Like, is it just an allegory for diesease and pestilince that tends to grow in swampy, damp, dark places or is there actually a type of body of liquid that would be poisonous to tread through and not by injesting or infecting through an open wound? 🤔
Florida.
Sort of… and I’m starting this from memory but I’ll pull in some references.
Rotting vegetation in anoxigenic conditions, and specifically, rotting algae, can get buried in sand or other material or sediment, and create Hydrogen Sulfide gas, which, if you happen to walk across what amounts to a buried compost pile, well…
So its not injection or infection…
I suppose I didn’t consider gasses from the swamp being the poison. That makes way more sense than the liquid in the bog poisoning you (as indicated in the games, especially with Elden Ring and how rolling through the poison sticks to you even after exiting the pool).
Yeah I found a better citation for what I remember from my phycology studies back in the day. I even recall it being having something akin to a ‘sulfur weed’ or similar common name but it escapes me at the moment.
The specific algae I was trying to remember was Sargassum:
During the Sargassum inundation event in 2018, 11,000 Acute Sargassum Toxicity cases were reported in an 8-month span on just the Caribbean islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sargassum
So if you are doing world building, Sargassum is some pretty cool stuff. It forms massive oceanic free floating mats, and when these get pushed ashore, it can result in the release of significant quantities of gas.
