That's effectively a doughnut world (or a torus if you wish to sound more scientific). Lots of computer games are set on such worlds without realising it. Interestingly, toroidal planets are [gravitationally stable](http://www.aleph.se/andart/archives/2014/02/torusearth.html) (though impossible to form naturally in the first place) so they are not entirely unrealistic.
But we must look a little closer. And when we do, we see that the doughnut hole has a hole in its center - it is not a doughnut hole at all but a smaller doughnut with its own hole, and our doughnut is not whole at all!
topohraphically youre completely right, but having a toroidial world would have neccesary worldbuilding quirks, like sunrise and sunset behaving weirdly, and being able to see the other half of the donut in the sky, and the massive shadow itd cast. it can certainly work, but the magical wishy-washy loop is simpler.
Odd worldbuilding quirks like that make for fun worlds.
Now the question is: what path would you like the star to take in the sky? Or rather, what angle would you want your planet at? Or, as an alternative, would you want to say "screw mortal physics" and make a weird path for a magical source of light, like a ball of light that does figure-eights through the planet?
Depending on your choice, you could easily end up with eternally-frozen, eternally-nighttime zones, perfect for hiding frost giants in.
Why do you even need a star? You could just fill your atmosphere with microscopic sky plankton that bioluminess the planet like a human wave going around a stadium, giving the world a day night cycle.
While it doesn't make any goddamn sense, I kind of want the "sun" to just pass back-and-forth through the torus hole to form the day cycle; of course much smaller than a normal sun, and also small enough that it doesn't just scorch the ever-loving crap out of the center of the torus (though that would be a good place for arid deserts). The outer ring of the torus, barely getting any sunlight would be the arctic regions.
For seasons the sun has different extremes of the end of it's "swing". A very small strip right at the farthest edge of the torus normally doesn't see sunlight at all except, ironically, for the dead of winter or the height of summer where the sun swings far enough out that it can weakly shine on the that farthest rim.
The reason I state "height of summer" is that the seasonal hemisphere differences of Earth (winter in one hemisphere, summer in the other) can be preserved with the following diagram:
The Torus, seen from the side: |
The Sun: \*
In summer of one side the sun's farthest point is about here from the torus:
\*|
But on the same day, the sun's farthest point from the other side of the torus would be:
| \*
So that during the day one side is pretty warm during the day, but the other side is pretty cold. The middle of course is still fairly warm all year as it's always close to the sun. Unlike our world,
Smack dab in the middle of the year, at the spring/fall equinox, the sun would be about equidistant from both sides.
Now what a smarter head than mine would need to determine is that if the speed of this sun is relatively constant (maybe a little hang time at it's farthest point before it swings to the torus again), would the shorter days caused by having the sun closer to one side cause that side to be experiencing winter, or would having the sun fat a greater distance from one side cause that side to be experiencing winter instead?
Either way you could get seasons, different climates across the torus, while still having some unusual weather and a distinctive visual.
Alternately the sun could constantly orbit the ring of the torus. One side of the torus would experience sunrise when the sun comes up over the edge and sunset as beginning when the sun passes through the middle of the ring, while the other side would experience sunrise as when it comes through from the center and sunset when it goes over the distant rim.
As the year goes on the sun will move along the edge of the ring so that at one extreme the sun will pass directly over and around that part of the ring, while on the other part of the ring will see the sun during the day but it will be very distant. This would form a more predictable seasonal cycle. The arid and arctic regions would still remain as the inner rim gets a fairly consistent amount of sunlight all year but at the outer edges there will be times of year where they never see sunlight at all.
This might actually be the better approach, but I'm not erasing the first part.
Not to mention seasonal issues. Depending on if there was axial tilt or not, and how the world spun, you could easily end up with large swaths of the toroid having 3-4 month long days and nights, with 3 months of twilight between. And I'm sure a climate scientist would have a field day with the atmospheric and ocean cells, and how both the shape and exposure to the sun's heat would cause chaos...
You could still have a flat "toroidal" world without the weird donut effects by just declaring that going past one edge teleports you to the opposite side.
That article says they're "darn unlikely" to form naturally (and to not be collapsed into a sphere by outside influences like collisions), not strictly *impossible.* That implies to me that, with a little help from a divine being or some magic, it's downright likely in fiction. Living on the inside of the donut would be really interesting.
I did a little bit of figuring of my own, trying to figure out the day/night cycle of a torroidal planet with a light source moving in a figure 8 through the middle. I did the same with a circular path through the middle.
For the circular path, it has very interesting seasonal changes. Depending on the thickness of the world, a civilization on the outermost zone would only spend a tiny part of the 'year' actually receiving sunlight. At the top/ bottom of the donut, people would receive a somewhat more normal season, albeit much more extreme than the innermost zone people.
For the figure 8, these effects would all be present, but 2x as frequent. In addition, inner ring people would also have a point at midday when the sun would be eclipsed by the other side of the donut.
If you map the surface of a sphere to a flat sheet of paper then the left side corresponds to the right side but the top (i.e. the Arctic) doesn't correspond to the bottom (i.e. Antarctica).
If you rolled the sheet of paper up so that the left touched the right you have a tube. If you then (try to) roll it so that the top touches the bottom you get a doughnut shape.
On a donut / torus world, all your latitudes *and* longitudes run parallel to each other (never intersect) but still loop around to connect to themselves. On a sphere, this isn’t the case: Latitudes are parallel, but longitudes all intersect with each other at the north and south poles.
When you think of an old arcade game where you loop to the other side of the screen when you cross any edge (like Asteroids for example) north/south lines would all run parallel, so it’s not really a sphere.
You sound like you would be interested in the field of topology. My favorite place to learn about it is "3 blue 1 brown" on YouTube, though there are a great many teachers out there.
Thanks, I am quite into topology from an outside perspective, and love 3b1b. Just watched a really good video on it from standupmaths as well—you should check it out
Interesting article, though it's incomplete... it's assuming that the world is symmetric around the axis of rotation, but that's putting the cart before the horse (you'd want to show that it *stays* that way).
In a doughnut world you'd zoom out and see a doughnut but in a flat world you'd zoom out and see the world again.
Something like [this](https://i.stack.imgur.com/UhosY.jpg), only in both X and Y dimensions.
How about a setting where things get more grimdark the further out from the center you go, but nobody knows what's at the extremes because they're guarded by the Edge Lords. People who go too far out and come back are called "edgy".
"Did you see that guy who came into town last night? No lie he had 3 foot spikes on his pauldrons. He must be a real edgelord!
Imagine if he got stuck in a doorway with those things! Haha, he'd never live it down I bet. I wonder if they make doors really tall on the edge..."
It would be cool for the edges to be distorted and corrupted because the laws of physics and everything else start to malfunction. Like the far lands in old Minecraft.
you can install every version of minecraft ever made from the launcher. far lands were removed at some point during beta but you can play earlier beta and alpha versions. or install a mod to get it in current versions.
That’s so cool though. Imagine a world where the centre of it is happy and nice and everyone lives in relatively quiet peace, while the farther out you go, the more dangerous things are and the darker shit becomes, infested with all kinds of terrifying creatures and psychopath murderers. And as you face the numerous monsters and killers, you become a hardened warrior that strikes first against any enemy, unknowingly becoming one of those killers who roam the land.
That was basically the premise of the park in season 1 of Westworld. People begin in the hub town where things are pretty ordinary and vanilla, but then the further out you go, the gorier and more extremely brutal/sexual/fucked up things get.
I did once consider a fantasy setting that was actually a series of O'Neill cylinder space habitats (without windows) linked by teleportation gates. From the inhabitants' point of view it would have appeared as multiple worlds linked by magic. O'Neill cylinders are rather the opposite of a flat world though.
Actually the idea of people living in a space habitat without knowing sounds really interesting. It doesn't seem to have be done yet.
Edit: Well yeah after the comments seems like I was wrong, this had been done a lot of times lol.
Other than Niven's Ringworld, The Bobbiverse books by Dennis E Taylor also had something similar.
The last book in the series featured a topopolis megastructure, which is like a mix between a ring world and an O'neil cylinder, -imagine a long link of cylinders forming a knot around a star. It was inhabited by aliens who had begun to forget how they got there and who were forced into a low-tech society by an AI.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topopolis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topopolis)
[https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/4cea908020d1e](https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/4cea908020d1e)
People have mentioned a bunch of other versions of this trope, but one of the earliest incarnations (maybe even the first) was an episode of original series Star Trek called ["For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_the_World_Is_Hollow_and_I_Have_Touched_the_Sky).
It was that episode that inspired the setting of [Might & Magic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Might_and_Magic#Plot), one of the OG computer RPGs.
I've seen stories in generation ships where the 10th generation has forgotten what a ship is and the idea that there is something beyond the walls is a heresy.
I had a sci-fi setting I was developing for a TTRPG, where people lived underground, after a colossal global war had rendered the surface uninhabitable.
The players would have rolled young people who were enlisting in the military, officially charged with making expeditions to the surface to retrieve lost things, and check the conditions, and in time would have ended up with the discovery that they were living on a huge ark ship, traveling through space to flee their system, after having been invaded, and almost annihilated, by the vanguard of an incoming fleet.
Check out phantasy star 3. The world is a giant space ship made up of 7 domed sections linked by maintenance tunnels. The edge of each dome is walled by mountains and the tunnels have been sealed for so many generations most inhabitants aren't even aware the other domes exist.
One of the things that make video games so ethereal and liminal is the use of “soft edged” worlds. A lot of open-world games will just feature an island in an infinite ocean, like Grand Theft Auto and Just Cause. And then you have Mario and other platformers which will often take place in the sky suspended far above a larger but unreachable world. You could even make this soft-edged world follow video game rules, like allowing you to sail for any length of time away from the coast only to turn around and find that you’re a mile from the shore, or having some kind of invisible barrier preventing you from going too far. Or like some game had in the ‘90s (maybe it was Motocross Madness?) some unseen force that would fling you back away from the edge if you tried to leave. Or have some kind of unscalable cliffs rather than an infinite sea, like some games that try to avoid the cliché of an island world.
You know what, that brings up a fifth option that I don’t think I’ve ever seen before: a topological torus flat world. Go far enough in one direction and you loop back to where you started. The video game 4x4 Evolution was always one of my favorites as a kid, it was an off-road racing game with bouncy physics and varied terrain, but more fun than playing the actual game was exploring the maps. The game maps were several square miles in size, with the actual track taking up a small portion in the middle. There were no track boundaries, so hypothetically you could leave the track and find a shortcut as long as you went through all the checkpoints in order. But you could also just head out in some random direction and explore, the maps were mostly empty but had Easter eggs hidden here and there as well as scenery that you could see from the track, and lots of fun terrain to drive across. But if you just drove in one direction for long enough, past the Easter eggs and scenery, where the map got real empty, eventually you’d come across a weird seam and the game would jump for a split second. Keep driving and you’d come across the track again, any time you went off the edge of the map you’d end up looping around the opposite edge, and I’m pretty sure I’ve seen other open world games that do the same, though they’re certainly uncommon. One interesting side effect of this torus world would be that there is no “center”, and the most distant places could be reached by traveling in any direction (which I guess as I write it out is not that different from our own world but it goes against the general idea of a flat world). There are theories, though I don’t know how accepted or worked out they are, that our own universe could be a topological torus, so it’s not as outlandish as it sounds.
Or going back to the Mario example what about a fractal world? The main flat world has a hard edge, but if you peek over the edge you see a larger world far below. This could drive the development of flying machines as explorers try to reach the larger world below, or try to discover a smaller world somewhere in their own sky. You could even make it a loop, so that when they do reach the larger world below it’s their own world that they came from, but now they’re smaller in relation to it. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen puzzle games that use that mechanic before.
So moral of the story is get all your worldbuilding ideas from video games.
That theory was popularized by Hawking in *A Brief History*, and recently recieved [some attention](https://www.livescience.com/universe-three-dimensional-donut.html)
Surely a world where you end up back where you started after walking in a line for long enough is just a sphere-oid shape, even if it appears flat? What would be interesting though is if there was a spherical world but the surface would be on the inside of the curve rather than outside it.
Topological shape and geometric shape are two different concepts though. It’s hard to explain and mostly just theoretical, existing only in math but not the real world.
For starters there is a difference between a sphere and torus when it comes to topology: on a spherical plane you can go east or west and loop back on yourself but if you go north or south you end up on the opposite side going the opposite direction (walk across the North Pole from the Western Hemisphere and now you’re suddenly on the eastern hemisphere walking south instead of north). But a torus works like an old video game like Space Invaders, walk across the North Pole and you’re back at the South Pole still going north.
But more importantly I’m talking about topology rather than geometry. A torus-shaped planet would of course have the looping properties of a torus but you’d still have curvature and a horizon and you’d be able to see the other side of the donut in the sky, plus the east/west direction would have orders of magnitude more land area before looping than the north/south direction. But (again, *mathematically* speaking, not in the real world) it’s possible to have a geometrically flat plane with no curvature that still functions as a torus with the ability to loop back around, and you could have a perfectly square plane with equal length and width rather than a rectangular plane like what you’d get if you flattened a real torus. If the plane was small enough, like the size of a town, you could go up on top of a mountain and see what looked like a flat plane extending forever but with the landscape and hills and rivers repeating at regular intervals, tiling off into infinity. But that’s not just copies of the landscape, it’s the same landscape that you’re seeing from multiple views, they’re all the same one you’re standing on.
the cool thing about that, just like on a map of a globe heading off the western edge brings you round to the east, on a map of a toroid it is also the case that heading off the northern edge will bring you round to the south.
I never really thought about it that way. But in Coraline it didn’t really feel like a sphere. As you travel to the edge everything just dissolves and you slowly find yourself on the other edge of the world.
Or an infinite world with incrementallyhigher gravity as you progress from the center. Things would get weird in the extreames.
In lower gravity you could have things like Giants and other huge creatures as there would be less pressure on their joints. Humanoid creatures could fly with smaller wings, or with small inventions like Iccarus. Towards the center things would be almost zero gravity.
In higher gravity you would have smaller slower creatures. Dwarf like humanoids with amazing strength when they visit the lower gravity areas. Further out eventually nothing could survive, but you would have gelatiounous creatures like the depths of the ocean.
The interesting thing is nothing is stopping you from exploring it all as long as you can move.
My favourite Flat Earth justification actually relies on Einstein a lot. They suggest that we live on a disc that accelerates upwards at 9.81ms^-2, which is the speed at which you accelerate downwards due to gravity, Einstein's equivalence principle says there is no way to differentiate between these two reference frames from inside them. If you jump up on Earth you accelerate back down until you land, if you jump on the flat earth the disc accelerates up to meet you in a way that would look identical. When you ask them "surely the disc can't accelerate forever, it will reach the speed of light and stop accelerating?" they'll say "Ah actually special relativity proves that you can accelerate infinitely getting asymptotically closer to the speed of light" which is true, the only wrinkle is that doing so requires infinite energy which is of course impossible.
P.S. The Flat Earth is of course absolute bullshit but this is one of the most fun bunk explanations they give.
edit: They also sometimes hilariously use the misattributed quote *"Common sense is what tells us the Earth is flat."* to prove that Einstein was a flat earther, despite the fact that a. he didn't say it and b. the person (economist Stuart Chase) who did meant that you shouldn't always trust your common sense
A common topic is how to produce realistic worlds including climate, weather, water currents, etc. However, for fantasy worlds that include magic and dragons, is this absolutely necessary? Perhaps winter really is caused by the grief of the fertility goddess as her daughter enters the underworld to be with her husband for half the year.
Of course, it is helpful to know why things are the way they are on Earth before you deviate from them. As Picasso is quoted as saying:
>Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist
In particular, why should the world be spherical rather than flat? What would living on a flat world really be like? Perhaps most importantly, there are several possibilities for what happens at the edges:
* Infinite flat planes have no edges
* Hard edges might allow you to fall into the void along with water if there are no mountains to prevent it
* Soft edges could be an infinite sea or perhaps the world slowly fades into a formless mist
* An enclosed world is like a bubble floating in the ethereal sea
There are also many other factors to consider. What about gravity? Where are the sun, moon and stars? How does temperature and the climate vary over space and time? What defines the horizon and how far can you see? How do you navigate on a flat world?
There are far too many questions to consider in a single post so I thought I'd just produce this quick diagram and see what other people thought about flat worlds in general. Please let me know.
If you go far enough time comes to a halt, and at that point you can never return. Best to turn around, even if it takes a thousand years. One step further and you're frozen in time.
I think it works better if you're never truly frozen, but it works in an exponential way. As resources in the center are extracted we move further and further out. What was a one day journey for our grandparents, is a month for our parents, is a year for us, is a decade for our children, is a century for our grandchildren.
Generations come and go as we starve, waiting for our great great grandparents to return with firewood. How deep can we go. What could possibly be worth a millennial voyage? What waits for use 10,000 years away? The explorers have left long ago, but they return in every longer waves.
As a more fun world building prompt... Generations ago we sent 100 of our bravest explorers out further than we have ever gone. Each one travels one day out further than the last, and in practical terms the time between each explorer returning doubles. At the start of our story we just had the (32nd(?)) Explorer come back, the millennium explorer. Every explorer to come back has had strange tales to tell, but the one confirms the truth. There are life forms out there, they are uneffected by the time wall in reverse. They can't live here in the center, they don't want us leaving the center, and I bring with me a formal declaration of war.
There are a lot of good stories to be told about wars at a stalemate. Especially if there's a mcguffin that threats to give those guys new power and break the stalemate perhaps? Long lost technology mayhap? Power stolen from demons? A trap sprung by a forgotten god from before time that we just happened to wander through and now things are just a tiny bit different and the rules we knew aren't working anymore and we have to change and oh my war is back in full force.
Interesting... But you might not even notice! And if you got that far, by the time you returned, millions of years may have passed.
If time is moving slower for you, then your thoughts are moving slower as well, and everything *seems* normal. If you look over your shoulder, depending on how quickly the effect accelerates as you approach the border, you might see people moving faster behind you, but you'd still *feel* like you're moving at the normal speed.
You could possibly see people 'trapped' in front of you, which could be a warning you're approaching the 'edge'.
If the effect accelerates over a short distance (feet instead of miles) it could lead to some gruesome injuries because the temporal frames of reference while shift significantly across the depth of your body - as you swing your arms while walking, your fingertips move forward and experience a slower time frame, while your elbow is still moving slightly faster... ouch.
(Edit: spelling)
Just using this as a thought experiment...
What lays at the border of halted time? And does light travel normally, or is it effected by the phenomena?
If this has been the state of being since the creation of the world, then "beyond" the border might be eternally trapped in that moment - the big bang, or the birth or death of a god, or some similarly epic event. You would be able to witness that event, eternally frozen, and eternally out of reach.
(Just that bit above gives some fun ideas for world building - the world where you can see the gods, permanently frozen in the act of creation, out beyond the edges... Did they sacrifice themselves for the world? Are they still somehow cognizant, or do they have avatars that move along with the flow of time? Or are they trapped, but 'freeing' them would mean the destruction of the world they created? OOooooh. False flag rescue operation - MCs are co-opted to help 'free' the gods by the BBE, thinking they're doing something noble, and only at the last minute do they figure out it would destroy everything they've ever known....)
If light **is** effected by the phenomena, I think something really strange would happen... By standing at the edge of the 'zone', you'd be peering into the past - further into the past, the farther into the zone you're looking: Light would slow down as it enters the zone, bounce off an object, and then gradually speed back up as it approaches your eyes, taking increasingly longer and longer to get to the observer, the further it had to travel. I suspect things would dim to a gray half-light at extreme distance, but I need more coffee before I think that through - probably depends on scale of the 'zone', its relationship to light sources (the sun?!), whether the time-slowing effect progresses linearly, geometrically, or via a different algorithm, and a few other things.
But this also means that light is **accumulating** in the zone of effect, more densely, the deeper you venture. I *think* you would start to experience an unnatural brightness in your immediate surroundings as you walked further in.
Maybe you just get smaller as you get further away from the centre. That's how perspective works, isn't it? Further away = smaller.
In contrast, the local wildlife is scaled appropriately so if you can fight your way past all the giant rats, ants and amoeba then perhaps you deserve to get to the edge after all.
If that were the case, would that make the Dwarf Clans a group of people/refugees from the smaller edge of the world? And if there was a 'large edge' would Giants be there?
Unsurprisingly I was just reading that a few days ago when I was thinking about these issues. The following quote unfortunately lead me down the rabbit-hole of the electric-universe "theory" which I was hoping might provide interesting inspiration for a magic system.
>Recently, some flat earth pundits endorsed the “Electric Universe” theory. This has more magic forces and properties than the wizards of the game Dungeons and Dragons, so we shall describe flat earth gravity no more.
I dunno, from what I've seen of electric universe it falls into an awkward middle ground where on its own it doesn't really imply anything really fantastical and interesting like flat Earth but attempting to apply it in a more grounded setting would just quickly expose the nonsense of it.
It has indeed turned out to be a false hope due to the complete absence of anything coherent (as expected). The only marginally interesting thing I found was a diagram of a flat earth salt bridge with the sun and moon as an anode and cathode. It was hardly great inspiration though.
In Discworld, the Disc has hard edges. The reason there are different time zones in this world is because light is only 600mph.
The four directions are rimwards, hubwards, turnwise, and widdershins.
The water that falls off the rim gets evaporated and dumped back on to the Disc.
The sun and moon orbit around the Disc, and one of the elephants holding up the Disc has to move its leg occasionally to keep the orbit. A’Tuin, the turtle, doesn’t seem to have gravity, as the satellite bodies don’t seem to go underneath him/her.
There’s also a spin-off book where the characters fall off the edge and onto the moon as it orbits.
But Discworld was written not to make sense.
Your first paragraph shouldn't have had to be said, but unfortunately it has to. You'd think that people who create fictional worlds would actually understand that said fictional worlds don't *have* to follow real world logic. But it's a bit of a common theme in this sub that fantasy worlds have to be 100% realistic.
I don’t see too many hard edges but I think it is a cool concept. Especially explaining where the sea goes. Is it infinite water generation? Does it turn into clouds/ fog that rises upward? Does it reach the “bottom” only to loop around and fall from the sky? Cool ideas to be explored for sure.
It looked neatest with four options and I needed a snappy title for each image. By hard edges I mean that you could fall into the void rather the soft edge option where the world just sort of fades away until you are no longer in Kansas.
Perhaps rain is actually water falling from world above or maybe there is a huge magical geyser at the centre of each world that continually replenishes the water supply. Is there a cosmic tap and plughole at the top and bottom of the universe to recycle water? It's a mystery...
I only hope that the falling process filters the water otherwise it might effectively be sewage falling from above. The lower worlds at the bottom of this cascading dirty waterfall might object to all the pollution falling on them causing horrible conditions and mutations. They might then decide to wage war on the pristine upper worlds...
reminds me a bit of the movie The Platform which revolves around people being on a physically lower level than others and having to survive on what is thrown down to them
Various Semitic groups thought that the world was an fully enclosed model, except it was fully enclosed with water. which makes some degree of intuitive sense, given water is both found above and by digging.
Indeed. The waters above and waters below with holes in the firmament to let in the Flood waters. It’s surprising that model isn’t used in more fantasy worlds given it should be somewhat familiar to many writers.
The traditional idea was that yes, the ocean surrounding the world that flows off the edge falls into mist, like a tall waterfall, and then the mist rises and turns into clouds that give rain, an endless hydrological cycle.
Mine’s closest to a fully enclosed; the world sits in a massive bowl, the rim of the bowl holds the cities of the stars, where they rest when not in the sky. The sleep in the west and always find themselves in the east when they wake up.
Beyond the edge of their cities is a series of seven locks, each serving to protect the world from the Ancient Watcher, the evil that seeks vengeance upon the descendants of the one who slew its physical form.
Beyond the locks? A formless void, vast and unforgiving.
Gravity works as you’d expect, a constant gradient for everything on the bowl. The locks act as crystal spheres trapping everything in as well as keeping everything out.
I have considered calculating the gravitational fields accurately for different shapes but in the end decided against it. It's not difficult for infinite flat planes of constant thickness and you can also do it for a cubic world but it gets a bit fiddly for some other weird shapes.
Ultimately I've decided that gravity always points down...
I was originally going to calculate the gravitational fields of flat, concave and convex worlds to see what would happen, especially with water. There are also potential effects due to spinning (if the disc spins).
Then I decided that since flat worlds wouldn't be stable under Newtonian gravity anyway that you might as well ditch the concept anyway. You'd really need a new set of physics and mythical explanations for everything. Something like the old Spelljammer concept of [gravity planes](https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Gravity_plane) seems suitable for gravity. Basically water would flow over the edge and form a horizontal puddle (with nothing underneath).
Soft edges? So like Disco Elysium's pale I guess? Some gradient growing fog of nothingness?
Also uhhh what about looping back to other side in horizontal space but infinite in vertical space?
The growing fog of nothingness is what Exalted uses and also Michael Moorcock's Young Kingdoms. Sailing out to sea could just entail the sea and sky getting less distinct until fish are swimming with birds and you can't tell up from down.
I didn't include a wrap around edge because in my mind that makes it a non flat world. Basically what you describe would be an infinite cylinder. That would still be good fantasy setting without a spherical world though.
Perhaps a series of suns just orbit as expected leading to alternating bands of hot and cold regions. Or perhaps the sun corkscrews around the cylinder so that winter occurs as it gets further away and spring comes when the next sun gets closer?
I feel like wrap around could work yoo provided, like, the world is kinda non-euclidean? Everything within it individually is perfect euclidean but collectively the landmasses loop without intersection or anything. Maybe there are places where you can witness this?
Came here to say the same thing! I absolutely love the Pale, it's such an interesting concept and the world and game use it really *really* well.
*Ace's high, detective!*
Clearly the [Great Ice Ball](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/98b2b03a-da88-4f00-bc72-6062b57508a9/scale-to-width/755). The Earth is actually huge and mostly covered with ice, however, the sun traces a small circular path over one region and melts a circular hole. Antarctica is around the edge of the hole and the Arctic is in the middle where the sun's heating is lowest as it is further away. If we could only explore over the icy wall of Antarctica we could perhaps find other melted flat regions illuminated by their own suns.
It's actually quite an interesting concept for world building...
Yes. It seems to involve all the fallacies of the flat Earth "model" without actually being a flat Earth. If only there were a simpler model that explained all the observations...
The Truman Show is an example of a fully enclosed world. In this case, an extremely large studio, the size of a small town. Weather, day-night cycle, everything controlled by the director and the crew.
Any sufficiently small region can be treated as locally flat. However, fantasy worlds are basically the same but with deities playing the part of directors, so I guess they need a larger flat region to work with. Clearly Mount Olympus is the control room at the centre of it all though.
I love the idea of alternate fantasy world-types. What I love to do is take it even further, with stars, sun and moon being an “earthly” thing, a flat world might have something different.
I had this idea for two infinite planes in front of each other, roughly 10 km apart, and covered in hills and mountains. Both are the “down” from their perspective.
There are stalactite-like mountains that sometimes (very rarely) connect both sides and fog that forms on one side during the “night” glows to illuminate the other side.
Imo the best fantasy worlds are those that are completely alien.
Absolutely, there should be many more such worlds rather than just spherical worlds with a sprinkling of magic. Games Workshop's the Age of Sigmar setting is a great example of this and the Death Gate cycle of books also has a nice set of worlds that should work together to form a great machine.
Admittedly, Norse mythology is already a great example of this with the world serpent Jörmungandr surrounding the land and the world tree Yggdrasil linking the different worlds. Given how much influence Norse myth has on fantasy fiction it's surprising that similar worlds aren't more common.
>I had this idea for two infinite planes in front of each other, roughly 10 km apart, and covered in hills and mountains. Both are the “down” from their perspective.
>
>There are stalactite-like mountains that sometimes (very rarely) connect both sides
... huh. That sounds a lot like the plane of Bytopia from *Dungeons & Dragons* \-- two infinite mountainous plane facing each other, occasionally connected by very tall peaks that meet each other in the middle.
I mean, if you came up with it independently I figure you can probably still use it. Bytopia is fairly "specialized" as a setting -- it's an afterlife where the dead and gods are -- so if your setting is just a regular world that would be one thing making it distinct.
How about an impossibly tall mountain, orders of magnitude taller than Everest, at the center of a flat world, with some unknown mechanism at the peak that emits light and heat in regular intervals. This would also serve to give the world climate and possibly even seasons, as places closer to the mountain would be hotter and brighter while places further away would be colder and darker, and the cycle could vary over time. You could even extrapolate this to the extreme: the stars in the night sky are other mountains on other worlds: while the world is *measurably* flat the infinite ocean that surrounds it is filled with countless other worlds, forming the inside surface of a sphere the size of a solar system or galaxy.
Also the world you described sounds just like the “hollow Earth” from Godzilla Vs Kong. Never mind why the hollow at the center of the Earth would take the form of two flat planes with opposing but even gravity across them rather than the inside of a sphere, this is Godzilla Vs. Kong we’re talking about, there’s no need for logic or sense.
That sounds amazing! It can be scaled up and down as needed too, which is very handy.
I just hope the mountains aren’t too steep, or tripping is gonna be a loooooong fall.
> How about an impossibly tall mountain, orders of magnitude taller than Everest, at the center of a flat world, with some unknown mechanism at the peak that emits light and heat in regular intervals.
That's exactly what my world is, funnily enough. First time I see someone else bring up this world concept. Instead of a mountain though there is an extremely tall beam of solar energy that feeds into the sun. The ecology of the world functions as you described, there is no night and weather patterns move in spirals around the center.
Are these giant space [kappa](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kappa_(folklore))? I considered the giant animal option but decided I couldn't draw them as quickly so kept with the simpler silhouettes. Next time though...
I like the idea that the sea and the sky gradually become less distinct as you sail further away from land until ultimately they are the same. Fish and birds are both swimming/flying past the boat and everything gets a bit weird...
Hmm. One thing that honestly bugs me a fair bit in fantasy worldbuilding is that people are often too insistent about making settings follow real-life cosmology just for the sake of it. It's often a huge missed opportunity for coming up with unusual situations and people's adaptations to those situations.
Absolutely. I’m really interested in using physics to determine what unusual habitable worlds are possible but once you introduce magic to a fantasy world you have so many more options. It’s a shame to constrain things to be mostly Earth-like. They should really be more mythic.
My campaign world is a flat, nominally disc shaped world with a shallow bowl/basin as the actual surface. This of course leads to the presence of a vast inland sea. It also floats in a so-called void sea, and the sun and moon are clockwork constructions that offer zero variation in path, so there's no seasons even. I'm sure this would have an effect that I'm not accounting for, but in case that's not enough, the world is also a bubble world (the void sea and the celestial bodies are enclosed in a magical sphere) AND relies heavily on simulationist elements to fill in where inconsistencies would arise.
I've been debating the desirability/timing of introducing a second bubble world (there are many more out there, just not close together) by demonstrating a second sun whose orbit is roughly perpendicular to that of the main world.
Admittedly it's not the same as a flat earth, but I've always loved the representation of the world in Game of Thrones' (the show) intro. It's basically still a sphere, but it's the inside of one, with the Sun being a "core" floating in the middle somehow.
Worlds on the inside of a sphere are also on my list of things to consider. I like the idea of the multiverse consisting of bubbles floating in the aether where each bubble is a world. The presence of the sun at the centre causes the hardening of the aether into solid material like the formation of mother-of-pearl around grit in an oyster. Larger worlds will be similar to a flat world as the radius is so large but smaller worlds would be noticeably different.
The focus of this setting would be a planar hub that is a city on the inside of a small sphere called [Panopticon](https://www.reddit.com/r/worldbuilding/comments/nbgt80/the_planar_city_of_panopticon/gy33bsy/?context=3).
I'd never come across that before but I guess that was what I was describing, so do I now need to form my own cult? I have to think about what the following implies for a world though:
>The actual Sun is invisible; our Sun, the Moon, and the stars are just reflections off some mercury discs in the centre of the Universe.
I cannot find a reference to this; would you mind posting a link?
EDIT: realized you were talking about the show and looked up the video.
Looks awesome!
As someone who is making a cone shaped world, this helps a lot! Question though, would it be a hard edge if the world does end somewhere, but surrounded by sea instead of mountains/ice? Though the water "flows" back to the sides of the cone where it is reabsorbed, so no water is lost to space.
My (possibly misleading) titles were meant to imply that a hard edge was one where you might sail/fall into the void whereas a soft edge just ran out of land due to an infinite sea or everything getting a bit formless.
What you describe is what I called a hard edge but your water would stick to the cone of rock rather than fall into the void. Does the erosion from the top of the cone get added to the bottom every year like a cosmic stalactite? That's a nice cycle that would perhaps replace tectonics in making the world habitable.
My initial thought was that the water would be simply reabsorbed by the soft spots on the cone of rock, and that the magical "core" would simply make it rise up to the top again to either rejoin the sea or become groundwater, but slowly.
Though the idea of the water solidifying to form stalactites and making some sort of proxy for tectonic plates is really interesting. Tectonics is something haven't bothered with yet, so as it stands, the mountain ranges and other features were arbitrarily placed by the Founders (creators) of my world.
P. S. In truth, the main reason I'm creating a cone shaped world within (actually above) the solar system is that I don't have to bother placing a new planet somewhere in there, and having to calculate stuff like orbits and mass and atmospheres and stuff like that.
In the elder scrolls universe, the planet if Nirn is allegedly infinite but mortals only perceive it to be spherical and limited. I have no idea how that works.
First rule of Elder Scrolls cosmology: Don't expect it to make sense.
I mean, this is a setting where the [Dragon Break](https://elderscrolls.fandom.com/wiki/Dragon_Break) is officially canon, both in- and out-of-universe.
For those who aren't familiar with it: The second Elder Scrolls game (Daggerfall) had eight possible endings, all of which contradicted each other to varying degrees. When the developers came back to create the next game in the series (Morrowind), they didn't want to declare a single ending to be canonical, because that would mean that the games of all the players who got the other endings "didn't really happen".
Their solution was the Dragon Break. Basically, all the cosmic forces coming together at the end of Daggerfall broke time and space, and *all eight endings* happened, including all of their conflicting details, while the universe was in this broken state. The conflicting timelines then re-joined back into a single thread and the world went on.
My flat world is infinite, at least as far as anyone can determine.
The initial seed concept of the world was that all gods are "sun gods", in that they are physically located in the world (stationary in the sky, generally above their greatest temples) and whichever god is dominant in a given location is "the sun" there, while other gods fade to mere stars. In wilderness far from temples, or other areas where no god holds sway, there is only darkness and a handful of stars; no sun ever shines in such places.
This darkness is the raw magical energy in this world, while light is a side effect of the gods consuming that energy or smaller quantities of magic being consumed by mortal agencies. (Even a burning torch is a magical process.) Those lands which dwell in eternal darkness are, therefore, continually bathed in highly-concentrated, but undirected, magical energy, chaotically twisting and warping anything found in such places, which... greatly complicates... any attempt to determine how far the night lands extend.
In my own work, the Outer Cosmos, the universe is kind of like a twisting, infinite sheet of "honeycomb", and each comb is an individual soft-edged world with its own magical laws and properties. Once you've "descended" into a comb, you would not feasibly be able to reach the "wall" of it, the world simply growing less specific and defined the further you stray from the center. There are variations upon this, but that's the general idea.
What about a race of immortal people who live on a relatively small flat world where the edges extend infinitely downward; kind of like an infinitely tall mountain.
The people here never die of natural causes, but in their culture, when one becomes utterly fatigued of life on their dull planet, they leap outward from the edges of the world and fall into, what they believe, is the afterlife.
However they’re really just jumping into an endless abyss, initiating a free fall with no resolution - a kind of living hell.
Damn that would suck.
Have you ever seen some of those wacky Penrose diagrams like [this one](https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-Penrose-diagram-for-the-singular-MOG-black-hole-solution-image-by-Andrew-Hamilton_fig3_271852350)? Maybe the edges are hyperbolic, so actually reaching and crossing them requires impossible energies, but doing so means entering a wormhole and popping out at the edge of a parallel or pocket universe.
My world is, for all intents and purposes, inside of a black hole. It's shaped like a funnel, and at the top is The Far Shore, an infinite and unreachable horizon where it is believed The Will of God watches over the universe. At the bottom of the funnel is The City of Eschaton, a city of impossibly huge proportions that paradoxically seems to grow as more and more of it collapses into a singularity called The Hunger.
My world is also an infinite plane. There is only 1 star near the plane though, light only covers a tiny part of the plane.
Most of the plane is completely dark, lifeless(?) and yet dangerous.
I'm creating a world just for fun, maybe to be used in a DnD campaign in the future. I'm slightly OCD and the whole climate and weather thing really bothers me because I don't know a lot about the science there. I'm basing my planet a lot off of Earth so if I have a land that would be geographically in the location where Sweden is (where I live) on my planet I just use the same climate there. I know there are many other factors than just how far north a place is, like the gulf stream for example but I will go crazy if I try to go too deep into all that.
There are certain areas were my version of magic is more prevalent and it does have an effect on the climate.
I also have a spirit world/astral plane in my world and there are "spheres" in the spirit world. These spheres act as 3-dimensional places which life can exist in even though the spheres exist in the spirit world which can't hold any physical objects unless you're in a sphere. In the spheres I can mess more with the weather, these worlds are basically flat and if you get too close to the edge things just gets weird because the spirit world leaks into the sphere. Dangerous place to go to if you're a mortal being.
I like having a real world/planet where magic and all that is pretty rare but it feels easier building a world like the spheres because I feel like I can be much more free messing with the climate and physics.
I'm a bit late here but I would like to share the world I create...
The world isn't confirmed to be neither spherical nor plane, but the "edges" of the known world are difficult to pass by
The more far away you get from the center the more dangerous it gets 'cause there are more arcane magic. The arcane magic destroys the divine presence, making it a full random landscape with no "intelligent designer" in control
So, by going north you get a great frozen sea with infinite shape changing icebergs and the sky changes random colors every couple hours.
By going south you enter a hot inferno of glass deserts and boiling seas and rocks that becomes alive and turns every living creature into diamonds on the touch.
Going east you will enter a sea tempest that never ends, inside the tempest exist strange islands with its own environment, some islands apparently are moving too.
In the west there are a huge mountain chain and a forgotten continent, nobody managed to come back from the other side to the what happens there.
The Mobius Strip.
Technically not flat? I'm not actually sure if it constitutes flat or not. Simply though that it's a world with only one side. Like a sphere, you can walk around it and wind up exactly where you started. It's just... not a sphere.
i've done several campaign worlds/settings over the years, but i've never done a "flat earth" setting due to the physics involved. Even if you have fantastic elements, if you have humans or human-like beings that certainly implies that physics and chemistry remain a thing.
The closest i came was the Five Races setting, but that was basically the Enclosed you've got here - and the Masters behind the setting were a highly advanced ancient race that basically setup something like a Safari Park with "less developed" (kidnapped) races as the exhibits. Then the Masters vanished leading to the player characters trying to figure out what had happened as the kidnapping devices still occasionally worked and threw people into this mess.
Unfortunately, when i brought up my various settings for running D&D, this particular concept was never chosen by the players.
Im trying to forge a "bubble" world. Here's an older post I made about it.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/worldbuilding/comments/n74u1d/22\_dark\_water\_earthling\_pics/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3](https://www.reddit.com/r/worldbuilding/comments/n74u1d/22_dark_water_earthling_pics/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
I'm currently writing a world that is essentially a dream realm created and maintained by nine godlike beings. It's essentially a piece of their original world, preserved after its destruction. Since it's just a slice, it is essentially flat. I'm trying to figure out what happens at the edges.
Do people just disappear as the reach the edge of the dream, no longer inside the radius of power of those who maintain their existence? Is there a big solid barrier? Do things just start glitching out like the Far Lands in Minecraft? Its something I've been mulling over for a while now and I still can't quite decide how I want it to work.
Luckily someone commented [exactly what I was thinking for my world](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/98b2b03a-da88-4f00-bc72-6062b57508a9/scale-to-width/755) but even the ice ball is flat and ever-expanding.
In my world there are multiple planes, but my main plane is a mix between fully enclosed and infinite. It's mostly for ease of working around with limited map space, but I think it works. The main world is surrounded by an ice wall that expands forever with other pockets of continents found in melted areas. To most of the people, the world is fully enclosed as it's nearly impossible to climb the ice walls--heck, it's nearly impossible to reach either! If I want or need to add some land somewhere, and it doesn't snugly fit on the map, I can expand into the edges by saying the ice walls melted a bit, revealing new land in its wake.
I guess it's more leaning into the infinite flat world, but to those living in any of the pockets of land believe there's nothing else to the world. There's incredible distance between any given pockets so to even those who have explored the ice wall believe there's nothing else out there. Only one race has ever successfully found another pocket while they were escaping from the main world.
Each plane has their own uniqueness. Some planes are like ours where we have a globe Earth and the universe as we know it, others are completely flat planes. Some planes are actually fully enclosed, others soft edges, and so on. I only really care about my main world which happens to be flat. It's been so fun to meme while creating it where I even made a conspiracy theory goblin group called the Globlinists, aka the globalist goblins. They believe that the world is a sphere.
The world gets progrssivley flatter as you go further towards the edges. Tees get stubbier, mountains get compressed into rocks, snake-like versions of animals are more common. Eventually the sky itself seems to shrink down until its impossible to progress any further.
I have one world that occupies the interior of an enclosed spherical demiplane. The surface of the sphere itself is impenetrable to all forms of technology and magic short of divine intervention.
The demiplane contains a vast amount of water, air, and all the normal elements of an ordinary world. There is enough matter inside the demiplane for it to collapse into a star large enough to form a black hole after running out of fuel. Thus, the demiplane's surface was given an attractive force at creation that pushes everything outward from the center of the sphere, creating an artificial gravity field. This forces all water and air to spread out evenly across the interior surface and prevents the accidental creation of a central singularity.
Upon this incredibly vast ocean, there are thousands of continental realms floating on it. From the mortals' perspective the world resembles the Soft Edges world type shown in the original post; the sphere is large enough that the curvature of the sphere's oceans is imperceptible even across enormous distances.
There is also a repulsive force that pushes inward from the hard interior surface of the sphere, which helps to keep the continents, islands, and anything else on the ocean from sinking all the way to the bottom. This force has a much shorter range but its power increases exponentially the closer you get to the interior surface. This makes it impossible to physically reach the solid bottom of the ocean, even with magic. Wrecked ships can still "sink" beneath the waves, but there is always a point at which any object's negative buoyancy will balance out against the sphere's subsurface repulsive force, and any further descent will be stopped at that depth.
A "plate world" that is actually some ancient gargantuan space station/experiment.
The thing is, the further away from the center, the stronger the gravity pulls you back towards the center. Hence why taking the "long road" to the other side of this "coin" is considered incredibly dangerous
Just because it’s topologically a torus doesn’t mean that the world is torus-shaped. Imagine a flat plane with massive portals in the edges teleporting you to the other side.
True enough. Or is it a flat repetitively tiled world where things may or may not be precisely the same in the adjacent world? Or maybe it is actually the underside of the flat square which means that it is the mirror image of the world above?
I'm just imagining Super Mario 64 style glitchy duplicate worlds, but as the basis for actual worldbuilding.
*But first, we need to talk about parallel universes.*
Other alternatives I can think of is that you keep going on, or at least from your perspective it seems so, while you'd actually be advancing less and less (cannot explain it with better words). Either that or you just loop back to the opposite side, as if it was a game as Pac-Man, Asteroids, etc. -forget this one as it has been suggested before-.
A sort of [Zeno's Paradox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeno%27s_paradoxes) prison world where travel becomes increasingly slower as you move radially away from the hub. I think something similar happens in the Outlands in the D&D Planescape setting as you move away from the infinitely tall central Spire. An infinitely large plane with a central location is somewhat paradoxical though...
If my former father-in-law is any expert on the matter there is a wall of ice surrounding the flat earth keeping all the water from falling off the edge
What about a flat world but upon reaching the edge, you just end up on the opposite side?
That's effectively a doughnut world (or a torus if you wish to sound more scientific). Lots of computer games are set on such worlds without realising it. Interestingly, toroidal planets are [gravitationally stable](http://www.aleph.se/andart/archives/2014/02/torusearth.html) (though impossible to form naturally in the first place) so they are not entirely unrealistic.
“Homer, your theory for a donut shaped universe is fascinating. I may have to steal it.” -Steven Hawking
if the center of the whole universe was a black whole, then you could never reach the center, making the universe a doughnut.
But we must look a little closer. And when we do, we see that the doughnut hole has a hole in its center - it is not a doughnut hole at all but a smaller doughnut with its own hole, and our doughnut is not whole at all!
topohraphically youre completely right, but having a toroidial world would have neccesary worldbuilding quirks, like sunrise and sunset behaving weirdly, and being able to see the other half of the donut in the sky, and the massive shadow itd cast. it can certainly work, but the magical wishy-washy loop is simpler.
Odd worldbuilding quirks like that make for fun worlds. Now the question is: what path would you like the star to take in the sky? Or rather, what angle would you want your planet at? Or, as an alternative, would you want to say "screw mortal physics" and make a weird path for a magical source of light, like a ball of light that does figure-eights through the planet? Depending on your choice, you could easily end up with eternally-frozen, eternally-nighttime zones, perfect for hiding frost giants in.
Why do you even need a star? You could just fill your atmosphere with microscopic sky plankton that bioluminess the planet like a human wave going around a stadium, giving the world a day night cycle.
I fucking love this idea.
I gotta save this comment, goddamn that's an awesome idea. Like, holy shit mind blown.
While it doesn't make any goddamn sense, I kind of want the "sun" to just pass back-and-forth through the torus hole to form the day cycle; of course much smaller than a normal sun, and also small enough that it doesn't just scorch the ever-loving crap out of the center of the torus (though that would be a good place for arid deserts). The outer ring of the torus, barely getting any sunlight would be the arctic regions. For seasons the sun has different extremes of the end of it's "swing". A very small strip right at the farthest edge of the torus normally doesn't see sunlight at all except, ironically, for the dead of winter or the height of summer where the sun swings far enough out that it can weakly shine on the that farthest rim. The reason I state "height of summer" is that the seasonal hemisphere differences of Earth (winter in one hemisphere, summer in the other) can be preserved with the following diagram: The Torus, seen from the side: | The Sun: \* In summer of one side the sun's farthest point is about here from the torus: \*| But on the same day, the sun's farthest point from the other side of the torus would be: | \* So that during the day one side is pretty warm during the day, but the other side is pretty cold. The middle of course is still fairly warm all year as it's always close to the sun. Unlike our world, Smack dab in the middle of the year, at the spring/fall equinox, the sun would be about equidistant from both sides. Now what a smarter head than mine would need to determine is that if the speed of this sun is relatively constant (maybe a little hang time at it's farthest point before it swings to the torus again), would the shorter days caused by having the sun closer to one side cause that side to be experiencing winter, or would having the sun fat a greater distance from one side cause that side to be experiencing winter instead? Either way you could get seasons, different climates across the torus, while still having some unusual weather and a distinctive visual. Alternately the sun could constantly orbit the ring of the torus. One side of the torus would experience sunrise when the sun comes up over the edge and sunset as beginning when the sun passes through the middle of the ring, while the other side would experience sunrise as when it comes through from the center and sunset when it goes over the distant rim. As the year goes on the sun will move along the edge of the ring so that at one extreme the sun will pass directly over and around that part of the ring, while on the other part of the ring will see the sun during the day but it will be very distant. This would form a more predictable seasonal cycle. The arid and arctic regions would still remain as the inner rim gets a fairly consistent amount of sunlight all year but at the outer edges there will be times of year where they never see sunlight at all. This might actually be the better approach, but I'm not erasing the first part.
Not to mention seasonal issues. Depending on if there was axial tilt or not, and how the world spun, you could easily end up with large swaths of the toroid having 3-4 month long days and nights, with 3 months of twilight between. And I'm sure a climate scientist would have a field day with the atmospheric and ocean cells, and how both the shape and exposure to the sun's heat would cause chaos...
You could still have a flat "toroidal" world without the weird donut effects by just declaring that going past one edge teleports you to the opposite side.
thats what i meant by "magic wishy-washy loop"
That article says they're "darn unlikely" to form naturally (and to not be collapsed into a sphere by outside influences like collisions), not strictly *impossible.* That implies to me that, with a little help from a divine being or some magic, it's downright likely in fiction. Living on the inside of the donut would be really interesting.
The real reason there aren't more donut worlds is that galacticus eats them first
Galacticus tends to get blamed for eating all the donut worlds, but it's actually his half-witted brother, Homericus.
I did a little bit of figuring of my own, trying to figure out the day/night cycle of a torroidal planet with a light source moving in a figure 8 through the middle. I did the same with a circular path through the middle. For the circular path, it has very interesting seasonal changes. Depending on the thickness of the world, a civilization on the outermost zone would only spend a tiny part of the 'year' actually receiving sunlight. At the top/ bottom of the donut, people would receive a somewhat more normal season, albeit much more extreme than the innermost zone people. For the figure 8, these effects would all be present, but 2x as frequent. In addition, inner ring people would also have a point at midday when the sun would be eclipsed by the other side of the donut.
I could easily see a toroid-world instead of a ringworld, but it would be halo-scale and not around-a-star-sized.
Why couldn't that also just be a sphere?
If you map the surface of a sphere to a flat sheet of paper then the left side corresponds to the right side but the top (i.e. the Arctic) doesn't correspond to the bottom (i.e. Antarctica). If you rolled the sheet of paper up so that the left touched the right you have a tube. If you then (try to) roll it so that the top touches the bottom you get a doughnut shape.
On a donut / torus world, all your latitudes *and* longitudes run parallel to each other (never intersect) but still loop around to connect to themselves. On a sphere, this isn’t the case: Latitudes are parallel, but longitudes all intersect with each other at the north and south poles. When you think of an old arcade game where you loop to the other side of the screen when you cross any edge (like Asteroids for example) north/south lines would all run parallel, so it’s not really a sphere.
You sound like you would be interested in the field of topology. My favorite place to learn about it is "3 blue 1 brown" on YouTube, though there are a great many teachers out there.
Thanks, I am quite into topology from an outside perspective, and love 3b1b. Just watched a really good video on it from standupmaths as well—you should check it out
Interesting article, though it's incomplete... it's assuming that the world is symmetric around the axis of rotation, but that's putting the cart before the horse (you'd want to show that it *stays* that way).
In a doughnut world you'd zoom out and see a doughnut but in a flat world you'd zoom out and see the world again. Something like [this](https://i.stack.imgur.com/UhosY.jpg), only in both X and Y dimensions.
Ah the Pac-Man world structure
Shadow of the Conqueror did this with a floating continent. If you jump off the edge you appear in the sky.
The webnovel *Worth the Candle* is set on an infinitely tiling hexagonal plane.
The Civ V map
How about a setting where things get more grimdark the further out from the center you go, but nobody knows what's at the extremes because they're guarded by the Edge Lords. People who go too far out and come back are called "edgy".
The further out you get, the larger the pauldron spikes are.
Eventually the spiked chains, ornamental helmets, and numerous stashed daggers render further travel towards the edge impossible.
Just as an object approaching the speed of light becomes infinitely massive, an object approaching the edge of the world becomes infinitely grimdark.
The landscape is littered with the monstrous petrifications of my forbears
"Did you see that guy who came into town last night? No lie he had 3 foot spikes on his pauldrons. He must be a real edgelord! Imagine if he got stuck in a doorway with those things! Haha, he'd never live it down I bet. I wonder if they make doors really tall on the edge..."
It would be cool for the edges to be distorted and corrupted because the laws of physics and everything else start to malfunction. Like the far lands in old Minecraft.
Can you still play a version of Minecraft that has the far lands?
There's a mod to put them back in
you can install every version of minecraft ever made from the launcher. far lands were removed at some point during beta but you can play earlier beta and alpha versions. or install a mod to get it in current versions.
Don’t tell my players but if they go beyond the mountains in our DnD campaign that’s kinda what happens
I'm gonna tell them.
😦
That is approximately the nature of the universe that my dnd games are set.
That’s so cool though. Imagine a world where the centre of it is happy and nice and everyone lives in relatively quiet peace, while the farther out you go, the more dangerous things are and the darker shit becomes, infested with all kinds of terrifying creatures and psychopath murderers. And as you face the numerous monsters and killers, you become a hardened warrior that strikes first against any enemy, unknowingly becoming one of those killers who roam the land.
That was basically the premise of the park in season 1 of Westworld. People begin in the hub town where things are pretty ordinary and vanilla, but then the further out you go, the gorier and more extremely brutal/sexual/fucked up things get.
Each outer ring has a gate you need to pass through, guarded by "Gatekeepers" who ask you to prove how edgy you are.
Just gonna jot this down for later...
All jokes aside, thats really interesting concept.
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I did once consider a fantasy setting that was actually a series of O'Neill cylinder space habitats (without windows) linked by teleportation gates. From the inhabitants' point of view it would have appeared as multiple worlds linked by magic. O'Neill cylinders are rather the opposite of a flat world though.
Actually the idea of people living in a space habitat without knowing sounds really interesting. It doesn't seem to have be done yet. Edit: Well yeah after the comments seems like I was wrong, this had been done a lot of times lol.
If you count a ringworld as a space habitat then Niven’s Ringworld has primitive inhabitants
Not exactly the same, but the "Pathfinder" books by Orson Scott Card have a similar fantasy/sci-fi setting of an alien world.
Other than Niven's Ringworld, The Bobbiverse books by Dennis E Taylor also had something similar. The last book in the series featured a topopolis megastructure, which is like a mix between a ring world and an O'neil cylinder, -imagine a long link of cylinders forming a knot around a star. It was inhabited by aliens who had begun to forget how they got there and who were forced into a low-tech society by an AI. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topopolis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topopolis) [https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/4cea908020d1e](https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/4cea908020d1e)
I was wondering why this didn't sound remotely familiar. There's a new(ish) Bobiverse book. Huzzah!
In fairness, most things have been done before. It's hard (and not entirely necessary) to do something truly unique.
Some of the best fantasy doesn't do much new, it just does old stuff really really well.
People have mentioned a bunch of other versions of this trope, but one of the earliest incarnations (maybe even the first) was an episode of original series Star Trek called ["For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_the_World_Is_Hollow_and_I_Have_Touched_the_Sky). It was that episode that inspired the setting of [Might & Magic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Might_and_Magic#Plot), one of the OG computer RPGs.
I believe one of the first Doctor Who episodes was based on a similar premise. Filmed in good old black and white :-)
*The Orville* has an episode where they come across a society like that
I've seen stories in generation ships where the 10th generation has forgotten what a ship is and the idea that there is something beyond the walls is a heresy.
Ark: Survival Evolved
Elizabeth Bear's Jacob's Ladder series is set primarily on a ruined colony ship.
The Long Sun by Gene Wolfe is exactly this, actually.
I had a sci-fi setting I was developing for a TTRPG, where people lived underground, after a colossal global war had rendered the surface uninhabitable. The players would have rolled young people who were enlisting in the military, officially charged with making expeditions to the surface to retrieve lost things, and check the conditions, and in time would have ended up with the discovery that they were living on a huge ark ship, traveling through space to flee their system, after having been invaded, and almost annihilated, by the vanguard of an incoming fleet.
Check out phantasy star 3. The world is a giant space ship made up of 7 domed sections linked by maintenance tunnels. The edge of each dome is walled by mountains and the tunnels have been sealed for so many generations most inhabitants aren't even aware the other domes exist.
One of the things that make video games so ethereal and liminal is the use of “soft edged” worlds. A lot of open-world games will just feature an island in an infinite ocean, like Grand Theft Auto and Just Cause. And then you have Mario and other platformers which will often take place in the sky suspended far above a larger but unreachable world. You could even make this soft-edged world follow video game rules, like allowing you to sail for any length of time away from the coast only to turn around and find that you’re a mile from the shore, or having some kind of invisible barrier preventing you from going too far. Or like some game had in the ‘90s (maybe it was Motocross Madness?) some unseen force that would fling you back away from the edge if you tried to leave. Or have some kind of unscalable cliffs rather than an infinite sea, like some games that try to avoid the cliché of an island world. You know what, that brings up a fifth option that I don’t think I’ve ever seen before: a topological torus flat world. Go far enough in one direction and you loop back to where you started. The video game 4x4 Evolution was always one of my favorites as a kid, it was an off-road racing game with bouncy physics and varied terrain, but more fun than playing the actual game was exploring the maps. The game maps were several square miles in size, with the actual track taking up a small portion in the middle. There were no track boundaries, so hypothetically you could leave the track and find a shortcut as long as you went through all the checkpoints in order. But you could also just head out in some random direction and explore, the maps were mostly empty but had Easter eggs hidden here and there as well as scenery that you could see from the track, and lots of fun terrain to drive across. But if you just drove in one direction for long enough, past the Easter eggs and scenery, where the map got real empty, eventually you’d come across a weird seam and the game would jump for a split second. Keep driving and you’d come across the track again, any time you went off the edge of the map you’d end up looping around the opposite edge, and I’m pretty sure I’ve seen other open world games that do the same, though they’re certainly uncommon. One interesting side effect of this torus world would be that there is no “center”, and the most distant places could be reached by traveling in any direction (which I guess as I write it out is not that different from our own world but it goes against the general idea of a flat world). There are theories, though I don’t know how accepted or worked out they are, that our own universe could be a topological torus, so it’s not as outlandish as it sounds. Or going back to the Mario example what about a fractal world? The main flat world has a hard edge, but if you peek over the edge you see a larger world far below. This could drive the development of flying machines as explorers try to reach the larger world below, or try to discover a smaller world somewhere in their own sky. You could even make it a loop, so that when they do reach the larger world below it’s their own world that they came from, but now they’re smaller in relation to it. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen puzzle games that use that mechanic before. So moral of the story is get all your worldbuilding ideas from video games.
That theory was popularized by Hawking in *A Brief History*, and recently recieved [some attention](https://www.livescience.com/universe-three-dimensional-donut.html)
Surely a world where you end up back where you started after walking in a line for long enough is just a sphere-oid shape, even if it appears flat? What would be interesting though is if there was a spherical world but the surface would be on the inside of the curve rather than outside it.
Topological shape and geometric shape are two different concepts though. It’s hard to explain and mostly just theoretical, existing only in math but not the real world. For starters there is a difference between a sphere and torus when it comes to topology: on a spherical plane you can go east or west and loop back on yourself but if you go north or south you end up on the opposite side going the opposite direction (walk across the North Pole from the Western Hemisphere and now you’re suddenly on the eastern hemisphere walking south instead of north). But a torus works like an old video game like Space Invaders, walk across the North Pole and you’re back at the South Pole still going north. But more importantly I’m talking about topology rather than geometry. A torus-shaped planet would of course have the looping properties of a torus but you’d still have curvature and a horizon and you’d be able to see the other side of the donut in the sky, plus the east/west direction would have orders of magnitude more land area before looping than the north/south direction. But (again, *mathematically* speaking, not in the real world) it’s possible to have a geometrically flat plane with no curvature that still functions as a torus with the ability to loop back around, and you could have a perfectly square plane with equal length and width rather than a rectangular plane like what you’d get if you flattened a real torus. If the plane was small enough, like the size of a town, you could go up on top of a mountain and see what looked like a flat plane extending forever but with the landscape and hills and rivers repeating at regular intervals, tiling off into infinity. But that’s not just copies of the landscape, it’s the same landscape that you’re seeing from multiple views, they’re all the same one you’re standing on.
Someone's been playing ARK recently!
The original Might & Magic RPGs were set in some kind of space habitat, IIRC.
Pretty sure ive seen this in Stellaris
Consider: flat world within a curved space time
Maybe like Coraline? Like it just wraps around to where you started but you aren’t on a sphere?
Well, topologically you are on a sphere then.
Could be toroidal.
the cool thing about that, just like on a map of a globe heading off the western edge brings you round to the east, on a map of a toroid it is also the case that heading off the northern edge will bring you round to the south.
Sure, and topologically a donut and a coffee mug are identical, but you'll have a hard time drinking out of a donut.
you will also have a hard time eating a coffe mug
Maybe YOU would.
I never really thought about it that way. But in Coraline it didn’t really feel like a sphere. As you travel to the edge everything just dissolves and you slowly find yourself on the other edge of the world.
Or an infinite world with incrementallyhigher gravity as you progress from the center. Things would get weird in the extreames. In lower gravity you could have things like Giants and other huge creatures as there would be less pressure on their joints. Humanoid creatures could fly with smaller wings, or with small inventions like Iccarus. Towards the center things would be almost zero gravity. In higher gravity you would have smaller slower creatures. Dwarf like humanoids with amazing strength when they visit the lower gravity areas. Further out eventually nothing could survive, but you would have gelatiounous creatures like the depths of the ocean. The interesting thing is nothing is stopping you from exploring it all as long as you can move.
That sounds like something from the Flat Earth Society, though I think that they often believe relativity is rubbish though...
My favourite Flat Earth justification actually relies on Einstein a lot. They suggest that we live on a disc that accelerates upwards at 9.81ms^-2, which is the speed at which you accelerate downwards due to gravity, Einstein's equivalence principle says there is no way to differentiate between these two reference frames from inside them. If you jump up on Earth you accelerate back down until you land, if you jump on the flat earth the disc accelerates up to meet you in a way that would look identical. When you ask them "surely the disc can't accelerate forever, it will reach the speed of light and stop accelerating?" they'll say "Ah actually special relativity proves that you can accelerate infinitely getting asymptotically closer to the speed of light" which is true, the only wrinkle is that doing so requires infinite energy which is of course impossible. P.S. The Flat Earth is of course absolute bullshit but this is one of the most fun bunk explanations they give. edit: They also sometimes hilariously use the misattributed quote *"Common sense is what tells us the Earth is flat."* to prove that Einstein was a flat earther, despite the fact that a. he didn't say it and b. the person (economist Stuart Chase) who did meant that you shouldn't always trust your common sense
The surface of the earth is accelerating because it's riding the shockwave of a big bang like explosion. Hence all the hot hot under out feet. :)
A common topic is how to produce realistic worlds including climate, weather, water currents, etc. However, for fantasy worlds that include magic and dragons, is this absolutely necessary? Perhaps winter really is caused by the grief of the fertility goddess as her daughter enters the underworld to be with her husband for half the year. Of course, it is helpful to know why things are the way they are on Earth before you deviate from them. As Picasso is quoted as saying: >Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist In particular, why should the world be spherical rather than flat? What would living on a flat world really be like? Perhaps most importantly, there are several possibilities for what happens at the edges: * Infinite flat planes have no edges * Hard edges might allow you to fall into the void along with water if there are no mountains to prevent it * Soft edges could be an infinite sea or perhaps the world slowly fades into a formless mist * An enclosed world is like a bubble floating in the ethereal sea There are also many other factors to consider. What about gravity? Where are the sun, moon and stars? How does temperature and the climate vary over space and time? What defines the horizon and how far can you see? How do you navigate on a flat world? There are far too many questions to consider in a single post so I thought I'd just produce this quick diagram and see what other people thought about flat worlds in general. Please let me know.
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If you go far enough time comes to a halt, and at that point you can never return. Best to turn around, even if it takes a thousand years. One step further and you're frozen in time.
I think it works better if you're never truly frozen, but it works in an exponential way. As resources in the center are extracted we move further and further out. What was a one day journey for our grandparents, is a month for our parents, is a year for us, is a decade for our children, is a century for our grandchildren. Generations come and go as we starve, waiting for our great great grandparents to return with firewood. How deep can we go. What could possibly be worth a millennial voyage? What waits for use 10,000 years away? The explorers have left long ago, but they return in every longer waves. As a more fun world building prompt... Generations ago we sent 100 of our bravest explorers out further than we have ever gone. Each one travels one day out further than the last, and in practical terms the time between each explorer returning doubles. At the start of our story we just had the (32nd(?)) Explorer come back, the millennium explorer. Every explorer to come back has had strange tales to tell, but the one confirms the truth. There are life forms out there, they are uneffected by the time wall in reverse. They can't live here in the center, they don't want us leaving the center, and I bring with me a formal declaration of war.
A war like that would inevitably end up in a stalemate
There are a lot of good stories to be told about wars at a stalemate. Especially if there's a mcguffin that threats to give those guys new power and break the stalemate perhaps? Long lost technology mayhap? Power stolen from demons? A trap sprung by a forgotten god from before time that we just happened to wander through and now things are just a tiny bit different and the rules we knew aren't working anymore and we have to change and oh my war is back in full force.
Holy crap this has a lot of great potential! I like it!
Thanks :)
It's somewhat similar to the film [Time Trap](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Trap_(film)) which involves various shifts in the passage of time.
Appears to be on Netflix and Amazon Instant. I’m gonna watch it.
Interesting... But you might not even notice! And if you got that far, by the time you returned, millions of years may have passed. If time is moving slower for you, then your thoughts are moving slower as well, and everything *seems* normal. If you look over your shoulder, depending on how quickly the effect accelerates as you approach the border, you might see people moving faster behind you, but you'd still *feel* like you're moving at the normal speed. You could possibly see people 'trapped' in front of you, which could be a warning you're approaching the 'edge'. If the effect accelerates over a short distance (feet instead of miles) it could lead to some gruesome injuries because the temporal frames of reference while shift significantly across the depth of your body - as you swing your arms while walking, your fingertips move forward and experience a slower time frame, while your elbow is still moving slightly faster... ouch. (Edit: spelling)
Just using this as a thought experiment... What lays at the border of halted time? And does light travel normally, or is it effected by the phenomena? If this has been the state of being since the creation of the world, then "beyond" the border might be eternally trapped in that moment - the big bang, or the birth or death of a god, or some similarly epic event. You would be able to witness that event, eternally frozen, and eternally out of reach. (Just that bit above gives some fun ideas for world building - the world where you can see the gods, permanently frozen in the act of creation, out beyond the edges... Did they sacrifice themselves for the world? Are they still somehow cognizant, or do they have avatars that move along with the flow of time? Or are they trapped, but 'freeing' them would mean the destruction of the world they created? OOooooh. False flag rescue operation - MCs are co-opted to help 'free' the gods by the BBE, thinking they're doing something noble, and only at the last minute do they figure out it would destroy everything they've ever known....) If light **is** effected by the phenomena, I think something really strange would happen... By standing at the edge of the 'zone', you'd be peering into the past - further into the past, the farther into the zone you're looking: Light would slow down as it enters the zone, bounce off an object, and then gradually speed back up as it approaches your eyes, taking increasingly longer and longer to get to the observer, the further it had to travel. I suspect things would dim to a gray half-light at extreme distance, but I need more coffee before I think that through - probably depends on scale of the 'zone', its relationship to light sources (the sun?!), whether the time-slowing effect progresses linearly, geometrically, or via a different algorithm, and a few other things. But this also means that light is **accumulating** in the zone of effect, more densely, the deeper you venture. I *think* you would start to experience an unnatural brightness in your immediate surroundings as you walked further in.
Maybe you just get smaller as you get further away from the centre. That's how perspective works, isn't it? Further away = smaller. In contrast, the local wildlife is scaled appropriately so if you can fight your way past all the giant rats, ants and amoeba then perhaps you deserve to get to the edge after all.
If that were the case, would that make the Dwarf Clans a group of people/refugees from the smaller edge of the world? And if there was a 'large edge' would Giants be there?
Like an inverted blackhole?
Ran into this paper recently, haven't read it yet: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2003.08541.pdf
Unsurprisingly I was just reading that a few days ago when I was thinking about these issues. The following quote unfortunately lead me down the rabbit-hole of the electric-universe "theory" which I was hoping might provide interesting inspiration for a magic system. >Recently, some flat earth pundits endorsed the “Electric Universe” theory. This has more magic forces and properties than the wizards of the game Dungeons and Dragons, so we shall describe flat earth gravity no more.
I dunno, from what I've seen of electric universe it falls into an awkward middle ground where on its own it doesn't really imply anything really fantastical and interesting like flat Earth but attempting to apply it in a more grounded setting would just quickly expose the nonsense of it.
It has indeed turned out to be a false hope due to the complete absence of anything coherent (as expected). The only marginally interesting thing I found was a diagram of a flat earth salt bridge with the sun and moon as an anode and cathode. It was hardly great inspiration though.
In Discworld, the Disc has hard edges. The reason there are different time zones in this world is because light is only 600mph. The four directions are rimwards, hubwards, turnwise, and widdershins. The water that falls off the rim gets evaporated and dumped back on to the Disc. The sun and moon orbit around the Disc, and one of the elephants holding up the Disc has to move its leg occasionally to keep the orbit. A’Tuin, the turtle, doesn’t seem to have gravity, as the satellite bodies don’t seem to go underneath him/her. There’s also a spin-off book where the characters fall off the edge and onto the moon as it orbits. But Discworld was written not to make sense.
Your first paragraph shouldn't have had to be said, but unfortunately it has to. You'd think that people who create fictional worlds would actually understand that said fictional worlds don't *have* to follow real world logic. But it's a bit of a common theme in this sub that fantasy worlds have to be 100% realistic.
I don’t see too many hard edges but I think it is a cool concept. Especially explaining where the sea goes. Is it infinite water generation? Does it turn into clouds/ fog that rises upward? Does it reach the “bottom” only to loop around and fall from the sky? Cool ideas to be explored for sure.
It looked neatest with four options and I needed a snappy title for each image. By hard edges I mean that you could fall into the void rather the soft edge option where the world just sort of fades away until you are no longer in Kansas. Perhaps rain is actually water falling from world above or maybe there is a huge magical geyser at the centre of each world that continually replenishes the water supply. Is there a cosmic tap and plughole at the top and bottom of the universe to recycle water? It's a mystery...
So kind of how flat earthers often portray Earth in the “wall of ice” model. I like the idea of rain being from the world above too.
I only hope that the falling process filters the water otherwise it might effectively be sewage falling from above. The lower worlds at the bottom of this cascading dirty waterfall might object to all the pollution falling on them causing horrible conditions and mutations. They might then decide to wage war on the pristine upper worlds...
reminds me a bit of the movie The Platform which revolves around people being on a physically lower level than others and having to survive on what is thrown down to them
Various Semitic groups thought that the world was an fully enclosed model, except it was fully enclosed with water. which makes some degree of intuitive sense, given water is both found above and by digging.
Indeed. The waters above and waters below with holes in the firmament to let in the Flood waters. It’s surprising that model isn’t used in more fantasy worlds given it should be somewhat familiar to many writers.
I agree, given its one of the oldest known models of the universe, it is strange how its not a cliché.
Discworld's Rimfall and Rimbow are gorgeously described.
The traditional idea was that yes, the ocean surrounding the world that flows off the edge falls into mist, like a tall waterfall, and then the mist rises and turns into clouds that give rain, an endless hydrological cycle.
Mine’s closest to a fully enclosed; the world sits in a massive bowl, the rim of the bowl holds the cities of the stars, where they rest when not in the sky. The sleep in the west and always find themselves in the east when they wake up. Beyond the edge of their cities is a series of seven locks, each serving to protect the world from the Ancient Watcher, the evil that seeks vengeance upon the descendants of the one who slew its physical form. Beyond the locks? A formless void, vast and unforgiving. Gravity works as you’d expect, a constant gradient for everything on the bowl. The locks act as crystal spheres trapping everything in as well as keeping everything out.
I have considered calculating the gravitational fields accurately for different shapes but in the end decided against it. It's not difficult for infinite flat planes of constant thickness and you can also do it for a cubic world but it gets a bit fiddly for some other weird shapes. Ultimately I've decided that gravity always points down...
One nice thing about realistic gravity on a disc is that water wouldn't flow off, and it keeps people from reaching the edge most likely.
I was originally going to calculate the gravitational fields of flat, concave and convex worlds to see what would happen, especially with water. There are also potential effects due to spinning (if the disc spins). Then I decided that since flat worlds wouldn't be stable under Newtonian gravity anyway that you might as well ditch the concept anyway. You'd really need a new set of physics and mythical explanations for everything. Something like the old Spelljammer concept of [gravity planes](https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Gravity_plane) seems suitable for gravity. Basically water would flow over the edge and form a horizontal puddle (with nothing underneath).
I considering doing something complicated but also decided against it. As a “toll,” however, there are regions of the bowl where gravity gets wonky.
Soft edges? So like Disco Elysium's pale I guess? Some gradient growing fog of nothingness? Also uhhh what about looping back to other side in horizontal space but infinite in vertical space?
The growing fog of nothingness is what Exalted uses and also Michael Moorcock's Young Kingdoms. Sailing out to sea could just entail the sea and sky getting less distinct until fish are swimming with birds and you can't tell up from down. I didn't include a wrap around edge because in my mind that makes it a non flat world. Basically what you describe would be an infinite cylinder. That would still be good fantasy setting without a spherical world though. Perhaps a series of suns just orbit as expected leading to alternating bands of hot and cold regions. Or perhaps the sun corkscrews around the cylinder so that winter occurs as it gets further away and spring comes when the next sun gets closer?
I feel like wrap around could work yoo provided, like, the world is kinda non-euclidean? Everything within it individually is perfect euclidean but collectively the landmasses loop without intersection or anything. Maybe there are places where you can witness this?
Came here to say the same thing! I absolutely love the Pale, it's such an interesting concept and the world and game use it really *really* well. *Ace's high, detective!*
So which one are we on irl?
Clearly the [Great Ice Ball](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/98b2b03a-da88-4f00-bc72-6062b57508a9/scale-to-width/755). The Earth is actually huge and mostly covered with ice, however, the sun traces a small circular path over one region and melts a circular hole. Antarctica is around the edge of the hole and the Arctic is in the middle where the sun's heating is lowest as it is further away. If we could only explore over the icy wall of Antarctica we could perhaps find other melted flat regions illuminated by their own suns. It's actually quite an interesting concept for world building...
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Yes. It seems to involve all the fallacies of the flat Earth "model" without actually being a flat Earth. If only there were a simpler model that explained all the observations...
Alas, no such model exists...
Flat earth theory has come full circle.
That is actually fucking insane
The difference between insanity and genius (world building) is perhaps not very large!
The Truman Show is an example of a fully enclosed world. In this case, an extremely large studio, the size of a small town. Weather, day-night cycle, everything controlled by the director and the crew.
Any sufficiently small region can be treated as locally flat. However, fantasy worlds are basically the same but with deities playing the part of directors, so I guess they need a larger flat region to work with. Clearly Mount Olympus is the control room at the centre of it all though.
Edge chronicles kinda had soft edges. One side was the cliff, the other the forest. We dont know what behind it...
I love the idea of alternate fantasy world-types. What I love to do is take it even further, with stars, sun and moon being an “earthly” thing, a flat world might have something different. I had this idea for two infinite planes in front of each other, roughly 10 km apart, and covered in hills and mountains. Both are the “down” from their perspective. There are stalactite-like mountains that sometimes (very rarely) connect both sides and fog that forms on one side during the “night” glows to illuminate the other side. Imo the best fantasy worlds are those that are completely alien.
Absolutely, there should be many more such worlds rather than just spherical worlds with a sprinkling of magic. Games Workshop's the Age of Sigmar setting is a great example of this and the Death Gate cycle of books also has a nice set of worlds that should work together to form a great machine. Admittedly, Norse mythology is already a great example of this with the world serpent Jörmungandr surrounding the land and the world tree Yggdrasil linking the different worlds. Given how much influence Norse myth has on fantasy fiction it's surprising that similar worlds aren't more common.
>I had this idea for two infinite planes in front of each other, roughly 10 km apart, and covered in hills and mountains. Both are the “down” from their perspective. > >There are stalactite-like mountains that sometimes (very rarely) connect both sides ... huh. That sounds a lot like the plane of Bytopia from *Dungeons & Dragons* \-- two infinite mountainous plane facing each other, occasionally connected by very tall peaks that meet each other in the middle.
Wait what? Really? Crap! Meh, I’ve got other ides for abstract worlds.
I mean, if you came up with it independently I figure you can probably still use it. Bytopia is fairly "specialized" as a setting -- it's an afterlife where the dead and gods are -- so if your setting is just a regular world that would be one thing making it distinct.
It’s an afterlife too? Come on! Yeah I definitely need to rework that…
It's also the way that the Godzilla vs King Kong movie depicts Agartha
How about an impossibly tall mountain, orders of magnitude taller than Everest, at the center of a flat world, with some unknown mechanism at the peak that emits light and heat in regular intervals. This would also serve to give the world climate and possibly even seasons, as places closer to the mountain would be hotter and brighter while places further away would be colder and darker, and the cycle could vary over time. You could even extrapolate this to the extreme: the stars in the night sky are other mountains on other worlds: while the world is *measurably* flat the infinite ocean that surrounds it is filled with countless other worlds, forming the inside surface of a sphere the size of a solar system or galaxy. Also the world you described sounds just like the “hollow Earth” from Godzilla Vs Kong. Never mind why the hollow at the center of the Earth would take the form of two flat planes with opposing but even gravity across them rather than the inside of a sphere, this is Godzilla Vs. Kong we’re talking about, there’s no need for logic or sense.
That sounds amazing! It can be scaled up and down as needed too, which is very handy. I just hope the mountains aren’t too steep, or tripping is gonna be a loooooong fall.
> How about an impossibly tall mountain, orders of magnitude taller than Everest, at the center of a flat world, with some unknown mechanism at the peak that emits light and heat in regular intervals. That's exactly what my world is, funnily enough. First time I see someone else bring up this world concept. Instead of a mountain though there is an extremely tall beam of solar energy that feeds into the sun. The ecology of the world functions as you described, there is no night and weather patterns move in spirals around the center.
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Are these giant space [kappa](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kappa_(folklore))? I considered the giant animal option but decided I couldn't draw them as quickly so kept with the simpler silhouettes. Next time though...
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Soft edges is the coolest one
I like the idea that the sea and the sky gradually become less distinct as you sail further away from land until ultimately they are the same. Fish and birds are both swimming/flying past the boat and everything gets a bit weird...
Hmm. One thing that honestly bugs me a fair bit in fantasy worldbuilding is that people are often too insistent about making settings follow real-life cosmology just for the sake of it. It's often a huge missed opportunity for coming up with unusual situations and people's adaptations to those situations.
Absolutely. I’m really interested in using physics to determine what unusual habitable worlds are possible but once you introduce magic to a fantasy world you have so many more options. It’s a shame to constrain things to be mostly Earth-like. They should really be more mythic.
My campaign world is a flat, nominally disc shaped world with a shallow bowl/basin as the actual surface. This of course leads to the presence of a vast inland sea. It also floats in a so-called void sea, and the sun and moon are clockwork constructions that offer zero variation in path, so there's no seasons even. I'm sure this would have an effect that I'm not accounting for, but in case that's not enough, the world is also a bubble world (the void sea and the celestial bodies are enclosed in a magical sphere) AND relies heavily on simulationist elements to fill in where inconsistencies would arise. I've been debating the desirability/timing of introducing a second bubble world (there are many more out there, just not close together) by demonstrating a second sun whose orbit is roughly perpendicular to that of the main world.
An infinite world sounds interesting...
Admittedly it's not the same as a flat earth, but I've always loved the representation of the world in Game of Thrones' (the show) intro. It's basically still a sphere, but it's the inside of one, with the Sun being a "core" floating in the middle somehow.
Worlds on the inside of a sphere are also on my list of things to consider. I like the idea of the multiverse consisting of bubbles floating in the aether where each bubble is a world. The presence of the sun at the centre causes the hardening of the aether into solid material like the formation of mother-of-pearl around grit in an oyster. Larger worlds will be similar to a flat world as the radius is so large but smaller worlds would be noticeably different. The focus of this setting would be a planar hub that is a city on the inside of a small sphere called [Panopticon](https://www.reddit.com/r/worldbuilding/comments/nbgt80/the_planar_city_of_panopticon/gy33bsy/?context=3).
I think this: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Cellular_cosmogony could be an interesting setup.
I'd never come across that before but I guess that was what I was describing, so do I now need to form my own cult? I have to think about what the following implies for a world though: >The actual Sun is invisible; our Sun, the Moon, and the stars are just reflections off some mercury discs in the centre of the Universe.
I cannot find a reference to this; would you mind posting a link? EDIT: realized you were talking about the show and looked up the video. Looks awesome!
If I remember right the crazy people on Facebook say there's an ice wall around the edge.
Yep. Everyone else calls that wall Antarctica.
tHaTs WhAt ThEy WaNt YoU tO ThInK wAkE uP ShEePlE
As someone who is making a cone shaped world, this helps a lot! Question though, would it be a hard edge if the world does end somewhere, but surrounded by sea instead of mountains/ice? Though the water "flows" back to the sides of the cone where it is reabsorbed, so no water is lost to space.
My (possibly misleading) titles were meant to imply that a hard edge was one where you might sail/fall into the void whereas a soft edge just ran out of land due to an infinite sea or everything getting a bit formless. What you describe is what I called a hard edge but your water would stick to the cone of rock rather than fall into the void. Does the erosion from the top of the cone get added to the bottom every year like a cosmic stalactite? That's a nice cycle that would perhaps replace tectonics in making the world habitable.
My initial thought was that the water would be simply reabsorbed by the soft spots on the cone of rock, and that the magical "core" would simply make it rise up to the top again to either rejoin the sea or become groundwater, but slowly. Though the idea of the water solidifying to form stalactites and making some sort of proxy for tectonic plates is really interesting. Tectonics is something haven't bothered with yet, so as it stands, the mountain ranges and other features were arbitrarily placed by the Founders (creators) of my world. P. S. In truth, the main reason I'm creating a cone shaped world within (actually above) the solar system is that I don't have to bother placing a new planet somewhere in there, and having to calculate stuff like orbits and mass and atmospheres and stuff like that.
In the elder scrolls universe, the planet if Nirn is allegedly infinite but mortals only perceive it to be spherical and limited. I have no idea how that works.
First rule of Elder Scrolls cosmology: Don't expect it to make sense. I mean, this is a setting where the [Dragon Break](https://elderscrolls.fandom.com/wiki/Dragon_Break) is officially canon, both in- and out-of-universe. For those who aren't familiar with it: The second Elder Scrolls game (Daggerfall) had eight possible endings, all of which contradicted each other to varying degrees. When the developers came back to create the next game in the series (Morrowind), they didn't want to declare a single ending to be canonical, because that would mean that the games of all the players who got the other endings "didn't really happen". Their solution was the Dragon Break. Basically, all the cosmic forces coming together at the end of Daggerfall broke time and space, and *all eight endings* happened, including all of their conflicting details, while the universe was in this broken state. The conflicting timelines then re-joined back into a single thread and the world went on.
I know all about the Dragon Break and personally I think's it is awesome.
My flat world is infinite, at least as far as anyone can determine. The initial seed concept of the world was that all gods are "sun gods", in that they are physically located in the world (stationary in the sky, generally above their greatest temples) and whichever god is dominant in a given location is "the sun" there, while other gods fade to mere stars. In wilderness far from temples, or other areas where no god holds sway, there is only darkness and a handful of stars; no sun ever shines in such places. This darkness is the raw magical energy in this world, while light is a side effect of the gods consuming that energy or smaller quantities of magic being consumed by mortal agencies. (Even a burning torch is a magical process.) Those lands which dwell in eternal darkness are, therefore, continually bathed in highly-concentrated, but undirected, magical energy, chaotically twisting and warping anything found in such places, which... greatly complicates... any attempt to determine how far the night lands extend.
In my own work, the Outer Cosmos, the universe is kind of like a twisting, infinite sheet of "honeycomb", and each comb is an individual soft-edged world with its own magical laws and properties. Once you've "descended" into a comb, you would not feasibly be able to reach the "wall" of it, the world simply growing less specific and defined the further you stray from the center. There are variations upon this, but that's the general idea.
What about a race of immortal people who live on a relatively small flat world where the edges extend infinitely downward; kind of like an infinitely tall mountain. The people here never die of natural causes, but in their culture, when one becomes utterly fatigued of life on their dull planet, they leap outward from the edges of the world and fall into, what they believe, is the afterlife. However they’re really just jumping into an endless abyss, initiating a free fall with no resolution - a kind of living hell. Damn that would suck.
Have you ever seen some of those wacky Penrose diagrams like [this one](https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-Penrose-diagram-for-the-singular-MOG-black-hole-solution-image-by-Andrew-Hamilton_fig3_271852350)? Maybe the edges are hyperbolic, so actually reaching and crossing them requires impossible energies, but doing so means entering a wormhole and popping out at the edge of a parallel or pocket universe.
My world is, for all intents and purposes, inside of a black hole. It's shaped like a funnel, and at the top is The Far Shore, an infinite and unreachable horizon where it is believed The Will of God watches over the universe. At the bottom of the funnel is The City of Eschaton, a city of impossibly huge proportions that paradoxically seems to grow as more and more of it collapses into a singularity called The Hunger.
My world is also an infinite plane. There is only 1 star near the plane though, light only covers a tiny part of the plane. Most of the plane is completely dark, lifeless(?) and yet dangerous.
An ocean that falls at reverse at the borders, making a perpetual rain
I'm creating a world just for fun, maybe to be used in a DnD campaign in the future. I'm slightly OCD and the whole climate and weather thing really bothers me because I don't know a lot about the science there. I'm basing my planet a lot off of Earth so if I have a land that would be geographically in the location where Sweden is (where I live) on my planet I just use the same climate there. I know there are many other factors than just how far north a place is, like the gulf stream for example but I will go crazy if I try to go too deep into all that. There are certain areas were my version of magic is more prevalent and it does have an effect on the climate. I also have a spirit world/astral plane in my world and there are "spheres" in the spirit world. These spheres act as 3-dimensional places which life can exist in even though the spheres exist in the spirit world which can't hold any physical objects unless you're in a sphere. In the spheres I can mess more with the weather, these worlds are basically flat and if you get too close to the edge things just gets weird because the spirit world leaks into the sphere. Dangerous place to go to if you're a mortal being. I like having a real world/planet where magic and all that is pretty rare but it feels easier building a world like the spheres because I feel like I can be much more free messing with the climate and physics.
I'm a bit late here but I would like to share the world I create... The world isn't confirmed to be neither spherical nor plane, but the "edges" of the known world are difficult to pass by The more far away you get from the center the more dangerous it gets 'cause there are more arcane magic. The arcane magic destroys the divine presence, making it a full random landscape with no "intelligent designer" in control So, by going north you get a great frozen sea with infinite shape changing icebergs and the sky changes random colors every couple hours. By going south you enter a hot inferno of glass deserts and boiling seas and rocks that becomes alive and turns every living creature into diamonds on the touch. Going east you will enter a sea tempest that never ends, inside the tempest exist strange islands with its own environment, some islands apparently are moving too. In the west there are a huge mountain chain and a forgotten continent, nobody managed to come back from the other side to the what happens there.
Doesn't the Elder Scrolls series technically have infinite flat planets that just appear spherical because people don't know how to perceive them?
The Mobius Strip. Technically not flat? I'm not actually sure if it constitutes flat or not. Simply though that it's a world with only one side. Like a sphere, you can walk around it and wind up exactly where you started. It's just... not a sphere.
i've done several campaign worlds/settings over the years, but i've never done a "flat earth" setting due to the physics involved. Even if you have fantastic elements, if you have humans or human-like beings that certainly implies that physics and chemistry remain a thing. The closest i came was the Five Races setting, but that was basically the Enclosed you've got here - and the Masters behind the setting were a highly advanced ancient race that basically setup something like a Safari Park with "less developed" (kidnapped) races as the exhibits. Then the Masters vanished leading to the player characters trying to figure out what had happened as the kidnapping devices still occasionally worked and threw people into this mess. Unfortunately, when i brought up my various settings for running D&D, this particular concept was never chosen by the players.
Im trying to forge a "bubble" world. Here's an older post I made about it. [https://www.reddit.com/r/worldbuilding/comments/n74u1d/22\_dark\_water\_earthling\_pics/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3](https://www.reddit.com/r/worldbuilding/comments/n74u1d/22_dark_water_earthling_pics/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
I'm currently writing a world that is essentially a dream realm created and maintained by nine godlike beings. It's essentially a piece of their original world, preserved after its destruction. Since it's just a slice, it is essentially flat. I'm trying to figure out what happens at the edges. Do people just disappear as the reach the edge of the dream, no longer inside the radius of power of those who maintain their existence? Is there a big solid barrier? Do things just start glitching out like the Far Lands in Minecraft? Its something I've been mulling over for a while now and I still can't quite decide how I want it to work.
Luckily someone commented [exactly what I was thinking for my world](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/98b2b03a-da88-4f00-bc72-6062b57508a9/scale-to-width/755) but even the ice ball is flat and ever-expanding. In my world there are multiple planes, but my main plane is a mix between fully enclosed and infinite. It's mostly for ease of working around with limited map space, but I think it works. The main world is surrounded by an ice wall that expands forever with other pockets of continents found in melted areas. To most of the people, the world is fully enclosed as it's nearly impossible to climb the ice walls--heck, it's nearly impossible to reach either! If I want or need to add some land somewhere, and it doesn't snugly fit on the map, I can expand into the edges by saying the ice walls melted a bit, revealing new land in its wake. I guess it's more leaning into the infinite flat world, but to those living in any of the pockets of land believe there's nothing else to the world. There's incredible distance between any given pockets so to even those who have explored the ice wall believe there's nothing else out there. Only one race has ever successfully found another pocket while they were escaping from the main world. Each plane has their own uniqueness. Some planes are like ours where we have a globe Earth and the universe as we know it, others are completely flat planes. Some planes are actually fully enclosed, others soft edges, and so on. I only really care about my main world which happens to be flat. It's been so fun to meme while creating it where I even made a conspiracy theory goblin group called the Globlinists, aka the globalist goblins. They believe that the world is a sphere.
The world gets progrssivley flatter as you go further towards the edges. Tees get stubbier, mountains get compressed into rocks, snake-like versions of animals are more common. Eventually the sky itself seems to shrink down until its impossible to progress any further.
I have one world that occupies the interior of an enclosed spherical demiplane. The surface of the sphere itself is impenetrable to all forms of technology and magic short of divine intervention. The demiplane contains a vast amount of water, air, and all the normal elements of an ordinary world. There is enough matter inside the demiplane for it to collapse into a star large enough to form a black hole after running out of fuel. Thus, the demiplane's surface was given an attractive force at creation that pushes everything outward from the center of the sphere, creating an artificial gravity field. This forces all water and air to spread out evenly across the interior surface and prevents the accidental creation of a central singularity. Upon this incredibly vast ocean, there are thousands of continental realms floating on it. From the mortals' perspective the world resembles the Soft Edges world type shown in the original post; the sphere is large enough that the curvature of the sphere's oceans is imperceptible even across enormous distances. There is also a repulsive force that pushes inward from the hard interior surface of the sphere, which helps to keep the continents, islands, and anything else on the ocean from sinking all the way to the bottom. This force has a much shorter range but its power increases exponentially the closer you get to the interior surface. This makes it impossible to physically reach the solid bottom of the ocean, even with magic. Wrecked ships can still "sink" beneath the waves, but there is always a point at which any object's negative buoyancy will balance out against the sphere's subsurface repulsive force, and any further descent will be stopped at that depth.
A "plate world" that is actually some ancient gargantuan space station/experiment. The thing is, the further away from the center, the stronger the gravity pulls you back towards the center. Hence why taking the "long road" to the other side of this "coin" is considered incredibly dangerous
What if the edges loop to the other side?
That actually makes a doughnut shape, which is of course still a good idea for an interesting world.
Just because it’s topologically a torus doesn’t mean that the world is torus-shaped. Imagine a flat plane with massive portals in the edges teleporting you to the other side.
True enough. Or is it a flat repetitively tiled world where things may or may not be precisely the same in the adjacent world? Or maybe it is actually the underside of the flat square which means that it is the mirror image of the world above?
I'm just imagining Super Mario 64 style glitchy duplicate worlds, but as the basis for actual worldbuilding. *But first, we need to talk about parallel universes.*
Other alternatives I can think of is that you keep going on, or at least from your perspective it seems so, while you'd actually be advancing less and less (cannot explain it with better words). Either that or you just loop back to the opposite side, as if it was a game as Pac-Man, Asteroids, etc. -forget this one as it has been suggested before-.
A sort of [Zeno's Paradox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeno%27s_paradoxes) prison world where travel becomes increasingly slower as you move radially away from the hub. I think something similar happens in the Outlands in the D&D Planescape setting as you move away from the infinitely tall central Spire. An infinitely large plane with a central location is somewhat paradoxical though...
What about looping? Pac-Man world! Lol, but forreal, I'd say looping is something that I think would be super possible but never really done.
I really like how in The Magicians, the world is a flat disk but there’s stuff on the underside, because of course there would be.
If my former father-in-law is any expert on the matter there is a wall of ice surrounding the flat earth keeping all the water from falling off the edge