Major minor details

[Storm Raven]

In my world the sun is a God. He is a messenger to the two moons, who are his sisters. Since he is a messenger or fetch boy to them he is always going back and forth. He rises in the north and goes south on even days and rises in the south going north on odd days.

What major minor details make your world different?

My campaign world is three interlocked planes, Ilkeas, Midrun, and Altius, all connected by a network of linked gates, soft spots, and rifts. The planes seasons and days are synchronized, but magic is affected by the individual astrology of each plane (Ilkeas, for example, favors necromancy and evil magic over abjuration and good magic). Once every six years, winter lasts for an entire year on all three planes (called Zhiema). Inhabitants of all three planes prepare stores for the remaining five years to survive this event.

 

[Voadam]

In my world the gods don't actually provide or control divine magic, clerics just think they do and many churches reinforce this viewpoint. Every cleric is therefore actually a godless cleric.

But I haven't told the PCs, it is a metaphysical aspect of the world that could be discovered, but has not come up significantly and is not starting PC knowledge.

The fact that there are multiple overlapping and conflicting pantheons might be a clue, as could the different cosmology legends even among the party's different religious PCs (a druid, a cleric of the dwarven pantheon, and a human paladin of the "old gods").

Despite this churches are significant forces in the world, the campaign is set in a theocratic empire, there are pantheon machinations going on in the uberplot, and church factions are players in most of the main action going on at the PC interaction level.

 

[Ferret]

I didn't want to pour my heart out, but it seems everyone else had a go...Lets see....

No gods, the creatures that are worshipped are from a dead race, the Ascended became so powerful that they ascended. Of course hardly anyone knows that...

No core races!! The three races that run are all of my creation, also there are no other inteligent creatures, goblinoids exist but are very primitive, and everyone just thinks of them as animals.

And just because your of that race doesn't mean your immediatly friendly with people of your race from accross the continent, some countries aren't on the best of terms with each other either. This was something I disliked with other settings.

And overall, I'm trying to make it as believable as I can. Science-fantasy if you want.

 

[alsih2o]

More-

The Valley of Drayne- A valley that used ot be a verdant forest. It was home to some gnomes who came to cross a weather mage. He created a never ending storm over it and it is now barren piles of red, brown orange and black rock with a torrential river pouring out from it.

 

[Mouseferatu]

Okay, I'm trying to get a picture here about what is happening.

The planet is egg-shaped. It rotates around an axis. Is the axis of rotation the egg's long axis?

The planet also revolves around it's sun. As it moves around the sun, is it's axis of rotation (mostly) perpendicular to it's motion? Mostly parallel?

Sorry, guess I wasn't clear.

Selion is a horizontal oval, when viewed on a north = up view. The east and west poles are the narrow ends. Take an egg and roll it across a counter-top; that's how the planet rotates.

It revolves around the sun on the same plane; north-to-south, rather than east-to-west. Therefore, neither of the poles ever faces the sun directly.

And again, just to be clear, I'm aware of the complete lack of scientific basis for this.

 

[Sialia]

Bandeeto did a simple thing to his world, but it has had some interesting effects: normal shaped world, but he set the campaign below the equator.


The parties have had the darndest time overcoming thier northern hemisphere biases.

 

[Umbran]

Selion is a horizontal oval, when viewed on a north = up view. The east and west poles are the narrow ends. Take an egg and roll it across a counter-top; that's how the planet rotates.

Ah, I think I see. The thing your players wound up hating, and not being able to adjust to, is that you were using a non-standard, unintuitive definition of what constitutes "north".

Astronomers (and virtually everyone else I know) defines planetary directions in this way: East is in the direction of the planet's spin. West is anti-spinwards. If a human stands on the surface with east to his right hand side, and west to his left, he ends up facing north. In this framework, The sun always rises in the east.

You, however, seem to choose to define North relative to some outside framework. That would confuse anybody.

It revolves around the sun on the same plane; north-to-south, rather than east-to-west. Therefore, neither of the poles ever faces the sun directly.

Okay, so let me see if I have this straight:

Take the sun, and put it on a table.

The planet is an egg, lying on it's side on the table. It spins around it's long axis. It's side faces the sun.

As it orbits, it moves up off the table, arcing over the "top" of the sun, back down into the table on the far side, arcing back under the "bottom" of the sun, and then back up to where it began.

Is that right?

If so, do you realize that this is the same as "Grab the earth by it's north and south poles. Twist until there is no axial tilt. Now pull on the poles apart to elongat the planet"? Your planetary orbit is basically the Earth's with an exterior definition of North that is at 90 degrees to the one we normally use.

And again, just to be clear, I'm aware of the complete lack of scientific basis for this.

The shape of the planet is odd, but not entirely impossible. The only other issue isn't one of science, but one of nomenclature - defining north relative to some external frame rather than relative to the planet's spin.

 

[darklight]

***Geeez, this ended up rather long...I must really like talking about my creations ***

In my homebrew, the planet is set between two suns, slowly drifting back and forth between them. The seasons are created by the distance to the sun. The sun is always in the same place in the sky, directly over the north pole, it never goes down, instead the sun turns dark at night. Day and night are always equally long. During the day, the sun emits positive energy and negative energy during the night, keeping the constant, pulsating balance of life. What happens when the days for some reason seem to be getting shorter, and the night longer?? (Midnight? ) I have the rough outline for a campaign based on "turning the sun back on."
Oh and the world doesn't just drift back and forth in empty space, it is attached to a huge rope running between the suns and a gigantic machine pulls it back and forth I envision the last chapter of the above mentioned campaign involving the pcs climbing the huge rope to get to the blackened sun for the final encounter with the dastardly villain, battling strange creatures on the way

The two hemispheres are divided by a huge mountain range that runs all the way around equator. The geography one one side exactly mirrors that on the other side, but I was thinking about having two very different sets of cultures on either side, one being highly magical in nature and the other being technological.

The world is basically an experiment made by very advanced humans in the far future. They have redisovered magic, and found that is is far more powerful than their advanced technology, but far less accurate, so both have a place in their society. Some of them grew tired of exploring the universe and instead wanted to explore the effect of culture, magic, different levels of technology etc. on the evolution of the mind, so they created the world. Or rather, they took another world and put it in between their two artificial suns and populated it with 'primitive' humans (cloned) and creatures from ancient myths, to see how it would go. The thing is, the world they took was already populated, by the Adjati, a psionic race. The advanced humans had never mastered psionics, and feared it greatly, but they discovered a way to block the Adjatis powers, which had the side effect of making them very apathic, causing their civilization to crumble. At the beginning of the campaign, noone knows about the former glory of the Adjati, but their power might be unlocked (by the pcs?) with 'interesting' consequences

The advanced humans are the 'gods' of the world, but in the many, many years since the creation, most of them lost interest in the experiment, more or less leaving it as a plaything for their kids, resulting in a new group of 'gods' who are generally more responsive, but also prone to the occasional very strange reaction. The above campaign (blackened sun) is the work of one of the former creators who wants to use the world (and perhaps the Adjati) for his own sinister purposes...

darklight

 

[Mouseferatu]

Ah, I think I see. The thing your players wound up hating, and not being able to adjust to, is that you were using a non-standard, unintuitive definition of what constitutes "north".

Astronomers (and virtually everyone else I know) defines planetary directions in this way: East is in the direction of the planet's spin. West is anti-spinwards. If a human stands on the surface with east to his right hand side, and west to his left, he ends up facing north. In this framework, The sun always rises in the east.

You, however, seem to choose to define North relative to some outside framework. That would confuse anybody.

Actually, I'm aware that it doesn't correspond to standard definitions. I chose the nomenclature I did because I felt that if I simply defined "east" as "the direction in which the sun rises," it wouldn't get across the point of how the planet orbits/rotates. That, and I just think the image of a horizontal oval is cooler than a vertical one, even though I know that hypothetically, such concerns are meaningless in space where this is no true up/down, north/south.

I will, however, admit that my logic on that is probably quite fuzzy. I was really young when I first developed Selion. It's changed a great deal as I've matured, but I just really liked the image, so I kept it. It's been a long time since I've actually thought about why I termed things as I did.

The prolem may just be me. I can't get my mind off the "north = up" mindset, and that seems to color everything else, to the point where I'd rather change outside definitions than have north not equal "up" when looking at the planet as part of the system.

All that said, it's been something like 10 years since the shape of the world/direction of the sun actually served any campaign purpose, as opposed to being flavor text. Maybe I'll just give in on the definition of "east" next campaign I set in Selion. :\ After all, I've already ditched most of it for fiction purposes.

That, or I'll just come up with an in-game historical reason for the discrepency.

 

[Umbran]

I chose the nomenclature I did because I felt that if I simply defined "east" as "the direction in which the sun rises," it wouldn't get across the point of how the planet orbits/rotates.

Ah, okay. I was looking at it considering that the people who live on the planet, and thus actually use the words North and East, don't generally care about how it orbits, even if they had a clue. They'd design their coordinates based upon how they're used.

That, and I just think the image of a horizontal oval is cooler than a vertical one, even though I know that hypothetically, such concerns are meaningless in space where this is no true up/down, north/south.

There's no absolute up/down, or North/South. But there are still useful ones - you can define a planetary north and south. Or a solar one. Or a galactic one. And all can help you navigate. The trick is choosing the right one for the situation.

The prolem may just be me. I can't get my mind off the "north = up" mindset, and that seems to color everything else, to the point where I'd rather change outside definitions than have north not equal "up" when looking at the planet as part of the system.

Here's the clincher - on Earth, we use a coordinate system that is fixed with respect to the ground. Think, though, about what happens if you don't do that. Fix the coordinates out in space, and let the planet move around... That means that directions will change as the planet moves! The farm that's to the north during the day will be to the south at night. And similar wierdness happens as the time of year changes.

If you thought New Englanders were bad at giving directions, the folks on this planet will have 'em beat!