its been done

I think it has potential.

First, you must explain what's at the top and bottom of the cliff, or at least why those areas can't be accessed.

I remember something like this being posted before. Not quite the same though. Same "big pit of doom" mentality though, although in that guy's setting, the mist creeps up, killing everything.

Try looking through 1d4 or suptg.

>>15187304
It has been done at least two other times that I can recall. One version had a poisonous miasma the constantly kept the inhabitants of the cliff moving ever upward.

in one of the Animorphs books they had this for the home planet of one of the species, the ones covered in blades.

They had all the blades for climbing purposes.

>>15187315

Well, just make it reaaaaaally high. Not inaccessible, assuming you describe Mount Everest as "accessible". Bitter cold, no air, wind gusts of a bajillion mph.

But the down part? I donno. Poison heavier than air mist miles thick?

Maybe the wall is a massive disc with the sun in the center causing those to "fall" toward it to die.

The ring where people live is the habitable region.

or MAGIC.

Oh.

And here i was thinking that it was an original idea, how silly.

So much for dreams of hanging gardens and the secret nightmare kingdoms of the Crawlers deep in the sunless warrens. Even the migratory birds that fly off into the void and induce heretical speculation about another vertical world beyond the sun and moon now seems silly.

I apologies for wasting your time.

>>15187416
No you dumb nigger don't sulk, keep fucking going. It's a good idea.

I like the idea, I'll throw some ideas out.

The atmosphere could be too thin near the top of the cliff to climb up. Maybe some explorer looks for an easier route, or some "empire" would try to design a structure that allowed a more leisurely ascent. Results should vary.

Obviously that wouldn't work well with access to oxygen tanks and such, but it would work nicely in a pre-industrial era setting.

The bottom of the cliff should be EXTREME CLIMBING, ROCK SPIKES, COLLAPSING GRIPS AND FOOTHOLDS, and some crazy predators that can't climb up the cliff very high.

Throw in some plain weird shit for good measure, like weird gravity that only affects certain things (like water, sideways lakes) in some places to really make the world strange.

>>15187335
Fall, the bottomless pit that contains entire civilizations, falling endlessly forever.

http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/9146018/

>But the down part? I donno. Poison heavier than air mist miles thick?
Nothing. Just nothing. The wall never ends, you could climb down your whole life, for all eternity and never reach the bottom. This does wonders for most climbers' sanities and climbing downwards without a goal in mind is somewhat less than encouraged.

The same may go for the top of the wall as well. You can keep going up and all it does is get colder and the air gets thinner. By the time you die you still can't see the top.

>>15187412
>>15187525
I'm not the OP but here is what I imagine. The wall is several light years tall, maybe infinite, and humans inhabit a couple of thousand miles worth of wall near the middle. It's so tall that it would take explorers thousands of generations to climb all the way up or down. there may be a top or a bottom to the wall, but nobody has the resources to get to there. This is a fantasy setting and doesnt have to make sense.

>>15187525

Well if the air gets thinner and colder going up, whos to say it doesnt just keep getting thicker and hotter going down?

Air being less dense than water, but with enough distance, same principal

>>15187438
Ok.

The Wall seems to go up forever and ever and ever and descends further than a man can see.

Some heretics claim that it is not a Wall at all but a Cylinder that the moon and sun orbit and that the could be other Cylinders out there.

Many have even tried to dig through the Wall to find the other side and by the Maker don't we wish they hadn't. Things dwelt in the hollow rotten cavities of the World Wall, the Crawlers. Cursed by the sun they are driven back into the wall only to emerge each night and abduct new victims.

Some of the more suicidal heretics have constructed great false wings of silk and bamboo and vines to glide and fly with the migratory birds to far off worlds. if it worked they must like it there because none of them have ever come back.

crops tend to be grown on the Great Ledges. As food is the basis of all civilizations these are the Hearts of the Nations. some can be a few miles square, jutting out and scooped into the rock.

Much war has been fought over them and the dead tend to get buried upon them. New ones are discovered on occasion by Crag Hoppers and always there is a war to lay claim to it.

No matter where you go there is always something above you, as the constant stream of falling thins and occasionally unlucky people attest. Even the Upper Kingdoms, once thought to be the pinnacle of settlement occasionally find a bit of pottery or an old coin dropping down onto them from the Unknowable Heights.

Pushing someone off the Over the Edge is considered one of the worst forms of murder as it probably condemns someone to a death by dehydration.

>>15187649

I figure they'd toss the dead off the side, since reality is like, mega rare, and wouldn't be wasted on graveyards. Maybe thats just the DF in me.

>>15187458

OP of The Fall here. I'm kinda chuffed that /tg/ still remembers it.

Saying that, The Wall sounds sufficiently different that its worth the time, although you might be able to find useful inspiration if you skim through the old thread.

One thing to think about is objects falling from above. There's really no way of predicting when or where, and it could ruin entire communities with ease- rocks falling at terminal velocity could easily kill, and boulders could ruin settlements. Or would winds etc naturally drag objects away from the wall, making the threat more rare?

How would you explain gravity?

Awesome idea though

>>15187700
And condemn our honored ancestors to eternal fall through the Endless Depths? Remove yourself from our presence immediately, you are beyond heretic and blasphemer; a villain more beast than man.

Perhaps people live within the Wall, but not so much as to disturb the horrors lurking within, the area of the ledges are too valuable to waste on even the greatest king's home.

>>15187705
Rare but its not unheard of for your neighbors house to be replaced by a big rock over night.

>>15187700

The bodies add nutrition to the soil and allow a persons soul to rejoin the Wall. Heretics, blasphemers and traitors are thrown over the Edge. Don't want those fuckers on the wheel of reincarnation, one lifetime in their company was bad enough.

This is going to vary between cultures and religions. Many may which to be free from the walls prison of the soul.

>>15187743
I am not the OP but I dont really know why you would need to explain gravity more than "phsyics works differently there." If you had to you could always go with "the wall is constantly accelerating at 1G in a direction parallel to the plain of the wall."

>>15187743
Gravity is trying to kill you.

Watch the Movie Time Machine.
There is a pretty cool cliff village in that movie.

>>15187412 But the down part?

This.

The "wall" just ends, and no expedition has ever returned from the underside, where no light ever reaches.

Oh I love this idea btw OP.

using some ideas from spell jammer here
planet is in a crystal sphere and runs pretty much all the way down the middle save for a path that the sun has melted for itself near the edge (which no one uses because the sun will melt the everloving shit out of you), making it thicker than most planets and about as large as a good sized solar system. the wall could technically be dug through but the creatures on the other side are vastly alien to the creatures on this one, could be evil but are most likely as scared of us as we are of them. the top and bottom do exist but the people of the wall can see them as easily as we see stuff near pluto, the atmosphere just blocks it out.

>>15187743
Same as you would on Discworld.

Shit goes downwards. Everyone knows that.

>>15187821
and now the sun itself

Creatures and objects touching the sun are dealt 16,666d6 fire damage per round. The sun is of a liquid consistency, and creatures that can survive the temperatures (few exist) can swim in it. Being completely immersed in the sun's fire deals 166,666d6 fire damage per round. Creatures which travel to the absolute center of the sun are dealt 1,666,666d6 fire damage per round.

Fire Immune creatures are not immune to the fire of the sun. Creatures possessing Fire Immunity instead gain Fire Resistance 50 (which stacks with any other source of Fire Resistance). Creatures possessing the Fire subtype gain an additional Fire Resistance 50 (stacking with the resistance gained by fire immunity, above), and creatures made primarily out of fire (such as fire elementals) gain an additional Fire Resistance 50.

Creatures which normally do not die even when dealt sufficient damage, such as the Frenzied Berzerker, die anyway if dealt more than twice their hitpoints in fire damage from the sun.

Passing closely to the sun can also be hazardous to one's health. An intense aura of heat extends around the sun, dealing half the damage of touching the surface every mile away from the sun you get, until it deals no fire damage at a distance of 15 miles away. The sun also emits radiation. Anything within 15 miles suffers 1 point of radiation poisoning per round, which deals strength, dexterity, and constitution damage. Each mile closer to the sun deals an additional point of radiation damage per round, dealing 15 at the surface of the sun, and then 30 at the core.

This has been done before, I think even several times. Just archive search it.

Idea is interesting, I must admit

But lets get few things straight
>gravity is always pulling towards center of masses, meaning that there has to be something down there
>In order to be life, there needs to be water, so water needs to recycle by evaporation

>>15187815
But that could just be a BIG overhand and scoop. It's impossible to tell.

There is almost certainly more Wall bellow that sideways fissure.

And 'It That Hungers' is an awesome name.

>>15187879
Gravity pulls towards the center of mass in our universe, but we are designing a fantasy setting here. see the gravity rules for Spelljammer for an example of Fantasy Gravity.

>>15187879
>gravity always works however the creator diety says it works, meaning there could be absolute nothingness down there
>In order to be life, there needs to be water, so there needs to be a gate to the elemental plane of water
fix'd

>>15187879
Gravity in this universe is always pulling down. Down is defined as that direction that Old Uncle Norburt went when he started sleep walking.

Water falls in waterfalls from the Above. And rain.

>>15187879

This is fantasy, we can make up whatever physics we damn well want.

>>15187879
>>15187914
>>15187918
Gravity pulling downward could be a side-effect from a (magical) black hole that is the "center".

>>15187971
sphere of annihilation that absorbs the atmosphere around it. while new atmosphere and water is added through gates to the elemental planes the vaccuum created by the sphere pulls them in, making gravity a push down rather than a pull down

>>15187971
And if you wenture to the underside, you find some form of a thurster that keeps humming.
The Wall is indeed a cylinder and not just that. They are the Arks of an ancestral race that tried (or tries?) to escape from The Hole below.

Consider reading: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_(novel) for fluff/narrative ideas. Roberts uses a convoluted excuse to justify his world setting being vertical; one which I can't remember thanks to his book Polystom warping my mind*; but his world building is usually pretty good.

*TL;DR:
>1930's britain
>Air between the planets
>Part one; protag's uncle gets killed by some rebel butlers who hijacked a space whale to kill him after he buttsexed another butler behind angry butler's back
>Part two: Protag falls in love with, questionably consensually sexes, and then accidentally kills a girl with the burgers
>he mad
>Part three: grieving Protag pressgangs his butlers into forming a rag tag military unit and goes to revenge himself on the raging battlefield that's The Planet of Rebel Butlers
>Protag's unit either turncoats or gets shot to shit on a World War One Style (in too many ways) military conflict
>protag joins the other side, discovers the butlers are protecting a giant computer (?) and then there's a long bit of exposition which implies the giant computer holds the key to whether or not the reality of the Protag is a simulation within the fictional computer
>Protag decides to blow up the computer as he believes it holds the key to whether or not the girl with the burgers loved him or was a malfunctioning 'punch card coded progrom'
>My mind is full of fuck to the extent that I forget the plot of the previous book I'd read by the same author, beyond that it's about "walls"

Giant Spiders are farmed for their rope.

Some people, the Sifters, construct great nets out from the Wall to catch what falls. Occasionally a Faller is caught. Some of those can be quite strange and some of them are not human or crawler. Some of them are Beautiful and some of them Hideous but all of them are strange and cause dilemma about what you should do with them.

Many Hanging Villages have families with exotic features as a testament to the integration of these Fallers into Hanger Society.

>Does this have potential or should I just scrap it now?
Yes, but human civilisation would either tunnel into the caves or develop a way to scale sheer cliffs.
Furthermore, flying carnivores WON'T be at the top of the food chain, mostly BECAUSE everything burrows. They'd still kick arse vs. anything that spends time on the cliffs, but a majority of your shit will be cave-dwelling most of the time.
Crawling creatures are a good candidate for top of the food chain - I can see hunting spiders being your region's apex, I can see humans or dwarves or drow being the region's apex. I also see Black Bears being a good candidate for apex.

Your cliff likely won't have a good deal of dirt. Plenty of water and sunlight, not much dirt. So you're looking at Vines or Weeds or Cacti or shit that grows without much soil. You'll get the occasional Tree-at-a-45-degree-angle.
That's assuming anything you drop down the cliff face is gone forever.

If the cliff-face wraps around, such that anything falling off the bottom ends up at the top, then your entire cliff is going to be muddy, and full of grass and flowers. No trees because of mudslides. Farming in caves very prevalent, but anything that needs a lot of sunlight won't be eaten by people, because caves tend to block that. IIRC that's only Grapes that are really blocked by that.
In this case, a climber won't be your apex predator 'cause you can't climb mud. Your apex is going to be a burrower. Giant worm, Giant mole.

What if the wall is just the equator of a planet, where gravity always pulls down, not into the center of the world.

Climb down and the slope gets more and more horizontal, until you'd be hanging from the underside of the world.

Of course, climb up and you'd get flatter and flatter land, which probably isn't what you want. Maybe there's just too much water flowing out of the top pole to find any dry land (magic water-hole or something endlessly disgorging water, methinks. Meanwhile the bottom pole is incredibly arid, since water just falls off the equator into the void, and never reaches it.

Therefore, the most habitable areas are around the equator: the aforesaid Walls. There might also be some spread upwards onto the Slopes, but you could just say that area is too waterlogged to live on.

Here's how I see it.

The cliffside area that people can live in may look small, but it is tall. Ridiculously tall. You could climb your whole life and your great-grandchildren wouldn't make it to the top. Because of this great distance, there is massive cultural diversity and ridiculously variable technology levels. Travelers and merchants make great fortunes selling the more advanced or magical items to people in places that are not as progressed. Digging too far into the caves is a mistake, as that is where many horrible creatures lurk. If you travel too close to the bottom (not going to happen) then massive sea monsters will rip you from your cliff and pull you into the murky depths. Expanding outward is halted by the predatory birds and other flying creatures. Etc.

Since the most ancient times people have told tales about a culture of great explorer wizards. Sheathed in arcane protective magics and extensively trained in cartography and mountaineering the wizards split their civilization in two and set off on a journey of exploration through both the Unknowable Heights and Endless Depths.

Though their departure is said to have occurred in times near immemorial and the wizards having passed from legend into myth; every so often explorers will happen upon one of the wizards caches, small catacombs mined into the side of the Wall bearing what remains of their dead as well as expertly stored and preserved maps and findings of the highest caliber.

None have met, seen, or contacted these wizards since before even time remembers, but there are few who would voice opposition to the belief that they are still out there. An entire civilization,exploring, recording, and climbing ever further away along the wall.

We don't know what they are, and we aren't likely to truthfully find out. But one in a night when the wind is fierce and the creak rope and rigging is loud you will hear them.

And then you hear the scream. And if you are lucky you won't recognize who it is. But they will scream.

Don't, little child, don't raise your head from you covers, don't look out your window.

A flap of wings and it will be gone and so will your friends who screamed so loud.

Nothing but a house torn open and a family gone forever, torn from the Wall.

But on those stormy night just you keep quiet and hope you never have need to scream.

>>15188218
Can I steal this idea?

If you have to have a quasi-scientific explanation, why not make the planet a gas giant with a solid (diamond?) core? The Wall might be an oddity, a remnant of some cosmic collision, jutting out from the core through the atmosphere. Above, you'd have the air to thin to breathe, stopping climbers-up. Below, the atmosphere gets too thick, the pressure killing anyone who gets there. The setting is just the habitable area.

>>15188294
Of course, this is a brainstorming thread, that's what it's for.

ON ONE CONDITION

Have fun with it.

>First, you must explain what's at the top and bottom of the cliff, or at least why those areas can't be accessed.
The cliff doesn't have a top or a bottom. There's cliff all the way up, and cliff all the way down. If you go to the left or right, there's cliff there too.

>How would you explain gravity?
It makes things go down.

>How would you explain water?
It falls down from higher up.

1. Open Sky, You can find Birds and Other flyers in this area. Also giant mats of floating algea like plants can be see drifting through the blue void. Often used as nests for fliers. Ledges that reach out to this area are the most precious things in this world, as the hold the only soil in the world and the sunlight for crops to grow.

2. This is the safe zone for humans to dig into and make their homes with in The Wall. Not much Mineral Value, just plain rock.

3. This area holds a great amount of precious metals and gems, and other useful minerals.
Many mining shafts and a few natural caves are found in this area. Some lesser Crawlers and other creatures live in this zone.

4. Filled with natural caves, it is a very dangerous place to venture, but many rare metals can be found in this zone, such as mithril and adamantium, as well as elemental gems. Crawlers and many other strange creatures make this their home.

5. Unkown. None have ever returned alive from this zone. It appears to be where the Crawlers spawn from.

6. The Uncharted Heights. The air is very thin up here. It is the source of The Walls entire water supply (from rainfall and waterfalls)

7 The Unfathomable Depths. The surface of The Wall gets more broken and twisted the deeper one goes. The air is very heavy and stale here, and is know to cause extreme sickness from over exposure. No life can be found in this desolace.

>>15188289
Suddenly, party of orphans levelling up and searching for nest of enormous flying predators. Epic level plot hook.

Why have only one wall? Why not have many walls? Some that converge, others that just sit parallel, maybe just close enough to bridge to.

A chaotic maze of walls without a bottom or a top.. Just walls.

I have an idea as to why the lower reaches are uninhabited: Nitrogen narcosis. When you get low enough (in air, this would be ~7 km or so), the partial pressure of nitrogen becomes so high in the bloodstream that it mimics the effects of drunkenness. People with very high alcohol tolerance could probably live in the lower reaches, but not much further than ~10 km.

Question: where are these people getting their food? It's not like there are big fields of grain, and people each need about 250 kg per year to survive. Considering that most communities need to be at least ~300 strong, that means there needs to be around 75 tons of food per year for a small community. How, exactly, can a wall produce so much?

heres my solution to the gravity problem. Anyone who actually gets to the dense ball is instantly squashed due to the immense pressure and gravity.

Idea: These "Crawlers" resemble terrestrial deep sea creatures.

Imagine an angler fish the size of an elephant, with massive clawed forearms that can dig through granite, its spiked maw can swallow an entire party of adventures whole, and its angler is enchanted with a spell that makes you see the thing you desire most.

>>15188440

Mosses, mushrooms, funguses, moulds. Farmed like some ants do.

>>15188529

goblin shark

>>15188440
The wind moves the air around sufficiently enough to prevent problems with nitrogen.

Some of the ledges are quite big and there are enough of them. Also vines with fruit on them clinging to the walls. And spiders and birds and other climbing animals.

But not to eat the flesh of the Crawlers and the Twisted Ones. That shit rots your brain. They say it also turns you into them, but none of us believe in such fairy stories.

>>15188566
Goblin Shark Men. The only know sapient species of Crawlers. They often make raids into surface dwellers mines to steal equipment and people for purposes unknown.

>>15188648
They are the corruption of the blasphemers who dug into the Wall in the dreams of finding another side to it.

They take the healthy so that they do not have to dig anymore and they take the children and the sick and the old because there is no food in those dark places.

If you are a fair and pretty maiden pray you are not taken alive. Better to throw yourself off the edge than be taken.

>>15188648

On one of the rare occasions the Goblin Shark tribe sentient crawlers find a tunnel to a Shelf-Village they drive crawlers down the tunnel and rampage through the settlement. Most villagers are killed but some very unlucky ones are dragged screaming into the tunnels never to be seen again.

There is some who say there are things even the Goblin Shark Men fear. Something that even they will flee from, some n-nameable Horror from the Deepest Layer. They call it That Which Hungers, and none have seen it and lived to tell the tale.

>>15188798
If no one has seen it then how do you know it exists? This is the age of science and reason, not of baseless fantasies!

THE WALL IS ALL.

Mountain goats variants take the place of all other terrestrial domesticated animals.

Some are bred for meat, others for milk, some for their wool, and some are even used as mount to cross the cliff sides.

>>15188849
I prefer GIANT SPIDER MOUNTS.

>>15188834
Perhaps those who escaped the Goblin Shark Men heard from them.

>>15188872
My good sir, would you really take the tales of inbred savages over the careful scientific studies of our leading minds?

>>15188863
>>15188849

Giant Spiders AND Mountain Goats are the main domesticated animals.

Also a few crazy wizards have even made SPIDER GOATS!

>>15188834
Or this is D&D in which case it IS the age of baseless fantasies.

>>15188440

In fact, some of the Low Tribes (Lower down on the wall, possibly also lower in status) have rites of passage that involve spending periods in the nitrogen. These could be rites of passage into adulthood or shaman/mystic spirit seeking type things.

Been there, done that.


Well, OK. It sounds like a good idea. Maybe have the PCs "poof" over into this brave new world from a problematic portal, etc. Then have them look for a way out & find it if/when the world becomes boring or you run it thru to a logical conclusion.

I says go for it

>>15188938

Or possibly in order to achieve some kind of mystical high, the tribe's mystic would live below the threshold to stay in a constant state of delirium that the tribe saw as divine.

>>15188877
Whites eye are the only know herbivirous Crawlers. They spend their lives wondering around the endless caves searching for fungus and slime molds to consume.

They live in small family units, doing their best to advoid the more dangerous Crawlers.

When encountered by an adventurer, they meerly give him a very sorrowful look with their giant pearl like eyes.

Some view them as a death omen.

Others find them strangely cute.

At some point, somewhere, along the wall, this WILL happen.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2cNbii3mbhM
You know it to be true.

>>15189053
Goblin Shark Men often take them as slaves for use in small, remedial tasks.

They also beat them as a form of entertainment.

>>15189053
There is a belief that if two lovers keep one pearl from each eye, they will be reunited even in death.

Someone archive this, as a collaborative world effort this is pure gold

>>15187412
Relates to your Everest analogy.
the top of the Wall, which is legendary in the book, is the highest point in the area, although, being part of a mountain, is not literally like a wall, but is more like a wall in the sense the Himalayas are a wall, but moreso for various reasons related to the local geology.

You have vast expanses of territory that are relatively flat, but then, you also have simply huge areas where you have to make ascents that are probably as bad as climbing entire mountains on earth.

Getting from the edge of the mountain range that is the Wall, to the top, takes years. More, if you don't want to deal with climbing as much as possible.

It's not in the favor of the protagonists that they are at best, in the Iron Age.

Just some scribbles.
Don't blame me. It's rather late here.

Vertical bump

Bottom of the wall, WAY WAY down, could be home to a whole civilization, or a lush rainforest. It's so far down many explorers have spent decades descending, and finding no evidence of a bottom, so the people believe there is no bottom. To reinforce this, the main religion(s) all incorporate some reason to not go down. One could say it's the afterlife, and mortals cannot get to it, others could say it's home to demons, or another could just say that the god(s) made there to be nothing but The Wall, and saying otherwise is DAH HARASAY!!!

I'll admit to not knowing a lot about Dark Sun, but couldn't you base it there, or your own post-apocalyptic world for that matter? Have the mountain cliff placed on a continent uninhabitable due to the heat. All races have climbed the continents famous mountain chain. They risk the heat if they descend, they risk freezing and low air pressure as they ascend.

As a storyline, you could have the first flying machines being invented (hot air balloons, magic, etc.), and civilizations being rediscovered.

How about, the cliff world is a normal world, but one half of the world is smaller, so that the cliff is the dividing shelf between the larger half and the smaller half. In the smaller half, below a thick cloudline, is an "underworld" where everything is a waste, the undead roam, demons, etc. The larger half is a world of dead civilizations, full of powerful relics, artifacts, tech, etc. the inhabitants live on the cliff divide of the world, and rumors of the dead climbing the wall and attacking lower villages,etc, look for magic relic blah blah in upper world, stop undead, cleanse lower world

>>15189181
I have no fucking idea what you're trying to say.

Is all this information being compiled somewhere?

>>15189631
You could always archive the thread on suptg.

>>15188877
>white eye
>the old White Eyes story
>cannibals that come out at night
Oh dear, this seems like a rather good creature to use.

So we got the inside worked out pretty well, but what is outside?
Here are some ideas:

Giant whale like creatures filled with gas sacks that have a symbiotic relationship with algea on their backs to produce food.

Giant Wasps that make nests on the cliff face and carry whatever protein they can bring back to the hive.

Crab like creatures that graze off moss and vines that grow on the cliffs.

Flying fish that are always floating in the waterfalls they need to breath. They store water in a special sack before they venture off to find insects to eat and must return before their water supply runs out.

>>15192402
>Giant Wasps that make nests on the cliff face and carry whatever protein they can bring back to the hive.
>and carry whatever protein they can bring back to the hive
>whatever protein
inb4 wasp blowjob

>>15192515
It's actually the spiders that do blowjobs.
The wasps sting the spiders and make them snowball.

one secluded tribe/civilization live in burrows with holes for doors shaped perfectly to fit their bodies.

>>15193849
Forgot my pic.

>>15192515
What cha thinking about /tg/?

>>15187390
>in one of the Animorphs books they had this for the home planet of one of the species, the ones covered in blades.

>They had all the blades for climbing purposes.

Greentext so none of you will click on the link and be shuffled off back to the top of the thread:

Hork-Bajir did not in fact evolve naturally: they were genetically engineered by the original dominant race on their planet called the Arn. After an asteroid struck the planet several millennia ago, most of the planet was left uninhabitable apart from deep valleys that were ripped open by the impact. The Arn, who were adept at genetic engineering, created enormous trees with which the atmosphere could be maintained in the valleys. Not willing to become a race of tree-herders, they created the Hork-Bajir as being naturally suited to tree-herding. So that the Hork-Bajir remained unaware of their existence, the Arn also created a layer of blue gas halfway down the valleys: the Hork-Bajir lived above, the Arn lived below, and several types of genetically engineered monsters lived within the blue mist to scare away any Hork-Bajir.

Pretty close.

>>15187304
Woah... let's mix this with the idea that the Wall itself is a kind of border. So you'd have this huge-ass, megastructure-level wall that'll make Great Wall of China look like a speedbump. On the top you have all these defensive mechanisms and patrols which have lived there the entire time, self-sufficient, only remembering that they have to guard the Wall, forgetting which side is their nation. If they look down, all they'll see is clouds and fog.
Further down, however, you'll have all these hanging villages, probably some kind of bug infestation somewhere along the wall, etc. etc. and they can't see the ground. Only sometimes there are nearby mountaintops/hills/gigantic trees/floating island.
But no one has ever seen the real ground.

Makes for an intriguing setting, that.

>>15187304

Reminds me of that indie game Hammerfall... also called Hammerfight... also called Age of Hammer Wars. Anyway, great game.

>>15193878

>>15193878
I think I just found the leader of my race of bee-people.

Pardon my MS paint, but here is how it could work in a sci-fi setting

I was making a flat earth world similar to this. Go too far in any direction and the atmosphere thins out in to space.

I'd put a lot of reasonably large ledges on the wall at intervals. The largest kingdoms inhabit them (mostly farmland). Everywhere else just builds on the side of the wall or on smaller ledges.

I like the idea of going down a ways in a dungeon and eventually ending up in the cieling of another ledge.

>>15188397

This sounds fun.

Imagine it: not just one wall, but several walls, like that of a canyon. Minus a bottom. They also go forever.

In some places, there isn't another wall visible.

In other places, you can see multiple walls - a vast space with weird algae floaters, smaller rock formations that shoot out from the bottom, and the corners of walls that abruptly end. Again, not unlike a canyon.

In some places, where the walls are close enough, they build massive bridges spanning the two sides. Presumably, these areas tend to be of higher technological levels, especially if they made the massive bridge as opposed to just carving a space in the natural outcrop.

In places like the big expanse described above, you'd get "floater" communities. Think water world, but everything glides, is built on colossal algae mounds, or is a hot air balloon.

I'm having an exam in about an hour. This thread had better not die when I get back.

Have one insane civilization based on the idea of building a giant suspension bridge off of the wall. Everyone in their society for untold generations has been involved in The Great Work, something of similar importance to the Tower of Babel. Every great engineer and (if the setting permits) wizard is honored to be involved in the continued construction of the giant bridge.

The civilization itself exists at the very base of the bridge, while the structure extends for miles horizontally into the air. Hundreds of thousands of ropes, chains, cords and rods make up the suspension for the bridge - all of them tethered to the wall above in various ways and forms. It is considered cultural tradition to make a contribution to the suspension at least once in your lifetime, maybe in some kind of coming of age ceremony.

>>15194189

That coming of age ceremony could be like a rite of passage - adding an additional supporting rope to the bridge.

Naturally, the further out your rope is along the bridge, the more it contributes. However, to do that, it means the anchor point needs to be higher up.

Thus, to claim more honor, people push themselves to climb higher and higher each year, so that their addition to the bridge surpasses all the others made that year.

Perfect place for the PC's - kids/teens on their coming of age ceremony, setting out to climb the wall.

I was thinking, and this could combine nicely with what they did in Skies of Arcadia. Only, instead of floating islands and flying ships, there's The Wall. At some point, there's the clouds. No one goes below the clouds, or at least comes back to tell the tale. Below the the clouds, do whatever. Crazy lightening storms, ancient civilization, and - obviously - the reason people starting going up the wall in the first place. Or maybe the reason, if it were some sort of threat from animals etc., has died out. And no one knows it is safe. Perhaps that's why the characters go beneath the clouds - the newest expedition to see if it's habitable.

On a side note, damn, now I want to run this setting.

>>15194370
did someone say Skies of Arcadia, because I heard some SKIES OF ARCADIA

>>15194456
Damn right you did, Anon. Damn right.

Time to dust off my old Dreamcast.

>>15194456

>>15194456
Oh shit, dawg. I actually have some houserules for simplifying airship battles and fighting giant monsters that makes it feel like SoA. Also, giant wall world sounds awesome. There should be an exploration theme to see what's on the other side - if there is one at all.

>>15194465

>>15194370
>>15194509
Time for sleep. Anons, don't let this thread die before morning, I want to see what else people come up with.

Guys, guys. How about this. Guys listen.

It was said earlier, but here's how this world came to be: It was created as a "flat pancake" kind of world, but then whoever created it fucked gravity up, so it ended up being a "vertical pancake."


Also, how does the sun work? are there ever "sunsets"? Or does the sun just
a) move in circles
b) Just hang in a stationary position

>>15194509
>>15194503
>>15194470
>>15194465
>>15194456

>>15188397

OK, I don't want to get all science-y, because fuck it, fanstasy yo, but if there are lots of walls like a bottomless canyon and shit, and the wall goes up forever, where the fuck does the light come from? I love this idea, but it occurs to me you would never see any sky. It would be like living in a cave if the wall stretches all the way to the vanishing point in both directions, wouldn't it?

The wall is simply the border of the universe.

I quite like the canyon idea. The empty space in between walls is like an ocean. The walls are like continents. "Sailors" are people with blimps/gliders/floating alage/flying machines.

And what if Wall itself was alive? Puny human kingdoms parasitize on the body of HUGE god-like being. Have to make rituals to keep him sleeping.

>>15194635
On the wall Bender Bending Rodruigez waits dreaming

Oceanic trench.

the cliffs of such trenchs can be incredibly high.

Andfull of life.


Anyway, is it a straight wall or morel ike an infinite height Fjord ?

This would be more credible.

The floating world concept (see chasseur de Dragons or Avatar movie) is quite similar... exept that "islands" have a bottom and a top, floating in something...

In this case it is the same but each "islands" have and "infinite height.

BTW, how do you deal with landslide due to burrowers ?

>>15194709
forgot picture.

>>15194189
Hm. Things would fall onto that bridge, and possibly set the work back by a hundred years.

Speaking of which, what about falling things? Assuming the wall actually is infinitely tall, wouldn't there be a constant stream of falling rocks, water and possibly animals?

>>15194756
More reasons to hate higher-dwellers. Who could be elves.

Has anyone considered a torus? Basically, everything eventually loops around.

>>15194804

>empty your chamberpot out the window
>orbiting feces forever
>entire cities do this
>permanent shitstorm
>plants evolve to grow in the diffuse floating night soil
>humans who fell off the wall form freefall civilization, consider the wall the death zone which will grind you to giblets if you touch it

>>15194826
>permanent shitstorm
holy shit, I lol'd. Would be a logical means to create floating islands that way.

If you didn't create an elaborate 'shitworld' setting as a kid, you were never a kid.

This thread is really going to shit.

>>15194804
Does the physics on that actually work out? IIRC a rotating torus gives you gravity on the inside, and not in the direction you'd need for a wall. See O'Neil cylinders.

>>15194781
Ooh. Could be a twist, where the higher-dwellers do a sacrifice once every year when things are dire. So the bridge-builders suddenly have their bridge damaged by someone who jumped from above. At first they think it was just an accident or a suicide, but after the third time they thought someone's targeting their bridge specifically. Especially since the gap between drops are consistent.
So now a party of adventurers are asked to climb up and give the high-dwellers a piece of their mind.

>>15194844

Not sure you could get it with conventional physics, but I still think the concept can have some interesting implications, as indicated by >>15194826

I like to leave the scientific explanation completely out of fantasy things like this. It hurts the helpless, superstitious atmosphere. Up is up, down is down, the clerics tell stories about what exactly that means, and nobody really knows empirically.

>>15194877
Actually, I think I've got it working with real physics, has to be a sci-fi scale superstructure though. Ms paint in a minute.

I think the gravity problem could be solved by making the wall a wall of a giant fissure in the surface of a geologically dead planet shattered by a collision. The problem with this setting is explaining why horizontal movement encounters insurmountable barriers

>>15187879

The problem with gravity could be solved by making "planet" look like two connected cones. Gravity would still pull towards center of masses, but that kind of planet could any be made by gods or some ancient advanced race.

hows this? it may have already been sugested idk.

>>15194011
>>15194947
>>15194930
>>15194912
Hey, This guy >>15194011 Had the physics working, although it looks like it would have to be a super huge planetary or stellar scale engineering.

>>15194961
two posts earlier
>>15194930

Personally I think it the most plausible explanation.

>>15194011
i really like this one. it is my personal favorite so far.

The world is a rotating cylinder, with the diameter being large enough to conceal this tidbit to the inhabitants. They live on the flat face of the cylinder, atmosphere is kept inside by a transparent wall beyond the face of the disk.

You can have water or w/e in the area b/t the wall and the face of the cylinder. Day/ night is simulated by a shade that doesn't rotate along with the cylinder.

I'm not sure about the size and rotation needed to get force strong enough to make venturing in the direction of gravity dangerous. And if you head up towards the axis of rotation gravity gets weaker, eventually non-existent at the axis.

I fail at noko.

>>15194974
ah well it has a diagram now i guess

>>15194992
this is pretty much the same as
>>15194011

>>15194635
But God is not sleepeing, he is imprisoned for an eternity. And his followers were cursed to be parasites on his body.
As god blood and sweat spawn some weird and scary shit (so digging is a big no-no), they have to make tools and weapons, mining metal from his cuffs and chains. Which are also bloodied.
Sometimes a God Tear falls from the sky, and clears a path to somewhere. People who touch these tears can have some awesome powers, while people who touch blood get crazy and shit.
One day chains will erode and break, and thats would be a End-of-Days-Apocalypse thing.
And thats how one sick setting got another sick setting-baby.

Someone got to the shattered planet explanation before I did :) Gravity would still pull inward, toward the center of mass. The verticality would be incidental, then - some shards obviously wouldn't be only vertical. I like this idea soooo much.

>>15195002
Not really, ones a ring world, the other is a cylinder orbiting a star. His works if you flip the structure around, as its the rotation of the ring that keeps things from floating away, not the gravity of the central star.

>>15195013
Yeah that was the Idea, spin for gravity and to keep the air in
Idea: Different ecosystems at different heights, story takes place in the narrow band with earth like atmosphere

Please stop talking about the rational explanation for the gravity. It doesn't really matter unless the plot revolves around it.

So why don't you start thinking about campaigns set into this world before you start thinking about possible solutions for this plausibility problem?

So far, I'm in pure love with the whole bridge civilization plot and adventurers being sent upwards to find out what the fuck is going on with shit falling on their monument. But, of course, it's probably really nothing. That's just a catalyst for the plot. What happens next? What sets off the quest and what profound conclusions, uh, conclude it? If any?

I think thinking about the actual story is the fastest way to flesh out the world because all the background detail and lore naturally grows around the *need* for that detail/lore to be there.

>>15195044
We are just proposing ways to adapt the setting to Sci-fi, if you are in a fantasy setting ''fuckken magic'' will do

>>15195044
Oh look "a wizard did it".
If air travel and weather exist in your setting, then the physics of it will be quite relevant.

>>15195051
>>15195061

You're gonna painstakingly work at this for days and then realize you can't make a story work in it.

It's a very difficult setting for stories. The story will be far more difficult than the lore. The lore just kind of writes itself, it's a fucking wallworld, how hard can it be? Even the most mundane shit is automatically interesting. Anyway, let's think of the bare-bones of the story first -- the kind of thing that you can fit into both a sci-fi and fantasy setting. Then we'll figure out how wind works and where the water is coming from and whatnot.

>>15195088
see:
>>15194856
It's pretty good idea.
And at the end they discover that this world is a torus.

>>15195088
Well if you want it to be generic fantasy life on wallworld, then I suppose the story is hard bit.

So how are our inhabitants getting around, how many different civilizations are there, is there trade between wall civs, do they use lighter than air craft to get around, or are there boats, how do they navigate, what kinda of societies exist on this world?

A setting is more than just a physical location, but that location can be a major influence on the setting.

>>15195141
man, that is really getting on my nerves.
noko goes in the email field.

>>15195141

I've been thinking of moving with lines and ropes and hooks along the lines of Kor in MtG.

One cool campaign for this setting would be a voyage of discovery by a group of adventurers using the newly invented hot air balloon. Read some explorer books and the story writes itself.

>>15194604
This shit still annoys me. The most stupid thing in a universe of stupid things.

Fucking DC.

If it was a straight kirby-verse, fine. But in the same reality as batman it's beyond ridiculous.

>>15195209
Claws, hooks and ropes, Some areas have enough vegetation to climb barehanded. Civilised parts have Steps ladders, and pathways cut into and built onto the cliff face, Probably tunnels inside the cliff as well, some advanced civs may have elevators, wait an Idea occurs, A system of cargo/passenger funiculars and elevators, as a thing for the most advanced civilisations.

Why would you need a scientific explanation of how world works?
There is a One Who Hungers. He ate a Earth Deity. Everything is fucked up and his mouth is a center of gravity now.

The entire thing is an issue of scale.

Your wall is only enormous an unending from your perspective, it's actually just the outside surface of an old brick wall in a slightly ramshackle english garden.

>>15195275
He Hungers because the only way to end His pain is to consume everything.

Guys, you'd better find another way to sate His Hunger.

>>15195271
I would expect most civilized places to use stairwells cut into the rock. It's much safer than moving on the face of the cliff. Elevators are problematic due to the material requirement for ropes. I'd expect all arable land to be used for food production. Animal husbandry is out of the question for obvious reasons. That leaves you with human hair or possibly silk for fabrics and ropes.

How far along will the wall's societies progress technology-wise?

>>15195306

Mountain goats provide limited amount of material for ropes, as does silk from giant spiders.

Actually you know, people are remarkably well suited to climbing faces, what with our four long limbs and opposable thumbs. We're just not trained for it.

A couple of generations on this wall and we'd be racing up and down it like fucking spiders ourselves. With or without grapples.

>>15195229
>hot air balloons
No. Airships. Enitre Nations built on airships, Airship factories carved into the cliff side, Wars fought hanging from a hydorgen ballons. Airship wars, airship carriers carrying small heavier than air craft (not enough real estate for runways) Cliffside cities colapsing into the void under airship artillery fire. It would be.... Glorious

>>15194548
The sunset and moonrise would just happen at the bottom and top of the wall respectively.

It'd be like a normal horizon, only offset by 90 degrees.

>>15195340
DID SOMEONE SAY AIRSHIPS? DID SOMEONE SAY SKIES OF ARCADIA?
hell yeah

>>15195319
Well, they have almost no wood, but there has to be MAGIC. I`d say a stone age for smaller tribes, and a classic greek age for stone carver/miner guys. And flying steampunk merchants guys, who are often screwed by flying predators.

>15194011

It's fucking halo.

Will there be a master chef on this wall?

Sometimes you look out from one of the small platforms in your village and you swear you see something out there in the clouds, something big.

Recently others have been saying the same.

>>15195355
There can still be trees.

Just perpendicular trees.

>>15195341
I`d prefer having places, which are always in shadow of some huge rock above them.

>>15195319
agriculture should be advanced due to limited area for farming
renaissance era mechanical contraptions are likely if there is some material alternative replacing wood
metallurgy should be hindered by lack of wood for making charcoal, though places with bituminous coal could have blast furnaces

overall difficulty in trade should mean that science and technology progress slowly and there remain sharp contrast in technology levels between areas with different resources

transporting goods in bulk would be very problematic so there should exist centers of industry that export finished products

resource gathering away from agricultural areas would be limited to only the most precious substances justifying the cost of transporting food and produce

>>15195275

Naah, it's trite. This is a perfect opportunity to write something better and really mindfucky. Like -- I don't know -- it turns out their entire wall/torus/whatever was an artificial structure, a device of some sort.

Though that's not the real question. The answer to what the wall is is always gonna be trite. The trick is integrating it all into some sort of philosophy that in turn serves a real human story. Whatever the purpose of the wall, it's revelation should:

- Reveal a larger scheme of some sort
- Trigger a really emotional reaction

You know -- the whole 'it's was just a torus all along' isn't half bad. We Earthlings didn't have half a trouble accepting our world is round than these people would if they found out their world is a torus. Their lives are pretty fucking horrible and the promise of something being 'out there' is much more meaningful when you're hanging off a fucking cliff your entire life. Finding out that it's all there is is quite something.

That breeds a whole lot of opportunity right there. The story could end right there. The adventurers tell of what they've discovered, nobody believes them and they're thrown off the cliff. The most hilarious thing ever would be if they ended up somewhere far better that way, but I digress.

Another alternative would be that this is the ending of the first book. The second one would be about an enlightenment movement rising about the true nature of the wall that could lead to unification between tribes. Now you could flesh out a classic 'unification wars' story right there.

Anyway, by book three, you could advance the whole thing far into the future where the tribes are united. They have advanced technologically by sharing their knowledge and now they're starting to dig into the wall and explore vertically a lot more efficiently.

>>15195363
>Halo
No, Think bigger, imagine something like that encirlcing an entire star, It's not infinite but it's close enough for a people who think that airships are high tech, You could travel one way or the other for as long as you wish and still see the wall as far as the eye can see

>>15195340
Same idea, different era.

It could be the same civilization 200 years later.

>>15195374
Perpendicular forest? Now thats just awesome.

>>15195380
Perpetual darkness in some spots?

How well would a nocturnal ecosystem work? If it was too big and biomass import was too low it'd just dry up after a while.

You could make wall fungi, but that's just a stereotypical tg response to your suggestion.

not gonna read the whole thread to see if someone has already mentioned it.

How about if this 'wall world' were in fact a planet that rotates at a speed great enough to neutralize the gravitational pull to the core. The wall in question could span the equatorial line, as the poles would have bizarre gravitational properties. So in essence, the walls face is actually the surface of the planet, but it's rotating so fast that it seems that they're actually surviving on a cliff face.


Also, because of this. if you climb far enough down the walls (which probably wouldnt even be possible in a lifetime) you would end up exactly where you started

>>15195399
A Wall deserts are fine too.

>>15195424
That's not how gravity works, silly.

>>15195431
Prove that gravity works

>>15195431

I was talking about centrifugal force.

>>15195444
You mean centripetal force

Never.

>>15195424
A planet that rotates fast enough to counteract gravity would spin itself apart

>>15195424
>>15195453
>>15195449
>>15195444
Facepalms everywhere.

>>15187743
-------> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitation

Why does everyone assume there has to be gravity? The wall is simply accelerating at a constant pace to some direction, which will look like up to those who dwell on it. The entire thing could be a giant, planet sized space ship. It would obviously be cylinder shaped, with everything on the inside(well, that would be the most logical solution, anyway). Air pressure would still go up when moving down and down when moving up, so no-one would ever see the top or the bottom. And if you dig deep enough to the wall, you'll simply go through it to the empty space beyond. The pressure drop causes the tunnel to collapse, so from everyone else's point of view they'll just...disappear. And water can simply be pumped from bottom to top, creating rain.

So. Assuming it's traveling to somewhere, what happens when it reaches the midpoint and starts decelerating, turning "gravity" upside down? Or better yet, what if it did that in the past, with legends telling of a catastrophe of unimaginable proportions, and is now reaching it's destinations? And what if the course has to be corrected? For that matter, who's piloting this thing, anyway?

ok, campaign hook:

the sun is getting closer. the weather is hotter by the day. drought. crops wither. heat-crazed, skin-cancer-ridden refugees from Up Above.

so you and your clan move Down. always Down, the sun inexorably chasing you.

Give the Carnotaurus a heavier skull with more horns and long powerful digging arms and I can totally imagine it as a top predator.

Hunting in groups, they seek prey with smell, sneak around, until the hunting crew starts forcing its way to the prey by tearing their own tunnel towards the prey, while the stalking crew stay behind in the dark tunnels, waiting for the prey to stumble on them.

>>15195507
>Acclerating constantly
Ok in order to simulate earth's gravitational pull it would have to accelrate at 9.81 m/s^2, at rate that you'll be going relativistic pretty quick

>>15195512
you meet strange peoples in your journey. some you convince to join you. others scoff at your stories. still others are resigned to their fate. strange beasts that you have to cut through. eerie white moss forests that dry up and turn into dust at the first ray of sun in uncount aeons.

>>15195507
If you insist on making this sciency the ringworld idea is the best one, a starships accelrating constantly at those gravities would reach relevistic velocities fairly quickly, which means fun and games with time dialation would occur meaning that only a few years would occur subjectivly

>>15195507
>Accelerating
>Perpetually

Eventually you'll hit the speed of light and the shit will hit the fan. That just doesn't work for so many reasons.

>>15195526
So? That just means that the time inside is slowing down from outside observers point of view. No way to tell from inside without observing something in the outside. As long as the world doesn't end, from inside it's impossible to tell whether their speed is 0.01% of c or 99.999999999% of c.

Your nation has just begun to realise the immensity of the wall, With the invention of the telescope you have theorised that the cliff is not just a flat, infinite cliff face with the sun hanging from an arch, but a cliff stung around the sun like a ribbon.
You are the crew of your people's best modified long range scout airship, sent along the cliff on a mission of eploration and research

TL:DR, Star trek on the cliff with an airship instead of a starship

>>15195507

I like this.

The entire ship could be some sort of refugee ship that just went haywire at some point. Dyson Sphere of some sort, one of you people work out the physics. Some civil war erupted and they managed to somehow fuck up the gravity. As generations succeeded one another they eventually forgot who they are and where they come from and there you have it.

>>15195526
Relativistic? relative to what? If there is nothing else in that universe but the wall (I prefer a cylinder) accelerating up, then there's no problem.

These guys would make awesome predators too.

I mean, it could just chill way above or below your position... stealthy, and suddenly, you're flung in the air like reptile food.

Guys, guys. I love sciencing it up as much as the next sci-fi fan, but we need to keep a couple things in mind.

First, the Wall cannot be natural. It has to be artificial, because there cannot be such huge non-spherical objects in space. We need to give some thought to who created it. I really don't see how you can rationalise its being non-constructed.

Now, I really don't like the idea of cylinders, either. It doesn't really captivate the spirit of OP's post. So, I come to you with what I like to think is an elegant solution to atmosphere, gravity, and a light source, courtesy of the equivalence of inertial and gravitational mass.

It's simple: the Wall is constantly accelerating parallel to its surface. Why? I don't know. But since I'm actually giving the matter some thought, that means that I'm in the realm of sci-fi, and FUCKIN' MAGIC doesn't work. So, I'm going to go ahead and propose a simple explanation: rockets at the Endless Depths. Who put them there? The ones that constructed the wall, of course.

Now, it should be fairly easy to emulate Earth's gravity. According to Wikipedia, RD-180 had a thrust-to-weight ratio of 73.4. We need it to be 1 to emulate Earth's gravity. Split that over thousands of exhausts, and it doesn't sound too outlandish.

>>15195539
Lrn2Relativity.

>>15195585
>Whoops, >>15195507 beat me to it (the constant acceleration idea). Welp, I'll post the rest of my post for "completeness". At least someone implemented it more plausibly.

If you think that "ROCKETS" is a cop-out, and you can stand alternate physics laws, as long as they are consistent, consider this: the lumniferous aether exists, and not only does it exist, but it affects matter as well. It provides a small, tiny drag for EVERYTHING. So, the Wall was thrust with a huge initial velocity parallel to its surface, along with a small star orbiting it. But now, check my pic. There is a drag downwards, which provides a small acceleration downwards. And there you have it: artificial gravity. Also, since we established that the Wall is huge, the drag, if proportional to mass should be small enough so that it doesn't affect the humans on the wall at all. Also, if the wall isn't that thick, we should be able to ignore gravitational effects. Still, there could be a minor attraction wallwards. Sure, drag being proportional to velocity would mean that the acceleration of gravity would change over time.

Now, obviously, atmosphere couldn't stay on the Wall. So how about the atmosphere being constantly generated, in the caves, perhaps? It works. It's not realistic, but it's consistent. You know what? Forget the rockets. Someone just made the wall, thrust it like mad, and now it's decelerating. The deceleration changes, but it exists.

>>15195599
Or, you can throw away any semblance of realism, and just say that the Wall is falling towards some sort of cosmic ground, the bottom of the Universe, if you will. It need not actually be the bottom of the universe, but if it's a flat disc HUGE AS HELL, it provides a uniform gravitational field throughout space (thanks, Gauss), and if the Wall falls downwards and it's "upside down", voila: gravity again, constant this time. At least, until the Wall hits the ground. Hm. It could be that the "ground" is a very, very thin gas (it'd need to be thin, after all, to provide an Earth-like acceleration). Then, when the Wall passes through it, gravity flips. It changes directions. That's annoying. And how would the gas not dissipate?

Damn, I'm rambling again. These are the explanations I could come up with, without resorting to cylinders. They're not that elegant, since all have small flaws, but if you want to keep the Wall a wall, I think they're adequate. Of course, if you're thinking fantasy, this post is absolutely pointless.

>>15195574
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_relativity
No, not really that doesn't work. If you really want it to be a generation ship just pull out the old Staple of artificiel gravity or ''a sufficiently advanced alien did it''

I've comeup with a neat twist to this concept.

Ok, imagine there's like humanoid sea-creature-like beings in the dark places. Thing is, they are actually a product of an infection from a particular fungus in said dark places and the creatures are actually humans from the Wall that in ancient times dug too deep.

The creatures would have glowing eyes that makes them able to see in the dark and life in the dark places is actually somewhat BETTER than the Wall due to things like more soil, more diverse cave-creatures as food and wellsprings for drink.

The humans think they are a race of monsters bent on their destruction. The creatures want to turn their human brethren to bring them liberation from the harsher conditions of the Wall. The creatures have things like schools and entertainment and a proper governmental system only it's so deep in the dark places that no human has figured it out yet.

Halfway through the story, the party gets infected and brought to the dark places and realizes the truth, in the end bringing a peace and better living to both races due to trade and friendship.

The story part would be different according to DM tastes but the whole twist I think would be pretty sweet.

>>15195507

Look -- why don't we just take this idea. The ship was a O'Neill cylinder -- is that what you're getting at? Irrelevant.

Get this:

The ship actually landed. Vertically. The artificial gravity is no longer active and the thing is upside down now. It's sitting still on some unfortunate planet like a mountain and the gravity pulling everything down is actually the gravity of the planet. The ship arrived where it needs to arrive. However, the journey took it's tool and the passengers inside don't even remember it's a spaceship anymore. It's been just sitting there like an idiot for untold millenia.

>>15195679

I think everyone was trying to find a way to sneak the 'it's actually better out there but the idiots are too stupid to get off their wall' scenario in there. I think this is an elegant solution.

>>15195679

This gives 'clinging to your old ways' a whole new meaning.

>>15195691
Horey shit, this guy, it would have to be huge though, kilometres across, slightly taprered and terraced so shit doesn't fall off. Ship's broken Nuclear reactor has fallen to the bottom and is leaking rads, you go to low ou die from rad poisoning

>>15195725
>>15195691

Fuck fuck fuck fuck we're onto something. Radiation poisoning is always a welcome turn of events for any setting in terms of artistic freedom it gives to create the most fucked up creatures.

>>15195725

Why would it need to be terraced? It's sitting vertically, it wasn't meant to do this originally. The people should have disembarked a long time ago. Originally, the 'Wall' was just simply *the ground*.

Or am I misunderstanding you?

Anyway -- it's a given this thing would be huge. Much bigger than the O'Neill Cylinder on the picture. But not necessarily *too huge*. Something like Earth-size is ideal, assuming they're sitting on a fuck-huge planet. Anyway -- here's what I'm getting at. If we managed to get a plausible reason for a *lot of fog* inside the cylinder, that would explain why you can't ever see the other side.

Something in the ship's air filtering system went a bit haywire? Someone who knows more about chemistry could step in here.

>>15195736
>>15195725
YES, ok people can't tunnel out through the wall because of the ship's hull is too strong, people can't tunnel out through the airlocks on the floor or roof because of Deadyatmosphere/radiation.
Animals/ plants are varied as the colonists took lots of species with them which the inteded to use for terraforming. All have heavily mutated due to the ship having been crashed for a very long time/high death rates and therefore rapid natural selection. As there are no minerals to mine, there is little technology, the colonists have forgotten that they live on a starship, this is just teh world to them.

>>15195725
>>15195691
>>15195736
Nothing that big would be powered by something as simple as nuclear energy.

The aliens must've done it.

>>15195779
consider a huge planet, and that the O'neil cylinder crashed in a sea, in a deep trench.
You can't dig in the deep due to water pressure, and the radiation from central + Water => many many clouds.

>>15195679
>>15188141
>>15188166
It's like the society of water-world meets the plot of pandorum/edenlog

And it's on a wall.

wat

>>15195782

This place is absolutely huge and was meant to house thousands of generations. I don't think the airlocks would just lie on the floor. They would only be accessible through really long elevators. The entire soil/rock crust would be really thick -- up to a kilometer, maybe even more. Remember that this place would have been big enough to house oceans and mountains -- and it probably did. The idea is that the Cylinder should resemble home as much as possible because it was a place to live first, and transport second.

>>15195810

If it works, it works, excellent job -- another issue solved. I don't know what to say. I don't know enough about physics to tell you anything here.

>>15195834

Of course -- the really interesting part would be the fact that the main airlocks are on the top and bottom of the Cylinder. The bottom airlocks are useless now, of course, seeing as the Cylinder crashed. The top however -- ... You know what would be really hilarious? What if a whole advanced civilization flourished outside of the Cylinder? The first survivors just ran out and kept people they don't like locked in and populated the planet meanwhile. Now the Cylinder is a huge monument to the first settlers -- a temple of sorts -- and the people who live inside it don't know any better and live like cavemen in comparison. The people outside treat the Cylinder as holy and they never open it and so they too don't know that there are people trapped inside.

>>15195843
I'm not a doctor in Physics. But we are talking about a kilometers long O'Neil tube, with Mountains & seas inside. We are stretching a bit already, that's no more hard science, more like soft sci-fi. We have plausible sciency explanations to explain the wall, but we don't need to get ALL the details.

>>15187304>>15187335

This guy here. I think it was not saved on suptg

>>15195786
Considering we have ''indestructable starship hull''
I think ''super fission reactor'' is an accpetable departure

>>15195875
oh, nice. really nice !
first twist for the players : that there's a world around them, that they are descendants from an advanced civilisation, yada yada...
and then, this. to twist again for a climax at the end.

>>15195875

>Now the Cylinder is a huge monument to the first settlers -- a temple of sorts -- and the people who live inside it don't know any better and live like cavemen in comparison. The people outside treat the Cylinder as holy and they never open it and so they too don't know that there are people trapped inside

Now get this -- the people outside have created a perfect technocratic utopia. The people have pretty much become completely docile and absent minded.

Now -- our adventurers discover a way out of the cylinder and find a whole new world outside. They go back in and get entire tribes out. Now they completely ransack the living shit out of this hippy society who cannot even comprehend the possibility of violence, yet alone self-defense.

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

Basically a very strong yet thin Anderson disk surrounding a giant star. Because of it's negligible thickness the disk's mass is insignificant compare to the mass of the star. Because the center star is giving off a lot of energy the disk's habitable zone is closer to the outer edge. Since most of the system's mass is starwards from the people living in the habitable zone gravity is almost parallel with the disk's surface.

>>15195890
Except with fission if there's any radiation at all getting somewhere it's not supposed to then it'll just fuck shit up. I'm thinking like huge fucking explosions or something.

Unless it's cold fusion.

>>15195906

... And now the whole thing has a satisfying conclusion complete with a very resonant moral.

We're all set /tg/, we have everything we need. We can go back to talking about fleshing out the different civilizations inside the cylinder.

>>15195923

Who says the reactors needs to have fallen off the top? Maybe it was on the bottom all along. As time went by and it saw no maintenance, it sloooooowly started leaking and getting hairier and hairier.

Come on, we need an archetypal hell at the bottom.

>>15195906
>completely docile and absent minded
>Whole new world

This post is shouting so much dystopia it's not even funny.

Go read some literature, fuckhead. That's not how it works.

>>15195943
Nonono Idea Lights placed along the middle were nuclear powered, it's themt that fell down

>>15195921
And just to be clear, the Wall for us on this scheme seems to be horizontal, along the blue arrow I've added, with gravity going toward the star ?

>>15195943

Now -- remember this post?

>ok, campaign hook:

>the sun is getting closer. the weather is hotter by the day. drought. crops wither. heat-crazed, skin-cancer-ridden refugees from Up Above.

>so you and your clan move Down. always Down, the sun inexorably chasing you.

Replace down with up. As the reactor is fucking shit up at the bottom, people start migrating further up.

But I don't know -- I don't like this as a full-on campaign hook. The rise of radiation should really just be a sort of a constant in the world rather than the thing driving the plot. I mean, if the radiation started rising so fast that it's pushing entire populations upwards, there's little room for a campaign there since there's no element of lone adventurers braving up if everyone and their granny is doing it.

>>15195953

Sure it does. They've created an AI that achieved singularity and is taking perfect care of them. They're like little spoiled babies.

>>15195981
When a species' drive for continuation interferes with their sentient status then they destroy themselves.

That's a dystopia. As in BAD. Your idea was one where BAD things were happening to the advanced peoples.

BAD.

That's why your post was BAD. fuck

>>15196010

>Your idea was one where BAD things were happening to the advanced peoples

Uh no. The bad things were happening to people INSIDE the cylinder. The people outside of the cylinder have meanwhile flourished on this incredibly huge planet overflowing with resources. Read more carefully.

>>15195973
Yeah, the wall is actually the flat surface of the disk. A lot of the system's mass will be concentrated in the center star. Obviously the disk does have a mass and therefore also exerts gravity, which is partly responsible for keeping a breathable atmosphere at the habitable zone. Which means that the overall gravity experience in the habitable zone is not exactly parallel to the wall but actually downwards to the sun and slightly inwards towards the disk.

The atmosphere will be stripped out of the habitable zone towards the star if not countered by the solar wind pressure and atmosphere convection along the disk's surface. Atmosphere convection is caused by the star bobbling and and down the center hole. When more of the star is on your side of the disk, the star-wards lower atmosphere heats and and cause massive gales to blow "up" from below you. And conversely when the star sinks below your side of the disk the atmosphere cools down and you have massive rush of wind blowing "down" from above.

>>15196028
>flourished

How exactly do you call that flourishing?

Multiplying like rabbits does one no good if you become as intelligent as rabbits.

>>15196107

Perhaps I wasn't clear enough. The people outside have retained all the technology they had before the Cylinder crashed. They found themselves on this planet and simply rebuilt. Whether they became a huge civilization or not is irrelevant, the point is, they became a successful civilization. They had everything they needed, they didn't wage war partly because they had everything they needed and partly because of the fresh trauma of having been on some sort of an exodus ship that escaped whatever tragedy forced them to travel untold light years in search of a perfect home. It doesn't matter - that part still needs to be fleshed out if it's at all relevant. The point is, the civilization outside created what is essentially a utopia. AI or not -- though I feel a benevolent AI really drives the point home better. Live like that for generations and generations and you'll quickly be reduced to manchildren who have it all handed to them.

Look -- I mean, I don't see what's your point here. Either you misunderstood something or you're just arguing semantics because of a centipede infestation down below.

>>15196160
That thing.

That thing you just described.

It's called a dystopia.

>>15196180

Semantics. Who gives a shit? Any utopia given enough time will become a dystopia because it doesn't give incentive for any growth and self-reliance. Entropy, in other words.

So, how do we fit airships into this?

>Atmosphere convection is caused by the star bobbling and and down the center hole. When more of the star is on your side of the disk, the star-wards lower atmosphere heats and and cause massive gales to blow "up" from below you. And conversely when the star sinks below your side of the disk the atmosphere cools down and you have massive rush of wind blowing "down" from above.

I can already see the religions people will develop from this. They would call the star "The Invincible Sun" because periodically the demons of the lower depths would grasp the sun and pull it into their caves to consume it, yet the sun always fights its way out and raises again from the lower wall.

I can imagine people would see the rising sun and the updraft as good and darkness and downward wind as bad. Plants will grow when the sun is on this side and the updraft would bring their dandelion like seeds as well as migrating flying animals up, providing plentiful food for the people. Navigation both upwards and downwards will be easier as the wind counters the gravity and by skillfully manipulating kites like contraption strapped to their body people can fly up or down the wall for great distances.

Converse when the sun is down, little grows and flying up becomes impossible. People must with great difficulty migrate downwards in search of food.

Good job making me nauseous…

>>15196180
>>15196210
Oh look we've discovered that not everyone has the same ideas about utopia, and some people don't think it's a good thing.

Apparently some people never read Brave New World in highschool?

OP here.

Holy Shit.

It still lives.

Thought this would have died in the first dozen posts.

Instead it mutated into sci-fi.

Wow.

also this >>15194189 is an unimaginably awesome idea.

/tg/, it gets shit done in strange, strange ways.

What do people use for archival these days?

>>15199226
Sup/tg/ is standard, you can use the other sites like 4chanarchive too if you want.

>>15199243

4chan archive doesn't work and sup/tg/ is way too much work for me right now.

I got this on my hard drive anyway -- I'm just surprised nobody wants to go through the trouble to archive this.

>>15199226

all threads automatically get archived at
http://archive.easymodo.net/tg/

>>15199383
>sup/tg/ is way too much work
>surprised nobody wants to go through the trouble
Make up your mind, man.

>>15199422

That sounds dangerous and completely unnecessary. Who's gonna look at your brain and HOW?

One question!
How comes that they didn't fall off when this ship landed?

>>15200282
small ledge?
ship got lodged so they had a nice little area to start up in?
the outside of the ship was covered in sticky tack?
they ejected with full climbing gear?

The only problem with a heavily, uh, bumpy Cylinder interior is that all the mountains and all the indentations for lakes and seas kind of get in the way of the steep, veritcal Wall theme. Perhaps a flatter, simpler one is preferable?

>>15202319
Well, the mountains crumbled when the ship stuck vertically. Wait, why should we make it stick exactly 90 degrees to the ground, anyway? Why don't we introduce a bit of a tilt, say, no bigger than 10 degrees?

Also, a twist: The ones who try to escape the ship are actually stuck on top of the ship, them forgetting to bring climbing gear/airship/whatev to get down from the top. So, they have decided to 'colonize' the top exterior. Maybe due to the stress these guys have went through (or just simple greed) they decided to stop anyone from getting out. This is made possible since they got what few bits of 'advanced' technology they brought with them to work, thus making them slightly more advanced than the rest of the wall-dwellers.

>captcha sez: elledus Journal
So... the story could be read in the form of a journal of travels kind of thing.

>>15202456

I like the idea that the leaders knew that the reactor was fucked up and just decided to run away as soon as possible. Some people proposed going back to save the survivors but the leaders convinced them there's no one to save because they don't want to risk climbing down any time soon. They seal the place up and leave. A little bit of guilt goes a long way and in a few generation's time, the place is already considered a borderline-religious monument and nobody knows there's a leaking reactor at the bottom, let alone people who had to be left behind to die.

>>15202456

Why would we introduce a tilt?

Besides, that's not a problem. Huge holes and bumps in the walls are the problem. Smaller ones are no problem, but anything big enough to build in kind of detracts from a primarily Wall-based world. Though I guess having only a few of these places isn't a bad idea.

>>15202456
That doesn't work, then they'd have no resources. Let's say they have a huge city on top of the cylinder, but they use personal transports to fly elsewhere.

>>15205489
Eh, just have them 'evict' the dudes who live near the top floors, and using the top floors as a resource plant or something. This makes the PCs encounter their hardest battles because the top few hundred kilometers are owned by the slightly technologically-advanced civ.

>>15205704
No, because that invalidates the original premise - that the two types of people have had no contact.

>>15205489
>>15205704
>>15205946

I have no clue what you guys are talking about. Haven't they left the cylinder and locked it down? Why would anyone remain in the cylinder willingly? Isn't the idea is that those who remained didn't do so of their own will?

Am I missing something here?

Tell you the truth, I'm gonna steal parts of this in my upcoming game. I contributed so I don't feel bad about it. I just feel kind of meh about a regular horizontal game now when compared to the wall.

Okay guys, now this is getting seriously lame, like the armchair politics with preachy factions lame that drives away players.

It was AWESOME when it was just a bunch of different people on a wall and sometimes they'd fall into the nets of people lower down.

>>15209840
I agree. The best thing for this setting is to stop reading the thread right when it becomes SciFi.

rolled 751 = 751

>>15194276

If you stop about here then its fine. Lets just stop with "A Wizard Did It" shall we?

Since I contributed a couple of things Im going to steal the bejesus out of this.

>>15209840

Actually, we worked out a perfect sci-fi setting that actually has a point beyond just explaining what exactly happened to create a wall-world. Certainly better than your a-wizard-did-it bullshit.

>>15210305
You're playing a game. It's not supposed to be completely detailed and accurate, if it were it would just be like making up a life for yourself, which would be sad.

Right now you guys are deep in the uncanny valley between the two.

Wait, why am I surprised? Half of the people on here are 40k fanboys...

>>15212317
Also, even "A Wizard Did It" is too far.
We don't need the explanation. For all we know, it's just a really huge land feature on a larger planet. Not every setting has to be futuristic and advanced. Maybe, heaven forbid, the people of the Wall haven't advanced far enough to be aware of anything beyond their own locality and so, to them, the world is a wall.

>>15210122
>>15210305
but by giving a point to the world other than "ITS A GIANT FUCKING WALL" along with a questionable sci-fi explination, you make it boring,

lets just have it as a giant fucking mountain on some far away planet.

I have the pic you need OP.

The Blame setting has vast chasms the size of Planets, maybe you should use that.

>>15212438
You there, mute asshole, walk to Saturn and fetch me a jug of milk.

Oh and net terminal genes, those too.

>>15212342
>>15212382

How about you just read the thread? It's not an explanation for an explanation's sake, we've pretty much worked the entire base of the plot out by explaining what the wall is.

Also, if you know what the wall exactly is, it helps in creating a more believable world. Nothing is more immersive than an organically grown world where every detail ties into a greater whole and has a plausible explanation.

You're also completely ignoring the fact that this is something the player character will only find out late in the game. Hell - this is just the setting. You don't even need to ever reveal it. You could just hint at it and let the players draw their own conclusions. If players get to like the setting and want to find out what it's all really about, you have an excellent explanation that will keep them occupied. It could be a different campaign... Or, if you're really skilled, the main quest could have absolutely nothing to do with what the wall is -- but -- you could allow the players to find out if they so choose and render the entire prebaked campaign obsolete by letting them reach the top of the wall and leave the cylinder.

And finally, sci-fi doesn't prohibit magic or whatever else you want to have in there.

I don't understand you. Do you have some sort of deficiency of imagination? Just because there's a how-and-why behind the setting doesn't mean you have to address it. You could still create whatever you want within it. The players need not ever find out.

>>15213187

I think his point is that having an explanation saps the feeling of mysticism. I don't entirely agree but I get where he's coming from.

It's easy enough to cut out the sci-fi parts if you want to play it as a fantasy setting with a mystic, alien atmosphere.

>>15214011

I wouldn't play it any other way.

That doesn't mean you have to cut out the sci-fi foundation. You just need to keep it a secret from the players.

We caught one of the Fallen today. Grandfather got up early, just before second moonrise, to check the nets, and called out to all of us. We came rushing out, little Yannic first, because he wants so dearly to be a net-farmer like his grandfather. We all stopped immediately, though, as soon as we saw the Fallen. Grandfather just stared, mystified. My wife clung to me, and Yannic hid behind my greatcoat, whimpering. I swallowed hard and approached the net, which was pulled taut under the strain of the struggling Fallen. I had never seen anything like it-- even after the great Artifact Harvest many seasons ago. It was breathing - I think - hard, and it kept yelling at us in a tongue I didn't recognize. It was at once both familiar and completely alien; sapient, vaguely female, with intricate bangles and wrappings all over. It looked like a fish-- on its arms and legs were feathery fins, and its eyes were huge and deep like a jewel mined from the Inwards. Those eyes stared at me now defiantly, and the Fallen again struggled vainly at the rope around its thin arms. I considered what to do. The rest of the village would not be active until third moon, and if anyone saw a fallen we would surely all be branded heretics...

>>15214145

What'd you do bro?

>>15210122
>Stops the post before mine, which wasn't sci-fi at all...and was based on a kickass, totally-not-sci-fi /v/idya.
>Could still be "Wizard did it" or the like.
>Has great fantasy-setting potential.
>mfw