Ceri B.

Way back in the day, someone in one of the roleplaying magazines suggested a campaign background that included the Americas having been created via Japanese court magic to have something that would keep Europeans coming from the east busy for a long time. That has, of course, precisely the same othering, trivializing, ultimately eliminating problem as The Thirteenth Child.

But what might be very interesting is a story in which new lands and seas are sliced into the world, creating new stuff for everyone to explore. And if they're pulled in from different geological areas + different evolutionary histories, then there'd be lots of exotic animals all around.

In my head is a story about Pacific Northwest traders sometime before 1800 or so, maybe Chinook or Tlingit, stranded somewhere in the interior of North America with hundreds or thousands of miles more land and sea between them and home, with motives that combine a sharp eye for entrepreneurial possibility (a whole land of stuff nobody controls access to would be a very big deal for someone from the tribes in this area) and the simple desire to get home...if home is still there.