How hot the day is depends on the size of the shard, as well. Also, seasons are now non-existant, as they depend largely on the angle of the planet in relation to the sun. Speaking of... does the planet orbit anything anymore? Or are we just floating in space? This could lead to problems later on in the game, what with other planets potentially running into ours and killing all life (or just destroying our planet, if heavanly body #2 is large enough).

Chaotic orbit leads to chunks of sun hitting the planet.
>YFW

Okay, what's the practical effect of this? Some places randomly become uninhabitably hot/pitch black for months at a time, forcing people to be nomads? Shards of sun rain down from time to time? Unless you have an actual effect that your changes make, they're a waste of your time and ours.

>>13681060

I'm not mad on the "sun is a giant crystal ball" notion but this:

>Some places randomly become uninhabitably hot/pitch black for months at a time, forcing people to be nomads?

...this is a hell of a hook. A fantasy world where civilisation is destroyed and EVERYONE has to keep moving ALL THE TIME could be brilliant.

Random related ideas:

Astronomer is now the most prestigious profession imaginable, possibly also the de facto priesthood of a world the gods seem to have abandoned.

Every tribe/clan/village has a group of "adventurers" - essentially advance scouts who make safe the routes laid down by astronomers, clearing out old ruins and so forth.

There are creatures lurking in the dark and oh-so-cold places of the world that hate the light but love the warm, sun-fat flesh of ordinary folks. Get caught in the twilight and you might just have to fend off a horde of them.

Well, I liked it.

>>13681161
I like where this thread is going.

Sunshards could also be a highly sought-after resource, if they're small enough. Automatically Flaming/Flaming Burst weapons that cannot be quenched, rings of fire protection needed to wield them. Larger sunshards would be considerable hazards.

Maybe have a stretch of coastline constantly wracked with storm systems generated by an enormous sunshard that fell into the sea.

>>13681584
Then there could like some dwarves that done took a shard undergound and are living like the humans in the marix movies going up on land to fetch slaves, because FUCK YOU, IVE GOT SUNNY DELIGHT

I like the idea.

Also, a giant shard that has fallen to earth and made a large area around it completely uninhabitable. It sticks into the sky as a constant reminder to the world that the world has become akin to hell.

"Horakhty's Spear"

So basically we're taking Nightfall and kicking it into overdrive?

May I suggest the name "Broken Sky", to differentiate it from Dark Sun a bit.

>>13681639

That's a point, this idea of the crystal sun does allow for some "hollow earth" style stuff.

>>13681161

We could have a relatively sustainable band of "safe day", a band of the planet where the orbits of the fragments are relatively stable and create consistent habitable areas, creating a sort of equator. That's where most civilisation is.

>>13681656

Or maybe there's an ocean where a lot of small shards have fallen in, heating it up in places and creating fucking crazy currents.

The Boiling Seas?

>>13681719
You will probably want to limit items that give resistances to fire and cold, because if there's a pit of magma with treasure (sun shard) It is my duty to put on my fire resist gear and have a nice swim.

Was the sun orbiting the planet or the planet orbiting the sun, or was there a completely different astrological set up here?

>>13681767
What if the planet is being held up by immovable rods over a water world that is heated up by a sunshard core.

SUN ORBITS MOON WHICH IS NEAR PLANET, LETS ROCK

>>13681767

Presumably, yeah. Beforehand, it could have orbitted like a moon or other satellite. Except it's a globe made of shining crystal instead of a furnace of nuclear fire.

Have it so that the fragments don't just move chaotically across the sky. Have them follow roughly predictable paths with generally understood periods (though these paths and periods can lead them so that multiple fragments can be in the sky at once). And give the larger fragments names as well.

I'd think that, given how they're just fragments of a sun and not a whole sun, the whole world would be considerably darker. Not pitch black, but sort of stuck in an eternal cloudy day at dawn. Would certainly make a good premise for a grimdark world, or for some high fantasy shenanigans.

>>13681820
since the shards are now much much closer to the planet one could argue it would be hotter


and predictible patterns should still be extremely complex so only a special kind of people can accurately predict the suns' movement giving (like said above) astronomers a sort of mystical status

At the very least, society could no longer reliably operate on a simple night and day system.

I mean, there's no longer twenty four hours in a day, or seven days in a week; there's no days or weeks at all. How time is measured could change radically.

I dare you to name the Campaign "TWILIGHT: The Eclipsing"

>>13681820

>Have it so that the fragments don't just move chaotically across the sky. Have them follow roughly predictable paths with generally understood periods (though these paths and periods can lead them so that multiple fragments can be in the sky at once). And give the larger fragments names as well.

Yeah, that makes sense. Someone said earlier that there could be a large majority of terrain that is generally hospitable, but there could be Dark Lands where no sun shines, and it's fucking freezing.

>Not pitch black, but sort of stuck in an eternal cloudy day at dawn. Would certainly make a good premise for a grimdark world, or for some high fantasy shenanigans.

Yeah, the hospitable band could have a decent amount of light, but outside things get kind of twilight-y all the time.

>>13681894
water and mechanical clocks would be artifacts of near priceless value

a man with a magical clock could buy a kingdom

What I'm really wondering is how this would affect agriculture and plant growth.

There'd have to be some areas that reliably get a regular amount of light, maybe due to patterns of the shards' orbit. Plants will die out completely in areas that get too much darkness, or too much heat for that matter.

>>13681972
Depends if the shards are mostly sticking to the crystal star's old orbit or if they're doing a decent imitation of the Rutherfordian atom. If the former, there should be a temperate band on either side of the orbit.

>>13681972
>>13682032

In history, wars were fought over the best agricultural land all the time. Generally it depended on the quality of the soil and the location relative to a good water source.

Of course, in this setting the best soil and the best water isn't going to matter at all if the location gets no sun.

This setting would probably severely reduce the number of good agricultural zones on the planet, meaning wars over them would be that much fiercer and more frequent.

What would this mean for the icecaps?

>>13682100
I'm betting ice wastelands where the sun don't shine.

Sounds like a solid premise. I'd work out a chart or table of which shards orbit when to help manage time in the campaign.

I'm very interested in this. Please continue OP. I'd love to see more about this setting.

>>13682283

Thanks. Currently, it's little more than "what if there were multiple, little suns instead of one big fuck-off Sun", but I'll get to work on some more.

For instance, one of the thoughts I'd had about it was the effect it would have on vampires. There's less night, but day's not as big a deal any more. Or they could just move to the nightlands.

And then there's also the question of "what the fuck broke the SUN?"

>>13682362
Archmage/paladin turned lich who tried to harness the sun to make himself a god

This is a pretty cool thread.

>>13682362
Aztec style. Sun god needs strong hearts to survive. The sun itself is HIS heart. But when the people turned away to newer, kinder gods, his strength waned until the people's rejection of him LITERALLY broke his heart.

Without the sun god's full fury in effect, sunlight becomes uncomfortable to vampires, but not damaging. Say, some of their powers don't work, but they're still mobile and undamaged.

>>13682387
Too mundane. How about the gods got pissed at each other and got in a big fight which leveled a good amount of the planet before one god threw another through the Sun. They they flew off to fight some more in the sky, breaking more stars occasionally.

Broken Sun, Broken Sky... not great names...

Go with Kristallnacht.

>>13682432
Way to exalted for my taste

It could have 3 'rings' of sunshards. Each one orbiting either the x, y, or z axis. However, there are large gaps in each ring, which is where night falls.

At the section where two of the rings intersect night would be much less common. These would be great spots for the inhospitable areas.

Consider this shit STOLEN for my next campaign

>>13682362

Vampires did it? Like, some scheme to plunge the world into eternal night. It's a partial success - parts of the world are now vampire havens of eternal night, but other parts of the planet are also in permanent day.

>bornated labia

OH MY GOD captcha that's DISGUSTING

>>13682362

The sun was broken when a party of adventurers went on a quest to save the Sun God but they failed due to rampant incompetance and stupidity. Their descendants have become noble families that conspire to hide this secret shame, usually bungling it with inherited rampant incompetance and stupidity. But somehow circumstances always conspire to ensure the secret stays preserved.

>>13682387
>>13682506
Liches? Vampires? Come on, we're designing a fantasy world from the ground up (or sky down). Let's get a little more creative.

The sun was an egg that hatched so a new solar system could be born. It's a perfectly natural cycle, but it does mean a slow extinction for all life on this earth.

>>13682362
>"what if there were multiple, little suns instead of one big fuck-off Sun"
Kind of reminds me of the Shellworld in the book "Matter". Parts of the book take place inside a covered planet, with multiple small suns of various intensity, light color, heat, and speed that revolve inside the covering, thereby heating the insides and generating a decent amount of light.

>>13682537

To be fair, I'm working under the assumption that this is going to be used in D&D, so we can't be TOO staggeringly original with what we make.

>>13682565

Wouldn't that result in total planetary destruction? I mean, a solar system being born right next to your planet can't be healthy.

Maybe the egg of some kind of fire god or space-phoenix? I do like the idea that the sun was originally an egg or some kind of lifeform

>>13682582

>space-phoenix

YES

>>13682582
That was the general idea, some creature emerges from the sun and flies off to nest in orbit around another rock somewhere. Space Phoenix sounds good to me.

>The idea is that the sun is broken. Shattered, to put it more accurately. The sun is (was, at least) a giant ball of crystal that, at some indetermined point in the past, was smashed. Now the fragments orbit the planet, still projecting heat and light

I'm sorry, but that's asking for too much suspension of disbelief on my part...You could have tried doing crazy ass solar flares and winds and reach and whip out through the solar system. In some cases the plasma would even fall into grav wells and orbit planets for some time. Naturally, all the habitable planets have juiced up magnetic fields; this coupled with the fanatical solar winds makes for unbelievable light shows at night, but NOPE. YOU WANTED TO DO A SOLID CRYSTAL SUN. FUCK!

>>13682712

Dude.

Magic.

>>13682712
Suck it up, it's a magical fantasy world. The sun is made of solid, glowy matter and it orbited the earth until it hatched.

>>13682712
I can sort of empathise because I'm so sick of inexplicably glowing crystals as plot elements and/or window dressing in fantasy, but honestly this is a pretty solid idea.

>>13682731
>>13682722
No, fuck you. You have to TRY to make even some kind of sense. You can't put a whale in front of me and then tell me it's a land animal that burrows and glides past mountains purely because of magic. That's fucking stupid; there is a point where even fantasy becomes bullshit that you just pulled out of your ass.

>>13682771

No, fuck you. You have to TRY to make even some kind of sense. You can't put a wizard in front of me and then tell me it's an elderly man that Fireballs and Disintegrates past mountains purely because of magic. That's fucking stupid; there is a point where even fantasy becomes bullshit that you just pulled out of your ass.

>>13682771

Hell you could have dwarves or something like that which managed to create an artificial sun with magic, craftsmanship and a "sun shard" inside of a mountain home, making the inside of the mountain the most lush paradises on your planet.

>>13682771

Just so you know, for the longest time people thought that the world was a huge disc and the sky was a big glass dome with stars attached. This did not seem strange to them, because the fact that the stars are giant burning orbs of gas floating in an endless empty space sounds equally retarded, even though it happens to work that way. The only reason the sun absolutely must be a certain thing in your mind is because somebody told you that it is so.

>>13682771
No, I've got to say I'm not seeing the problem here.

It's a impossible, far-fetched premise for a fantastical world but so what? It's just the backdrop. You set up the story by saying "this absurd thing that cannot possibly be true? Well that's how things are here" and everyone accepts it and moves on because that's how fantasy works.

Hell, you could tell the grittiest, lowest kind of fantasy story in this setting with faultless internal consistency or you could make it a whimsical flight of fancy, the actual basic premise for why night is a thing that marches more or less at random around the globe is beside the point.

>>13682771
This is a sandworm. It's bigger than any whale and basically swims through desert sand. Which is physically impossible, of course, and even if it was what could a creature like that possible survive on?

Who gives a shit, it's a cool image.

>>13682805
Speaking of which, totally noting this down for in minecraft.

>The Myeet
Why thank you captcha, a name, for me?

>>13682805
Reminds me of Arx Fatalis, an old vidya RPG based on the premise that the sun went out and civilisation went underground.

Personally though I prefer the idea that all the civilised races went nomadic because Night could fall anywhere. It would also be a shame to make up a weird new world and just put dwarves in it.

>>13682805

That'd be an interesting subversion of Dwarves as Nordic beardmen. In this world, they're subterranean pygmys, maybe with a big Mayan/Incan influence to their culture. They live in Amazionan, lush, jungle-filled caverns that are like hothouses.

>>13682712
Your idea is far worse when it comes to suspension of disbelief, I find. You pretend to base it on our natural laws to start with, then it just goes retarded. OP's idea, on the other hand, sets a premise completely different from our natural laws, so there's nothing grinding against the perception of how things should work, because that's thrown out from the start. Then it's just a matter of fleshing out the consequences of that.

>>13682857

What sort of fa/tg/uy doesn't love dwarves?

Did this setting have a moon or stars? Because if it did, what happened to them? Does the moon still exist? Was it destroyed like the sun?

Perhaps it has sustained too many impacts from sunshards and fell to the planet after the catastrophe. Maybe its still in orbit, slowly collecting shards from the debris field orbiting the planet, making it now the new brightest object in the sky. Perhaps a campaign idea could be turning the moon into a new sun.

>>13682814
What I'm saying is- you're asking for too much suspension of disbelief. I'm okay with giant space faring turtles like in discworld because if there was agiant space turtle, then I guess it COULD support a large land mass. But a solid crystal sun that routinely brakes apart?? Sorry, but my mind will begin picking away at that. You know how suns work, and there is absolutely no way a solid crystal one will come about; even if it was crystalline- I can't imagine any process that would cause it to produce heat and light. Furthermore, if you broke pieces off of it, how the hell are they still producing heat? Even after I try to imagine it in existence there are so many reasons why it should immediately stop producing heat and light and just become a dead ice ball. The whole thing reeks of unfounded and unsupportable kindergarden ass pull bullcrap. Sorry, but that's my opinion, and your setting is wall bangingly unbelievable.

>>13682982
>IF there was a giant space turtle, then I guess it COULD support a large land mass.

IF there was a crystal sun, then I guess it COULD break apart.

The trick is to gloss right over the thing that doesn't make any sense, just accept it as a given and try to think out the ramifications of it.

>>13682982

>>13682982
>I can't imagine any process that would cause it to produce heat and light
Magic

>>13683031

But how could a turtle do that? They have a round shell.

Now, if you had some sort of support structure standing on the turtle, that would make more sense.

>>13682982

How could the sun be floating in emptiness? I mean, like, nothing is holding it up there. And it being billions and billions of times larger than the Earth? Are you fucking kidding me? You are asking for way too much suspension of disbelief here.

>>13682982
Confirmed for troll, but still points for fooling people earlier. And me too, until I hit F5 and saw this.

Seriously, what kind of asshat came up with the whole "willing suspension of disbelief" bullshit?

Also, so that I don't derail: I'm totally stealing this.

And what about the vegetation? We could see a species of plants that migrate along the sunlight areas.

>>13683083

Maybe a plant that can store the energy from sunlight to live off of during the longer nights similar to how a camel stores water?

>>13683083

Oooh, I like that. Even the vegitation is nomadic.

What if you have ecologies that normally exist in the underdark in the "Dark Zones" of no light, after having been forced out of the caves by surface creatures looking to escape the heat who brought sunstones with them.

Drow have land cities, while high elves are forced into underground forests.

>>13683054
there is. its four giant elephants. there used to be five. but one fell off and orbit'd till it hit a continent. now that countries main export is fat that is mined from the continent.

Here's a thought: polytheism would be quite prevalent. I know that's common in fantasy, but it's justified here. The reason for a lot of the big gods like Jehovah and Krishna have the same recurrent birth-death-rebirth cycle has to do with our Sun setting then rising again. In a world with multiple suns, and which acknowledges the existence of these suns, there would be a completely different religious culture stemming from that.

Perhaps there might be a pantheon organised around the size and intensity of the shards. The main 'skyfather' deity is the largest shard, which might be orbitted by another, smaller shard which in mythology is the skyfathers wife etc etc.

>>13683119

DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS~

>>13682916
I just think there's potential for something cooler than a retread of D&D here. 'Fantasy world' doesn't automatically mean you have to find a niche for dwarves and dragons and five kinds of elf.

>>13682582

>space-phoenix

i love this idea.

>>13683119
If the sun shards follow relatively stable orbits, then you'd start seeing, then you'd start seeing different plant species adapted to areas that receive a given amount of sunlight.

In fact, the kind of plants you can see is probably the best indicator of how much regular light an area receives.

Assuming that this state of affairs has been going on long enough for the plants to adapt to it, of course.

>>13683189
We all love Space Phoenix (if you don't she'll kill you).

>>13683083
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspension_of_disbelief
>>13683075
>>13683046
Fuck you and all of you who thought I was trolling. Fine, this is your fantasy and I have no right to try and stop you; I was just giving my two cent's worth. If you think pure magic is enough to justify entire phenomena for you then fine, I guess I was wrong to assume magic could do any less. But fuck you if you think anyone that criticizes you must be a troll.

>>13683337
>But fuck you if you think anyone that criticizes you must be a troll.
Classic troll statement

Don'tsagedon'treplylethimrot.jpg

>>13683337

We were being generous, because you are either a troll or a retard. You are having trouble believing that the Sun, which you have never seen or felt, takes a different form than the one that you imagine it takes right now.

Holy shit. Great concept, OP. Also, this reminds me of Pitch Black just a little bit.

>>13683352
Never cared anyway, I'm going. go enjoy your stupid perfectly flawless self

>13683387

S-s-stupid anons! It's not like I cared what you think anyway. I was just passing by and needed to kill time! It doesn't mean I like you or anything!

>tsundere.jpg

I once read a short story about a planet at the center of a galaxy where it was never night because of all the suns so close together. The people on the planet hadn't figured out orbital mechanics because planets didn't follow elliptical orbits. A bunch of astronomers finally figure it out only to discover that their planet is about to swing out to the edge of their multi-sun solar system and night will descend for the first time in thousands of years. When it happens everyone goes crazy at the sight of the stars (of which there are far more than are visible on Earth) and start burning anything they can find that will burn in an attempt to create enough light to bring the day back. Civilization is destroyed over the couple of months that a day-night cycle exists, something that apparently happens every few thousand years.

So as for the actual sunshard mechanics, what do you propose, OP? The idea that someone in the thread had were three X-Y-Z axis rings of sunshards that provide a night-day cycle. Perhaps over something approaching a year, the rings begin to become more erratic in their rotations, denying light to some places, but incinerating others, but generally lengthening the days. Near the end of this cycle, the rings align into one massive band, denying light to nearly the entire world for three or so "days" (cue desperate defense in pitch-black darkness from ravenous hordes of night-monsters.

>>13683440
I remember that too. Man, what was it's name again?

>>13683470
also, what happened to the moon? an idea could be that it was heavily damaged when the sun shattered, and was pulled to earth by mages. Now the moon is its own floating mini-continent with a personal sunshard that orbits it. The moon-civilizations could be the big-bads of a campaign or something.

>>13683504
I don't remember. My favorite part was how the scientists team up with a crazy doomsday cult and hide in their secret underground sanctuary.

>>13683533
Addendum: found it thanks to Google. Nightfall by Asimov.

>>13683504
>>13683533
It's by Isaac Asimov you dumbasses, how could you forget the name? It was Nightfall or something.

>>13682431
This. I love this. That idea is boss.

>>13682731
>The sun is made of solid, glowy matter and it orbited the earth until it hatched.

I like this as well but here's a question I think needs some discussing: What hatched from it?

>>13683557
You're a little slow at the blocks there buddy.

>>13683621
I simply brought them up because I felt they needed more attention. Went too long without any other input.

Name needs to work in "Sundered" somehow.

Because it's a terrific pun. Though Sundered Sun is kind of pushing it.

>>13683657
How about: Sundered Sky: The Sundering

Head for that storm system! There's a sun shard at the heart of it!

>>13682435
Shattered Heavens.

>>13683553
>Wow that story sounds kinda cool, maybe I'll read it if anon finds the name
>Of course it's by Asimov.
This does not surprise me at all. What an odd guy he must have been.
Also: you are now thinking of how awesome/terrifying it would be to play in a campaign run by Asimov.
And OP this idea is pure gold. Stealing this for my next campaign. Maybe the civilization that existed before the shattering was very advanced, but they abandoned all their technology and cities when the burning happened. Scavengers willing to venture inside such dangerous zones are highly rewarded, and when shards move away from the area of the sky, hundreds of people rush into deserted cityscapes, still burning in many places, searching frantically for lost tech.

/sci/ here, this is a completely ridiculous and pointless idea

>>13683747
>What an odd guy he must have been.
According to Wikipedia the story wasn't his idea, it was Campbell's.

>>13683766

>>13683766

itsmagicIain'tgottaexplainshit.jpg

>>13683766
Did you miss the part about it being a fantasy setting?

Presumably the most successful wildlife would be that which could determine "My current location will become unbearably hot in several hours. The safest option is to travel Northwest." and the like. What biological methods might they have developed to be capable of such?

>>13683766

>ridiculous
Yes, you're right. It's fantasy. Dealwithit.jpg
>pointless
Here's where you're wrong. This is an idea that is being made into campaign settings. It's the seed of a homebrew.

You could argue that the point IS that it's fantasy. I thought someone claiming to be from /sci/ would be more aware that fantasy/sci fi is more accurately called "speculative fiction" because it asks "what if" and goes from there. Here it's "what if the sun were a solid, and fractured?"

>>13683577

>What hatched from it?

I'd like to tentatively declare the Space-Phoenix to be canon. It fits with the fire aspect and also means that the Sundering (fine we'll call it that) isn't an entirely negative event, despite the consequences. New, glorious life emerges.

Also, it explains the "break" from the traditional birth/death/rebirth representation of the sun if the Phoenix has LEFT.

I sense the beginnings of a "/tg/ gets shit done" thread.

With that said, amazing idea, OP. Might steal it myself.

>>13683777
Well, I still expect he was not your ordinary Joe. I read In the Country of Last Things last year and good lord...

Some plants should have evolved movement so that they could follow sun shards

>>13683833

OP here.

I hereby declare the Space Phoenix canon. The Sun was an egg and it hatched.

in terms of vegetation, you would have massive broadleafed plants growing in the twilight bands, but they are a darker purplish/navy colour, so as to absorb more light from the spectrum. theres some realistic ground for that suspension of disbelief motherfucker.

Also, add some steampunk (But dont fag it up) and make the towns massive rolling self-contained transports. Kinda of like sandcrawlers, but not full of tiny mexicans.

>>13683766
>/sci/ here, this is a completely ridiculous and pointless idea
You're absolutely right. It doesn't have the scientific authenticity that most prominent fantasy worlds have. I mean, the physics of elves hurling lightning bolts through the use of arcane words and gestures is rock solid. We haven't yet made the breakthrough that would allow us to do it ourselves, but there's little doubt that we will some day. The notion of a crystal sun, though, is clearly retarded, and any magical flying lizard worth even half its weight in gold would tell you so.

>>13683969

>they are a darker purplish/navy colour

twilights bands confirmed for nightmare zone

Bands of marauders would probably wither lurk in the twilight zones or follow some of the suns across the sky so that they could intercept migrant towns and cities as they were evacuating, killing, looting, raping and pillaging.

>>13683969

I don't know how I feel about EVERY settlement being roving. I think there should be a band of relative safety around the equator, where a group of larger and more stable shards create tropic conditions. Here is where you get permanent settlements and civilisations Away from these bands, which obviously would be held by the highest military powers, you would get smaller nations and yeah I can see there being a lot of nomadic activity.

Out here are where individual shards orbit, or groups of weak ones, and their patterns are mean that they rarely intersect. Nights are long out there, and you don't stay in one place very long as a result. You follow your star.

1-3: Total darkness
4-8: Twilight or "sunrise", 1d2 shards visible
9-13: Full daylight, 1d4+1 shards visible
14-18: Exceptionally bright*, 1d6+2 shards visible
19-20: Sunscrape: at least one shard is close enough to the ground to cause fires and may be ploughing a flaming trench across the planet's surface as we speak


*Races accustomed to low-light conditions get fucked here

>>13684165
>Sunscrape
>shard is close enough to the ground to cause fires and may be ploughing a flaming trench across the planet's surface as we speak

>>13684165

>19-20: Sunscrape: at least one shard is close enough to the ground to cause fires and may be ploughing a flaming trench across the planet's surface as we speak

OH SHIT THE SUN'S COMING RIGHT FOR US
RUUUUUUUN

>>13684165

>Sunscrape

>sunshard's face

I'd like to integrate this with an idea that /tg/ had over the summer.

There is one spot where civilization is safe and can progress unimpeded by the suns' scorching presence. On the edge of a twilight zone is a massive, sprawling city packed to the absolute brim with migrants and peoples dispossessed of their homes. This twilight city is viewed as the one spot the Phoenix god deemed where men could live peacefully.

...if only that were true. It is full of politicking and backstabbing and is never free from war for more than a few years as another faction attempts to claim the Holy City. Magitech is a rampant, generally in the form of powered weapons, armor, and airships, and is powered by magic obtained by sun shards.

They revere the sun shards, and one major part of their religion is the want to unite all of the fallen sun shards in the Holy City because they believe if they can do this, the cycle of birth and rebirth will have been completed and their new, whole sun will ascend to the heavens.

Whenever a sun shard is said to have gone down, teams veritable armies of shard hunters and pilgrims move on it to behold its divine radiance and bring it back to the Holy City.

The religious society of the Holy City is often at war with outside forces who besiege their city to claim it or capture their sun shards so they themselves can live more comfortably in the twilight lands and power their own magic engines of war.

>>13684195
>>13684203
Holy shit.

>>13684217
Not so sure about the magitech/power armors.

>>13684165
>Sunscrape
>looks like this
>much damn

>>13684247

Eh, it's really a take it or leave it concept. It's fine either way; not integral to the idea of the Holy City and their wanting to reclaim all of the fallen sun shards to create a new sun phoenix egg.

>>13684217
>>13684247

Agreed. I like the idea of using sunshards as power source, but I don't want to cross over to steampunk overmuch. Like, the sunshard is used to heat the city's water, making steam power a reality, sure. But not MAGITECH level stuff. Indoor plumbing is more like it. Maybe the odd riverboat powered by steam.

Oh, and I'm saying this now: NO airships. Shit be cliche.

Here's an idea for the moon. The Space Phoenix had a brother. Some big event (universe origin story?) killed them and reduced both of them to eggs. The moon is the Space Phoenix's stillborn younger brother.

>>13684269
I kinda get the feeling a good end to the campaign might be the PCs escaping the atmosphere and killing the space pheonix itself. Once the pheonix is dead, it goes comatose and forms another egg out of the broken pieces, returning the world to normal... for now.

>>13684303
>Oh, and I'm saying this now: NO airships. Shit be cliche.

What about big sheets with baskets attached that ride the thermals?

>>13684303

Fair enough.

So, now we have fantasy, twilight-living, sun-god worshiping Jerusalem.

I'd say we're off to a pretty damn good start.

>>13684308

Does there have to be a moon? If the sunshards are physical objects, they have a pull on the tide so we don't really NEED one.

That said, I do remembers some Gaiman story that said a phoenix lays TWO eggs; one which it hatches from and a black one. No-one knows what hatches from the black one. That could be the moon.

>>13684312
>I kinda get the feeling a good end to the campaign might be the PCs escaping the atmosphere and killing the space pheonix itself. Once the pheonix is dead, it goes comatose and forms another egg out of the broken pieces, returning the world to normal... for now.

There is no good end for this world.

Its sun has been born and left the nest, to form a new system somewhere else. This world, this system, everything in it... all of it is just leavings, now.

The sun has shed itself of us, and we are all alone.

So, what happens if people decide to dig under ground and have vast emergency networks of tunnels? Or if they just move underground instead of living on the surface?

If they get far enough under ground, they'd be able to withstand the sun's searing heat for a few days, and then re-emerge when conditions returned to "normal."

>>13684312

That could be like an epic-level campaign for this world, sure.

>>13684326

You mean like some kind of sailboat version of a hot air balloon? Shit, that could work, actually.

>>13684303
>NO airships. Shit be cliche.
Swords are also cliche. Are swords also banned?

>>13684346
Perhaps the campaign should focus on the black egg. Nobody knows what hatches from the black egg, but if the ONLY THING that hatches from the red one is a space phoenix, then the black egg has got to contain something really bad.

Hell, make the entire campaign about the duality of the red and black eggs.

As for OP's world, there wouldn't be much of a biosphere, considering most of it would be scorched away. Hell, consider the effects on wild-life, they'd need to be damn good at venting off heat.

First Campaign begins approximately 1-4 weeks before the Sun explodes...

>>13684381

You can have sci fi without teleporters. But I can't remember the last time I saw steampunk without an airship.

>>13684355

But if there's no hope, it makes adventuring in the setting a little less satisfying. There is no way to get things back to normal, so why try?

There doesn't need to be a definite recipe for how to get the world back for normal...just not a definite mention that the world is well and truly fucked.

>>13684378
>You mean like some kind of sailboat version of a hot air balloon?

Yes, that's exactly what I mean!

>>13684396
Why hasn't anyone said this already.

>>13684390

So, most of the organisms are mostly migratory or live in twilight zones.

But yes, the biosphere would be nowhere near as diverse as before. Soooo... we're pretty much dealing with Arrakis, sans spice and worms.

Though...huge sand worms COULD be fun...

>>13684397
And I can't remember the last time I saw fantasy without swords. Doesn't mean I have any problem with swords being in fantasy.

If you don't like airships, fine. But don't say stupid shit like that because everything is cliché. Thus, your reason for disliking it isn't that it is cliché, it's something else.

>>13684399

A low level campaign wouldn't be too focussed with the big-picture of the Sun. They might come across old legends of times before the Sundering, even get their (gloved) hands on a sunshard or two. But it wouldn't be until really high level that things start going "you know, that moon looks awful egg-like" or "hey, is that the Phoenix coming back to roost?"

>captcha: eriodu from

Eriodu. Could be the world's name?

>>13684432

Never played Planescape: Torment, have you?

>>13684396
Then everything dies and the planet faces at least thousands of years of complete desolation.

At least that is what would happen if you want things to make the tiniest bit of sense.

>>13684418

I think if we have the entire world be arid desert, that gets a little too Dark Sun. I prefer the idea of having stripes of desert and lush jungle, with permanent night at the poles.

>>13684461
This is a setting where the sun was an egg from which a space phoenix hatched and now the pieces of that age orbit a planet. What part of this 'makes sense'. This is a fantasy setting, we get to make up our own rules for fucks sake.

>>13684399
>There doesn't need to be a definite recipe for how to get the world back for normal...just not a definite mention that the world is well and truly fucked.

Anon you quoted here. I agree with your idea; there might be another way to save the planet, but the sun is well and truly gone.

This could lead to a lot of conflicting factions, all with their own ideas about what should be done in the post-solar world. There's gotta be a doomsday cult (maybe they sacrifice victims by chucking them at downed sunshards). Mad scientists who are trying to study the shards and replicate them. Maybe a clan of wide-eyed optimists who employ huge flying draft animals to drag shards they've collected to a central location in the skies above the planet.

>>13684461

Yes. How do you survive this?

>>13684498
Because what you just said might even work in a world filled with magic. It's consistent and believable.

However, unless all plants are magically altered somehow, they're not going to survive such a radical change in environment. It's not only impossible, it's inconsistent and not believable. When that crystal egg breaks, plantlife will die the fuck out. It doesn't matter if there's still a shard hovering above it, the plants are completely set towards the "clock" of the old "sun" and plants don't evolve over night. At least, they don't if you don't want this setting to be absolutely fucking stupid. And if you don't have a problem with that there's no reason to come here asking for advice. Just make up stupid shit and say a wizard did it. That's what all the other stupid writers does.

>>13684561

Ha ha, I thought you'd left!

>>13684553
Nothing short of cryogenic sleep or some magical equivalent.

Pretty much all plant life across the entire planet is going to die. You won't have food and you won't have a breathable atmosphere.

The only things that will survive are extremely resilient plants like maybe certain mosses and stuff. And over many thousand of years, the planet will be re-terraformed naturally. Unless you want to involve handwaving magic hijinks, that's how it's going to go down.

>>13684584
I ain't even mad.

You didn't troll anyone, dude.

>>13684553

How do you survive the Big Bang?

I never imagined this being "set" just before or after the Sundering, but many generations after. Long enough for civilisations to have risen, adapting to the conditions, for life to have gotten it's shit together and got busy living again.

I was just a boy when the Great Pheonix awoke from his slumber. When after thousands of years, he had regrown and regenerated from his great crusade against the swarms of the void. When he began to flex within his crystal shell, the normally yellow light slowly pulsing through the spectrum, from red to ultraviolet, changing every several days. Wizards and alchemists pondered the meaning, gazing at the sun in wonder, debating in their towers. Until The Cracking.

The slow changes between colors began to speed up. Faster and faster they came. Everyone in my village went out to look at the sun, captivated by its power. Staring up as colors spun like a child's kaleidoscope. I could not, for I was bedridden with fever. But I could see the lights playing with the shadow beyond the doorway of our hut.

Suddenly, a flare. Screams from outside as the onlookers were struck blind by the Phoenix's power, by the incredible influx of light. I stumbled from my fever bed and looked up at the sky. I and those others who had looked away or were busy indoors saw something not seen before or since. A great bird unfurling its wings across the sky, crystal slivers exploding outwards with incredible force in all directions, its feathers changing colors before our eyes. Women fainted, men wept, most soiled themselves. I could only look up in awe, mouth agape, as the great bird flapped its wings and flew off into the void, searching for its prey.

>>13684691

Weeks later the Shards began to fall. Daggers flying towards us, flung from an uncaring god. Forests burned, seas turned to steam, cities destroyed. Civilization died along with most of humanity.

But we persevered. Some shards dance across the sky now, smaller suns for smaller men. Others are stabbed deep into the earth, pillars of flaming stone burning evermore that no man may go near. All are intensely magical, creating new life and imbuing the mundane with the extraordinary. Wizards prize even the smallest of pieces. Some say there are great feathers within the Shards that can bring back the dead and give life everlasting.

One must get past the death cults. Exotic beasts driven mad by magic. Twilight cannibals that feast upon sun-fed flesh. Not to mention the mountains of fire themselves.

I've seen every Shard from here to the Scalding Sea. Join my crew and you shall as well. A life of fortune and fame is offered to you, my boys. The only question is, are you man enough to take it?

The thing about the egg and the space bird? That's a creation myth.

It might be real, it doesn't matter, it's just one story people tell to explain why things are this way, and it's an indication that maybe things weren't always this way, but regardless it's just backstory. You don't need to go into space to kill the sunbird and set the world to rights, because it can't be set to rights and this is just the way things are.

...is how I'd run it were it my campaign, I guess I should say.

>>13684704

You have my sword

>>13684704

And you have my bow.

>>13684704

>>13684627

You assume the sundering happened quickly instead of over years, centuries or even millenia. Furthermore: Suspended Animation, Wish, Time Travel into the future, Time Travel into the past to try and prevent it or become prophetic seers who forsaw it and created Earthdawn-like arcologies underground, an eternal version of Mordenkainen's Magnificent Mansion, Magical Castles that survive due to awesome +25 Prismatic Walls and their own aura of adaptation, a party of all warforged or undead, travel to another dimension and send expeditions over the years, these are just some of the endless possibilities. No limit to imagination man.

>>13684704
>>13684744
>>13684761
>>13684774

May I have a screen cap of this please?

Having mulled it over a while, I realise the image I had of tiny suns orbiting the world like satellites doesn't work, since they'd just illuminate the whole world if they could be seen from that distance. I guess we have to go with much more obviously magical glowy shards floating through the atmosphere. For there to be any darkness at all then the light they emit would still need to be quite weak. Maybe most of their energy output is in non-visible spectrums, so they're still powerful heat sources.

Life's not easy in the Strobelands. Lot of cold land around us. Nothing grows, nothing nice at least. We have to scrounge, scavenge and trade when out pathways intersect. I met this trader from the Twilight once. He was an arsehole, read too many books. He called us Strobers 'fireflies in the dark', all these little lights flicking about. I let him talk so's he wouldn't notice me cut his pursestrings.

Those folk in the Holy City talk all high and mighty about ideals and Eggs and such. They say us Strobe folk are savages, but they don't know what it's like out here. They just sit there as the Shards circle overheard, making everything warm and perfect. And anyone tries to muscle in, out comes the steel and the lies.

Us? We've got to work for our warmth. It doesn't just pass overhead every day, like clockwork. Oh no. We see a Shard in the sky and we stick with it for as long as we can. We travel for days without sleep sometimes - as much as "day" means out here. It's hard on the horses, hard on the riders, but it's our life.

Now quiet, that's enough talk. We're chasing dawn.

>>13684822

i imagined it as the larger the shard the more light.

there could be thousands of tiny shards giving off almost no light and a few larger ones.

but the small shards would still be powerful head sources like you say.

>>13684822
The intensity of the individual shards could be much less than it would be as a whole. The sun is broken, after all. This was basically what I was envisioning the entire time.

>>13684789
>magitech, magitech everywhere!

I dunno, I thought this world was more interesting as a really quite primitive Dying Earth kind of place, with society at large being bands of footslogging nomads trudging after the nearest star that looks like it might be hanging near the earth and exploring the ruins of long-dead civilisations.

Although that Holy City one guy was talking about sounds pretty cool, with the stipulation that it's the last real city in the world.

Has this been archived yet? I'd like to have something to refer to when I start writing up a campaign setting.

>>13684940

It has been archived. Vote it up.

It has been archived. Vote it up.

>>13684820

http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/13680606

Thread is archived here

Bump?

Can we have people be Sundere?

Stupid sun, it's not liked I even like your light and warmth...

>>13685247
>sundere
oh god, that's the funniest thing I've seen all day.

Personally, I would prefer the Space Pheonix to be unconfirmed on wether it exists or not by the people on the planet. That way, you could have groups associated with its existence and groups the deny its existence easily or work in an angle like that.

>>13682431
>>13682805
>>13682884
>>13683205
>>13681750
>>13681639
I think these combine for some of the best options.

First campaign needs to be a high-level campaign that establishes that the sun is made of diamonds. The ending needs to sunder the very sun (either as a result of the players' hubris or because they fail to defeat the BBEG. This may completely justify allowing an evil party). Then, suddenly, the rest of the campaign is about surviving the Sundering itself, with bits of the sun falling from the sky, the world tossed into turmoil, with nations shattering like a dull mirror of the celestial upheaval.

The second campaign is set approximately 250 years later (nobody can be sure of the date in the old system, or keep a new system, because "day" and "year" no longer have real meaning). The low-level party needs to survive. Eventually, they find the remains of the site of the very ritual that destroyed the Sun...and because PLOTMAGIC, there's a way to reverse it. The catch is that they need physical contact with a large enough Shard, and the only two anybody knows of that are large enough is the Stormbringer, a massive shard in the Southern Sea, the source of unfathomable storms that make the nearest continent absolutely uninhabitable. The second...is the Hearthstone, the shard around which the dwarves have built their subterranean jungles.

Either you must brave hordes of Aztec Jungle Dorfs, or a sea that rages with turmoil of Jehovan proportions. You must earn the Sun.

>Centuries after the Phoenix's Awakening...

"Allow me to get this correct: A lowly savage such as yourself, a mere wanderer of the Strobelands, seeks an audience with His Luminance to warn him of a Shardfall in three weeks' time upon His glorious City? You dare disturb him with the very idea of an occurence deemed completely and utterly impossible by our Astronomers, the most expert and insightful in all of the land!?"

"E-exactly... I don't mean t'intrude, b-but..."

"SILENCE! There is reason His Luminance has dubbed His City the City of Eternal Shardlight. Not only do we lie under a stable Shardstream, but our storied Astronomers foresee a long and prosperous life for the City. I can understand if others such as yourself look upon the City with envy and desire, but I will not dare allow the hollow words of a Strober bring a most unnecessary panic upon the City! Guards!"

>>13685734
"I ain't tryin' to cause anything! I'm tryin' t'warn y'all b'fore-"

As the guard struck the young man in his dusty robes on the back of the head with the pommel of his blade, the advisor watched the youth collapse to the floor with a strained grunt. A lazy gesture wordlessly commanded the guards to take the unconscious youth to the dungeon for what amounted to treasonous conspiracy in the advisor's eyes. For too long has he worked to earn the trust of His Luminance and His Astronomers to get where he was today. He would not allow the hazardous words of a Strober urchin to set forth the demise of his standing and reputation.

Despite himself however, the worrisome man couldn't help but to wring his hands together once the guards were out of view. Even someone confident in the City's longevity as he remembers well the stories of the Phoenix's Awakening told by his elders. This most tragic tale resonates with every Citizen, high and low, as it does everyone else under the Shattered Heavens.

>>13685737
Those in the world before the Awakening were far more sophisticated than they, but they became too comfortable in the perceived permanence of their existence. They became the first to perish upon the Awakening, their magnificent realms but mere ruins in the Strobelands and the Twilight now. Perhaps the youth foresaw something the Astronomers cannot: the end of his people's Eternal Shardlight.

While the advisor's fears were stirred by the youth's drawled proclamation, his ambition drowned the fears. He kept the entire matter to himself, never spoke a word of it to his Liege or to the Astronomers...

Three weeks later, the youth's fears came to pass. An especially bright and vivid Shard streaked across the lavendar sky that day toward the Shardstream above the City. It crashed into one of the Shards in the Stream, bringing forth the more brilliant flash of light since the Awakening, and the most terrifying roar since then as well. From a distance, it looked like shining needles rained down upon the City and its proximity over the next few days, sparking a most relentless inferno upon its populace. The compassionate youth and the ambitious advisor paid the ultimate price.

If you seek the Eternal Shardlight, it remains upon the City's ruins, still burning everstrong until all of the Citizens' ambition and excess wither away.

>>13685737
Make that vizier responsible for the oncoming shardfall, and you've got Aladdin and the Crystal Sun. :D

Which would, I suppose, make Genie a Pheonix Feather?

Jafar's plan is to sacrifice the Shining City as a blood offering for the Pheonix's favor?

>>13685774
Oh lawd! We need a drawfag on this, STAT!

>>13685803
The ending would be significantly more epic, too. In typical Disney fashion, Aladdin gets the girl, defeats Jafar, and REASSEMBLES THE FUCKING SUN.

>mfw this thread

It may not be on-topic, but I can't possibly let this Captcha go without posting SOMETHING.

>>13685887
As much as I usually disdain anything remotely close to the Disneyfication of any mythos, this might actually work better than planned.

On another tangent though, I do like the angle of the Mesoamerican Sun God's death from a lack of devotion. Find five teenaged paladins of the Sun with ATTITUDE!...

>>13685934
Actually, there was a thread a while back where we took the mesoamerican mythology to a pretty awesome place:
http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/12128162/

It's also a great example of /tg/ derailing a shitty racism thread into something good.

>>13686018
Such derails are a great thing. In any case, I'm off to bed. Carry on, elegan/tg/entlemen!

i love this idea its very similar to dragonmech back story for people who dont know it

moon comes closer to the planet shit starts to falls of the moon but it so just happends the moon is ruled by elder gods with fucking huge monsters ect. dwarves build huge mech's to suvrive the dust storms and occasional meteor shower.

i think the broken sky idea needs some of the elements of the dust storms and meteor showers and things from the sun that either are hostile or are friendly but are just taking over because there no competition from the surface races giving a peaceful alien invasion feel to it

I think the moon should be an intact orb circling the world at a slightly more distant and erratic orbit. Silvery and cold, it doesn't provide much light, and it can't be relied on even as much as the other shards since it seems to defy the laws of celestial bodies (as much of that as the inhabitants of this world know), sometimes slowing down, sometimes speeding up.

>>13684561
What if there were already some kind of flora that benefits from areas of great darkness on the surface of the planet? Something that normally grows in caves due to darkness. I'm pretty sure it would spread outside fairly quickly into the twilight zones.

What about sun shards that fell to the planet with little to no power left in them? I'm thinking of tiny pieces that give off little to no heat, little to no light, or a combination of both. The sun is essentially broken, so this isn't beyond the scope of what's happening.

>>13687523
This could actually be another huge driving force behind what little civilization there is: the sun shards being used for civic purposes are slowly dying, running out of power, and the ones which fall down to the surface of the planet are already depleted, or too large to acquire with the old means. This situation gets worse and worse as years go by, and every time a big one falls, the orbits of the others get perturbed bit by bit.

/sci-fi/ fag here: This setting is very much possible.

However what blew up wasn't a real sun to begin with. The planet never had a "proper sun"... it and its old "false sun" (an artificial moon) were orbiting a black hole or a brown dwarf that gives off so little light people saw it as just another - albeit bright - star at night.

...then something made the "crytal star" (actually a moon) break up... it's fragments were sent into chaotic orbits, some shards have impacted into the surface in cataclysmic events, creating new mountain ranges, staggering gorges and chasms...

...others are in retrograde orbits (compared to the old fake star), and some shard inevitably collided, creating orbits that are at angles to the old orbit.

...so you have shard orbiting the planet in every imaginable direction, pro-grade, retro-grade and so on.

To make matters more complicated (and created the swaths of darkness and hot), the shards don't radiate light and heat in all directions... instead they emit it on tight beams. The old crystalline surface of the fake sun was ruined by the cataclysm, so instead diffusing the inner "glow" if focuses it now.

Only a handfull of shards remain that give off diffused light, mystics and priests venerate these "dim suns" as gods of providence, for they create a semblance of day (or twillight) depending on their power...

Unknown to the sages, these are shards are in rather low orbits, so it was the planet's atmosphere that slowly polished them back to a diffuse state. Inevitably these shards will fall. They illuminate only a 1/4 of the planet (their orbits being really low), but they provide a twilight/night cycle.

Other shards, emit tight beams, the center of the illuminated areas are too hot to live in. Where-ever these bands go, things must burrow or otherwise hide for the duration of the "day" or at least "noon".

There is even a ring of "fire" (the old orbit of the fake star/moon) that's almost in constant "hard light"... life is altogether impossible there. Unfortunately this ring is angled compared to the planet's axis, so slowly (over months) the band of "fire" seems to sweep north & south over the lands of the equator... for a couple of months, life is possible in the immediate areas next to it.

Suggestions
* Sun Sand: When two shards collide, brush past each other or bump, they send down a rain of sand sized crystal shards, each eternally burning but each eternally powerful. Terribly dangerous to be under it when it's happening.

*The chaotic spin of the planet has it occasionally orbit or slingshot around higher gravity planets from the system which may add or remove sunshards from the worlds orbit as they are drawn away/to from gravity. And on occasion smaller planetoids would be drawn to the world. History says there was originally only one moon, now there are many and some glitter like a gem from their own impacted shards.

*What are the sapient races? humans only? Standard fantasy? I'd have several go extinct due to the mishap, or at least end up crossbreeding into another racial population as their own numbers dwindled. An example would be the forest living elves being wiped out as their wilderness died in the darkness taking shelter with human nomads or in shardlit cities and eventually mingling into the population. The large shard cities could have a 'mutt' population from years of mingled breeding. This only works of course of crossbreeding is possible in this setting. Also I'm rambling at this point.

*The darklands being populated by creatures without sight, but hunt like bats, via echolocation. The darklands are exactly that, dark, but they are not silent.

*Attempts at creating artificial shards for farming and stable cities, some more successful then others. At best, a temporary light to grow with, at worst a deadly radiation spewing chunk of hate that kills all that wanders too close or worse should the wind change direction.

Magitech? Steampunk?

Nah.

What this setting is some good ol' fashioned alchemy.

Imagine, a brotherhood of alchemist-priests, perhaps part of the same group as the astronomer priests. Their brother priests track the shards, while they apply the sacred power. Or, maybe they're RIVAL to the astronomers. They don't regard the power of the sun shards as sacred, merely an energy source to be distilled and concocted. Or perhaps something in between.

Either way, they take the smallest shards which have fallen to earth (more like flakes of the actual shards, no larger than the size of a man's head) and use them to power whatever the hell it is they do.

>>13680606
This world is filled with large chasms, valleys and cave systems.

Most cities and societies exist in these places as it is sometimes too hot to bee outside. The "overworld" is in many places just deserts and only in the chasms and valleys there is forset/farms the year around.

Some species of trees and insects have developed an long incubation period and fast growth. Some forests exist only for a few months a year, appearing in only three days and dies when a too large shard arrives.

>>13688454
Oh and mage a religion that is based on the idea that the shards are dying and they must sacrifice people to slow down/hinder the process, think Mexicana/Aztec.

I like the idea of there being some evil faction that uses blood sacrifice to artificially empower dead sunshards, all Mezoamerican style. It sounds like enough of a Moral Event Horizon for us to use them as an 'evil' faction, but also it could be plausible in a magical setting; they could be essentially binding the souls of the dead to the Shard to power it. Perhaps there are side-effects, though. Perhaps a soulshard radiates a strange, haunting light which drains colour from the skin instead of tanning it.

Vampire soul shards?

I like it...

>>13688810

How about this: only special souls get sacrificed. To put DnD terms on it, you have to be a sorceror to be selected - you're marked out as a special life form by your inherent magical energy, which they believe makes you better fuel for the Shard. "Congratulations! You're going to become the Sun! Now, get up on this altar and expose your sternum, please. This won't hurt, except for the bit where I cut out your still-beating heart."

>>13688853
Well that will definitely make me rethink trying to make a Sorcerer/RDD in a setting like this.

>>13688912

It wouldn't be EVERYONE does that, just this crazy albinoid Aztec faction.

Ooh, had an idea. What if around the brighter areas of the world, they wage war using GIANT MAGNIFYING GLASSES to create death rays? Like, some Da Vinci style fucker figured out how to break a siege - he waited until the shard's orbit was the closest it would get and then erected a giant magnifying lens that turned the already intense heat into a focused beam of fuck, which melted the besieging forces. Since then death rays have been powerful, but seasonal, weapons of defense in the Holy City.

>>13688810
>>13688853

you could conversely have those crazy enough to try and mount sunshards into their flesh. Giving strange shards based abilities (and a health golden glow of course). but also make you hated/despised by everyone because of it.

>>13688997
and radioactive.

>>13681161 A fantasy world where civilisation is destroyed and EVERYONE has to keep moving ALL THE TIME could be brilliant.

OP's idea was "meh", but this is the shit. There's no way I'm not stealing that.

Looters pick over the ruins of ancient cities filled with magics and technologies they couldn't begin to understand. Entire villages travel in caravans hundreds of wagons long, or take to the sea in gigantic floating atolls, desperately steering out of the way of flash-boiling or snap-freezing "storms". Adventurers are hired to clear out dungeons, once places of death but now the only safe refuge for the refugee hordes.

>>13689035
http://www.obsidianportal.com/campaigns/axiom-arcana

Following close behind... or actually being the foundation that the astronomer priesthood is built upon is mathematics.

Adventures in the Shattered Sky verse may be centered around, not just collection of astronomic data - lots of meaningless numbers and dates, that to laymen and incomprehensible, but are essential to make good predictions - but mathematic secrets as well.

Imagine an adventure where you have to save a mathematician priest from a rival state (states being rare, as they need *really* good predictions, so they don't get wiped out in a couple of years... they need to move every couple decades, sometimes more anyway) as he's about to be burned...

...for discovering irrational numbers, which is heresy over there! (The gods couldn't have made something irrational! Burn heretic!) This "principle" though would make predictions a lot more precise, so expeditions could be sent it with narrower margins into "ash zones" (areas, that are most of the time scorched lifeless).

Mathematician? I think you mean mathemagician.

The way I see it there's about 4 different 'species' that the human race has divided into. They can all still interbreed, but its enough to change some stats based on where you're from.
People in the Holy City (Tanners, Radiants, Baskers): They get bonuses to a lot of social skills due to all the backstabbing and political intrigue going on inside. They might also get a bonus to intelligence for being educated as best as one can be on this planet.
Twilights: People who live on the edges of the permanent strip of sun that the Holy City exists in. They constantly live in a half-lighted world. As a result they are the highest concentration of mystics, junkies, and superstitions. Often a twilighter can't tell if he's awake, or dreaming. They get low-light vision, and bonuses to perception and sense motive, as they notice things others do not, and are the most accustomed to seeing into the darkness. Perhaps a bonus to Wisdom for their transcendental nature.
Strobes: People living in the wilderness, traveling from one shard to another. They are well and truly always on the move, and these people make up the majority of the human population. They get a bonus to base speed and increased endurance or constitution. They tend to be the most realistic and cynical of all people. Because of the constant movement and erratic possibilities of finding food, strobes tend to be malnourished and shorter than the average human.
Subs: These are your dwarves. Humans that took a shard and moved underground to form a sort of aztec society in a verdant, underground, paradise. Because of the tunnels, they've grown shorter, and hardier. They get bonuses to strength for all their excavating and are familiar with all the creatures that grow in the sun.

>>13689646
Also an NPC race of vampires that live in the sunless zones and come out during dark periods to feed on the twilighters and strobes that get caught out in the dark. As they have had to adapt to getting fewer meals they don't need to feed as often.

Also, it seems that the way things have adapted within a few thousand years makes me think that the shards have mutagenic properties or possibly just make things more adaptable due to proximity.

Asun, entahus
Yes captcha, the sun does enter into this setting

>this thread

>>13684704
>Some say there are great feathers within the Shards that can bring back the dead and give life everlasting.

>phoenix down

How about elves? I know, they're kinda over-hyped and Mary Sue-ish, so you could've intentionally avoided mentioning them...

...well how about this: in this world, the elves weren't just another race, they were the most anthropomorphic of the fey. The fey, who happen to be almost extinct in this world... the magical forests, the haunted lands... all gone. Literally destroyed in a cataclysm.

Granted the fey never really *lived* in this world, being "odd" and "other" by their very nature... however now very few places can touch the realm they're from.

The elves were pretty much fucked... they were living between two-worlds drawing on both... now they can never return to the realm of their ancestors, and the world is a living hell for them, with all the beauty and magic gone... or so twisted that the few who adapted are more like monsters than the whimsical tricksters they used to be.

Even before the cataclysm they had a vicious streak with a narcissism humans find outright humorous... if the elves weren't a 100%, bloody serious about it, to the point of raping you half to death in games of delight and pain to prove their point. They never did (or do) anything by half measures, since they are obsessed with perfection... and excess.

>>13690143

Glad to see someone got the reference :)

Speaking of writefaggotry, would anyone be interested in me fluffing out this universe some more? May require a separate thread.

>>13690285 - continued:

Ever since the cataclysm, they've become even worse. While before they were (very) dangerous, they also had their good points, as in if you managed to score browny points with them (ie. you were really good at something to the point even they were impressed, or you did an act so excessive or dramatic it made an impression), you had an ally for life...

Nowadays it's pretty hard to have any meaningful or productive contact with them, since they've turned to nihilism and sadomasochism (...they're already in pain, and heck if you can't get rid of it, you might as well enjoy it!)

So the elves as a race, are pretty much insane, tortured souls, who could technically live forever... if life wasn't a daily torture for them. They seek death through various means.

The few souls who venture out and adventure tend to be either boundless hedonists - seeking one pleasure after another to quench a thirst that can never be sated or they're blood knights reveling in destruction around them, just itching to see the world "burn".

Rarer still are those who have turned to stoicism... if these souls ever venture out into the world, it is to test their beliefs, or just to get away from the madness back home.

While they seem decent enough fellows, beware that they literally don't give a shit about *anything*. To them, seeing you eaten alive by predators of the darklands or sacrificed by a twilligter shard priest is just another experience to disregard as superficial mirage of the world.

>mfw /sci/fags keep trying to inject REAL-WURLD FISIKS into a dungeons and dragons game

One more thing: in this world, most civilized men are *black*. Since civilization only exists (briefly, for a decade or two before it has to move on as the pattern of shards changes) in areas of light, and those areas tend to be really hot, black men were naturally more adapted to them. Twillighters are Afro-Asians.

White men are strobes, ever on the move the barbarians of this world.

>>13690385
There could actually be myths about the pale men, they could either be treated like we threat nowadays Atlantis, and ancient and mythical civilization.

>>13690385
>claims to be from /sci/
>thinks black people are black because of heat

Oh wait, you said you were from /sci/. Carry on, blathering tripfag.

>THIS GOD DAMNED THREAD!

>>13690477
He didn't say they were black because of the heat, he just said they were better adapted for hot temperatures.

>>13690385
>>13689646

Let's not forget the albinoid Aztecs. Potentially this is where the NPC vampire races come from - a human civilisation that got a Shard and was like "well fuck your shit, rest-of-the-world! Isolationism is GO!" They lived out in the nightlands, kept safe by the light of their Shard and far away from the Holy City.

Up until the point where their Shard ran out of juice. In desperation, a religious cult seized power on the policy of blood sacrifices.. which more or less worked. The Sunshard reignited when regularly fed with blood, but took on a strange, silvery glow instead of it's usual golden glory. The light began to do strange things to them. Over generations of inbreeding and exposure to the ghostlight, this culture mutated into a hive of bloodthirsty albinoid creatures, only just recognisable as humans any more.

They go out into the nightlands and hunt stray Strobers, hitting their caravans in bloodless ambushes, dragging the captives back to their home to sustain the Soulshard.

>>13690493
>He didn't say they were black because of the heat, he just said they were better adapted for hot temperatures.

Which is absolute twaddle. A black man is not "better adapted" to work in a forge than a white man.

Dark skin = better protection against high levels of cancer-causing UV radiation
Light skin = better ability to create vitamin D from low levels of radiation

Note that this doesn't matter at all in a fantasy world where female dragon-people have tits. All I'm saying is that the guy whose credentials are "i yam /sci/fag" really needs to check what he's saying before he posts it.

>>13690531
I claimed to be a sci-fi "fag", tongue in cheek and I don't see a sci-fi board anywhere :b

Anyway, just as you said, the more melanin in the skin of black people protects them better against UV radiation... guess what the "lots of light" from shards will entail?

Bump

>>13690321
I'm working on a writeup for my next campaign which will use this setting.

However, I'm picking and choosing based on personal preference, so take it or leave it

>>13690321

OP here. Yeah, I'd obviously love to flesh this out more. We've got some basic cosmology and culture going, I like the idea of the different human sub-species.. what else we need?

Should we go more in-depth on the Holy City? It seems that as a political hive of backstabbery, that makes a lot of sense to base a game in and around.

>>13690757
A city that eventually has to move on...
...so they always have agents looking for the next spot, if a spot is found, work is already in progress to lay the foundation of the new city.

...and the big question: WHEN?
...is something of theological arena, with different astrologist trying for the best estimate. Of course, there's massive political pressure, since staying more means you get ahead those already invested in the MOVE, while moving now means getting ahead of those unprepared...

...and if the astrologist ever screw up (through incompetence, mishap, trying to cut it too fine)... or political obstruction prevents the "true word" from getting out, then the city is torched.

So these are holy cities, where the word of the gods, literally means not only prosperity or decline, but death and rebirth.

>>13690788

There could be a series of city-shells that have been erected by the ancestors, so make the moves easier. You know, basic infrastructure based on a common template to make adjusting easier. Scouts are sent out ahead to clear the way, chase out anything that's been living in the shell etc.

This can lead to a "lost city" style situation; there's a broken link in the chain where the ancients had founded another shell city, but modern migratory routes skip over it. And no-one knows why.

I like the idea of political enemies using the Sun to do their work for them - using subterfuge to tamper with the migration charts, so that they end up ash when the Sunscrape comes.

Shardspawn -

Beings that spring up from time to time underneath/near individual shards due to the leakage of its power over time (a result of the weakening of the shards).

Also what if some shards are almost cool to the touch but so bright you can't look at it directly, will others barely glow but can will massive burns and need strong magics etc to handle, but some might also be bright and hot, and these are highly prized

Each type could be any size

Does this setting outright ban Shardmind characters, or are they holy avatars?

>>13690874
Since there are hundreds if not thousands of shards, each with their own orbit, own period time, own perturbation (ie. big eliptical orbits that makes that shard spend more time over one part of the globe) it's not a given that "set" chain of refugee sites could be devised, so you couldn't just go from settlement to settlement own a simple daisy-chain.

Instead, it could be that the "next" safe site (for a decade or two) would be several hundred to thousands of miles away, in a very different direction than the last one, you might even have to backtrack and go back to a previous site for during a whole "cycle" (if a cycle can be devised) and the cycle itself could be slowly changing.

All those crazy Mayan, Egyptian, Mesopotamian, etc. calendars with crazy numbers and prophecies for tens of thousands of years? If you disregard the batshit insane parts (gods from above, end of the world) a lot of it, just *works*.

When I wrote mathematics as necessity for civilization, that's what I meant... you have mind bogglingly complex calculations ahead, especially since you need to take the measurements yourself.

>>13690874

And let me add that while foundations have been set-up, once the budding masses of civilization leaves to look for newer grounds, it would mean leaving these settlements into the mercy of the "nightdwellers", men who have adapted living in the dark and prey on those left behind.

These nightdwellers then move in to live there for a while and make it their temporary living grounds, wherein they proceed to pillage and ransack these settlements built by nomads until light shines anew again by the shard's predictable patterns.

More or less, we would have the role of parasites leeching off the labors of men and whose very being is permeated (and connected) with darkness. Somewhat like the light vs dark epitome.

Illithid.
The mind flayers aren't just sheltered into the Underdark, but come out on to the surface and even have a few settlements there. The settlements will have Illithid that are especially resilient to the light of the fractured sun. Maybe they are trying to further destroy the fragments, or maybe they did break it to help the other Illithid move out from the depths.
Pic unrelated. Unless you'd like it to be related.

Don't you 404 on me!

>>13691914

Assuming every Shard is large or potent enough to have a noticable effect on earth, of course. It could be that a handful of orbits are actually hot enough to need this sort of behaviour.

Pelor made your sun. He became angry at you and cracked the sun for shits and giggles to make you suffer because you have abandoned the Light. Now live in darkness and suck it.

>>13694257
>>13691914
Well there could be eliptical orbits where particularly large shards would spend decades or centuries far enough away to look like a common star, then slowly come near for its destructive pass before leaving for the reaches again. Its possible that some shards might physically scrape the surface or even crash on their approach.

Think of it, a new canyon, carved from a shard greater than a mountain range, and the shard returns every 10,000 years.

>>13695257

Oh man, like that old theory about Earth having this twin planet called Nemesis moving around and wrecking our shit every now and then? That could be pretty cool. Have some Shards be harbingers of doom as much as harbingers of life.

>>13695257
>>13695308
Passing close by, sure, but scraping the earth and then leaving again is a bit too much to swallow, to me. If we can't even assume gravity works anything at all like we're used to, we can't make any assumption about the setting anymore.

>>13695173

http://community.wizards.com/go/thread/view/75882/19558798/Pelor_the_Burning_Hate

>>13695257
Congrats, you just fluffed this fucker... They DID say there was more than one, hmm?

This whole Idea is pure genius. why did everyone leave? did we get a new thread?

>>13696823

There's some writefaggotry for it here:

>>13692388

But yeah, tomo I'm going to repost some of the basic points and see if we can't get some more going on this

>>13695443
The shards themselves are presumably exempt from gravity to some degree so that they can keep floating through the sky. as mentioned above, shards in scientifically-sound stable orbits can't work, or they'd just be a belt around the equator that illuminates the whole world. They need to float low and bring day to a very small area, so there's no reason hitting the ground and drifting up again should be beyond their capabilities.

>>13697096
See
>>13697002

>>13696815

Yes.

>>13697218
Eh? No.

Why would they only orbit around the equator, I already give a good reason why they could have angled orbits... and it's absolutely realistic.

You right though about what balls of "mini" suns would do - act like suns. This is why I proposed the idea that they act like giant torchlights: emitting only a tight beam of light and heat on a narrow angle from cracks on their surface.

>>13697096
But wait, there's more writefaggotry here now!

Also, I'd be scared shitless if I saw this in the Strobelands. There's a reason that Strobes "keep together"...

not quite related, but the pic reminds me of something that might be seen in a strobe-land.

That said, bumping epic thread for another day of awesomeness.

I know it's been said several times, but I'm stealing this idea for a setting I'm working on. Totally fits too, since it's mostly desert.

There should be a small area that for some reason still has day and night normally. or maybe just eternal day. In this spot is the one remaining huge city. This can be a main campaign starting point like Stromreach or Sharn for Eberron.

Also- the sun could have been destroyed by some major villian seeking unlimited magical power. Maybe it wasnt even a crystal before this villains influence- perhaps he made it that way to suit his purposes but then the power was too much for him?

even if you dont like the villain idea- maybe the sun was normal at some point and becoming crystalline is what shattered it in the first place.

>>13702481
It's already pretty well decided if you read through: The sun was a giant crystalline phoenix egg. It hatched.

Oh hello, my name is Hadarai, I am a shard hunter. you see, alchemists and sol worshipers pay top gold for even small fragments. So I travel from crash site to crash site, looking for some of the smaller shards, but I have my eye on a particular shard.

you see my village calls it Corona's spear, the shard is perfectly shaped like a spear. Ive been trying to catch it for years... oh I forgot to mention, it currently orbits about 400 feet above the ground and is known as the fastest shard, traveling the entire span of the globe every 5 hours.

Today i've decided to put my life on the line for it, you see my attempts so far have been indirect, trying to knock it out of the sky with a projectile, building a wall in front of it, even trying to lasso a rope over it, but today, i"m going to climb up a tower i made, and try to catch it with these gloves of mine... wish me luck.

I just got a stupid-goofy idea. Icarians. People who have built shanty-towns stretching between hot-air-balloons, trying to get as close to the shards as possible for warmth in colder climates. Free from land-bound predators, they nonetheless must raid the groundlings for food and supplies on their great migrations, following the slower drifting shards.

>>13703355
Very much a possibility, but given how chaotic the weather of Shattered Sun verse is, they'll have problems of their own: Avoiding the massive hurricane systems that can arise in the wake of the more powerful shards, not getting blown into mountains by the strong slipstreams and so on.

>>13703534
Like I said, they'd follow the slower, ore stable shards. Perhaps even have latched onto one and built their shanty-city around it so that it drags them with it.

>>13703661
If the shard is slower, then it's further away, on a higher orbit, so you can't get to it. (Period time and semi-major axis of the orbit are constant for a given system... so to go slower, the axis has to be bigger).

However even if you find such shards, there is no guarantee that another shard won't cross your path and bring havoc with it.

To realize the scope of how "chaotic" this world is, you have to think in three dimensions. Just imagining the world as a globe is not enough, if you still only use its surface and handle things as if everything was tied to it...

...no. It's very much possible to be under the influence of several shards at the same time, for the shards to be at different orbits, with different period times, for the "light beams" from these shards to intersect on the planet below even though the shards don't come anywhere near each other.

The assumption, that orbiting shards would only be on the plane of the ecliptic was false to begin with.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_mechanics

I know's its a bit outside the scope of standard fantasy, but if you wrap your head a bit around the pecularities of orbital mechanics, the payoffs in game can be immense, as you can tell stories of weird, almost mystical stuff that seems magic...

...but is just a result of how things are in nature.

Checks the "rules of thumb" section at least.

On the ground, the "apparent" path of things in orbit can be quite chaotic.

A shard can even appear to be stationary in the sky, if it's own a geostationary orbit over the elliptic.

OP came... idea was meh...

And few posts in it was fucking awesome. Am proud /tg/.

This thread must survive for another 12 hours.

So, do we have an entry on 1d4chan yet?

Airships/Dirigibles:
In the city of Terec, the founder of Daedalus Workshops has discovered an impending disaster. Having perfected (or so he believes) a system of predicting Shard orbits, he has discovered that a convergence of orbits will result in several Shard fragments altering their paths, leading to a Sunscrape of massive proportions that will scour Terec and its surrounding lands from the face of the world. Terec's workers, under the direction of Daedalus Workshops, have pooled their efforts to create several truly massive airships in an attempt to escape the impending disaster (as ground travel is unsafe in this region at this time of year). Your players are booked on the maiden voyage of Daedalus' second great airship, the Icarus.
-Daedalus Workshops have proudly announced that their aircraft cannot fail.
-As the collision of Shards occurs, a fragment of one of the larger Shards is knocked free, and rather than falling to earth as part of the Sunscrape, assumes a new path that will place it in the path of the fleeing airships.
Obviously just a rough idea, but imagine your players faces when they realize you're folding elements of the escape from Crete and Titanic into one adventure for them.

Thanks for your request.
It has been added to our database and the thread will be archived as soon as enough request for that thread have been made.
This thread has been requested 1 times now.

>post two days ago
>thread still going
>setting further fluffed and worked on
>more awesome than before
>mon visage quand

>>13703894
Pic fucking related.

Okay, #1, this isn't Dark Sun. We didn't lose moisture. We still have all our wetness. Most of it is in massive vaporclouds that fill the sky, so that what little night there was would become hazy and full of clouds and fog.

#2, Since the sunshards aren't flying around like jets incinerating the land, there is time for plant growth to form. You'll be seeing TONS of lichens and moss, anything that spores. Not a lot of tall stuff, especially nothing that requires seeds, but you'll have the landscape covered in mosses and lichen, adapted to absorb moisture from the giant hurricanes and rainstorms that are thrown into the mainland by the boiling ocean on the other side of the planet.

#3: We're getting a LOT of conflict on wether sunshards are barely glowing stones that don't get warm without a blood sacrifice, to "Super radioactive and burn with mile high flames for eternity"

I posit the idea of Paladins now being avatars of Hope rather than a moral code, infused with powers of very visible light.

"We live in a world that grows darker every day and yet burns us to the bone. We huddle in fear and terror from tumbling sunshards even as we flee the sight of the nightlands. We have been put through hell, but we are still here! We are still alive! I promise you, where there is life, there is hope. Where there is hope, I will be there. Where I am, there is light."

Seems like a rich environ that could support countless zones and themes, i approve. Also on the plant life question, while most plant life bites it, the stuff in relatively more stable areas could go on longer, and I'm sure some magic inclined survivors would take an interest in continuing plant life and helping them along. Which could lead to a massive settlement that is made from plant life and is tended and enhanced my the magi society that sprung up.

>>13710451
alchemy would be huge there too, leading to all kind of exotic and heavily resistant flora with all kinds of survival capacities. Also seeding expeditions to re-vegetate and repair the world.

it would occur to me that the dune worm sand worms would be possibility is high but perhaps more commonly on the tremors size scale, they are quite good and surviving, hibernating when food is scarce.

shameless approval bump

I want to start a 1d4chan entry on this setting. What was the title we settled for it again?

>>13710899
It's archived as Shattered Sun, but I've heard Sundered Sun thrown around, too.

>>13710960
Shattered Sun it is. I'll get started on it right away!

>>13710973
good stuff

>>13710998
Still working on it, but I got the page reserved: http://1d4chan.org/wiki/Shattered_Sun

>>13711444
Hey you.

Don't add shit to the wiki without talking about it in-thread first.

>>13711971
Sorry. Just trying to help expound the fluff and better organize it. I'll stop and let it be until the thread dies off.

>>13712001
Don't stop altogether. Just post it here first, and let people weigh in. There's some kernals of good in what you've written. But if you do stuff by yourself then it ends up just being shitty homebrew, and if everyone helps, it gets to be awesome.

>>13712015
Guess I get a little carried away at times. I suppose I also want to come up with a unified lexicon for the setting rather than a jumbled mess.

>>13712015
agreed. Your initiative is good but its a collaboration.

>>13712043
Well then, I'll leave y'all in charge of content for now. I'll help organize and work out the grammar.

>>13712015
>>13712001
On this note:
>Dominated in the sky by the Shard of Gargonel
Okay, this is good, but who the fuck is Gargonel?

>Terec
>Things are different and awesome, but we won't tell you how! And there's a shardscrape coming, but who knows what that knowledge is causing

Also, the Holy City was named because it's believed to have been left by the Pheonix. It should have been powerful and old. I suggest we refrain from describing it as "quickly growing" and give it the "one of the first Shardstreams that stabilized." line from Shardlight. Perhaps Shardlight could have been growing and becoming hugely powerful before it was destroyed.

>>13712083
>Gargonel
I was using that bit from the writefaggotry about the rival Astronomer houses.

>Shardlight
Sure thing. Fire away! :)

>>13712083
For Terec we need to figure out how Alchemy works

The Holy City stuff sounds good to me.

>>13712100
>Houses
Elaborate? How do you see this correlation?

>>13712102
>Alchemy
I know that's a bit of a wonky spot, but I see it as Alchemists being those who craft the energy from the Shards into technology in the new world. I'm only concerned with it from a fluff point of view for now. I'd figure we wait for crunch until the ideas are in place.

>>13712116
The second (albeit interrupted) story about Oduno and June here: http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/13692388/

...Hence the expression : As hot as a Nirgun woman! Well you're laughing but it's a true story I swear! What? Well of course they are strange. Not as educated as us city folks.
That's to be expected of course, what with running all day all year for their whole life... Weirdest I've seen?

Alright, as you know I've been traveling all over the place in the time I've been away from the city. In the second half of my travels, must've been 2 and a half cycles ago, I met this strange Strobe in a Vordback Tavern in Sundance.

See the man was the greatest warrior of his tribe, one of those ``Great champions`` the strobes are so proud of.

While I'm bouncing around, mind if I add terms and content from the fluff I made in that writefaggotry thread too?

>>13712205
Fuck it, sure.

The cities themselves have to move "all the time too"...
...sometimes they luck out and find a shard/shard-stream with a really stable orbit, but usually they too have to move every couple of decades.

The sheer fact they can exist et all is a massive feat in this world. You have to find either:
-Some shards/streams that create long enough "day cycle"...
-This is hard to do, since most shards are in middle or low orbit, so they streak across the sky fast and furious creating temporary streaks of hot havoc and thin strips of life bearing light.
-So you gotta find a shard in a slow (ergo high!) orbit, but one that still gives enough light for plants and agriculture. You can't build a civilization on twilight.
-If you luck out, you find a massive shard in geostationary orbit. This means, you can found a city that's "always" in light... in that case though you'll have to deal with overabundant fauna, and the city will be constantly surrounded by storm systems, since putting a hot spot like that into the atmosphere creates some wacky shit.

>>13712219
The Runner is now added. Now, what to pick from it to put into the wiki without making it look like a bit of a wankfest.

>>13712178
Well, he used to be and that's what the story he told me was all about. You see the strobe champion are those who get to stay behind when the darkdwellers are closing in, those who get to explore those creepy ruins first, those who get to fight that sunspawn monstrosity one on one. You get the picture.

The surprising thing is: The tribe warriors fight for that position! They all want it! Every single one of them wants to be the one who'll get thrown against the worst the world had to offer!

Anyway according to most tribe tradition, having a bad champion means badluck and badluck means death to anyone out in the sundance. You dont chose a champion unless you are darn sure he's going to de the job good. Some tribes have five or even a dozen ``representatives`` to do the job until a worthy champion arises. A champion need not be part of the tribe. Some champions are actualy from the city, I've heard about one, supposedly its a nice looking young woman who doesnt mind if...

Well thats not what I'm talking about, the point is not just anyone can be champion and the whole thing is real serious for them.

>>13712235
>The cities themselves have to move "all the time too"...
Not the Holy City.
It's been there for as long as anyone can remember.

And if a city's place ceases to be habitable, it doesn't move. Everyone leaves or dies. If there was another suitable place, it would have been filled by enterprising strobers by now, and a new city would have formed.

>-If you luck out, you find a massive shard in geostationary orbit. This means, you can found a city that's "always" in light
That's the shard of Gargonel, I guess.
>animals
makes sense, but I'd think most of the land around the city is agricultural.
>storms
There'd be a hell of a lot of wind, for sure. What else there is depends on more than the sun.

To get the effect of "darklands", the shards can't just cast their light everywhere... that way you'd have mini suns, and no areas of darkness.

So the shards must "focus" their light. The fluff I wrote earlier stated, that the hatching marred the polish of the egg, so instead diffusing, the shards now focus light, through their cracks.

This means, that knowing the orbit of a shard alone is not enough... to have *good* predictions, you also have to figure out in which direction does it focus light, how tight the beam.

...and you also have another can of worms, since not all shards are in a locked orbit! (Locked orbit: like the moon - it always shows the same face to the Earth, since its own turn takes the same time as a round around good 'ol blue tarball).

Here's an interesting thing you can have:
A "stationary" shard, that still has a day/night cycle. It's in GEO orbit, has a narrow angle crack, so although far, it still focuses its heat enough to create daylight and it has a turn time of 8 hours. So it has 8 hour days, and makes a small strip of land habitable on the equator...

...though we could shift that! If the crack wasn't pointing straight down at the planet, then it'd create a arc shaped land somewhere north or south of the equator.

>>13712301
Having a single champion is bad, we want a party of them for the sake of adventuring opportunities. Representatives are a nod to that, but where would a party go from there?

Read the writefaggotry thread.
The writer clearly stated that the "great" astrologist have seen two migrations. Even the holy city moves.

>>13712328
That writefaggotry is not in keeping with fluff that had been agreed upon prior to that point. It's also lame in the sense that it detracts from the Holy City being awesome, and in the sense that it makes absolutely no sense from a logical point of view.

>>13712301
See my man had always been a great warrior and a greater hunter. He was a perceptive man who knew you were lying before you even started talking. Or something like that, thats what he said anyway. Of course being so great at everything the guy had always been seen as a potential replacement champion.
When the old champion died everyone assumed he would be the one to replace him but they held the trials anyway, as I told you before they dont mess around with the champion selection thing.

>>13712219
While I'm thinking about it, I want to throw in the bit about the Rite of Phoenix's Blood, from my fluff. To do so though, I would also like to know whether or not the Strobes are traders with the Cities before I put anything about it up there.

>>13712343
There's no fluff that has been "agreed" upon...
...or you're just not good with reading comprehension.

There only was a consensus of the sorts, that:
a) The strobelands are wicked cool. Entire civilizations always on the march is something not yet seen in RPG.

b) The darklands are cool. To have them you need either shards in the atmosphere (and they stay there with magic!) or shards that don't cast their light in all directions.

c) The "hardlight" areas are cool. To have them, some shards have to cast more light. If they exist, than shards also create areas of very high risk.

...and finally you have no idea about orbital mechanics work if you think you can just outright state some areas are "stable", when you have all these hazards.

Yes it's possible, but not as likely and not how you imagine it.

>>13712402
Sure they are. Traders, raiders, whatever gets them by. And since they're out in the world, they're the ones likely to encounter the ruins of the old civilization, so they're likely to have some good things to trade, too.

>>13712430
>There's no fluff that has been "agreed" upon...
In the case of /tg/ getting shit done, "agreed upon" means "somebody posted it, people said it was cool, and almost everyone uses that as the assumption". There will always be people suggesting alternate possibilities, and that's good. But in general, people do agree on things, and alternate suggestions are thus alternate, rather than core assumptions. For example:
>The darklands are cool. To have them you need either shards in the atmosphere (and they stay there with magic!) or shards that don't cast their light in all directions.
In this case, the agreed upon version is that they're low in atmosphere, simply because it's what people said first, and what we've all been working from. Not being omnidirectional is an idea with its own merits, but it's different than what we've been working from, so it remains an interesting idea, rather than a core conceit.

>>13712430
Please bring discussion of this to the Discussion page of the wiki. Don't insert it right into the wiki.

>is this physically possible
For fuck's sake...
That's not what a wiki is for. Discussing if it's physically possible belongs in the thread. In fact, it's already in the thread. The wiki is for cataloging the agreed upon facts of the setting, such that people can use it to run a campaign from.

>>13712488
OK. This stuff has been just written to the wiki...
Though there's a problem with the "magic floating rocks" theory... how the *fuck* would astrologists make predictiosn if you can'd really observe these shards without being right below them?

What makes astrology viable is that you *can* observe the other shards even when you're not below them if they're in orbit.

>>13712538
Well... the things are glowing, so getting up on a tall tower should show you quite a few of them. And most of them are still high up compared to, say, a mountain, even if they're very low as far as astronomical bodies go.
I'd imagine there's some form of scrying applied too, although I don't know how deep into that we'd want to delve.

(Whoa. This thread's still here. It's time for some maverick writefagging. Maveritefagging, you might say. If you were drunk. Which I am.)

I haven't told this to anybody, ever, but I want you to hear it, because you're my son, and you deserve to know.

I saw the sun.

Yes, The Sun. Before it was sundered. I was there. I know your teachers told you nobody living had ever seen it, but they were wrong. I saw it. I stood in the light of the Unbroken Sun, twelve thousand rings of the Cloister Bell ago and longer. Before there even was a Cloister Bell.

And I'm the reason it shattered.

I was an adventurer in those days. I was a sorcerer, one of many people who had traded part of my soul for power. In theory, the deal would end once I gained immortality, but Aspok knew the odds of that happening were slim; all it had to do was power my magic for seventy, maybe eighty years, and then it could take my whole soul. Collateral. I was young enough and stupid enough in those days to think that was a fair deal, and immortality a worthy goal. I see now that it was merely a foreshadow of what was to come.

My companions were noble souls, the noblest souls of all. They weren't perfect. They bickered and stole, but when the time came, they proved exactly who they were. As did I.

We had traced a mad wizard by the name of Malaeseas to her tower in...I suppose it would be in Helioset, now. It was in the nation of Kremitov in those days, near the city of Ortesz. It had taken us weeks to find her. We had been sent by the Crown Prince of Myvia to bring her back in chains for burning a small village to the ground with her experiments. For the life of me, I can't remember the name of that village.

Anyway, we had tracker her there, and over the course of our journeys, we had realized her goal: she was going to tie her life to the Immortal Sun, and in so doing, become immortal. But to do so, she would require a bargain, similar to my bargain with Aspok. She would let the Furious Sun burn away the entire nation of Myvia to pay for her everlasting vitality.

We fought long, toiled through hardships and strife to reach her spellcasting chamber. However, we were too late. Her ritual was already underway. Even her death did not halt it. Orosia, our own Mage, produced a solution, borne out of desperation: she sealed the Sun's Wrath to the chamber. If all of us would sacrifice ourselves to slake the Cruel Sun's lust for vengeance at being used by one so small, it would retreat to the sky and all would be saved. She produced a dagger she used for her rituals, and she slit her own throat.

>>13712556
No, it's *NOT* enough. There's a thing called the horizon, that *severely* restricts how far you can see. To *only* cast light in a couple of dozen to hundred kilometers, the shards can only be a couple of dozen kilometers high in the air.

...so unless the world is flat, no that's not enough.

They all did. They all gave up their lives for the world. The barbarian, his rage giving way to his solemn respect for the world...the cleric, welcoming the embrace of his deity...the rogue, with a wink and a quip about how it was stealing the show...the druid, her last words a garble of birdsong. And...

And then there was me. I stood in the circle, the sun looming overhead as if awaiting my soul. I stood among the bodies of my closest friends, holding the knife with which they had taken their own lives. I stood, surrounded by the unfathomable bravery of their deaths...

And I couldn't do it. I couldn't let go of life. I couldn't renege on my deal with Aspok. I couldn't give up. I couldn't take my own life.

But the Sun demanded its due. It had been pressed into a magical partnership, and it could not be withdrawn except by my hand...but it was bound by our Mage's spell. It could not resonate with a human soul without the power of a million human deaths, but it could not break the resonance without my own.

And so the Sun tore itself apart.

The Sun died, because I refused to.

Over the years, I have realized what has kept me alive: the Sun, torn into pieces as it is, waits for my death. With Myvia tossed to the four winds, only my death can properly resolve the spell. I am tied to the Sun Shards. My death will unite them. My death will end this world of uncertainty, this world of storms and nomads.

I wanted you to know this, my son, before I returned to what remains of that tower. Aspok take me, but I will not condemn you to this. For what must have been millennia, I have groped at life at the cost of the world's prosperity, but I will release it for you.

The life of the world and the Sun itself were not enough, but for you? For you, I would give it all.

Goodbye.

>>13712616
How far can you see something that's bright, and kilometers high? I don't know, but I reckon it'd be pretty far. How far away can a lighthouse be seen on a clear night? And the shards are higher than that.

>>13712616
So the world's flat.

This is fantasy. It's possible.

>>13712634
Definitely some good endgame stuff right there.

>>13712616
As much as I try to avoid the excuse of magic, I do believe that not all settings need to perfectly operate in a hard, scientific set of rules. I am not seeking to create an alternate reality, if it were. I merely want a backdrop for a story, an environment to foster the elements of drama rather than the elements of matter.

Of course, I'm sure you can tool all this fluff to a more scientific mindset in whatever story you decide to make of the setting. But in this brainstorming phase, at least let us get the ideas down and take out the chaff from there.

>>13712674
I'm fine with *that*, in fact I love weird out fantasy shit that *dares* to be different...

...it just has to be internally consistent.
Living on a flat world has massive consequences.
For instance, you can climb a high mountain and see the edge of the world.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizon
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:How_far_away_is_the_horizon.png

...so even if I'm on top of a 1000 meter, or in other words, a freaking *kilometer* high tower! I only see for a 100 kilometers.

Standing on top of a massive mountain - say 4 kilometers high, and let's hope I see in all directions, there is no haze, etc. - is a lot better, but the horizon is still only 200 kilometers.

...which is very little compared to how freaking huge a planet is.

In other news, what would we call the lands in which the Light never touches? I suggest the Nocturne. But I'm sure that's been done to death.

>>13712764
I realized I didn't include how high the shards are - say 50 to 80 kilometers? Then they could be seen 500 to 800 kilometers away? Unfortunately no, only a fraction of that, since at the extreme distances you view them at long angles... there's a lot of atmosphere between the two of you, so even on a clear day, you might not see them...

...and let's not even talk about what atmospheric refraction does to your readings.

>>13712764
I'm all for the glory of astrophysics (I've been all up in the Symphony of Science vids this week), but D&D is about fantasy. It could very well be that this is a coin-shaped world that was orbited by a magical sun-crystal. Sure, it's possible to see the edge of the world from a high tower. It's possible to even walk around the edge of the world to the other side (not that you'd want to. Even the crazies who claim that gravity doesn't make them fall forever...you know, the crazies who claim to have gone there AND COME BACK, all universally claim that the monsters that live there feast on human flesh!).

Hell, for all we know, the stars are just Sun Shards that flew in the other direction. Maybe the night sky was just black before the Sundering. Who knows?

>>13712807
Why not Dark Lands? There's even a game with that name, though I doubt they TM-ed the phrase.

>>13712842
>Implying that this universe has a vacuum in space, instead of just air forever, and hence that the physics of air vs. a vacuum make sense

It's fantasy, dude. Seriously. It's set in a medieval time. Be willing to view the universe like a medieval commoner.

>>13712764
You're neglecting to consider that the thing you're trying to see isn't on the horizon. It's most probably several kilometers up at the very least. That should increase the distance you can see by quite a bit, though I figuring out exactly how much would be nontrivial to me. But this should be enough to get at least a working idea of whether a shard is about to come ramming into you at full force.
It can't be an exact and all-predicting science, obviously, or they would only need a few and predictions would tend to always be accurate. Most astronomy is probably done by carefully studying records than by observing visible shards, and debates about where exactly a shard will be are likely to be fierce.

>>13712807
Darklands, perhaps? It keeps the admittedly unimaginative naming scheme that we've been using.

Hey guys. The thread's autosaging. Wanna start a new one? Link to the sup/tg/ archives of the threads, of course.

>>13712893
Looks to me like we can ride it out for a fair while longer.

>>13712883
Darklands it is.

>>13712883
I did, see >>13712842
However *all* astrology is based on calculations. However your calculations are only as good as your data. You need a good time and angle measurements.

Actually our two requirements are working at odds:
-To have astronomers, observation still has to yield viable data, otherwise predictions are useless.
-To have darklands, we need shards with low horizons (since that's the area they'll illuminate).

That's why I still think that shards in actual orbit, with cracks focusing the light to tight beams is a better idea than shards magically levitating in the air.

>>13712962
>I did, see >>13712842
I neglected to refresh before posting. I apologize for my oversight.

>-To have astronomers, observation still has to yield viable data, otherwise predictions are useless.
This is true, but the viability need not be absolute. If the data is helpful but may not be entirely accurate, then astronomy is not a precise science as we know it, but an art, full of guesswork and skill rather than only measurements and math.

Okay, I'm about done for now with the wiki. I want to add more, but I may have to do it under, say, a campaign idea or some such. A lot of the ideas I jotted down after I committed my writefaggotry definitely clash with what we established tonight.

Looking at recent wiki additions
>stardust
>widespread use
If it's literally tiny shards, there shouldn't be anywhere near enough for widespread use.

>>13713027
So what? Roleplaying is about having fun. Is it fun? Damn right! If you (we) are having fun, what's the problem?

I see no reason why people couldn't tweak the setting according to their own tastes.

>>13712962
You're assuming Light functions the same way in the Sundered World as it does in Reality. This is short-sighted.

It could very well be that light only shines down from the Sun/shards. Certainly, our forebears may not have considered the idea that the sun shines in a spherical pattern, rather than just straight down on us.

Maybe photons are affected by gravity in this setting. It would certainly stand to reason that light should fall to Earth like everything else...

>>13713027
Link to our glorious setting page?

>>13713055
It was a concept I threw in threw in there to perhaps provide a plot hook or a macguffin. As for the widespread bit, there may have been cases where Shards were ground against something during their impact. Maybe there was erosion of a Shard within the seas, the remains of which washing up on a beach.

Just an idea.

>>13713068
http://1d4chan.org/wiki/Shattered_Sun

A lot needs to be filled in, but we're trying to get to some sort of consensus on some of the material.

>>13713055
fixed: "...use it in a ritual to choose the next generation of shamans."

It seems to me that the Strobers should be far more varied than they are currently implied to be, as they make up most of the people in the world. The only inherent similarity is that they remain in small tribes and they are nomadic. Different tribes from different regions should be as different as the Cherokee and the Huns.

>>13713087
Thanks

>>13713063
Photons are affected by gravity as is :D
Your idea also happens to be a variation of what I wrote with the shards having "cracks" and tight beams of light...

...and as usual, the problem with ideas to change "fundamental" things about the world is how will it affect everything else?

I'm all for these, but then you damn better carry out all the logical conclusions, exploitations and weird shit that the players will come up with.

>>13713090
Oh, I know there will be different groups of Strobes. Just trying to give them some form of unifying traits. Feel free to add in some tribes in the wiki!

i think this setting sounds fantastic. but i thought of a background that would do away with such suspension of belief to allow a crystal sun.

The planatery nebula that this solar system formed in, is in the direct path of a gamma ray burst (in the EeV range) this has caused a large portion of the gas loud to bwecome very radioactive.

as for the formation of the crystal sun. this was cased when two roaming brown dwarf stars crossed paths in the nebula and started to briefly orbit each other before heading their seperrate ways. The vortex caused between the 2 orbiting dead stars causes such preasure the the gas to cystalise (creating this settings sun). the vast amounts of radiation is what causes the crystal to produce heat and light.

fast forward several billion years to when a planet has formed with life on it.

due to the solar systems movemoent relitive to the gamma ray burst source. it has been out of harms way. untill the cataclysm that destroyed the star... which was the gamma ray burst.

the planet, is now orbited by tiny fragments of this massive crystal star.

also, the abundance of radiatiom in the solar system is what leads to the apearance of magic in the planets inhabiants.

hopefully that will explain the crystal sun, the magic and what actually happened to destroy the sun. and all without the use of 'magic did it'

I've got an interesting idea that, with /tg/'s approval, could make astronomy more accurate and elaborate on what it is Alchemists do, anyway.

A scrying pool. The alchemists can make a special basin, which holds stardust in water, and the stardust clumps in ways that indicate the location and size of shards. How far away, and the minimum size of shard it shows, are dependent on size, construction, and amount of Stardust used.

Added:
"Strobers usually colloquially call citizens of these lucky states 'tanners'."

>>13713119
I feel like the current unifying traits are in excess of what they should be. Perhaps we could indicate that those apply to the tribes near the Holy City?

>>13713161
To clarify, I was referring to "Mysticism" here.

>>13713161
Hmm, I don't see why not. I'll go ahead and reorganize accordingly.

If we're going for variation, we could also add the previous idea of "wandering states": that is citiess that have to move every couple of decades, as their astrologists are good enough (but only good enough) to predict safe, stable spots for a couple of decades.

So we have the Holy Cities, the Wandering States, The Twillighters (living on the outskirts of Holy Cities and Wandering States) and the Strobers.

>>13713117
>That's how physics works already
I meant to a "rocks fall down, so light falls down, too" degree, not the physicist's "a deep enough gravity well can pull in photons, too!" degree. Imagine photons having as much trouble escaping a gravity well as rocks...

>how will it affect everything else?

However the setting demands. We're talking about the sun as an enchanted crystal, here. It's inherently magical light and heat. It can react however would be most beneficial to the setting.

>>13713119
>Tribes of strobers

Congratulations on making an infinite number of plot hooks. Good work!

>>13713134
Last I checked, a gamma ray burst generally puts out enough radiation to wipe a quarter of a galaxy of life into paste...and irradiating matter, crystalline or not, enough to glow (much less shine) would require ridiculous amounts of radiation.

I think your setting requires some VERY rad-resistant forms of life.

>>13713186
And done. Tentatively called the Tribe of the Shardwatch. We'll see where this goes.

>>13713227
Oh, and made some corrections to get rid of the general text.

>>13713196
>Holy Cities
no, Holy City is the name of one city. It's the biggest, and it's the one with Gargonel. It's always been under Gargonel, at least as far as anyone remembers.

Also I thought Wandering States and Strobers were basically the same, just depending on how lucky they are with regards to finding shards.

>>13713299
That's what I was under the impression of as well. Although it would be interesting to have an entire tribe of Strobes in what amounts to a small moving fortress city. Definitely some aspiring Alchemists in there, hmm?

>>13713252
>>13713227
>>13713083
Not gonna lie, I'm disappointed with the lack of Aztec Dorfs and giant Sun Shards in the sea causing global storms.

Come to think of it, it's possible that world itself is fully and perpetually overcast. Enough of the shards may have hit the oceans (either evaporating an entire sea, leading to more land for Strobers and the like, or just boiling the seas slowly, leading to oceans that feel like hot springs) that the atmosphere is permanently afflicted with a light fog. Clouds march across the sky, forever obscuring the light from the orbiting Shards and making the clearing of part of the sky into the most beneficial and coveted of the astrologer's arts.

Your average astrologer can detect when a Shard is coming through the haze. A great astronomer can tell you where it's going, so you can follow. A legendary astronomer can peel apart the clouds just long enough to calculate its actual trajectory, and map where it will go indefinitely.

The most guarded secrets of the varying Strober clans are their Shard Maps, showing where their most skilled astrologers have calculated the passages of Shards.

The Wandering States

Unlike the shardstreams, these smaller towns, sometimes cities are located at temporarily safe of light. Foundation of based an astrological prediction of safe-spots for the next couple of years, maybe decades, enterprising souls move there to exploit previously inaccessible resources. During their brief existence, the States can amass enviable fortunes, raise strong troops or recover relics... the promise of change, or striking out, of making it better is palpable in the States.

However the light wait on no one, eventually the city has to move on. With their the new found power and wealth, wanderers often hire astrologists and pay massive fortunes for research of the next site in the hope of attaining further fortunes, further power. Some Wandering States have existed long enough to make the Move, the Journey or Exodus into a ritual of their own, a massed, regulated effort instead the haphazard exploration of their elders.

Power games, intrigue abound as the time of Move approaches, and the astrology is therefore highly politicized. Fortunes are lost, dynasties fall with the careful shifting of a Exodus by a year... and all too often entire States go up in flames, or are ransacked in orgies of violence by Vampires, when the city's elite has tried to play the game too fine. The light waits on no one.

>>13713345
Not a bad idea. Let's see where this goes with everyone else. If it's good to go, would be put this under the Twilight section, or this a group entirely of themselves?

>>13713384
It's entirelly different from twillighters. Their "standard of light" is just as good as of shardstreamers... but it's based on uncertain predictions.

They're not strobers because they already know where they're going.

It's like the "settlers" of America, except they know for certain that they can only stay for a couple of years... than they have to return.

So Wandering States either move on, or their population and wealth is reintegrated into a Shardstreamer city after their time's up...

(...or they go up in flames if political bickering prevented the timely execution of an Exodus).

>>13713337
Aztec dorfs are the Subfolk.

>>13713384
They should get their own. They're basically the same as other cities, except that their light is not likely to stay around for nearly so long.

>>13713345
There should be some indication in the text that this is what Strobers aspire to be, and that if these people fuck up (but avoid horrible death) then they end up being Strobers again.

>>13713454
>that this is what Strobers aspire
This is an area in which we should refrain from saying "all Strobers are like this". But most Strobers probably would like to found a Wandering State, so we say "most" or "many".

>>13713454
Well then, keep at it. I'm liking where this idea is going. As for me, I have some ideas for some details on the Holy City, garnered from some other writefaggotry done on the setting.

>>13713479
Okay, made these changes on the wiki. Plus some general wording cleanup. Ellipses are, in general, bad.

>>13713454
A Wandering State is most likely founded by enterprenours from a Shardstream City. You have limited time and you're there to exploit the shit out of whatever resources are available.

So they're a cross between Italian merchant cities, shanty towns in the American West, colonies for Shardstream Cities and the odd lucky guy who wandered in from the wastes. Likely their population is mixed, with Strobers retained as cheap workforce (explotation, class rage go!), and the merchant elite maintains their power by retaining the secret of the prediction, so they can hang the promise "we'll live you to burn!/freeze!" over the head of the masses unless they obey.

Granted a Strober tribe could luck out and find a good spot, but how would they raise the necessary capital to exploit it?

Especially since Wandering States could be founded in very violent areas - say with "hot, hot, HOT!" shards that even the Strobers normally avoid.

>>13713454
The original idea was presented long before their Shard wore out (which is a concept that should be left ambiguous, in case the DM wants to mess with it). I tend to disagree with advancing the timeline that far beyond the original idea.

Either way, maps of Strober culture should take into account proximities to "Openings" into the caverns of the Subfolk. If your tribe's Patron Shard passes too close to one of the Openings, you have to make the choice: preserve your Tribe's constancy to its Shard and risk losing all or part of your Tribe to the Subfolk raiding parties, or shift to a Brother Shard, taking a new Sun Path, hoping that the Brother is as providential as your beloved Patron?

And then there's the religious aspect! Your Patron Shard has guided your Tribe for three generations! Should you abandon it now that it asks for a leap of faith? Or perhaps your Tribe is fickle, taking whatever Shard shines on it at the moment and never trusting to the future? There is security in following one Shard, of course, but with a powerful astrologer, your Tribe can follow the strongest Shard.

Of course, if you change Shard Paths, you may cross paths with another Tribe. Some are alright with companions in the Twilight, but many will slaughter you for stealing their Light...

>>13713530
>A Wandering State is most likely founded by enterprenours from a Shardstream City. You have limited time and you're there to exploit the shit out of whatever resources are available.
In that case, it wouldn't be a continuous thing. They would go, exploit, and then go back home when the shard left. The ones likely to really wander are not the ones with a stable city to go back to. The ones that wander are the ones that are started up by lucky Strobers or, possibly, enterprising twilightmen. They of course start up a good way away from cities, since otherwise that area would be taken by the baskers you describe.

Strobers don't need capital, they have manpower. And they exert that. They then have resources, which can be converted to capital. It's not much, but it's better than life in the dark, and it's not worth it for anyone to take what they've got.

>>13713491
Again ripped from some writefaggotry. May provide a hook or two.

House of Wass
This long-standing House is a group of Astronomers who have integrated their charting skilled with political savvy, able to influence the highest levels of the Holy City’s government. They stridently defend the right of the Astronomers' voice in the government, also advocating all Citizens' right to pursue knowledge of Astronomy. Many famous Astronomers of the Holy City hail from this House, leaving a storied heritage of experts of both Astronomy and policy.

House of Ulan
This relatively new House is a group of Astronomers who aim to use their skills for the direct benefit of the people, whether it’s in the aid of Alchemists’ research or determining the best trade routes for neighboring Strobes. The House's endeavors leave them well-off financially, encroaching into the political arena with their increasing wealth. While the lofty words of a Wass win attention, an Ulan's money is starting to win loyalty in its stead.

>>13713530
Man, this is awesome. We can have the Wild West, huge cities, and dark, barbarous wilderlands, all right next to each other.

>>13713612
>Government
um.
What government do they have?
As far as I can tell we've not talked about that at all, but "Holy" implies religion is involved.

>>13713629
I would see the art/science of Astronomy, so vital to the survival of the City that it becomes elevated to a religious level. And there's still some hammering out of the governmental structure to do (High Astronomer? A Monarch? A Clergy?)

>>13713604
Oh, yeah... the *could* go back. But right now, they're *lords*, *nobles*, with none of the pesky sages, rival families, or royalty (whatever the Shardstream city has for powerful) breathing down their neck.

Some are willing to go back to just being "merchants", others go back and try to use their wealth to climb higher...

...however some decide that they didn't get *enough*. (Greed, ambition, eternal vices of humanity!) So instead they hire astrologers and start looking for *another* spot.... and thus the cycle starts.

>>13713629
Well... I guess the Church of the Phoenix would be on top, maybe? I dunno. I haven't really gotten a feel of organized religion from any of this, just more general sorts of beliefs. But I guess if it's intended to be a D&D setting, there needs to be a possibility for clericism.

I imagine there should be a Council of House Leaders which holds quite a bit of power.

>>13713604
You used the term twilightmen, which leads me to think that there ought to be different terms for different groups depending on where you're from.

Strobers would call themselves "Twilightmen" as it's poetic and noble sounding. They would call the people of the Holy City "Blighters," a resentful term combining their constant presence in the Light with their pretentious outlook...or "Tanners," because where the hell else are you going to get a tan?

"Strobers" or "Twinklies" could be pejorative terms the Holy City's citizens might have for the people out in the Twilight. They would of course call themselves something noble, like "the Suntouched" or "Men of the Noonday."

>>13713643
I reckon that Terec can be ruled by a High Alchemist. That reinforces there themes (and provides justification for them), and we can also elaborate on them being a meritocratic dictatorship. That means we don't want to do the same with Holy City. Shardwatch seems to have been religious, so making Holy City also religious seems a bit wrong. I don't know about Monarchy, I'd rather not have two much single-ruler governments. If we like the idea of high-bloods, perhaps each House (or better yet, only some of them) is actually a Royal House, and the city is ruled by a Council of Kings.

>>13713681
"twilightment" refers to people in the twilight zone. Farmers, mostly.

"tanners" is a term already in use, as is "baskers".

"strobers" is already a term used for "strobers" and, as the general term, shouldn't be pejorative. If we absolutely need a pejorative, we can refrain from reinventing the wheel, and just call them barbarians.

>>13713749
I like the council idea. Make it the leaders of the Houses and work on a one man, one vote system. Also, more Houses.

House of Gargonel
The oldest House of the lot is also the one with the most exclusive membership. Although the House no longer rules over the entirety of the Holy City as it did upon its founding, its members' devotion to the sanctity of the Phoenix as well as their gratitude for the sparing of the Citizens' lives remains today. Now, the House presides over those who give thanks to the Phoenix for their survival and eventual salvation from these dark times.

House of Arzot
This House has its roots in the long history of the Holy City, the only one of its kind after the Awakening. More appropriately, its roots are in the preservation of said history. Despite their little voice in the government and perennial lack of funds, great respect is given to their care of the ancient Shard Charts which many up and coming Astronomers look to learn from, as well as well-established Astronomers look to gain new insight from.

>>13713749
What about a two-tier government, that is you have a council of astrologers and a council of houses. The houses nominally rule, but the astrologers have great powers as they can decree some days unfit for "war", "work"... etc, so they have a lot of unofficial power.

The two councils are highly dependent on each other for legitimization or tangible money, yet are at each other's throats.

>>13713749
I like the royalty. Then lesser houses can be led by earls and whatnot.

I also like the Terec government you propose.

Your ideas are good, sir.

>>13713835
I don't care for it. There's liable to be enough infighting just with the Houses.

>>13713815
One Man One Vote amongst the leaders of Royal Houses? Sounds good to me.

>>13713857
Shall I start detailing the governmental system in the wiki then? Or do we need some more work on it?

>>13713901
At first, the Holy City was indeed just that - a city ruled by a theocracy. As it was the first bastion of civilization after the Awakening, the survivors who flocked to the City were thankful for the mercy the Phoenix afforded them.

As time wore on though, more and more peoples were interacting with the Holy City, which soon became a trade hub due to its perceived permanence in a world where the Light was fleeting, at best. Strobes constantly came to trade their wares, integrating with the populace to a degree and bringing their beliefs with them. In due time, the theocracy became inappropriate for such a mixed Citizenry.

The theocracy stepped down and Houses of renowned Astronomers stepped up, forming the Council of the Phoenix. The leaders from each House attend regular meetings to vote on issues. Each leader issues only one vote for each. In the case of a tie, the issue is brought before the Citizenry for an up-or-down vote. Despite the expected infighting amongst the Houses, the system works a lot more smoothly than the occasional cynic would think.

Tadah!

>>13713983
>The theocracy stepped down
>people in power willingly stepped down
No.
This is not a thing that happens.

>>13714002
True enough, but I'm thinking it's one of those stifle-or-proser moments, once different folks started coming in. By all means, rewrite that part if it works better.

In any case, I'm getting tired. I might lurk around a bit more, but I think I'm all outta creative juice tonight. Thanks for the muse, guys!

When the Phoenix hatched, the world was plunged into disarray. But the old kings still had power, and when news spread of a place where a fraction of the sun shown eternally, the Kings took their armies and their households and set out. The journey was long and hard, and they arrived in much diminished numbers. Gargonel arrived first, and he claimed the area. But others arrived, with their armies, and wanted a piece of the land. No king could hold against the other, so the warred very little before reaching a solution. They would form a Council of Kings, and would rule as a group. This plan was formed by King Arzot, for the royal houses had undergone much strife and death, and he was the only living king who yet had an heir, and thus he hoped that his son should rule all without resorting to conquest.
However the other kings appointed their greatest servants as their heirs. And indeed, those people appointed their own greatest servants as their heirs, even over their own children. And so it came to pass that the Holy City is ruled by a Council of Kings, and none of the Houses save the House of Arzot have hereditary inheritance.

>>13714058
That's... I like that.

>>13714058
And before I entirely call it a night, consider it yoinked and put as the government instead. I like it a lot!

>>13714091
>yoinked
That's sort of the poin.

The thread lives, like a thousand little suns in the sky.

>Ctrl + F "Mind Flayers broke the sun"
>Nothing
>It even mentions the world going dark and Mind Flayes appearing in their history/future
Come on you guys