Explain to me again, how we know the Earth to be banana shaped.

[KRussellB]

What I want to avoid is situations where (for example) the world is static and the sun settles on a mountain top at the end of the day and extinguishes itself (as in KRussellB's delightful idea above) and then a player says: "so how come there are seasons?"

Thanks for the shout-out.

To me, that question is honestly why I love having the mythical be real in campaigns. It creates this really fun domino effect of explanations. It's like how in Greek mythology, all these myths are tied together, all working under this theme of scheming, jealous gods.

Asking a question about the seasons opens up now the opportunity for more mythology... and the opportunity for adventure paths, magic items, monsters, etc. Let's say I'm continuing with my Sun King World above... There were once four elemental rulers who divided the land. To the north, all was cold. To the south, all was hot. To the west, spring rains flooded the land. To the east, fall harvests overgrew each other into mountains of vegetables. There was some terrible war between the four rulers, at the end of which they decided to divide up the year into four seasons, each of which would be ruled by one of the elemental kings.

The players might hear this and roll their eyes. But what if they find a dungeon in the east carved into a giant, petrified pumpkin? Or the remains of a once-underwater city to the west, abandoned millennia ago when the flooding rains stopped? Or they found the Horn of the Northern King, which instantly turned the weather to a snowstorm?

Then again, what if one of the elemental kings was trying to take his land back?

OR: What if one of the elemental kings died? Now there's no Autumn! What does that do to the harvest, to the crops? How can they restore an Autumn King and bring Fall back to the year?

 

[darjr]

There are seasons because Heaven and Hell are envious of each other. The constant battle over the realms of the mortals wanes and waxes and some day one of them will win. Pray that you do not live to see that day.

 

[knasser]

Also, this sense of explaining how things works is a very modern outlook. Historically, at least until the last few hundred years, folks did not understand how things worked, and would probably be severely chastised for asking questions. That's not to say they didn't have good practical skills; its the understanding part which was absent.

Thx!
TomB

Sorry to be this blunt, but that is flat out wrong. People have been seeking explanations for all of recorded history and they haven't been content with mythic explanations either. The ancient Greeks invented geometry and discovered parallax. Not just observed it but formulated rules for it that allowed them to calculate how far away the stars might be. If you read Thucydides, he begins saying that maybe there are gods, maybe there aren't, but that there may be natural explanations for plagues and storms. The Ancient Egyptians practiced astronomy (I don't mean astrology). And people were questioning things long before "the last few hundred years". Yes, you could get in trouble for challenging the religious dogma of the day in the 1500's, but even then things were looking shakier and it's not as if there wasn't scientific enquiry before that. The Chinese were experimenting with gun powder in the 1200's and figuring out how to make arrows explode whilst in England people were trying out different systems of crop-rotation. Crop rotation may not be quantum physics but experimenting with different sequences of plants in different fields each year to see what sequence produces the greatest yields IS scientific method and it's most definitely not just shrugging and saying "God makes things grow" and not seeking further explanation.

People have always sought explanations. I bet the first time Statius told his story about Achilles being invulnerable due to the waters of the Styx some smart arse yelled out "so how come he got wounded at Troy" and thus the storyteller had to come up with an explanation about his mother holding him by the heel when she dipped him in.

I think it's very flawed to take the idea that people did not know how things worked. They sought and found explanations to many things from the mechanical to the astronomical to the chemical. Read up on the tanning of leather as one example, and you'll see how involved and experimental our ancestors could be in figuring things out as much as the limits of their technology allowed them to.

While I see why a player might ask that, it's not a question that any _character_ born in the setting would ever come up with.

Why should there be any link between the path of the sun (whatever the sun is) and the existence of seasons?

I strongly disagree. In our own world, people faced with an unknown have sought out answers. Why would they not seek out answers in some fantasy world?

And to a large extent it's not relevant what a character may or may not ask. It is the players whose belief in the setting I have to court, not fictional heros. If something doesn't make sense to a player, then that's when I have a problem.

 

[knasser]

I guess that depends on what you mean by a 'physics approximation' or how you imagine magic overrides it. If by 'physics approximation', you mean that the world has all the physical laws that this world has, then those physical laws preclude magic (no action at a distance, physical quantities like mass, energy, and momentum have to be conserved, etc.).

As I said earlier, it's about internal consistency, not adherence to the real world. You can introduce anything to the setting you want. But to engage the players, you need to consider how it affects the rest of the setting. Bad writing is bad writing, whether that is inconsistent characterisation of an NPC or not forseeing the consequences of what you decided to introduce or take away. You have to anticipate the problems you create - that's what this thread is for. So KRusslB's idea about the sun extinguishing itself on the same mountain every night is bad if he wants seasons but neglects to think of a reason why they'd still exist, but great if he anticipates it and comes up with a story about the four elemental kings and the players find remnants of their ancient war.

Physics does NOT preclude magic. Any more than it precludes me picking up a book. A book levitating into the air with nothing acting on it violates the physics we know. Me exerting force on it to lift it, does not. One can add magic to a setting with realistic physics without everything instantly breaking. Magic can supply the force to make the book levitate. Excess energy from a falling druid turning into a bear but maintaining the same speed? Magic supplied that energy and Newtonian physics remains inviolate. Now if you want to say that there is no real world explanation for magic, that is fine. But adding more exceptions does not break general rules.

Also, I take issue with your comments about "no action at a distance". Entangled electrons beg to differ. And magnets? How do they work?

 

[Jhaelen]

If something doesn't make sense to a player, then that's when I have a problem.

Well, you're right about one thing at least:
You have a problem if your players are unable to relate to the mindset of the characters they're trying to portray. It basically means they don't have what it takes to roleplay in a setting that is different from the modern real world.

 

[knasser]

Well, you're right about one thing at least:
You have a problem if your players are unable to relate to the mindset of the characters they're trying to portray. It basically means they don't have what it takes to roleplay in a setting that is different from the modern real world.

That's got to be one of the most passive aggressive posts I've ever read. Not to mention that who says the characters they try to portray should not have any desire for things to make sense.

 

[Parmandur]

Without apace travel, it probably wouldn't affect your PCs one way or the other. That's how people can believe things lime flat Earth or Geocentrism today: doesn't have much effect on us day to day.

 

[TBeholder]

Each world has their own sun that is different. One is a grand Phoenix that is born each morning and dies each night living a glorious light filled life arcing across the sky. Another is a theif who has stolen a tremendous sun fish from the depths and his eternal struggle to tame the monster plays out as the days and nights and season's. The other stars are suns that have not yet found an island world to illuminate.
There are also dark worlds with no sun. Vast dead dark continents where the dead rule.

2e Spelljammer established Oerth(Greyhawk) as having a small sun orbiting it. Didn't seem to give any real consequences.

I liked the example where stars are giant glowing beetles crawling on a crystal sphere's surface. Because why not.

Without apace travel, it probably wouldn't affect your PCs one way or the other. That's how people can believe things lime flat Earth or Geocentrism today: doesn't have much effect on us day to day.

Yup, it's another side of the same old problem. You can get away with the Moon made of green cheese, especially if no one gets to smell it, why not.
And then someone turns out to be postmodernist enough to claim that elven bows are made of green cheese and gets belligerent when told this makes no sense.

 

[Parmandur]

I liked the example where stars are giant glowing beetles crawling on a crystal sphere's surface. Because why not.

Yup, it's another side of the same old problem. You can get away with the Moon made of green cheese, especially if no one gets to smell it, why not.
And then someone turns out to be postmodernist enough to claim that elven bows are made of green cheese and gets belligerent when told this makes no sense.

Heh, exactly: the closer it is to day to day, the more practical the effect. Having Mage Hand is of much bigger effect on an Elf Wizards life than whether the Sun orbits the Earth or the other way around.

 

[Ratskinner]

You could go a little stranger - the world is ring shaped, with the sun and moon traveling around the outside of the ring at slightly different speeds. Now the world is both round (going east/west) and flat (going north/south) - with an edge you can fall off.

That would be really visually weird for earthers to experience. There'd (almost) always be the "Great Arc of the Sky" (far side of the ring) at night, that would only briefly go dark in a regular pattern. (And how much detail you could see of it would depend on the dimensions of the ring. Additionally, days and nights wouldn't need to be the anywhere near same or even regular length.

The first big question I think of is "what angle does the axis of the solar orbit make with ring's axis?" That will determine what odd-to-earthlings path the sun takes across the sky. Also

One big additional question would be: is the ringworld spinning? If so, the ringworld spinning gives you "days", while the sun's (slower) orbit gives "years". You'd have two times each year when the whole ring is plunged into a deeper darkness than it usually sees as the sun passes "behind" some portion of the ring and the Arc disappears from lack of illumination. I would expect those to be important times in people's lives.

If the solar orbit and ringworld rotation are at the same period, you would have permanently cold "polar" regions and warm "tropical" regions along the ring.

The more I think about it, the weirder it gets (lotsa possibilities here).