Fantasy Cartography vs the Great Tumblrsplosion of 2018
So just like every other blog on here, Iām probably going to have to talk about what Iām going to do after Tumblr eats itself on the 17th. But I also have some things to say about my personal life, why the YouTube channel hasnāt been updated, and some thoughts on the nature of online censorship in general, so this post is going to get awfully long. The details about where else I can be found will be in Part 1, before the cut, while below the cut you will find the state of the channel in Part 2 and the nature of censorship in Part 3.
Part 1: Where Else to Find Fantasy Cartography
This blog has not been affected by the Tumblrsplosion -- my content here will remain safe for work for the foreseeable future. However, I object to Tumblrās new policies strongly enough that I am going to be pulling my operations away from here as much as possible. This blog will remain operational as a promotional channel and a way of asking me questions for as long as there are still creative nerds on Tumblr, but I intend to move the blogging & transcription functions across to an independent site (which will probably be a .wordpress.com domain unless I figure out how buying URLs works and can scrounge up the money to get one).
As always, the place to find my videos is on the Youtube Channel. My Facebook pageĀ and Twitter feedĀ still exist, although they are in need of updates, and of course if you would like to support me financially through Ko-Fi, the option is entirely open!
Other than that, Iām interested to hear your thoughts about other social media that I could use! Iāve heard good things about DreamWidth, Mastodon looks like it would be good if I could actually figure out how it works, and Pillowfort looks promising although I believe that it still requires money to sign up at the moment. But if youāre willing to show me around these websites and/or throw me some Ko-Fi money to get keys for them, Iād be extremely happy to come along for the ride!Ā
And donāt limit yourself to those three, either -- if you think you know some social media that Fantasy Cartography could make use of, then please make a suggestion! Discord? CuriousCat? The skyās the limit! Throw me a message or an ask and Iāll see what the big wide internet has to offer!
Part 2: Where has Fantasy Cartography Been?
It was all going so well. My mental health was on the up-and-up and I was prepared to get back into video making.Ā
...And then my lease ended. Oops.
Now, to be clear, I do have a place to live at the moment. Iām staying with family, so Iām about the least homeless you can be while still not technically having a home (the technical term is ātertiary homelessnessā -- so Iām still homeless, just, yāknow, not veryĀ homeless). I donāt need financial support to help me get a place, either -- since Iām not paying rent at the moment, Iāve easily been able to save enough to pay my outstanding bills and to pay the bond when I do get a house. No, the problem is simply that Canberra does not have enough rental properties. So unless you happen to have an empty one-bed for rent that you havenāt listed on the big real estate websites, I donāt think thereās much you can do to help.
All of this aside, making new Fantasy Cartography videos is like the second- or third-most important thing for me to do when I actually move into a new rental, so the only thing holding me back is the lack of a good space for me to work privately for the focus time that making a YouTube video needs.
Once again, Iām doing okay on my own here. You donāt need to help me, unless you happen to have an apartment or a filming studio for rent in Canberra. Your best wishes is consolation enough to keep me going through this vast fantasy-cartography-less wasteland.
Part 3: Female-Presenting Nipples and the Censorship Thereof
A lot of governments hate the internet right now:
The European Parliament is working on laws that effectively eliminate Fair Use.
Australia just passed a bill which will make encrypted online communication impossible.
The US Government has passed laws which aim to eliminate all online pornography.
All of these laws are allegedly passed with good intentions. They want to stop piracy, or terrorism, or sex trafficking. But every single one of them has had knock-on effects which disproportionately target the poor and marginalised while doing virtually nothing to stop actual criminals. Either these regulations are being passed by people who are actively working against the idea of understanding how the internet works, or they are being passed by people who receive quite a lot of money from lobbyists to deliberately misunderstand how the internet works.Ā
And of course the websites themselves are getting in on the act. We all know about Tumblr and its rage against the female-presenting nipples, but Facebook is also updating its Terms of Service to exclude almost all sex-related conversations. These rules come from a combination of the CEOs wanting to play it safe with various regulations and from their advertisers pushing them into the safest, most mainstream content available.
Regardless of what the malice:stupidity ratio is here, one fact remains; the free and open internet is dying. If we continue on our current course, the English-speaking internet will be just as restricted as the Chinese-speaking internet, but our restrictions will come from a piecemeal agglomeration of intergovernmental nonsense and overly restrictive ToS agreements instead of one big neat firewall.
Of course, none of this is to say that we should allow open criminal activity on the internet -- but I would say that it is morally wrong to accuse thousands of people in the hope of catching a single criminal. Getting rid of paedophilic or terrorist content is good, but getting rid of all pornography or all encrypted communication just because you think that it might stop a few paedophiles and terrorists is not. (And it wonāt stop the paedophiles or the terrorists in the first place -- theyāll just move to another website).
And of course we should point out that absolutely nothing has been done to the other kind of criminals on the internet -- the Nazis. (And yes, being a Nazi or sympathising with Nazi beliefs should be seen as a criminal act -- advocating for the deaths of millions of people is a crime, guys). Iām no expert on algorithmic image detection, but I bet that it would be way, way easier to build a swastika-detection algorithm than it would be to build a nipple-detecting algorithm -- and yet itās the nipples which the algorithms constantly target.
I donāt want to get too openly Marxist about it, but itās hard to see this kind of attitude as anything other than an oligarchical attempt to keep theĀ āundesirablesā off the internet. The people who suffer from these internet regulations are trans people, people of colour, sexual minorities. People who are already oppressed by society at large. People for whom the internet used to be an escape, the place where they could be themselves. Meanwhile, the openly criminal Nazis are allowed to stick around, because their beliefs reinforce the oligarchy (at least for now).
To close, hereās my prediction for this website. In a few years, Tumblr wonāt beĀ āThe place where the SJWs hang outā, because these insane regulations will have driven all of the social justice away. Nope, if this website hasnāt crashed and burned, it will become the new 8chan -- the one-stop shop for every swastika you can imagine. And by that time you can trust that Fantasy Cartography will be long, long gone.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
ā Live Streamingā Interactive Chatā Private Showsā HD Quality
Anya is LIVE right now
FREE
Free to watch ⢠No registration required ⢠HD streaming
Hi everyone, Iām looking for any suggestions on this monster! Is it appropriate for a CR 5 creature? Any rules Iāve missed or ideas on how to improve it?
Copyright stuff: The Zuvembie appears in the Pathfinder Bestiary 3, and can be found on the Pathfinder System Reference Document at https://www.d20pfsrd.com/bestiary/monster-listings/undead/zuvembie. This conversion for D&D 5th edition is by Lachlan McGowan, and uses text from the Harpy in the 5th edition Monster Manual.
Ā Monster lore & tactics:
Ā A Zuvembie is an undead creature formed when sacred forests are corrupted by necrotic energy. They wander the paths between the Feywild, the Material Plane, and the Shadowfell, driven by a twisted desire to protect whatever forests they travel through. Some zuvembies are former dryads; others were once elves, eladrin, or even hags. Most zuvembies are forced into undeath by the forestsā corruption, but a few have embraced it willingly, looking to take revenge on the creatures who attacked their lands. In either case, their desire for revenge soon overtakes all else in their mind.
Territorial Wanderers: Zuvembies are determined to protect the sacred groves they once resided in, but they are also compulsive wanderers with a poor sense of direction. This means that they usually consider whichever patch of forest they happen to be standing in at the moment as an inviolable holy site. If a zuvembie sees someone starting a campfire, trapping an animal, or even stepping on the wrong patch of grass in the forest, it is likely to fly into a cold rage and prepare an ambush.
Controlling and Summoning: When a zuvembie decides to attack a person, its priorities are controlling the battlefield and keeping itself safe. It will usually begin fights by luring in enemies with its hypnotic Corpse Call, and summoning animals to distract foes that it has not enchanted. Zuvembies have a particular affinity for poisonous beasts, and will usually summon giant scorpions, giant spiders, or giant toads. If its summoned allies are defeated, the zuvembie will use its other spells to control the battlefield so it can kill its enemies or escape. While it carries a battleaxe and has razor-sharp claws, its primary focus is spellcasting ā it only uses its melee weapons on entranced or entrapped targets.
Guardians and Traps:Ā In theory, a zuvembieās extreme territorial instincts could make it a capable guard creature ā in practice, they are almost impossible to bargain with, since they value nothing but indiscriminate violence. A few powerful necromancers and foolhardy fey lords have managed to use a zuvembie as a guard creature; by all accounts, their usual method is to capture the zuvembie with magic, let it loose in whatever room they need guarded, lock the doors, and let the zuvembieās territorial instincts do the rest.
Portal Protectors: More intelligent zuvembies will sometimes settle down in a permanent lair, usually close to a portal between the Feywild and another realm. It may even attract similarly-minded undead and plant creatures, such as Banshees, Blights, and Will-oā-Wisps, in a loose confederacy of guards who look to protect the portal from any and all intruders. Even then, these other creatures usually give the zuvembie a wide berth, knowing that it could at any point take offense to their existence and turn its rage against them.
I have been spending an irresponsible amount of time writing and adapting D&D adventures lately! Hereās something that I made. (I have given it immunity to Frightened since I made that image, but itās otherwise unchanged).
Non-Boring Environments that need Fantasy Representation
Tropical Rainforests
Scrubland/Dry Forests. For extra effect make them the sort that burn very often; some native plants never germinate until after a fire, and some animals not only rely on fire to smoke out prey, but may even start them themselves.
Savannas/Tropical Grasslands
Temperate Rainforests. I almost didnāt include this bc New Zealand is covered in them, and thatās where they filmed Lord of the Rings. But tbh, no one really knows about them, so it belongs here
Taiga Forests
Barren Tundra, perfect for some extreme seasonal dichotomy
Polar Ice Sheets
Desert-Grasslands (arguably the same as Scrubland but Australiaās good at adding its own twists)
Barren Desert
If you like Cacti, look at American Deserts like the Sonoran
Salt Flats
Soda Lakes and Alkaline Lakes
Madagascarās Karst Limestone Formations
Madagascarās Spiny Forests
Madagascarās Baobab Forests
Madagascarās Subhumid Forests (Madagascar is cool as hell ok)
Danxia Landforms
Badlands/Mountainous Deserts
Steppes and Highland Prairies
Flood Basalts
Newly-Formed Islands, still rife with Volcanic activity
Now for Underwater Environments, sure Coral Reefs are cool.
But there are SO MANY other kinds of environments for aquatic settings, itās unbelievable:
Seaside Cliffs
Archipelagos. Not just Tropical Island chains like Polynesia (Moana anyone?) but also Coldwater Archipelagos like the Aleutians.
Tidal Flats
Bayous/Cypress Swamps
Tropical River Basins, AKA Seasonally Flooded Rainforests
Mangrove Swamps/Deltas/Beaches
Kelp Forests
The Open Ocean
Coastal Seabeds
Rocky Beaches with Tidepools
And there are a LOT more I could name but this post is already obscenely long as is, if youād like to toss in your own go right ahead, but my point is if you limit yourself to European Deciduous Forests youāre a wimp.
Is there any way to have a large landmass around the equator without having a desert? Is it possible to have a map that stretches from the North Pole to the South, and have green fertile countries around the equator? And if it is possible, what kind of land, sea, or mountain shape/sizes would be required? I want to create a āparadiseā planet where everything is at least somewhat green and lush, polar deserts are still acceptable, but I donāt know how realistic it is.
Hey there! Sorry for taking a bit to answer this one!
Iām guessing that this is in reference to my video about brickworlds and supercontinents, where the general implication was that supercontinents were not nice places to live. The thing is that there are a lot of factors that feed into climate, and as a rule supercontinents have rolled pretty badly on every single one of them. The main factors which affect the climate of an area are latitude, elevation, and its distance from large bodies of water; supercontinents are usually at equatorial latitudes, have high elevations, and their central areas are a long distance from bodies of water.
Of course none of this says that you canātĀ have a supercontinent with a pleasant climate, but you need to either keep those main factors in mind, or come up with some other reasons why the climate is stable. My suggestion would be having a world which is somewhat more tectonically active than Earth, with a fair number volcanoes on the supercontinent and a correspondingly large number of lakes and inland seas. This also has the benefit of giving most of the continent fertile tropical and semi-tropical soil conditions, thanks to volcanic ash and greenhouse gas emissions. Shape-wise, maybe start by thinking somewhat like Seanchan from The Wheel of Time, but make the rift lines less aggressively linear.Ā
Of course, itās possible that adding a whole bunch of volcanoes would make your planet a bit less Arcadian than you would prefer. Culturally, you could look into the people of Hawaiāi and the Philippines and how they deal with volcanoes ā but a lot of their comfort comes from modern seismological early warning systems. If you wanted a fantasy world equivalent, there could be some sort of geologically inclined oracles who help to plan evacuations?
Anyway, thatās about the best I can get from this question; hopefully itās been helpful! If you come up with more ideas that help narrow this down, then feel free to send me another ask!
So... I would appear to have hit 400 followers! And, based on my quick survey of them, it would appear that at least 50% of them are actual legit, non-porn blogs* -- mostly D&D related! I only had to actually block and report two so far.** So, um, I should probably make a post or two on this Tumblr, huh?Ā
Short version; this is the Tumblr for a YouTube series called Fantasy Cartography, which is pretty much what it sounds like. The YouTube channel is here, you can check out myĀ āaboutā andĀ ācategoriesā pages to learn more, and I also have a Facebook pageĀ and a Twitter feed.
Now, youāre probably wondering why I havenāt posted much on this blog, or made any new videos for a while. Well, itās basically because things arenāt going great for me right now. I am wrestling with:
- Anxiety
- Lack of money
- Caring for my disabled partner
- Trying to finish a Masters degree
- Constant low-level roadwork outside my window (I donāt mind it but it makes recording hell)
This isnāt meant to be a sob story or anything. Iām dealing with this stuff okay. Iām stuck in a rut, but at least itās a comfortable one. But I do need to do more stuff to try and push myself out of this, and Fantasy CartographyĀ is one of the things that has helped me out in the past.Ā
The main reason Iām writing this post now is to try and kick myself into making more content, and youāre totally allowed to bug me to keep going. I have a few scripts done, but my stupid anxious brain is waiting for a planetary alignment that isnāt going to happen. Something which I keep having to tell myself is that the best way to get into work is to just get started on it and hang the need for perfect conditions -- and if you want to back me up on that, it would be very fondly appreciated.
*I have no objection to actual curated porn blogs, as opposed to pornbots -- I follow a couple of them myself -- but this blog is entirely SFW and will never post porn. Still, a follow is a follow, even from a pornbotĀ :)
**Iām not going to say what kind of blogs they were in a public space, for fear of summoning their ilk, but if youāre curious you can message me privately. I didnāt keep the URLs, though.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
ā Live Streamingā Interactive Chatā Private Showsā HD Quality
Anya is LIVE right now
FREE
Free to watch ⢠No registration required ⢠HD streaming
Because of the inevitable distortions involved in converting our spherical earth to a flat map, global projections can be quite misleading in the representation of geographic area and shape. This problem is particularly true of such classic projections as the Mercator, which exaggerates the size of the high northern latitudes, such as Greenland, Russia, and Canada.Ā
There have been numerous attempts to correct this problem ever since, but a new map by Tokyo-based artist and architect Hajime Narukawa is definitely helpful.Ā Named the AuthaGraphic map, this projection is both scientifically accurate and aesthetically appealing. In fact, it has been so well received that it was just awarded Japanās prestigious Good Design Grand Award.
The secret to its accuracy is versatility ā the map can be quickly converted from flat map to sphere. No matter what form this map takes, from a conventional, flat rectangle shape to a 3D-folded structure ā one that can be tessellated without visible seams ā the countries and continents remain proportional to each other, including the often neglected Antarctica.
My main reservation to the accolades above is that brilliant futurist Buckminster Fuller (1895 - 1983) already pioneered a very similar projection, which he called theĀ āDymaxion Map.ā TheĀ DymaxionĀ projectionĀ shows Earthās continents with minimum distortion when projected or printed on a flat surface.
Fullerās 1954 version, made with cartographer Shoji Sadao, sometimes called the Airocean World Map, used a modified but mostly regular icosahedron as the base for the projection, which is the version most commonly cited today. This version depicts the Earthās continents as āone islandā of nearly contiguous land masses.
While the AuthaGraphic is useful, it owes a big intellectual debt to the prior Dymaxion Map of Fuller, and his Airocean World Map with Shoji Sadao.
Let me remind you all: There is no such thing as a perfect 2D map projection. Itās mathematically impossible.Ā Every map projection has flaws. Every map projection has some things itās good at and some things itās bad at.Ā Even a globe -- the most accurate way of representing the entire earthās surface -- it not without its flaws (among them, the relative lack of portability).Ā The main thing that makes certain map projections more popular than others is marketing, and dumping on the Mercator projection is an easy way to drum up some marketing credit (it worked for Arno Peters...).
If you want to hear more about how map projections actually work, have a look at my video on how projections work and how they donāt work:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NtkGh6RCY3Q
And if you support this kind of sick Tumblr burn, why not buy me a coffee?
CW: Violence, corporal punishment, kidnapping, colonialism. We did a crossover of sorts recently. We had Lachlan from Fantasy Cartography on the show to play a little bit of The Deep Forest with usā¦
Hey everyone, my guest appearance on Insert Quest Here has gone live!Ā
If youāre up for nearly three hours of post-colonial fantasy worldbuilding, why not give it a listen?
In case you didnāt know, The Deep Forest rules are available online for free!Ā Download them if you want to play the game for yourself, or if you want to figure out why all of us goĀ āoh noā after drawing certain cards!
Also, Iāve made an annotated version of the map in the picture above. Iām hiding it behind a ākeep readingāĀ link because it spoils a few major developments:
CW: Violence, corporal punishment, kidnapping, colonialism. We did a crossover of sorts recently. We had Lachlan from Fantasy Cartography on the show to play a little bit of The Deep Forest with usā¦
Hey everyone, my guest appearance on Insert Quest Here has gone live!Ā
If you're up for nearly three hours of post-colonial fantasy worldbuilding, why not give it a listen?
Hey everyone, I made a couple of improvements to the YouTube channel!
1. I fixed up the video descriptions so they actually, um, describe the content of the videos. They even have tables of contents now! I havenāt tested all the timestamp links so if any of them donāt work or if anything is missing from the contents, please tell me.
2. I made playlists! Thereās anĀ āall episodes in orderā playlist and various other playlists sorted by thematic content. Some videos are doubled up between playlists (or tripled up, or quadrupled up) if they fulfil the requirements of multiple categories; theyāre designed mostly for people who want to learn about one specific topic. If you can think of any other topic youād like me to make a playlist for, then please send me the suggestion.
āIāll never understand why so many fantasy authors insist upon the useless bloody imperial system. You know who would invent metric units? Dwarves! Dwarves wouldnāt put up with this elven nonsense of chains and furlongs and leagues; dwarves would invent something sensible.ā
Thankyou @fuck-planets for your kind words. Iāve gotten quite a few compliments on that passage from other Metric-users, and a lot of confusedĀ āuh whatā noises from Americans. (Fun fact; the only reason Imperial seems moreĀ ānormalā to you is because youāre used to it. Yes, that even applies to temperature. Farenheit seems just as alien to me as Celsius does to you).
And Iām sorry, @thetransintransgenic, but I havenāt actually read the whole thing. I knew that Lewis Carroll had made a joke about life-sized maps and spent a good long while searching Snark and the Alice books for the joke in question, but I didnāt have any luck until I typed āLewis Carroll life-sized mapsā into Google and remembered that the Sylvie and BrunoĀ books existed.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
ā Live Streamingā Interactive Chatā Private Showsā HD Quality
Anya is LIVE right now
FREE
Free to watch ⢠No registration required ⢠HD streaming
Today, we're talking about how to make big things into small things so they can fit on a piece of paper, and how that affects fantasy storytelling. There's also a special announcement or two!
(P.S. I also offer a special thanks to Tumblr users @wot-tidbits and @ethanmann30 for knowing more about The Wheel of Time than me and inspiring the section about the scales in that book. Thanks so much!)
Today, while looking for cover art, I came upon the worst example Iāve ever seen.
This art for Neil Gaimanās wonderful novel Stardust (published in 1999) makes it look like the most generic early-1980ās sword-and-sorcery novel of all time. It does technically depict the events of the novel, but it doesnāt reflect the tone at all. Like much of Gaimanās work, Stardust is a neo-Grimm fairy tale, best illustrated with writhing coils of black around the outside border. My favourite part is how Yvaine (centre), who is literally a personified star fallen from space, is riding a unicorn side-saddle and wearing bright pink stiletto heels.
This cover is part of a set of Gaiman reissues that came out a couple of years back, that were all given retronostalgic pulpy cover designs: āearly-1980ās sword-and-sorcery novelā is what they were deliberately aiming for with this one.
Iām not a huge fan of them ā even the ones that I think look good have the problem you mention where they suggest a different book than the one theyāre actually attached to ā but Gaiman was actively involved in the design process, and is on record as loving how all of them turned out, including this one.
Well, isnāt that... thoroughly bizarre. Hereās a chained image of all four of those special edition cover designs:
I will say that the NeverwhereĀ cover gets it. That thing just radiates gothicness from every pore. It may not give the best impression to female readers because gothic horror + woman in skimpy non-gothic dress doesnāt always lead to good outcomes, but itās traditional if nothing else. You could use that same cover art for Dracula, which is generally what you want to achieve with a Gaiman novel.
The StardustĀ cover is still awful and very little will be able to change my opinion on that. In the blog post where he revealed these covers, Gaiman seems to love the nostalgia value that he gets out of the StardustĀ cover, so at least itās a deliberateĀ callback to terrible early-80ā²s sword-and-sorcery. But Iām sorry to say, Neil, but sometimes... things that are older... are worse. The artist could have put something in there to make it look at least a little bit like a subversion of that archetype instead of following it to the letter. Stiletto heels? Really?
The American GodsĀ cover is just mediocre. It does an okay job of conveying the nature of the story, but not as well as other cover art that Iāve seen. My favourite American GodsĀ cover is actually the poster for the TV showĀ (or the book cover which came with the āhey look we have a TV showā edition), which gets the same message across with a much better aesthetic sense.
And lastly, Anansi Boys. I think... okay, Iāll admit, I actually love this cover. Anansi BoysĀ is probably the least Gothic thing that Gaiman has ever created. In that light, the Late Jazz Age look of the Anansi BoysĀ cover is brilliant. Mr Nancy himself would be extremely proud of that art, and Fat Charlie would be suitably embarrassed by it. My main complaint is that the cover focuses on a scene from the very beginning of the book, with most of the major characters not present (maybe the woman on the left is meant to be Rosie or Daisy, but neither of them ever meet Mr Nancy as far as I can recall, so it isnāt depicting an event from the book). Oh, and the women on the right should have been black. Anansi Boys is not supposed to have any white characters.
(Update: @shinyhappygoth reminds me that there are a few older white characters in Anansi Boys, for example Grahame Coats and Maeve Livingstone, but there are no young white women equivalent to the two women on the right of this cover).
Today, while looking for cover art, I came upon the worst example I've ever seen.
This art for Neil Gaiman's wonderful novel Stardust (published in 1999) makes it look like the most generic early-1980's sword-and-sorcery novel of all time. It does technically depict the events of the novel, but it doesn't reflect the tone at all. Like much of Gaiman's work, Stardust is a neo-Grimm fairy tale, best illustrated with writhing coils of black around the outside border. My favourite part is how Yvaine (centre), who is literally a personified star fallen from space, is riding a unicorn side-saddle and wearing bright pink stiletto heels.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
ā Live Streamingā Interactive Chatā Private Showsā HD Quality
Anya is LIVE right now
FREE
Free to watch ⢠No registration required ⢠HD streaming
How would you realistically create a land covered in mist/fog? I like the aesthetic of forests cloaked in a heavy cloud of fog, but I don't know how to make an entire country with that effect. How high does the land need to be? How much water does there need to be nearby? What about hemispheres? I want to create a kingdom ruled by vampires, but I donāt know what geographical features the land would need to have to be covered in fog.
So hereās the thing about fog. Making fog is easy ā keeping it is hard. The easiest way to make fog is to rapidly increase the relative humidity of the air. You can do that by either increasing the absolute humidity (i.e. by pumping water into the air), or by decreasing the temperature (because relative humidity increases as air temperature decreases). This is especially likely to happen if you have moving sources of particularly warm or cool air or water, like a cold ocean current being forced upwards or a warm front being pushed over snow.
The problem is that fog exists in a really fine equilibrium. Letās consider the temperature factor in isolation. Get the temperature too high, and the humidity will decrease (the relative humidity will decrease because the temperature is increasing, and the absolute humidity will decrease because of evaporation). But get the temperature too low and the fog will freeze, and youāll be left with a coating of frost on everything instead of a coating of dew. Or consider the wind ā if itās too slow, the fog will settle close to the ground and youāll get a ground-effect fog where the sky is still perfectly visible, but if itās too high the fog will just blow away.
But, Iām here to try and think of solutions, not problems, so hereās a hypothetical idea we can work with. Think about Yellowstone National Park. Itās basically a big volcanic caldera with lots of water flowing through the middle, including a great big lake. Weāre going to take the Yellowstone Caldera and move it northwards (close to the Arctic Circle, but not completely within it ā so the sun still sets for a few hours even at midsummer), and towards the coast (so the water doesnāt have especially far to flow until it reaches the ocean), and weāll lower its elevation by a few thousand metres (so itās more believable as a coastal region and more comfortable for human/vampire residents and their agriculture).
What that gives you is dozens of different potential sources of fog. You have cold water flowing off the glaciers meeting the geothermal heat of the lake. You have smoke from volcanic cones and steam from geysers. The volcanic activity offers plenty of dust particles for the fog to condense around. The wind canāt do much to disperse the fog because most of the area is surrounded by the caldera walls. The sun always shines in at a low angle, be it summer or winter, so it canāt disperse the fog especially easily. And you could even get fogs blowing in from the ocean if you imagine that thereās an ocean current convergence nearby. If I was a vampire living in this kingdom, Iād still take precautions against the sun ā itās always possible that a strong sea breeze will come along and blow most of the fog away ā but Iād still feel comfortable going outside as long as I had good long sleeves and a wide brim.