"Alien Settlements ON EARTH?" Topic

Here are a couple I think should inspire lots of nice fictional gaming scenarios . . .

Cappadocia, Turkey:
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Tataouine, Tunisia:
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QUESTION: In your travels or research, what other inspirational and alien landscapes and/or settlements have you found?

Thanks.

CC

Just got done with watching the Pagan Underworld eh?

Aye, mate.

I'm still watching the one on Cappadocia. Tatouine (Tunisia) is another one I find fascinating:

TMP link
TMP link

CC

Hey, wait a minute, "Tatooine" sounds a lot like "Tatouine"……

…and did you ever notice that the Mon Calamari look a bit like…oh, never mind.

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i am sure that one is an Alien hide-out !
The "people" in there are very-very strange

Captain Jean Luc! Now, that's not nice! :)

CC

From a recent trip to France, I found two places that really stuck in my mind. Rocamadour, Southeast of the Dordogne, an erie monastic settlement carved from the limestone cliffs.
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Also Gouffre de Padirac, near Rocamadour, a sprawling cave complex made more accessible by a collapse of the central vault. Visitors ride an elevator down to the cavern floor, then proceed through the cave on paths and in boats through the underground stream that formed the cave.
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artslave :

montaigle.be/MOpg0105.html

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Pretty nice and interesting places, although for the most part they don't seem so alien-as-in-extraterrestrial to me. Cappadocia is a fairly weird place tho.

Last summer I visited Aran Islands in County Galway, Ireland. Quite a magical place they are, although there's not much there by the ways of architecture. The stone forts were impressive of course, but mostly they are dominated by a magnificiently desolate, rocky landscape that could stand in for a planet in the fairly early stages of terraforming I suppose.

I think there have been close encounters here before…………

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……………..Doug

I think Tatouine,Tunisia is where George Lucas actually filmed the Tatooine part and he just named it so.

Well…I don't know about EARTH…but for Star Wars fans…isn't it interesting that Twilek's come from Ryloth….and have 'head TAILS'….that really look more like TENTACLES….(Rlyeh?)….though that spot in TURKEY gets my 'vote' for Ryloth/cavern living…but what about that whole CITY underground in Australia because of the HEAT/climate???? Pro, can you help us out on that????
*slish…slish*
Sgt DWW

Right here in the good ol U.S. of A.

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Their is also Roraima…

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Well, Utah…… They film everything here, including Pirates 3. And there has always been this "underground" society going on that visitors and even outsiders moving in never see. Then there was the TV series, Battlestar Galactica, written to prime us for the "return" of the Ten Lost Tribes. The list goes on……..

1066.us

I like the idea of landscape and biota conjoined to form something alien. Here are some examples, although I can't claim to have been to them:

The "mysterious" floating islands of the Zacaton cenote:

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And the similar floating settlements of the Uros of Lake Titicaca

The stromatolites of Australia:

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Also, cliff swallow nests which remind me of the cliff-side settlements of some Native American communities.

I had a very good dinner in Rocamadour once.. If I was an alien that's where I would go..

These mud mosques definitely look alien, as if made by sentient termites:

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CC

My point about those sites in France was that they were very evocative. Rocamadour is a vertical city, with streets running across the cliff and climbing to the next above. It has such a unique arrangement that reminded me of Minas Thirith for LOTR.

The cave complex at Padirac seemed like a hole was punched through into the main chamber, and I thought of a space craft crash site, or a settlement beneath a planet as we have speculated here about Mars.

I always found salt flats pretty alien

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Alien-looking terrain is easier to come by than alien-looking architecture. Madagascar for example is a good place to go looking for such stuff. Tsingys and spiny forests surely go to the top of the worldwide "alien places" list:
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Iceland is another good place to find weid-looking terrain, in this case volcanic in origin. Some examples (didn't catch any of the best ones unfortunately, such as the "Black Fortress" basalt formation):
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Lhasa (Tibet) definitely looks like it could be used as the basis for the architecture of an off-world culture (humanoid or not):

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CC

A couple of things…

Yes, Tautouine was when George filmed Star Wars, and is why he named said planet the same thing.

As for alien looking terrain… I have been to every continent on earth save for Antartica, and I have found strange and beautiful terrain in all of them.

I have also found that pretty much only the US and China have as much concentrated terrain in one place… China has the Yangtze River valley and the Gobi Desert, which both have wonderful and bizarre terrain…

The US has the Rockies and the SW USA… There, you can find Bryce Canyon, The Grand Canyon, Zion National Park (with some of the most bizarre formations I have ever seen, including many more of the strange pillar like structures that are in cappadocia… They are basically what Bryce Canyon are formed from…

Then there are the literally thousands of caves… From Lechugia, Carlsbad, to the Ice Caves of Wupatki National Monument (I think they are closed now to the public, but you can still get permission to enter them if you contact the park service)… actually, the Rockies and SW Desert have more ice caves tan anywhere else in the world (Which is especially strange when you consider that many of them are in the middle of the desert)…

Many of the settlements of the SW US would look pretty alien if they were still whole.. Africa also has some pretty unusual architecture…

Dogon mud huts have an alien feel to them, don't they?

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CC

Also by the Dogon:

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CC

If we ever do run into aliens, the only quaint, "ethnic," and exotic-looking settlements we will find will be tourist attractions designed to harvest money from gullible earthlings.

The average alien will be living in a tacky apartment building, housing development, or trailer park – just like we do (along with the odd run-down inner cloud city).

Well, the Dogon have obviously adopted the Nommo architectural practices as well as their lore of the Sirius binary system*:
unmuseum.mus.pa.us/siriusb.htm

Anyway, we have so far overlooked some fairly common examples of the "alien" (as in nonhuman) architecture. For example termite mounds and weaver bird nests. You can google them up in numbers:
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---

*) Or maybe not: skepdic.com/dogon.html

Tnjrp,

Good examples! Imagine going down one of these "bug tunnels":

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CC

There's also the classic of Sci-Fi: Vazquez Rocks, just outside of Los Angeles. They're the nicely angled rocks you see in just about any science fiction movie, especially those with robots.

I can't believe someone didn't yet mention Hell's Half Acre.

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Complete with tunnel entrance-
"Shoot a nuke down a bug hole, you got a lot of dead bugs".
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Oh, and Yonderboy: Those aren't floating islands. They're the aliens.

For alien-like landscapes . . . I seem to remember that the film "Enemy Mine" was filmed in an exotic volcanic location, though I cannot remember where:

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CC

Death Valley has some good sites for truly alien terrain. Let's face it, the area known as 'Devil's Golf Course' is about the nastiest, most alien terrain you can think up: A salt flat, eroded into strange scoops and edges. It's sharp and nasty. Add that it also get damn hot…

There's Ubehebe crater.. nice solid metorite crater..

Some of the valleys hidden along its edges are quite nice. Some are wonderful examples of erosion.

The giant sand dunes would do tatooine proud.

Robin Bobcat,

Any alien-looking settlements, villages, structures from your travels?

CC

I finally dug up where "Enemy Mine" was filmed in part.

The location was Lago Verde, Lanzarote, in the Canary Islands:

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Apparently, it was also the location where "One Million Years BC" was filmed!!!

CC

Oakland, California

Alien Settlers on earth…..

With technology so advanced that they make ours look equivelent to Spears and Bows in the eyes of the Early Explorers.

starting to sound a bit like War of the Worlds. But just imagine, i mean surely they coudnt colonise the planet in One go, so they would have to set up a colony some where. maybe in Antartica…..

Someone beat me to Zacaton…

Wonderful place.

Excuse me, CC?!! The San Francisco Bay Area of course! I should know; *I* am a Bay Area NATIVE after all…!

Leland R. Erickson
Metal Express
metal-express.net

P.S. And just what makes you *locals* think we actually left…? Mwahahahahahaaa!!!!

For something more planet-specific (Mars):

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CC

You know…. I fully opened this posting with the idea of reading about my inlaws' home city.

Some of the Cappadocia structures in the first link remind me of these POTA beauties:

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CC

"Alien Settlements ON EARTH?"

First things that pop into mind…

Detroit
L.A.
Chicago

I love what IrishSerb did here:

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Truly amazing.

CC

The ruins along the Taklamakan Desert, in ancient Khotan (China), look very odd:

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It's amazing what the wind-driven sand can do. Very post-apocalyptic.

CC

OK since this thread has been resurrected anyway, let me add the obvious alien city: Harbin, China during its ice festival. Erie, alien and breathtaking.

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Ooo. NICE!

Thanks, Wellspring.

CC

Reading the title of this thread, I thought you were asking about allowing aliens to settle here on Earth…. of course there is now District 9 (great film, seen it twice in the last week….), but there is also Alan Dean Foster's "Humanx Commonwealth" universe, where Humanity allows the friendly insectoid Thranx to put some settlements in the Amazon Basin (Thranx like hot and humid conditions), while in return human settlements are founded on some high, dry plateaux on the Thranx homeworld. An interesting inversion of the usual kill-or-be-killed bug/human relationship!

This must be hell to duplicate on a gaming table:

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Dan

Lava fields look otherworldly to me. We've got several here around Austin TX, including a fairly big one at McKinney Falls. Couldn't find any good shots of that, but I did find a few from other places:

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These Icelandic ones are by far the coolest:

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EDIT:
Woah, I guess that doesn't actually count as a settlement, though, does it? Well, it looks alien at any rate.

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Milwaukee.

LOL.

Dan