Occasionally, I'll find a photo of a place that inspires me to try to sketch out a scene using the photo as an anchor point or reference. This is true to Rydell's Sanctuary, which is based off a photo of Scotland's Faerie Pooles and is more or less a text duplicate of the image, to the best of my (admittedly limited) skills. I've never been to Scotland, nor had I heard of the Pooles... I just loved the photograph.
In the early/lower levels of the Agojen, I did something similar with this photo:
This isn't one I stumbled across and then decided to insert into the story. this time, I had the idea (I needed a way to power all the stuff in there even in the absence of the Agojenites) and so I hunted for the right photo. When I found a good one, I tried to do another text-sketch. This scene was a real challenge to put together, mostly because there was a lot of noise that needed to be included to capture the grandeur of the falls... but I also had to have dialogue happen. I must have mixed it five time to get it right :)
