder and are the starting places of rivers yes tons of water comes from Mountain runoff glaciers and springs it’s only natural this is why mountains are often culturally seen as places of life especially in heavy Agricultural and irrigating societies although because of

The rain shadow effect oftentimes one side of a mountain range is far wetter than the others but that doesn’t always apply so the land usage of mountainous areas might see little pockets of settlements in cities where agriculture is feasible in between them in the more Highland and harsh areas they’ll be

Either rural Villages or nomadic tribes of herders these people will form trade systems of more specialized goods and contributing to that there will arise more complex culture politics and religion part 4 culture there are a lot of people that you can use as examples for Mountain peoples Tibetans Swiss Iranians Armenians Mayans

Aztecs malagasy and drunk Jebediah the cave dweller first let’s talk about the General Social and infrastructural effects that this environment has and then get into Mountain cities and settlements I will try to explain some noticeable Trends regarding how Mountain civilizations function but know that these different cultural Logics will

Contradict each other’s Trends so I am just generalizing traditionally speaking Mountain peoples are often minority groups that are pretty culturally conservative Mountain climates are often pretty harsh and dangerous so they have limited food and they can’t grow a huge population and they need to adhere to strict social Customs so the youngins

Don’t do anything stupid and get themselves killed it’s also hard to travel in rugged Mountain terrain and societies can be extremely fragmented and isolated because of this this is why the mountainous terrain of ancient Greece led to the formation of large city-states instead of unified Empires and why the caucases are crazy

Linguistically diverse also fun fact the thin Mountain Air makes it easier for languages to develop ejective sounds like like in the Georgian word for water it’s Gully rugged terrain also makes it hard to develop and conduct trade and leads to mountain ranges being seen as kind of a back country the uyghurs Tibetans

Kurds and Scottish are all mountainous people that came to be dominated by lone land people around them but the difficult accessibility of mountainous regions also makes them decent safe havens from Imperial Powers oftentimes refugees will flee to mountainous areas because it’s really hard to track people down here like

Happened in Genghis Khan’s childhood and it’s really hard to dislodge inhabitants from places fortified in the mountains there is a reason why the Chinese Communist party took the Long March through the mountains of Yunnan because they were retreating after losses in the Civil War now a lot of people died but

They came around to win so I’d say it was a pretty good choice I think this is also why mountain people are often seen as really stubborn and clinging to their identity a lot besides the strict social Customs they have natural physical advantages that push them to resist

Outsiders more than others and I’m not just talking about those sexy oiled up Scottish muscles now there are obvious exceptions to all this the main one being what I’ve been saving for the big review feel the Incan Empire the Incas were actually the final iteration of a longer line of Andean

Civilizations like the several cultures descending from Norte Chico and the states of the moche tiwanaku wari chimor and then the Incas in Empire this big and complex doesn’t spring out of nowhere hi I’m Stoney and I’m your new high school history teacher nice to meet you the Incas made Mountain living work

Through agricultural Innovations strict communal customs and a system of roads and bridges across the Andes in this way they became the real Imperial Metropole of South America and people didn’t flee to the mountains to escape Empire they fled to the lowland jungles and plains I told you that mountains are Patchwork of

Different biomes and climates right as you go far north to south you’ll find similar climate spots in the mountains along the whole chain so where the lowlands go from thick jungle to Plains to Desert the mount have similar climate areas all along here uniquely turning the mountains into a connecting Force

Rather than a separating or isolating one this is especially big when we think about agriculture here it’s hard to grow stuff in the mountains but with all this climate diversity you can find areas to grow a bunch of different crops especially at different elevations so the biggest issue for starting Farms

Then became soil quality in response to this Andean peoples got really really good at figuring out which soils and areas were good for farming what it was so important to them that their mythological origin story has the gods charging the OG Inca founder to go out

And find the place with the right soil quality using a golden rod but once you have that good soil erosion and water runoff are big problems but the Incas made it work because they communally built aqueducts and Terraces that prevent erosion they were also able to domesticate and breed crops to be better

Suited for high altitudes in different conditions like how they farmed dozens of kinds of potatoes or adopted corn from mesoamerica and bred it to be Hardy year I made a whole shiny video in agriculture if you want to know more so click that like button and just

Forehead of that subscribe button with a stapler sorry about that likewise travel is really hard in the mountains but the Incas made it work because they communally built roads and bridges a little patterns emerging here they got a little work done through communal labor the Incan government strictly controlled labor and tribute

Resources they used work as taxation for the regular people and they took about two-thirds of people’s agricultural output and in return the people got food shelter clothing religion and a skull that was not Shattered by a mace sometimes I watch horrific videos of people dying just to feel something again

The harshness of the environment favored conditions that saw people working together in a tightly organized authoritarian command economy kind of way oh your son didn’t lay the gravel for the potato terrorist right take a stick and just whack one of the families you oversee didn’t send their man to

Help build a bridge whack the farmers are gathering sticks without permission from the government whack they’re outside and they’re coming for the stick stockpiles wait no no no no no The environment of the Andes selected for this kind of centralized control because societies that ran this way had more efficiency and output up here in the mountains but this also came at a huge cost they had to keep track of their citizens with a bulky census system keep people’s divided into

Familial social units called I lose and create a robust network of Messengers and record keeping developing a civilization in rugged mountains can be hard so you have to do some hardcore sh so with all of this stuff along with some good old-fashioned god king military diplomacy you get Social and

Technological innovations and an Empire of big mountain cities but these Mountain cities are strange if you’re thinking about adding Urban centers in the mountains you should first think about the Region’s valleys basins and plateaus most cities aren’t built up on steep mountainsides or high mountain tops Machu Pikachu is Iconic partly

Because it’s a mountain City Adele up on a High Ridge Which is far more exotic and impressive to see than a lower Valley settlement that’s the exception that proves the rule although rule of cool Machu Pikachu is pretty cool like Solitude and Skyrim things are pretty cool the early and medieval history of

Switzerland is focused on towns and land claims that are mostly in the lower Foothills and The Valleys despite the romanticized image of people living up on the mountaintops things being Consolidated in The Valleys allows for a bit more centralization because people can efficiently control the land by blocking off the exits blocking the

Water Source or building a fort that overlooks the whole thing like there’s a reason why the establishment of the Tibetan Empire started with the capital hwasa extending control over a Big River Valley then expanding its control out to all of the plateau the surrounding mountains and even Downstream of that

River Valley into modern Bangladesh a high altitude Capital that I’ve recently been interested in is the city of tiwanaku which grew before the Incas came around in the Andean altaplano Plateau growing powerful due to its agricultural Surplus from farming Innovations resources from Lake Titicaca and its impressive religious megastructures

Cities are gonna pop up and become really big for a few main reasons defense local resources far-flung trade and religion mountains offer defensive and home field advantages because it’s difficult to attack upwards and they also make knowing the local terrain and paths really important local resources doesn’t just mean or deposits or Chinese

Boner fungus by the way but also agricultural space and Water Resources this makes mountainous settlements pretty densely populated even if most of the mountains themselves are relatively open and Rural and far-flung trade pops up because the mountains are natural barriers to travel but that means that there’s people on either side of the

Mountain range with different resources cultures and demands so a business pops up for getting trade goods either around or through the mountains the ancient tiwanaku State benefited greatly from this as well as the Central Asian city-states of sogdiana although they were less mountainous than just right

Next to all the mountains same thing now I think the development of cities out of religion is a bit of an oddball here but it’s impactful no matter how you spin it often times religious ascetics will go out into the mountains and form isolated monasteries and sometimes people will settle around those monasteries

Similarly settlements that have the resources and the convenient location to host religious festivals or temples can grow way larger than surrounding Villages because it’ll become a cultural Hub and it’ll gain from the religious tributes given there this is a bit of a phenomenon everywhere but I feel like in mountains religious organization tends

To become a bit more pronounced this isn’t a idea and feeling more than a substantiated claim so let me know what you think in the comment section Down Below in lots of tropical environments people end up creating Mountain cities and civilizations maybe because it’s cooler or offers different resources but

The most convincing Theory I’ve heard is that it’s because there’s less disease up here so when World building Mountain civilizations I think it’s best to question first what kind of people do you want up here do you want it to be a tribal nomadic clans of stubborn

Warriors do you want it to be an urbanized and well-coordinated Empire do you want somewhere in between where there’s a social and religious through line that connects people culturally but doesn’t dominate over them politically so keep that in mind in your world building I would say start there and

Then work your way backward to see if they’re pastoralists or have good agriculture or have roads and all that kind of detailed stuff but no matter what you choose some of these builds are gonna end up fighting part 5 war a war in the mountains is no joke the

Rugged terrain the small winding precarious paths and the difficulty of logistical support if you’re waging a medieval or Fantasy war in the mountains you better hope it’s a defensive war and you’ve got home Fields advantage or you’ve got some dragons that you’re riding on there’s a lot of reasons why

It’s difficult first on the large geopolitical scale mountains are a shield from Invaders because they are hard to pass like Rome really benefited from the protection of the Alps to their North except for the invasion of Hannibal but even he had a bunch of his men and elephants die by Falling to

Their death freezing and attacks from the locals it was ballsy and successful but other people didn’t cross the Alps with an Army in the winter for a reason the ruggedness of mountain terrains makes it so that conventional organized field Battle Tactics do not work very well when there’s massive Rock faces and

Steep slopes it’s difficult to muster regular battle formations like a Phalanx or a shield wall Cavalry cannot charge at all unless you’re fighting on a clear field or a valley cause horses are going to get injured and stuck on the uneven and Rocky terrain the best example of

This is the second war fought between the Romans and the mountain Sam Knight tribes of South Central Italy the samnites would hit the clumsy and blocky Roman Phalanx formations with fluid hit and run tactics so the Romans adapted their formations into what’s called manapols which are much more flexible

Can turn to face an enemy way faster and can maneuver around rough terrain without breaking formation so soldiers in the mountains might need to adopt new tactics skills and Equipment maybe they should learn rock climbing mounted navigation skiing and maybe they should adopt lighter weaponry and armor to make

All this travel easier but I personally find the most interesting part of mountain Warfare is the Tactical Logistics of it all especially if you’re writing a d d campaign like this because Mountain paths are so windy unpredictable and difficult to navigate an army is either going to need a real

Really good maps or a local guide not having this could end up with your guys in a valley and then suddenly a group of local Warriors blocks off all your exit points and now you’re either besieged in the valley or you have to fight uphill

To get out or maybe the guide knows that there’s a choke point in the mountain paths that one Army and another Army are racing towards because the first to get there is gonna be able to cut off the other from a defensive position you could have your characters or players

Try to convince guides or locals to give you Maps or extra tips about what they could do I mean this is how the Spartans lost at the Battle of Thermopylae they successfully held a strong defensive position between some Mountains and the coast until a local told the enemy

Persians about a mountain pass around the Spartan position and they snuck around their flanks and then killed them all there’s also the issue of baggage trains since it’s harder to move and trade over rugged terrain the lines that carry an Army’s food and Supply can get really bogged down this had catastrophic

Results for Mark Anthony’s campaign on Parthia he marched with his army through the mountains on the shorter more difficult route to his Target city of frata but his baggage trained Siege engines and Armenian allies marched the longer but easier route so as Anthony was besieging frata the parthians jumped

On his less defended baggage train and cut him off from his supplies which forced him to humiliatingly retreat from the campaign and suffer a lot of casualties in the Armenian mountains winter Marcus Antonius more like Marcus Anton no now if you’re doing a d d campaign in the mountains where you’re

Fighting this terrain is just begging for enemies to lob Boulders and logs and carts down at the Players this actually happened to Alexander the Great’s army as he invaded into the mountains of Thrace the Thracians lobbed a line of their wagons down at his army but he beat this tactic by training his

Soldiers to lay flat with their Shields over them or to move out of the way yeah this part was a bit easy to draw examples for because I watch a lot of Historia civilis in my downtime but also if I do a World building video and I don’t mention Greco-Roman stuff some of

You viewers get really mad at me so there you go but meet me in the Hills so I can beat you over my head with my maqua weedcliffe pre-columbian Supremacy I will cut your heart out part six religion mountains are pretty much always spiritually important there’s a near Universal feeling that

One gets from Mountain Vistas or summoning a peak and looking down around the world it’s crazy and it’s very special the Hebrew Bible has Moses receiving the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai the gospel of Matthew has Jesus on a Mountaintop where he meets the prophets Elijah and Moses and Islam has

The angel jibrail dictating the Quran to Muhammad as he meditated in a mountain cave and that’s just the abrahamic I think there’s four reasonable things that influence religious interpretations of mountains their perceived power and connection to the Divine their danger in climbing and traveling their resources and potential riches especially for like

Gold mining and finally questions of how they got there or why unique ones look the way they do the connection to the Divine is a through line in many mountain myths they are physically massive and Powerful they rise up and they are humans closest reach to the heavens until America came along and

Invented airplanes and Moon travel each land dwellers so logically and emotionally being up on a mountain brings you closer to the gods there’s also the idea of an axis Mundi the center of the world it’s a bit difficult to explain but in axis Monday is a point

On the globe by which people mentally Orient themselves in space like the center of the world in most Jewish and Christian thought it is Jerusalem mountains are inherently good candidates for physical access mundies because they’re so conspicuous and they seem big and strong enough to be able to Anchor

The world in place to rotate around it I think all it takes for a mountain to be a good access Monday is that it has to have some really important stories behind it I mean hell Jerusalem sits on a little mountain called Zion the best example of a mountain axis Mundi is

Probably Mount kailash which is seen as the center of the cosmic world to many Hindus jains and Buddhists in both Indian epics the Mahabharata and the ramayana it’s supposedly the Abode of the god Shiva but also a portal to the heavens and to Liberation as well as

Those things it’s seen as an important location of many events and individuals like where some people attained Enlightenment or performed Miracles I think if people live in an area for long enough landforms that stand out and are interesting tend to just accumulate stories around them whether historical

Or mythological and that’s what makes a place sacred to a religion and this is especially true and prevalent to mountains because they stand out pretty well now the danger of mountains makes them good settings for hero myths up here there can be physically demanding challenges dangerous environments and

Animals and no oxygen but the danger here also keeps mountainous areas unexplored and mysterious there’s a Trope called the king asleep in the mountains where a ruler of a past golden age is said to be still alive preserved and hidden in the mountains waiting for a new time to come out and make

Everything right again striking down the false gods of the tribunal casting out The Outlanders and reasserting the sixth house unmourned the game Morrowind has an interesting take on this because the main mountain in the game is supernaturally dangerous and the sleeping King is a deranged poser with god-like powers then there’s also the

Riches of a mountain think of the hobbit’s Lonely Mountain where the dragon sits on piles of gold treasure or there’s a Chinese myth that has a mountain of ten thousand magical Treasures underneath it which ends up trapping a greedy King who wanted to take them all it’s a simple format

There’s a mountain with a boatload of treasure in it and we have to go explore its depths and do something dangerous in order to get them and finally you get the creation stories of the mountains the Oglala Lakota tell of the Black Hills origin from three spirits that

Aided a girl running away from a giant bear so they Rose the hills out of the ground in order to protect her and slow the bear down this myth seems to harp on how difficult it is to travel in mountains one version of the Hawaiian Pele myth tells that the volcano Kilauea

Was formed after the goddess Pele was chased by her sister and killed at the site of the volcano her body then became the volcano and lava while her spirit still inhabits the lava chamber this one seems to harp on how the mountain is visibly building itself from within so

There’s a lot of religious connotations and stories surrounding mountains but if you’re World building more for say a d d game you’re going to want to tap into the more physical and active expressions of religions like rituals Mountain related rituals usually involve people asking for the gods to assure their

Safety to continue giving resources going on pilgrimage to Sacred sites and not to explode Pompeii style mountain climbers in the Himalayas may know a bit about these because often times they’re made to pay respects and give prayers for safety before they start their climb and the connection to

The gods also makes them a really good candidate for where you should do some Human Sacrifice the because sometimes took people probably captured Warriors or ritualistically chosen children ouch and they would bring them up to the extreme mountain peaks so that they would freeze to death as a sacrifice to

The gods the Aztec rulers used mass human sacrifice as a way to terrorize their enemies and their own population and they did it at the main pyramid in the city center this was called The Serpent Mountain as it was a ritualistic recreation of a mountain in their mythology where the war god with

Teleport disemboweled his mother’s murderer and threw her body down the side of the mountain the Aztecs did the same thing in their rituals and at the bottom of the temple stairs was an artistic depiction of that God disemboweled and flayed so they physically recreated this mountain and

The symbolism of that story as a public platform over the crowds below so Mountain religions super interesting honestly when I was researching this section I expected to find more direct Spirit of the mountain types or like the Kami of Mount Fuji whose name is konohana sakuyahime FUNimation I hear

You’re hiring but most of the mountain stuff that I found was more indirectly using the mountains as a powerful setting or as an allegory for some need that the mountain fulfills or as a representation of a figure’s Divine status it’s some really interesting stuff at this point in the video I was

Planning on talking about one of my own world building projects and Friends of the channel will be familiar with Dakota lakes Mouse World building project that I have going this is an extension of that for a larger ttrpg system I wanted to tell you about a chain of mountains

That has Prairie Highlands that are filled with bugs with roving gangs of dragon-like birds and Raptors and Eagles which cover the mountain tops with guano and potassium white rocks but the scope of this project is a little bit too big and incomplete for me to start talking

About it here so stay tuned for future updates on that from my head Canon of the dwarves to my Minecraft server to the Black Hills and the Himalayas and the Andes I hope that I’ve shown you a lot about mountains for you to incorporate into your own world building

Projects and I hope that I’ve given you a little bit of inspiration and understanding for just how complex and interesting these things can be so thank you for watching and listening I’ve been Stoney and if you want to tell me which topics to cover in the future make sure

To join my patreon and I’ll see you later