Worldbuilding Wednesdays: Intermediate Consequences
Welcome to Worldbuilding Wednesdays! Every Wednesday, we spend what is probably far too much time walking through our worldbuilding process. In this week's post, we start digging into the less obvious consequences of some of our decisions, like how hard it's going to be to mow the lawn.
What We Have So Far
Our world has 10 times the radius of Earth. It is also 10 times as massive. As a result, the gravity is 1/10 Earth's, and its surface area is 100 times bigger. On the inside of the world? Mostly nothing, it's 99% hollow. On the outside? Three satellites. The closest is the Lantern, which shines like the sun (more or less literally). Further out but appearing roughly similar in size are what we've taken to calling the Red Moon and the Blue Moon. They, combined with our world's leisurely rotation, give us our day-night cycle and our week: the Lantern pokes over the horizon every 43 hours, and all three satellites roughly line up every 9.2 days.
We've focused on a single continent, the map of which can be seen above. This wasn't mentioned last time, but the program we used to make the map was Azgaar's Fantasy Map Generator, which we recommend. Since it's one of four and "average" for our planet, it has 25 times the land mass of all of Earth.
Also, there's a lot of rain here.
Botany For Dummies
Now, before we go any further, we should mention something. We shoot for somewhere between 1000 and 2000 words with these posts, so there's quite a bit of glossing over done to keep a brisk pace. Behind the scenes, we do quite a bit more work. Most of it is math, but, polyglots that we are, other sciences are dipped into as well. We've already referenced physics, geology, orbital mechanics, and meteorology, and we'll hit more sciences before we're done. We'll be spending a lot of time on botany today, for example.
That's not a requirement for worldbuilding, just so you know. When you worldbuild the way we do, the big things you need are:
- An eagerness to explore details
- A sense of curiosity about how worlds (including Earth) work
- A basic ability to research what you don't know
For example, until we started working on the plant life of our new world, we thought that the primary limiters on plant growth were resources and the square-cube law. It took Googling "why do plants have a maximum size?" and then clicking several times to find out about a third major issue: sap.
It turns out that, all else being equal, even if a tree were more structurally sound- and trees are already some of the most massive singular organisms in the world, so they have the "sound structure" thing down pat- they still couldn't grow much larger than they already do because they can't get their vital fluids (sap) much higher. Your typical tree doesn't have a heart and can't simply pump the fluids up. It instead uses hydraulic pressure, and little tricks like creating negative pressure by evaporating dew off their leaves, to push and pull that fluid around alternately. The problem is that the taller a tree gets, the less efficient these processes are. After a certain point, even if the tree could grow larger, it literally can't push any nutrients higher.
Which is one reason why plants won't simply be ten times taller on our world.
Oh, but don't worry. They're still mostly going to be huge.
The Return of Consequences
Plants are the way they are for a multitude of reasons. One of those reasons is gravity. Gravity means leaves must make a tradeoff between size and the resources necessary to support that size. It means that they must support a certain amount of weight against wind and rain. Gravity even changes the way that things like fruit work.
So it is that on our world, we can expect plants that otherwise work the same way they would on Earth will be somewhere north of twice the normal size. Grass will be six feet tall, trees would routinely grow to 100 meters+ in height, and we can expect the tallest trees to be five or six times taller than that. Rather than the tallest trees being conifers with relatively narrow trunks (for their height; compared to the smaller trees they'll still be massive), the big boys of this world will have massive canopies.
Hey, remember how we mentioned fruit? That wasn't a weird little aside. On a world with 1/10 the normal gravity, plants will use more exotic seed dispersion methods, simply because they can. Lowered gravity means that fruit that would normally become ripe, then drop to the ground, smashing itself open, can't anymore; even from a great height, the terminal velocity of the fruit won't break them. A plant that favors smashing fruit open to disperse seeds will effectively need to be spring-loaded so that it more or less explodes upon impact. On the bright side (for the plant) that kind of action, which would perhaps launch seeds a handful of feet away on Earth, could potentially get them over a hundred feet away on our world. Hang time is a serious advantage here.
Similarly, a kind of fruit would be possible here that might never occur on Earth: rolling fruit. With much lower gravity, friction has a harder time playing a role in stopping objects in motion. So, for example, a tree could evolve a partially erupted root structure with grooved centers that permit and even encourage rapid lateral motion.
Translation: ball-shaped fruit rolls down the tree and off into the wide world.
These particular adaptations are precisely what we're talking about, by the way, when we discuss pursuing consequences. Here are two different types of fruit, fairly unique to this world, and they aren't thought up wholesale; instead, they arise naturally as a consequence of one of the tweaks we made earlier. As you work on your own worldbuilding, unusual details like this will be the goal. Why? Because a small detail like this does a whole lot of worldbuilding for you. Anyone paying attention will notice the weirdness of these fruits as they drop from absolutely massive trees, and they will be able to work backwards from the detail to what your world must be like to allow it. Anyone not paying attention will see an unusual detail, but certainly not an unreasonable one. Either way, you, the worldbuilder, have done your job.
The Hilltop
A hill by the coast, we are already aware, will get plenty of wind, rain, and water. For giggles, let's say it's enough for a medium-large tree, some 300 meters tall. Due to the way canopies work on medium-large trees, this single tree will shade the entire hill, some 600 meters from side to side. You have carefully sat between the tree's roots, waiting for the entertainment of the day.
After a few moments, the wind blows through the canopy. Above, somewhere fairly close to the trunk, there is a distant crack. Several seconds later, you see it: a rollstone, a foot-wide citrus, plummeting downward. The rollstone is more or less aligned with one of the buttress roots, thanks to the tree's branches growing directly over them. And the root is shaped like a shallow "U."
The rollstone drops onto the root, rolling into the "U" shape. Resin has smoothed the inner surface, and the rollstone's vertical speed is neatly transferred to horizontal speed. It shoots out of the root like a bowling ball, rocketing off into the distance. You watch as it rolls off down the hill, eventually bouncing into the sea.
Of course, not all of the rollstones wind up in the sea. Most roll to a stop between hills, go to seed, and the resulting trees eventually grow taller than said hills; fruit from those trees rolls down the buttress roots or the hills themselves. You idly wonder if that means the tree you find yourself beneath, sitting on top of the hill as it is, was planted.
Conclusion
We have enough to start talking about climates at this point, which means we can finally establish whether the map we've been using all this time is at all accurate, beyond establishing the topography. Expect a long list next week, folks.