At the same time, where you are from North to South dictates whether it is spring, summer, autumn or winter. Imagine it as a kind of graph, with a few illustrative examples of lands within it.
Island 1: Always night. A barren and frigid place where nothing grows. In the South it is slightly warmer than the North.
Island 2: Always noon and always in the middle of summer. An extremely verdant and fertile place (depending on levels of rainfall - could be a blasted desert).
Island 3: Always autumn and split between dusk and night. In the West there is some growth and life; in the East there is night.
Island 4: Always night and always winter - basically the Arctic in midwinter.
This is a very interesting concept, useful for exploring the ecology of eternal nigh/day/winter/summer. If the world be a bunch of islands, I recommend Jared Diamond's writings for inspiration, especially, Collapse, where he writes about the development and collapse of civilizations on various isolated islands and atolls in the South Pacific. He has a lot in it, that most people aren't aware of, and don't think about.
ReplyDeleteI've read Collapse, and Guns, Germs and Steel. Great books.
Deleteclive barker
ReplyDeletehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Books_of_Abarat#Islands_of_the_Abarat
I actually have a copy of that book somewhere but never got around to reading it. Maybe now's the time.
DeleteWhat about the shitter, did you come up with anything on the shitter?
ReplyDeleteYep, it's called Agonmayar.
DeleteIt would be cool if they had entirely different ecosystems. The dark side one could be base on extremophiles gathered round ancient fumaroles and volcanic vents and fungi that collected cosmic rays and the light side could be super-charged species growth like a hemisphere-covering rainforest.
ReplyDeleteYes. There's also a lot of monsters from various D&D bestiaries that can be plundered and which might qualify as extremophiles. Things which eat minerals and like the dark. Xorn and Xaren and whatnot, not to mention sverfneblin living off fungus and entire civilizations of galeb duhr whose interactions put the conferences of the ents in LotR to shame.
DeleteThis is a report of a game world with the same basic setting conceit: http://tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=55065 As with many online game journals, it ends kind of abruptly, but it's not a bad read.
ReplyDeleteI'll have a look - thanks.
DeleteExpanding on Patrick Stuarts thought, it seems like this is a good opportunity to take all those "dungeon" and "underdark" type creatures and get them out on the surface, albeit still seperate from the rest of the world. It becomes a flat horizontal dungeon in a way...
ReplyDeleteDefinitely. See my most recent post.
DeleteSort of like a ribbon world:
ReplyDeletehttp://asimov.wikia.com/wiki/Ribbon_World
My first thought is, "sword & planet version of Mercury."
ReplyDeleteYou should check out a book called West of January. It is about a civilization of sorts that has arisen from the remains of some kind of colony ship(the details are purposely vague) and how a world might look if the sun moved very slowly and thus constantly transformed the face of the planet. Though they divide the face of the planet by the months of the year and the days of the week, so you could be west of January but north of Wednesday.
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