Monday, June 16, 2025

This is the fifty-eighth installment of West Wind, your daily drop of thoughts, ideas, and info for this Season. June is Accordion Awareness Month, so increase your awareness by listening to some of my favorite artists and soundtracks!

First of all, I want to apologize for the issues with the music tracks in recent posts. It looks like the Gobblins aren’t content in just causing trouble in their world, or they really hate accordions. Bandcamp embeds don’t display in email clients, you have to open it in a browser tab to see and listen. There’s a tiny link at the very top of the email to help you do that, so I made that fake media player image to make it a little easier. Thing is, I didn’t add a link to the image, so clicking or tapping on it did nothing. But no more! Now there will be an easy-to-click button.

Also, if you missed a post, you can find all the accordion tracks I’ve featured so far in an easily navigable index. Because keeping track of things is important around here.

Moonlighter is kind of a silly little game with a very tedious gameplay loop, but at least the art is good and the music is even better. As you walk around the town, the background music will change to a different style depending on the merchant you are standing near, and when you leave, it seamlessly changes back to the standard version. This track is a compilation of all five different styles, including an accordion accompaniment! You can listen to the whole thing if you want to, or just skip ahead to 4:10 for the part I wanted to feature.

Today, I wanted to feature a little something I had come up with a while ago. In the Frontier Flora world, Florabeasts have existed alongside humanity since the beginning, unlike in the Pokémon world where taming and training only started relatively recently. Because of that, the myths and legends of every culture would feature Florabeasts just as much as they did animals and other creatures. So that’s where this story comes in. It’s also available on the World Anvil site.

The Tale of the Great Fire

 Long ago, the Great Spirit created the world, and filled it with plants for the animals to eat. He had to make the plants first, to give them time to grow deep roots and let the trees grow tall. Then he added the insects so flowers could make fruit, then the birds and lizards to eat the insects. Then he made the creatures with fur: the buffalo, the dog, the cat, the the fox, and all the rest. Finally he made people, so they could have food from the plants and the fish, and companions from the animals.

      The land was hot and dry, though, so the Great Spirit sent rainclouds to soothe the thirst of the ground and the people. The storm brought lightning, and with it a fire that blazed across the prairie and into the forests. The people fled on their horses and the animals ran to the mountains to avoid the fire, but many plants burned up and perished. This saddened the Great Spirit tremendously, since the plants could not have run even if they had wanted to.

      So, he planted new seeds. New creatures, plants at their core but with the shapes and abilities of animals. They could follow people around like their horses and dogs, and they could find safety when they needed it. Those are the creatures we call Florabeasts today.

I know it’s not Friday, but a weekly lore drop doesn’t mean I can’t share any content the other days of the week. Besides, Frontier Flora is quickly becoming my most popular intellectual property, which is pretty neat. Enjoy the day!