Member
rabidbacon
Izurich
hanzo
Phase
Marlowe
LadyAnnaLee
Atalanta
Noctis
Abstract Proxy
SkwintOookay. I'm intrigued by this, but I have some questions! I always have questions. :3 I'm also sick, so if I've managed to memory-hole something that's in the first post, please forgive me.
- The wording of "rising once more..." is more than a little ambiguous. Have these heroes of legend been resurrected before? Are the protectors of this world typically made up of new heroes and the stewards of previous nights, brought back from the grave?
- In the same vein as the above, are our characters expected to be the dead heroes from long ago, returned to fight against a greater enemy than the world has seen, or new people with the powers and abilities of the fallen, or wholly new heroes, normal people who are given the strength to save their world?
- There's a little bit of inconsistent tone in exactly how the day-night cycle destroys nations, and the nature of those civilizations. The primary destructive force seems to be Big Monsters that show up on the night side, which is fine. At the same time, though, your "Places..." hider suggests that there are nations that have survived several cycles (and, in fact, I would argue that conceit is necessary for the narrative), but the introduction seems to much more strongly suggest that nations are wiped out categorically during the day-night cycle, leaving everything to start anew. Is it just the nations that don't wind up with heroes who get wiped out? Is there some arbitration or council whose job it is to decide which nations are given the power of the heroes (and are more likely to survive the night) and which are not?
I feel like this wouldn't be a case of the "Ant and the Grasshopper" - there's no question that night is coming, and there's no question that it hasn't come before. Depending on how good timekeeping is, there may not even be a question of what hour night will come. Preparing for that seems like it would be an integral part of any culture that survives longer than one night. While a nation filled only with foppish lordlings and simpering sycophants certainly would not survive a night cycle, it feels...weird that there would even be one - or, indeed, many, like the introduction seems to suggest.
-----
- Are we ready for Naril Talks About Science For A While? I hope so! :3
Leaving aside some of the finer points of how a planet with such a long day-night cycle would behave in the purest technicalities, there are some neat pieces of atmospheric science that could make this place very interesting, and play very directly into the cycle of destruction that happens during the night (and, indeed, again during the transition to day, all being even).
At the extremely macro level, and with a little bit of hand-waviness (because I don't want to do the math - narratively it wouldn't actually be important, and I'm an engineer, not a planetary scientist :3), a planet that rotates very, very slowly would have some fascinating characteristics.
For example, the idea of a very long growing season isn't completely weird. The planet would, necessarily, have plants on it that have adapted to be in sunlight all the time (many plants on Earth do require periods of darkness for optimal growth), and agriculture would necessarily have taken advantage of that. But! On a planet with a slow rotation, you wind up with a condition where the "warm" side of the planet is constantly evaporating water out of the soil (no condensation period at night to squeeze it back out as dew, and very little precipitation), and atmospheric action will tend to take that moist, warm air to the back side of the planet, where the water rains down. If the planet were completely tidally locked, this would inevitably mean that all the water would eventually wind up on the "dark" side in a huge ice sheet and the "light" side would wind up as a purely desert environment.
This means something interesting for the narrative, especially for farmers. It is entirely plausible that growing food would also move in cycles. With the rising sun, you would have very wet, bog-like soil, and whatever you had to grow would be things that grew well in bogs - probably lots of berries, or things like rice. The years would pass, and the bogs would get drier, becoming more like the soil you think of in the American Midwest, and now you have years of maize, tubers, sweet fruits, grains - a time of pure abundance. Once night creeps closer, your fields are dry, their water spent, and all you can grow are hardy things that grow quickly (for now you only have a few years to harvest) and use very little water. Things with spines and small, sweet fruit. This all becomes even more interesting with the idea of conservatories that can preserve some amount of plants from season to season. This is very handwavey of a lot of science, but I'd buy it as narrative worldbuilding. :3
And at night? At night, the farmers grow mushrooms in their fields drenched in darkness and the first rain in a generation. The dead stalks, stems, trunks and roots of the day's harvests yield their bounty again. I like the idea of tree-sized mushrooms, but you don't have to include any of this, I'm just thinking. :3
In terms of pure agriculture, there's a question of where the soil fixatives and nutrients for the day's field work come from, and the answer to that can be to ignore it, or to...well, to grimly point out that a lot of people die in the transition from day to night, and they've got all the things a bunch of plants really need to grow...
And what about that transition? The day-night terminator (the actual term for the transition between day and night) would be a terrifying place. Thanks to the water moving from the warm day side to the cool night side, the terminator would be a vast barrier of endless, titanic storms, turning the laws of thermodynamics into wind, rain, lightning, and cyclones. These storms could be part of what damages nations of the world so badly - they would spend (earth-equivalent) weeks or months in these bands of storms, being pummelled by hurricane-force winds the entire time before emerging into the comparative calm of the monster-filled darkness or the fresh reprieve of the light.
----
Um. I suppose I should also say that I like this idea a lot, and I think you have something that could be really fun here. I'll be watching with interest!
- The wording of "rising once more..." is more than a little ambiguous. Have these heroes of legend been resurrected before? Are the protectors of this world typically made up of new heroes and the stewards of previous nights, brought back from the grave?
- In the same vein as the above, are our characters expected to be the dead heroes from long ago, returned to fight against a greater enemy than the world has seen, or new people with the powers and abilities of the fallen, or wholly new heroes, normal people who are given the strength to save their world?
- There's a little bit of inconsistent tone in exactly how the day-night cycle destroys nations, and the nature of those civilizations. The primary destructive force seems to be Big Monsters that show up on the night side, which is fine. At the same time, though, your "Places..." hider suggests that there are nations that have survived several cycles (and, in fact, I would argue that conceit is necessary for the narrative), but the introduction seems to much more strongly suggest that nations are wiped out categorically during the day-night cycle, leaving everything to start anew. Is it just the nations that don't wind up with heroes who get wiped out? Is there some arbitration or council whose job it is to decide which nations are given the power of the heroes (and are more likely to survive the night) and which are not?
I feel like this wouldn't be a case of the "Ant and the Grasshopper" - there's no question that night is coming, and there's no question that it hasn't come before. Depending on how good timekeeping is, there may not even be a question of what hour night will come. Preparing for that seems like it would be an integral part of any culture that survives longer than one night. While a nation filled only with foppish lordlings and simpering sycophants certainly would not survive a night cycle, it feels...weird that there would even be one - or, indeed, many, like the introduction seems to suggest.
-----
- Are we ready for Naril Talks About Science For A While? I hope so! :3
Leaving aside some of the finer points of how a planet with such a long day-night cycle would behave in the purest technicalities, there are some neat pieces of atmospheric science that could make this place very interesting, and play very directly into the cycle of destruction that happens during the night (and, indeed, again during the transition to day, all being even).
At the extremely macro level, and with a little bit of hand-waviness (because I don't want to do the math - narratively it wouldn't actually be important, and I'm an engineer, not a planetary scientist :3), a planet that rotates very, very slowly would have some fascinating characteristics.
For example, the idea of a very long growing season isn't completely weird. The planet would, necessarily, have plants on it that have adapted to be in sunlight all the time (many plants on Earth do require periods of darkness for optimal growth), and agriculture would necessarily have taken advantage of that. But! On a planet with a slow rotation, you wind up with a condition where the "warm" side of the planet is constantly evaporating water out of the soil (no condensation period at night to squeeze it back out as dew, and very little precipitation), and atmospheric action will tend to take that moist, warm air to the back side of the planet, where the water rains down. If the planet were completely tidally locked, this would inevitably mean that all the water would eventually wind up on the "dark" side in a huge ice sheet and the "light" side would wind up as a purely desert environment.
This means something interesting for the narrative, especially for farmers. It is entirely plausible that growing food would also move in cycles. With the rising sun, you would have very wet, bog-like soil, and whatever you had to grow would be things that grew well in bogs - probably lots of berries, or things like rice. The years would pass, and the bogs would get drier, becoming more like the soil you think of in the American Midwest, and now you have years of maize, tubers, sweet fruits, grains - a time of pure abundance. Once night creeps closer, your fields are dry, their water spent, and all you can grow are hardy things that grow quickly (for now you only have a few years to harvest) and use very little water. Things with spines and small, sweet fruit. This all becomes even more interesting with the idea of conservatories that can preserve some amount of plants from season to season. This is very handwavey of a lot of science, but I'd buy it as narrative worldbuilding. :3
And at night? At night, the farmers grow mushrooms in their fields drenched in darkness and the first rain in a generation. The dead stalks, stems, trunks and roots of the day's harvests yield their bounty again. I like the idea of tree-sized mushrooms, but you don't have to include any of this, I'm just thinking. :3
In terms of pure agriculture, there's a question of where the soil fixatives and nutrients for the day's field work come from, and the answer to that can be to ignore it, or to...well, to grimly point out that a lot of people die in the transition from day to night, and they've got all the things a bunch of plants really need to grow...
And what about that transition? The day-night terminator (the actual term for the transition between day and night) would be a terrifying place. Thanks to the water moving from the warm day side to the cool night side, the terminator would be a vast barrier of endless, titanic storms, turning the laws of thermodynamics into wind, rain, lightning, and cyclones. These storms could be part of what damages nations of the world so badly - they would spend (earth-equivalent) weeks or months in these bands of storms, being pummelled by hurricane-force winds the entire time before emerging into the comparative calm of the monster-filled darkness or the fresh reprieve of the light.
----
Um. I suppose I should also say that I like this idea a lot, and I think you have something that could be really fun here. I'll be watching with interest!