I came across this last night while digging around for some inspirational landscape photos.
Guess I’ll be adding Fog Deserts somewhere in my hexmap.
And of course why not reflavor your standard desert Oasis filled with crystal clear water and palm trees to be a mysterious Fog Oasis?
Or how about including the squashy, “rippling” bog qualities of a “Muskeg”? The description section on this definitely feels like it could be picked apart for some overland travel narration
" Although at first glance muskeg resembles a plain covered with short grasses, a closer look reveals a bizarre and almost unearthly landscape. Small stands of stunted and often dead trees, which vaguely resemble bonsai, grow where land protrudes above the water table, with small pools of water stained dark red scattered about. Its grassland appearance invites the unwary to walk on it, but even the most solid muskeg is spongy and waterlogged. Traveling through muskeg is a strange and dangerous experience for the unaccustomed. Muskeg can grow atop bodies of water, especially small ponds and streams. Because of the water beneath, the muskeg surface sometimes ripples underfoot. Thinner patches allow large animals to fall through, becoming trapped under the muskeg and drowning."
I’m guessing these trees were shaped by humans at some point, but the suggestion that a specific kind of caterpillar causes these trees to curl and grow in weird shapes seems perfectly Fey.
Lastly in reading about the DRIEST PLACE ON EARTH (the Atacama Desert) I learned about the Chinchorro people of South America, they were mummifying their dead much much earlier than Egyptians and developed a method of preservation where they encased the body in clay.
Say bye bye to those cloth wrapped mummies and say hello to crumbling clay encased mummies.
They also had “black” and “red” mummies depending on the type of soil/minerals they covered the bodies with.
This is of course a very short and fantastically minded blurb about this culture, but I suggest you read more about it, fascinating and ingenious!
Show and Tell whatever rabbitholes you’ve gone down while worldbuilding! I can’t get enough of all these amazing real world things to inspire the fantasy.
Why not indeed! I love finding little bits of magic in our own world that we can use to create magic in our created worlds! I love the idea of a fog oasis. I guess it usually occurs in coastal deserts but there’s no reason we can’t make the presence of fog more mysterious than that!