#roj

RCサクセション 忌野清志郎のSEX, DRUG & ROCK'N ROLL 聞き手／渋谷陽一

photo: 上田義彦 yoshihiko UEDA

ROCKIN' ON JAPAN VOL.1　1986

The Transactional Dharma of Roj

So I wanted to continue with my thoughts in my speculations on what is below Pandoria’s clouds, so I continued with some speculation on the subject. My doodling is no where near top tier, but I hope it helps illustrate my ideas at least.

Ok, so I wanted to actually illustrate my ideas on what I was talking about in my original post first. This is a general sketch of what I imagine Pandoria looks like in profile, with the very top being the only places we’ve heard about and been to so far. The very top is a space filled with the debris of these rapidly rising mountains broken off by the turbulent Arcane Strata layer, the clouds beneath the islands we’ve been to so far. Creatures like the Pandorian Manta Rays can swim through this strata, allowing them to move between the two.

At the base of the mountains, I imagine things would be quite dangerous. Magically infused lava has broken through Pandoria’s crust and pours down to create rocky badlands as the tectonic plates continue to rapidly press the spires up. I imagine that this happens over decades, long enough for Pandorians to escape and rebuild, creating monuments on new spire peaks (like the temple on the top of this one), for life to survive on the ride up to the surface, and for fauna to adapt to surviving the new biomes. But overall it’s still far more rapid than anything we’d see here on Earth.

This leads to two major biomes beyond the mountains. The first is in the ruins of now shattered mountains and/or the shattered remains of those peaks that didn’t float up into the strata. These then become stabilized by thicker vines and flora to keep them from floating away, allowing for the magic to return to the earth to form future peaks. In these crags, I imagine creatures like Fripp or @adelaide-swiftheart-sso​‘s Pandorian tamarins to reside, with a sort of glowing cold Gobi Desert vibe going on as this area would still be recovering from being fairly volcanic.

The aftermath of that would be the rapid vegetation growth of the jungles that followed, where we get just like. Avatar levels of bioluminescent colorful jungles. It’s brimming with the majority of life found in Pandoria, which I would love to see more of y’all’s interpretations of.

And that gets into the critters I doodled myself.

This guy I’m calling the Pandorian Sun Drake and it’s huge (if the little guy for size comparison didn’t give it away). These guys are omnivorous, mostly flying beneath the Arcane Strata between mountain peaks. They eat Panda Rays and other such critters, but their identifying trait comes from their relationship with their plant diet. I imagine these guys swim over the top of the jungles and bite off the tops, in the process these bioluminescent parasites attaching onto their lower body and their long feelers. This results in these massive glowing globules that shine as the drake flies through the air, and considering their size, they can be pretty massive light sources, hence the “Sun” Drake.

There are really only two left, I wanted to give Fripp’s species a try, but we all kinda know what they are.

The other is an old favorite of mine, it’s what Rhythma really looks like. Islandleapers live on the spires mainly, bounding from island to island (hence “islandleaper”). They are fairly nomadic, but will return to temples to meet other Islandleapers and build small clans or families to travel with. They use their horns to fight, but also to burrow into the sides of islands to form caves, explaining the incredibly high rooves to many of the caves we’ve seen in Pandoria as the average islandleaper is around 15 ft tall. They are sentient, capable of shapeshifting, though many of their features like their size and pupils will often show through. They range in color from bubblegum pink to deep magentas.

The other critter I’m calling the Uradon because they’re based on salamanders and I gotta hold up a second to throw in this beautiful sketch @ruth-westside​ did after I tossed this up on the SSOblr discord.

The Uradon are also sentient, and are both amphibious in water and in lava. They often live beneath the surface of Pandoria’s crust in the pockets between lava, and will climb the rise of spires to tell the story of those who lived beneath the mountain, crowning the journey with a temple on the spires as marking stones for other sentient Pandorians. Among Pandorians they are rather reknowned as crafters and artisans. I imagine they were likely the Pandorians who spoke with the druids first, teaching them about runestones and keystones and how to bridge the worlds. Over time as the Pandorians and druids divided themselves, their image likely was correlated with centaurs more than salamanders (because horses). They are also shapeshifters, but they can only hide one set of appendages at a time, often meaning they’ll appear as four armed humanoids when they’re on Jorvik. Unlike the islandleapers though, uradon are relatively “normal” sized, even in their native state, standing around 5′ to 5′6′’ in height. They come in a multitude of colors across the colorful range, and some will ink spots on themselves to further themselves.

I’ve gotten extremely behind on posting these, so here you go: Small versions of all the wallpapers @thebeeskneesocks​ and @jovian12​ have made for the Roll to Breathe Patreon!