Is your world round? Do the PCs know it.

In most worlds I've done, the world is round and people know this. It's actually a pretty easy thing to prove once you have geometry; the Egyptians did it with a pair of (widely separated) sticks. With magic it becomes pretty easy since you have various divinations and creatures that can fly and carry people.

They don't quite get why people 'stick' to the ground, but in most games I've run that's been a question asked only by people with way too much time on their hands.

Almost always round (unless its Planescape ), especially if its Mystara as I dig Hollow World.

I've contemplated (haven't actually done it) doing a world that's a torus. Imagine a rectangular world map, but that if you go off the right edge you come back on the left edge, and if you go off the top edge you come back on the bottom. (It's also equivalent to playing on the surface of a donut.) This means that there can be no absolute north and south, only relative, since going north all the way around the world becomes south. East and west work like that in our world, so it's not such a crazy idea.

I briefly considered a projective plane, Mobius strip or Klein bottle; those are stranger surfaces on which you can go off one edge and show up on the opposite side but reversed, so that if you keep going east until you go all the way around the world you come back and find that your idea of south has turned into north and vice versa. Also that your idea of up has turned into down and vice versa. When I realized that would happen I decided it really wouldn't work out, so I abandoned those plans. But the torus I think would be possible.

Of course, I'd only do this if I actually expected players in the course of the campaign to travel around the world. Otherwise, I'd just stick with the "we know what it looks like locally, who really cares beyond that" approach.

I always use spherical worlds. I reserve weirder things for the other planes.

One thing I have considered, though, is making a world that is a torrus (shaped like a donut). In the Final Fantasy games, when you sailed off the east edge you appeared in the west -- but when you sailed off the north edge, you appeared in the south! It took me a while to visualize how that could work, but I finally realized it was a torrus. Very funky shape to have for your world.

orsal said:

This means that there can be no absolute north and south, only relative, since going north all the way around the world becomes south. East and west work like that in our world, so it's not such a crazy idea.

Click to expand...

You do know that if you walk toward the North Pole, reach it, and continue in the same direction, you'll be going south, right?

Place a donut and an orange on a table. Decide that up is north and down is south. You'll see it's exactly the same.

Gez said:

You do know that if you walk toward the North Pole, reach it, and continue in the same direction, you'll be going south, right?

Click to expand...

Right. But if you go east, you'll still be going east, and you'll come back to where you started while your direction will have remained east the whole time.

On a torus, the north-south axis would behave this way too, as well as the east-west axis.

Gez said:

Place a donut and an orange on a table. Decide that up is north and down is south. You'll see it's exactly the same.

Click to expand...

I could go on for pages and get totally off-topic listing all the topological differences between a sphere and a torus, but here's the simplest one I can think of, just to convince you that they aren't the same. Cut through each one. Cut all the way around, and see what you get. If you started with a sphere, you'll now have two pieces. If you imagine any band (say, the equator) on the earth being impassable, there is no way to get from one hemisphere to the other. Do the same on a torus, and there's always another way around. One cut will leave the surface in one piece.

Okay, I must be really out in left field here. My game world is set on the inside of a Dyson Sphere (radius equal to the orbital distance of the Earth-Sun). So, the average person thinks that the world is flat (no visible curvature, ya see), but, the sages (loremasters?) know that it is curved. And, yes, I know how much surface area that is, thats why I went with it.

About 20 years ago, I played in one session of a game where the DM's world was a ringworld. We knew it because you could see the arch going up to the son, and there were tales of "traveling the arch."

For my own gameworlds, it's a question of "which one"?

My AU game is set in Serran, the world where the Lands of the Diamond Throne are placed. Which is round. One group of players is about to learn this for certain because they're going to get a glimpse from a "dark body" in orbit. The other group (f2f) has a giant PC whose parents are sailors, and they understand that it's round, but it hasn't been a subject of interest.

For my Terminus Est game, it's a really bizarre setup. The Ways of the universe that connect to each Land are flat. Finitely wide and long, even though they keep growing. Any given Land though can have whatever configuration I want. Oh, and the center of the universe is the city of Terminus, which floats on an asteroid in the Abyss at the conjunction of all the Ways. (Which "stack" sorta since there are three and any one could touch a Land.) The lower half of the asteroid is the Nekropolis where the dead of the last ten millenia are interred.

Other:

My setting for the last 20 years is basically a yo-yo. In truth, it's a sphere that was cracked in half millenia ago in a divine cataclysm. It's also larger than the Earth. That's a lot of physics to violate, but I wanted the best of both flat and round, while having the general veneer of 'reality'.

The setting I'm in the earliest stages of creating (read: nothing on paper) for my next campaign is a series of earth "islands" floating in the air, with nothing below them. If it sees play, it'll be a very high magic setting with weather caused by angry/fighting elements, etc.

I'm also using a Dyson Sphere, and it's a plot device at that. The characters are blissfully unaware, and the players likely assume the world is a solid sphere that they live on the outside of. The evil cult they're currently battling certainly assumes this, which is why their attempts to find a certain thing at "the center of the world" has been quite futile so far... they keep digging down instead of flying up.