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  1. - Top - End - #31
    Orc in the Playground
    Join Date
    Oct 2006

    Default Re: Developing a Coherent Undersea Setting

    Thank you for the thoughtful replies. Especially @Yanagi for the primer on different ocean biomes and how hypothetical people would gather food there.
    Last edited by Scalenex; 2020-05-25 at 03:43 PM.

  2. - Top - End - #32
    Troll in the Playground
     
    HalflingPirate

    Join Date
    Nov 2011

    Default Re: Developing a Coherent Undersea Setting

    It did not have a name. Not as surface dwellers understand the concept. It did have a designation: 68945281. This was both its address and its place in formation: 6th city, 8th sector, 9th ring, 4th legion, 5th regiment, 2nd company, 8th squad, 1st row. That it lacked a name had never bothered it. Indeed, it had never been told it wanted one. It understood only that the masters who ruled the sehaugin city desired things the way they were.

    And it understood that it had been assigned by 6894528 to indoctrinate the replacements which would soon arrive to replace 283 and 286, who had been killed in the military training exercise in the last interval. 4 and 5 had been moved up one row while 7, 8, and 9 moved up two rows. The replacements, fresh from the creche, would become the new 8 and 9.

    The assignment for this interval was guard duty over the tube-worm farm. It hated the farm. It hated guarding tube-worms. It hated eating tube worms. It hated the warm water in which the tube-worms thrived. Most of all it hated the red light that glowed in the cones and cracks through which the superheated water jetted, often taking foul-tasting and sometimes poisonous dirt with it and spreading it in a cloud which fell onto the farm as the hot water cooled.

    The replacements arrived in a ragged column lead by the creche squads. Two were prodded out of the school and 281 shoved them roughly into their places. As the rest of the replacements were assigned elsewhere, 281 instructed the two assigned to its squad in their new stations, prodding them with its long pike when one or the other failed to answer quickly. (And once or twice just for the thrill their fear elicited.)

    Then 689452 signalled and the company moved out in formation, (with 1sts falling back to prod replacements into proper formations.)

    281 was dilligent and soon the replacements were approximating good soldiers. It hoped they would train quickly and well. In a few intervals there would be another training exercise, and the losing side would be punished by decimation. Usually squad leaders selected the 1sts.
    Last edited by brian 333; 2020-06-02 at 04:47 PM.

  3. - Top - End - #33
    Dwarf in the Playground
     
    ClericGuy

    Join Date
    Feb 2012
    Location
    Greece
    Gender
    Male

    Default Re: Developing a Coherent Undersea Setting

    Personally, I would have started an undersea setting simple.

    1st:
    They read and write on waterproof papyrus. They either purchase that from the "surface races" (e.g. humans) or they create it magically.

    2nd:
    They have great bubbles of air, the same way we, the mighty humans, have great pools of water. They do things in there, especially the ones they can not do in the water, but they can hold their breath out of the water only for a fixed number of hours (much like the Aquatic Elves of 3.5).

    3rd:
    The metal they use has all the properties of iron and steel but it does not rust in the water and it will be called Oreichalchos because why not.

    4th:
    They speak normally out of the water but use body language and telepathy while submerged.

    Hope I was helpful...

    EDIT: What about using magic waterproof pills instead of potions underwater?
    Last edited by ARTHAN; 2020-06-14 at 03:23 AM.
    Post if you wish to ask about Ruins & Raiders. I do not answer to PMs anymore.

  4. - Top - End - #34
    Orc in the Playground
    Join Date
    Oct 2006

    Default Re: Developing a Coherent Undersea Setting

    I was watching a video on fantasy world building and they talked about harbors, rivers, and sea travel and I thought. Well, when I am building a civilization under the sea, that's sort of moot isn't it.

    Then I thought about Finding Nemo when they showed a bunch of sea creatures hitching a ride on the East Australian Current.

    So I had the thought that predictable regular ocean currents would serve the equivalent of rivers.

    On a surface world river, you could haul a barge upstream, but you cannot easily travel against the East Australian Current. However, I think people going the opposite direction would still benefit from traveling near a current. If hypothetically you were hauling ore or something heavy you could barter for food from people coming the opposite fast direction of the current. You could also benefit from soldiers patrolling it.

    In a world with magic and active gods, a team of wizards or a benevolent deity could artificially create artificial currents in directions that are helpful to civilization.

    Since I'm planning to make the main setting underwater an analogy to Rome, and real world Rome depended on the economic utility of their awesome roads, Water Rome could have a monopoly or near monopoly on artificially created traverse-able currents. That can also help me with map building. The "Here there be barbarians and sharks and shark barbarians" parts of the map would be any where far from the undersea roads while Water Rome would be safest and most stable in transportation hubs.

  5. - Top - End - #35
    Troll in the Playground
     
    HalflingPirate

    Join Date
    Nov 2011

    Default Re: Developing a Coherent Undersea Setting

    By using shallows, backwaters, and eddy currents one can easily pole a barge upstream, and portage around areas where such advantages do not exist. This was how the rivers and (later) canals became the highways of commerce in Europe and America two centuries before the advent of steam engines. (And long before in other cultures.)

    Certainly currents in the ocean have eddys and backwaters. Indeed, if one were to look, one would see that not only do surface currents make gyres, or huge circles around the ocean, eventually returning to their point of origin, these patterns create smaller, regional gyres, and not only in the horizontal. Currents in the ocean are 3D. It may be possible to ride the Gulf Stream north and the Arctic Haline Current south or to use the Loop Current in the Gulf of Mexico to go from any coast to any other coast in the Gulf.

  6. - Top - End - #36
    Ogre in the Playground
    Join Date
    Mar 2019
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    Magrathea
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    Male

    Default Re: Developing a Coherent Undersea Setting

    I should point out that there are kinds of waterproof material that can be used for writing, and either strong sediment or waterproof ink could hypothetically be used (maybe they breed special breeds of squids for ink).

    I really like the idea of using underwater currents as parallels to rivers, it seems like a great way to work with many of the major commerce aspects of a civilization.
    An explanation of why MitD being any larger than Huge is implausible.

    See my extended signature here! May contain wit, candor, and somewhere from 52 to 8127 walruses.

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    "I think, therefore I am,
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  7. - Top - End - #37
    Orc in the Playground
    Join Date
    Oct 2006

    Default Re: Developing a Coherent Undersea Setting

    Quote Originally Posted by brian 333 View Post
    By using shallows, backwaters, and eddy currents one can easily pole a barge upstream, and portage around areas where such advantages do not exist. This was how the rivers and (later) canals became the highways of commerce in Europe and America two centuries before the advent of steam engines. (And long before in other cultures.)

    Certainly currents in the ocean have eddys and backwaters. Indeed, if one were to look, one would see that not only do surface currents make gyres, or huge circles around the ocean, eventually returning to their point of origin, these patterns create smaller, regional gyres, and not only in the horizontal. Currents in the ocean are 3D. It may be possible to ride the Gulf Stream north and the Arctic Haline Current south or to use the Loop Current in the Gulf of Mexico to go from any coast to any other coast in the Gulf.
    Physics are not my strong suit. I understand that an ocean current would create forces on the edge pushing the opposite direction, but I'm lost on how a Merman would pole a barge or the functional equivalent of a barge against a current. Please elaborate.

  8. - Top - End - #38
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    HalflingPirate

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    Nov 2011

    Default Re: Developing a Coherent Undersea Setting

    The bladder was compressed now, crushed by the weight of the ocean above. At this depth the sunlight was little more than a pale blueing of the blackness.

    Poc-pree guided the school of Oceanic Whitetip sharks which were harnessed to the bladder which suspended the gondola at neutral buoyancy here at almost 150 body lengths below the surface where the cold water lay still, locked in its place by the mighty arctic current rushing south many body lengths below them and the immense tropical current that flowed above. Since his destination was east, he used muscle and the vast, empty void between the currents for his road.

    He caught a taste. A flavor of grass on the water. He had been waiting for that, but it was gone. His mental map showed that he was nearing the archipelago. The broad tropical stream meandered into the flanks of the mountains and swirls of surface water were forced into the depths. He might share their fate if he came too far south in his approach, or worse, be washed ashore and stranded. But if he surfaced too soon the tropical current would drag him north into desolate waters filled with ice.

    The correct course was to catch the easternmost edge of the warm stream where it branched off to loop around the island. In the lee of the island was Dreekuue, the trading center of the central ocean.

    He swam onward, confident that he would taste the green water in the darkness and hear the turbulance of the warm surface water swirling around the seamounts, and he would know when it was time to release his ballast to catch the Archipelago Current for the swing north and east.

    The block of blubber in the gondala would be given to reward his six companions when he released them offshore of the port: most merfolk (rightly) feared the predators. Taking them into the mer city would be beyond rude. But they ate only once a month or so, and they were exceedingly strong. And there were white tips all over the ocean who would come at his call when his trading was done.

    There! Another taste! Now to listen for the growl of sea against stone...



    The abbyssal plain appeared empty. To those who could see. It was lightless. Eyes were, at best, secondary senses.

    But there was life, and it was everywhere. Tiny creatures to whom water was a viscuous medium in which they were trapped which ate the detritus which fell from the surface in a constant snowfall, to the tiny crustaceans and fish which ate them, to the larger creatures which ate them, and so on, right up to the giant lobsters which were trapped in the cages the merfolk had assembled.

    Some were trying to remove the packs the mers were fastening to their backs. Most were trying to escape the cages. The packs contained the rewards of two months in the deep: clams and shells, bones of whales cleaned by hagfish, various deep water delicacies, and most importantly, the manganese nodules that surface dwellers craved. Their haul would become wealth in the shallows.

    With the last bundles secured the merfolk gatherers broke the cages, releasing the lobsters. Their tiny brains knew what to do. It was their season, and their only thought was migration. Their chotic surge soon became an orderly chain of lobsters making a steady, sure course toward the shallows.

    As they approched the rise which was the foot of the continental shelf, currents pulled at the merfolk, but the lobsters marched on. When those currents became ferocious and the mers had to struggle just to make headway, the lobsters would march on.

    The mers protected the lobsters along the way. Sharks and rays and giant octopods would prey on them if they could. In exchange for their labor the lobsters would survive to breed in the shallows. In a week the males would head back to the deeps, followed a month later by the females. They would leave behind the next generatiom of lobsters which would grow in the sunlight until, in two years, the dark deep called them.

    And in the years to come they would return to the shallows. Perhaps burdened with packs tied to their backs.
    Last edited by brian 333; 2020-06-18 at 12:31 PM.

  9. - Top - End - #39
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    HalflingPirate

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    Nov 2011

    Default Re: Developing a Coherent Undersea Setting

    The Agulhas was not a ship. Not as humans would know it. It was more like a raft. Or maybe a mat.

    What it was was a huge collection of flotsam which had been threaded with seaweed vines, and their near-continual growth made the floating platform stable enough that suspended nets of seaweed vine could be woven into chambers. Some of these, in the dark interior where thick old vines had grown into an almost solid snarl, were used to store treasure and trade goods. The lightly woven open baskets around the perimiter were dormitories for the Trading Clan.

    Around, beneath, and within the mat creatures of the open ocean, (mostly juveniles,) schooled or lurked. This was convenient for the merfolk clan, both as a handy larder and as bait to attract larger oceanic creatures upon which they could dine.

    The merfolk seldom tried to steer their vessel. It was locked in a great oceanic gyre that brought it northward along the coast of the desert land, and farther north into the tropical archipelagoes, and as the current began to warm under the equatorial sun the raft turned west and flowed with it.

    North of their course the currents flowed in smaller gyres, limited in size by the embayments of the great northern continent which brought the great winter storms and dry summer winds that rained dust. The clans of these smaller gyres occasionally crossed the equatorial currents to meet them. Sometimes this was not practical, but they did when they could because the Trading Clans had to intermarry, and children of every clan on the Southern Ocean were a part of the Agulhas Clan.

    But the Equatorial Current flowed swiftly westward into the Storm Islands which stood on the shoulder of the great Western Land. The current was forced south along its coast, and followed it to the southern tip where the great Circumpolar Current surged east through the island chains which would trap the great blocks of ice which flowed north far enough to become caught in the warm waters of the gyre.

    Now headed east, the current rapidly cooled. By the time it reached the coast of the dry continent again, some six years had passed and the traders had met and traded with from fifty to eighty cities in the shallow coastal waters.



    The warm loop current in the top fifty body lengths of the sea occasionally pinched off and formed gyres in the sea. When this happened the main loop current shifted east, and was no more than a bulge poking into the narrows that divided the sea from the ocean. When a second or even third gyre was pinched off of the loop their currents fought against each other, slowing the gyres even faster than they would have slowed on their own. When these gyres drifted west and south and lost rotational speed, the loop would grow westward again, forced by the tropical heat that fueled the great oceanic gyre of which it was a minor branch.

    Eeprrra-ak knew of another current. Deep in the still, cold of the sea a great current surged. Over the melennia it had surged along the same path. Colder than ice, saltier than the warm surface water, it flowed in deep canyons carved in the seabed by scouring sand pushed year after year along the natural low points of the sea floor.

    Down into this current Eeprrra-ak and her sisters dropped their sail. At the proper depth it unfurled. The trick was to allow the sail to flow out ahead of the ship so that it would pull the ship forward against the warm current that ran in the wrong direction for the human sailors.

    Powered by the mermaids' sail the ship sailed east and south for two days before they furled the sail. The human sailors rewarded them with golden rings set with earth-delved gemstones, and they waved as the wind, finally strong enough to overcome the shallow, spread out surface current, pushed the ship south.

    Eeprrra-ak and her sisters wrestled the sail up to the surface where they rested and played in the warm sunlit sea as they drifted with the current back north and east into the loop current where, soon, another ship would heave to awaiting the magic of the mermaids to draw them south and east against the powerful current.
    Last edited by brian 333; 2020-06-20 at 11:45 AM.

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