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So I'm stuck here at work with nothing much to do and naturally this leads to my favorite activity: spacing out and imagining things I'll never get around to writing about.

I thought it might be fun to have a place for little brainstorming sessions about settings for people who also like to do this instead of writing. Either present a setting and ask others to come up with characters and plots for it, or ask for help in coming up with setting details that fit some particular situation you want to create.

No hard rules on this, let's just see where it goes. (for maybe ten posts until it dies, because this is Writing Workshop...)

I'll stay with the second idea since I can't do 5000 word text walls from my phone right now, and this something I've been thinking about on and off already this morning:

Would it be possible for any sane ancientish/medieval themed society to have a system where it's common for women to inherit land?

Two possibilities I've come up with:

She's expected to sell the land before she can legally marry. Offering it first to the eldest sibling and then moving on down. This could make for an interesting scenario since if it was someone the family absolutely hates, they'd have collective veto power by just refusing to buy.

But this also means every girl in the family meant a considerable sum of money going out of it to the hands of another family. I guess that could be considered as replacing a dowry or something but it's still inconvenient enough I can't see the custom persisting for long or anyone wanting to have girls at all.

The second idea was just that women would be expected to always marry down, to someone who'd then move in with her. Maybe to a skilled tradesmen that didn't have land of his own....that'd keep everyone from getting too pasty and inbred and mean a lot of surprisingly useful people among the nobility. But I feel like it would lead to a lot of social changes I haven't really had time to consider yet. And the first idea just instantly created interesting plots because of how flawed that system would be, so I kind of prefer it.

Thinking that I'll reserve the second for some throws setting detail and consider the first for writing* a story with the conflict centered around the obvious plot for that marriage system.

Can you guys come up with anything else though, or any of your own plots based off these?




*No writing will take place.

Ooh, Sparta already did this! Because men were so likely to die in a war or something, it was easiest for the Spartans to keep their wealth consolidated (I.E. not split up among children who were probably still literally children) by having inheritance go to the spouse before the offspring. This went just about as you would expect, with essentially an aristocratic council of widowed (and probably re-married) MILFs and grandmas becoming nearly as powerful as the actual government.

There wasn't too much social change just because the Spartans we actually think of as "The Spartans" were basically upper-class nobility in and of themselves, and households were more determined by the individual men rather than who their father was, so the womens' actual holdings were something that had more generational staying power than the stuff that the guy was expected to amass himself unless both his parents died.

This is pretty cool, thanks. I'll file it away and I'm sure I'll repackage it for something or other. I wouldn't have thought to look to Greece for anything to do with women's rights.

Oh and in light of recent developments, I request that @SpartacustheGreat join the thread.

Malk is playing a game about dwarves called Deeprock Galactic, and the question that's bugging me now is what a civilization of spacefaring dwarves would be like.

All I can think it's that they'd hate it. I'm sure they have a pretty deep connection to the mountains. There's their magic, traditions, and probably a psychological thing related to a feeling of security. Their ancestors have tombs going back generations and I can't see them just abandoning all that.

But maybe they'd leave the planet for work and adventures, but always intend to return to it. The unique thing about them might that they don't settle other planets the way the various other species do.

I've always imagined dwarves hated sailing and flying though (like the way Toph hated not being able to feel the earth in Avatar) and spaceflight has to be a thousand times worse. You're just completely untethered from everything with nothingness in all directions.

Anyway I'll just leave this here for now and ponder it more in the morning.

Probably colonized an asteroid or something. 

Dwarves with a serious connection to the earth around them probably view their suffering as a necessary tribulation as they make a pilgrimmage to the next mountainhome. They're journeying to a new place with new metals, new materials, possibly even undiscovered elements and technologies, with some of the biggest landmasses imaginable. Even planets thought to be mostly uninhabitable, have mountains higher than everest and expansive rocky badlands with the possibility of frozen groundwater to sustain future dwarves. Consider if you will, how unthinkably, mind-bogglingly enormous the  tallest mountain on mars is. And how huge the mountains of other worlds might be.



You can't tell me that the Red Planet wouldn't at least be a little bit enticing to the dwarves.

Mars be compensating. 

Okay, I can work with this. I could see an epic dwarven city on/in that mountain. Maybe some massive planet spanning aqueducts to bring in water from the ice caps?

In fact I'll have to see if I remember how to mod DF enough to make that happen. A desert of red dirt at least isn't difficult to achieve in vanilla, I'd just need more Martian themed critters.

That's a pretty picture but actually quite misleading. (Why is ML higher than Everest?) Technically Olympos Mons is the biggest mountain, but if you stood on it you could mistake it for a plain. For a dramatic landscape you might visit the 6 mile-high cliff on moon Miranda.

Mauna Loa's representation is showing its height in relation to the actual ground rather than sea level, I think. There are technically larger mountains on earth if you count volcanic islands. I think it's less the dramatic appearance of the mountain as it is its potential as a fortification. And I could in theory see a massive stack of interwoven cities built inside the rocky dome of Olympus and powered by the slow geothermal storms raging underneath them. Just some major terraforming around the bottom in order to make the "edges" sharper and more wall-like, and you would probably be set.

A lot of the biggest mountainhomes in the Sci Fi Future probably won't look like the quaint 'small' and pointy mountainhomes of earth, but there is a certain frightening sense of enormous scale with this altered aesthetic. Our modest peaks might house a few hundred thousand dwarves, but can you imagine the visage of a massive subterranean space-settlement, five times as tall as Mount Everest, forming a belt around the entire moon of Iapetus? All to mine some incredibly rare magical resource deep inside this moon in particular, nevermind what lurking horrors have been festering inside undisturbed by mortal eyes since the beginning of time...

They would go to pluto ... it's a dwarf planet.

What would change from earth's perspective if the earth didn't go around the sun, (at least, not perceptibly) and the sun was so big and so impossibly far away that a series of swirling planets were slowly going around it from lightyears away? The laws of thermodynamics work differently in this world, so the earth is still warm and habitable, but would there still be things like seasons, eclipses, and phases of the moon? If not, how could this be rectified? 

Let's consider a planet that is really far away from the sun (a light year is a bit too far but we can put it a bit beyond beyond pluto's orbit, so about 0.001 lightyears away from the sun). That would mean that a 'year' on the planet would last several hundred earth years.

If we assume that the planet rotates then there is still a day-night cycle and if there plane rotation is a titled moderately with respect to the direction of the sun, you still get seasons ... but they are very long season. Since our year takes hundreds of earth years, a winter could last a lifetime (sounds familiar?).

Note that also the constellations that you see at night change with the seasons, so with our ultra long seasons we would be seeing the same stars every night.

If the planet is very far away from the sun, seasons might be very boring because the sun isn't much brighter than most other stars. We can fix this however. if we orbit a particularly big star. In this case we could be very far away but receive the same amount of energy as on earth. Also, because we are far away the star would not even be huge in the Sky.

The star not being visually huge or tiny is important, because for proper eclipses we need the sun and the moon to be pretty much the same apparent size (i.e.~how large they look from earth in contrast to how large they actually are). On earth we are pretty lucky because we got a particularly big moon that has almost exactly the same apparent size as the sun, which makes for nice eclipses.

The phases of the moon would work exactly as on earth and the length of a month would be the same. Also, tides would work exactly the same.

Sounds like the setting of Helleconia, although the Helleconia seasons would last many generations until the last season was mere legend.

Still working through that series. Spring was good but Summer is a pain to even finish. Flashbacks within flashbacks with in flashbacks, it's dizzingly non-linearanon-linear, most the characters are repugnant.

Thinking of this reminded me of a phenomenon that is under-explored in writing: bound rotation. In a nutshell: If two bodies orbit each other they eventually end up facing each other with the same side all the time. This typically happens more quickly for smaller bodies.

For example the moon is in bound rotation around the earth, which means, from earth, we always see the same side of the moon. (Ever heard of the 'dark side' of the moon. It's not actually dark, it has a day-night cycle much like the rest, but always faces away from the earth. So 'far side' describes it more accurately, but people would confuse it with Gary Larson cartoons, and 'dark side' sounds cool).

Now imagine a planet that is in bound rotation with a star. So one side has constant daylight, a scorching desert. The other side has constant night, a frozen wasteland. In between you get a habitable stripe of eternal dusk that circles the planet.

One of the worlds that i'm building is a moon thats tidaly locked to a gas giant. It still has day and night, though they are quite long, but every day the planet fully eclipses the sun. During the night, the gas gaint would be far brighter than our moon, so the sky wouldn't be that dark. The eclipse would be the darkest time of the day.

My brain just went on an adventure from that idea, so thanks!  I'm fascinated by that kind of thing.

Honest to goodness science fact here regarding tidally-locked moons in orbit around gas giants:

Several moons in our own solar system are strong candidates for hosting water-based life, the most promising being Europa, which orbits Jupiter.

On its surface, Europa is a frozen ice ball that is uninhabitable because it lacks an atmosphere (also, it is irradiated to hell by Jupiter). This moon is too far from the Sun to receive much solar warmth, and so the surface ice is permanent.

However, there are no craters on that ice surface, telling us it is continuously renewed. And analyses of its mass only make sense if there is a deep ocean of liquid water beneath the ice.

As it turns out, tidal locking exerts other forces on Europa (and other similar worlds). On Earth, tides are mostly observed in the rise and fall of the oceans, all caused by the orbit of the Moon; we can see our liquid oceans rising and falling several times a day, but the land seems immobile. With the gas giant moons, however, the planet's gravity exerts a pull on the rocky cores, sort of kneading them like bread dough. These tidal stresses sustain tectonic activity where it otherwise shouldn't exist. (By contrast, the reason why Mars is a poor candidate for life is because its atmosphere mostly blew away, and its molten iron core cooled and solidified.)

So, the hypothesis is that Europa possesses more water than Earth, and that it is kept in a liquid state by a substantial amount of hydrothermic activity created by tidal stresses. These vents would be comparable to the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, where ecosystems of microbes and multicellular organisms thrive on the mineral-rich heated water, completely independent of sunlight. If life exists on Europa, it would be based on these kinds of microbes. Whether or not multicellular life could exist in that environment would depend on how oxygenated the ocean is; Jupiter's radiation could be creating oxygen on the moon's surface, which may then be falling into the ocean below through fissures in the ice.

This isn't idle speculation found on some sketchy blog; this is NASA's theory, and they have a Europa-bound probe scheduled to launch in 2022. There are other moons in orbit around Jupiter, Saturn, and Neptune where the potential for life can't be ruled out; the moons of Uranus are too little known.

Reading about stuff like this gave me the idea in the first place. It would be amazing if we found life on other planets.

I think I read a few books about that by a guy called Arthur C Clarke ;)

I tried to work a lot of Bucky's prompts into my entry, and one was about a tidally locked planet. I think it also mixed in a couple other prompts like a talking bear and Cleopatra.

Here's that story from the Book of Vanishing Tales, though it wasn't done as a tale he told others but more a semi-conscious dream sequence:

In the far reaches of space burns a fierce red star, and swift around it rushes the planet of Day and Night. One side of the planet is always day, and has grown hot and shriveled. Almost nothing lives there, save lichen and hardy bugs in the smallest pockets of stubborn life. The other side is always night, forever dark and icy. Even the stars do not give light, as the sky is thick and clouded. But in a ribbon of twilight binding day and night together, civilizations rise and clash and fall.

Here is the dawn circus, forever traveling, with mighty elephants leading the parade. They come to a golden palace and do tricks for the queen. Streamers are hung from sandy statue arms, and aerial dances performed to inspire the slaves. The god-queen sips on wine seasoned with crushed pearls as she watches, fanning herself to the flex of the strongman's muscle and the fleshy twists of the contortionist.

She rewards them with a talking bear, a bear who speaks prophesy! He tells of woe to come, woe from the lands of dark! But the clowns laugh, and the tigers chuff, and the queen simply smiles.

The circus moves on, entertaining children in crowded camps and migrating families seeking new land. At last it reaches the valewind, a wall of air no one can cross, and must turn back.

But behind it, something comes!

Creatures of the dark, foul chimeras of the endless winter, who cut through wind as butter and devour all flesh! Guiding them, a warped man in a white coat, crazed and no longer human.

The strongman is the first to die, throwing himself to the battle as the others flee. The elephants next, forming a barrier, their corpses slowing the tide but unable to stop it.

"To me!" the bear cries, and erects a shield of magic. He enchants the daggers and the ribbons and the hoops. With the power of dreams he charges them, and the circus fights back:

The knife throwers pierce the heart of the beasts, the aerial dancers strangle them. The children throw the taming hoops and watch the chimeras turn to dust.

"The Final Circus" they are called, the ones who saved the twilight world. Give them your coin and your respect! They are not mere entertainers, but protectors of the realm.

... That's disturbingly close to what I've written already. I may have to revise things somewhat.

Nah, just publish first and claim all the credit ;)

... and who is uncanny valley wierd bald guy?!?

Well I can't have everyone guessing the twist!

And, the bald guy is one of the patients from the DOS game Emergency Room! I thought he had a nice expression for all situations.

Is that the game where the patient can die from stupid things if you don't diagnose fast enough, and if he did you always got the weird shot of the feet in the morgue with the tag? I don't remember the doctor's face, but yeesh those feet...

It is!