Announcing Frontier Flora: Weird West Creature Fantasy

This post is narrated! Listen along in your browser or app.

Mighty fine and a great big western howdy, buckaroos and buckarettes! The second story in the oddly prolific Frontier Flora series has been officially published, and I thought it would be a great time to officially open the corral gates and introduce it to the world, and to you. Can I still introduce a series that has two stories already in print? I think so. Here’s the overall blurb:

Imagine your favorite weird west fantasy stories, except instead of magic or eldritch horrors, people bond with plant creatures that serve the purpose of `mons in most creature taming series. But there are a few key differences, which we’ll cover a bit later. To fully understand the what and why, we’ll need to go back a while and tell a few yarns around the campfire…

The Beginning

My family and I were involved in history ever since I was a wee young-un. My parents started taking me to living history re-enactments and primitive camping events when I was just two years old. These get-togethers, called Rendezvous, focused on the 1840’s fur trade era, so a little earlier than the Civil War and a lot later than the Revolutionary War. Participants made their own clothes, used tents made of canvas with wooden poles, cooked around open fires, and stuck closely to the rules of using as few modern items as possible. We used coolers full of ice to keep food for the whole week, they just had to be covered up with burlap sacks. Cellphones didn't exist in either the real time period or the re-enacted one, so that wasn't a problem. Cameras could be used as long as you stuck them right back in your pouch afterwards. That's how these pictures were taken:

There were activities for the kids, mostly crafts and learning about the time period that we had found ourselves in, along with some shooting sports for the older ones which I never got too interested in. Muzzleloader rifles are awfully loud and kick like nothing else. I stuck with tomahawk and throwing knife, and got pretty good at them! We went at least once per summer, sometimes more when there was an event at a historical site nearby. There were other families with kids and I did spend some time with them, but for the most part I was a pretty solitary child and preferred to just wander off into the nearby landscape and explore the woods. This was in the western states, mostly California, Oregon, Nevada, Colorado, etc., so it was largely pine forests and sagebrush scrubland. That exposure to nature was fundamental for me, not only just experiencing it, but in such a different way from modern camping. Cooking every meal over a fire and wearing shoes hand-made out of leather helped me to appreciate the amenities we enjoyed when we returned home (or as I called it, to the future).

These trips involved long car rides, and while I read plenty of books, I also had some auditory input as well. My trusty cassette player and I spun through a lot together¹ , with my overall favorites being America's Favorite Cowboys, otherwise known as Riders in the Sky. I counted Ranger Doug as one of my idols, and knew all the words to the children's and Christmas albums, which I still have both digitally and on tape. I also had an album that was kind of like a re-cut summary of their ongoing radio show, which I'll mention more later. For now, understand that I was fairly well taken with cowboy culture.

The era of our living history events was much earlier than the post-Civil War of the canonical Wild West, but there was a lot of overlap and things tended to blend together when we participated in larger events. At a site in California called Roaring Camp, my mother would be showing visitors how to make tortillas by hand while my dad was starting fires with flint & steel and target shooting with muzzleloaders, and I was riding the train in full costume and keeping my grins contained when the "bandits" jumped on board from a nearby ledge and committed a little staged robbery. That afternoon they had the Civil War re-enactors fire off their cannons.

And as tends to happen, I grew up. I went to my last Rendezvous 25 years ago, and never carried the tradition on to my family. We've attended a few local living history events to show them the kinds of things that they had only seen in my old photo albums, but it never really became a part of our family culture. The spirit of the past certainly lived on in me, though.

Back when I was a teenager, the PlayStation One was all the rage, and Final Fantasy VII was the popular game. It was also the expensive game, and I didn't have enough cash to buy even a used copy at Software, Etc.² I did have enough to buy a different RPG, one that drew me in right away with its style and themes: Wild Arms.

Wild Arms 1 is a Japanese RPG where you save the world against an evil female alien who's come to destroy it. If that sounds a lot like FF7, you're right, but I'll get into that in another post. For now, the really important part was that despite the traditional generically-medieval fantasy setting, the main character carried a gun. And it was a bit of a big deal in the game's storyline. Guns, the eponymous ARMs of the title, were semi-magical devices that could only be used by certain people, and carried a stigma because of their destructive power. Gunslingers were ostracized by society and left to wander through the wasteland on their own...

This solitary, Wild West aesthetic completely spoke to me, and despite its flaws, Wild Arms has endured as my favorite game series of all time. The first three and Alter Code: F, anyway. The third game dialed up the Western elements as far as they could go, with a ruined planet covered with sand, ARMs becoming usable by everyone, and the first boss battle taking place on top of a train. Such fun! Wild Arms was so influential that it ended up being a major foundational inspiration for Euphony of Seasons as well as Frontier Flora, but again that will need to be a different post.

Jumping forward again to 2016, I landed my first job after graduating from college (yes, at 30 years old), and found myself commuting, something that I had never had to do until then. I started down the noble path of listening to podcasts, but quickly discovered something I hadn't heard in over 20 years: every episode of the comedy variety show Riders Radio Theater was available online for free. So naturally, I downloaded all of them. Each episode consists of songs, skits, and an installment of an ongoing radio drama about a group of singing cowboys opposing the Big and Evil Plans of a mustache-twirling villain and his hulking sidekick. The greatest part? No one took it seriously. Everything was played for comedy, and since standards were higher back then, the good were good and the bad were bad and that was all. It was very clear-cut and very family appropriate. This was a sharp contrast to the gritty westerns that were so popular at the time, both in movies and in video games, where the only rule was the gun, and decency went by the wayside.

The next stop on the Inspiration Trail was gardening. As I've detailed before, gardening became a big part of my life during COVID, and I started learning all I could about different kinds of plants; how they seeded, grew, were harvested, and propagated again. We had a wide spread of crops in our first garden, from the common like carrots and lettuce to more niche like leeks and salsify. Lots of different flowers and herbs, some of which thrived and some of which just didn't. Idaho is a hard place to grow anything, though.

At the tail end of this period, my nephew came to stay with us for a while and introduced a fandom that we'd been curiously out of until then: Pokémon. He had a few trading cards and his cousins didn't, so I got a few preconstructed decks for everyone and that was the beginning of a new creative era. Since we had a little catching up to do, I got a paper Pokédex and my detail-oriented daughter proceeded to learn every single one. That's when I learned that for the majority of Pokémon, at least in English, their names are puns or elaborate wordplay. I could go into a long article about the most interesting ones, but between that and my kids playing the Prodigy math game at the same time, I knew that if I ever wanted to come up with creatures for my own properties, I had to have clever names too.

I finally got to introduce my family to the joy of Wild Arms with a playthrough of Alter Code: F earlier last year. It didn't win them over the way it had when I was young, but it provided a foundation of sorts for some odd ideas that I had been kicking around lately. I was able to see just how much of the game had left an imprint on my memories and creativity, from the subtle underlying comedy to the number of elements in the combat system. One of the features that takes up a large portion of gameplay in the second game and Alter Code: F is one party member learning different attacks from nearly every monster in the game. This character quickly becomes the most powerful and versatile combatant, but it also requires you to backtrack all over the world and download the magic/data from Level 1 monsters that you can defeat by sneezing at them. This collection quickly becomes tiresome, and I didn’t go through with it, but it make me think hey, that sounds a lot like Pokémon, doesn't it?

The Middle

That was the moment when I knew a wild west creature taming saga needed to be a thing. But what could I do that hadn't already been done? I needed creatures that could be similar yet varied, diverse but all fitting within a larger category. I had an old idea for an RPG Maker hybrid farming and battling sim, with creatures grown from seeds instead of captured. It was supposed to be set in the early 1900's, but that wasn't so far off from the mid 1800's. A little adjustment and a name change, and Florabeasts were ready to harvest. My illustrator, my story consultant and I spent many a dinner and car ride brainstorming all kinds of combinations of animal and vegetable names, and we eventually got enough to have a full Generation of 108 critters. There are already fifteen more in Generation 2, plus a few extra surprises.

One of the biggest things that I wanted to distinguish my "Veggiemon" from other creature properties was compression. Florabeasts can't be packed up and stored away inside any kind of container like Pokémon can. That means they're walking around alongside their planters all the time, and the world had to be built to accommodate that. Cities would need to be more spread apart to fit all of the people and all of their creatures. Trains would have passenger cars and Florabeast cars, for those too big to sit on their planter's laps. I watched some of the Pokémon miniseries videos for inspiration on how to show a world full of people and creatures, and in many of them people do keep their Pokémon out and about with them all the time. But as soon as they need to go inside, that giant metal elephant goes right into their pocket. Most trainers also have other Pokémon held in reserve, that they can use when needed. Since they've been capturing so many of them, after all.

The other major difference was how the patience of gardening doesn't fit well with the collecting nature of most creature games. Sure, you can sow a whole field of a crop and reap many of them at the same time, but there's still a significant wait in between planting and harvest. I wanted it to be more like the Monster Rancher series of games, where you can only have one active monster at a time (albeit with more frozen in reserve), and the focus is on training them one-on-one instead of managing a team or squad of creatures. If there ever is a Frontier Flora game, the maximum party size will be three (a magic number for RPGs), but each beast will need to come with their own planter. Teamwork over sheer numbers.

Next was the battling concept. Pokémon battle competitions are a large part of the culture of their world, not only in formal tournaments but casually between trainers, and most of that has to do with how Pokémon can fight with one another. First, there’s quick-healing technology so fighters run little to no risk of permanent harm, and second, differences in size, speed, and strength are mitigated by energy-based attacks. A 1"4" tall, 13.2 lb Electric Mouse³ can fight against a 4'7" tall, 194.9 lb Wild Bull, not by pummeling it with physical blows but by blasting it with lightning bolts. Special Attacks, as they're known in-world, allow for smaller creatures to best larger ones, and vice versa. Since the emphasis of Florabeasts is on realism (mostly real, anyway), I knew this would become a limiting factor.

No Florabeasts breathe fire. None of them have icy breath, or can shoot lightning bolts from their horns, or use psychic abilities to crush their foes. Some can learn a few Tricks, like the Pityvern's cloying breath or the Lupine's pitch shot, but largely this means that some Florabeasts are suited for combat, and most aren't. That took organized battling off the table, at least at the same scale that it is in the Pokémon world. I'm sure there will be a Florabeast Battle Tournament at some point in a story, since tournaments are a great way to add conflict to a low-stakes world.

This also meant that Florabeasts don’t really fight each other, except to protect their planters. Meaning that no wild Florabeasts were going to appear when walking through the tall grass. While the setting may be the wild west, it is a setting created by me, who loathes violence and strives to keep all of my stories as safe and family-friendly as possible. Harkening back to the days of the Golden Age singing cowboys, this West isn't gritty and dark, it's smooth and fairly bright.

The colonization of the New World didn't happen like it did in our history, either, as the Europeans weren't able to overpower and exploit the natives of the new continent, they all had Florabeasts too and could defend themselves rather handily. This means there won’t be any tribal war parties riding down from the ridge to pillage and scalp anybody. Since the colonists couldn't claim large portions of land for themselves, they didn't build plantations that required lots of labor, and they couldn't have gotten the labor anyway since the peoples of Africa didn't get captured as slaves. The explorers took one look at their Garliphants and Asparagators and decided to play nice. This led to the Civil War never happening, in fact the US government barely exists at all. Therefore, no disgruntled Confederate soldiers lurking around trying to reclaim anything for the glory of their Side. What, then, makes this Frontier dangerous at all? Well, think back to your Oregon Trail days, and one of the worst things that could happen to your party: spoiled food.

It's no secret that Dachsbun is one of my favorite Pokémon, and while I was coming up with puns on animals and plants, I also came up with some great puns on animals and prepared foods. Eelclair and Bagull being among the first (but definitely not the best). These didn't work as Veggiemon, but I didn't want to waste them. So I let them get a little smelly until the idea of the Gasts was nice and ripe. Unnatural monsters made out of food seemed like the perfect antagonistic force in a world where humans don't really fight each other very much, and even wild Florabeasts aren't dangerously aggressive. They filled the role that standard monsters usually fill in an RPG-type world, of a malevolent force that just keeps appearing and can't really be stopped. How did they get created? What purpose do they serve? All good questions to be revealed in time, but rest assured that while the covetous force that animates the Gasts seeks to consume both food and Florabeasts, they won't cause much harm to people, at least not directly.⁴ We have to keep the kiddies in mind, after all.

And that's pretty much the story behind the story! Frontier Flora is a lighthearted, comedic wild-west creature-taming saga, where the presence of said creatures changed human history, but not so much that there can't be some adventures out there in the trackless wilds. Most of my stories focus around harmony with nature anyway, so only having one or two creatures at a time and having to wait months to grow a replacement falls right in line. There are two fully-narrated short stories already out in the world, making up components of various anthologies⁵ , with another one on the way in a few months. There's also a lot of lore and background info on the World Anvil codex, where you can find out the origins of the creature's names, learn how to pronounce them, and hear me do that! Those that have been revealed, anyway...

I realized that Frontier Flora has a lot in common with the Muppets. In the Muppet world, people and animals and talking vegetables and all kinds of odd creatures coexist together, with no one really questioning the arrangement. A frog and a bear driving a car? No problem. Hiring a glamorous pig as a receptionist? Nothing to it. No one on the Frontier stops to wonder if the only reason a deer is growing lavender flowers from its antlers is because the names of both are similar. What are they even called in other languages? Unless there's a joke in it, I'm not too worried.

I make all of my stories available for free, and if you buy the anthologies that the two short stories are in, the money goes to the groups that published them, not to me. If you'd like to see more pun-filled Western fun, you can support the project either through a subscription or a donation, or you can buy one of our other fine books in print or digital.

1  Including an orchestral composition of Looney Tunes scores, and the soundtrack to the Where In The World is Carmen Sandiego? TV game show. Rockapella forever

2  Aww, baby GameStop, how cute!

3  Every single one is exactly the same height and weight, down to the 10th of a pound!

4  Yes, I know that the narrator in A Christmas Corral mentions that if a Jelly got into the camp they could lose a few men, but that was an oversight. What he really meant was that they wouldn't be able to work for a few months because of bruises and sprains. That's all.

5  A Christmas Corral can be found in There’ll Be Scary Ghost Stories by Inkwells & Anvils.