For the crazy biomes everywhere, I'd imagine the initial deity battles in the First Age screwed up things quite a bit. The sunlight may have been moved around by the magic causing crazy seasons and crazy day-night cycles, plus there's all that magic going around and changing the landscape.
Also, from encyclopedia:
Quote:
..the gods constructed a massive pillar at the northernmost point of the globe, fusing their corporeal bodies together into layers of elemental marble slabs. The World Pillar, as it is known today, would be the Eight's last and final resignation as makers. If the scarred flanks of the young world were ever to heal, they would do so on their own, unmarred by the omnipotence of the gods.
I'd imagine it
should be pretty icy there, but maybe the Pillar warms it up somehow. Who knows? Perhaps it was full of pine trees and mountains with a large grassy area for the Pillar before it was all changed up with earth magic.
Referring to the second age here (after the pillar, before the reactor explosion)
As for the other regions, they would've been natural for a long time. One of the tooltips of an arcane item says that the crystalspine reaches used to be normal mountains. Starfall isles probably would've been a birch and deciduous forest type of climate surrounded by mountain ranges.
I can imagine the southern icefield probably had some more reasonable temperatures instead of just being "cold, cold, and more cold". And I doubt viridian labyrinth would've been a tropical rainforest. Pine trees, ice, and snowy mountains is more likely.
The north of the shifting expanse may have been a rainforest due to being on the equator. Ashfall waste might've been like one of those caribbean or hawaiian volcanic islands, with lots of forests, rainforests. May have been quite cold in the south.
The climates of light flight, wind flight, shadow flight, and plague flight were probably typical temperate deciduous and coniferous forests with grassy areas.
The humans may have altered it slightly with magic (calling them "humans" here, whatever those humanoids may have been) but not as significantly as the deities did.
This period of Sornieth's existence may have lasted a long time, possibly a billion years or so. Sornieth would've still had magic, but most of it would be in the Pillar to protect the world from the Shade. Still, there'd be magic, with mages and slightly magical creatures.
Then the humans make a big thing of magic and power it up and oops it explodes. All that magic creates a whole new deity (the arcanist) and significant changes to the nearby landscape (creating gladekeeper and plaguebringer). Gladekeeper and plaguebringer's warring probably released a ton of magic and changed the climates there a lot. They battled for a few centuries too. That sure would've made the shade go "pspspsps hey you little pink thing let me in pspspsps" and BAM the Pillar explodes.
I imagine the Pillar exploding would've released an enormous amount of magic. Most of the Pillar shards and chunks would probably stick together to similar magics and land on places of Sornieth, causing magic to seep into the land. As for the deities, they'd follow the Pillar shards (I think there was also one big chunk that came out of each slab) and magic up their new homes even more.
And poof. Now you have pink magical crystals, meatland, purple bioluminescent swamps, golden pine forests and yellow meadows, blue deserts with constant thunderstorms, a whole region of volcanic rock and lava everywhere, a big brown rocky desert with blue crystals poking up, a grassy bamboo plateau with all its winds supplied by one constantly-rolling giant hurricane, a bunch of really cold icy islands (some near the equator), and a tropical rainforest near the poles. What a crazy supercontinent.
It's all the deities' doing, in my opinion :P
They probably can bend the light they want to their domain, and use magic to change the whole landscape for their continent.
..Oh right, you were asking if Dragonhome is hot or cold. I think it's hot.
coco