WHY

[james_davis_nicoll]

DO PEOPLE INSIST ON ADDING DETAILS TO ROLEPLAYING SETTINGS THAT UNDERMINE THE ESSENTIAL REALISM OF PEOPLE FIGHTING DRAGONS BY THINKING HARSH THOUGHTS SO ENERGETICALLY LITERAL FIRE SHOOTS OUT OF THE CHARACTERS' FINGERTIPS?

Comments

[dragoness_e]

So this is either about non-white characters in fantasy pseudo-medieval pseudo-Europe, or a certain hugely popular fantasy MMORPG that appears to have the sun both rise and set in the north. I admit to being the person who bitched about the latter.

[(Anonymous)]

Is it possible the game is set on an Alderson disc?

[dragoness_e]

Only if it somehow manages to look exactly like a round planet when viewed from orbit. (Yes, there is a point in the game where you are standing on the deck of a spaceship in orbit looking down at the planet). And all if all the globes found in various Neglectful Precursor dungeons are lying. (Which is possible, the NPs somehow missed a few continents when mapping... not to mention mapping the globe in a time when it was a pangaea but showing the current map. Self-updating globes, I presume.)

[(Anonymous)]

There's precedent. The planet in Final Fantasy 8 looks round when you see it from space, but the surface clearly has toroidal topology when you're moving around on it.

[kgbooklog]

I've seen more than one fantasy novel where the provided map had E and W swapped on the compass rose. None of them ever mentioned this detail in the text.

[keith_morrison]

It comes from the probably geographically-clueless belief some people have that they're going to show an otherwise Earthlike planet but the sun rises in the west! See, dramatically different worldbuilding!

They usually assume that "north" is the prime cardinal direction and the others are defined off it, when in truth "north" is simply the direction of the pole to your left when looking toward the rising sun (over most of the planet's surface area, anyway).

[scott_sanford]

Doesn't this come up in an Oz book? Granted that this is not in the top hundred bizarre things in the land of Oz, so it could easily be forgotten.

[(Anonymous)]

The further north you go in summer, the further north the Sun rises and sets. Of course, at some point it just skims the due north horizon. North of that, no rising or setting.