#actually all ancients are larger than moderns‚ imps are only a little bigger than moderns‚ spirals are a little bit larger than imps

[xeneric-shrooms]

🍓fr ask game!

🍓Biggest dragon in your lair (based on in-game sizes) and biggest dragon in your lair (based on lore sizes

In terms of ON-SITE size Cassette here would be my largest with a Length of 30.99m and a Wingspan of 18.52m

But for lore/headcanon my dragon PlanetaryFizzANYWAYS

In lore PlanetaryFizz (name given to it by the head scientist) is the largest

It's a transdimensional entity that infiltrated the Aether Orbiter and assumed the appearance of the Aethers inside. It's not malignant, but it's not overly friendly. You could approach it but it's very dangerous to, it could kill you in an instant.

It's held in some sort of cell in the laboratory and is being studied. The head scientist, Hollunuo, has appointed himself the task of understanding this... Thing.

It's driving him mad though. At first he thought the cell actually contained the entity, but he quickly realized that no. The entity is staying in there willingly. It can leave whenever it wants to.

(↑↑This guy right here↑↑)

PlanetaryFizz' true size is unknown, but after the Orbiter returned to Sornieth and the entity was taken to the lab it grew in size. Significantly. It's about the size of a 3–4 story house currently.

[weaselle]

Hey, do you think you could do an 'Old World' post, like the one you contributed to before? The one with the huge trees and ground sloths and musk oxen being goats. I ADORE that post, and I'm hoping to see more eventually. Please don't feel like you have to, I would just enjoy it :) hope you have a good one!

do you have any idea how much I appreciate being asked to talk about something I’m interested in!? Thank you, I’d love to

Imagine this: It’s 100 thousand years ago. There are dwarves, trolls, goblins, imps, giants, a couple kinds of elves, the First People (those that came before us all) something that might later be called seraphim, and many strange monsters. 

I’ma talk about monsters in a minute. Let’s talk about those other things, the like, fantasy races. Now, I don’t have time for every one of these, so I’m going to cover one I have the most information on. Dwarves

A sister species of humanity that is short, broad, bearded, some with red hair, lives in caves in the hills and mountains, are superb crafters, making instruments, wearing intricate leather outfits and known for creating large expertly made axes and hammers. Dwarves, right?

Or did I just describe Neanderthal

See, the earliest stories of dwarves from Scandinavia are confusing, because sometimes they talk about them being small or short, but sometimes talk about them being enormous. And that’s actually perfectly explained by Neanderthal

Check it out. Neanderthal, while noticeably shorter on average, were BUILT big. Look, it’s not just the cranial capacity, the eye sockets are larger, the nasal cavity is larger, the mandible is thicker, the teeth are larger, the bone around the ear and eye is  thicker. Looking at these skulls you would assume the person on the left was far bigger than the person on the right, and you would be correct, in every way except height.

So when the earliest stories of dwarves sometimes talk about them being short, and sometimes being massive, this situation matches. Neanderthal were THIC. But they averaged about five foot four at a time when humans in the north were passing 5 foot nine

That’s only averages tho, so sometimes it would be like a 5.1 Neanderthal and a 6.1 Sapiens, but sometimes it would be like, a 5.6 inch Neanderthal and a 5.3 inch Sapiens. Which makes the early myths make even more sense:

me, a 5.5 neolithic farmer, whose community of farmers trend toward the short side, having met my first Neanderthal, a 5.8 man built like a bear twice my weight and three inches taller than me “the Dwarves are massive! giant! huge!”

you, a tall hunter from a community of hunters who tend taller than average, who runs into Neanderthal several times a year and knows they are usually nearly a foot shorter than you are “you mean the little people?”

I’m pretty sure that humans were actually the elves that came in both dark and light varieties in these Scandinavian myths, but that’s a whole topic involving the way that invaders often adopt stories of the people they invade. But there are other species, not just Neanderthal and Sapiens and Denisovans, there was also at LEAST one other sister species we’ve found genetic proof of within our own genome. And who knows what relatives of ours were living only on the exposed continental shelves of the last 100 thousand year ice age? So there are a lot of options for elf.

ANYWAY

I like to think of all these sister species of humanity as being these fantasy races. I know I mentioned goblins and imps, and all I have to say is if you’ve ever seen videos of people dealing with baboons or macaques in some town somewhere, you can appreciate what a population of humans who were much closer to wild themselves might think of similar species.

NOW. Monsters.

Not only are there many strange animals to pick from, but I use a fun thought process to include almost anything I want.

See, when you say a creature lived from X time to Y time, it’s because we have some bones from X year, and we have some bones from the same creature dated to Y year. That’s great for describing what we know for sure.

But for what MIGHT have been, for what’s possible, you can extend the range

It’s pretty safe to assume we didn’t get a fossil of literally the last of them to live. So if I want to think about how a mythical creature sounds just like a real creature, but that real creature was from a time half a million years previous to the culture, well, that could still be a match.

Consider the Siberian Unicorn also known as Elasmotherium sibericum a species of rhino. We thought they went extinct 200 thousand years ago, which would have made them unavailable for the time period we’re talking about. But then we found some bones from between 30 and 40 thousand years ago, which means they might have out survived the Neanderthal!

Now consider the Coelacanth a 4-6 foot fish we were sure went extinct with the dinosaurs. Turns out we were wrong by about 75 million years, because they’re still alive today

So clearly, as long as there is somewhere preserving approximate environmental conditions, any number of things could have far different periods of existence.

Like, we know of Denisovans, a whole sister species of humanity, from a handful of bone fragments. This is the biggest piece of Denisovan bone we’ve ever found

That’s part of a jaw. And along with a handful of small bone shards, some teeth, and the tip of one pinky finger, it’s the only physical evidence we have for the whole species. Except that we managed to get a whole genome from the miraculously well preserved pinkie tip. This branch of humanity split from us at roughly the same time as Neanderthal, and modern Tibetans owe their genetic adaptation for higher elevations to human interbreeding with the Denisovan people. They existed for about half a million years, and the only hard evidence we have is a handful of bone pieces. From like two locations.

So if something interesting could be explained by a population of Neanderthal or Homo Erectus living outside the age range of the bones we have, that is entirely possible. Depending on how far outside, it even becomes LIKELY, because, again, we’re never going to get the LAST one that lived as a fossil, fossilization is so rare.

WHAT I’M TRYING TO SAY IS THAT THE OLD WORLD REALLY WAS A WORLD OF GIANTS AND ELVES AND DWARVES AND MONSTERS AND MAGIC

wait, did I say magic? Yep. Consider this: there is a magic valley in Africa that kills anything that goes into it at night. lizards, birds, people, they just... die. But not every time - a person can walk through it during the day and be fine, or sometimes at night too. Turns out there’s a large pocket of carbon monoxide underneath that leaks out constantly. In the day, the heavier than air gas creates a layer along the ground and collects in dips and hollows, but in the cooler temperatures of night drifts up six feet or more. So you might walk into the valley and be fine, but it gets a little cooler, or you walk down hill for a bit, and boom, carbon monoxide poisoning. It can take only a couple minutes to kill you.

Viola, one Cursed Valley.

Or! Imagine you are a human from 40 thousand years ago. You find a grave, you dig it up, somebody was buried with something like a wooden axe or sword (these things exist, it’s all about the density of the wood, the wedge shape, and the weight -- a heavy wooden sword can definitely decapitate a person, and we’re taking about a time when metal was rare or non existent). But THIS wooden weapon, while clearly wood, also sparkles like a gem in the light, is hard as stone, doesn’t burn if put in the fire... THAT’S a MAGIC WEAPON.

It’s also petrified wood.

This is the world I’ve been researching for my book Stone Punk, which I’ve only managed to write one chapter of so far

I would be so happy to write so many more posts about this, I’ve been researching the first domestication of wolves, cave art, neanderthal diets, ancient Indian, Russian, and Chinese myths... all kinds of things, but this post is long enough -- hope it was close to what you were looking for Anon!