Topic: Planetary Dawn Project: Construction of Worlds

[Krakow Sam]

I'm joining the anti-goblin party as well. Sorry Hydro and Slinky. I have enough trouble wiith goblins in my day to day life, I don't want them in my games.

[Oviraptor]

Don't forget to take a look at this:

And here is what I came up with for plate tectonics:



And here is the first "official" project KMZ file: https://gofile.io/?c=oab8Jx It includes the 800 pixel version of the map, the 10k pixel version of the map, and the tentative plate boundaries. (The 10k file takes a while to load so be patient).

If it's to everyone's liking, I can add directions. (Already have some in mind from the way I drew it).

[Josasa]

I knew my PCP senses were tingling.

I want in on this as well since I always enjoyed these kinds of projects. I was actually checking out the old DoW threads a few months ago so I'm glad to see this moving forward. However, my contributions will be limited until after Christmas due to things.

If we're voting on it, I'd rather stay away from the more fantastical side of things and go with a realistic approach.

[PatMan33]

Haha I was kind of hoping for some fantasy too, but it isn't as big a deal to me.

We have time until we reach any stage where we'd need to consider magic, maybe we can come up with a compromise then? Maybe some kind of slow magical force that permeates? I dunno. Or nothing at all! Remember guys, we have time on our side! Just don't die and we should be fine.

Out of curiosity, since we're at the start of this, instead of trying to fit tectonics onto an existing Map 4, do we just want to start with a generated Pangaea, cut it in spots, and then extrapolate it out? Ovi was showing me a thread yesterday at the Cartographer's Guild that laid out a very similar process. It wouldn't take that much longer and now that we have a couple more experienced players in the game it could be pretty great.

https://www.cartographersguild.com/showthread.php?t=2238

Thoughts? Remember there's no rush and there is plenty of time to discuss!

[Inkling]

Yeah, I'd like to see some element to make this different than Earth more than different continents.  I kinda thought this was going to be like Dawn of Worlds with a ton of weird races, but this direction is fine, too.  I guess now I'm picturing something like the world from Game of Thrones.  Mostly realistic, but a few weird animals and some magic stuff on the periphery.  But I haven't actually seen or read any Game of Thrones so that could be a completely inaccurate description of the setting.  Like Pat said, it sounds like we're a ways from adding in any of that stuff.

So again, how do we play this? what are the mechanics?

[Krakow Sam]

The magical elements in Game of Thrones start out on the periphery but then steadily ramp up through the series until people are giving birth to ghosts, stealing people's faces and using them as perfect disguises, wielding magic swords and unleasing dragons onto their enemies. Oh, and some light time travel.

The issue I have with "some fantasy elements" in a shared setting like this is that you very quickly lose any sort of cohesive style for the world and things get pretty out of hand pretty quicky. Something like Dawn of Worlds almost always ends up pretty goofy with a lot of off the wall goofball stuff. I'm not saying it's impossible to create something coherent but come on guys, lets be real, it's us we're talking about here. Me and Pat seem to have completely opposite taste about stuff about 50% of the time so chances are if we gave a carte blanche for fantastical elements someone would end up pissing off someone else without realising.

I#ll pretty much just go along with whatever the collective decides but that's my two cents.

[PatMan33]

Yeah that makes a lot of sense.

Any thoughts on the Pangaea idea?

[Krakow Sam]

Pangea sounds good to me.

Pangea in her pan-rear.

[Oviraptor]

Out of curiosity, since we're at the start of this, instead of trying to fit tectonics onto an existing Map 4, do we just want to start with a generated Pangaea, cut it in spots, and then extrapolate it out? Ovi was showing me a thread yesterday at the Cartographer's Guild that laid out a very similar process. It wouldn't take that much longer and now that we have a couple more experienced players in the game it could be pretty great.

https://www.cartographersguild.com/showthread.php?t=2238

Thoughts? Remember there's no rush and there is plenty of time to discuss!

The only problem I have with starting with plate tectonics is that we lose the infinite zoom of the vector map. And it's not like adding the plates after is too difficult. I thought mine came out okay. I didn't add in the plate directions in case people wanted to make changes to it, but I already had a vague idea of which way they would head.

As for fantastical elements, I'm definitely in the anti- group. Sam pretty much summed up how I feel about it. Besides, restrictions breed creativity much more than free reign (at least I've found that to be so).

[PatMan33]

Right right the vectors! Yeah okay, that's fine by me. Your plates look good as well.

Perhaps we could incorporate some sort of fantasy idea into the "mother nature" idea I was discussing last week. Basically each turn one person gets to be mother nature and gets to cause events to occur around the planet before everyone else begins their turns. Would allow us to have some random or unexpected events happen and each turn it would rotate to a new person. Maybe we include some kind of event that is a miracle or some other unexplained happening that impacts history.

[Oviraptor]

Here are the plate directions I came up with:



And the blank version (you can replace the "Tectonics" layer in Google Earth with this one):



These are functional, more than aesthetically pleasing.

[Hydromancerx]

Ok here is my guess of where mountains and trenches will form.



Red = Big Mountains
Orange = Small Mountains
Blue = Stays Flat
Green = Makes Trench

[Oviraptor]

Here's a good article about plate tectonics that should help define terms better. Faults basically fall into three categories, convergent, divergent, and transverse. Fault lines also generally promote the formation of volcanoes. Also, make sure to view it on the globe to get the full perspective.

[Hydromancerx]

In that article's picture it looks like single plates don't go in just one direction.

[PatMan33]

Well, for the pea brains in the group like myself, let's keep it pretty straightforward since we're already going into plate tectonics and that is a bit more deep than even I initially expected. :3

Plates move in one direction.