[OGCS] What happened to Tempest?

[Nellisir]

Actually, they are not murky at all - fortunately, SJGames has a very clear Online Policy. I've just added an appropriate disclaimer to the main page. All anyone needs to do is add a "GURPS" tag to any page that contains GURPS as opposed to OGL material - an example can be seen here.

Seems pretty straightforward to me.

For GURPS.

 

[Yair]

I've made some changes to the Legal and some related pages (the OGL and front-page). I'm still not fully satsfied with them, but I think it's an improvement. We need to find a better way to make "tags" or categories.

 

[helium3]

Regarding the Category: GURPS idea - I largely see Tempest as a D&D setting. I don't think a D&D setting is much of a system-independent setting. Too many D&D assumptions. For example, in my depiction of Reshen I suggested a plot-hook based on the reincarnation spell and its ramifications for Reshen's society - is this mechanics or fluff?

Most of what I plan on posting will be 90% D&D 3.5 with a little bit of homebrew thrown in at some point. All OGL, of course. Also, I mentioned your aboleth plot hook to some of my gaming friends and they all thought it was very cool. Good job on that.

I really like the new maps. They may be less eye-catching, but they are very clear and just what I think is needed. The new open-source format is also a very good idea. (I use Firefox too.)?

I agree with this. I've been playing around with Inkscape (to redo the climate maps) and think it's a very useful and versatile program. I'll be using it more in the future.

The climate-maps were a great thing, I would love to see them reworked into the new format. (The only problem I had with them was that I am a bit color-blind, and found some of the colors hard to distinguish.) I would also like to see a map with D&D-environment defitions however ("this area is Cold Mountains, this is Warm Forests..."). Perhaps I'll try to master the program and work on something like that based on the current climate maps.

What colors are hard for you to distinguish? I can change them quite easily. I've already re-worked them with the new format and they look quite nice. D&D environment definitions are definitely something I could do, since they're actually lower resolution than the environment definitions I'm currently using. I'd probably like to keep both sets, as my reasons for doing the map the way I currently am is because it allows me to link each climate entry to a website that describes various climate regions of Earth. In the future, if I write up descriptions of my own I'll sever that link.

I like the Geography page, but I would suggest making the first paragraph less technical, and a little thicker in detail. The section opens with a very general section, which is great. However, it talks in degrees and latitudes which mean very little to me and, I suspect, to most any reader. I suggest that instead the analogy-system would be used. "Brennan is roughly the size of North America and Gerin is roughly the size of Australia." is a great sentence. Saying "Brennan is a wide continent that spans a diverse climate from an ice cap at its north to jungles at the south", however, works better for me than "these two continents span roughly 70 degrees of latitude" [I hope I remember the climates right]. What about changing the first paragraph to something more like: Something like that? (I'm sure I've got things a bit wrong, but I think in terms of style it works better when it's less technical.)

I'm definitely in favor of working on the language to make it less technical sounding and more readable. One of the biggest complaints about Kalamar (a highly detailed setting) was that it was too technical. Our maps do need some sort of relative scale however, and I'm more partial to some kind of grid system, as opposed to a side bar that states that "this bar is XXX miles (or km) long."

 

[helium3]

Made a number of minor changes. Replaced the old climate zone map and lat-long map with the new ones I put together in Inkscape. They look pretty cool.

 

[Nellisir]

Made a number of minor changes. Replaced the old climate zone map and lat-long map with the new ones I put together in Inkscape. They look pretty cool.

OK, someone is going to have to explain this to me in small words.

It looks like the center of Gerin is back to being a dry place - semiarid/steppe is how it's listed. And once again I'm back to rewriting what I've written about the Soze. OK. If that's how it is, that's how it is.

But.

If weather moves from west to east, there are no mountains to block the weather anymore. And sure, interiors are dryer than coasts, at least some coasts - but semiarid? Really? Why don't the mountains to the EAST of the Soze catch rain and funnel it back west?

Is Gerin that much bigger than North America? I live a little bit inland from the east coast, and this is not an arid region. Ohio, Tennessee, Kentucky, Illinois -- why aren't these arid regions? Why isn't the Amazon basin an arid region?

I'm not trying to be difficult, it just seems like, no matter what, 50 miles from any coast on Gerin turns into semiarid or desert, and that doesn't match up with what I see in the world.

And I don't want to write about desert frellin' nomads.

 

[helium3]

I can easily move the line between the marine region and the steppe region to the east, if it's more woods that you're looking far. Also, "semi-arid and steppe" doesn't mean desert. It just means not enough rain for forests. By my understanding, you need a fair amount of water to sustain a forest (and low enough temperatures to keep evaporation from drying the soil out) but open grasslands doesn't need as much.

So, if it's open plains dwelling nomads with lifestyles similar to those found on the great plains of North America, the interior of Gerrin is what you're looking for.

 

[Nellisir]

I can easily move the line between the marine region and the steppe region to the east, if it's more woods that you're looking far. Also, "semi-arid and steppe" doesn't mean desert. It just means not enough rain for forests. By my understanding, you need a fair amount of water to sustain a forest (and low enough temperatures to keep evaporation from drying the soil out) but open grasslands doesn't need as much.

So, if it's open plains dwelling nomads with lifestyles similar to those found on the great plains of North America, the interior of Gerrin is what you're looking for.

Well, that's the catch. I'm not looking for plains. I had pictured the Soze as a sort of temperate - cold Amazonian Basin, with the Deep Mountains in the east catching most of the rain that didn't fall and funnelling it back to the Soze. Most of the area would be forest.

I'm not a science student, so some of this is a bit fuzzy. But it seems like topography, particularly mountains, have more of an effect than continental vs coastal, particularly over relatively short distances like Gerin. The Soze basin is relatively small - indeed, the continent of Gerin could almost fit in the eastern US. There's clearly a rainshadow effect from the Rockies, but it abates with distance - Wisconsin and Mi is pretty close to the center of the North American continent, and forested (even west of the Great Lakes). My understanding was that almost everything east of the Mississippi is "naturally" forested, despite far greater distances from a coast than are present in Gerin. Rain from the Gulf of Mexico, travelling inland west of the Appalachians, can reach (and rain) here in New England.

I'm really not trying to argue, I'm trying to understand. Why semiarid/steppe, and not continental (cool summer)? What forces the transition from marine to semiarid? Why BSk and not Dfb or even Cfb?
Thanks for your patience,
Nell.

 

[Nightfall]

What happened to Tempest? I ate it.

 

[helium3]

Well, that's the catch. I'm not looking for plains. I had pictured the Soze as a sort of temperate - cold Amazonian Basin, with the Deep Mountains in the east catching most of the rain that didn't fall and funnelling it back to the Soze. Most of the area would be forest.

I'm not a climatoligist either so the arid/steppe portion was an educated guess on my part. Basically, the distance that prevailing winds travel over water before reaching the coast of Gerrin is pretty short (about 1400 miles) and there's a cold current flowing down the western cost. Those two factors got me thinking that the amount of moisture in the air coming in from the coast wouldn't be all that high. Certainly not as moist as the air coming in from the Pacific over the west coast of North America. But then, I don't really know how long it would take for air flowing over a relatively cool body of water to take on enough moisture to produce significant amounts of rain throughout the year.

An argument could probably be made that the flat-ness of the Soze basin before it gets to the mountains would result in a more arid (grassland) environment nearer the coast and a wetter (and forested) environment closer to the mountains. Or maybe its all forested. I think that other parts of the map would be easier to defend then this particular part of Gerrin, since there are more obvious Earth analogues.

Ultimately, it doesn't really matter. If you want there to be a large temperate rain forest in the Soze basin, then that's what's there. Particularly in the case of Gerin, I don't have a real clear idea of what the continent's local climate zones would really look like. Besides, the climate work I'm doing is as make believe as the rest of what everyone else is doing. I'm not really trying to create a scientific world. Rather, I'm trying to generate guidelines for people who are coming in without any ideas about what goes where.

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

The climate map looks nice! Can you also upload it in SVG format?

I've been trying to figure out how to get decent filtering effects on Inkscape maps - you can see some of my efforts [URL="http://www.enworld.org/showthread.php?t=172286]here[/URL] - and that climate map looks like a good starting point...