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07-15-2003, 07:45 PM #1
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Daniel McSorley wrote:
> I`m thinking of putting a what-if-Columbus-were-right continent over
> there. The part the Anuireans colonized would roughly resemble
> Kamchatca and the eastern coast of Russia, in terrain at least.
I like it. One very important question would be: are there elves in
those endless Siberian forests, or not? If yes, are they anything like
the Cerilian Sidhelien, or not?
> West of the asians, maybe some Mongol-type orcs, because I like orcs
> and I like Mongols.
A fine plan. Two great tastes that taste great together? ;>
> West of that, some mountains,
AKA the Urals and the Caucasus? =)
> then a hellenistic area, which is visited by some far-ranging Basarji
> from the original homeland of that people. They probably sailed
> pretty far, maybe island-hopping to get there.
Sounds good to me.
> In the south of this big landmass, maybe some big island chains
> like the islands between Australia and Asia.
>
> East of Cerilia, there are the Dragon Isles, right, and then the
> Basarji homeland. Probably a long gap between there and my asia,
> that`s about it for the northern hemisphere.
>
> South of Cerilia, we have Aduria, of course, which some people have
> variously put yuan-ti and beast-man type empires on that I know of,
> and the Adurian Empire or remnants thereof.
>
> Any other continents you`ve placed on Aebrynnis?
This leads us to the age-old question, just how big is this planet?
The map we have which shows the largest region is the cardstock terrain
types map from the original boxed set, and its near-twin ocean areas card
sheet from Cities of the Sun. The scale on those maps, taken at face
value, would imply they measure about 2,500 miles east-west and 2,000
miles north-south. With fantasy worlds, flat planets are always a
possibility, but the strong north-south climate gradient implies to me
that the planet is indeed round.** This would mean we can believe the N-S
number, but the E-W number is true only at some specific latitude -- which
we don`t know (or else the "lines" of longitude are _curved_ on the map,
which is a complication all sane sailors (Cerilia`s primary mapmakers, no
doubt) would avoid). Furthermore, properly correcting for distortion
requires we know at least two actual latitude lines on the map and the
radius of the planet.
Now, Cerilia is quite small -- a bit smaller than Australia (if, for the
sake of argument, we take 2000x2500 as a real, rectangular area, Cerilia
would need to cover half of this map to be the same size as Australia;
it`s shown as more like 20-25%). 2,000 miles N-S is about 29 degrees on
Earth -- is that big enough to handle the variation from Aduria`s deserts
to Thaele`s glaciers? I`d say yes, since that`s enough to reach from
Tunisia to Finland (though of course the effect of mountains and ocean
currents on rainfall and temperature should also be considered, not to
mention that desertification is largely the fault of goats...). That
means, although some people have in the past suggested this, it is not
actually necessary to make Aebrynis as small as Mars (one-quarter Earth`s
surface area). In fact, if we say Aebrynis is the size of Earth, the map
position is about the same range as Tunisia to Finland, and the horizontal
scale is set at the N-S center of the map (to minimize the relative
distortion between the edges), then we find that the map in question
covers, say, 30 N to 60 N, and 50 degrees E-W, and really does cover about
5 million square miles (my choice of middle latitude for the horizontal
scale is what makes this the same as the rectangular calculation).
The crucial result of all of the above is this: that map covers only
_one-fortieth_ of the total surface area of an Earth-sized Aebrynis.
There`s plenty of room out there for other continents!
Any thoughts on how big Aduria is? How about Djapar? Thaele?
** As an aside, it`s also probably a bit farther from its star, since its
year is 388 days long; its sun could instead or also be smaller than ours,
but I personally would prefer slightly farther away from a rather more
massive star, so that the amount of solar energy received per unit area is
not too much less than ours, lest we leave the whole planet too cold.
Ryan Caveney
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