Richard’s wholly unimaginative blog

So, for the past week and a half I have been trying to create a unique world for my D&D campaign. My wife thinks I’m nuts and she might very well be right in this assessment. The thing that is rather funny, I think, is that I’m trying to use pseudo-science to make my world different from Earth as far as the appearances are concerned, but similar otherwise. For example my world (codenamed RP1) is somewhat larger than Earth, orbits a much cooler star (K0 star category), and has two moons. The trick here is that the life on this planet is very similar to that on Earth, so some things will have to be the same.

Right now I’m working on the moons and it’s proving to be a headache. First, I want one moon to be much larger in appearance than Luna from Earth (about 0.5 degree viewing angle). However, I also want it to have an orbit of around three days. Additionally, it mustn’t have too great of a tidal effect on the planet, otherwise all kinds of things would go nuts, including planet’s rotation around its axis. And now I read some study that a planet a little larger than Earth or Venus would get completely disrupted by the tidal pull of its satellite. In short, it’s all way too complicated :\ I may need to either overlook some things or just go back to Earth-like planet.

I’m working on a believable world for my D&D campaign and the subject of a calendar has been bothering me for a while now.

I don’t want to simply change the month names and day names and presto, I have a new calendar. I want it to be different from the Earth calendars and I want it to be believable and consistent. However, simply changing the number of days in a year seems unwise, since that has other implications. Earth solar year has roughly 365 days, meaning that the planet rotates around its axis 365 times while it circles around the sun once. If there are fewer days, that would mean that either the planet is closer to the sun (hence hotter) or rotates more slowly (thus day and night last longer than on Earth). Both seem to be important concepts that cannot be simply changed, as they will have an impact on the plant and animal life on the planet.

It seems like the easiest way to change the calendar like this is to simply change the number of months. There are 365 days in a year, but maybe there are 18 months, 20 days each, and then a 19th month of five days that is considered holy? That would make things different, but still save me from considering all the implications of non-Earth planet. Of course, 18 months is a lot and it’s not as useful as 12 months. You can’t have a quarter of a year. A dozen is a very nice number indeed, since it can be divided evenly by 2, 3, and 4. The next such number seems to be 24, being divisible by 2, 3, and 4.

In short, I’m back to square one