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Seonid

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  1. Seonid

    That moment when you realize that you are going to have to come up with 18 different religions for your world (and 12 different sub-groups), and you begin to wonder whether you have a problem...

    1. Kobold King

      Kobold King

      In my desperate attempts to thwart the species-wide culture trope so prevalent in sci-fi, one of my stranger races at least three major cultures, two accepted religions, and one persecuted religious minority. It's nothing compared with what you've done, but I'm beginning to see your point. :P

    2. Seonid

      Seonid

      Ah worldbuilding. Isn't it the most rewarding and frustrating drain on our free time? Interestingly, an extremely large quantity of my worldbuilding (including all but two of the religions and almost half of the cultures) has come in my mind only in the last 8 months or so.

  2. Seonid
    (First off, sorry to totally dominate this discussion, Kobold) Now that that's over with, I've given this the requisite amount of thought, and essentially decided that all of my concerns are resolvable. In astronomy terms, we want a 3:2 spin-orbit resonance (which means that the moon spins around its axis 3 time for every 2 times it goes around the planet) with a high eccentricity orbit (which means that it is more elliptical than circular - we are probably looking at an eccentricity of 0.21 or so, which is strongly elliptical) that is inclined compared to the ecliptic as well as to the plane of the planet's rings (say about 5 degrees from the ecliptic and about 20 or so from the rings - which implies a planetary tilt of either 25 or 15 degrees from the ecliptic - either would work). In layman's terms, the moon would have an elliptical orbit around the planet, have 3 days for every 2 times it went around the planet, and the planet would occasionally and predictably but not constantly eclipse the sun. In addition, the rings would be visible from the whole moon (although only from about 1/2 at a time). Essentially, the day/night cycle would be normal, and only interrupted by eclipses occasionally. The planet would rise and set like the sun, although on a different schedule. When the planet-rise coincided with sunset, you would see a spectacular view of the rings. Whether they were visibly during the day would depend on a lot of things, but it is possible.
  3. Seonid
    I'm definitely thinking a sorcerer and her familiar. After I post my Nessei marriage ceremony for last month, of course. Which also happens to easily satisfy both Kobold's and Ashiok's prompts...
  4. Seonid
    Good post, Unodus. I quite enjoyed reading it. Voidus is right, though. This goes for everyone participating. If you are going to do something with somebody else's character, ask them first. If you want it to be a surprise, ask them in a PM so the rest of us don't know (although I'd kind of like to be included in those, for GM purposes), but asking permission is the first rule of using others' characters.
  5. Seonid
    Gandalf - LoTR Elrond - LoTR Obi-Wan Kenobi - Star Wars Belgarath - Belgariad Dumbledore - Harry Potter Deth - Riddle-master of Hed Brennan - Sword of Shannara Allanon - Sword of Shannara Walker Boh - Sword of Shannara Cogline - Sword of Shannara Star Wars may be a controversial choice, but I feel that, while it is a blend of sci-fi and epic fantasy, the fantasy elements are dominant by far. Name 12 cosmere religions
  6. Seonid
    So...I was going to post a January submission, but it's not quite done yet. It should be done soon, so I'll post it as soon as I get it. Rather embarrassing to be late two months in a row, though.
  7. Seonid
    Now, if we were able to hypothesize a moon that wasn't tidally locked, but was in some non-1:1 spin-orbital resonance, we might be able to get somewhere with the whole moon seeing the rings. Mercury has this feature, actually. It has a 3:2 orbital resonance (meaning that each orbit around the Sun is 1.5 Mercury-days) Something similar for this shepherd moon around its parent body would result in the whole moon getting to see the rings/planet (instead of having the planet and rings just 'hang' in the sky, which is what would happen for a tidally locked moon), but would create a complicated day/night cycle where for some parts of the day, the planet eclipses the sun (on a regularly recurring basis, unlike - for example - the chaotic pattern of the Earth's solar eclipses). Actually, the gas giant eclipsing the sun is a problem for a tidally locked moon too. If you are on the 'inside,' the face that can see the planet, then during your night, you are facing away from the sun and at noon, the planet eclipses the sun. You would get a sunrise, but as the sun got brighter, the planet would start to block it. This could potentially be a problem for life on the planet-side (cold-wise, that is). One possibility might be to posit a higher spin-orbit resonance, such as 3:2 or even 5:3. I'll give this some more thought, and come back to it.
  8. Seonid
    Any time! Physics is one of my majors at the university, and I love getting a chance to put it to use in...well, not real life, but you know what I mean. (TBH, half the reason I am a physics major is because I want to be able to write physically accurate sci-fi) The math probably looks a little bit daunting, but what we did was use Kepler's 3rd Law. Detailed explanation inside the spoiler tag. The Roche limit is the limit where a small body (such as a satellite or moon) would be torn apart by tidal forces rather than staying together. A particularly rigid body can exist temporarily inside of it, (we see this with Saturn, where the moons probably formed elsewhere and migrated within it), but nothing can form there. That said, your layman's explanation/interpretation is exactly on-target. I had a whole long investigation of the day/night cycle, but then I found that almost all moons are tidally locked, which means that only 1 side actually faces the planet at any given time, so the rotation around the planet would always equal the rotation around its axis. Which made all of my speculation useless. Ah well... As far as naming things go, I'm good with whatever. Maybe use Seonid backwards, like the Dinoes River or Sea
  9. Seonid
    Hey, it was a better mistake than my constant mixing up of signs on simple algebra problems...
  10. Seonid

    Back to Edassa now. Pondering the awesome potential of undead there...

    1. Show previous comments  1 more
    2. Seonid

      Seonid

      Yep. Unembodied spirits sloppily bound to recently (or long-time) dead corpses.

    3. Kobold King

      Kobold King

      Cool. I look forward to hearing more about them! Will you be talking about them in the forthcoming Edassa worldbuilding thread?

    4. Seonid

      Seonid

      Yep. Probably more than is healthy for me...

  11. Seonid
    I haven't checked the math itself, but the form looks right for a Kepler's 3rd law problem, Voidus. That orbit might be a problem, as it lies well within Saturn's Roche limit of 147,000 km. The big question is whether this is close enough to have the surface-destroying symptoms that we see on Io. I suspect that it is. Just checked. Io orbits at 421,700 km from Jupiter's surface. This is a problem. Going to check the math now. (Sorry, this is kind of stream-of-consciousness stuff, I thought it might be valuable to see the whole thought process - makes it easier to nitpick there) Found a solution. 3 days is 259,200 seconds, not 25,920. Using Kepler's 3rd law with that value of T gives us 400,985 km, a much more reasonable orbit. It's outside the Roche limit, and about as far as Io is from Jupiter (but Saturn has less mass by a factor of 1/3 - so we might not be too close to get the constant surface renewal). This brings up a new problem. All of the rings we've so far observed (except for Saturn's E Ring) are within the Roche limit. However, the E Ring of Saturn (very thick and formed of microscopic rather than macroscopic particles) lies between the orbits of Mimas and Titan, outside that limit. Titan, in particular, is large enough to be a shepherd world with life on it (if we move its solar system position). It's big enough to have a thick atmosphere. Under these circumstances, we also don't have to worry about impact from Ring particles, as the large particles are all orbiting significantly inside the orbit of the moon. So, maybe not quite as spectacular as having a moon in between the rings, but much less risky. This might be able to solve your second problem. Titan's actual orbit is about 15 earth days, but we could rather easily imagine a situation where a Saturn-like body had a Titan-like moon with an orbital period of 3 days. (Mimas, the inner shepherd of the E ring, has an orbital period of .9 Earth days) We'd just have a smaller ring. We might have to check the resonance patterns to make sure we aren't violating something there, but I think we're on to a workable solution here.
  12. Seonid
    Note to self. What seems funny at 12 midnight after a long day's worth of work while you are drugged up because of a stupid head cold just seems ridiculous in the cold light of day. Sorry, Quiver. My last post was meant to be a joke...but it sounded much funnier to my medication-befuddled mind. At least I got an MLP reference in there. That should cover a multitude of sins. The rest will just have to be covered by this month's submission!
  13. Seonid
    Thanks, Mail. I'll copy-paste Khuvlai's spells to the thread when I get them finished too. And I'm glad everyone likes the map. I'll post a map of the area around Menkor (when I draw it, which will probably be during one of my Quantum Mechanics classes. Maybe General Relativity, if I can spare the attention, but Quantum's more likely to get ignored anyways...) Other random and tangential comments: Storm it, Kobold! Your chiskreven are awesome enough to make me want to rethink only having humans on Edassa! Probably not going to do it on the world of Edassa proper, but I think that you may have guaranteed that this universe contains non-humanoid intelligent life. Also, I've finally decided that while most of Edassa's flora and fauna are earth-like, it's not a 1-to-1 map. (The non-Terran animals bear similarity to Terran forms, but have some differences). This weekend, I'm going to get the worldbuilding thread up in the Creator's Corner section, to post worldbuilding stuff not directly related to the RP. (Although we still haven't started shipping yet! What's wrong with you people... ) I'll probably post another world-idea I just barely had over there too, involving an inversion of an ocean/archipelago world. Something like a sand world, where the sand is extremely fine, and civilization is clustered about pockets of water. (I just like the imagery of the vast sea of sand and islands of water) It will be complete with nautical terminology and the like, adjusted slightly for the sandy world. Or at least a continent like this. Or something. Maybe another continent with a primeval forest, inhabited by the first set of non-human intelligent life-forms I'll be creating...I think there's potential there.
  14. Seonid
    Mail...I...just don't know what to say about that. There's waaaaay more in there than I'd ever think of putting in a Tineye message. I am quite impressed.
  15. Seonid
    Good job. We ended up with 158 pages in the Spiked doc, plus 104 pages of copied PMs in docs that we linked to in order to keep the loading time down. If we both managed to beat the Urbain doc, that would be quite the feat... Not that I'm fishing for the "Participated in the longest doc" award or anything
  16. Seonid
    Banner of the Raven is an excellent name. I'll add it to the list.
  17. Seonid
    Ok. Average spellcasting time (for both Paladin and Inquisitorial spells) is on the order of 5 to 6 seconds or so. The flag of glory spell takes longer, about 30 seconds to cast. Incidentally, BreathTaker, I was thinking of a similar spell for Bran, one that projects his Raven into the sky above his army. Does that sound fitting?
  18. Seonid
    Alrighty then...here are Paladin spells! Paladin Spells: Svalding Spells So Lieseer (and the Paladin spell Discernment) both last for about an hour, actually.
  19. Seonid
    Hmm...The Siren seems to be a little bit OP for The Dalles, even if we can get the soul stuff worked out. Might be a good candidate for Astoria, however. I wonder, Lightsworn, have you considered having The Panda pull out of The Dalles (after a suitably Epic fight, of course) and move towards Astoria? Just a thought. The Astoria is much higher power level, and The Siren and some others seem like a more balanced fit over there. Thanks. I've done my fair share of bouncing around, but funnily enough, all of that bouncing all led me back to the same place. My sci-fi trilogy even found its way into the future extension of Edassa's universe.
  20. Seonid
    Well then, one Inquisitor Spell Book coming right up. I'll wait for BreathTaker to weigh in, but I can't imagine that he'd have an issue with my posting his spellbook too. Inquisitorial Spells Words of Power The Inquisitorial spell list is heavily focused on direct damage-dealing spells, almost exclusively. When we get to see Bran's list, we'll see a lot less damage-dealing spells and a lot more buffs (including for allies), some healing magic, and one or two interesting Svalding effects. Also, clarification on the word of command - it operates by forbidding all of the spirits to enter the area. So mage-type and god-sourced magic is unaffected, and familiars can still operate. But it completely stops all sorcery. Finally and tangentially, if y'all do end up setting up a PM for working out details of a character interaction, it would be nice (although not completely necessary) to include your friendly neighborhood GM in it. I may or may not have something to say, but it's nice to know plans beforehand so that I can point out potential problems/continuity issues/places where it would contradict canon (if and only if these exist) before the post goes up.
  21. Seonid
    Sounds fine with me. And I'll take it as a compliment only if it was good enough that it's hard to critique. If it is just so bad that you are trying to find a way to critique it without hurting my feelings, I'll (perversely) take it as an anti-compliment (like an insult, only about 20% cooler)
  22. Seonid
    Yeah...25 isn't old. I'm 25, and I'm not old. (I meant it when I said that I'd been working on Edassa for a decade - it's actually more than that now) And on the subject of burning all of my teenage writing - well, all of my fiction from before 20 or so is never going to see the light of day, but some of my writing assignments for high school English classes weren't half bad. And my Honors Thesis on string theory that I wrote for my Associate's Degree is something I don't cringe to read through again (I cringe leading up to it, then read it, then think - that really wasn't all that bad. It even had a few really good points.) But all of the fiction can join yours on the bonfire. Ooh!!! We should all have a teenage fiction bonfire burning party! EDIT: And my wife has celiac disease, so we eat gluten free (except for when I can get my hands on some Chex mix...)
  23. Seonid
    All of those are definitely well within her capabilities. If you want to do anything extreme along those lines, PM me first so I can tell whether it would affect her ability to manifest afterwards. And thanks! I'm glad that you like the map. Also, I was going to add you to Voidus' Spell Book PM, but it looks like he already did that. I almost want to post both books in the thread, but I don't know if BreathTaker or Voidus want to keep some of their weapons a secret. One more point for the whole thread in general - I highly recommend PM-ing each other before your characters go into combat with each other. Plan out how the combat will go with the other person involved before you write it up. A good general rule - if your post involves another person's character, ask permission first. The best solution is always collaboration. We haven't had any problems yet, I just want to head any off before they arise.
  24. Seonid
    Almost time for January Submissions! When do we get the new thread?
  25. Seonid
    Double post, I know, but I'm going to put the map in its own post so that its easier to find then searching through spoiler tags in the OP. It's still there, though...
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