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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AdmundfortGeographer" data-source="post: 1935918" data-attributes="member: 4682">Not really, you can just say the planet has formed "just so" that the lowest elevations were at the poles. It depends on how much real-world astronomy you want to put in to it, say, maybe the two poles had attracted major meteor impacts more than elsewhere on the planet 100s of millions of years in the past. You could make up whatever reason that was the case.Well, water will always flow so as to level itself. So if the equator was evaporating everything like mad, water will still continually flow that way. An issue is that you would want there to be enough replenishmant of the polar oceans' volume to equalize with the evaporation at the equators.  Not likely. Can you imagine the amount of constant rainfall to compensate? Whew! So you would be best served saying that the polar oceans were simply isolated by elevation.Correct, no seasons. Instead a worry would be that mountains at the poles would cast shadows dozens of miles long (the sun is close to the horizon at its highest after all). Not as problematic to civilizations as seasons of total sun and total darkness. Indeed, civilizations might build irigation systems to bring water from the dark sides of the mountains around to the life-favoring side.You could just say that "coincedentally" it happened just so. In fact, yeah, it would be like the Pacific Ocean's Ring of Fire. You would probably want the mid-latitude plates to be subducting under the polar plates. Over geologic time, plates that are subducting under are other plates that will eventually disappear. We're talking geologic time here though...Without plate tectonics? Well, some astronomers believe that earth planets with no tectonic activity are "dead" planets. Tectonics, and the vulcanism this process creates, is believed to have been necessary to the creation of composition of the atmosphere as we know it. Gases released by vulcanism and tectonics created the early atmosphere that made proto-life possible on earth.An idea that I considered. As you want a ring of mountains right at the appropriate latitudes. You might want to consider a gigantic impact crater at each pole. I know, the statistical chance for this to happen exactly at both poles would be unreal.You could say the planet's past civilizations earned the wrath of the gods who sent two planet killer meteors, one at each pole simultaneously. The impacts would create the exact geologic features you want, and potentially caused the enirvonmental change that made a desert of the whole planet. Thousands of years later, whatever water wasn't thrown into space by the impacts would have settled in the gigantic craters at the poles. Civilization of the remarkable survivors would then rebuild anew.I'm stretching the believability of this option, of course. But it could be cool! Anyway. The continent of Taladas on Krynn of the Dragonlance is an example. Just make the meteor(s) bigger, and strike the poles.Another option to contemplate, there was a Spelljammer accessory... Something Planetology...There was one example planet that had one pole aimed directly at the sun eternally. An interesting idea. One half of the planets was an eternal desert sun, hot enough that fire elementals were comfortable... many hundreds of degrees above freezing. The other side was eternally dark, colder than the coldest layer of the Abyss... hundreds of degrees below freezing. However, right along the equator was a narrow ribbon of "livable" ground where the sun was perpetually at dusk/dawn. Here civilization exists in a temperate band. Occassional unpredictable storms of oven-hot air blows in, and occassional blasts of unpredictable "arctic" air come through, but generally would keep temperately mild. Of course, you're not going to get "polar seas" but it's a similar concept in some ways...Dunno if any of this is much more help, but there you go. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />Regards,Eric Anondson</blockquote>

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