WayneLigon
Adventurer
Some other tidbits.
Virtually no land means virtually no mining. Whoever owns that bit of land, especially if it's minerally wealthy, is the king of the world because they'll have iron and silver and copper and all sorts of things.
You can get around that, too, and add some cool bits as well. The world of Tekumel, from Empire of the Petal Throne, is also a metal-poor world and Barker came up with a very cool idea. There is a beast called the Chlen that looks kinda like a hippo. It's thick hide, treated with special chemicals and magics (?) stiffens into an almost metal-like state. So you have a substance like that, maybe the bony plates of some tremendous sea animal, that does the same thing. That also gives you a caste of people that make the hide into the usable material, giving them tremendous power.
Or maybe just have an animal that naturally extracts metals from it's environment. There is a snail that lives down deep, deep by the boiling 'smokestacks' of minerals that come from deep in the earth; the mineral content is so high that the super-boiling water is black. This snail incorporates metals into it's shell. Have a creature that does something similar, only on a larger scale.
Have areas of the planet that are much more volcanically active. Temporary islands can form, with metals on them, or these fumeroles are more common.
Also: your planetarty ocean is likely to be pretty shallow; the vast majority will likely be less than two hundred feet deep. There can be old flows of metal-rich stones down there. Geodes of metals, perhaps. Go nuts.
Think about having a cheap method of giving people the ability to breathe water. Some special seaweed to chew, or something.
Virtually no land means virtually no mining. Whoever owns that bit of land, especially if it's minerally wealthy, is the king of the world because they'll have iron and silver and copper and all sorts of things.
You can get around that, too, and add some cool bits as well. The world of Tekumel, from Empire of the Petal Throne, is also a metal-poor world and Barker came up with a very cool idea. There is a beast called the Chlen that looks kinda like a hippo. It's thick hide, treated with special chemicals and magics (?) stiffens into an almost metal-like state. So you have a substance like that, maybe the bony plates of some tremendous sea animal, that does the same thing. That also gives you a caste of people that make the hide into the usable material, giving them tremendous power.
Or maybe just have an animal that naturally extracts metals from it's environment. There is a snail that lives down deep, deep by the boiling 'smokestacks' of minerals that come from deep in the earth; the mineral content is so high that the super-boiling water is black. This snail incorporates metals into it's shell. Have a creature that does something similar, only on a larger scale.
Have areas of the planet that are much more volcanically active. Temporary islands can form, with metals on them, or these fumeroles are more common.
Also: your planetarty ocean is likely to be pretty shallow; the vast majority will likely be less than two hundred feet deep. There can be old flows of metal-rich stones down there. Geodes of metals, perhaps. Go nuts.
Think about having a cheap method of giving people the ability to breathe water. Some special seaweed to chew, or something.
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