Kibitzing Cidri: Calendar And Climate

[Oaf]

For the sake of context. I played a lot of role-playing games between 1977 and 1983. I mostly GMed home-brew TFT variants. I write and illustrate and have recently become fascinated by the artsy-pretentious wing of the so-called OSR movement and have wanted to do some work along those lines but those folks are all doing D&D and I never had fun with D&D. So I was thrilled to find out that TFT was coming back and signed up for the Kickstarter. I was grateful to receive the PDFs ahead of time.

And now Cidri is making my brain itch. I think Cidri does what it sets out to do perfectly but there are parts of it that I just don’t get. So if it isn’t too pushy or demanding, I’d like to air some questions and suggestions.

Let’s start with the seasons of the year, holidays, the passage of time — how are these handled on Cidri? And this relates to another question — how does the climate on Cidri work?

Because if Cidri is just a huge, huge planet in Earth orbit, that means it has huge, huge polar icecaps and a habitable band around the middle and its climatic zones are going to be both outsize and exaggerated.

I think it’s reasonable to assume that the calendar can be mapped to Earth’s. And since Earth cultures are present on Cidri, then they’ve probably kept their astrological traditions as well. So any culture would have been presented early on with either familiar or unfamiliar skies.

Cidri has magic, technology, and a long history and nobody’s been able to figure out its diameter. We were able to figure Earth out a lot sooner with a lot less. I don’t think Cidri sounds like a simple sphere.

What is Cidri? Is it a hypersphere? Is it an infinite series of Earthlike planets in alternate dimensions linked by gates so vast and subtle as to be invisible? Is it the inside or outside of a Dyson sphere and the sky is just a projection?

And if it is a huge constructed object, how is climate managed? Are there vast ice fields, vast prairies, vast jungles, or are individual areas given their own unique climates? It seems likely that the climate is artificially maintained, especially since there's less sea than land and seas stabilize climate. If so, are there any startling or surrealistic effects that result?

I’m not asking for a solution to the mysteries. But I really want to know what happens when you approach them.

[hcobb]

If those darn kids keep chipping off rocks from the mystic pass to use for their own enchantments then they're going to collapse the trade route!

It is of course due to the mixing of warm humid air with the chill from the mountains that causes the pass to always be covered in fog.

[TippetsTX]

I think a critical factor in making Cidri work (assuming you stick with the 'big planet' premise) is that it is artificial. The Mnoren could've implemented any number of advanced technological solutions to address the climate challenges presented by such a massive planetary body.

P.S. There are also some interesting ideas in a thread titled "Cidri Genesis" in the TFT House Rules Forum.

[Chris Rice]

I think the whole point of Cidri is that it too large to ever be fully known or mapped. That allows everyone who plays TFT to have their own little (or not so little) part of it that doesn't interfere with anything else and yet can interact with other parts via gate. Some have even envisaged Cidri as many separate, but connected, worlds.

In my opinion, it would be a mistake for the Publishers to try to set limits on Cidri by mapping the whole thing or trying to lay out climate zones etc. In my small part of that vast planet I'll have jungles, seas, frozen arctic wildernesses and whatever else I want to put there. I'm not interested in being tied by wider limitations.

[Skarg]

I agree with what Chris Rice just wrote. I think Cidri is provably "all of the above" and more, since it allows for (and has been played with) a wide variety of interpretations, which means it is multiple planets and situations, some of them very large, some of them weird, some of them neither.

I started out my campaign liking the idea that the world was large enough that I could map as much as I wanted to without ever having to think of it as anything but flat, and that I could get away with the parts I'd mapped when I was 11 years old, meaning some pretty "interesting" terrain and peculiarly rapid and reasonless climate shifts and strange irrigation and mountain patterns, odd island distributions, etc.

After having learned more about physics, astronomy, technology and proportions, and having designed many campaign worlds since, it seems more likely my campaign is a round and smaller planet with some weirdly engineered/conjured terrain and climatic effects. (Dyson spheres and ring worlds don't work for my imagination.)

We did use the standard European Earth calendar in our TFT campaigns.

Astrology existed but its details were mostly out-of-scope because none of the players cared. If forced to care, I would say the constellations are different because it is definitely not located at Sol. But there's one yellow sun of Sol intensity from my campaign, and one Luna-like moon (with monthly orbit but with different craters).

[platimus]

Originally Posted by Chris Rice

I think the whole point of Cidri is that it too large to ever be fully known or mapped. That allows everyone who plays TFT to have their own little (or not so little) part of it that doesn't interfere with anything else and yet can interact with other parts via gate. Some have even envisaged Cidri as many separate, but connected, worlds.

In my opinion, it would be a mistake for the Publishers to try to set limits on Cidri by mapping the whole thing or trying to lay out climate zones etc. In my small part of that vast planet I'll have jungles, seas, frozen arctic wildernesses and whatever else I want to put there. I'm not interested in being tied by wider limitations.

Amen to all of that.

[JLV]

I'm going to agree with Chris Rice on this too. At the end of the day, if anyone questions the physics and logic, I'd just send them to the Handwavium mines at Karst for a period of reflection as they mine some more for me to use. Cidri is a mystery wrapped in an enigma, and if we knew how it was done, WE'D be Mnoren ourselves!

[JohnPaulB]

Originally Posted by JLV

I'm going to agree with Chris Rice on this too. At the end of the day, if anyone questions the physics and logic, I'd just send them to the Handwavium mines at Karst for a period of reflection as they mine some more for me to use. Cidri is a mystery wrapped in an enigma, and if we knew how it was done, WE'D be Mnoren ourselves!

I think WE ARE the Mnoren. We built Cidri 40 years ago (well SJ & team, but we continued to do this.) We Mnoren are so powerful that we can make it a Huge planet, a Dyson sphere and a RingWorld, ALL while it also being a multi-parallel universes that occasionally overlaps.

We Mnoren are so powerful, that even if someone MAPS Cidri, they map only one of the Cidri. Your mapping may vary.

ITL p5: Three hundred years after Jen Mnoren's first jump, his dependents had found, mapped, and conquered three hundred seventy-one alternate Earths. Three had space travel; eleven had magic. All ofthem honored the Mnoren rulers.

Using the above concept, I think the Mnoren descendants probably numbered the worlds so they could keep track of them easier. So OAF's might be Cidri #250; TIPPETs might be Cidri #81; SKARGs and PLATIMUSs might both be on Cidri #138, but on different continents.

They could all be correct simultaneously.

[Skarg]

Originally Posted by JohnPaulB

I think WE ARE the Mnoren. We built Cidri 40 years ago (well SJ & team, but we continued to do this.) We Mnoren are so powerful that we can make it a Huge planet, a Dyson sphere and a RingWorld, ALL while it also being a multi-parallel universes that occasionally overlaps.

We Mnoren are so powerful, that even if someone MAPS Cidri, they map only one of the Cidri. Your mapping may vary.

ITL p5: Three hundred years after Jen Mnoren's first jump, his dependents had found, mapped, and conquered three hundred seventy-one alternate Earths. Three had space travel; eleven had magic. All ofthem honored the Mnoren rulers.

Using the above concept, I think the Mnoren descendants probably numbered the worlds so they could keep track of them easier. So OAF's might be Cidri #250; TIPPETs might be Cidri #81; SKARGs and PLATIMUSs might both be on Cidri #138, but on different continents.

They could all be correct simultaneously.

Yes, quite, metaphorically but also actually, sort of. ;-)

[ColBosch]

Cidri mapping software: Minecraft.