Math Gurus: Walking across my world

MeepoTheMighty said:
That's gotta be a weird world to live in. Does the sun stay at a static point in the sky? What does the horizon look like with inverse curvature? On a really clear day, can you see the other side of the bowl?

Well it is kind of bizarre. The "sun" is actually a permanently open portal to the Elemental Plane of Fire. Of course its aperture is cyclic, allowing for day, night, and seasons. These times are the same all over Chalice.

There is no horizon...not really. But since the curvature is so gradual it'll just look like the land goes on forever. I don't imagine that you'd really be able to see great detail on the other side. Even on a clear day, the haze of the blue sky would conceal alot of detail. You might see a bright desert, of the snowy peaks of mountains. I can imagine that looking across at the sea would be particularly stunning: like a starlit sky in the daytime.
 

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Okay, I goofed. I went with a chalice the size of half the Earth. If the chalice has the full area of the Earth, Iron Sheepis correct. The circumference of the lip should be about 35,000 miles, and from lip to bottom of bowl about 8790 miles.

Now, the diameter of this bowl is about 11,190 miles. From the lip, you won't see much of anything. 11,000 miles of air and dust will be pretty much opaque.

Of course, there's no "horizon" as such. And the curve is very, very slow. If I've got my figures right, if you're standing at the bottom of the bowl, a point 100 miles away is slightly less than 2,000 feet "higher" than you. So what I'd imagine you'd see is a "horizon" of atmospheric haze.
 

Well, I'm a bit bummed about the lack of a turtle. ;)

I agree with Meepo that it would be a bizarre world to live on (from our perspective, the native inhabitants would thing nothing of it). Is this place more or less a perfect hemisphere? (as opposed to a more shallow or deep chalice?)

Regardless, if you live near the rim, your sky is about half, vast expanse of clouds and minute terrain. The other half is black, starry night.

But when the sun goes out, half the sky is a starless black expanse, perhaps with a few tiny dots of light if there are cities advanced enough to make use of torch lighted streets at night.

Actually, a rather large question about how the world appears is whether the entire cup is full of air. If you had an indefinite source of flight, could you fly all the way to the sun with air to breathe all the while? If so, then seeing any other part of the cup from a given point on the "ground" will be impossible due to the atmosphere.

I won't get into the issue about how that much atmosphere would generate some hellish air pressures at sea level, because it's magic.

Another big question is, "What happens if you walk up to the rim?" Can you fall over the edge and out into space? Is there a wall around the inside edge.

Then again, maybe you don't really care about all this minutae. But if you do, you might want to look up some information on Dyson Spheres, because your world is basically half of one. I'd also highly recommend reading Larry Niven's Ringworld and Ringworld Engineers. They're fun and contain a lot of information about an unusually shaped world.
 

It's ALIVE!!!!

Mods: Feel free to move this to the appropriate forum. Forums may have changed since the five years I originally posted.

So I'm dusting off the old campaign world for 4e, and I'm looking for some fresh ideas. Mostly just musings on what living in the world might be like. Any idea has value, and feel free to riff off of ideas on the campaign website if you feel inclined.

You'll notice that I did start incorporating 4e fluff (as well as KotS) into the campaign world.
 


Actually, a campaign featuring math gurus walking across the world, fighting evil circle-squarers, vanquishing unsolved problems, and founding new fields of study, sounds cool.
 




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