Pherim's Comberry Variations (Variation Framework Mod)

Description

Not at the road -- at the hedge beside it.

The comberry follows you south. It grows on the terraces of the Ascadian Isles, along the walls of Dren, in the plantation rows of Oran, and down until the drying heat of Shipal-Shin -- and it is not the same plant when it arrives.

Leaves narrow in the cool north broaden as the land warms. Bark darkens. The bush that shades a Hlaalu manor and the bush that leans over a southern canal share a name and little else.

Pherim's Comberry Variations gives the comberry three phenotypes -- regular, subtropical and tropical -- and lets the land decide which one grows where.

Pherim's replacer supplied the two ends of that range. The middle was missing: nothing stood between the temperate bush of the north and the broad-leaved southern one, so the change from one to the other arrived all at once, like a border on a map. The subtropical phenotype was made for this mod to fill that gap -- new bark and foliage, built from his originals to sit between the other two, so the cline reads as a gradient rather than a line.

The choice is made per bush, not per cell. Two plants an arm's length apart can disagree. Of the cells holding five or more comberries, 123 of 132 come out mixed; Oran Plantation alone carries eleven regular bushes among thirty-five subtropical.

A plantation is not a warehouse. Nothing in it should be identical.

The cline

The distribution is anchored on places you already know:

• []North of Dren -- comberries are wholly regular.[/]

  []Dren Plantation -- the first subtropical bushes appear, roughly one in four.[/]

  []Oran Plantation -- subtropical takes the lead and the first tropical plants take root.[/]

  []Hlan Oek -- tropical passes half.[/]

  []Shipal-Shin -- the southernmost released cells run four parts tropical to one part subtropical.[/]

  But latitude alone would be a lie. Morrowind warms toward the Padomaic sea and cools inland to the west -- the West Gash against the Grazelands, the Velothi mountains and Uld Vraech against the Telvanni Peninsula. So, the whole band slides north as you go east. Out at Alt Bosara, subtropical comberries grow at a latitude that would be entirely fil