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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jhaelen" data-source="post: 6992056" data-attributes="member: 46713">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?There's plenty of potential explanations in a mythical setting. One of the simplest is that there's a sun god and deities for each of the seasons. Another fairly common idea is the concept of different faerie courts aligned to seasons that are at constant war with each other: if the winter court currently has the upper hand, it gets colder, if the summer court is (temporarily) victorious, it gets warmer. Regular seasons may be the result of a truce between the courts, having arrived at a contract that gives each court an equal share of time to rule.In one of my D&D 1e campaigns, the sun god was put to sleep by a rival god resulting in eternal darkness. That didn't cause the world to fall into eternal winter, because seasons were not part of the sun gods domains. I did rule that it negatively affected plants, but even that isn't a given: There's no reason why a Nature/plant godess couldn't keep plants alive and let them thrive without sunlight.I do agree, that you need to be consistent to a certain degree, though. It's fine to make up all kinds of rules how or why your setting works the way it does, but generally these rules shouldn't change at your whim, _unless_ that's part of your idea (i.e. it's a system ruled by chaos).As a final thought, it's even possible to have a perfectly correct scientific explanation for an (apparently) completely chaotic system. E.g. I recently read the 'The Three-Body problem' by Liu Cixin which features a world in a system with three suns. The completely unpredictable movement of these suns results in equally unpredictable seasons, periods of stability, ice ages, etc. without any discernible patterns.It also describes a few phenomena caused by objects from higher dimensions that seem like magic, although they can be explained scientifically, if you get the right idea.Or remember Arthur C. Clarke's famous quote: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."</blockquote>

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