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CockroachTeaParty
2010-03-26, 06:43 PM
I've been tossing around ideas for a new campaign setting, and recently wondered what the implications of living on a world tidally locked with its sun would be.

To clarify, one side of a tidally locked body always faces another. For instance, the same hemisphere of the moon always faces the earth, because it is locked in a tidal orbit.

What if a planet always faced the sun? There would be no real day and night cycle, since one side would always face the sun and the other would always face the darkness of space.

I'd imagine that the side that always faced the sun would be some manner of scorching desert, while the dark side would be a frozen glacier, but I'm no scientist, so perhaps that wouldn't be the case.

I imagine the strip between the dark and light sides would be habitable, not too warm and not too cold. Would it always appear to be morning/evening in such a place? If I used this setting in D&D, I could just handwave it and say that magic or divine intervention keeps the world habitable, but I'd like to get a bit of verisimilitude.

It would be cool if horrid monsters of cold and darkness lived on the dark side, and threatened to invade the habitable ring. Perhaps the world was not always tidally locked, and the ruins of ancient civilizations await brave explorers who dare to explore the scorching sands or frozen wastes.

Anybody with a better understanding of celestial bodies, gravity, orbits, or weather have any ideas?

Frozen_Feet
2010-03-26, 06:57 PM
There actually is a long-running scientific speculation detailing such a world, orbiting a red sun. Don't remember the name, though.

The conclusion was: the side facing the sun will be barren and too hot for life. The dark side is too cold, and eternally frozen. However, between them is a ring-like, intermediary belt, a world of eternal eternal sun-set. Water flows from the glaciers of the Dark, where the heat of the Light is just enough to melt the ice - thus, life can appear on this "calm belt".

CockroachTeaParty
2010-03-26, 07:05 PM
That's the general idea I had.

I don't know how exactly weather patterns and wind work, but what would the weather be like on such a 'calm belt'? Would there be constant winds from the different temperatures and pressure zones of the two extreme hemispheres?

How would civilizations living on such a belt tell the passage of time? Could they perhaps see the changing constellations near the darker side of the sky?

I think a cool campaign setting could be produced out of this... a world living in a delicate balance between life and death...

Flickerdart
2010-03-26, 07:10 PM
Maybe they wouldn't have such a cultural importance placed on time, since nothing in their environment visibly changes. You wouldn't even have seasons, so they have absolutely no need to develop a calendar, or days, so a clock would be useless.

CockroachTeaParty
2010-03-26, 07:14 PM
Yet they would still grow old and die. I think marking the passage of time is a cornerstone of any mortal race.

Perhaps if the world had a moon or two that orbited the planet? The moons might create 'shadow zones,' eclipses, and other phenomena that would mark the passage of time. Perhaps they have magical properties, or are linked to other planes of existence?

Jack_Simth
2010-03-26, 07:15 PM
That's the general idea I had.

I don't know how exactly weather patterns and wind work, but what would the weather be like on such a 'calm belt'? Would there be constant winds from the different temperatures and pressure zones of the two extreme hemispheres?

Weather would be... interesting, probably stormy, as most of the habitable realm is a convergence zone.

The corollary to that, however, is that the terrain shapes the weather quite a bit. You're going to have some "sheltered" sections that get much less of one side of the planet's contribution than the others... and these will have much calmer weather, overall. Great places for civilization to flurish, small as they'll be.

In general, though, the sunward side hot air will pull moisture that reaches it, dragging it up and darkside, where it cools, rains, and snows. The snow builds up darkside, creating ice sheets that push water (in the form of ice) back at a (literally) glacial pace towards lightside... where they melt.

Depending on how the planet is internally set up, and how much water is out there for redistributing, though, you may have a periodic disaster: a buildup of ice on darkside will slowly cause the planet's center of gravity to shift... possibly making darkside and lightside slowly trade over time, possibly doing absolutely nothing until it hits a tipping point at which the crust slides and shifts thirty degrees all at once (thrusting much of the civilization into the uninhabitable extreme sides, leaving only a few small packets of what used to be the civilized world in habitable areas).

There's a lot you can do by whim, as it's based on things not necessarily observable about the planet in question.


How would civilizations living on such a belt tell the passage of time? Could they perhaps see the changing constellations near the darker side of the sky?

There's lots of things to base clocks on. Moons, stars, meteor showers, lifecycle of some plant or critter... not all that hard. Alternately: How do the denizins of the Underdark tell time? It's the same problem, really.



I think a cool campaign setting could be produced out of this... a world living in a delicate balance between life and death...
Could be. But then, interesting is what you make of it. Be warned: Sci-fi books that are too heavy on the Sci have a very much smaller market than the "soft" sci-fi books.

Flickerdart
2010-03-26, 07:16 PM
Hm, moons would definitely be fun, since they would allow for passage under their shadow through the dead zone on the hot side.

If they measured time by people dying, they'd have colossal units of measurement. Someone would be so and so generations old, for instance.

CockroachTeaParty
2010-03-26, 07:20 PM
How would directions work? Would there be any real way to tell North from South?

I could see directions such as 'sunward,' or 'shadeward,' to describe getting closer to the hot/cold sides of the planet. But what about moving up and down the habitable belt?

Some cool ideas here. I like Jack Smith's idea of impending disaster... perhaps a powerful guild of mages keeps the ice melting properly to prevent such a backup...

TheMerchandise
2010-03-26, 07:34 PM
Depending on the size of the planet, there could be a gradient along the hospitable-ish area. You could have more desert-like or tropical climate on the one side, temperate in the middle, and cooler, dark stuff towards the shade end. That way you can have a variety of inhabitants and terrains.

Nations would be a tricky thing as well. Natural boundaries along the Ring depend on what you had in mind for this place, but they might cuts things in half left and right or be few and far between. The Ring might be a giant mess of tiny townships or it could have sprawling metropolises. IT'S UP TO YOU!

Jack_Simth
2010-03-26, 07:35 PM
How would directions work? Would there be any real way to tell North from South?

I could see directions such as 'sunward,' or 'shadeward,' to describe getting closer to the hot/cold sides of the planet. But what about moving up and down the habitable belt?

North, South, East, and West are fundamentally arbitrary. North = Sunward, South = Darkward, east and west are respective directions around the twilight. If you want to use earth-terms, which may or may not have any bearing whatsoever. You'll have to learn a rather arcane art on Darkside, though: Navigation by the stars.... something those who don't dwell on Darkside don't have any use for. And almost nobody dwells on Darkside...


Some cool ideas here. I like Jack Smith's idea of impending disaster... perhaps a powerful guild of mages keeps the ice melting properly to prevent such a backup...

That's one plot-hook.

Another is that Darkside need not be void of life. On Earth, there's volcanic vents deep in the ocean, that have bacteria that digest the assorted energetic compounds coming out of the vent... which are in turn eaten by other sea life. No particular reason you can't replace "bacteria" with "fungus" and put that above ground.

Likewise, an area that can't produce food of any kind can still be inhabited by things that migrate - near darkside (and sunside), you'll get roving predators (intelligent and otherwise) that retreat to darkside (or sunside) to rest in relative safety. And, of course, you'll also have things that stay on darkside (or sunside) preying on said predators ... or stealing the leftovers they bring.

Flickerdart
2010-03-26, 07:36 PM
Constant winds also means an easy source of power, so they wouldn't necessarily develop very complicated technology. Certainly no ships, but I could see a train-like contraption powered by the wind that goes around the habitable belt, for a more technologically advanced version of the setting.

Frozen_Feet
2010-03-26, 07:38 PM
Obviously, you can circle in two directions, and depending on which way you go, Light and dark will switch sides. So if you go "north", light is on your right, and if you go south, it's on your left.

TheYoungKing
2010-03-26, 07:40 PM
I think you should definitely imply that the world was not always that way.

I'm imagining secluded crystal spire cities occasionally interrupting the monotony of the Brightside/Darkside landscape. Arcanist arcologies, keeping some semblance of a lost empire alive.....

Lycanthromancer
2010-03-26, 07:45 PM
The world might still spin, but it could spin with the 'poles' facing toward and away from the sun. If the axis was slightly irregular, the sun would wobble in the sky, and may even dip below the horizon, thereby still granting 'day' and 'night'. There most surely wouldn't be any seasons in such a world, however.

One thing, though, is that water would be constantly pulled away from the inhabitable strip due to tidal action (the sun's gravity working on the oceans, which in our world causes tides), so sailors who traverse the sea would be constantly pulled toward the sun or away from it, depending on which side of the equatorial regions they'd sail on.

Whatever water is pulled toward the sun would evaporate long before it reached the solar pole, and would be blown back toward the equator due to the temperature of the air expanding and being blown away. Likewise, water pulled toward the lunar pole would freeze well before it hit, creating massive cliffs and glaciers that drop down to an invisible, dark nothing. Explorers that brave climbing down the cliffs to the void below would likely come across a desert just as barren as the one on the other side of the world, since liquid water cannot exist here (and what little there used to be would've evaporated via sublimation). There may be underground hot springs and creatures living off of it, but that would be all that could really exist there (sans possibly elemental and undead creatures roaming the ruins of the ancient civilizations).

Jack_Simth
2010-03-26, 08:11 PM
The world might still spin, but it could spin with the 'poles' facing toward and away from the sun. If the axis was slightly irregular, the sun would wobble in the sky, and may even dip below the horizon, thereby still granting 'day' and 'night'. There most surely wouldn't be any seasons in such a world, however.

One thing, though, is that water would be constantly pulled away from the inhabitable strip due to tidal action (the sun's gravity working on the oceans, which in our world causes tides), so sailors who traverse the sea would be constantly pulled toward the sun or away from it, depending on which side of the equatorial regions they'd sail on.

Whatever water is pulled toward the sun would evaporate long before it reached the solar pole, and would be blown back toward the equator due to the temperature of the air expanding and being blown away. Likewise, water pulled toward the lunar pole would freeze well before it hit, creating massive cliffs and glaciers that drop down to an invisible, dark nothing. Explorers that brave climbing down the cliffs to the void below would likely come across a desert just as barren as the one on the other side of the world, since liquid water cannot exist here (and what little there used to be would've evaporated via sublimation).


Not really a problem, of itself. Ice, under stress, flows like water - and with a source of more ice, but nothing to cause melting, it will do so under it's own weight, given time and buildup - it's how glaciers work. On the hot side, all water eventually migrates towards the cold side. On the cold side, if there's enough water to really go around, you get an ice sheet, flowing away from the freeze zone, both towards the cold-pole (until it meets at the cold pole, of course, at which point, almost all ice flow is towards the temerate zone) and towards the twilight zone. In the twilight zone, the ice heats up enough to melt into the middle. The twilight zone has a steady diet of melted ice... and the melted ice, of course, either pools in the twilight zone, or flows towards hotside, where it evaporates (cyclically).

If conditions are "right" for it to happen, ice will build up in the cold zone... unbalancing the world, and causing it to shift in either a rather spectacular cataclysm (the world suddenly shifts 30 degrees; you have MASSIVE worldwide earthquakes, cities turned mostly to rubble standing in the freeze zone to be slowly buried in snow and ice ... or worse, past the freeze zone, to be trapped between encroaching walls of inevitable ice, other cities shifted to the hotzone, to roast, burn, or even melt, depending on how far they go and how hot it gets there ... plus absurd amounts of ice shifted to the hot zone, where ice cannot long endure... causing massive flooding, clouds, wind, and storms as that ice melts, flows, and evaporates... then ultimately condenses) or in a very slow cycle of doom (if the world shifts, say, one degree per decade ... which with a roughly earth-sized world, is about seventy miles ... then cities won't survive more than a few centuries before they have to be abandoned to the ice/heat ... making for civilizations that are either at least somewhat nomadic, or are relatively short-lived).

Oh, yes - and you can't tell "periodic sudden shifts" from "the world used to be much less polarized" from the more visible traces.

In any scenario, though, the constant glaciers will tear up the land something fierce, so a map from a few decades or centuries ago will be just this side of useless ... which makes finding an ancient place quite the puzzle.


There may be underground hot springs and creatures living off of it, but that would be all that could really exist there (sans possibly elemental and undead creatures roaming the ruins of the ancient civilizations).
Quite reasonable. Oh, and don't forget the terminations of underground rivers, insulated from the heat, on hotside causing the occasional oasis.

CockroachTeaParty
2010-03-26, 08:14 PM
Could it be possible to have one giant ocean around the habitable belt? Perhaps dotted with islands, and flanked by mountains/deserts sunside and glaciers darkside?

It sounds like realistically water would be moving around too much to really form large bodies of water, but maybe if there's a lot of water and a lot of rain/precipitation...

Also, I could definitely see a tropical zone closer to sunside, a temperate area, and a colder area closer to darkside. The idea of things living beneath the frozen ice of darkside, or the general 'underdark' of sunside would also be certainly possible.

I can see elementals, or elemental themes, being prominent as well. Fire for sunside, water (ice) for darkside, air for the crazy weather, and earth for the world itself, trying to resist the forces that want to tear it apart.

Volkov
2010-03-26, 08:15 PM
That's the general idea I had.

I don't know how exactly weather patterns and wind work, but what would the weather be like on such a 'calm belt'? Would there be constant winds from the different temperatures and pressure zones of the two extreme hemispheres?

How would civilizations living on such a belt tell the passage of time? Could they perhaps see the changing constellations near the darker side of the sky?

I think a cool campaign setting could be produced out of this... a world living in a delicate balance between life and death...

It would be very windy due to enormous temperature differentials.

Lycanthromancer
2010-03-26, 08:25 PM
Could it be possible to have one giant ocean around the habitable belt? Perhaps dotted with islands, and flanked by mountains/deserts sunside and glaciers darkside?

It sounds like realistically water would be moving around too much to really form large bodies of water, but maybe if there's a lot of water and a lot of rain/precipitation...You wouldn't have that much water, actually, since the vast majority of the water would be in frozen deposits on the cold side. All of the liquid water would be around the equatorial zone, but it's all either being dragged sunward or shadeward, and it's mostly the sunward water that would return in a regular fashion (as ice-sheets can grow several miles thick, even in normal worlds; I'd hesitate to imagine just how many miles thick the ice shelf would be in sideways-world).


It would be very windy due to enormous temperature differentials.I would expect frequent windstorms, even to the point of monsoons and tornadoes. This would leave civilization nomadic more than stationary; windstorms would demolish more permanent structures.

Also, the faster the world spins and the rougher the terrain, the more wind you'd have, I'd expect. Of course, the rougher the terrain, the more calm areas you might get.

CockroachTeaParty
2010-03-26, 08:26 PM
Would plants wind up looking strange? Would trees have leaves only on the side facing the sun?

If the winds are especially crazy, I could picture winged races such as raptorans having greater power/importance, as couriers, scouts, etc.

Jack_Simth
2010-03-26, 08:34 PM
Could it be possible to have one giant ocean around the habitable belt? Perhaps dotted with islands, and flanked by mountains/deserts sunside and glaciers darkside?

It sounds like realistically water would be moving around too much to really form large bodies of water, but maybe if there's a lot of water and a lot of rain/precipitation...

Well, here's the thing... how big of an ocean can be made, how fast water is moving, and whether you've got the sudden cataclysm, the slow turn, or no movement at all depends on quite a few things that are up to DM whim:

1) How much water is on the planet
2) The rigidity of the planet (crust, mantle, core, the interfaces between them, and any additional layers)
3) How much solar input is actually present (what color is the star, how far away is it, and how big is it? But those can be shorthanded to "solar input" as we've decided the planet is tidally locked already ... so it's just how much is hitting the planet, and how much is bouncing back off)
4) The mass of the planet

If the planet is sufficiently rigid, and outmasses the water enough that the water could all bunch up on one side without changing the gravitational arrangement any, then it won't shift at all, and you can have rather long-running civilizations where the enough glacial melt meets enough sunlight to grow crops. Bear in mind: If you go this route, it's normal, minus easy time, and plus rough weather.

If the planet is not up to the structural task of keeping the crust in place, and there's enough water to cause enough of a weight difference, then you'll get a periodic sudden shift of the crust. How often depends mostly on how much solar input there is (more sunlight means it happens more often... but bear in mind: if you go this route, the oldest civilization is either undead and in an inhospitable region, underground subsisting on magic/technology in some manner, is tiny and living off of some geothermal resource on coldside (rivers will move too often to form long-running civilizations, due to the effects of glaciation), was formed just after the most recent cataclysm, or was in a ridiculously lucky spot at the time of the last cataclysm, and didn't shift much).

If the planet is up to the structural task of keeping the crust in place, but doesn't sufficiently outmass the water to keep the center of gravity from shifting, then you'll have a very slow rotation of darkside ground to sunside ground as the world turns on a second (or third) axis. How quickly depends mostly on how much solar input there is. Bear in mind: If you go this route, the oldest civilization is either close to one of the borders (hotside/coldside), as above.

More water means more oceans; less water means less oceans, but all three other options are still viable in either case, due to other considerations.

AKA, pick your choice of sudden periodic disaster, slow habitat change cycle, or no particular migration, then build your world around it.

Oh yes, and with scenario 2 or 3, you could also have critters with a ridiculously long life cycle, that hibernate while their habitat is on coldside or darkside.



Also, I could definitely see a tropical zone closer to sunside, a temperate area, and a colder area closer to darkside. The idea of things living beneath the frozen ice of darkside, or the general 'underdark' of sunside would also be certainly possible.

I can see elementals, or elemental themes, being prominent as well. Fire for sunside, water (ice) for darkside, air for the crazy weather, and earth for the world itself, trying to resist the forces that want to tear it apart.

Could work quite well.

TheMerchandise
2010-03-26, 08:35 PM
Would plants wind up looking strange? Would trees have leaves only on the side facing the sun?


I dunno if they'd be lopsided in that way, but there would be definite tilt. They might lean towards it so that all their leaves are facing that direction. Though there wouldn't be any trouble whatsoever distinguishing direction, it would be amusing to be able to tell which side is which simply by looking at the lean of the plants. And I certainly would expect that flying folk would be in high demand if they can bear the brunt of the winds. Wind power is a cool idea; whoever thought of that deserves a medal. An intarwebs medal.

Lycanthromancer
2010-03-26, 08:42 PM
If there is a standard Underdark, or if the mantle of the planet is sufficiently fragile, the glacial sheets of ice could potentially crush the crust on the shadeward side. If it got thick enough, you'd end up with a gigantic ring of buckled crust, where the planet's shell simply collapsed. You'd end up with a massive ring-shaped crater around the leeward pole, possibly a few miles deep, filled with ice.

Bear in mind that this is only in case there's not a slow rotation beyond that swinging around the normal sunward pole.

PersonMan
2010-03-26, 08:55 PM
You know, if the Dark/Sun sides are moving, why abandon cities? Personally, I'm imagining a city simply growing as it goes towards the inhospitable side, being built up towards the more temperate zones, with the scrapped ruins(or just abandoned areas) stretching deep into the deserts.

Interesting plot possibilities.
"Er, yeah, the ancient artifact we need is in the mayor's office."
"Then why not just get it?"
"The first mayor's office. Deep into the desert and by now probably collapsed and/or burned by heat and neglect, dozens of miles from here."
"Oh my...."

TheMerchandise
2010-03-26, 08:58 PM
RE: plot possibilities-
Let's not forget the opposite being true. Why, what about the ancient temple that's been making its way across the shade for the past 3 or 4 decades? Dunno about you, but I have a hard time making my way through miles of ice. Blowtorch + couple of centuries maybe

PersonMan
2010-03-26, 09:02 PM
RE: plot possibilities-
Let's not forget the opposite being true. Why, what about the ancient temple that's been making its way across the shade for the past 3 or 4 decades? Dunno about you, but I have a hard time making my way through miles of ice. Blowtorch + couple of centuries maybe

I just got a mental image of traveling through a city once protected my magical barriers against the ice, slowly collapsing as you go farther and farther, until the city was smashed beneath the ice.

Although, if the planet was small and this movement happened very quickly, you could have a "race against time" scenario to try and retrieve an artifact or whatever before the crust's movement drove it into the ice...

Volkov
2010-03-26, 09:07 PM
You wouldn't have that much water, actually, since the vast majority of the water would be in frozen deposits on the cold side. All of the liquid water would be around the equatorial zone, but it's all either being dragged sunward or shadeward, and it's mostly the sunward water that would return in a regular fashion (as ice-sheets can grow several miles thick, even in normal worlds; I'd hesitate to imagine just how many miles thick the ice shelf would be in sideways-world).

I would expect frequent windstorms, even to the point of monsoons and tornadoes. This would leave civilization nomadic more than stationary; windstorms would demolish more permanent structures.

Also, the faster the world spins and the rougher the terrain, the more wind you'd have, I'd expect. Of course, the rougher the terrain, the more calm areas you might get.
Frequent? Try never-ending. The twilight zone would have at the very least hurricane force winds at all times. And it's almost certain that it will be F-5 tornado force winds at the least. Making a civilization in a world where one side is so hot that you quickly die from heat stroke, and on the other you freeze to death within moments and there isn't a plant to be seen, and the in-between zone has winds so fierce that the brick you are trying to lay hits you with enough force to instantly kill you is nigh impossible.

Jack_Simth
2010-03-26, 09:19 PM
Frequent? Try never-ending. The twilight zone would have at the very least hurricane force winds at all times. And it's almost certain that it will be F-5 tornado force winds at the least. Making a civilization in a world where one side is so hot that you quickly die from heat stroke, and on the other you freeze to death within moments and there isn't a plant to be seen, and the in-between zone has winds so fierce that the brick you are trying to lay hits you with enough force to instantly kill you is nigh impossible.Not necessarily. In order for winds to blow, they must push other air out of the way; and they're limited by how fast that other air moves. You'll have hot winds higher up, and cold winds lower down... but there's also a heat exchange between the two, and an inertia exchange between the two, and don't forget the impact of terrain.

But you won't necessarily get lethal winds very often.

Hecore
2010-03-26, 09:20 PM
If you wanted a somewhat less dramatic world, you could make it a moon of a gas giant. Most of the heat is generated due to the interaction of gravity between the two worlds; the sunward side is still a desert (but more like the Sahara than Mercury) and the planetward side is more like an arctic ocean then a land of perpetual glaciers. The central belt would still be the best place to live, but there could still be a few scattered groups living in the two extremes.

At least this would solve the issues of massive earth/ice quakes and constant hurricanes.

magic9mushroom
2010-03-26, 09:20 PM
A planet tidally locked to its sun will have a massive Hadley cell circulation. Air rises near the middle of the sunny side, sheds its water in huge perpetual thunderstorms, blows around to the dark side in the upper atmosphere, descends on the dark side, and blows near the surface back to the sunny side (meaning that the wind will always blow from shadeward).

@Lycanthromancer: Tides wouldn't actually pull water away from the middle. Because the tides don't change, the entire planet would elongate to compensate, meaning that gravity perfectly compensates for the tides (from the sun).

Volkov
2010-03-26, 09:26 PM
If you wanted a somewhat less dramatic world, you could make it a moon of a gas giant. Most of the heat is generated due to the interaction of gravity between the two worlds; the sunward side is still a desert (but more like the Sahara than Mercury) and the planetward side is more like an arctic ocean then a land of perpetual glaciers. The central belt would still be the best place to live, but there could still be a few scattered groups living in the two extremes.

At least this would solve the issues of massive earth/ice quakes and constant hurricanes.

If it's too close and the gas giant has a powerful magnetic field, you will get a massive current of electricity flowing from the gas giant to the moon. Much like Io. This current will ionize the atmosphere and almost certainly fry everything it touches.

Lycanthromancer
2010-03-26, 09:40 PM
A planet tidally locked to its sun will have a massive Hadley cell circulation. Air rises near the middle of the sunny side, sheds its water in huge perpetual thunderstorms, blows around to the dark side in the upper atmosphere, descends on the dark side, and blows near the surface back to the sunny side (meaning that the wind will always blow from shadeward).

@Lycanthromancer: Tides wouldn't actually pull water away from the middle. Because the tides don't change, the entire planet would elongate to compensate, meaning that gravity perfectly compensates for the tides (from the sun).But the winds would pull the evaporated water from the sun-side and would cause torrential downpours closer to the equator, where the gravity from the sun would pull it back toward the sun (or toward the glacial ice cap). This would mean that you would have a constant current as the water flowed into the sea and then was pulled toward the li'l ol' rays of sunshine.

Ergo, a constant one-way tide.

I still like the idea of a barren sea of land surrounded by nearly insurmountable cliffs of ice. Even if it technically wouldn't happen like that, you couldn't have much in the way of vestiges of ancient civilizations there, since it'd all be destroyed by the grinding activities of the flowing glaciers.

Although if the ice were compressed enough, you'd have a massive ice-shell with a thick, pudding-like sea of half-frozen slush inside of it. Finding a way to survive down there would take some doing, and the ruins would likely have residents (at least in a fantasy world), but this would allow you to go and visit, and maybe bring something back (like information or artifacts that could save the world as the PCs know it).

[edit] Also, might I suggest a very steep spine-of-the-world equatorial mountain range? This would keep water flowing on the hot side, so you wouldn't lose it all to the glaciers. It'd leave the lee-side very dark and dry, however, with most of the terrain being colder savannas and what little water would likely pool up in cold bogs and marshes. VERY different climate than the other side of the planet, which would range from comfortable temperate zones to lush jungles to dry deserts.

Ormur
2010-03-26, 09:51 PM
I've stumbled on some articles that dealt with the possibility of life on such worlds that suggested a thick enough atmosphere would distribute the heat enough for the dark side not to freeze over completely. Adapting conventional life to a thick atmosphere in the otherwise temperate twilight-zone might be easier than to adapt it to regular planetary scale disasters. Also if the sunny side isn't unbearably hot it could be an interesting place, the same for the dark side.

In the habitable zone there would also be mostly life-less areas on the shade-wards side of mountains and hills.

Set
2010-03-26, 09:53 PM
If the tidally-locked planet had a face-locked moonlet that follows along between itself and the sun, you could even have a 'shadow oasis' in the middle of the sunside desert.

There's no chance in heck such a thing would ever occur naturally, but could be formed by some unnatural tampering (or the 'moon' might be some other supernatural light-blocking thing, like a rift to the plane of shadow or something).

CockroachTeaParty
2010-03-26, 10:03 PM
Ooh, I like that shadow oasis idea. Maybe a powerful cabal of mages 'locked' the moon, and they rule a giant metropolis in the shade, safe from any interlopers by the scorching desert. Of course, the BBEG would plan on sabotage, and disrupt the moon's tethers, spelling doom for the oasis city...

"Welcome to the Shadow Oasis." That's probably the city/area's name right there.

PersonMan
2010-03-26, 10:17 PM
Ooh, I like that shadow oasis idea. Maybe a powerful cabal of mages 'locked' the moon, and they rule a giant metropolis in the shade, safe from any interlopers by the scorching desert. Of course, the BBEG would plan on sabotage, and disrupt the moon's tethers, spelling doom for the oasis city...

"Welcome to the Shadow Oasis." That's probably the city/area's name right there.

Disrupt the tethers? Why not just bring it down on the city, or move it to build his/her/its own metropolis?

ryzouken
2010-03-26, 11:05 PM
A band of livable area that runs the circumference of the planet... Like a giant ring...


I'm calling mine Halo. And that shadow tethered moon? Yeah, that's no moon...

a_humble_lich
2010-03-26, 11:41 PM
You could have your moon for the shadow oasis sit at the first Lagrange point between the planet and the sun. No tether would be needed but some kind of magic/super-science would be needed to keep it there or it would eventually wander away. In real life, there have been/are satellites that sit at L1 to monitor the sun.

I think the big question you would have with a tidally locked planet is how thick the atmosphere is. If it is very thin (like Mercury) there'd be a massive temperature difference, but with a think atmosphere (like Venus) the air would transport a lot of heat to the far side.

EvilBloodGnome
2010-03-26, 11:59 PM
One interesting thing: if it had a moon(s), as the moon passed over the hot side it would create a vast shadow, theoretically cooling the area in the shadow, which could give adventurers a window of time to cross it or enter it. Depending on the speed of the moon's orbit, this could be a mad dash for thousands of miles only doable by magical assistance or flight, or if the moon took months or even years a long, drudging trip across a barely existable shadow with reserves of supplies always low.

Life needn't be be completely void on the hot side. Maybe vagrant fire elementals, underground societies, fire wyrms, all sorts. The same could be for the dark side, only flipped.

The habitable belt would also be a very interesting place to visit. A place in eternal twilight has always been an interesting one with a consistently strange but appealing aesthetic.

Lycanthromancer
2010-03-27, 12:18 AM
Just how big would this planet be? The habitable belt would be rather narrow, comparatively speaking (depending on atmosphere, of course), so it'd have to be considerably larger than Earth to have the same livable surface area. If it was a landmass the size of Saturn, that might just be enough.

Also, you may consider scaling up the general size of the wildlife if the planet is so massive, as a larger planet can handle larger critters, especially if the change from standard planet to sideways planet was geologically recent. See Final Fantasy XIII for details.

[edit] This could be a very interesting campaign setting, especially if the planar cosmology was different. Instead of the ethereal plane, for instance, you could have Faerie. And instead of the Astral, you'd have the Far Realm.

Mmm...

EvilBloodGnome
2010-03-27, 12:27 AM
The habitable belt could be of different size, depending the shape of the planet. Still small, but if it were more oblong, such as an eggish shape with the points pointing towards/away from the sun, the belt would be larger. Given that the planet is in tidal lock, it may very well be of oblong shape. If the shape messes up the science of it, a wizard did it. Although a somewhat eggish shape would likely work well with the science, just enough to make the belt big enough.

Draz74
2010-03-27, 12:32 AM
Two things.

(1) Tidal lock like this is inevitable if the planet is within a certain distance of the star, and much less likely if you're further away. For example, in our solar system, Mercury is almost tidally locked (and was thought to be so for a long time), while none of the other planets are even close. (Though Uranus has its own wacky thing going, with the poles pointed along the ecliptic plane. Which, btw, is not compatible with the tidal lock thing. But is another cool worldbuilding idea to explore.)

However, I don't think anything (except probability) keeps more distant planets from being tidally locked. If conditions were right, a planet as far away as Mars could have the tidal lock thing going.

If you want to go this direction, we could toss out what we've been assuming about a hot desert half and a frigid half. If Mars was tidally locked, for example, only the center of the hot side might be hot enough to be inhabitable.

Such a world doesn't seem to have as many easy plot hooks as the Venus-distance (?) tidal locked planet. But it would still be an interesting direction you could go.

(2) Even tidal-locked bodies "wobble" quite a bit. For example, check out what our own moon does (http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap070902.html).

If your worldbuilding planet wobbles in a similar fashion, then the habitable "ring" can be a lot wider (but still pretty harsh conditions along its hot and cold edges), and can also have some version of seasons, where the sun gets higher and lower in the sky. You'd still have constant twilight conditions in the middle of the habitable ring, but you could alternate between "light twilight" and "dark twilight."

EDIT: I hope this post still makes sense in the context of the thread. I started writing it, then got interrupted for a few hours, so naturally I got ninja'd many times. :smallwink:

Flickerdart
2010-03-27, 12:33 AM
Why do we want the belt to be big? Methinks a narrow belt is much more interesting than a wide one. Living space could be increased by enlarging the planet, but having the habitable zone being narrow would make the impact of the setting on daily live much more severe.

EvilBloodGnome
2010-03-27, 12:48 AM
A small one would be interesting, but the biggest plothook that might dominate the others would be land wars. A medium one would likely be best just because there would be land wars, but also space for peacetime endeavors.

From Draz's rather informative post I think I have an idea that would be interesting. Maybe have the planet a little bigger than Earth that's somewhat oblong that wobbles. With this you could pull off a sizable amount of the planet being habitable, maybe something like 10-15-20%, maybe even 25%, depending on how much you wanted competition for land to be a factor.

Flickerdart
2010-03-27, 01:05 AM
Well, I was thinking something more like "That way, there is no water, harsh winds will oppose your every step and the blood in your veins will boil. And over that way, those same winds will drag you into an icy prison from which the only escape is death. Clockwise there's the Realm of Torment, City of the Thousand Black Spires and Castle of the Lord of the Damned. Counter-clockwise? You don't want to go counter-clockwise."

magic9mushroom
2010-03-27, 01:34 AM
But the winds would pull the evaporated water from the sun-side and would cause torrential downpours closer to the equator, where the gravity from the sun would pull it back toward the sun (or toward the glacial ice cap). This would mean that you would have a constant current as the water flowed into the sea and then was pulled toward the li'l ol' rays of sunshine.

Ergo, a constant one-way tide.

Not exactly. When hot air rises it expands, cools, and drops almost all its water as it condenses out. So almost all the rain on the planet is going to fall in that zone of convergence, near the subsolar point (assuming that's below the boiling point of water... things get weird if it isn't). The air everywhere else is going to be very dry, at least on the ground. Far above the ground, the high-level air blowing to shadeward will possibly form high clouds as it cools, but the amount of moisture actually in that high-level air will be tiny anyway.

As for the "gravity from the sun", no. The planet (all of it) will elongate slightly because of that exact effect, making it slightly thinner at the equator than the poles. Because the equator's closer to the planet's centre, the planet's own gravity will pull water towards the equator with exactly as much force as the tidal forces pull it towards the poles. Which cancels out the effect.

Fizban
2010-03-27, 02:15 AM
I was wondering about how the "sudden shift" type of disaster worked. I'm guessing the idea is that the ice buildup isn't perfectly even, so when it builds up above the weight limit the edge with slightly more ice shifts sunward.

Pechvarry
2010-03-27, 03:23 AM
This is crazy. I've been wanting to run a campaign on a tidally locked planet for over a year now, and just today, I started thinking about it some more. And then I see this thread. Wild.

What I've been considering: the planet isn't actually tidally locked, it just has an incredibly slow orbit. Something like one rotation every 1000 years. This means every year, a sliver of ground becomes unbearably hot or cold, but a new sliver becomes more comfortable. All life has learned to be at least semi-nomadic since their farm homes only last 1-3 generations before becoming unbearable. This also means the PCs are always encountering ruins of 1000 years past -- the cultures of previous cycles, built upon ruins of other cultures innumerable.

It seems to me that the presence of a healthy atmosphere would also help extend the comfort belt -- the warm side is getting its atmosphere warmed up, and it would expand into the dark sections somewhat, keeping them healthily warm longer -- albeit gloomily.

Finally, I was considering the impact of a very large Hot Jupiter (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_Jupiter) constantly interdicting between the campaign's planet and its sun. This would create rather frequent eclipses, some pretty effects with super-heated atmosphere venting off of the gas giant, and perhaps be close enough to have some tidal impact on the planet (like our moon does)? I don't know enough about gravity and such to know what's feasible.

Regardless, I don't think sun (which I imagine to be pretty small -- maybe a red dwarf?) >> exceedingly large gas giant >> rocky, earth-like planet is a natural arrangement of a solar system... at all.

Zen Master
2010-03-27, 08:00 AM
My take on this - entirely without even glancing at what might be reasonable science, only at what I like and find cool:

Scalding winds blow from sunside. At times they are merely hot, but depending on other factors, Heat Storms easily ignite light vegetation (like grass - the planet has naturally evolved to thrive with this cycle).

When these hot winds reach darkside, they do so in spectacular shows of nature force. Ice melts, huge gouts of steam rise, thunder and lightning crash constantly, and so on. The steam rises very quickly high into the atmosphere, where it freezes instantly - and is carried back towards sunside, to fall as rain. The rain may never actually hit the ground - depending on distance from Twilight.

The northern border of Twilight would be a shallow ocean, as water constantly pours off insurmountable steep cliffs of ice. From here, water flows rapidly into sunside, where it evaporates, adding to the continuing natural cataclysm that is the weather on this world.

What is an ocean just south of the ice cliffs becomes lakes and rives, then a steaming swampland as it reaches sunside. Eventually, the swamps boil away, leaving the land beyond a sunblasted wasteland.

To me, the real question is how wide we can imagine the zone of Twilight to be?

magic9mushroom
2010-03-27, 08:06 AM
My take on this - entirely without even glancing at what might be reasonable science, only at what I like and find cool:

Scalding winds blow from sunside. At times they are merely hot, but depending on other factors, Heat Storms easily ignite light vegetation (like grass - the planet has naturally evolved to thrive with this cycle).

When these hot winds reach darkside, they do so in spectacular shows of nature force. Ice melts, huge gouts of steam rise, thunder and lightning crash constantly, and so on. The steam rises very quickly high into the atmosphere, where it freezes instantly - and is carried back towards sunside, to fall as rain. The rain may never actually hit the ground - depending on distance from Twilight.

The northern border of Twilight would be a shallow ocean, as water constantly pours off insurmountable steep cliffs of ice. From here, water flows rapidly into sunside, where it evaporates, adding to the continuing natural cataclysm that is the weather on this world.

What is an ocean just south of the ice cliffs becomes lakes and rives, then a steaming swampland as it reaches sunside. Eventually, the swamps boil away, leaving the land beyond a sunblasted wasteland.

To me, the real question is how wide we can imagine the zone of Twilight to be?

You're killing my braincells. AAAH!

Zen Master
2010-03-27, 08:14 AM
You're killing my braincells. AAAH!

It makes very little difference if it would work or not. AVATAR has floating mountains explained by 'flux zones'. And 'slow gravity' - what the hell is slow gravity?

No - what liberties I take are entirely justified. Only if I also come up with something called Unobtanium will it be good and proper for the powers that be to strike me down with lightning.

magic9mushroom
2010-03-27, 08:54 AM
It makes very little difference if it would work or not. AVATAR has floating mountains explained by 'flux zones'. And 'slow gravity' - what the hell is slow gravity?

No - what liberties I take are entirely justified. Only if I also come up with something called Unobtanium will it be good and proper for the powers that be to strike me down with lightning.

Don't get me started on Avatar.

That Avatar is worse than your brain-boiling post does not make said post good.

Also, it's "this low gravity", not "the slow gravity". Avatar's crap, but you're wrong there.

Subotei
2010-03-27, 09:07 AM
Worth a read if you can find a copy - Hothouse by Brian Aldiss:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hothouse_%28novel%29

Lots of interesting ideas - if a little strange...

Zen Master
2010-03-27, 09:29 AM
Don't get me started on Avatar.

That Avatar is worse than your brain-boiling post does not make said post good.

Also, it's "this low gravity", not "the slow gravity". Avatar's crap, but you're wrong there.

Actually, I'd like to see you come up with some sort of reasoning here. What sort of science do you think supports your claim that my post melts brain cells?

It's not that I claim that it's accurate - I absolutely don't - but since we're in the realm of extremely uncertain facts, I'd just like to hear what you build that statement on?

Scientifically, I base my post on convection: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convection

That something I know a little about. Now, if I were cleverer in this regard, I'd base it on thermodynamics - but I'm not, so I don't.

But really - do enlighten me.

ericgrau
2010-03-27, 10:07 AM
The sun facing side would be beyond scorching and the dark facing side would be beyond frozen. Perhaps put the whole world farther from the sun so that the sun facing side is cooler and more habitable. The cold side would then be subarctic and not habitable without powerful magicf or else lifeless creatures like undead and constructs. The border of the two sides would be fret with beyond hurricane force winds, flowing from cold to hot, due to the temperature difference. At high altitudes the wind direction is reversed. Think of it as hot air rising, cool air dropping, and then making a loop. The winds would mix the air a bit, so there could be a windy (but tolerable) area just outside the hurricane force region with more moderate temperatures. At the dead center of the two planet halfs the air would often be still and windless, though some variations may occur randomly or due to mountains and so on.

Rain travels through evaporation and wind, so there could be lush areas near water bordered by total desert at a relatively short distance. If the planet is tilted like earth then, besides creating seasons, the border between the two halves would shift based on the time of year. If the planet has no tilt then there are no seasons.

DabblerWizard
2010-03-27, 10:13 AM
This world, as it's being described, would have a very consistent survival overtone.

Much like a post apocalyptic setting, where resources are scarce, and various human factions are all competing for the little that is there, a tidally locked campaign world could also face this struggle.

Some of the story might revolve around man vs. environment, where people have to make sure to migrate to available sources of food or water. There would also be a strong man vs. man theme, where sharing those resources is one problem, but also, you could have people that are fed up with merely surviving, and end up trying to gain some sort of advantage. In a world where everything hangs in tenuous balance, whenever someone tries to disturb that order, a great deal of chaos would be impending.

boomwolf
2010-03-27, 10:59 AM
I would play the whole "Tidally Locked" aspect differently. reffered by MTG's Lorywn and Shadowmoor (same place. lorywn is eternal light. then somehting happened to cause eternal darkness and created shadowmoor.)

The "Light" side is one thing, the "Dark" side is another, and the area between is known as the "Twilight Zone"

The Twilight Zone, as the location of the meeting between Light and Dark is naturally a very chaotic area with constant warfare between the ones of the Light and the ones of the Dark.

Now, setotype calls PC's to be from the Light side, adventuring in the "Dark" side (like how they travel into doungeons in regular DnD), with the Light side being warm and nice, like Hawaii during the summer, and the Dark side is a barren wasteland where survival of the fittest is the law. that only a reason to do things differently.

The Light side is like a tropical island, with lots of plants and animals, but also crawling with lethal monsters that eat said animals, and occasional humanoid. The Dark side on the other hard, while being hard to see, provides shelter and cover for the average humanoid. while its hard to grow anything there, you got yourself an area where the predators cannot survive for long, as they need to eat alot, or directly require the sun to survive.

And then, you got the "Poles", the "Light Pole", a scorching desert, where the great dragons nest, and the "Dark Pole", where the world's largest city is. naturally the farther you get from the Dark Pole, the closer you get to the Light Pole, and the more danger you will encounter.

Why would anyone visit the Light side?
Well. the predators of the Light tend to collect trophies, and you want them.
Not to mention that they tend to raid the areas near the Twilight Zone, and the Twilight Zone itself (and the Twilight Zone IS the place where most farming happens, because the Dark side cannot support it.) so their population must be kept under check, if they grow too much they will start raiding further into the Dark, and you cannot allow that.
Also, the most vile of humanoids make home in the Light, either by scaring potential predators, or by making a pact with them. some of them even learn fowl sun magic, and use it to invade the world of Dark in attempts of conquest and destruction. (in a similar fashion on how you get lichs and things live in the underdark and in dungeons and send minions to invade the world above.)


In such a world, you defiantly need new races for the Dark world, and new dangers for the Light world.

Races need to be redefined. I suggest to make a short list out of the following: Human, Underfolk, Lesser Drow, Deep Halfling, Changeling, Orc, Kenku, goblin and kobold. (screw halfbreed races. never liked them.) (admitting that orcs and underfolk is going to have trouble in Light-land adventures. but even without them you have 7 races out there.)

As for the predators of the light, I suggest a focus on Plant-based life forms, that will explain why they cannot survive in the dark. also massive creatures such as dragons dwell there. and they need lots of nourishment that are hard to get in the Dark.


Heck, I like this so much that I might expend on it myself. having sun as evil looks sweet.

Lycanthromancer
2010-03-27, 11:07 AM
This world, as it's being described, would have a very consistent survival overtone.

Much like a post apocalyptic setting, where resources are scarce, and various human factions are all competing for the little that is there, a tidally locked campaign world could also face this struggle.

Some of the story might revolve around man vs. environment, where people have to make sure to migrate to available sources of food or water. There would also be a strong man vs. man theme, where sharing those resources is one problem, but also, you could have people that are fed up with merely surviving, and end up trying to gain some sort of advantage. In a world where everything hangs in tenuous balance, whenever someone tries to disturb that order, a great deal of chaos would be impending.You would have to either take magic into account for this, or take the accounting out of magic. Remove spells such as create food and water and purify food and drink, or make them very rare.

Like Dark Sun, this would be an excellent world for being primarily psionic (or at least have the magic be something other than Core Vancian, such as mostly binders, or mostly shadow weave, or something). Psions get access to sustenance, but it only takes care of the manifester. Elan would likely be very common as well, given that they don't really need to eat. Rings of sustenance would be either rare or common, but would be exceedingly valuable either way.

CockroachTeaParty
2010-03-27, 11:33 AM
For some reason, I never wanted this world to be tilted; no seasons, just to make it that much stranger (to those of us used to living with 4 seasons...).

I also imagine the other planes of existence to be different. Some ideas, in no particular order:

-A plane from which all 4 classical elements spawn; likely a chaotic, Limbo-esque plane, from which all elementals originate.

-A plane of words, from which the gift of language came. Perhaps Illumians are 'planetouched' from this dimension. Other word or language-based creatures could hail from this plane. Likely Lawful.

-A soul forge plane, positive energy dominant, from which all souls are produced, and also the source of Incarnum.

Drogorn
2010-03-27, 11:51 AM
This sort of setting seems like a good place for a duality pantheon. Light and dark deities, neither of which are evil, but both of which are great and terrible.

Then you add aspects of those gods. The god of light gets fire, light, glory, and so forth. The god of darkness gets cold, rain, shadow, and such. You then have clerics which can be of any alignment and can draw power from either deity

Zellic Solis
2010-03-27, 11:58 AM
Ugh.... no it wouldn't. You know, for a species that grew up on a planet that's 75% covered in oceans we have an unhealthy obsession with dirt. The planet's oceans are the key to having this world be viable at all. Place a really big pacificesque ocean facing the sun. If you HAVE to have some super baked rock there then make it Madagascar and not Africa. Maybe it's the origin for whoever stopped the planet's rotation? "Please sun god, let your light always shine on us!" "Okay." Nice high level adventure land.

Incidently, if your world has a significant tilt on its axis then you'd likely still have seasons, which would slowly shift around area of most direct sunlight unless your planet also conicidentally wobbled just right to it always pointing at the same spot. Easier just to have the low axis or ignore it.

The area with the most direct sunlight will be like the ocean at the equator: hot and sticky and sunny. Think of it as the pupil of an eye. Land in this area will be barely habitable near the sea and arid. On earth, wet heated air is spun towards the poles due to rotation. That's not happening here. So what you'll get are jet streams like a daisy: bands of very wet and heavy air streaming away, with cooler and drier air being drawn back towards the pupil between the dry. Ocean currents will line up along with these jet streams unless blocked by land. Hurricanes would be... very interesting. Might not happen at all or might not ever end depending on the circulation.

As you move away from the pupil towards the iris zone then you're hitting regions that are either tropical or arid, depending on which type of band is crossing them. If the bands are very unstable then the region might average out like regions of the southeast US in summer. If they're stable then wet areas are going to be VERY wet. Mountains will be smaller overall or extremely carved like Hawaii. Not a lot of metals but possibly gems. Arid regions won't be uninhabitable thanks to things call "aqueducts", "Irrigation" and "rivers". It all depends on the topography and cultures.

Once you leave the iris and into the white of the eye you start hitting temperate zones. The moist bands of air will continue to cool to drop precipitation, and mountains will act as extractors or dams. Terrain and ecology could be anything like what you'd find in the continental midwest. Great plains or temperate forests under moist belts. The southwest under return dry belts. The further away from the pupil you go the further north you go, hitting pine forests and areas of glaciation on the shadow side of mountains. It could still be habitable, depending on ocean currents and jet streams.

When you get to the edge of the eye then you would probably reach an area of no growth on our world. However, where you have magic (and evolution... life ALWAYS finds a way to win if given enough time) then you might have trees with antifrieze sap. Furry people. Other kinds of life that can thrive in the diffuse light.

Now we hit the terminus. Guess what. You might still have life. If the jet streams and currents are warm enough and strong enough (like the gulf stream) you could have livable conditions in areas with no direct light at all. It would be difficult. Food chains would be closely linked to the sea. You might end up with cultures like the inuit or... vikings.

As we move away from the terminus then we'd likely hit permanent ice pack. Not "SOLID OCEANS of ICE!" You might have miles of ice and the water might be pretty cold but it would still be water. Land past here would likely be rock covered with rime ice. You would also have wind; katabastic or 'gravity' winds would blow constantly in some areas. Now... guess what! You might still have life. Why? The sun isn't the only origin of energy on the planet. Geothermal hot spots could provide the warmth and chemical energy needed to sustain life. If magic is involved you could have glowing tree-fungi plants supporting strange and unearthly life. You might find that giants, dwarves, or dragons have carved volcanoes to form these oasis of heat.

At the far opposite end of the planet you're at the coldest of the cold. If there's land here, it's probably hard rock or ice sheets. IF there's ocean here it's a thick crust over frigid above freezing water. Guess what... there might still be life here. It sure won't be natural or earthly though. You might have dragons with radioactive slugs in their gut keeping them warm enough to survive. Blind worms with acidic antifreeze in their fatty bodies bore holes in the ice looking for deposits of lichen metabolizing chemicals in the ice. With no clouds there might be enough light from the stars for weird plants to survive. If you're looking for a place for undead to have a society; this is it... long as they don't need the living to persist. Maybe the other great culture that caused the planet to stop like this ended up here. One side nuked by sun and the other frozen in darkness. poetic. Maybe it's become the domain of the gods of darkness. Who knows?

Zen Master
2010-03-27, 12:16 PM
I was wondering.

An ice sheet thick enough would cause enough heat to melt itself - deep enough down.

How thick a sheet would this require? And where would the water flow - towards sunside, or darkside? I'm thinking with a little luck, this might be the source of those oceans at Twilight.

bosssmiley
2010-03-27, 12:58 PM
The Alien Worlds/Extraterrestrial documentary series had one episode about life on a tidally locked world. Shame the creature designs were sophomoric and riddled with errors though...

Brian Aldiss' Hothouse was based on a far future tidally-locked Earth. The characters are tedious cyphers, but the worldbuilding was fun.

Stephen Baxter's Vacuum Diagrams had an alien zoology story set on Mercury IIRC.

Tackyhillbillu
2010-03-27, 01:16 PM
I'm imagining a City on the Darkside, populated only by Warforged, who are working furiously to keep the Ice from encroaching on their city.

Draz74
2010-03-27, 09:08 PM
I was wondering.

An ice sheet thick enough would cause enough heat to melt itself - deep enough down.

How thick a sheet would this require? And where would the water flow - towards sunside, or darkside? I'm thinking with a little luck, this might be the source of those oceans at Twilight.

First of all, a thick enough ice sheet would cause enough pressure to melt its lower layers. Not heat. (Yes, ice melts under high enough pressure, no matter how cold it is. Weird, huh?)

Second, as soon as this "liquid" water got to a lower pressure, like by flowing out from under the ice, it would freeze again.

Third, I believe this is exactly how glaciers in fact do move. Their lower layers exist in a constant almost-melted-by-pressure state, but instantly refreeze anytime they become liquid enough to flow a tiny distance.

Zen Master
2010-03-28, 03:33 AM
First of all, a thick enough ice sheet would cause enough pressure to melt its lower layers. Not heat. (Yes, ice melts under high enough pressure, no matter how cold it is. Weird, huh?)

I'm not talking about plastic flow. I'm talking about heat. Pressure creates heat. When the pressure is great enough, that is.

Melayl
2010-03-28, 09:41 AM
Just because the moon is fixed in respect to the world doesn't mean the the world does not spin. Yes, the moon-locked side would still be cold (but probably not frigid wasteland cold in all but a small constant solar eclipse area), but the non-moon-locked side would be normal in all respects.

The idea of a fixed non-spin world that you've been debating is interesting, though.

Just my two cents.

ericgrau
2010-03-28, 10:32 AM
I was wondering.

An ice sheet thick enough would cause enough heat to melt itself - deep enough down.

How thick a sheet would this require? And where would the water flow - towards sunside, or darkside? I'm thinking with a little luck, this might be the source of those oceans at Twilight.

Ice is an insulator, but it does not create heat. Constant pressure does not create heat, no matter how high; I dunno where this notion came from but it is completely made up. Maybe b/c a positive change in pressure increases temperature, but this is akin to squeezing a sponge to release it. If held this way the heat escapes and the temperature soon matches the surrounding areas. It is impossible to create heat without a source of energy. FWIW the heat in the earth's core comes from nuclear fission.

Since the cold side is cold 100% of the time, the ice would reach all the way to the ocean bottom. On earth water flow and ice insulation slows this process and keeps it from completing before the winter is over.

For that matter, places near bodies of water would not be cooler than other regions. This normally happens because the water stores heat during the day, making days cooler, and releases heat at night, making nights warmer. But without a day/night cycle the water temperature soon matches the land temperature and heat transfer stops.

I'm sensing a theme of constant-cy on this planet. Temperature, weather and so forth are unlikely to change much if at all. Rangers (or anyone with survival) could probably "predict" the unchanging weather of a new region by looking at the nearby mountains and other features.

Flickerdart
2010-03-28, 10:53 AM
A 100% accurate meteorology service? Score.

DragoonWraith
2010-03-28, 11:01 AM
You know, if the Dark/Sun sides are moving, why abandon cities? Personally, I'm imagining a city simply growing as it goes towards the inhospitable side, being built up towards the more temperate zones, with the scrapped ruins(or just abandoned areas) stretching deep into the deserts.

Interesting plot possibilities.
"Er, yeah, the ancient artifact we need is in the mayor's office."
"Then why not just get it?"
"The first mayor's office. Deep into the desert and by now probably collapsed and/or burned by heat and neglect, dozens of miles from here."
"Oh my...."
I really like the idea of "cities-as-rings", which is what this would eventually turn into. Eventually you'll be building on the ruins of the previous city.

Actually, even before that, someone half-way around the world is going to be building on the ruins of your city, only to abandon them as they come back towards you.

That would make every city have an opposite on the other side of the ring; kind of interesting.

Of course, that all assumes that the time in the inhospitable zone doesn't destroy the cities utterly before they return to the habitable area.

Flickerdart
2010-03-28, 11:12 AM
An interesting thing to note then is that at the poles (the geographical, not solar poles) the rotation makes your city go in circles, not slip into the uninhabitable areas. The civilizations here could be considerably ancient, with equatorial civilizations being the least mature.

Zellic Solis
2010-03-28, 11:23 AM
Pressure does cause heat due to the internal repulsive forces between atoms. As force increases, the atoms push harder against each other due to magnetic (in the case of electron clouds) or strong nuclear (holding the nuclei together) forces. This creates heat. In the case of water, the heat allows the breaking of rigid hydrogen bonds that allow the water molecules to occupy a lower volume, reducing the amount of pressure. So water can actually be colder than ice provided there is enough pressure.

Incidentally, pressure is also why the core of the sun can undergo fusion at a measely 15 million degrees K while scientists have to heat it to temperatures in excess of 165 million degrees K. We don't have ridiculous amounts of pressure squeezing Hydrogen nuclei together.

a_humble_lich
2010-03-28, 11:59 AM
I wouldn't say that pressure creates heat. However, pressure and temperature are related, and high pressures can have effects which look like heat is created.

Specifically, putting ice under pressure will lower the melting point of the ice and possibly cause it to melt. But this is a special property of water and due to the fact that water expands when it is frozen.

As to the original question of how thick the ice would have to be, it would depend a lot on the temperature of the ice.

Zen Master
2010-03-28, 02:39 PM
I wouldn't say that pressure creates heat. However, pressure and temperature are related, and high pressures can have effects which look like heat is created.

Specifically, putting ice under pressure will lower the melting point of the ice and possibly cause it to melt. But this is a special property of water and due to the fact that water expands when it is frozen.

As to the original question of how thick the ice would have to be, it would depend a lot on the temperature of the ice.

And the temperature of whatever is below the ice. But yes.

Hm, I think my mother is the one who told me pressure creates heat. Basically, the constance of energy means that for that to be the case, the heat must be converted from something else. So hm.

When I was a kid, I was at a scrapyard. They had huge piles of metal debris of various sorts - and these piles were hot to the touch, and smoking. A guy working there told me that at the bottom of the pile, it was hundreds of degrees warm. Due to pressure.

I really should look into this more deeply. Unless someone here actually knows?

Anyways, all this science really isn't the point. Creating a world that is visually dramatic is (well, that's my attraction anyways).

I've actually drawn it, on my whiteboard, with schematics showing weather and so on. I really like this idea =)

jseah
2010-03-28, 03:27 PM
Constant pressure creating heat is impossible, via 1st Law of Thermodynamics.

Increasing pressure creates heat. (by converting the energy exerted by the force x compression distance)

Fendalus
2010-03-28, 10:38 PM
How wide would the habitable zone on such a planet be? A few hundred km? Less?

a_humble_lich
2010-03-28, 11:24 PM
As wide as you want it to be :smallsmile:

Realistically, it would vary widely with the brightness of the star, the distance to the star, the size and shape of the planet, and the thickness of the atmosphere. The last one especially is important with a thick enough atmosphere you could have the whole planet habitable, as the atmosphere would transport heat to the far side.

If Earth were tidally locked and make some simple assumptions we can calculate the width of the habitable zone. Assume that everything in "twilight" is habitable. On real Earth, twilight lasts about a half hour. It that time the Earth moves 7.5 degrees around it axis. That means on our tidally locked planet an arc of 7.5 degrees will be habitable. If the planet is the same size/shape as Earth this is a width of 500 miles.

Realistically is implausible that a planet like Earth would be tidally locked because it has such weak tidal effects with the sun. However, if it were smaller and very non-spherical, or much closer with a dimmer star it might happen.

Irreverent Fool
2010-03-29, 01:16 AM
Constant pressure creating heat is impossible, via 1st Law of Thermodynamics.

Increasing pressure creates heat. (by converting the energy exerted by the force x compression distance)

Right. That's where the confusion comes in because I think most of were taught that "pressure creates heat" using nothing but examples of increasing pressure which is relieved and in turn fueled with some other matter to produce more pressure and heat, etc. (Like volcanoes).

But one might assume that there is some process of sublimation in the form of glacial movements, which means that the ice sheets would be melting at some point anyway, right? Without some form of ice melt, would the world still be habitable in a way that is recognizable to normal humans? (Since magic can make any world 'habitable', at least small portions at a time)

I don't know if I'm contributing anything here, but I'm intrigued by the idea of this campaign world.

obnoxious
sig

Lycanthromancer
2010-03-29, 01:21 AM
So does this world spin at all?

...What would a world be like where a day takes a full year, such that the world is rotating around the sun that doesn't otherwise spin at all?

EvilBloodGnome
2010-03-29, 02:06 AM
Technically, having a day that takes a full year is the definition of a tidally locked body. It takes just as long for it to rotate on its own axis as it does for it to rotate around what it's orbiting. That way a face of the body is constantly towards the thing it's orbiting (in this case a sun).

A body that didn't revolve at all but was in the orbit of a sun would have visible nights and days, just that it would take an entire year's time for them to cycle. Which would pretty much make it uninhabitable as one side would get baked for half a year while the other cooled down and eventually froze, with no Twilight Town in the middle.

But back to the tidally locked setting, we've been science-ing it up for some time now. And already many possibilities. I do wonder where he takes it.

Kaun
2010-03-29, 02:13 AM
I am not sure if this has been mentioned but i belive 2000 AD did a one of set of strips on exactly this kind of world.

From memory there where humans living along the ring and i belive the ice side had deamns inhabiting it.

Ut was so long since i read it that i can rember tho.

Malificus
2010-03-29, 02:39 AM
Come up with as many names for slight variations of daylight as you can. The dark and light side have 1 name for the entire thing, but the habitable meridian should have a variety of names to distinguish slight variations of sunset, since it never changes unless you actively move.

Dilb
2010-03-29, 03:34 AM
Pressure does cause heat due to the internal repulsive forces between atoms. As force increases, the atoms push harder against each other due to magnetic (in the case of electron clouds) or strong nuclear (holding the nuclei together) forces. This creates heat. In the case of water, the heat allows the breaking of rigid hydrogen bonds that allow the water molecules to occupy a lower volume, reducing the amount of pressure. So water can actually be colder than ice provided there is enough pressure.

That's ... really really wrong. Pressure is force over an area. To create heat energy, you need work, which is force through a distance. Squishing things together involves a distance: the squishing distance. This is how a gas can heat up when compressed. For a glacier, even a planet-spanning one, the ice will not be squished down enough to do much work, so there won't be much heat created. And the heat will only be generated once anyway, so in the long run it won't matter.

For something like scrap metal, or even play-dough, the material is practically incompressible. If you have a loose pile of it you can squish it together by bending the stuff into a different shape: in this case it moves sideways against itself, so friction-like forces cause it to heat up.

Atoms mostly repel each other due to the electric force of their electrons, but there are also some effects due to electrons being fermions: they literally push away from each due to a funny property of quantum mechanics. It takes an unfathomable amount of pressure to get them closer together: even at the centre of the earth, the pressure isn't high enough: the density of the hot, high pressure iron at the centre of the earth is lower than cold iron here on the surface. You need large stars to start to significantly compress solids, and you need even bigger stars before the nuclei start to press into each other.

Compressing ice to make water only works down to about -20 Celsius, and works more because it's packed into a different shape, rather than because the electrons are being squished together. After than different types of ice are formed. You even get ice at temperatures above zero if you compress it too much.

However, depending on how thick the ocean is, the bottom might be liquid either from circulation from the warm side, or geothermal heat from underneath.


Incidentally, pressure is also why the core of the sun can undergo fusion at a measely 15 million degrees K while scientists have to heat it to temperatures in excess of 165 million degrees K. We don't have ridiculous amounts of pressure squeezing Hydrogen nuclei together.

The reason we use high temperature is because the sun is incredibly slow at producing energy. A human body produces more heat than an equal volume of the core of the sun. Since we would like a fusion power plant to occupy considerably less volume than the entire earth, we need to make it work a bit faster.

Back on topic (i.e. mostly baseless speculation), without a day-night cycle I imagine the weather would be remarkably consistent. As you go from sunward to darkward, you might have places that are always dry, then places that get some light rain, then places that get constant storms (but not thunderstorms: thunderstorms are generally caused by air rising extremely quickly in a certain place, but air never rises in the twilight zone: the wind is always darkwardly). At the end, in the dark side there would be a constant snowfall, creating either a giant glacier covering the entire darkside, or possibly a glacier ring around a cold but dry centre.

Depending on how easy it is to get to the darkward side, you could have a scientific/religious outpost dedicated to studying the stars: people can't live there, but send expeditions or supply ships to a base. Seeing a black sky with those points of light that move throughout the year, unlike the fixed sun, would be incredibly weird. It's also a perfect place to put eldritch horrors: it's a literal land of eternal cold and darkness.

Going around the twilight zone, the weather would be greatly influenced by mountains. A large mountain range more sunward could cause a rain shadow where a semi-tropical jungle could be, while a mountain more darkward would give rise to more of a temperate rain forest.

Lycanthromancer
2010-03-29, 10:12 AM
Unless you want the entire planet to be completely devoid of liquid water eventually, you'll need some mechanic to return frozen water sunward in a timely manner; otherwise, the entire planet's water supply (or at least, all of the water that reaches the surface at any point) is going to be locked into the icecap over the lee of the planet.

You're going to have three layers of air:

1.) The air rises into the upper atmosphere on the sunward side of the planet, taking huge amounts of evaporated water back toward the equator, and then over toward the coldest regions of darkward, dropping some of it in the twilight zone before dumping the rest of it as snow and ice in the cold dark (and then sinking as it gets colder). This is the warmest air, higher in the atmosphere.

2. The air that reaches the dark side of the planet cools and sinks toward the ground (generally after it dumps its dihydrogen monoxide somewhere along the way), and heads back toward the equator along the ground, which will be cold and dry, and will head over toward the sun due to the air behind pushing it along. It'll pick up more and more moisture as it warms up, leaving it more and more muggy as it goes (because warmer air can hold more water, the environments will get more muggy but there will be less precipitation as you go along). You'll have plants that absorb water from the air, and will likely store large amounts in big bulbous bases, which is where the animals have to find their water, much like you do with cacti.

3. The layer between the two other layers will be a constant broiling plane of rolling clouds, as the hot wet air of the upper atmosphere meets the cold dry air nearer the ground. It will become more and more homogenized between the first two layers as you near the poles, where the weather calms significantly. Near the equator, the weather gets worse and worse, and you'll get more and more hugely violent storms (which will drop a lot of rain, but by no means all of it). They'll rival or surpass the strongest tornadoes and hurricanes here on Earth, and will be larger, longer, more frequent, and more powerful, and they'll originate between layers #1 and 2. Of course, these storms get worse the faster the planet spins, but they are driven by huge volumes of moving air regardless.

Now, some interesting effects of this depend mostly on just how hot it gets toward the sun, and just how cold it gets away from it. If life as we know it can still survive on the part of the planet facing the sun, you'll have the air rising at the pole itself, causing massive updrafts of humid air, and windstorms with huge velocities. If the temperature is considerably hotter, the hot moist air will rise in a ring around the pole instead, leaving a round area of incredibly hot dry still air, instead. The hotter it is on that side of the planet the larger the circle of still air.

Something similar happens on the other end of the planet, though the windstorms will be downdrafts. If the cold reaches a certain point, you'll have a still frozen world that is dry as can be, surrounded by a ring of dry downdrafts, and that ring is surrounded (at a distance) by constant storms of ice and snow, dumping more and more frozen water onto a massive glacier.

Just how big these rings are depend on the size of the planet, its distance from the sun (and the sun's size), and the thickness of the atmosphere (since larger planets will have larger rings at each end, and thicker atmospheres diffuse heat better, and result in less violent weather).

Those windstorms surrounding the doldrums at either end of the planet will either be purely vertical movement (if the planet doesn't spin on its axis), or will swirl around the poles of the planet's axis (if it does). If there's a tilt to the planet's axis (if it spins), you'll have the doldrum zone wobble quite a lot, which could severely impact the air currents heading back toward the equator, which could alter the seasons considerably, depending on just where all of the moisture is headed. You wouldn't end up with Spring/Summer/Fall/Winter, but you would have variations on Rainy/Stormy/Dry/Calm (which can be in any order at all, and that order can vary widely even in nearby climates, since they depend completely on where moisture and air are being channeled, due to what the terrain is like nearer the poles. This would affect animals and plants greatly, and you'd have a wildly divergent set of ecosystems very close to each other because of it.

I could very well be wrong, but this is how I think it would work.

Flickerdart
2010-03-29, 10:18 AM
So you have not one but two naturally formed areas that are unreachable due to powerful storms? These plot hooks practically write themselves.

Lycanthromancer
2010-03-29, 10:30 AM
So you have not one but two naturally formed areas that are unreachable due to powerful storms? These plot hooks practically write themselves.Oh, indeed. You could very well have one massive tornado around each pole hundreds or thousands of miles wide, with a calm center nearly devoid of wind and water. One would suck you in and throw you high into the upper atmosphere, where the other would blow you away from it toward the ground, the air filled with scouring dust; if you were flying, it would suck you in and blast you back out at hundreds of miles per hour.

You'd also have funky warping in the planet's gravitational field, depending on the lay of the land and whether the planet spins or not. You could very well have a natural satellite (ie, a moon) that gets funneled into sitting at one end of the planet or the other, which could have interesting effects on the planet's ecology and possibly the emergence of magic on the planet as well. Psionics would emerge first, as the electromagnetic energies channel themselves spontaneously, likely warping DNA and brainwaves as it goes, with arcane spellcasting being an artificial means of harnessing that same energy through equations and alchemical items. Divine would come later, as the most powerful psionic and arcane casters rose in power, and began diffusing the energy into followers before it overwhelms them and makes 'em explode.

...Just a thought.

CockroachTeaParty
2010-03-29, 02:35 PM
I'd have to draw the line on the science somewhere, since I imagine players would not care about the specifics.

But I've been pleasantly surprised by the response to this thread. There's a lot of geeks here. :smalltongue:

Zen Master
2010-03-29, 02:52 PM
I'd have to draw the line on the science somewhere, since I imagine players would not care about the specifics.

But I've been pleasantly surprised by the response to this thread. There's a lot of geeks here. :smalltongue:

Geeks? Hmf! :p

Anyways, I just have such graphic pictures of how this planet would look. Perpetual stormy skies, land blasted continually by wind. Towns could be built in canyons or the lee of mountains to escape the wind - but farms would need to light of the sun to grow anything, and protection from the wind also means living in darkness.

Hm, people would look different. City dwellers (if they chose to build in the shadows of mountains) would be pale, while farmers would be dark and weather bitten.

With the habitable zone taking up a relatively minor part of the planet, (some) ressources might be scarce. This might provide incentive to travel into sunside, risking heat storms (or what ever).

Excession
2010-03-29, 03:12 PM
A tidally locked world has a "day" rotation equal to it's year. That's how it keeps one side facing the sub. I can't see there being too much rotation in these storms.

Some have suggested a world with it's axis facing constantly toward the sun, but that's not reasonable afaik. Taking the example of Uranus, it's axis does in fact face the sun at times, but only around the solstices. At the equinoxes the sun faces the equator so you get a normal day/night cycle. At different points around the orbit, the axis looks something like this:





↑ ☼ ↑




I think if you want to stay close to physics you need a non-rotating tidally locked world. Sticking close to physics being completely optional of course.

Lycanthromancer
2010-03-29, 03:16 PM
A tidally locked world has a "day" rotation equal to it's year. That's how it keeps one side facing the sub. I can't see there being too much rotation in these storms.

Some have suggested a world with it's axis facing constantly toward the sun, but that's not reasonable afaik. Taking the example of Uranus, it's axis does in fact face the sun at times, but only around the solstices. At the equinoxes the sun faces the equator so you get a normal day/night cycle. At different points around the orbit, the axis looks something like this:





↑ ☼ ↑




I think if you want to stay close to physics you need a non-rotating tidally locked world. Sticking close to physics being completely optional of course.That would depend, really. If the world's axis always pointed toward the sun (it's spinning on its axis while it's axis is spinning on a secondary axis, with THAT axis keeping the first axis always pointing toward the sun) that would work, and it's not even unbelievable. Certainly not as unbelievable as a world with intelligent life in the first place, anyway.


I'd have to draw the line on the science somewhere, since I imagine players would not care about the specifics.

But I've been pleasantly surprised by the response to this thread. There's a lot of geeks here. :smalltongue:They might not care about the specific science behind it, but you'd have answers to their questions if they did. Plus, with all this stuff thought out, you'd have an internally consistent world, and can use all the little details to work out other details. Plus, the idea of, say, the electromagnetic currents of a statically-placed moon at one of the poles would alter the history of how the world formed, so you could toss out little hints here and there for them to figure it out on their own, if they want to think about it much.

It's the little details that matter for a deep, immersive experience, and you won't have big plot holes that develop that you'll have to fill in.

Iceforge
2010-03-29, 03:17 PM
Yet they would still grow old and die. I think marking the passage of time is a cornerstone of any mortal race.

Perhaps if the world had a moon or two that orbited the planet? The moons might create 'shadow zones,' eclipses, and other phenomena that would mark the passage of time. Perhaps they have magical properties, or are linked to other planes of existence?

Also, moons reflect sunlight, so the moons could alter the brightness depending on it's cycle.

One slightly reflective moon passing every 24 hours could mark a day, while a slow moving more shiny one could mark the "seasons", which would most likely be split in 3, sort of "Acending", "Decending" and "Resting"(For when it is out of sight on the other side of the planet) and if that orbits once a year, you got a reason to mark the period of time we know as a year as something significant

Lycanthromancer
2010-03-29, 03:25 PM
Also, moons reflect sunlight, so the moons could alter the brightness depending on it's cycle.

One slightly reflective moon passing every 24 hours could mark a day, while a slow moving more shiny one could mark the "seasons", which would most likely be split in 3, sort of "Acending", "Decending" and "Resting"(For when it is out of sight on the other side of the planet) and if that orbits once a year, you got a reason to mark the period of time we know as a year as something significantGood point. If there were two moons at some point, and one of them shattered (which would be a good way to tie into the cataclysm that turned this into a tidally-locked world), you could have the debris be really reflective, and they could give enough light to (just barely) see on the surface on the dark side. It's still deep night, but you'd have a belt of reflective chunks of stone floating overhead, which could give some wonderful descriptive text. Plus, a giant dark moon goddess hanging ominously up there, blocking out the comforting belt of sparkling light.

jiriku
2010-03-29, 03:31 PM
If the atmosphere is thick enough and the amount of sunlight energy transferred low enough, your entire planet is habitable, as mentioned. Combine this with an extremely large volume of water, and the sunward side contains a handful of super-tropical archipeligos buffetted by frequent (or in places continual) storms, especially if the planet has a large, close moon to generate a tide. Undersea travel and even hidden undersea cities might become desirable as a means of escaping the terrible storms. If the moon is close enough, wizards could even use it as a means of transitting the impassable border between light and dark: teleport to the moon, wait for it to orbit around to the dark side, then teleport back down to the surface.

Bibliomancer
2010-03-29, 03:32 PM
To widen the area of the habitable zone and increase the severity of the weather, consider giving the planet a tilt to its axis well in excess of earth's 22.5 degrees. If you increased the tilt to thirty or forty, seasons would be magnified, giving you a way to set dates, as well as creating a natural cycle of expansion and growth in summer contrasted with retreat and hibernation in the winter. If you increased the length of the year to around four earth years, Spring, Summer, Fall, and Winter would each be a year long, with their own distinct personalities and sets of adventure hooks.

The "Equator" would be in the center of the habitable zone and would be where the majority of the population is based, while on the fringes (and the distance between the two could approach a thousand miles, even on an Earth-sized planet) certain settlements might only experience a few months of light or dark each cycle before being again covered in ice or sand.

I attended an astronomy public lecture last year that presented the work of a study speculating on the conditions of a planet like this (specifically an earth sized planet very close to a red dwarf). Their models actually indicated that the upper atmosphere would distribute heat better than previously predicted, although the affects on the surface would be unclear. So, consider an aerial civilization that is the only one to know the full surface of the planet, and the PCs must contact the wind-riders to gain transport to the heart of Sunward Pole.*

*Hypothetically, East and West Poles would now exist, as would Sunward and Iceward. The Sunward would be the hottest place on the planet, the Iceward the coldest, and the East and West Poles would be the most habitable places in the equatorial region.


Good point. If there were two moons at some point, and one of them shattered (which would be a good way to tie into the cataclysm that turned this into a tidally-locked world), you could have the debris be really reflective, and they could give enough light to (just barely) see on the surface on the dark side. It's still deep night, but you'd have a belt of reflective chunks of stone floating overhead, which could give some wonderful descriptive text. Plus, a giant dark moon goddess hanging ominously up there, blocking out the comforting belt of sparkling light.

This seems reminiscent of the Ring of Siberys in Eberron, and you could easily adapt some of the concepts of the latter to it. Perhaps the Ring has prophetic qualities, and the PCs must travel to deep into the Ice the learn of the only way to save their city from the sand.

Flickerdart
2010-03-29, 03:55 PM
Y'know, this actually gives an excuse for a place to have seasons that never change throughout the course of an adventure. Or even weather conditions that stay identical over time.

RandomNPC
2010-03-29, 05:16 PM
I know this is a little off topic, or atleast a change to the topic, but what if we turn the world ninety degrees, so instead of a rotational axis pointing at the sun we have it so the equator lines up with the sun. Basicaly the sun rises in the south, it's freezing out, it gets warm, maybe 90F by noon, back to 75F by end of day, sun sets in the north, and all night it gets colder and colder untill the sun comes up again.

Back on topic, I've been toying with the idea but haven't given it much thought. All toghether I think what we have in reality is the best we can hope for. In the OP if I understand right the sun would cook the surface except near the dawn/dusk line, in the idea I just posted crops would either burn up or freeze on day one, depending when they were planted.

EvilBloodGnome
2010-03-29, 05:19 PM
They might not care about the specific science behind it, but you'd have answers to their questions if they did.

I'm not entirely certain of this, actually. Only the most detailed oriented people will ask much about the science of the world and we've already delved into that a lot. And the people inhabiting the planet wouldn't know as much as we do most likely. They have magic to distract them from hard science. Shouldn't let that sort of thing distract from a good story.


I attended an astronomy public lecture last year that presented the work of a study speculating on the conditions of a planet like this (specifically an earth sized planet very close to a red dwarf). Their models actually indicated that the upper atmosphere would distribute heat better than previously predicted, although the affects on the surface would be unclear. So, consider an aerial civilization that is the only one to know the full surface of the planet, and the PCs must contact the wind-riders to gain transport to the heart of Sunward Pole.*

*Hypothetically, East and West Poles would now exist, as would Sunward and Iceward. The Sunward would be the hottest place on the planet, the Iceward the coldest, and the East and West Poles would be the most habitable places in the equatorial region.

This idea I like, actually. Excuse to include raptorans into the setting. Maybe with air elemental touches.

This setting seems to be shaping up in interesting ways. I'm almost temped to try something like it myself. Moon shadows to cross the desert, land wars over a small strip of habitable land, air folk aloof of the ground wars, ancient remnants of civilizations consumed by the desert and tundra, ravaging storms and eerie eternal twilight. Chock full of flavor.

One thing, though. Large bodies of water seem unlikely as most of the world's water would be caught up on the ice side. Although rivers seem likely, possibly giant fjords from the encroaching and departing ice packs. Most you could hope for is perhaps a small sea.

And as long as we're talking aerial civilizations, underground ones seem a logical consequence of a world like this. Drow seem like they would have a great deal of space to use on both sides of the world and their civilizations might be the only safe passage into the harsh sides to rummage through the old parts of the belt civilization that was consumed by the ice/desert.

Kobolds, too. Although as reptiles they would favor the desert side. They along with lizardmen (read: Viashino (http://img28.imageshack.us/img28/3281/20090317125336viashinos.jpg)) might be the major desert civilizations.

Subotei
2010-03-29, 05:43 PM
One thing, though. Large bodies of water seem unlikely as most of the world's water would be caught up on the ice side. Although rivers seem likely, possibly giant fjords from the encroaching and departing ice packs. Most you could hope for is perhaps a small sea.


I'd expect most of the precipitation to happen at the 'equator' as the warm air from the bright side meets the cold air being sucked in from the dark side. However without much variation in the atmosphere, I doubt there would be much weather to speak off - a stability would establish very quickly with no spin - constant drizzle at the equator. I would expect the equatorial region to be a miserable wet place - a bit like Scotland in the winter.

The dark side could be a cold yet arid region, with most of the water on the warmer side. There could be massive build-ups of snow and ice at (or just over) the equator, trailing off rapidly on the cold side. Local geography would determine which way any ice moved.

Lycanthromancer
2010-03-29, 05:56 PM
I know this is a little off topic, or atleast a change to the topic, but what if we turn the world ninety degrees, so instead of a rotational axis pointing at the sun we have it so the equator lines up with the sun. Basicaly the sun rises in the south, it's freezing out, it gets warm, maybe 90F by noon, back to 75F by end of day, sun sets in the north, and all night it gets colder and colder untill the sun comes up again.

Back on topic, I've been toying with the idea but haven't given it much thought. All toghether I think what we have in reality is the best we can hope for. In the OP if I understand right the sun would cook the surface except near the dawn/dusk line, in the idea I just posted crops would either burn up or freeze on day one, depending when they were planted.Um...

Assuming I understand you correctly...that's pretty much what our world is like, except our axis is tilted a little. Spinning in that way just means that E and W become the new N and S, and the temperatures would basically be much as ours are (but with less variance in seasons if there's little to no tilting of the axis.

CockroachTeaParty
2010-03-29, 07:24 PM
I actually like the idea of a mega-tilt more and more. Seasons that last stupid amounts of time... Perhaps Westeros and the rest of the world of A Song of Ice and Fire is tidally locked? (summers and winters last years in that series)

EvilBloodGnome
2010-03-29, 08:23 PM
That could work. And if the world is tilted and wobbled, you get more twilight belt.

You also have outer regions of the twilight belt that are really, really ragged weather-wise. Half the year being Death Valley, half the year being the Yukon in the winter.

Although we can't forget the transitional seasons. For some reason autumn in the Twilight Land seems rather appealing to me. Thoughts of Cheydinhal from the Elder Scrolls series.

Springtime makes me think, though. Flora and fauna will be very different. Without true day cycles and with less sunlight both will be very different. Things that require lots of energy plant-wise, like sentient plants, are likely a no go without a wizard being involved. Either that or meat eating plants being a good thing to consider.

Extreme diurnal or nocturnal animals are likely out of the picture or need to be retooled. Low-light vision will be very common (perhaps even a trait humans and halflings have developed if they exist in the setting). Mooncycles should make for something that effects the brain telling it to sleep if you want moons to be timetables. (I still like the two moon idea; one that cycles around the planet once a 24-hour sequence, another that takes perhaps a full year to help with months and to perhaps cast a shadow to allow further exploration of the sun side). For some reason I see most of the twilight belt being temperate more than tropical, so lots of deciduous forests.

More things to consider: Sunside being sort of a mini Plane of Fire and the Darkside being a mini Plane of Ice/Darkness. Warforged could survive in either one perhaps. Hot loving species could live further towards the sun than normal (lizardmen and kobolds already said, but perhaps even dragons and pyrohydras) and cold-enduring species suited to the dark further on the ice side (dwarves, anything from Frostburn).

Ormur
2010-03-29, 08:27 PM
I actually like the idea of a mega-tilt more and more. Seasons that last stupid amounts of time... Perhaps Westeros and the rest of the world of A Song of Ice and Fire is tidally locked? (summers and winters last years in that series)

The seasons in Westeros are irregular and I think George R.R. Martin has hinted that the reasons for it are magical rather than natural.

Flickerdart
2010-03-29, 08:30 PM
An interesting thing to note would be that people could very well adapt to significantly longer operating days, or otherwise very brief periods of activity and brief periods of rest. In either case, spellcasters that need their 8 hours of rest every day will be out of place, because in the latter case a "day" can easily be 2 hours long and in the former upwards of a hundred.

Lycanthromancer
2010-03-29, 08:37 PM
An interesting thing to note would be that people could very well adapt to significantly longer operating days, or otherwise very brief periods of activity and brief periods of rest. In either case, spellcasters that need their 8 hours of rest every day will be out of place, because in the latter case a "day" can easily be 2 hours long and in the former upwards of a hundred.Clerics may never get their spells at all, since most can only do so at a very specific time of day, such as sunrise or sunset.

Hope those Persisted spells aren't disjoined Mr. Cleric, because they're all you'll ever get.

Flickerdart
2010-03-29, 08:49 PM
I'd imagine quite a few deities would have followers prepare spells at high noon.

Fendalus
2010-03-29, 08:49 PM
Clerics may never get their spells at all, since most can only do so at a very specific time of day, such as sunrise or sunset.

Hope those Persisted spells aren't disjoined Mr. Cleric, because they're all you'll ever get.

Well, that would obviously need to be fixed. Taking the two moons suggestion and using one to count out 24 hour intervals, the choice of time may be determined by that moon. Of course, this does leave the problem of how you determine the time when the fast moon is out of view... Maybe take the suggestion of a ring of debris and have that be opposite the fast moon? Would lead to a very interesting orbital view, with two moons and a debris field around a planet split into a permanent desert/storm and the other side a permanent glacier.

Hm... if the planet had a slight wobble, just enough to expose sections of the twilight to sun for part of the year, that period might be the crop-growing season. The plants might be able to lie dormant during the remainder of the year, with that period being characterized by rapid growth, as I expect any photosynthesis that they use would have to be much more efficient than any form on earth to survive the twilight periods between the light breaks.

Zovc
2010-03-29, 08:57 PM
The entire thread is "tl;dr," so I'll go ahead and apologize to anyone who may have suggested this:

Perhaps the 'lit' surface of the planet isn't so hot as to make the planet uninhabitable? Also, perhaps the planet's atmosphere is thick enough to warm the dark side of the planet enough to make at least the edges of it explorable (maybe not habitable).

I don't know if you were going for a 'ringworld' with your original idea, but this is just a thought.

RandomNPC
2010-03-29, 08:59 PM
Um...

Assuming I understand you correctly...that's pretty much what our world is like, except our axis is tilted a little. Spinning in that way just means that E and W become the new N and S, and the temperatures would basically be much as ours are (but with less variance in seasons if there's little to no tilting of the axis.

trying to clarify.

Immagine if our world turned so the rotational axis was where where currently think the equator is. in such a manner that instead of going around and around the world like we do, we would go over and under the world.

Your sun would rise and you would be at what we know as the north pole, and your sun would set with you at the south pole.

Ok, I got it! turn a globe so the equator goes up and down, then spin it. Immagine how that would go. You could live near the rotational axis better than the equator, but i don't think it'd actually be viable.

Bibliomancer
2010-03-29, 09:05 PM
Hm... if the planet had a slight wobble, just enough to expose sections of the twilight to sun for part of the year, that period might be the crop-growing season. The plants might be able to lie dormant during the remainder of the year, with that period being characterized by rapid growth, as I expect any photosynthesis that they use would have to be much more efficient than any form on earth to survive the twilight periods between the light breaks.

Not necessarily mocu more efficient though. The Arctic has plants that hiberate in the winter and grow in the summer. They are admittedly sparse (lichens, not trees), but they are sufficient to support huge herds of migratory caribou.

Speaking of which, migration should be a large theme on this planet, with animals moving to wherever plants grow and entire civilizations following them. Most cities would be partly mobile, or at least have two or three alternate locations. A truly stationary city would be an object of wonder and envy, and would probably be primarily magical.

Depending on how far the planet was tilted, you could end up with a habitable zone of around a tenth of the landmass, one tenth permanently frozen, and another tenth permanently scorched. The remainder would vary back and forth. Thus, most humanoids would live near the East and West Poles, while the North and South Poles are places of extreme shifts and the Sunward and Iceward Poles would be places of danger and mystery.

I like the idea of two moons. Someone earlier mentioned that perhaps the planet hadn't always been this way, and the shattering of a third moon (the twin of the Timekeeper) threw the planet off its axis a few millenia ago (long enough for all but elves and dwarves to have forgotten all but the baguette scraps of folklore).

Secondary question: would it be possible to reasonably and logically make the Timekeeper habitable? If so, then there could have been a war between the two habitable moons over shares of the planet's surface, and both were destroyed, leaving only their colonists. If so, it would be important to work out which species came from which location.

I'd suggest humans from the intact moon, and halflings and gnomes from the shattered moon, with elves and dwarves being the original inhabitants of the planet, along with orcs. This could result in an interesting racial unity between the three against the newcomers, whom they blame for turning most of the world into an inhospitable wasteland. To develop on that further, dwarves could have adapted to the Ice and the elves to the Sand (a la Fremen of Dune), mainly leaving the orcs to battle the humans, gnomes and halflings. Of course, the old interlunar enemies have forgotten their differences in the face of the orcish onslaught.


Ok, I got it! turn a globe so the equator goes up and down, then spin it. Immagine how that would go. You could live near the rotational axis better than the equator, but i don't think it'd actually be viable.

I'm fairly certain he understood, since I agree with him that your proposed model wouldn't result in the extreme weather that we wanted. In fact, from the point of view of someone on the planet, the sun could look rather normal.

Lycanthromancer
2010-03-29, 09:34 PM
Not necessarily mocu more efficient though. The Arctic has plants that hiberate in the winter and grow in the summer. They are admittedly sparse (lichens, not trees), but they are sufficient to support huge herds of migratory caribou.

Speaking of which, migration should be a large theme on this planet, with animals moving to wherever plants grow and entire civilizations following them. Most cities would be partly mobile, or at least have two or three alternate locations. A truly stationary city would be an object of wonder and envy, and would probably be primarily magical.Very true. However, migratory doesn't necessarily mean primitive (as it normally does in such stories).

The populace could be hunter/gatherers that regularly band together to bring down some fricken huge animal or other for food, but that doesn't mean they don't have creature-comforts, especially if most everyone is generally part of a caravan-type civilization.

Though I would imagine some few would intentionally deprive themselves of magical creature-comforts, much like some people IRL go without electricity and modern technology.

The highest tech levels would, however, generally be in places that don't move, and they'd likely be protected by vastly powerful wards. In my head I see massive domes of iridescent green energy that can be seen for dozens, possibly hundreds, of miles around, which are generated by mythals that may be ancient and forgotten magitechnology, from back before the cataclysm, some of which are in use and habitable, and others act as barriers and haven't been breached since The Last Age. Perhaps some of them hold wonders and horrors and eldritch abominations (which will, of course, be set loose for the players to hide from, train for, and perhaps eventually kill be slaughtered by).


Depending on how far the planet was tilted, you could end up with a habitable zone of around a tenth of the landmass, one tenth permanently frozen, and another tenth permanently scorched. The remainder would vary back and forth. Thus, most humanoids would live near the East and West Poles, while the North and South Poles are places of extreme shifts and the Sunward and Iceward Poles would be places of danger and mystery.'East' and 'west' don't really work, since there's no rising or setting of the sun to speak of (unless it's referring to one of the moons? Or the moonbelt?). You'd have to go with 'sunward,' 'shadeward,' (or perhaps 'leeward'), 'widdershins,' and 'deasil,' (or maybe 'destrorotary' and 'levorotary').


I like the idea of two moons. Someone earlier mentioned that perhaps the planet hadn't always been this way, and the shattering of a third moon (the twin of the Timekeeper) threw the planet off its axis a few millenia ago (long enough for all but elves and dwarves to have forgotten all but the baguette scraps of folklore).:smallwink: :smallbiggrin: :smallsmile:


Secondary question: would it be possible to reasonably and logically make the Timekeeper habitable? If so, then there could have been a war between the two habitable moons over shares of the planet's surface, and both were destroyed, leaving only their colonists. If so, it would be important to work out which species came from which location.

I'd suggest humans from the intact moon, and halflings and gnomes from the shattered moon, with elves and dwarves being the original inhabitants of the planet, along with orcs. This could result in an interesting racial unity between the three against the newcomers, whom they blame for turning most of the world into an inhospitable wasteland. To develop on that further, dwarves could have adapted to the Ice and the elves to the Sand (a la Fremen of Dune), mainly leaving the orcs to battle the humans, gnomes and halflings. Of course, the old interlunar enemies have forgotten their differences in the face of the orcish onslaught.I like this idea, though perhaps we should put in slightly more esoteric races, to fit in with the more offbeat world?


I'm fairly certain he understood, since I agree with him that your proposed model wouldn't result in the extreme weather that we wanted. In fact, from the point of view of someone on the planet, the sun could look rather normal.I'm not even sure how seasons and weather on such a planet would work...

avr
2010-03-29, 09:46 PM
As I understand the physics:

Over time, more and more of the water is going to freeze out on the dark side far enough away from the shadow zone that it won't melt, at least at the pressure on the surface.

Eventually this is going to be a very large mass on the far side from the sun. If there's enough mass, this will be dynamically unstable.

In other words, the planet will swing around so that that mass is facing the sun again.

Fun times for those living there, obviously.

Lycanthromancer
2010-03-29, 09:53 PM
As I understand the physics:

Over time, more and more of the water is going to freeze out on the dark side far enough away from the shadow zone that it won't melt, at least at the pressure on the surface.

Eventually this is going to be a very large mass on the far side from the sun. If there's enough mass, this will be dynamically unstable.

In other words, the planet will swing around so that that mass is facing the sun again.

Fun times for those living there, obviously.It'd be so disastrous as to wipe out most inhabited worlds, and leave them reeling. The shift in weather and the resulting ice-melt would result in Waterworld-esque flooding, and you would end up with basically The End of the World (for now).

However, if the planet is spinning at a reasonable rate, it should remain fairly stable, even with the ice buildup (think about how gyroscopes work). It'd have to be spinning fast enough, though, with very little tilt; otherwise, it would probably start wobbling harder and harder, and may end up spinning out of control (maybe even crashing into one of the moons, or a nearby planet, and would quite likely lose its orbit around the sun altogether).

Yeah, very bad.

That's another reason why we need to have some sort of mechanism to return the frozen water to the warm side (or at least keep enough liquid water from going over to the dark side to keep the planet from going critical).

Bibliomancer
2010-03-29, 09:56 PM
Very true. However, migratory doesn't necessarily mean primitive (as it normally does in such stories).

The populace could be hunter/gatherers that regularly band together to bring down some fricken huge animal or other for food, but that doesn't mean they don't have creature-comforts, especially if most everyone is generally part of a caravan-type civilization.

Certainly. In fact, 'civilization' could look down on those primitives that hibernate during the Winter instead of moving like any civilized person. That suggests, to me, that the halflings are the dominant civilization, since most humans would be constantly struggling to protect their ancestral plot of land. However, the few places that are civilized AND stationary are spoken of in hushed tones, for the nomads know that they could not achieve that level of stability if they tried.


Though I would imagine some few would intentionally deprive themselves of magical creature-comforts, much like some people IRL go without electricity and modern technology.

Again, halflings get along just fine in normal D&D. Perhaps the gnomes are the halflings of the air, and are closely allied with the raptorans? In any case, you could fit quite a lot of living space into a magically-constructed wagon.


The highest tech levels would, however, generally be in places that don't move, and they'd likely be protected by vastly powerful wards. In my head I see massive domes of iridescent green energy that can be seen for dozens, possibly hundreds, of miles around, which are generated by mythals that may be ancient and forgotten magitechnology, from back before the cataclysm, some of which are in use and habitable, and others act as barriers and haven't been breached since The Last Age. Perhaps some of them hold wonders and horrors and eldritch abominations (which will, of course, be set loose for the players to hide from, train for, and perhaps eventually kill be slaughtered by).

This would certainly be appropriate. Perhaps these were the abandoned colonies of the Lunar races, now made doubly perilous by the neglected golems and the grudges of the long-lived Terran races.


'East' and 'west' don't really work, since there's no rising or setting of the sun to speak of (unless it's referring to one of the moons? Or the moonbelt?). You'd have to go with 'sunward,' 'shadeward,' (or perhaps 'leeward'), 'widdershins,' and 'deasil,' (or maybe 'destrorotary' and 'levorotary').

East and West could work. Since they isn't any rotation the twilight zone (not that Twilight Zone) would have 4 points, and the inhabitants might have used the same four words, since North would mainly mean cold. Besides, I like the sound of the West Pole, and players would certainly be able to understand what it was. Widdershins certainly wouldn't work, because it isn't spinning (although the Moon is orbiting).


:smallwink: :smallbiggrin: :smallsmile:

Apparently if you type vaguest with a b instead of a v and then spellcheck, the first option is baguette.


I like this idea, though perhaps we should put in slightly more esoteric races, to fit in with the more offbeat world?

Maybe...

How about goliaths instead of dwarves (changed to LA +0, somehow), spellscales (adjusted to be more wizard-friendly) instead of elves, raptorans as the aerial race, illumians as the lunar race that won the war but is stationary so doesn't form the main civilization (except for the two great normal cities at the East and West Poles), and the other lunar race, nomadic, being....darn. Drawing a blank. Any ideas? Preferably mammalian.


I'm not even sure how seasons and weather on such a planet would work...

I think it would be functionally identical to our own, since you still have everything getting regular doses of daylight and the seasons being caused by a slight tilt away from perpendicular. It would get rather complicated it it wasn't close to that, though.

erikun
2010-03-29, 10:14 PM
Just something to note:

Such a planet would have seasons. All celestial bodies have an elliptical orbit, with one point closest to the sun and one point farthest from the sun. We don't notice it that much on Earth because Earth is tilted - the southern hemisphere generally receives hotter summers and colder winters, because it is closer/further to the sun during those seasons.

Lycanthromancer
2010-03-29, 10:20 PM
Certainly. In fact, 'civilization' could look down on those primitives that hibernate during the Winter instead of moving like any civilized person. That suggests, to me, that the halflings are the dominant civilization, since most humans would be constantly struggling to protect their ancestral plot of land. However, the few places that are civilized AND stationary are spoken of in hushed tones, for the nomads know that they could not achieve that level of stability if they tried.Humans are good at being nomadic; we can travel very long distances fairly quickly for a land-bound animal, as our original means of hunting was simply running faster animals down in the heat of the subtropical savannas of Africa. We may not get over our territorial nature, but we'd surely get over being attached to a specific plot of land (instead seeing a large migratory path as being ours to tread).

(Assuming we go with the PHB races) I'd imagine humans would live far more on the warm and sunny side of the planet, since we're diurnal and have bodies adapted to heat. Elves would live more along the equator, given their predilection for dense forests. Dwarves would live half underground and half above it on the darker side of the world. Halflings would travel around everywhere. Orcs would likely be in territorial wars with dwarves underground. Gnomes would ride around on the air-currents in balloons. And half-elves and half-orcs were long ago killed and eaten by their kin for much-needed sustenance.


Again, halflings get along just fine in normal D&D. Perhaps the gnomes are the halflings of the air, and are closely allied with the raptorans? In any case, you could fit quite a lot of living space into a magically-constructed wagon.Agreed.


This would certainly be appropriate. Perhaps these were the abandoned colonies of the Lunar races, now made doubly perilous by the neglected golems and the grudges of the long-lived Terran races.How about extinct progenitor races, at least for some of the older ones? Perhaps the colonists started reproducing the technology in the early days of the cataclysm to protect themselves, since it wouldn't have been needed before that? The domes were originally prisons, to keep things in. Then they were adapted to keep things out. During the upheaval, some of the ancient prisons collapsed, and a few monstrosities (such as the tarrasque, some umbral blots, and perhaps a few hecatoncheires) were unleashed on the world, making the disaster worse. The hecatoncheires were trapped in the ice-fields, the umbral blots were plane shifted out or destroyed, and the tarrasque was left to its own devices.

Etc.


East and West could work. Since they isn't any rotation the twilight zone (not that Twilight Zone) would have 4 points, and the inhabitants might have used the same four words, since North would mainly mean cold. Besides, I like the sound of the West Pole, and players would certainly be able to understand what it was. Widdershins certainly wouldn't work, because it isn't spinning (although the Moon is orbiting).Well, I envision it as spinning on its axis pointing toward the sun at all times. Makes for more interesting weather, and the sun is still always in the same point in the sky. Also, you'd have a nice moonbow that orbited the planet along with one of its sister moons. Perdy.


Apparently if you type vaguest with a b instead of a v and then spellcheck, the first option is baguette.As humorous as that was, my emotifest was due to my having been the one to come up with the shattered moon/cataclysm idea. It was a plot-point in a webcomic I was working on (though since I don't have an artist [of the caliber I want or not], alas...).


Maybe...

How about goliaths instead of dwarves (changed to LA +0, somehow), spellscales (adjusted to be more wizard-friendly) instead of elves, raptorans as the aerial race, illumians as the lunar race that won the war but is stationary so doesn't form the main civilization (except for the two great normal cities at the East and West Poles), and the other lunar race, nomadic, being....darn. Drawing a blank. Any ideas? Preferably mammalian. Could do. I really like the illumians thing. Reminds me a lot of Final Fantasy IV. Maybe most of them are sleeping on the moon, with only a few (named FuSoYa, Golbez, and Cecil, maybe?) who long ago traveled to the surface, and have hidden themselves while observing the terrabound races.

Also, how about lesser planetouched and/or genasi for the nomadic tribes?


I think it would be functionally identical to our own, since you still have everything getting regular doses of daylight and the seasons being caused by a slight tilt away from perpendicular. It would get rather complicated it it wasn't close to that, though.I'd imagine, yes. But the ball would have several axes of rotation, and that does make things quite complex.

Certainly harder to predict than a planet that rotates on one axis that always points toward the sun, anyway.

PlzBreakMyCmpAn
2010-03-30, 12:44 AM
just pointing out how bilb won this thread last page :)

absolmorph
2010-03-30, 01:37 AM
Just something to note:

Such a planet would have seasons. All celestial bodies have an elliptical orbit, with one point closest to the sun and one point farthest from the sun. We don't notice it that much on Earth because Earth is tilted - the southern hemisphere generally receives hotter summers and colder winters, because it is closer/further to the sun during those seasons.
The temperature difference caused by the elliptical orbit is minuscule. Seasons are caused by the tilt in the Earth's rotational axis. At any given point in time, one hemisphere is more exposed to the sun than the other; as a result, that hemisphere is warmer, and the other is colder. Except at the equinoxes; then, the hemispheres are pretty much equally exposed.

hamishspence
2010-03-30, 04:18 AM
True about the differences being small relative to the seasonal differences.

Still, all other things being equal, the temperature extremes tend to be wider in the south.

Though that might be partly due to geography- Antarctic winter temperatures are lower than Arctic ones, but might this be partly due to the fact that Antarctica is a continent, whereas the Arctic ice cap is an ocean one?

Indon
2010-03-30, 08:27 AM
If there is a standard Underdark, or if the mantle of the planet is sufficiently fragile, the glacial sheets of ice could potentially crush the crust on the shadeward side. If it got thick enough, you'd end up with a gigantic ring of buckled crust, where the planet's shell simply collapsed. You'd end up with a massive ring-shaped crater around the leeward pole, possibly a few miles deep, filled with ice.

Bear in mind that this is only in case there's not a slow rotation beyond that swinging around the normal sunward pole.

In this case, Darkside's 'Underdark' would probably be in the glaciers itself, an essentially sealed/insulated (usually) series of pockets in the ice, recieving heat from geothermal deposits and possibly from the occasional Lightside wind (though Lightside winds are likely to be catastrophic when they happen, since they would cause meltage and flooding everywhere the current went from the Lightside wind breach to the Darkside pressure breach).

Any civilization living here is likely to fiercely revere fire, and fire-generating characters are likely to play a very prominent cultural role.

I think a sufficiently porous crust would provide for water exchange from Darkside to Lightside. Glacial water would geothermically melt further down and seep into the crust, seep through to Lightside by pressure gradient, come towards the surface and evaporate. This also provides another potential exotic inhabitable area - a series of temperate underground, underwater caverns deep beneath the Twilight ring, inhabited by hardy aquatic species (though most of the life proper would be in those caverns without actual current).

As for clerics, I imagine requirements would be simpler - just face a specific direction or be in a specific part of the Twilight ring to prepare spells. Other possibilities could be spell preparation while immersed in water or some other elemental focus.

pasko77
2010-03-30, 08:42 AM
This thread is awesome (and geeky) :)

I'll add a little bit:
the underground on the sun side would be more developed and thriving, since there would be a lot of heat passing through the surface, but not enough to be harmful. A lot of plants and fungi would develop on this, and from them, further life forms.

Kalirren
2010-03-30, 11:49 AM
You can't have a planet tidally locked to its Sun if it has moons that are gravitationally more influential due to being closer. As an example, if Earth were to become tidally locked to anything, which it can be, it would become tidally locked to the Moon, not to the Sun.

unre9istered
2010-03-30, 12:13 PM
I like the idea of the light side being a miles thick jungle like the Fire world in the Deathgate Cycle. The dark side being an ice ocean with ice ships skating all over it. Between the two a farm-able twilight patch. The center of the jungle would have a desert with volcanoes and the center of the ice ocean would be mountains of ice rising higher and higher. For extra fantasy coolness, the ice climbs so high that it has trapped the moon.

Draz74
2010-03-30, 12:26 PM
Apologies for length. Catching up on a few days of this thread.


I'm not talking about plastic flow. I'm talking about heat. Pressure creates heat. When the pressure is great enough, that is.

As others have explained, this only works with an increase in pressure, not just a constant high pressure.


Seeing a black sky with those points of light that move throughout the year, unlike the fixed sun, would be incredibly weird. It's also a perfect place to put eldritch horrors: it's a literal land of eternal cold and darkness.

Twilight dwellers would be used to seeing stars: they can see them anytime they want, around the darkside horizon. Only the bright ones, though (the ones that are visible during twilight); the number of stars deep on Darkside might be weird to them. But the way the stars shift throughout the year probably won't be a surprise.

Agreed about the eldritch horrors thing, though. In 4e-terms, Darkside is quite a paradise for Starlocks. Or, more in general, Far Realm/Aberration influence could be very strong there.

This also got me thinking more about conditions in the twilight belt. What color would the sky appear? Seems like they might always have a gorgeous sun"set" on the sunside horizon, or maybe even reddish sunset colors in all directions. Near the zenith would probably still be a deep blue, though.

Even crazier: If the sun doesn't move, shadows don't move either. Any mountain, tree, or building will have a shaded area next to it, towards Darkside, in which plants won't grow. I'm seeing civilizations with very strict zoning ordinance laws about where you can and can't build a building and therefore cast a shadow. Also, farms will mostly occur on the Sunside of the closest city. With orchards in between the farms and the cities.


Unless you want the entire planet to be completely devoid of liquid water eventually, you'll need some mechanic to return frozen water sunward in a timely manner; otherwise, the entire planet's water supply (or at least, all of the water that reaches the surface at any point) is going to be locked into the icecap over the lee of the planet.

One thing, though. Large bodies of water seem unlikely as most of the world's water would be caught up on the ice side. Although rivers seem likely, possibly giant fjords from the encroaching and departing ice packs. Most you could hope for is perhaps a small sea.
It's true that you need a return mechanism for water. But I don't think that's really all that hard.

Glacial flow is slow, but with enough glaciers -- and perhaps some coastal points where they form icebergs in large quantities -- you're already doing ok.

Then, as Dilb said, there's always the possibility of geothermal heat melting some of the lower layers of ice. Possibly forming an extensive groundwater system, which would naturally flow towards the drier parts of the planet.


Near the equator, the weather gets worse and worse, and you'll get more and more hugely violent storms (which will drop a lot of rain, but by no means all of it).

I ... think you've been led astray by the people calling the Sunside and the Darkside centers "poles," which they're absolutely not. The twilight belt is very much not the "equator."

To be tidally locked, this planet has to rotate, and has to rotate on an axis that is (more or less) perpendicular to its orbit. So its equator -- halfway between its rotational poles -- will go more or less through the centers of the Sunside and Darkside.


That would depend, really. If the world's axis always pointed toward the sun (it's spinning on its axis while it's axis is spinning on a secondary axis, with THAT axis keeping the first axis always pointing toward the sun) that would work, and it's not even unbelievable. Certainly not as unbelievable as a world with intelligent life in the first place, anyway.

Ah, that's what you were thinking. No, that violates all kinds of Conservation of Angular Momentum; it's completely impossible without some sort of external driving mechanism (which is possible, but IMHO more surprising even than intelligent life).


To widen the area of the habitable zone and increase the severity of the weather, consider giving the planet a tilt to its axis well in excess of earth's 22.5 degrees. If you increased the tilt to thirty or forty, seasons would be magnified, giving you a way to set dates, as well as creating a natural cycle of expansion and growth in summer contrasted with retreat and hibernation in the winter.
Erm. I believe giving the planet an extreme tilt like this wouldn't only not "widen" the habitable zone, it would nearly obliterate it. Now, every spot on the "habitable" belt, except the two zones right near the equator, is deep in Sunside during the summer and deep in Darkside during the winter. Yikes. You've essentially cut the planet down to those two little regions that are both equatorial and twilight-range.

Not to mention, Angular Momentum issues again. In fact it is very difficult for a tidally locked body to have any significant tilt, even as big as our earth's. I suppose it could be worked out if there was, for example, a moon with a crazy, crazy orbit to counterbalance it.


If you increased the length of the year to around four earth years, Spring, Summer, Fall, and Winter would each be a year long, with their own distinct personalities and sets of adventure hooks.

Watch out for Kepler's Third Law when you go increasing the year's length like this. Multiply the year by four, you've now put the planet about two and a half times further from its sun than we are from ours. I can't remember for certain, but I think varying the mass of the planet's star would give you some leeway here. Still, this would almost undoubtedly place the planet further out than we on earth are; and that make the tidal lock thing pretty unbelievable in general.


Their models actually indicated that the upper atmosphere would distribute heat better than previously predicted, although the affects on the surface would be unclear. So, consider an aerial civilization that is the only one to know the full surface of the planet, and the PCs must contact the wind-riders to gain transport

This idea I like, actually. Excuse to include raptorans into the setting. Maybe with air elemental touches.

Gnomes would ride around on the air-currents in balloons.

Now, that's a fun concept -- the aerial civilization that can be much more widespread than the surface dwellers. Especially if these aerial folk are more or less "trapped" within a certain stratus of altitude in their flight. ("Now little Timmy, remember, don't ever fly lower than the lowest floating platforms of our town. Or above the highest platforms. You'll get sucked into the Stormwinds and never be heard from again!")


And as long as we're talking aerial civilizations, underground ones seem a logical consequence of a world like this. Drow seem like they would have a great deal of space to use on both sides of the world and their civilizations might be the only safe passage into the harsh sides to rummage through the old parts of the belt civilization that was consumed by the ice/desert.
That's a great point that needs to be considered. This world could actually have more reason than most to have loads of Dungeons networking its underground regions.

Even the standard realism issues with producing enough food underground might be easier to work around than usual. On Sunside, even underground might be pretty warm, and you might have plant life that can essentially photosynthesize infrared light.


I'd expect most of the precipitation to happen at the 'equator' as the warm air from the bright side meets the cold air being sucked in from the dark side. However without much variation in the atmosphere, I doubt there would be much weather to speak off - a stability would establish very quickly with no spin - constant drizzle at the equator. I would expect the equatorial region to be a miserable wet place - a bit like Scotland in the winter.

I think there would still be plenty of instability in the weather. Mountains and so forth would always give the wind plenty of reason to flow in interesting eddies and currents, and if the planet has a moon (for tidal forces), you're set.

In general, though, I agree with what you're saying, especially about the habitable region being "a miserable wet place." And also about Darkside receiving little precipitation.


That could work. And if the world is tilted and wobbled, you get more twilight belt.
Again: wobbled works. Tilted really doesn't, except maybe if you have moons with super-wild orbits. And tilted would make nasty summers and nasty winters, not "more twilight belt."


You also have outer regions of the twilight belt that are really, really ragged weather-wise. Half the year being Death Valley, half the year being the Yukon in the winter. [snip] More things to consider: Sunside being sort of a mini Plane of Fire and the Darkside being a mini Plane of Ice/Darkness. Warforged could survive in either one perhaps. Hot loving species could live further towards the sun than normal (lizardmen and kobolds already said, but perhaps even dragons and pyrohydras) and cold-enduring species suited to the dark further on the ice side (dwarves, anything from Frostburn).

The impression I got was that most people were considering Sunside to be Death Valley-ish conditions, and Darkside to be "Yukon in the winter." Whereas you're talking about something much more extreme: where Sunside is perhaps 200 degrees Celsius or more, and Darkside is -100 Celsius or less.

Those truly extreme conditions are probably more realistic (though we have some room for creative license here through air thickness and composition, distance of planet from sun, and so forth). But if we're talking about really extreme temperatures on these two sides of the planet, we've got to go the whole distance. Even in a moon's shadow, caravans across Sunside are not going to happen. (Maybe you could get away with caravans underground and also in the moon's shadow.) Warforged and reptiles might be fine in a Death Valley-style Sunside, but I'm pretty sure they'd break down in the more extreme version of Sunside. It would literally be a realm fit only for [Fire] creatures like elementals.


Flora and fauna will be very different. Without true day cycles and with less sunlight both will be very different. Things that require lots of energy plant-wise, like sentient plants, are likely a no go without a wizard being involved. Either that or meat eating plants being a good thing to consider.

Extreme diurnal or nocturnal animals are likely out of the picture or need to be retooled. Low-light vision will be very common (perhaps even a trait humans and halflings have developed if they exist in the setting).
Actually, carnivorous plants will make even less sense. Unless the animals they're eating are photosynthetic. (Note that, in real life, carnivorous plants tend to happen only in climates where photosynthetic plants are also most abundant.)

Good points in general, though. The plant life will be pretty homogenous: only those species that can survive with a low level of sunlight to power them. I think there are plants that close their flowers and leaves up during the day, and open them at twilight, yes? Crepuscular plants, as it were? Now, to have realistic ecology (and mammalian civilizations) in this world at all, I think we have to assume that there are a lot of those crepuscular plants, and that this works because they can at least be "active" and taking in whatever sunlight they can get, 24/7.


Hm... if the planet had a slight wobble, just enough to expose sections of the twilight to sun for part of the year, that period might be the crop-growing season. The plants might be able to lie dormant during the remainder of the year, with that period being characterized by rapid growth, as I expect any photosynthesis that they use would have to be much more efficient than any form on earth to survive the twilight periods between the light breaks.
Or that works. :smallwink:


For some reason I see most of the twilight belt being temperate more than tropical, so lots of deciduous forests.
Yes, it would be temperate. Or rather, the middle of it would be. As you get closer to Sunside, of course you can find a narrow ring of tropical weather.


True about the differences being small relative to the seasonal differences.

Still, all other things being equal, the temperature extremes tend to be wider in the south.

Though that might be partly due to geography- Antarctic winter temperatures are lower than Arctic ones, but might this be partly due to the fact that Antarctica is a continent, whereas the Arctic ice cap is an ocean one?

Don't take the weather right at Earth's poles and assume that it applies to the whole hemispheres. I think the Southern Hemisphere actually has milder seasons, overall, than the Northern. (After all, Siberia and the Saharan are both in the Northern.)

The issue is, indeed, proximity to large amounts of water. That's precisely why Antarctica is colder than the Arctic, like you said, yes. But it's also why the water-filled South can generally be more mild than the North, in spite of being closer to the sun in the summer and further in the winter (whereas the North is the other way around).

EvilBloodGnome
2010-03-30, 12:38 PM
You can't have a planet tidally locked to its Sun if it has moons that are gravitationally more influential due to being closer. As an example, if Earth were to become tidally locked to anything, which it can be, it would become tidally locked to the Moon, not to the Sun.

This is where a wizard did it. Or perhaps a god. Or a wizard god? I forget if deities can have class levels <.<

And all very good points, Draz. Builds quite a bit of clarity. But the science we've gotten to is getting pretty hard; yeah, if the Sunside was Mercury then a caravan would be impossible even with a moonshadow. But hey, we've got a half-fey dragonwrought kobold in the party, that's what we have suspension of disbelief for.

We have a metric ton of good ideas floating around, so much so that even a few of them are scientifically plausible. But hey, if we pick some of the impossible ones for the sake of a good story or an interesting setting, I'll be the last one to start complaining.

This could very well be a different universe. So long as any planes-types spells are around, theoretically we're dealing with a multiverse. Perhaps there's something about this particular plane where the impossible is completely mundane, such as raptoran cloud folk and drow that live in glaciers and a desert that's an in-pass until a magical moon creates a shadow just habitable to go through.

Draz74
2010-03-30, 12:50 PM
That's fine; of course you're always free to break away from the science as much as you like. But the way I see it, this thread as a brainstorming session had sticking to the science as its purpose. See where that takes us, then people can deviate from it as they like.

That's certainly how I and my astrophysics degree can contribute the most. :smallwink: If I have nonscientific ideas about this type of planet, well, maybe I'll bring them up if this thread shifts to being an actual group worldbuilding project. (Though, in my experience with such threads like that, my ideas tend to be a little maverick compared with the group consensus. So I mostly think I'm better off sticking to my own worldbuilding projects.)

Besides, I think it's an interesting (and possible) challenge to stick to the science pretty closely and still come up with a fantastical world. After all, Kepler didn't write any laws contradicting the existence of Half-Fey Dragonwrought Kobolds. :smallamused:

Though it's worth pointing out that the occasional player like me could be turned off to your D&D campaign if some gross violation of physics -- like an orbit that defies conservation of angular momentum for no particular reason -- is a staple of the setting.

Lysander
2010-03-30, 01:21 PM
The sun of this planet doesn't necessarily have to be exactly like ours. Perhaps it's much smaller or much further away so the sunward side of the planet isn't completely roasted.

Instead of one big moon why not have hundreds of tiny moons? Together they might reflect enough light (and heat) on the dark side to keep the atmosphere unfrozen and allow a small amount of life.

Also make the planet very geologically active in places as suggested. There can be habitable areas on the dark side heated by hot springs. These can also contribute to the atmosphere remaining unfrozen there.

Another possibility is to make this a binary system. The planet orbits the nearer star, but the second star also provides heat and illumination. It sometimes can be seen from the dark side but it's so distant it never appears much brighter than the real world's moon. This still provides enough heat and light to keep things merely arctic and not unsurvivable.

hamishspence
2010-03-30, 01:49 PM
Don't take the weather right at Earth's poles and assume that it applies to the whole hemispheres. I think the Southern Hemisphere actually has milder seasons, overall, than the Northern. (After all, Siberia and the Saharan are both in the Northern.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seasons

Specifically:


Seasonal weather differences between hemispheres are further caused by the elliptical orbit of Earth. Earth reaches perihelion (the point in its orbit closest to the Sun) in January, and it reaches aphelion (farthest point from the Sun) in July. Even though the effect this has on Earth's seasons is minor, it does noticeably soften the northern hemisphere's winters and summers. In the southern hemisphere, the opposite effect is observed.

It does suggest that the Northern hemisphere's seasons are "softer" than those of the Southern hemisphere, allowing for difference of geography (Asia is an exceptionally big continent, which might be why Siberia's winter/summer difference is unusually high.)

It may, however, not be perfectly accurate.

Flickerdart
2010-03-30, 02:14 PM
About the shadow thing, we could have a whole caste system based on who's allowed to cast a shadow where. If you're a king, you can build the craziest super-castle you want and blot out the sun, but peasants can't build more than a certain height (and because of a lack of living room, a certain width either). This also implies a certain shape of cities: instead of circular, they would have the buildings get progressively taller and richer towards Darkside, culminating in a castle that both acts as a deterrent to Underdark attackers and an always-illuminated symbol of the king's power.

Lysander
2010-03-30, 02:29 PM
About the shadow thing, we could have a whole caste system based on who's allowed to cast a shadow where. If you're a king, you can build the craziest super-castle you want and blot out the sun, but peasants can't build more than a certain height (and because of a lack of living room, a certain width either). This also implies a certain shape of cities: instead of circular, they would have the buildings get progressively taller and richer towards Darkside, culminating in a castle that both acts as a deterrent to Underdark attackers and an always-illuminated symbol of the king's power.

They probably make a point of building on sloped hillsides and mountains. Perhaps there are vertical dwellings carved into cliffsides. Any arable slope facing the sun is also a prime place for farming.

The dark side would be infested by all kinds of nocturnal creatures. Undead in particular wouldn't be bothered by the lack of warmth or food, and many like vampires would welcome the eternal night. They'd have to make raids on twilight belt towns to get victims though. There would probably be rules about keeping sunlight corridors between buildings to make it hard for vampires to move freely.

Subotei
2010-03-30, 02:41 PM
About the shadow thing, we could have a whole caste system based on who's allowed to cast a shadow where. If you're a king, you can build the craziest super-castle you want and blot out the sun, but peasants can't build more than a certain height (and because of a lack of living room, a certain width either). This also implies a certain shape of cities: instead of circular, they would have the buildings get progressively taller and richer towards Darkside, culminating in a castle that both acts as a deterrent to Underdark attackers and an always-illuminated symbol of the king's power.

That is a very cool concept - thanks. Imagine being accused of building a hedge... Hillsides facing the sun would be good growing land - heavily farmed closer you got to the darkside. You'd also get dark zones on the sun side due to mountains etc.

unre9istered
2010-03-30, 02:47 PM
You could also have a sort of anti-vampire that requires the sunlight and for safety you go in the shade. Would probably not be undead though, plant maybe?

Lysander
2010-03-30, 02:53 PM
You could also have a sort of anti-vampire that requires the sunlight and for safety you go in the shade. Would probably not be undead though, plant maybe?

Hey...that's a thought. Plants that evolved specifically to handle the incredibly bright sunward side. It might not be a desert, it might be a rainforest! The canopy is scorchingly hot but humans and other creatures can survive in the thick shade below it, which is still lit by a bright diffuse green glow.

Indon
2010-03-30, 03:15 PM
Hey...that's a thought. Plants that evolved specifically to handle the incredibly bright sunward side. It might not be a desert, it might be a rainforest! The canopy is scorchingly hot but humans and other creatures can survive in the thick shade below it, which is still lit by a bright diffuse green glow.

A rainforest with massive trees with deep roots reaching down into the network of underground waterways fed by the glaciers on the other side of the planet!

Now the circle is complete - it's possible to dungeon-run in this world from a Twilight temperate zone, through the dangerous jungle, into a dangerous tree in the jungle, out the roots through the aquatic underground (full of aquatic civilization), up into a fire-worshipping glacier civilization, then back to the twilight zone!

Draz74
2010-03-30, 03:44 PM
About the shadow thing, we could have a whole caste system based on who's allowed to cast a shadow where. If you're a king, you can build the craziest super-castle you want and blot out the sun, but peasants can't build more than a certain height (and because of a lack of living room, a certain width either). This also implies a certain shape of cities: instead of circular, they would have the buildings get progressively taller and richer towards Darkside, culminating in a castle that both acts as a deterrent to Underdark attackers and an always-illuminated symbol of the king's power.

Oooh, I like this!


They probably make a point of building on sloped hillsides and mountains. Any arable slope facing the sun is also a prime place for farming.

This goes double, because building on the Sunwards side of hills or slopes would also provide some shielding from the frigid winds that would constantly be blowing in from Darkside.

On the other hand, if such slopes are part of a significant mountain structure, they would also be where the most rain falls. Reinforcing that the Twilight Ring would be a soggy place to live.

Lycanthromancer
2010-03-30, 04:14 PM
It sounds odd, but I'd be willing to bet that mirror-making would be Big Business in this world. The ability to redirect light (and heat) from places that have it to places that need it would be incredibly useful.

You'd have mirrors everywhere, and mirror-making itself would be a fine art by now.

Hmm. What if there are crystals just growing organically from the ground? You could grind them to a smooth finish and use them as a relatively inexpensive mirror.

Flavorful AND functional!

Bibliomancer
2010-03-30, 09:38 PM
It sounds odd, but I'd be willing to bet that mirror-making would be Big Business in this world. The ability to redirect light (and heat) from places that have it to places that need it would be incredibly useful.

You'd have mirrors everywhere, and mirror-making itself would be a fine art by now.

Hmm. What if there are crystals just growing organically from the ground? You could grind them to a smooth finish and use them as a relatively inexpensive mirror.

Flavorful AND functional!

Good idea. Extending that concept, perhaps the mirrors can be used as weapons. If you get near-constant sunlight, it wouldn't be hard to construct war-mirrors to burn attacking troops, reducing warfare to stealth tactics in the opening phases and providing PCs with an endless supply of crucial missions to destroy or capture opposing mirrors.

On an unrelated note, I think that the general consensus is two moon and one asteroid belt, with the belt and the smaller moon closer in the same orbit, right? Thus the smaller moon acts as the regulator of 'day' while the larger moon acts as a 'year,' (and with the small moon and the belt being the former homes of the 2 lunar races*). Now, what is the Yearmoon was set in an orbit perpendicular to the plane of the solar system. Could this cause the necessary wobble? If you increased the period to a month, you would have short periods of freeze, thaw and burn, with longer periods of 'spring' and 'winter' necessitating retreat to the middle section caused by the revolution around the sun. (Again, I'm not sure if the physics would work.) This would require the closer moon to be very small and close, while the larger moon would be about the size and distance away of our moon here on Earth.

Lastly, the Yearmoon (or Monthmoon) would pass over the Sunward side, casting a shadow

*A thought on the lunar races: if the nomadic one that 'won' the war were shifters, they would revere their moon as a sign of power, and see lycanthropes as beings of great power from before the Fall. With a bit of tweaking, this could serve as a solid ranger/rogue/druid race.

The other race should still be the secretive illumians, since they are solid generalists with an 'alien' nature that distinguishes them from humans in a way unlike elves or dwarves.

The desert would probably contain a lot of lizard races in the fringes, perhaps with a few hidden cities deeper in.

Any other thoughts on racial composition?

Also, I apologize for erroneously using the word 'pole' since they do not rotate. I was using it to mean "stable and most extreme point of following adjective." Since the planet's position relative to the sun has a fixed average (assuming it wobbles evenly), it would have four points around the equator (actual, not the twiilght zone great circle) that would be the most extreme points towards/away from sun and towards/away from direction of revolution. Can anyone think of a better word for these points (and the twilight zone, for that matter? Perhaps the Habitable Ring.).

EvilBloodGnome
2010-03-30, 10:05 PM
The mirror thing is good. In Pathfinder at least half-elves already have an affinity for crystals, maybe that could be an elvish trait. Illumian, too. Also an excuse to include Mirror Mephits so Planer Familiar becomes more awesome >_>

Another name for things?

Extra points if you call the habitable belt The Twilight Zone.

But for something that won't get cabbage thrown at me, the point that happens to be closest to the sun could be Novapoint and the point opposite that (on the frozen side) could by Umbrapoint. For those actually close enough to the point to notice it changing positions (elementals, the undead, warforged, whatever it be) it could be a possible thing if reverence or timekeeping.

The belt could be most anything, like the Twilight Kingdoms, the Lifebelt, or even just the Twilight(not that LoZ fans will like that).

Draz74
2010-03-30, 10:05 PM
On an unrelated note, I think that the general consensus is two moon and one asteroid belt, with the belt and the smaller moon closer in the same orbit, right? Thus the smaller moon acts as the regulator of 'day' while the larger moon acts as a 'year,' (and with the small moon and the belt being the former homes of the 2 lunar races*). Now, what is the Yearmoon was set in an orbit perpendicular to the plane of the solar system. Could this cause the necessary wobble? If you increased the period to a month, you would have short periods of freeze, thaw and burn, with longer periods of 'spring' and 'winter' necessitating retreat to the middle section caused by the revolution around the sun. (Again, I'm not sure if the physics would work.)
The "wobble" can happen whether there's any moon or not. It's caused by gyroscopic complexities of the same type that make a toy top wobble when you spin it. The occasional earthquake is enough to keep it going.

Having a moon can generally make more complex interactions believable, though. "Perpendicular," maybe not so much. Just have it be some crazy diagonal orbit. If it's irregular, too, it might even make the planet having a consistent "tilt" in one direction possible. (But as I've said before, seasons of that sort would mostly just make less of the planet habitable.) Orbits don't have to be elliptical if there's something else (such as a small moon) present to perturb the system.


the larger moon would be about the size and distance away of our moon here on Earth.

Incidentally, our own moon is really quite freakishly big for a planet of our size, according to astronomers' models. If we ever colonize hundreds of other solar systems, it's unlikely we'll ever find another planet so "small" with a moon so big. But obviously it can happen, so I guess it's obvious that it can also happen in a fantasy.

pasko77
2010-03-31, 04:45 AM
Extra points if you call the habitable belt The Twilight Zone.


Throws cabbage -.-
And anyway, people wouldn't have the concept of "twilight". Lifebelt is much better.



But for something that won't get cabbage thrown at me, the point that happens to be closest to the sun could be Novapoint and the point opposite that (on the frozen side) could by Umbrapoint.

I'll go with zenith and nadir. They sound more "sciency" and since we are adding a lot of pseudoscience...

Yora
2010-03-31, 07:16 AM
I havn't read the entire thread, but here's some ideas about climate changes.

Just like on earth, the planet could go through massive climate changes over time. During a time of relative cold, normally habitable zones would be to cold for habitation, but the lowered temperatures make it possible to travel some hundred kilometers further into the light side. You'd still have sunshine all day, but the proximity to the glaciers in the twilight zone would cool down temperature enough to allow for settlements and plant growth.
And in times that are exceptionally hot, people and animals might migrate into the dark zone and get all their heat from warm winds. In both cases, the habitable zone would probably be much smaller than during times of average climate.
But under these conditions, it would be possible to find old ruins on both sides of the twilight zone, and it would be quite an effort just to reach any destination that is only one or two days travel from the habitable zones edges.
An underdark would probably be not as much affected by surface conditions, so you'd go much further out when traveling underground and make treassure raids to the surface that last only a couple of hours before the conditions turn deadly.

AbyssKnight
2010-03-31, 08:20 AM
I like the hill-farming idea a lot. Thinking about it further gave me some ideas.

Create large plantation style settlements on the edge of Sun-side. Just inside the human-survivability zone. Something like Carribean/South American plantations from European settlement, but more hellish due to the constant sunlight and rain.

I am imagining it being significantly brighter than twilight, sort like eternal morning.

Long man-made earth rows, sun side terraced for crop growing and residences built on shade side to give protection from the constant sunlight.

Given early points made, it seems like the region would be very wet, hot, humid. Poor workers or slaves would live extremely difficult lives of manual labor, quickly burning out from constantly being exposed to the heat, light, and wet.

People in this region may associate paleness with wealth (not having to leave the leeward side of the large earth-mound rows to work in the fields). This will probably make them opposite of other societies further into Twilight (where exposure to sun would be more important and the wealthy would probably occupy the sunniest spots).

The farm owners are probably very rich, from selling food to other settlements. This leads to a moral conundrum. People further into the twilight don't like how the slaves/indentured servants/serfs are treated but depend on the agricultural products from the region. Even proud democracies would need to buy foodstuffs from these agrarian dictators.

Lycanthromancer
2010-03-31, 08:39 AM
Actually, despite the fact that the world wouldn't normally spin on an axis always facing the sun, if the planet's composition was right, and there was more mass in the darkward-facing part of the planet, you would potentially have enough pull from the gravity of the sun to keep the whole thing properly aligned. That, or some electromagnetic property of the sun (or a moon, if it's trapped in a polar non-orbit) is keeping it aligned in such a way, due to vast iron deposits at one pole or the other.

Let's say there's one lunar body stuck hovering over the leeward pole, with all the world's iron ore trapped under the crust beneath the glaciers. The unique composition of the mantle, coupled with magnetic ore in the lunar body, and the shape of the electromagnetic and gravitic warping of space caused by the sun, would keep the whole thing properly aligned, while spinning in a way that is most likely otherwise not quite realistic. This would give the dwarves their livelihood (mining for ore, which is quite fitting, all things considered), and it would also potentially keep the whole setup going nicely.

You don't have to have this setup, but I like the spinning planet notion, especially since it gives us violent windstorms over each pole, which would be excellent extensions for adventure hooks.

This would also have interesting atmospheric effects, giving periodic light shows in the sky whenever solar flares happen.

Groovy.

Draz74
2010-03-31, 10:56 AM
Eh, none of that -- no amount of electromagnetic forces or any other kind of forces -- really change the way gyroscopic motion works. Try playing with a spinning gyroscope, and feel how hard it is to move it through radial motion perpendicular to its axis of rotation.

But it seems clear that you really want to design a setting that works like that anyway, and that's fine. Just either admit that it's a gross violation of physics (and hope that none of your players are physicists like me), or declare that there's some external force keeping it moving that way. (A moon, especially a stationary moon, doesn't really count as external. You'll probably have to resort to magic here; a god actively holding the world in this strange orbit, for example, works.)

After all, it's possible (just surprisingly hard) to move your gyroscope toy in a way contrary to its gyroscopic effect. But it will "right itself" immediately if you ever stop forcing it.

jseah
2010-03-31, 01:51 PM
^Let's say for a moment that a crazy god decided to make such a world. Just so that it can start that way.

We have a planet orbit it's star, with it's axis of spin in the plane of orbit and pointing towards/away from the star.

Ignoring fringe effects like moons and other planets (and let's assume newtonian gravity here), exactly how is that situation unstable? The only forces acting on the planet is the gravity of the sun. It'll keep spinning because of angular momentum and rotating the planet is going to be harder than usual due to gyroscopic effects (not that rotating something that big isn't already impossible)

EDIT: you could get the planet to precess slowly about the rotation axis as well. On the order of Earth's 11 000 years, so not fast enough to be noticeable.

Draz74
2010-03-31, 02:02 PM
Ignoring fringe effects like moons and other planets (and let's assume newtonian gravity here), exactly how is that situation unstable? The only forces acting on the planet is the gravity of the sun. It'll keep spinning because of angular momentum and rotating the planet is going to be harder than usual due to gyroscopic effects (not that rotating something that big isn't already impossible)

Thing is, you've got it rotating in two separate directions in that situation. It's rotating daily about its own axis, and it's also rotating yearly about an axis that's perpendicular to its orbital plane.

If it weren't doing the latter rotation, it would just be pulling a Uranus: its axis of rotation would point towards/away from the sun at the solstices, tangent to the sun at the equinoxes, and somewhere in between the rest of the time.

And angular momentum/gyroscopic effects means that objects don't normally rotate about two separate axes like that at the same time. If you try to set them up that way, they'll just find a new single axis to rotate around that compromises the two angular momentum vectors. And then you're just back to normal earth-like rotation, albeit with a heavier tilt angle.

CockroachTeaParty
2010-03-31, 02:05 PM
Wow, this idea's really taking off.

I'm... I'm so proud of you. *sniff* :smallredface:

jseah
2010-03-31, 02:40 PM
To #144 (Draz74):

Ah, I see. In which case, you need a mechanism that continually changes the planet's angular momentum. Going to be one crazy bunch of moons around. Should be possible to create a system of moons that suck off and put back the spin yearly, get two of them with perpendicular spins and time them half a year apart and you get the system he wants

Might be a problem with collision risk and lots of potential for instability. XD

Draz74
2010-03-31, 02:53 PM
To #144 (Draz74):

Ah, I see. In which case, you need a mechanism that continually changes the planet's angular momentum. Going to be one crazy bunch of moons around. Should be possible to create a system of moons that suck off and put back the spin yearly, get two of them with perpendicular spins and time them half a year apart and you get the system he wants

Might be a problem with collision risk and lots of potential for instability. XD

Yes, that can work. I think. :smalleek:

I need a memory refresher, though: what was actually so appealing about the planet's poles being the same points that always face towards/away from the sun? I mean, the Habitable Belt can now be called the equator, but otherwise it doesn't seem all that different from the tidal-locked planet that most of the thread has focused on. But I'm probably forgetting something.

jseah
2010-03-31, 05:21 PM
Spinning planet = coriolis force = massive windstorms around the poles.

Lycanthromancer
2010-03-31, 05:33 PM
Spinning planet = coriolis force = massive windstorms around the poles.You forgot a step.

= empty space in the eyes of the impassable storms = awesome adventure hooks.

jiriku
2010-03-31, 06:00 PM
Indeed.

"No one can get into the heart of the God's Eye storm! The winds are too intense! Although...if you could...some say there's an ancient civilization there, that the Forerunners have left shrines and ruins behind, and perhaps some of their magic..."

Yora
2010-03-31, 06:11 PM
Let's say a planet like earth becomes tidally locked. How wide would the habitable zone actually be? For practical reasons let's assume that habitable means the temperature range currently found on earth and that rainfall is evenly distributed and common enough to prevent deserts.

If it were only 10 to 20 km wide, it would be feasable to build a wall from the hot side to the cold side and block any travel. And going the other way round would mean a 20.000 km detour.

Bibliomancer
2010-03-31, 06:31 PM
^Let's say for a moment that a crazy god decided to make such a world. Just so that it can start that way.

If we went with a tidally-locked instead of axis-shifted world, this would be very interesting. During the Moonshattering, the inhabitants of the world cried out with one voice for salvation. When the elder gods quailed before the destruction and death of the system, one lone demigod stepping forward, binding himself to the Sunwardpoint to hold it closer to the sun. Expecting death, he was instead empowered by the overwhelming gratitude of the survivors, and his church remains the dominant religious force among all races of the Blending Place to this day. He is forever occupied with his holy mission, however, and so many rival churches profess to be his true servants, with the merest scraps of doctrine to guide them.

Even in a rotated world, he could be at the center of the storm, inducing the slight monthly shifts that allow for limited seasons. This would have some interesting game effects, since a primary, ambiguous church would be added to the setting. An interesting quest might be to seek out the deity at the heart of the Sand to discover his true goals for his church.

Bibliomancer
2010-03-31, 06:34 PM
Let's say a planet like earth becomes tidally locked. How wide would the habitable zone actually be? For practical reasons let's assume that habitable means the temperature range currently found on earth and that rainfall is evenly distributed and common enough to prevent deserts.

If it were only 10 to 20 km wide, it would be feasable to build a wall from the hot side to the cold side and block any travel. And going the other way round would mean a 20.000 km detour.

An interesting idea, but for the thread thus far we've been assuming a few hundred, given that the atmosphere would be able to stabilize temperatures fairly efficiently (the coldest Antarctica's ever gotten is -70 C or so, and some places do not get any sunlight for two months), with a marginal zone increasing the diameter to perhaps 500 km, since twilight lasts half an hour and that would correspond to roughly 5 degrees of longitude (more like 500 miles) on earth.

Fendalus
2010-03-31, 06:39 PM
Let's say a planet like earth becomes tidally locked. How wide would the habitable zone actually be? For practical reasons let's assume that habitable means the temperature range currently found on earth and that rainfall is evenly distributed and common enough to prevent deserts.

If it were only 10 to 20 km wide, it would be feasable to build a wall from the hot side to the cold side and block any travel. And going the other way round would mean a 20.000 km detour.

Based off of a_humble_lich's math on page three:


If Earth were tidally locked and make some simple assumptions we can calculate the width of the habitable zone. Assume that everything in "twilight" is habitable. On real Earth, twilight lasts about a half hour. It that time the Earth moves 7.5 degrees around it axis. That means on our tidally locked planet an arc of 7.5 degrees will be habitable. If the planet is the same size/shape as Earth this is a width of 500 miles.

I would assume it's about 805km/500mi wide due to this. It will probably be less or more than that based on the local terrain.

jiriku
2010-03-31, 07:09 PM
How would people be impacted psychologically by the lack of days and/or seasons?

If you spend your entire life bathed in warmth and sunshine, what's your experience like the first time you go inthe the dark on the coldward side of the planet? It's like a living death for you. Phobias of cold and darkness might be extremely common.

I misremember the name, but I recall reading a science fiction novel once about a race of people living in an extraordinarily complex system with 13 suns. There was always a light in the sky, always, and they could never see the stars. Once every 13,000 years, an extremely complex conjunction with a sister planet led to a total solar eclipse and plunged the world into darkness. This would always result in the worldwide destruction of civilization, because the darkness and the sight of countless thousands of stars would drive the whole world temporarily insane, and the inhabitants of every city would burn their homes to the ground in an effort to create enough light to blot out the stars. Tens of thousands would permanently lose their minds.

Ravens_cry
2010-03-31, 07:15 PM
I misremember the name, but I recall reading a science fiction novel once about a race of people living in an extraordinarily complex system with 13 suns. There was always a light in the sky, always, and they could never see the stars. Once every 13,000 years, an extremely complex conjunction with a sister planet led to a total solar eclipse and plunged the world into darkness. This would always result in the worldwide destruction of civilization, because the darkness and the sight of countless thousands of stars would drive the whole world temporarily insane, and the inhabitants of every city would burn their homes to the ground in an effort to create enough light to blot out the stars. Tens of thousands would permanently lose their minds.
Nightfall, by Isaac Asimov and Robert Silverberg

snikrept
2010-03-31, 09:53 PM
You folks have really cooked up an evocative setting here.

A tidelocked planet that was not always tidelocked but got the way it is now because of Gross Magical Malfeasance or a tremendous Magicanical Industrial Accident opens up tremendous possibilities for reworking the standard "ancient civilizations that were more advanced than we are now" fantasy bit. The Ancients grew so mighty they were able to manage their world's spin - but something happened, as it always does when hubris is involved, and now civlization is slowly scrabbling out of a many-thousand-years' dark age caused by 90% of the surface of the planet becoming uninhabitable, with the attendant earthquakes and megastorms as the crust realigned to the new orientation of gravity and solar radiation.

Somewhere out there in the scorching and frigid wastes near the starward and anti-starward poles are still lying all sorts of high level magical goodies the Ancients left behind... treasures that would be akin to having nuclear weapons when your enemy has pointy sticks. And your land has lots of enemies, the available resources for life being so scarce. So every two-bit ruler who can afford to fund an expedition has people out there, warded against frost and fire as best they can, prospecting the ruined cities.

What guards these treasures? The Ancients built to last and many of their magicanical mechanisms still remain. Slaved elementals: what would a bound fire elemental, formerly used to drive some great engine in a now ruined city, now buried under a glacier and in eternal torment, pay for his release? Undead: billions of the Ancients perished in fire and ice, and they are PISSED. Especially at whoever looks like they might resemble those responsible for this magical disaster. Constructs: it's seventy thousand years later but nobody has told Servant B-Z831 not to stop guarding the king's relics... the ambient temperature is now well above scorching in the ruins he guards, but who cares when you're a robot?)

Not sure how you could explain away rotation about the starward axis without "a wizard did it." Which is a pity because having a precession about that axis would give you longish seasons for variety. If the planet rotates about an axis pointing starward, some higher latitude zones would move out of "lethal temperatures" and into "really dangerous temperatures" for short periods every cycle, allowing time-sensitive snatch-and-grab type salvage operations.

However without wizards involved, a formerly wholly habitable world that had a natural cataclysmic event which knocked it over would end up like Uranus, as posted above.

Though that too could be interesting I guess - consider: if the tropics of cancer and capricorn are now up in the high latitudes near the rotational poles, every half-year one pole comes to face the star full-on. The habitable area is still a tiny strip near the equator, like on a tidelocked world, while the rotational poles alternate between scorching heat and frigid cold. The kicker would be that the spring and autumn would probably be the worst time to be at the rotational poles, as the tundra melts rapidly and crazy storms rage. I am envisioning two seasons of incredible wind in the habitable zone as the heat energy redistributes to a new pole as well. Probably the highest civilizations would live underground to escape the terrible twice-yearly katabatic hurricanes.

Flickerdart
2010-03-31, 10:07 PM
Protection from Cold or Fire kind of makes this moot. Can we assume the planet has the two appropriate feats that bypass the energy resistance?

snikrept
2010-03-31, 10:13 PM
A high magic setting in general makes much of the environmental danger moot. IMO run it as a world where magic as a profession is not readily available due to its secrets being hoarded, shunned ("Say, you wouldn't be one of them brainy wizard types would you? Them's as ruined the world with their magic? Getim, my fellow Simpletons!") or not rediscovered yet....

Items that granted heat or cold resistance would be fabulous treasures, and their possessors would be powerful people, or quickly dead unless they concealed that they had such a thing.

Lycanthromancer
2010-03-31, 10:36 PM
A high magic setting in general makes much of the environmental danger moot. IMO run it as a world where magic as a profession is not readily available due to its secrets being hoarded, shunned ("Say, you wouldn't be one of them brainy wizard types would you? Them's as ruined the world with their magic? Getim, my fellow Simpletons!") or not rediscovered yet....

Items that granted heat or cold resistance would be fabulous treasures, and their possessors would be powerful people, or quickly dead unless they concealed that they had such a thing.Less magic, more psionics. Sure, you could protect YOURSELF from the blazing heat, but what about your fighter companion over there?

Irreverent Fool
2010-04-01, 12:17 AM
Less magic, more psionics. Sure, you could protect YOURSELF from the blazing heat, but what about your fighter companion over there?

He's better off dead. He rolled a fighter.

obnoxious
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DragoonWraith
2010-04-01, 12:20 AM
Less magic, more psionics. Sure, you could protect YOURSELF from the blazing heat, but what about your fighter companion over there?
But then you should just be playing Dark Sun...

EvilBloodGnome
2010-04-01, 01:28 AM
I sat heavy on mysticism, low/medium on magic. Have magewrights and adepts be faaaar more common than PC class casters. A fair amount of magic going on around everything, but not a whole lot of people able to do much with it.

Fire and cold resistance are easily nerfed. Either cop out and say it doesn't work to such extremes or nerf em to work only against magical sources of fire/cold.

Bibliomancer
2010-04-01, 04:09 PM
I sat heavy on mysticism, low/medium on magic. Have magewrights and adepts be faaaar more common than PC class casters. A fair amount of magic going on around everything, but not a whole lot of people able to do much with it.

This sounds a bit like Eberron, except without as much of the magitech. Not a bad idea for explaining how civilization managed to cope, though. I imagine that cantrips for creating temporary mirrors would be rather common.


Fire and cold resistance are easily nerfed. Either cop out and say it doesn't work to such extremes or nerf em to work only against magical sources of fire/cold.

Alternatively, you could create a sliding scale for cold damage per hour. Thus, in extreme temperatures you'd take some damage per hour, unless you had immunity, since the cold damage could be in excess of 20d6. However, it would be good to keep immunity to be exactly what it says on the tin, since it would be handy to have some type of creatures living in the deep wastes. It seems that ice paraelementals and fire elementals would be rather common.

Out of curiosity, is anyone interesting in actually trying to codify some of these ideas into a quasi-campaign setting, or is this thread still in the "hmm, interesting" phase?

Lycanthromancer
2010-04-01, 04:13 PM
Out of curiosity, is anyone interesting in actually trying to codify some of these ideas into a quasi-campaign setting, or is this thread still in the "hmm, interesting" phase?I'd be all for a campaign setting using this. Two questions though: #1. Who? and #2. How?

Also, who thinks we could get The Vorpal Tribble to work on some monsters and interesting LA 0 races for us?

Bibliomancer
2010-04-01, 04:15 PM
I'd be all for a campaign setting using this. Two questions though: #1. Who? and #2. How?

Are you asking in terms of players or creators?


Also, who thinks we could get The Vorpal Tribble to work on some monsters and interesting LA 0 races for us?

Maybe. We only really need a few, if we're happy using illumians and shifters.

Shifters could do with replacement or overhaul, though, and it would be good to have some dedicated subterranean races.

Lycanthromancer
2010-04-01, 04:21 PM
Are you asking in terms of players or creators?Creators. I mean, this has been a rather widespread project, with ideas coming from everywhere. Who's going to do the actual work, and who gets the final say on things? Considering the amount of dissension about what's what (though it hasn't been at all heated), someone is gonna have to spearhead this thing.

Bibliomancer
2010-04-01, 04:26 PM
I'm fairly new on the forums, so I'm not sure how these projects get started. Should we try PMing some of the major homebrewers (you mentioned the Vorpal Tribble) to get their feedback? If so, should the mechanics be kept separate from the design of the world?

Also, I guess a basic step would be figuring out what scale this would be on (ie, a short ish one thread project, or something that could approach the Tears of Blood). It would make sense to determine that before leadership or organization was established. What is your sense of interest in this project?

jiriku
2010-04-01, 04:39 PM
Out of curiosity, is anyone interesting in actually trying to codify some of these ideas into a quasi-campaign setting, or is this thread still in the "hmm, interesting" phase?

My personal homebrew campaign setting for the past 15 years is called "Light and Darkness." I do believe that I'll be using this thread to shake up the campaign world dramatically and make the name of the setting much more literally descriptive. :smallamused: I've run a Burning Wheel game on a player-created tidally locked world, and the setting was very compelling; there are more than enough ideas here to port the concept to D&D.

Bibliomancer
2010-04-01, 04:44 PM
My personal homebrew campaign setting for the past 15 years is called "Light and Darkness." I do believe that I'll be using this thread to shake up the campaign world dramatically and make the name of the setting much more literally descriptive. :smallamused: I've run a Burning Wheel game on a player-created tidally locked world, and the setting was very compelling; there are more than enough ideas here to port the concept to D&D.

Would you be interested in developing the setting on these forums? If nothing else, the reactions of your characters would provide useufl insight into how to reconcile normal D&D with something so exotic.

Also, your players would be living through a transition period, which would be enlightening, if not exactly like the 4000 years on world posited earlier.

Draz74
2010-04-01, 05:00 PM
Creators. I mean, this has been a rather widespread project, with ideas coming from everywhere. Who's going to do the actual work, and who gets the final say on things? Considering the amount of dissension about what's what (though it hasn't been at all heated), someone is gonna have to spearhead this thing.

Personally I think the basic idea of the tidal-locked world (not to mention all the spin-off ideas that have been discussed in this thread) is rich enough to have more than one campaign setting based on it without needing to get territorial. So I think whoever wants to should make their own campaign setting with this idea. Write a Homebrew thread about it, link the Homebrew thread back to this thread, post a link in this thread to your Homebrew, and if your other ideas are interesting enough, you might get some people signing on as dedicated helpers to your project.

Bibliomancer
2010-04-01, 05:29 PM
Personally I think the basic idea of the tidal-locked world (not to mention all the spin-off ideas that have been discussed in this thread) is rich enough to have more than one campaign setting based on it without needing to get territorial. So I think whoever wants to should make their own campaign setting with this idea. Write a Homebrew thread about it, link the Homebrew thread back to this thread, post a link in this thread to your Homebrew, and if your other ideas are interesting enough, you might get some people signing on as dedicated helpers to your project.

True. I guess in this capacity, this thread is currently being used as a staging ground for the formation of one of those projects, since it would take quite a bit of detail to even get to the WIP stage from here.

Umael
2010-04-01, 06:11 PM
I skimmed this thread; if already mentioned, my apologies.

Tidal-lock takes time. The world could have been created that way, or something could have nudged it that way, but if not, then we are talking about a long, long, long time.

One scenario is that the world is so old, it is dying. The sun is dying. Depending, the sun could be going nova or super-nova before too long. The internal heat from the planet could be gone, meaning there are no more volcanoes. No more volcanoes, the crust does not get renewed, erosion is the enemy. Mountains are nothing but hills, hills nothing but bumps, valleys have filled in, making floods cover a much broader area.

Without the mountains to break the air flow, the winds howl mercilessly all the time. The floods cross into the Light area and quickly evaporate, or into the Dark area and quickly freeze.

General_Ghoul
2010-04-01, 06:53 PM
The sun of this planet doesn't necessarily have to be exactly like ours. Perhaps it's much smaller or much further away so the sunward side of the planet isn't completely roasted.

Instead of one big moon why not have hundreds of tiny moons? Together they might reflect enough light (and heat) on the dark side to keep the atmosphere unfrozen and allow a small amount of life.

Also make the planet very geologically active in places as suggested. There can be habitable areas on the dark side heated by hot springs. These can also contribute to the atmosphere remaining unfrozen there.

Another possibility is to make this a binary system. The planet orbits the nearer star, but the second star also provides heat and illumination. It sometimes can be seen from the dark side but it's so distant it never appears much brighter than the real world's moon. This still provides enough heat and light to keep things merely arctic and not unsurvivable.


If the atmosphere is thick enough and the amount of sunlight energy transferred low enough, your entire planet is habitable, as mentioned. Combine this with an extremely large volume of water, and the sunward side contains a handful of super-tropical archipeligos buffetted by frequent (or in places continual) storms, especially if the planet has a large, close moon to generate a tide. Undersea travel and even hidden undersea cities might become desirable as a means of escaping the terrible storms. If the moon is close enough, wizards could even use it as a means of transitting the impassable border between light and dark: teleport to the moon, wait for it to orbit around to the dark side, then teleport back down to the surface.


Why does the planet need to be in a similar orbit as Earth? Mars has high temps in the low 50's F so what if we pushed this planet out to halfway between Earth and Mars. The sun side sees temps in the 80's except when the elliptical orbit is closer to the sun, then temps could reach the 100's.

I thick atmosphere, high in CO2 would allow much more cloud cover, with rain clouds reaching much of the sunny side. The white clouds would also reflect some of the solar energy, cooling the planet some more. I could see African savanna-like temperate zones next to the jungle zones, which are next to the temperate twilight zone. Only the true equatorial center would be a true desert, with no rain or cloud cover. This would be a great spot for a Brass City of Efreeti.

With the thick atmosphere, the temperatures on the other side of the twilight zone would not be freezing all the time, with warmer, moist air flowing into the zone. Now once it reached a certain point, it would turn to snow, with blizzard like conditions. This would create glaciers, pushing back into the twilight zone, melting and creating major rivers, which could flow into the all daylight area, creating even more life and navigable travelways into the hot region.

Bibliomancer
2010-04-01, 08:56 PM
I skimmed this thread; if already mentioned, my apologies.

Tidal-lock takes time. The world could have been created that way, or something could have nudged it that way, but if not, then we are talking about a long, long, long time.

One scenario is that the world is so old, it is dying. The sun is dying. Depending, the sun could be going nova or super-nova before too long. The internal heat from the planet could be gone, meaning there are no more volcanoes. No more volcanoes, the crust does not get renewed, erosion is the enemy. Mountains are nothing but hills, hills nothing but bumps, valleys have filled in, making floods cover a much broader area.

Without the mountains to break the air flow, the winds howl mercilessly all the time. The floods cross into the Light area and quickly evaporate, or into the Dark area and quickly freeze.

Interesting points, and that could certainly create a flavorful setting. However, thus far the default assumption has been an Earth-like world with 3 moons, two of which were marginally habitable at some point. Intelligent species evolved on the 2 close in moons and the main planet. The lunar races colonized the planet then had an interlunar magitech war, resulting in destruction of one moon (creating an asteroid belt) and the destabilization of the planet, which was locked into its current position by a demigod that was empowered by the panic of the inhabitants of the world.

All that happened 4000 years ago, so things have had a bit of time to settle down.

Irreverent Fool
2010-04-02, 01:12 AM
Interesting points, and that could certainly create a flavorful setting. However, thus far the default assumption has been an Earth-like world with 3 moons, two of which were marginally habitable at some point. Intelligent species evolved on the 2 close in moons and the main planet. The lunar races colonized the planet then had an interlunar magitech war, resulting in destruction of one moon (creating an asteroid belt) and the destabilization of the planet, which was locked into its current position by a demigod that was empowered by the panic of the inhabitants of the world.

All that happened 4000 years ago, so things have had a bit of time to settle down.

Even a thousand years ago would be enough, especially after a major cataclysm. I know fantasy and science fiction worlds tend to have incredibly long time-lines, but I'd be hard-pressed to suspend my disbelief while playing a game in which the cataclysm was a well-recorded and remembered event if it happened so long ago.

obnoxious
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Vilyathas
2010-04-02, 04:10 AM
Whew, there's more science in this thread than anywhere else in the forums :smalltongue:

I've only come across one such world in Brian Lumley's Necroscope series. Their Sunside/Starside world is pretty much what you guys explained earlier. There's a wide habitable ring, with desert on one side and freezing wasteland on the other. The world is populated by humans and vampires. The vampires live on Starside, for obvious reasons, but still close enough to the habitable regions that they have to hide when the sun comes up. When night falls, they ride out of their aeries to raid human settlements. The hardier humans live further out in the desert, Fremen-style. There's even an underground human settlement in the middle of the desert, using massive pumps to draw water and mirrors to get sunlight for their crops. Most of the other humans, however, offer regular sacrifices to the vampires for them to live in (relative) peace.

Zen Master
2010-04-02, 05:05 AM
Even a thousand years ago would be enough, especially after a major cataclysm. I know fantasy and science fiction worlds tend to have incredibly long time-lines, but I'd be hard-pressed to suspend my disbelief while playing a game in which the cataclysm was a well-recorded and remembered event if it happened so long ago.

obnoxious
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Think of Atlantis. Cataclysm, recorded - possibly well recorded at the time it happened - yet now all but forgotten and myth-ified. No actual records survive to this day, only later references and so on.

I find ... well ok, I personally find the legend of Atlantis extremely hard to belive. But in a fantasy setting, where such things could be as common as muck? Pretty believable, yea =)

Zen Master
2010-04-02, 05:11 AM
Nightfall, by Isaac Asimov and Robert Silverberg

Which, by the way, is an entirely awesome shortstory.

Valairn
2010-04-02, 10:30 AM
Giant storms, cold dark permanent glaciers, blistering hot deserts, and everything is hiding a secret, fantastic!

EDIT: As an aside, I would love to join a project on something like this. Though I'm not really a big fan of the magitech moons idea, I admit. Some of the prestige classes you could make for a world like this are a dream come true!

Lycanthromancer
2010-04-02, 11:17 AM
I'm fairly new on the forums, so I'm not sure how these projects get started. Should we try PMing some of the major homebrewers (you mentioned the Vorpal Tribble) to get their feedback? If so, should the mechanics be kept separate from the design of the world?I've never done a community project before, so I'm not sure how they really get going either. I have worked on my own stuff before (primarily my psionic powers revision), so I have a good idea of how to do that part, but...

Anyway, I think the mechanics should be integrated into the world (makes for a much more cohesive whole; see Eberron, for instance), but not all of it needs to be.

It'll help if everyone has a good idea of what's going on altogether, really. That way nobody feels left out, and there won't be any parts of the work that stick out like sore thumbs.

Also, I think maybe one of us should PM a few others (with The Vorpal Tribble being one of them, and perhaps Bacris, Angelis_Ater, and Tempest Stormwind, since they have experience in this sort of thing), linking them to this thread and asking if they have any interest in helping (with advice, if nothing else).

We could start it here, with a few threads here and there, and integrate it all into one document with several parts (basically a campaign setting book, though it'll start out as a series of rough outlines that we refine as we go along).


Also, I guess a basic step would be figuring out what scale this would be on (ie, a short ish one thread project, or something that could approach the Tears of Blood). It would make sense to determine that before leadership or organization was established.I imagine that we have something good enough here that we could turn this into an entire campaign setting, with supplements and everything. It's got a LOT of potential.

We could start it off here with several threads so the community can interject ideas (and offer new wellsprings of creativity and inspiration), and we might, might, someday move it to its own website, as an almost open-source project of sorts, even if it's just a closed Wiki with open forums.

Just a thought.

Of course, it's not my baby (that would be the OP; maybe we should get his blessings on this first), so...


What is your sense of interest in this project?Well, this whole thing is fascinating, and I want to be a part of it, but I'm not sure how my schedule will run over the next few weeks (I'm looking for a job, and the one I'm going in for next week will take up a lot of time). Let's say I want to be as big a part of it as I can be, while remaining flexible in just how big a part that I WILL be (no sense in the whole thing being shut down just 'cuz I don't have the time to help, after all).

flabort
2010-04-02, 11:27 AM
I must admit I skimmed. 6 pages? Aieeeeeee!

this "3 moons" idea doesn't really tickle my gizzard, 'cause it sounds too much like dragonlance, and that would be stealling. even if one's destroyed, it's still roughly similar.

On the subject of PLANTS, I have a few things to say ("recently" read an article on plants on alien worlds in sientific american. green is actually a really rare color, that could only happen in about 1/1000000000000000000000000 cases... different suns produce different amounts of different colors, plants shun what they don't need, or what's least common)

Plants sunside:
they get MORE than enough sun, being under it's influence 24/7. a white or light grey color is likely, maybe a soft pink. only a few leaves will grow, if any, but they'll be large leaves. this will result in a large area for photosythisization, but not take so much sun that it cooks the plant. it will spread the heat out through it's large leaves, cooling itself off. Water, however, would be a problem there. they would have long, long, deep spindily roots, with a thick core root (tuber), both to keep stable, and to find water underground. the tuber would grow in the direction towards which the majority of spindly roots are finding more water, and be hollow, to store water. as well, the stalk of the plant would be serrated, like cacti, so that when it fills with water, it can expand. as a final way of collecting water, several root-like spindly strands would hang down from the leaves of the plant, sucking water from the air. they would tend to grow near underground rivers, oasises, and geotherimic steam vents, AKA gysers. although there would be several variations on that theme, they would follow that general pattern. most would produce seeds, that, when released from the stalk, are propelled by compressed water, or maybe by wind (although a lot of those would end up darkside, and not grow)

Darkside: (Luke, I am your father)
plants here would grow really slowly. fast growth takes energy, which requires a source of nutrients, and with no sun, there's no nutrients. plants here would be purple, almost BLACK. this is to absorb as much light from the stars as posible. they would be root-less, as there is no soil to grow in, only ice. they would have to get soil nutrients from somewere, though, and so would be in a symbiotic relationship with bacteria. basicly, only lichens would grow Darkside. they would probably propogate through spores.

Twilight plants:
These would be very interesting. buffeted by constant winds, they would have very deep, very strong roots. as the sun is always perpendicular to the ground here, thier leaves would grow virtually verticly. to maximize sun collection, the leaves would grow tall, with a dark collor. I'm imagining mostly dark oranges and reds (gives the Blood forrest a whole new level of creapy now, doesn't it?). maybe if it's a very similar sun to our own, it might produce dark greens, but what are the odds? as well, since the sun is always facing the SAME WAY, they would grow in dish shapes, parabolicly. like satilite dishes. another fact is that this shape would cause them to be ripped off by the wind, so they would grow with several slits, to allow the wind to pass through. to support the leaves, espeasially in the winds, plant stalks would not grow very tall, but stout and heavy. those that grow multiple leaves would grow them in a fan shaped cluster, or spread vines and grow leaves from points were the vines spread more roots. since several creatures live in the twilight strip, these plants would rely on burs, fruits, and similar methoods to spread seeds. wind based propogation, though, would be least effective here.
there may be tree like structures, were several roots support a tall single stalk, with a bark-like armor to protect itself. rather than leaves, though, it's branches and stalks would have exposed pits at the ends, which are parabolic and photosinthsetic. they may produce long photosynthetic strings out of pore-like structures, though, in place of leaves, and have the wind keep these upright, so that they get sun. maybe even while they droop, in windless zones, they face sunwards, gathering what they need.

of course, that's not considering carnivorus plants, aquatic plants, or "grasses". this is just a musing of the most common plants there.

forests would be very interesting, though.

Lycanthromancer
2010-04-02, 11:34 AM
I must admit I skimmed. 6 pages? Aieeeeeee!

this "3 moons" idea doesn't really tickle my gizzard, 'cause it sounds too much like dragonlance, and that would be stealling. even if one's destroyed, it's still roughly similar.Depends on what we do with the moons. Most planets have natural satellites, and having only one is very rare, especially amongst larger planets.

Nothing wrong with having multiple moons.

Heck, I've never even read any Dragonlance, and IIRC, I'm the one that came up with the idea of multiple moons in the first place.

And in any case, it's rampant amongst fantasy and sci-fi alike, so it's not like it's going to be wholly unusual.


On the subject of PLANTS <snip>Ooh. I like this. Thank you for your input. This'll end up being...very...interesting...

Valairn
2010-04-02, 12:01 PM
Druids

I was thinking about Druid's in this world. And I was imaginging that they would be an order that desires to expand the habitable zones in the world.

You would probably have three distinct "specializations" or groups of druids. Those who know how to defend against the unrelenting sun on the dayside, those who were masters at protecting against the cold on the nightside, and those whose job was to maintain the precious balance in the endless evening.

I could totally see how they would be a slow moving society, desperate to make sure every change they make to the natural order kept the delicate balance of the habitable zone protected. I could even see them being almost a kind of zealot, where they desperately strive to preserve the balance and only affect it when they are absolutely sure their plan will work in extending the habitable zones of the planet.

EDIT: Meticulous, slow-moving, and obsessed with the balance. I imagine them even being some of the world's best mathematicians, dutifully studying the natural order in order to work their long term goal of planetary recovery.

Bibliomancer
2010-04-02, 12:07 PM
EDIT: As an aside, I would love to join a project on something like this. Though I'm not really a big fan of the magitech moons idea, I admit. Some of the prestige classes you could make for a world like this are a dream come true!

Do you have an alternate idea for explaining the cataclysm? It wouldn't necessarily be magitech specifically, simply epic-level magic.

Additionally, you'd be a welcome addition to whatever proto-team we're trying to put together. Any thoughts on the format of the project?


Druids

I was thinking about Druid's in this world. And I was imaginging that they would be an order that desires to expand the habitable zones in the world.

You would probably have three distinct "specializations" or groups of druids. Those who know how to defend against the unrelenting sun on the dayside, those who were masters at protecting against the cold on the nightside, and those whose job was to maintain the precious balance in the endless evening.

I could totally see how they would be a slow moving society, desperate to make sure every change they make to the natural order kept the delicate balance of the habitable zone protected. I could even see them being almost a kind of zealot, where they desperately strive to preserve the balance and only affect it when they are absolutely sure their plan will work in extending the habitable zones of the planet.

EDIT: Meticulous, slow-moving, and obsessed with the balance. I imagine them even being some of the world's best mathematicians, dutifully studying the natural order in order to work their long term goal of planetary recovery.

That would certainly add an interesting element to the story. We could actually make druids the 'clerics' of the god of stability, while the true clerics represent lunatic fringe elements of the old order.

Valairn
2010-04-02, 12:16 PM
Do you have an alternate idea for explaining the cataclysm? It wouldn't necessarily be magitech specifically, simply epic-level magic.

Additionally, you'd be a welcome addition to whatever proto-team we're trying to put together. Any thoughts on the format of the project?

Oh I was just commenting that its not my favorite idea, as in, I don't really like the idea of humans as "interlopers." I don't mind the idea of an epic magic war fought between empires on the moons, but I'd prefer the differences to be ideological rather than racial.

As far as project format is concerned, I do worry a little bit about pulling an Articles of Confederation, where we create a 13 headed monster with no ultimate say on the direction of the project, though I don't like the idea of a single figurehead, a voting system of some kind would be preferable.



That would certainly add an interesting element to the story. We could actually make druids the 'clerics' of the god of stability, while the true clerics represent lunatic fringe elements of the old order.

That could work, it makes sense they would have some "insider" information.

Lycanthromancer
2010-04-02, 04:59 PM
I wouldn't mind the technomage war if it's flavored properly.

Take Final Fantasy VI, for example. We have living weapons formed from magic that have survived from the old war between the gods, even millennia after the gods sealed themselves away.

Perhaps something similar could be had here; it was a religious war, between two pantheons that were worshiped on the two moons. They kidnapped and experimented upon the inhabitants of the planet to turn them into weapons, using them as surrogates (these could take the form of various outsiders; planetars and balors who fought side-by-side under the heels of their lunar masters), and used the planet's surface as the staging grounds for their wars, since the two moons had orbits on opposite sides of the planet, and had to move their troops across the face of the world, since the planet itself makes teleportation difficult (and yes, teleportation is very restricted outside of short-range dimension doors, which knocks out a few choice issues and enforces some limits on ruining potential adventure hooks).

Maybe the war lasted so long that those involved began to see it more as some sort of game, moving their pawns about on the board that was the planet. They didn't see the death and suffering, nor did they really care, so long as they stopped the opposing forces from gaining any ground.

Eventually the pawns rebelled, sick of being treated as mere disposable minions, and both sides joined forces, beginning the offensive against both moons. The power the lunar races created was far stronger than their ability to contain, and after a great deal of damage was done to both societies, the military leaders, in desperation, met on neutral ground, the third moon. This was discovered by the weapons of war, and they took the opportunity to end the war right then and there, with an epic blast that killed the masters, but shattered the neutral moon in the process. The sudden discharge of energy, along with the dispersal of a massive lunar body and the explosion that caused it, sent the planet and the two remaining moons spinning out of their respective orbits, forcing one of the gods of the peoples of the planet (from a weaker pantheon, which is why things escalated this far) to save the world by sacrificing himself, entrapping him where he remains to this day.

The two lunar societies were left in chaos, and were forced to enter hibernation to survive. The weapons of war dispersed, some settling down into obscurity, with others continuing an endless war among the planes on ethical and moral grounds.

This would, of course, likely lead to a lot of celestial/fiendish/elemental blood amongst the various races, meaning we'll have to see how to integrate it all into the setting as a whole.

Valairn
2010-04-02, 07:55 PM
On the matter of teleportation, I agree, limiting its power is probably a good idea.

I was thinking that instead of a peace meeting at the third moon. Instead what occurred was a very important magical material was discovered there, that powered some of the late wonders of that age. The moon had it in high quantities, and so the war shifted its focus to the moon, due to the nature of this magical material, the fighting over it, caused a cataclysm. I was thinking this mainly cause I think it would be awesome to have vestiges of the empires still fighting over scraps of this moon, with left over military bases and mining facilities strewn throughout the belt.

Lycanthromancer
2010-04-02, 08:11 PM
On the matter of teleportation, I agree, limiting its power is probably a good idea.

I was thinking that instead of a peace meeting at the third moon. Instead what occurred was a very important magical material was discovered there, that powered some of the late wonders of that age. The moon had it in high quantities, and so the war shifted its focus to the moon, due to the nature of this magical material, the fighting over it, caused a cataclysm. I was thinking this mainly cause I think it would be awesome to have vestiges of the empires still fighting over scraps of this moon, with left over military bases and mining facilities strewn throughout the belt.It wasn't so much a compact of peace so much as a, 'the enemy of my enemy is still my enemy, but better to make a pact with the devil and live to see another day,' type of thing.

However, I do like your take on it, if only for the mining colonies in 0Gs and an additional reason for conflict. We should tie this in to the difficulty in surviving on this world, and the general scarcity of things that most worlds take for granted.

Perhaps the moon had large iron deposits, and the planet has very, very, very little. The reason why there's iron under the glaciers is that a huge chunk of the moon fell to the planet's surface when it cracked apart.

Iron is scarce, and other metals are even moreso.

Valairn
2010-04-02, 08:23 PM
I really like that idea. I could imagine a crater covered in ice and darkness, with the riches of a whole world just waiting for someone to brave the nightmare.

Someone earlier in the thread mentioned that it would be cool if the starside of the planet had a lot of Old God type influences in it, it could be cool, cause it would make going for that iron a really dangerous type of work.

EvilBloodGnome
2010-04-02, 09:18 PM
This sounds a bit like Eberron, except without as much of the magitech. Not a bad idea for explaining how civilization managed to cope, though. I imagine that cantrips for creating temporary mirrors would be rather common.

Alternatively, you could create a sliding scale for cold damage per hour. Thus, in extreme temperatures you'd take some damage per hour, unless you had immunity, since the cold damage could be in excess of 20d6. However, it would be good to keep immunity to be exactly what it says on the tin, since it would be handy to have some type of creatures living in the deep wastes. It seems that ice paraelementals and fire elementals would be rather common.

Heh, I thought of Eberron, too, 'cept I didn't think dungeonpunk fit this too much.


I'd be all for a campaign setting using this. Two questions though: #1. Who? and #2. How?

Also, who thinks we could get The Vorpal Tribble to work on some monsters and interesting LA 0 races for us?

I'm willing to throw in my hat to help. I like to write and make setting.

I could even come up with some races, although I work a lot better with Pathfinder than I do 3.5. If I were going to help a lot with mechanics, I'd propose we use it just for ease of it.

Then again, people who like Pathfinder are (surprisingly, at least to me) harder to find, so I could work with bare-bones 3.5 if I had to.

Lycanthromancer
2010-04-02, 09:25 PM
I could even come up with some races, although I work a lot better with Pathfinder than I do 3.5. If I were going to help a lot with mechanics, I'd propose we use it just for ease of it.

Then again, people who like Pathfinder are (surprisingly, at least to me) harder to find, so I could work with bare-bones 3.5 if I had to.Ugh. Pathfinder.

If you're going to fix a ruleset, actually fix the damned thing. Don't tiptoe around the problems, weaken the weak and strengthen the strong and make a bunch of rules that don't affect things either way.

TLDR: Let's go 3.5. Pathfinder sucks.

Valairn
2010-04-02, 10:00 PM
Ugh. Pathfinder.

If you're going to fix a ruleset, actually fix the damned thing. Don't tiptoe around the problems, weaken the weak and strengthen the strong and make a bunch of rules that don't affect things either way.

TLDR: Let's go 3.5. Pathfinder sucks.

Here here.... or at least, I would prefer to work from 3.5.

EvilBloodGnome
2010-04-03, 12:23 AM
Although I could argue you on all of those points, fiiiiiiine xP

Irreverent Fool
2010-04-03, 12:55 AM
Pathfinder has some nice things going for it. My only beef with it has been integration and an easy way to see what's supplanted and what isn't when 3.5 is already so entrenched in the minds of myself and those with whom I game.

As usual, I'm not helping here at all.

obnoxious
sig

Valairn
2010-04-03, 11:13 AM
We are planning on modifying our rules to fit the world as well, we've already mentioned teleportation. So its probably best to start from 3.5, edit what we think is editable for the setting, and if we have time and energy, maybe make a few more edits just for the sake of it.

snikrept
2010-04-04, 01:56 AM
Druids

I was thinking about Druid's in this world. And I was imaginging that they would be an order that desires to expand the habitable zones in the world.

You would probably have three distinct "specializations" or groups of druids. Those who know how to defend against the unrelenting sun on the dayside, those who were masters at protecting against the cold on the nightside, and those whose job was to maintain the precious balance in the endless evening.

I could totally see how they would be a slow moving society, desperate to make sure every change they make to the natural order kept the delicate balance of the habitable zone protected. I could even see them being almost a kind of zealot, where they desperately strive to preserve the balance and only affect it when they are absolutely sure their plan will work in extending the habitable zones of the planet.

EDIT: Meticulous, slow-moving, and obsessed with the balance. I imagine them even being some of the world's best mathematicians, dutifully studying the natural order in order to work their long term goal of planetary recovery.
I see Druids being very interesting.

Druids have long been mocked for having a behavior set that serves balance, a concept that doesn't have much meaning in actual play.

On a tidally locked planet, balance finally has a real meaning. Druids are those mystics who devote their lives to making sure the habitable strip doesn't get wholly consumed by fire or ice. Druids would be strongly elementalist in training. Spells like Heat Metal, Control Weather, Sleet Storm and Flamestrike become terraforming tools.

EvenSeven
2010-04-04, 06:08 AM
You guys have some very interesting stuff going here, and I'd love to help if I could. I've been working casually on a setting not too dissimilar for a couple of years, so I have an idea or two to share.

For now, though, I'm wondering about what kind of technology the people of this world would have access to - would they take advantage of wind power for travel and day-to-day conveniences, like short-distance gliders to bypass difficult terrain, or windmills to help draw water from the ground? Would their weapons be the "standard" fantasy set, or would they have developed (or scavenged) slightly more advanced weaponry, like firearms?

flabort
2010-04-04, 12:28 PM
So, I'm going to be asuming that (in the sunset zone) the wind blows sunside near the ground (with the flowing waters), and coldside overhead. this would make sense with the wind RISING in the hot side, and blowing towards coldside, and DROPPING cold side, then being sucked hotside.

This would give armies with ranged weaponry an advantage when coldwards to an enemy, as thier arrows would be proppelled by the stormy wind into the enemies. however, unless you were shooting straight with the wind, ranged weaponry would be almost useless. (as an airsoft player, I know even a slight breeze can do a number on a plastic BB. and with almost no surface area, this means that I know wind really hurts ranged weapons). therefore, I would asume that most "inpenertrable" fortresses would have thier only entrance facing sunside, so that any aproaching hostile would be shredded by arrows, bolts, or crystal shards.

Otherwise, I'd assume there is a focus on melee, rather than range, as it would be very hard to use a bow on such a planet. even ranged weapons would very easily double as melee weapons. bladed bows, spike crossbows, blow-guns with sharped edges for stabbing, ect. I envision they've designed serrated swords with dimpled sides to prevent binding (don't you hate it when a carrot sticks to the knife? worse when an elf sticks to the axe), better quality materials and alloys, and more. folding weapons, for storage, flick blades, so even a 1st level commoner can draw them as a free action, ect.

since this is a magic infested setting, we've got magi-tech blades that drain a foes life force, hammers capable of spring-launching foes sunwards, ect. but otherwise, I see the standard fantasy set. I'm not seeing firearms even usefull, although they COULD replace bows, swords would still be more effective with these winds. maybe electric based weapons, such as tazers, if we're envisioning them in a more "modern" time.

Subotei
2010-04-04, 02:28 PM
This would give armies with ranged weaponry an advantage when coldwards to an enemy, as thier arrows would be proppelled by the stormy wind into the enemies.

That would probably be balanced by the fact that they would have the sun in their eyes all the time. An important issue also for melee, in the low-sun area.

Bibliomancer
2010-04-04, 04:17 PM
Oh I was just commenting that its not my favorite idea, as in, I don't really like the idea of humans as "interlopers." I don't mind the idea of an epic magic war fought between empires on the moons, but I'd prefer the differences to be ideological rather than racial.

Perhaps, but then the problem becomes how did a race develop in two places at once? Even if it only developed in one spot, then the battle becomes one between the homeworld and the colonists...

...which could actually be rather interesting. The main issue here, I think, is deciding whether or not the lunar race(s) is in hibernation or common (interestingly, the lunars on the planet would probably be 'untouchables', since they would be a low-ranking people literally below both the Old and New powers. A related issue would be whether or not to use the default races in this setting, or to create a completely new mix of player races.

I think eliminating humans would actually be beneficial, since the illumians share their adaptability without running the risk of seeming flavorless, as many human characters can be. If humans don't exist and the other races are modified, every character would be tied very strongly to the setting's background as an Overlord/Native/Plaything.


Iron is scarce, and other metals are even moreso.

If the main source of iron is on the cold side, it would be easy to say that copper (and thus bronze, which would presumambly be the main metal) is found on the sunside, and thus link both metals to 'heat' and 'cold' in a meaningful way.


That could work, it makes sense they would have some "insider" information.

Certainly. Druids would become very significant in this setting, if not quite on the level of the Catholic church in Medieval Europe. If the merest footstep of a god can result in a wobble that destroys dozens of communities, clerics would be mistrusted, if not hated. Most of the remaining gods would be demipowers, with a few lesser gods who survived the cataclysm, and atheism would be rather common (a mirror image of Forgotten Realms).


As far as project format is concerned, I do worry a little bit about pulling an Articles of Confederation, where we create a 13 headed monster with no ultimate say on the direction of the project, though I don't like the idea of a single figurehead, a voting system of some kind would be preferable

I wouldn't be adverse to a voting system, but it shouldn't be totally open, a la "Vote up a campaign setting." It should be limited to the people who are involved meaningfully in the project.

That said, it would be best to seek consensus with all of the designers instead of following a divisive 50% +1 system.

Lycanthromancer
2010-04-04, 08:30 PM
I like the idea of a bronze/iron paradigm, with most common weapons being made from bone, bronze, stone, and wood (with ironwood being extremely common due to the presence of druidic orders and its resiliency and ease of availability compared to the far more rare and expensive iron). I would wager that iron is prized greatly, and most items made with it would be a level of masterwork above and beyond what 'standard' D&D uses.

I'm thinking that adamantine would be the new iron. 'Regular' items would be made from bone, bronze, etc (with no mechanical changes at all from those assumed in other rulebooks), but due to weather issues and how fragile refined iron is (rusting and brittleness), master smiths would have long ago perfected the arts of several different alloys, and it would be unheard of for lower-grade iron items to be found anywhere outside of basic ore.

I could see 'religion' taking the form of self-actualization, a la the ardent. Perfection of the self through contemplation and spiritual awakening. Very Tao. Very Buddhist. The gods of the old pantheons are all but hibernating (what with very few worshipers), mostly followed through cults and rare open following (generally for the worldly gods of old). The god that saved the world would be a major exception. Perhaps his followers are the ones that espouse self-enlightenment, which is where the whole thing got started. He's revered, but more as a teacher and perhaps a friend, rather than a deity. He's well-respected for his self-sacrificial nature and for his knowledge and wisdom, and perhaps a pilgrimage to some of his holy places is a rite of passage into adulthood.

I'm seeing ardents and swordsages-as-monks being big parts of the temple scene.

Of course, there could be sects among both the Taoist philosophies and the druidic orders that get along well, and others that clash rather heavily, depending on the routes followed for perfection-of-self and how the various druidic orders see those philosophies and their views on civilization in general.

Of course, if the lunar races are mostly in stasis (aside from a few who have either awoken prematurely, or those who have watched the world over the eons), their pantheons may be, as well. If they were to ever be revived, there could be some severe spiritual backlashes that could cause quite a lot of chaos.

Could be that the illumians are rare, but still somewhat common (perhaps .5% of the standard population or so), and have integrated more with society, having learned their lessons long ago about seeing others as disposable.

The race of the other moon (fey - the uber-scary kind? doppelgangers/changelings? kalashtar/quori? something else?) is still mostly in stasis, and the few that have returned tend to be very...bad. Still full of hubris and powerhunger, they scheme and plot the return of their kind, and cause all sorts of problems.

...not that all of both are that way, but it'd make for a reasonable set of plothooks if we went there.

flabort
2010-04-04, 09:30 PM
I'd like to point out now the importance of shelters now, and how they {might} funtion. we, on earth, have several different styles of shelters, with different precations, functions, and values. We have earth-quake proof shelters, with deep foundations, flexible structures, and nail-less walls. we have tornado proof shelters, with reinforced walls, also deep foundations, and thick windows. we have flood-proof shelters, with little or no foundations, on stilts. we have portable shelters, such as tents. we have homes, houses, buisness buildings, factories, all built differently, with different purposes, syles, and ways of resisting natural dissature.

In our tidally locked world (we really need a name for it, don't we?), we are for certain buffeted by constant winds, lots of rain, and risk of flood at all times. these winds can reace hurricane level easily, so they have to be our top priorety. next are the rains and floods. we'll need to make sure the buildings won't be affected by such. since we're asuming there are several hostilities, cities should have ways of defending themselves passively. and, finally, any building must fit it's function.

we'll asume we're talking about a house. it could be in the middle of a city, or the middle of nowhere. winds are fierce. very fierce. to defend against such, we have a deep foundation. building most buildings will involve a bunch of digging before hand. even in town. you'd probably layer the inside with brick, or concrete if it's advanced enough of a setting. you'd leave holes in the bricks, though, as you'd ram a hollow peice of pipe (copper, iron, steel, or PCV, depending on level of tech.) down it, and deeper into the ground. this is for later. you'd work upwards with bricks and wood from there. since the wind is CONSTANTLY in the same dirrection, it would make sense to taper the building, to a point facing the wind. this would minimalize resistance. the door would best be opposite the point, because perpendicular to the wind, it would be blown closed/shut all the time, and simply shut if towards the wind. you want it in the zone of least wind at all times, if you want it to close.

After reaching ground-level with your foundation bricks, we insert the pipes mentioned above. we construct a little basin around the building, that pours into slits, that pour into these pipes. it then pours into the ground, deep, were it's absorbed into the earth. if it's deep enough, it may even stop filling the pipe up and overflowing the basin. so, we have over-flow procedures: extra pipes leading from these drain pipes, into the local sewer system, no matter how far. if no local sewer system exists, into the local lake/river/swamp/flood pond/nieghbor's basement/ect. building upwards, we add a floor on the inside, and slowly taper the walls into a peaked roof. think like a elongated pyramid with curved sides. this pushes rain water off, and slices the wind. of course, everyone's door would face sunside in this set-up, so this is only a rough example of an OPTOMISED STRUCTURE.

as we build up, we divide it into rooms. we need a room for eating, a room for preparing food, posibly a room for disposing of waste if society forbids from doing it outside, room(s) for sleeping, and possibly a room for hanging out and/or greeting guests. that is minimum three, likely four or five rooms needed. we also have stairs into the room left in the basement, for when winds get really bad. not good when it's flooding, as that could get flooded too if it's built badly.

Next... actually, I'm tapped for ideas at the moment, and my wrist hurts. badly. like, fire to my elbow when I twist it. that, and, my ideas are probably ALL WRONG. badly so. buildings may not even be similar to my description.

Nerdanel
2010-04-05, 11:37 AM
I remember reading that the scientists had done the math for an earth-like planet tide-locked to a red dwarf star. The temperature for the light pole in the model was 50 C and for the dark pole -50 C, with 0 C at around the terminator.

If we are talking about planets that have gotten tide-locked naturally, there probably would be oceans at the north and south poles. When the planet first solidified, it would have been spinning around its axis much faster than at the present, causing slight flattening at the poles much like Earth has. When the planet then got tide-locked, its spinning slowed greatly but since its crust was already solid, it didn't change to conform to the new equilibrium the way the oceans did.

The natural tide-locked planet probably wouldn't have a moon either. It's not a coincidence that Mercury and Venus, the innermost planets in our solar system, are both moonless. To get a planet tide-locked we need it very close to its sun and to avoid the planet becoming intolerably hot the sun needs to be very dim as stars go: a red dwarf. The inhabitants of the planet would have evolved to see a different spectrum than we do, likely making common infravision, AD&D style. The lack of a moon would also mean that the planet would be relatively poor in metals like iron, at least near the surface.

Since red dwarf stars burn for a very long time even on the cosmic scale, life on a planet orbiting such could be truly ancient. However, red dwarfs are prone to flares and general instability, which would be a problem to the tide-locked planet nearby. The people living on the planet would have to cope with sudden solar storms and either withstand the sudden increase in heat and radiation or take cover quickly. (I'd like to know how significant this factor is in practice... Probably not too much due to evolution adapting to it. It could help to spice up weather patterns though.)

With no days or moons to tell the time with, the people could still observe the stars. A red dwarf is dim enough that the brightest of the stars are visible even at the light pole, and those stars make a full circle in one year, which would be relatively short in Earth terms. East and west would be defined as the directions of the stars' yearly rise and fall. There also could be other planets in the solar system and things could be timed based on their circuits.

I've been thinking that one day I'd like to write a fantasy novel set on a realistically tide-locked world...

jiriku
2010-04-05, 12:45 PM
Would you be interested in developing the setting on these forums? If nothing else, the reactions of your characters would provide useufl insight into how to reconcile normal D&D with something so exotic.

Also, your players would be living through a transition period, which would be enlightening, if not exactly like the 4000 years on world posited earlier.

I could certainly do so, or at least post excerpts. Also, I tend to hop around chronologically between campaigns, so I'm likely to run one campaign as a cataclym scenario, then jump forward a tens or hundreds of years for a post-apocalyptic game, and then jump forward again by a few centuries or millenia to a world in which civilization has adapted itself to the aftermath.

Fitz10019
2010-04-05, 12:56 PM
This situation could be the result of a magical effect (perhaps because of a treaty between invading armies from the planes of Ice and Fire). When the planet was first locked into this position, it was an ecological disaster, and has taken centuries for the inhabitants to adapt to the condition. Still more centuries later, the locked state is the status quo.

If the planet were to begin rotating again, it would be yet another disaster (possibly worse, as every society has over-adapted to their current situation). The current status quo leadership would do anything to prevent the re-started rotation. It would be challenging to find a reason for someone living in the current times to want the re-started rotation to happen.

Reminds me a little of 12 Monkeys.

Bibliomancer
2010-04-07, 03:59 PM
I've been thinking that one day I'd like to write a fantasy novel set on a realistically tide-locked world...

That would certainly be interesting (and attending a symposium of a similar nature was my basis for saying that the upper atmosphere would probably diffuse quite well), but it is not what was being discussed here, mainly. The assumption is some kind of magical catastrophe that subsequently conformed to quasi-natural phenomena.

Nerdanel
2010-04-07, 04:22 PM
That would certainly be interesting (and attending a symposium of a similar nature was my basis for saying that the upper atmosphere would probably diffuse quite well), but it is not what was being discussed here, mainly. The assumption is some kind of magical catastrophe that subsequently conformed to quasi-natural phenomena.

The discussion veered to that direction, yes, but I think discussions about having the sun be a red dwarf, etc., are not at all off-topic as per the original post.

I mean, what's even the point of having a tide-locked planet if everything is going to be explained with magic? You might as well just go all the way and declare that the scorching radiation of the great Furnaceheart Crystal of the Luminous Death Mountain is stopped by the nine Iceshadow Veils and that humans find it most comfortable between Veils four and five.

flabort
2010-04-07, 06:18 PM
I know most of us are asuming earth-like, or at the very least standard D&D creatures, but let's delve into the more scientific aproach to what might evolve there.

Asuming that humans ARE the "final conclusion of evolution", we can asume a roughly humaniod population.

HOWEVER, the odds of the known portion of the universe existing as it is are 1:10^295, which is slim, and therefore the odds that they would be JUST LIKE HUMANS are also extremely slim.

So we start factoring in the elements from a roughly humaniod base.

Constant winds, very strong winds. This results in the creatures on the planet to be extra stable, compared to our's, to compesate for the winds. they may be a little lopsided if they tend to migrate in the same dirrection.

although there is ample water in the form of rain, rivers and reliable water sources can be quite a distance apart. we will asume most of the creatures are simmilar to cammels somewhat, in that they can store water longer than we can. they may also put a higher value on water.

the temperature fluctuates rapidly as the storms blow through. the winds near to the ground bring cold tempratures, and the higher winds bring warmer temperatures. so, they will have thick hair or fur to regulate temperature.

since iron and other metals will be rare on the surface, as well as several other usefull materials, we can see that to get metals, they will have to dig. we also see several underground water sources, and shelter from the winds and rains underground. so they could be natural diggers.

so, in recap, we have short, furry humanoids with high value on water, and a natural digging skill.

DWARVES!!!!!!!!!!! =D

Lycanthromancer
2010-04-07, 06:24 PM
DWARVES!!!!!!!!!!! =DYou mean anthropomorphic wombats, of course.

flabort
2010-04-07, 06:34 PM
excuse double post. breaks wall of text up.

I'm also seeing moles, worms, and other digging creatures more popular, and though creatures won't migrate with the seasons (what seasons?), they may migrate around the livable band to escape the predators that follow them. (creature A is eaten by creature B, so creature A flees around globe, creature B on tails. Creature B is also fleeing Creature C, who eats them in turn. Creature D................zzzzz...........eats creature Y, so creature Y flees creature Z. however, Creature A eats creature Z, and so follows them. as such, any given point gets a predictable cycle of creatures as they flee the others and pass through.)

so above ground, herds migrate because of food-chain cycles. as such, most would be herd animals, hunting and fleeing in packs. as well, they would have excellent running capacities, as they are always hunting, or fleeing, when not eating, drinking, or sleeping.

as well, the animals would be a very good way of telling what time of year it was.

Most creatures would also be furry and water packing as our humanoids, as they are subject to the same problems.

Above ground, most larger animals would probably devolop a knuckle dragging run, using 2 legs to run, but leaning forward enough that thier "hands" almost drag allong the ground. however, puting time into using them to run would take from thier speed. most smaller creatures would scamper on four, with powerfull springed legs.

I do not see anything with wings evolving, though, what with the winds. balloon sacs, with very rapid ascension and descension, maybe, because the wind blows they other way high enough, but no wings. (sorry, dragons)

underground, most everything burrows. so they should, even the herbavors, mostly have claw attacks. or spade attacks. or bite attacks, in the case of worms and such. you know, a whole planet's biology would be very advanced.