Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, Subscription Copy, 1885:
"Megrim, 2: A fancy, a whim, freak, a humor."
Megrim is a fantasy world characterized by whimsy and caprice. It has been influenced, and indeed contains parallels and allusions to, and even visitors from, an infinite number of neighboring realms. Many of these have been described by others; some such are listed below, by source or author.
Megrim differs from such worlds of "classical fantasy" as Tolkien's Middle Earth and LeGuin's Earth-Sea, Dinotopia (James Gurney) and Narnia, and the worlds of traditional Fairytales and Mythos (whether Nordic or Greek, Hindu or Chinese) in that it is not "realistic." Megrim is lighter, a world in which humor and caprice are as valid as majic and science. In Megrim, the rules of one realm may not be valid in another, and the pun may be mightier than the sword.
Lighter does not necessarily mean brighter. Megrim has a scattering of fairylands as sweet as Oz, but here they are complimented by a smattering of other realms far darker. Some realms lie somewhere in-between, but most are more a mixture of qualities more varied and colourful than mere "light" and "dark."
Megrim may be thought of as a colourful crazy-quilt, each patch differing distinctly from its neighbors and in itself patterned.
Many realms of Megrim border and have commerce with the Dreamlands and other wordls, including more "realistic"-style fantasy worlds, such as Merpavia (my interpretation of MERP, Middle Earth Pole Playing.)
Being based more upon metaphor and analogy the symbolic and surreal, Megrim would make an excellent Cyber-space "sub-world" within a science fiction world.
First and foremost must be
Oz, in all its disparate and conflicting versions by Baum and many, many other authors
Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West (1995) by Gregory Maguire
Dragonland and other PBS and BBC childredn's animated series
Cyber Chase a PBS children's animated series (This is a good example of whimsy and fantasy with a high-tech flavor.)
The Phantom Tollbooth
The Dreamlands by HP Lovecraft
The Land of Point animated film by ___
Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carrol
Pendragon: Epic Roleplaying in Legendary Britain, by Greg Stafford (Chaosium, 1990) and suppliments, good sources of chivalry and romance and a feeling of other-worldly legend in an rpg.
Baum did not shy away from technology in Oz. Oz had guns, hot and cold plumbing in its baths, a clockwork man, optics crafters, and many other examples of technology as advanced as any Baum knew of in his homeworld.
In H.P. Lovecraft's Dreamlands, it is asserted that technology lagged in the Dreamlands because something had to exist in the Waking World for several hundreds of years, if not a few thousand, before it could become real in the Dreamlands. In Megrim, this is clearly not the case.
Megrim has train tracks and subways, telegraph and telephone lines, and even the occasional pocket of high-tech civilization - or high-tech wilderness. There are laws of nature - or laws of the fantastique - which limit such areas of high technology, preventing them from spreading across the lands. It seems that when high tech items are carried away from their realms (or introduced by visitors from worlds beyond Megrim), they soon start to fail, although they revive quite readily when they enter another such pocket. High tech items may be protected by a shell of majical enchantment or of alchemically possessed material, such as lead transmuted to gold and then returned halfway back to lead, or crystallized fairie breathe.
Fig is not a simple tree, but a vast banyon-style plant of multiple trunks woven by limbs which criss-cross and fuses together as often as the branch apart.
Each of Fig's leaves is a realm of Megrim; the life of Megrim is Fig's florescence.
Ambergris is a somewhat dreamlike Faerie version of Amber.
SEE Ambergris file.
(Inspired by Bunville, __ Oz book, by Baum)
Where the desert sands give whey to flour and meal and, and neighboring the dessert, rises the happy lands of Doughserata. Here, baking resources take the place of "natural" mineral resources, with butter mires in place marsh and quick cream (in place of quick sand), sugar-sands and flour forlorn in place of sandy or dusty deserts.
Unlike Oz's Bunville, Doughserata is no softy, waiting to be rolled and devoured. While remaining sweet in its fillings, the doughy folk of Doughserata have developed a hard crust and are well-fortified against those who would exploit them.
Architecture
While many buildings and their parts are built of crackers, rolls, and smaller breads baked in great ovens, others such as the massive fortifications needed to protect this delicious realm, are built up of dough which is them baked in place. A protective layer of damp leaves protects the dough, which is then buried under carefully stacked kindling and firewood. This is sodded over, much as in charcoal burning. When done, the result is a hard-crusted structure. The special dough used continues to harden well beyond the mere stale of mortal breads, eventually becoming essentially petrified, and hard as granite.
The Folk
The population of Doughserata is carefully regulated. The folk here are unaging, but may be killed by becoming soggy and falling apart or be burnt to a crisp in a fire. Some become stale, brittle, and break. Soft or fragile ones may tear or crumble. Most frightening of all, "meat-folk" and animals may eat them.
When the population drops, due to accidents, wars, or other causes, natural or unnatural, more folk are baked right up. The military maintains a whole army of unbaked soldiers, called doughboys, ready to be baked in case fresh troops are needed.
All the tools and furnishings needed by the folk of Doughserata are formed of dough and baked in their community ovens. As fire is a danger here, private ovens are a commodity rare and regulated. The ovens are actually built by imported specialist labor, as these are among the few items in the realm which are not built of baked goods.
(Inspired by sod-rooved structures world-wide)
Canopy hills or mountains may be artificial, or natural. The natural ones no doubt had a magical inception, but in such a fantastic realm as this, a supernatural origin does not make something unnatural.
Canopy hills may appear from the outside to be just ordinary hills, abet of tent or pavilion-like form. They are in fact draped "skins," their sides like carpets of pasture, suspended over hollow interiors. They are supported by great trees, like vast tent-poles. The "fabric" of these pastures is very tough. To penetrate it would require not digging but snipping through several feet's thickness of tightly interwoven roots.
The interior caverns are often a bit humid. When there is more rain (outside) than the roofing pasture-carpet can absorb, the excess is trickled down by specific roots to pools below. These reservoirs created a general humidity sufficient to support the carpet of roots above. Should this fail, tap-roots draw water up from deeper (or even exterior) resources, water which is then dispersed throughout the roofing pasture-carpet, so even in times of general drought the canopy mountains stay green and lush.
The interior may be quite dark, all light blocked by the thick pasture-carpet overhead. Others may be lit by glowing symbiotic fungi on the roots above, or constantly changing constellations of glow-bugs flying above. Others may have windows in their rooves, creating a twilight, either gentle or dusky-dim, depending in the character of the inhabitants.
SEE also: Drum Valleys
Inspiration: the PBS children's animated series of the same name
Drangonland is simply a land populated by Dragons. These Dragons are rather anthropomorphic. Dragonland may, in fact, be a "nursery;" it is not clear whether the young Dragons here remain as sweet-natured when they mature.
SEE Canopy Mountains
Drum Valleys are made of the same pasture-carpets as Canopy Mountains, but instead of being suspended above the general landscape by vast tent-pole trees, Drum Valleys are deep valleys that have been roved over. An explorer might first be surprised that a mildly dished plain has been referred to as a "great chasm", but will understand once he realized that the chasm or valley is now below its roofing pasture-carpet.
Hammerheads The Hammerheads of Megrim are similar to those of Oz, but are not quite the same. They have the same rubbery, accordionated necks, but the Hammerheads of megrim have two horns, each shaped as one face of a hammer. Clans include the crafter Claw Hammers, the tinkerer Ball-peen Hammers, and the massive Sledgehammers. There are a related folk, the Mallet Clans, with relatively softer heads and lightly furred, somewhat monkey-like bodies. Some Malletheads live freely in the forests beyond while others are kept as a serving class in the Hammerheads' realm.
The Fabulous Calliope Steam Trains, hereafter TFCST, is as much a realm in its own right as it is a means of transportation. TFCST is an example of the fusion of technology and majic.
The Lines (tracks)
The Lines range from "permanent" through "occasional" and "elusive" to "fugitive." The rail beds of permanent lines often seem to have grown from the landscape, as natural as the line of a river or forest edge. Such lines may form the border between distinctly different regions.
Elsewhere, the rail lines appear and disappear, seemingly of their own accord. They grow from the ground and sink back in, or simply coalesce from a fairy-fog. This may happen on a schedule, or they may be unmapped tracks as mysterious to the trains exploring them as to any passengers they may bear.
Special track-trains carry freightloads of track, which they are able to lay or take up at will. Some carry flat sections, which they have steam-powered arms to lift and manipulate, while others hold their tracks in great rolls. Railway spikes are inserted and extracted by devices just under the edge of the engine front and caboose. The rail bed will simply form itself where feasible; progress is not possible where this does not happen.
Permanent rails are often made of metal. The metal may be laid manually, or it may clearly have been extruded upwards as a gift from the Earth. The Earth may instead grow tracks of stone, generally as sunken grooves rather than raised rails. Elsewhere, rails of extremely hard wood are grown, roots connecting them to the neighboring trees or turf. There are lakes that (or who) create crossings by freezing rails of ice as hard as they are ephemeral. Similar "Gassiur" super-hard ice rails are common in frozen lands.
The Trains
The Steam Trains are the people of TFCST realm. They are living, majical-mechanical people. They do not perceive themselves as being in any way unnatural, just a bit different, in a manner of no particular significance, from "meat-folk."
Trains gain mana (majical energy) by traveling. This is why they run the rails. Trains also require fuel as food and, as they are indeed steam trains, water. Most are able to consume basically any combustible material, but better quality material, such as coal, tastes better that, say, scrap wood. Similarly, water from dedicated trackside water towers tastes best, but most Trains do have extensible siphons, like telescoping straws, by means of which they can sip water from track-side ponds or streams running bridges slung low enough. In the worst areas, Trains may be forced to consume straw billets or old rags if there are no depots or stockpiles or fuel and they cannot carry enough wood billets of their own.
The personality of a Train is in its engine; the engine IS the Train. The cars, whether passenger or freight, are like its cloths, optional and interchangeable. The caboose is a Train's pride and joy; no Train wishes to be without its caboose. Whether a caboose is more like a modesty garment or like a pet is unclear.
Trains appear to be able to make their cars move independently a short ways in switching station and car yard areas.
Trains are generally assumed to have immunity to local laws, as their rail beds are considered a separate, self-contained if not contiguous, Realm. There are the occasional, dangerous exceptions, especially where the locals do not play be the rules.
Trains have families, generally based in the same train yard.
Lucrative routs are controlled by powerful, wealthy families of Trains.
A new Train costs money, but even poor families can slowly save up enough for a little starter Train. Over the years, as funding is available, the mechanix will upgrade the young Train part by part. Getting a larger furnace or boiler is a big step, but it's the bigger undercarriage that mark the real stages of growth. Eventually, the little Train will grow into a great, big engine. As this is in large part dependant upon money, in a wealthy family, a Train may be large and fancily trimmed out while in a poor family, a Train may be quite venerable and yet small, shabby, and even a bit underpowered.
Riding the Rails
Many Trains, the respectable, responsible Trains, run regular schedules. These schedules are posted at the Train Stations. Stations have ticket windows. Sometimes forms are involved, depending on the Realm. Most Trains also sell tickets onboard, but some will become angry if someone boards without a ticket.(Bureaucratic tangles can be a form of logic puzzle.)
Train Stations, and whistle-stops where one may flag down a passing Train if it cares to stop, are scattered throughout many - but not all - of the Realms of Megrim. In some places, one could walk the rails from one place to another. In others, the rails simply disappear when they go out of sight. One needs the majic of a Train to move from Here to There where the rails majically link distant places.
Monies from ticket sales are used to pay station employees, train yard personnel, and supply costs.
Train Yards
The train yard is like a train's clan. Each family of trains will have its own train barn in the yard. These are the private homes of the Trains. Here, they are attended to by their mechanix, who attend to mechanical and majical repairs. A good polishing is, for a train, like a massage. They may sleep in their train barns, or consult about new routs and schedules, or see if they have earned a new paint job.