Make this fantasy world work without resorting to too much magic

FAN: Discuss various fictional worlds that don't qualify for SF.

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mr friendly guy
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Make this fantasy world work without resorting to too much magic

Post by mr friendly guy »

I have been reading some translated Chinese web novels, and apparently a lot of these fantasy worlds seem bigger than earth. My question is how can we rationalise a planet this big, supporting human life and resorting to magic to explain it away the least number of times. This is of course just a fun exercise, but I am curious as to whether its possible. So lets start with this particular fictional planet.

http://ni-tian-xie-shen-against-the-god ... _Pole_Star

Its stated as 3% land and 97% water (presumably its referring to its surface area), and it was originally 40% land before a war of gods changed it. This might also explain why there are humans on the 3 continents which are too far for even sky ships to reach, since there may very well have been living there before the war of the gods, and there was land for them to stop across with their teleportation devices (it will be ridiculous to expect humans to migrate from one end of the other in a lifetime as we shall see below given the size of this world).

Now this world was created by a deity, so we can use magic to explain away any features that just don't make sense from a physics perspective. However the challenge is to explain as much as you can without resorting to magic. The main issue is, this world is ridiculously large with all the problems this entails. The continents are too far apart for humans to travel even by flying (and they have sky ships and powerful humans can fly), but there are some artefacts which can teleport vast distances.

Now the first sign that this world is huge is when one continent have a population larger than that of modern earth and they are only preindustrial. Another indication is when two countries on a smaller continent is described as 35 000 km away (the circumference of earth is only 40,075 km). Note the authors in these web novels tend to use traditional Chinese measurements of distance, however translators can convert that in kilometres.

The real big sign is when two continents are described as 4.5 million km away from each other. Even if they were at the other end of the planet and at the exact middle, this would still mean the circumference is 9 million km, giving it a radius of 2.05 solar radii, and assuming a density equal to earth, would be 34 solar masses, and a gravity around 225 times that of earth. It would be smaller than a subgiant star, but bigger than a star like Sirius A.

Now most probably the author has no clue about the size of astronomical objects and just chucked up some numbers, but lets assume for a moment the author actually wanted to describe a planet which somehow has these calculated properties.

How would this world even function?

For example - night and day. It behaves like an earth like planet, but if the star was like our sun, the orbit would be very strange as the sheer gravity of this planet would change the orbit of the star. Can we explain it away as saying the planet orbits a supergiant star?

Water - would the oceans boil with such pressure? Is there anyway to explain this one away without using magic.

Atmosphere - wouldn't the air be thick. So the humans must be adapted to handle the thicker air.

Gravity - I am no expert, but if it has more mass than the sun, wouldn't it undergo fusion at the core? The flip side is, we could try arguing the world is less dense, but then that would create its own set of problems and the planet would be gaseous.

Feel free to describe any other problems that might crop up.
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Re: Make this fantasy world work without resorting to too much magic

Post by Sea Skimmer »

Way too big. You need massive amounts of magic, its not interesting trying to explain this on that stupendous a scale of planet with a stable climate. Everything is magic. Gravity, climate, the ability of mountain ranges to not literally flow like lava, the spectrum of light from supergiant stars, ect...

At that point I'd rather think more about how to rationalize my idea for a flat universe planet which exists as the center of its own existence and then blows up into a extra dimension to create the present day type universe. I made it a million miles across so the flying battleship could be the ultimate weapon. Because really if your going to be all magic, the environment might as well be different too, with the weather being one constant circular pattern for example because I decreed the universe was spinning.
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Re: Make this fantasy world work without resorting to too much magic

Post by Terralthra »

It's totally possible, if the gravitational constant of the universe is different. That's about the only way.
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Re: Make this fantasy world work without resorting to too much magic

Post by Broomstick »

Could it work at a Niven-style ringworld? Which still has problems, of course, but is much more workable with physics.

Could it be a Dyson sphere?

Both of the above have issues with the day/night cycle being different than on a planet like ours. Unless the Dyson sphere is so big you can live on the outside and the sun really does orbit the D-sphere in such a circumstance.

But yeah, the world in question needs a healthy dose of magic, or different physical laws, to work.
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Re: Make this fantasy world work without resorting to too much magic

Post by Imperial528 »

It's probably a shell world.

But I have no idea how such a massive shell world would stay together, let alone rotate.
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Re: Make this fantasy world work without resorting to too much magic

Post by Broomstick »

That's where the magic comes in. :wink:
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Re: Make this fantasy world work without resorting to too much magic

Post by Terralthra »

Ringworlds require a material which has a tensile strength greater than the nuclear strong force to work, and this thing would have to have at least twice the radius of Niven's ringworld.
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Re: Make this fantasy world work without resorting to too much magic

Post by mr friendly guy »

It did occur to me that we can at least deal with the gravity problem by making the world hollow, like a dyson sphere without the star in the centre. This way it can be not dense without being gaseous. Since gravity is directly proportional to mass and inversely proportional to radius square, it can have a mass 225 squared times the earth and have the same gravity given its higher radius (experts please correct me if I am wrong). Of course we need to work out how thick the crust can get to have this mass.

Although I am starting to have to admit that this world has just magically resistant material which can resist so much pressure, and the inhabitants are superbeings who will become metahumans on earth's gravity.. well more so than the super powers they already display on their own world.
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Re: Make this fantasy world work without resorting to too much magic

Post by Imperial528 »

I was thinking, if it's a shell world well in excess of the radii of a dyson swarm, if you were to put a significantly energetic star inside of it the internal light pressure may be enough to hold it together, like a giant balloon-statite.

I'll run some numbers when I get home in about an hour to see if such a thing could work.
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Re: Make this fantasy world work without resorting to too much magic

Post by Terralthra »

A star energetic enough to keep a shell world this size from gravitational collapse would also sterilize the interior surface and the outside would be emitting light as a blackbody. Uninhabitable, certainly no liquid-water oceans.
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Re: Make this fantasy world work without resorting to too much magic

Post by Zixinus »

There would be an artificial star, or rather artificial lighting. If you are going to make a utterly impossible world why stop at just the planets? Go for the stars or lack of thereof. You don't need them to be stars, you just need them to provide light.
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Re: Make this fantasy world work without resorting to too much magic

Post by Q99 »

Hm, the only way to make it without magic off the top of my head is have the reality be a giant simulation.
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Re: Make this fantasy world work without resorting to too much magic

Post by LaCroix »

What about the gods did it by putting temporal anomalities over the oceans to seperate their domains? It's not actually billions of km, but time dilation makes you travel that long. Teleport works because it's not subjected to this as much as actual travel, only needs more power to push that far. So, people assume that it's that enourmous because of travel time, while in fact, it's just a lot bigger than earth (huge continents are settled, so they actually exist.)

Gods being able to make time behave strangely vs being able to make a world bigger than most suns without wrecking a whole solarsystem an all physics.
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Re: Make this fantasy world work without resorting to too much magic

Post by Solauren »

It's got to be a 'Hollow World' type set up (aka a Shell World).

Large planet but hollow instead of a massive inner core, with the central 'core' being replaced by something else. Perhaps a portal into a the star the planet orbits?

The 'shell' would rotate/effectively orbit the portal, which in turn orbits the star.

Magnetic north and south could be caused by Magi-babble related to the portal.
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Re: Make this fantasy world work without resorting to too much magic

Post by Khaat »

There's also the scale possibility: the planet's normal size, but the people were all long ago reduced to 1" tall (by magic, duh!), and they still base their measurements off personal dimensions (1/72nd scale). Continents 4.5 million km away are really only 62,500 km away (ok, smaller than 1". Half-inch? 31,250 km away? Quarter inch? 15,625 km? [could do that with a 29th level 2E AD&D reduce spell.]) "What are we?" "We're min!" :lol:

Or the Evil God who created it built some dimensional-warping effect into it, so it's always farther than it should be (to create delays in cooperative goody-goody stuff). Or "he" (Evil God, author, take your pick) just doesn't know why it shouldn't work at that size.

Or they're all laying in tanks of goo, wired into a Matrix. No magic at all (unless you count "sufficiently advanced technology...").
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Re: Make this fantasy world work without resorting to too much magic

Post by mr friendly guy »

Funny you should mention dimensional warping. Its stated by the Protagonist's sifu, who is a walking wikipedia for magical knowledge but has zero knowledge about this world's geopolitics, that there is something going on with the laws of space on parts of this world. Which makes it easier for her to transverse the vast distances, rather than the opposite.

Its suggestive as the story goes on, that this world is meant to be some sort of prison for creatures thought extinct and dangerous sentient magical artefacts. Its pretty much stated that this world is low in magical energy (its a trope I notice, where the hero starts off in the crappiest country, in the crappiest continent, in the crappiest planet and works their way up to wanktastic power). The reason its low in energy is so that sentient magical artefact will find it hard to recharge itself.

I am leaning towards this being a shell world as the best bet for this to work. Although we still have the problem of why these beings are imprisoned relatively near the surface (ok its quite deep, but nowhere deep enough given the radius of this planet).
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Re: Make this fantasy world work without resorting to too much magic

Post by Simon_Jester »

You know, magically shrinking everyone and everything in the world so that they're all one inch high sounds like a really good way to make any imprisoned beings and artifacts much less dangerous. If you ever have to go in and play the warden of this cosmic game preserve and/or ammunition dump, well, you're a huge giant compared to everything on the planet that could possibly threaten you.
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Re: Make this fantasy world work without resorting to too much magic

Post by Solauren »

Simon_Jester wrote:You know, magically shrinking everyone and everything in the world so that they're all one inch high sounds like a really good way to make any imprisoned beings and artifacts much less dangerous. If you ever have to go in and play the warden of this cosmic game preserve and/or ammunition dump, well, you're a huge giant compared to everything on the planet that could possibly threaten you.
That puts old stories about Giants and Titans into perspective, doesn't it?
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