subplotkudzu | Book 111

111) In a Sunburned Country: More of my recent Bill Bryson rereads, this is his Australia travelogue. I like this one specifically because his discussions of how the Australian ecosystem evolved - with lots of niche environments and nothing by way of outside competition - produces a locale full of plants and animals dangerous and mysterious enough for any fantasy game. It would be easy enough to mix this with the coral reef ecosystem descriptions I got from _The Word Without Us_ - apparently fully functioning coral reefs are one of the places where the biomass of the prey species needn't be significantly more than that of the predators, leading to lots of very big dangerous toothy creatures feeding on lots of little things - to make the sort of world I envisioned for my Earthdawn campaigns: where the PCs exit the Kaer into a world densely populated with dangerous things that nonetheless all make sense and can be rationally explained.

I'm a half hour away from the end of my latest audio-book, and have actually finished a couple of new graphic novels (but did so on Sunday so they're technically part of next week) so I should round out the year with well into the high one hundred and teens for books read. Not too shabby.