Location: World Premise

Discussion: World Explanations...Reported This is a featured thread

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castlewrks
castlewrks
World Explanations...
Jul 28 2007, 5:08 PM EDT | Post edited: Jul 28 2007, 5:08 PM EDT
For a world whose very survival depends on magic, to believe the population has developed an aversion to mage's needs to be explained. While the premise is an interesting and challenging undertaking, this "world" violates the very mechanics of planets and world-building concepts. Magic, and very powerful magic at that, was deployed to hold the shards together and to allow life to continue on... there are a large number of normal aspects that have to be accounted for in your world design. I would propose that mages are very much sought after by powerful coalitions that need their magic and abilities to keep things together.

I highly recommend... http://www.world-builders.org/ and http://www.sfwa.org/writing/worldbuilding1.htm

Being very technical, I would like to know the answers to the following questions:

How you propose the atmosphere bubble is maintained? How big is the inside space? What happens when a shard moves too close to the outside?

If each shard has its own gravity, normal influences of bodies with gravity will apply implying some kind of "dance" of shards that needs to be engineered... How do you propose this work?

What determines "up"? There are two ways to interpret shattered... the first is to assume that it is like the Earth system asteroid belt where every shard is a world unto itself and subject to the dangers of collision, etc. The second concept is that the world is shattered but everything still points down towards the original core and the shattered pieces are like continents of Earth separated by gaps instead of oceans.

In either case, what happened to the water? How does it rain? How can crops be grown to feed people?

What you propose is very similar to Integral Trees by Larry Niven (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Integral_Trees) where your shards correspond to the Integral Trees.
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Mr.Kite
Mr.Kite
1. RE: World Explanations...
Aug 23 2007, 7:05 PM EDT | Post edited: Aug 23 2007, 7:05 PM EDT
As far as what determines up, this is my understanding...

Up is the direction which all shards are always facing, which is also towards the sun. The shards orbit freely and randomly within the air bubble and the magic of the shard keys prevents them from colliding. As for the edge of the of the Air bubble, i believe the shards simply "bounce" off it.
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