How’s the shape of the world your campaign is taking place in? I’m expecting lots of “flat”s and “round”s, but there’s always some that are quite unorthodox, like pic related.
 |
 UFOs Are A Psyop Shirt $21.68 |
|
Hows the shape of the world your campaign is taking place in?
Curently flat, but i have some fun ideas about geometrically impossible worlds folded through multiple dimensions
I had an idea for a seemingly flat world that was in reality an infinitely concave plane.
What are the consequences of that? How can something be "infinitely concave" without meeting itself somewhere, and if so, isn't it a globe just inside? Or fricked non-real geometry in this universe
>What are the consequences of that?
Well one consequence of it is that it is more difficult for migrating tribes to ever return where they started. You can just walk forever. Also because it is concave, you can see where you are going vaguely in the distance. I won't claim there are a huge number of consequences, I just thought it was cool.
>How can something be "infinitely concave" without meeting itself somewhere, and if so, isn't it a globe just inside? Or fricked non-real geometry in this universe
It's an impossible object, I ain't gotta explain shit.
You think migrating tribes walk around the globe?
There wouldn't be any difference between something infinitely concave and a endless flat plane
it could be shaped like a snail shell that keeps spiraling outward
that wraps in on itself in all but one incredibly specific axis and would have obvious and interesting implications
>How can something be "infinitely concave" without meeting itself somewhere?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperbolic_geometry
Apart from the gods and a few wizards, nobody knows or cares.
Technically round, but so large that for all intents and purposes it can be treated as flat. Kinda like Earth, but on a much larger scale. (The world has a diameter more comparable to Jupiter. It's magic, and also hollow, ain't gotta explain shit.)
K but what's inside it
A smaller planet
Hasn't come up yet, so I haven't had any good reason to work on what's there. No one in the setting knows it's hollow either.
Caramel
Who gives a shit? All of these threads focus on minutiae that your players will never care about and will never affect your game anyway.
This, a thousands times until every DM gets it
the shape of the Earth barely affecta the experience of the average human in modern society, imagine in a ficticious medieval one.
People waste their times a lot in ttrpgs thinking and talking about things that matter nothing to the game.
Slight worldbuilding os great for DMs to get ideas when populating the world and dungeons with factions, but you dont need to go top deep into It for that.
Like Athanasius Kircher's.
The solar system has a water ring at the orbit one of the planets used to be, but we never got to actually playing on it.
How do australians not lose their mind when they look up?
The atmosphere should take care of it
Not really. We can see the moon and it's average distance is 30 times the diameter of the Earth.
The outer/mid zone would definitely be visible at least during the times Australia goes dark but the other lands are still illuminated. Unless direct line of sight blocks the outer regions, of course. But even then the equatorial people should be able to see it.
I never understood where the falling water in the flat worlds is supposed to come from if it's constantly draining.
The current group I'm running know that they have to cross a vast mountain range to the south. Once they get to the other side they'll find what appears to be a steep valley, with the far side appearing as just a dark ridge, like a cloud along the horizon. Between the clouds of mist and smoke that drift between it's possible see the sky below the valley, its two sides never meet. This is how I'm going to reveal the campaign world is actually a split sphere and they need to find a way to bridge the gap to get to the other side. There are several, long abandoned 'Suspended Cities' that hang between the hemispheres if they want to push forward, and the setting has flying mounts if they want to pussy out and trek back across the mountains and hire some griffins or something.
The inside of a hollow sphere
A round rod with a fat bell-end
I wanna do a campaign set on an alderson disk
They live in a saddle shape world. Although the world shape causes crazy weather anomalies and strange day night cycles, it also creates a general sense of togetherness as you can simply look up in the sky and see the other civilizations of your world and realize you are all in this shit together.
I had an idea for a flat world where the underside had "reversed" gravity and its own ecosystem, but I'll probably never do anything with it.
Banana shaped
I have played exactly one campaign where the scope got large enough for this to matter.
>Mortal world is flat, ringed by glaciers
>Beyond the glaciers, massive slopes that go down for hundreds of thousands of miles
>At the bottom, purgatory
>Beyond that, Hell
>In caves going into the slopes, Underworld
>In the skies above purgatory, demi-planes of minor gods and greater spirits as stars
My world has gone through planar inversion after the big bad essentially merged himself with Satan in an attempt to merge all of reality into a singularity centered on himself. That’s the short version, anyway.
The batshit physics of it are explained by the legendary Wizard of New Zealand: https://wizard.gen.nz/ideas/turning-the-universe-inside-out/
Traditional games?
What’s in the middle?
Slightly lumpy oblate spheroid.
Cylindrical
I'm running a mecha game that takes place a cluster of O'Neill cylinder habitats
>How’s the shape of the world your campaign is taking place in?
'Yes'
We have a custom spelljammer setting, short version: you have 'Spheres in the Aether', spheres are bubble settings which have a simplified fantasy settings in them, basically we had as a group gotten annoyed with some of the practicalities of how the kitchen sink settings like the Forgotten Realms work considering you have thousands of sentient races and kindoms and world-destroying entities and what have you.
Each sphere is it's own collection of self-consistent tropes, you have a couple sentient races, some defining story beats and villains, some relevant planes and cosmology, etc. My image here is a ringworld sphere with a sun/moon coin that the ring spins around. 'Stars' are windows to the aether. Lots of fun different sphere configurations, geocentric, heliocentric, discworlds, worlds on turtles, worlds in giant trees, etc.
Random setting tidbits: outside the spheres is completely barren of naturally occurring life, no other planes exist, there is only the prime material. Leaving a sphere for the first time is dangerous as you are suddenly cut off from everything that defines who and what you are, more so the more powerful a creature is. Trying to leave their sphere is mostly just a spectacular form of suicide for any extraplanar creatures.
There are some pseudo-european aether-traveling empires which are doing a Colonization Era to everything nearby.
It has been fun.
The world is a leaf on the universal tree.
The Sun revolves around the world. The Universe revolves around the world. Beyond this star system, itself contained in a dense heart of pure Chaos, is the rest of the universe that operates on regular rules.
Deep, deep blow the surface of the world lies the hollow world, where empty shells of human shape walk across a massive concave surface, curving forever up. Floating in the sky lies another sphere-shaped world, branches and tree trunks the size of nations connecting it to the surface of the hollow world. These root-branches snake throughout the depths of the true world, sometimes letting their flowers and leaves emerge onto the surface.
Each world below is bigger than the one above, repeating multiple times until the final sphere. Inside a floating sphere, "only," 50ft in diameter lie infinitely thick walls of indestructible material containing a universe with unlimited size, completely empty and devoid except for the single prisoner.
I assume the prisoner will be relevant later in the campaign
That's what you think, but based on my experience with campaign settings something interesting like that isn't in any way related to the plot and will not be mentioned ever again.
If you’re thinking about incorporating this stuff in a way that matters, Umberto Eco’s Baudolino is worth reading - in parts about the spiritual understanding of the world’s shape in the Middle Ages. Some say the earth is a sphere, others ‘like a tabernacle’
I'm currently working on a fantasy Alderson Disk. Which in essence is just a flat disk.
Based on some research it seems like the horizon and stuff would be (almost) the same as it is on Earth. What I am finding it hard to figure it is if a central tower would be visible / how big a central tower would have to be to be visible from the edge (several years travel). Preliminary research is trending towards atmospheric scattering would make it invisible past 300 miles-ish, so I might just throw realism out the window on that front.
The shape of my campaigns world for the past few years has been a basin. It's basically a large bowl that is lined by several mountains. One of the mountains is inverted, giving access to the outside of the bowl if you could make it past it, and one is near the center of the bowl. Beneath that one is the underworld. The god who created the world lived above it, dreaming up stuff to happen down there. Eventually he killed himself, and his entrails became the underdark. I don't know, man. My setting has a lot of lore and I have to go to work soon.
i'm brainstorming ideas for a world that is essentially shaped like a bicycle tire, a ring where all life inhabits the inside and the atmosphere is held in by massive walls on each side
due to the way the sun is cast against the axial tilt of the ring, some parts of the world are permanently cast in darkness due to the shadow of the atmospheric walls