Pluvimundus
Life and Environments of the World of Rain
a spiritual successor to the Sheatheria project (2013-2016)

Pluvimundus is a world-building project focusing on the speculative evolution of earth-like plant and animal life in a novel setting; a superhabitable greenhouse planet which is more biodiverse than our own as a result of its milder climate and a more complex terrain that heavily encourages speciation. Upon this planet, abundant organisms have arisen through convergent evolution which are equal parts alike and distinct from Earth counterparts. Many groups share names with unrelated Earth forms that share common defining traits, but differ markedly in other respects. Unlike in the retired Sheatheria project (the inspiration for Pluvimundus, being a much earlier work by the same author), these creatures are not introduced from our Earth, and all resemblance is convergent. Pluvimundan life is alien life, albeit purposely designed by the author along principles which explore possible ways similar-looking lifeforms could have evolved even through a totally different history.

This is a beautiful world untouched by human influence. Slightly smaller and quite a bit warmer and wetter than the modern Earth, its topography is different, with the shores of the continents heavily broken up by shallow seas into island-rich archipelagos. Strange and exaggerated ecosystems abound including towering, vertical cliff forests, flooded jungles, floating islands, and subterranean worlds of darkness deep below the sunlit world above. Once a cooler and drier world like ours, today this is a greenhouse planet with no ice caps and no deserts - a global rainforest, giving way to lower-growing vegetation only in rare, specific circumstance. Pluvimundus' current exotic environments, and the plants and animals that call them home, all owe their existence to this extreme rainfall and its resultant erosion that has been chiseling away at the planet's surface for millions of years. This current climate is temporary, as are all things in deep time, but whilst it lasts, there is no place more breathtaking this side of the milky way.

A beacon of biodiversity in the cosmos, life thrives here in unique environments without any Earth parallel.... all made possible by the rain.