Pathfinder World Building Question

[Anderlith]

I'm making a pathfinder campaign set in a world that was Sundered into a billion islands of land ranging from Hawaii/Cuba sized to little bitty rocks. The islands rotate around a elemental chaos called the Everstorm. The physics of the world are a bit messed up though. Gravity pulls toward the storm but the islands don't fall (they just rotate.) & the sky is still around (even though a normal atmosphere is unattainable). Most of this can exist just cause it's a fantasy world & I can make whatever I want exist but I have one big road block...

Without a backside of the world to block out the sun how should I handle night & day? I was thinking of the moon blocking but I feel that is kind of weak, & I'm looking for something on par with a world of disparate island-worlds floating in an eternal sky, dancing around an eternal primal chaos.

[Ravens_cry]

Maybe a periodic eclipse that lasts about a night?
Maybe the 'sun' rotates and only one half glows.
Perhaps it periodically dims and lightens.

[Xerinous]

Perhaps powerful storms that block the sun to cause night. They could be spawned by the Everstorm every night. It would make the islands closer to it have night fall earlier, and dawn would come earlier as well as the storms move on.

[supermonkeyjoe]

Whereabouts is the sun in relation to the islands and are all of the islands orbiting on a flat plane?

you could have something like a huge dead god orbiting the sun casts a shadow over the islands.

Alternatively the whole mess could still be revolving around the sun, night would be when the sun was shining on the underside of the islands and could be at completely different times to neighbouring islands depending on which way the island is facing.

[Nerdynick]

If you wanted to drag spelljammer into this, some of the Wildspace Dwarves could be using the sun to manufacture Pyre Iron and have a dyson sphere type set-up. :P

[Anderlith]

The islands rotate around the everstorm as if they were moons around a planet. They surround the Everstorm in a spherical pattern. The world rotates around the sun.

[Othniel Edden]

Or there could be a floating moon of some sort that absorbs all the light when it is in the sky. It could be a realm of enormous trees.

[FMArthur]

You could make a massive, warped channel of water that connects many of the islands together that used to be the ocean. Maybe this falls into regular daily patterns as the islands pass its gradual undulations, and blocks enough sunlight on the inhabitable islands for a twilight-level "night"?

If there isn't such a thing, how does the world's water flow? Do living beings need to magically generate the water on their own?

[Erloas]

You are not on a planet, you are on the moon of another planet. Such as Europa orbiting around Jupiter. So that night is when the planet is between the moon and the sun. And seeing as how the planet is much larger then the moon it would make sense for it to last a lot longer then an eclipse.

[Anderlith]

You could make a massive, warped channel of water that connects many of the islands together that used to be the ocean. Maybe this falls into regular daily patterns as the islands pass its gradual undulations, and blocks enough sunlight on the inhabitable islands for a twilight-level "night"?

If there isn't such a thing, how does the world's water flow? Do living beings need to magically generate the water on their own? No oceans exist, people use flying creatures & airships to travel. Water falls from the islands into the Everstorm, which periodically shoots it back up in huge geysers.

[Sylivin]

There is no night. Well, not completely. When the sun is on the "other side" of the world the light is being filtered through a bunch of floating "skylands", your elemental storm, and more "skylands" before finally reaching the far end of the planet. The sun is big and bright and all, but think about it logically. How much light is lost when a single tree is put between the sun and you? How much light is lost in the middle of a dense forest? How much light is lost a few feet under the water? While granted it will be brighter than some of those instances due to the scattering of light in the sky, it will still be dark at "night" time. You can fluff it easily too.

Unlike the moon which is fairly reflective, the continents are made of a dense, darker rock that absorbs more light than it reflects (really, this is the only way you can even have these floating skylands not be freezing cold unless the planet is much closer to the sun than ours.. even then it is pretty iffy.. maybe elemental chaos shinanigans?). This way each "skyland" casts a large shadow and filtering sunlight through an entire world of islands would create a twilight on the other side of the world. Not as dark as our planet gets, but maybe a bit brighter than a full moon?

A second option is that there is no night. The highest "skylands" are bathed in permanent light, while islands lower down get days and nights when islands higher in the sky pass overhead. Given that these islands are the size of countries their shadows will be massive and impressive indeed. Thus the further you get toward the elemental chaos the less light (and plant life) exists in the world.

[Anderlith]

I like the idea of a dusky twilight instead of darkness. I think I'll go with that. Thanks for the idea the "skylands" be made of darker material. Oh & I think I might steal the term "skylands"

[Paul H]

Hi

Or you could just simply amend an existing world.

The magical effects you describe could be a major local phenomenon, the result of a great magical war fought eons ago. Just the local people have lived here so long ago the cataclysmic event has long been forgotten into ancient fairy-tales & Legend.

What would happen if they travelled far away outside the phonemon? Or if Outsiders discovered them? Trigger the 'Valley of Dinosours' type campaign. (Archeologists discover an ancient remote valley where dinosours still live in 20th Century).

Just a thought...
Paul H

[Andreaz]

Let's see if I understood it.
There is a bunch of islands rotating around a whirlpool. Where is the whirlpool located?

If it's on the surface of a planet, night is still the planet's rotation with a sun far away from it. Bonus to the fact that screwed up gravity and positioning means the day/night cycle become irregular, with the islands' shadow "ending" the day earlier on the seasons in which the islands are around the equator. The ones near the poles would have a normal 50%/50% cycle. The position of the sun in the sky according to such seasons will change drastically too.

[Larpus]

What if instead of the normal planet rotation = day/night business, you make it so that planet revolution = day/night, considering a big enough ellipse of revolution, there might be some time where the sun is far enough that it barely warms or lights the planet.

The end result would be something close to the sun not moving at all at the sky, but getting smaller (and dimmer) as the day goes by, effectively working as an always present moon during the night time.

Yes, it's an insanely fast revolution time (their year lasts only 24 hours), but it can again be an anomaly caused by the Everstorm, something along the lines that it pulls the planet towards the sun, hence the fast revolution, but it's in an equilibrium, so each time the planet is pullet towards the sun it simply goes around it, gaining momentum, and is launched back to far away.

They'd totally lose the normal thumb-rule for measuring years tho, so maybe they can revert to a tribal-like fashion of counting "moons" or "far suns" or have some other event mark each year, such as an eruption from the Everstorm or something.