Besides, how do you know the moon is orbiting the world in the first place? For all you know, the world is essentially flat and the moons passing by are balls struck by the Celestial Hammer flying across the sky to the Big Hole on the other side.
Bingo!
Capntastic: What is the cosmology of the dwarven world; is it heliocentric?
Toady: So right now there is a sun that sets on one side and rises on the other side; I think it determines that at random, although those words depend on the sun and magnetism, so maybe that's meaningless, and there's also a moon. But we don't really have anything decided for those. What will probably end up happening further along is that you'll have the creation tale, there are several civilizations with different sets of gods, so I'm not really sure who's going to be right, or if's all going to be different sides of the same multi-sided coin, the same polyhedron or whatever, but it's probably going to be one of those things that's easily randomized and so it will be randomly decided what the deal is there. And that could also, with a little bit of work, have to do with the shape of the ... not just what is orbiting what, if anything's orbiting anything, rather than being dragged along in chariots and stuff, but also what the shape of the world is; how the edges work. Right now the edges just have this invisible barrier, but migrant groups and certain foreign materials can come in off the edges depending on the version you're playing; it's just not really well defined right now, what the world is. But it would be easy to make a torus or a cylinder, or to fudge a sphere with the proper edge behaviour, like something going off the top edge and then coming half way over on the other top edge. I don't remember if you actually get a sphere from that or some kind of weird projected space, but it's close enough. So we'll probably mess around with that later on ... the myth stuff might come sooner rather than later, just because I really want to mess around with that stuff, it's a lot of fun to do.
I think it would be awesome to randomly generate the celestial bodies and filter them through each culture's spheres and naming conventions.
As a silly simple example, suppose the world has two moons: a small red one that moves quickly, and a large gray one that moves slowly.
Red moon:
- To the Dwarves, red and fast associate it with magma. Named something like "Fast volcano."
- To the Elves, small and fast associate it with trickster spirits. Named something like "Flying pixie."
- To the Humans, red and fast associate it with a battle god. Named something like "Heaven warrior."
- To the Goblins, fast and small and red associate it with a thrown tomato. Named something like "Fast food."
Gray moon:
- To the Dwarves, large and gray associate it with gabbro. Named something like "Boring mineral."
- To the Elves, large and slow associate it with trees. Named something like "Treant home."
- To the Humans, gray and slow associate it with old age. Named something like "Wise hermit."
- To the Goblins, gray and slow associate it with indecision. Named something like "Foolish general."
The characteristics of the celestial body might feed back into the characteristics of the thing referred to in the name. In the above example, the phase of the red moon affects volcanoes in some way
but only the Dwarf civilizations know this. Only the Humans know that encounters with retired adventurers are more beneficial under a waxing gray moon. Goblins always launch a siege under a new gray moon, etc.
A simpler method (and not at all a bad place to start) would be to simply associate each celestial body with a deity or demon. In this case the characteristics of the celestial body would likely be a representation of the supernatural being.
Edit: Removed a couple non-sequiturs.
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Topic: My moon is broken! Please fix it. (Read 2017 times)