Is your fantasy world hollow?

[der_kluge]

That Dyson Sphere thing seems really cooky. There's not enough raw materials in the entire planet to create a thing that big.


On the Hollow World - I had that boxed set. It was interesting. I ran my high school group through some of that. The campaign fizzled down there. Of course, it was pretty munchkin, so I don't blame Hollow World for that.


The neatest aspect is all the races. There's a ton of races in that setting. Some are actually kind of cool.

 

[Nifft]

All I'm gonna say is that my campaign's Earth is not hollow.

-- N

 

[Mr. Kaze]

I really liked Barry Hughart's Bridge of Birds, in which gravity is explained as the pull that the kingdom of hell (inside the earth) has on people. So my world has the the celestial kingdom high up, then the surface, the underdark, and then the kingdom of hell below that -- residents of the assorted kingdoms of heaven and hell are listed as "spirits" and all folks who are actual Outsiders come from different worlds with heavens and hells of their own.

 

[jerichothebard]

My world isn't exactly hollow. It exists at a confluence of the elemental planes, which are bound together and merged through the will of the gods, renewed by a ceremony every 500 years. (Guess what's coming up soon...)

So, the lone continent is merely an outcropping of the Solid into the Endless Ocean, which floats under the Boundless Sky, through which sails the Radiant Star.

Not that anyone in the setting really knows that.

But, if you dug down deep enough (and, in true Tolkienesque fashion, the dwarves have, though they won't talk about it), eventually, you would enter into the elemental plane of Earth.

The transition, actually, is pretty unremarkable - it isn't even really apparent. I mean, really, what's the difference?

 

[Krieg]

That Dyson Sphere thing seems really cooky. There's not enough raw materials in the entire planet to create a thing that big.

When you are talking about building on such a massive scale, you'll be looking at using the material from ALL of the planets in a solar system (and any asteroid belts) to come up with the raw materials required (and coincidentally remove any possible collision hazards).

 

[Lonely Tylenol]

When you are talking about building on such a massive scale, you'll be looking at using the material from ALL of the planets in a solar system (and any asteroid belts) to come up with the raw materials required (and coincidentally remove any possible collision hazards).

Also remember that the purpose of a Dyson sphere is not to be inhabitable, but to be an energy collection device. Either a series of mirrors or a sphere of solar panels, not necessarily connected to each other...they could be overlapping sheets. In a realistic universe, a dyson sphere would be uninhabitable even if it were thick enough to stay stable under the weight of everything sitting on it. That is because a dyson sphere would have no magnetic field like the earth does, and so the surface would be cooked by hard solar radiation. The earth is protected from this radiation by the magnetic field, which deflects much of it (and in doing so creates the northern lights).

A ringworld might be able to generate the magnetic field required, but that would require a large amount of current to loop through the ring. Which would require a magnetic field to generate it, or the ring would have to be broken so that there's a potential difference, and have an energy source that could power that potential. But I don't see how a ringworld would be able to hold an atmosphere, unless it was designed like a tire, with steep walls.

Oh, and IMC the world is flat. Like a sensible world should be.

 

[Krieg]

I don't see how a ringworld would be able to hold an atmosphere, unless it was designed like a tire, with steep walls.

That's exactly how Niven handled it.

 

[s/LaSH]

'Other'.

My Twilight world is theorised to be a variant of the Dyson Sphere. By disassembling the entire solar system, including the sun, and building additional spheres in hyperspace 'beside' the core, and then stocking the lot with comparatively tiny, localised suns and floating continents to provide day/night cycles, the Ancients created a world with no discernible outside. The crust is 3 kilometres thick, and contains a nigh-impenetrable exotic element that generates gravity. The whole structure is about 2/3rd the orbital radius of Mercury. So everyone lives on the inside - it's not necessarily hollow, because to be hollow you need an outside, and nobody's really sure if there's anything out there at all. Their understanding only got this far by having the occasional civilisation so much greater than our own that they came up with the theory of solar-system formation all on their own, without examples. (Then the civilisations fell, and nobody noticed on the scale of the massive interior. It's a recurring theme.)

My Arcturus sci-fi B-movie setting assumes that every planet is hollow and lit by its own internal sun. I then explain everything with 'gravitium deposits', 'gravitium-lensed solar-type phenomena', and stuff like that. It's fun and I should do more with that.

Anything else I do tends to have solid planets.

 

[d4]

the last campaign world i developed was flat. if you dig down deep enough, you'd eventually end up in the Astral Plane, i suppose.

(same as if you fly to high into the sky or sail too far away from land into the ocean. but the boundary between what is considered "the world" and what is "the void" is very gradual.)