It occurs to me that Duskwall could be tweaked just a bit to have polar day/night cycles instead of just flat-out darkness. Then there would be short summers, where the sun doesn’t set much, and long dark winters where the sun hardly rises. Keep the weather temperate. Have a short frenetic growing season and time of sun, and start your campaign at the beginning of the long dark.
It occurs to me that Duskwall could be tweaked just a bit to have polar day/night cycles instead of just flat-out…
It occurs to me that Duskwall could be tweaked just a bit to have polar day/night cycles instead of just flat-out…
I always assumed that Duskwall had twilight and night as the city illumination.
And for some reason in my head it is heavily humid, dead cold in winter, suffocating hot on summer.
Duamn Figueroa Right, that’s the official Duskwall, for lighting. In my games I’ve described the only time of day that gets sunlight is dawn and dusk, because it slants in between the heavy overhead blockage and the earth. That’s just a flourish, though.
I was thinking that having sun sometimes makes a much sharper contrast than having it always dim and dark. Just a thought, and not really even for the official game so much as my own interpretation.
I, for some reason, always thought that the dim light was because the pollution that looms over the city.
But yeah, now that you mention it I had placed a lot of scenes in “daylight” without thinking. Maybe is hard to picture a setting without day/night cycle.
I think the dimness is because the gates of the underworld were shattered, releasing all the dead, and that led to blotting out the sky.
Page 45 of the second quickstart:
The islands have wildly different climates due to magical weirdness from the
cataclysm. The “water” of the Never Sea seems to be composed of opaque black ink,
but it’s possible to see constellations of shimmering stars far below the surface.
The sun is a dim ember, providing only purpleish twilight at dawn and dusk; leaving the world in darkness otherwise.
Don’t expect realism here.
Jmh, you got me thinking. Even in high-octane fantasy settings I like to place “natural” phenomenon at the same level that supernatural stuff.
I’d go with some combination of weird sun + pollution, I think it paints the setting better. I’m starting to dislike the “’cause magic” weird stuff in fiction.
(all this as a side comment triggered by Andrew Shields last post, please ignore my ramblings)
Duamn Figueroa Duskwall is meant to be customized by each group that runs games in the setting.
If I was going to go with “pollution blocks out the sun” then I’d ramp it up some; those sea winds for a coastal city would keep a lot of pollution cleared.
If you make the “cataclysm” a massive fire from early experiments to generate electroplasm by draining coal seams (ancient life energy compressed), then you could have mine fires outside the city.
And, because it was electroplasmic pollution, it could be drawn to the city. The endless smoke from the mines that are still burning and catalyzing (shades of “Silent Hill”) are drawn to the living energy of the city. The electroplasmic fences keep the pollution out.
Just a thought for how you could spin it.
Yeah, I agree, it was just an idea and the way I’m interpreting it in out groups.
I just thought of another cool reason the city could be darker. What if it was because the city was always in the grip of a fog from the ocean, and the fog from the ocean was the ghost of the sea from when the water levels were higher.
Sometimes the echoes of leviathans would move through those waters off the shore, and smaller memories move through the mist closer in.
The city would measure the fog in “stories” for how deep it was; most days six stories, but some top eight (the highest, burying the tallest building in the city) or down to one, so you almost wouldn’t notice the mist. These move in response to etheric tides from a long-dead and vanished moon.