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Old 09-04-2022, 03:58 PM   #21
phiwum
 
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Default Re: Kibitzing Cidri: Calendar And Climate

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Originally Posted by David L Pulver View Post
Indeed. We know people on Cidri are clever, with mathematical knowledge, yet they don't know how big Cidri is from calculating the horizon. Yet it would be difficult to avoid the knowledge of the horizon: even "Cidri is flat" or "Cidri extends infinitely due to strange Gate-like effects" should give some sort of result.So...
I'm not sure that knowledge of the distance to the horizon is all that useful. Eratosthenes measured shadows in two locations on the equinox. That seems a simpler calculation.

On my Cidri, there are definitely solstices and equinoxes. I haven't really thought about it, but I'd wager that the by far simplest model of Cidri must therefore involve a spheroid or something. (You could still let it be fixed and have the sun orbit if you want to be cutesy, as Ptolemy did -- even easier if you don't include other visible planets, or at least none with processions.)
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Old 09-04-2022, 04:31 PM   #22
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Default Re: Kibitzing Cidri: Calendar And Climate

I like the idea that there are a seemingly endless series of spherical planets connected by gates. These can be along mountain passes, at sea, along rivers, etc. They are sensitive to direction, so one gate can lead to different locations depending one whether one goes through directly or obliquely, and some don’t allow for return travel at all, with the far end instead leading to further destinations.
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Old 09-09-2022, 11:07 PM   #23
Skarg
 
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Default Re: Kibitzing Cidri: Calendar And Climate

I feel like as players and GMs, we can see from the cosmological differences between the many TFT campaigns that have been "on Cidri", that they're on different worlds.

But few if any PCs ever know about another campaign world, so like most cosmological details, the PCs almost never interact with them and just think of whatever their own world is as normal, as it's always been.
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Old 09-10-2022, 12:17 AM   #24
Steve Plambeck
 
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Default Re: Kibitzing Cidri: Calendar And Climate

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But few if any PCs ever know about another campaign world, so like most cosmological details, the PCs almost never interact with them and just think of whatever their own world is as normal, as it's always been.
And that would be especially true of us "old timers", who belonged to groups that formed before the first editions of ITL, Advanced Melee, and Advanced Wizard when the word "Cidri" wasn't even in print yet. You can do everything with only Melee and Wizard as your starting points.

My group had it's own World, with a complete world map, detailed climate regions, linguistic groups, political history. We had a printed almanac covering every year past and future from the time any adventure was set, so the GM would know the time for sunrise and sunset on any given day, and when the next solar eclipse was due.

Now had we ever met and merged with another group like ours (that would have been interesting!) I suppose we'd have just alternated adventures in the two worlds, depending on who was GM, and put a gate somewhere that allowed for PC crossovers. We certainly wouldn't have scrapped our World, or expected the other group to scrap theirs.

Cidri isn't really a World, and its details never need to be worked out. It's just a concept. The concept of players from different groups and backgrounds holding crossover adventures. The references to specific locals in Cidri we encounter in the rules and publications are, at least for me, just examples to help new players get started building a World of their own.
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Old 09-10-2022, 06:34 AM   #25
Shostak
 
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Default Re: Kibitzing Cidri: Calendar And Climate

Heck, I’d wager we don’t even all pronounce “Cidri” the same way.
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Old 09-10-2022, 09:26 AM   #26
malloyd
 
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Default Re: Kibitzing Cidri: Calendar And Climate

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Originally Posted by David L Pulver View Post
The main problem with this theory is that a long horizon, whether due to a flat planet, diskworld, ringworld, or dyson sphere, does have many implications for things like what adventurers can see when on a ship, flat plain, hill, etc.
It does and it doesn't. Theoretically on a flat world you can see stuff much further away than on a round one. But in practice most of it will blur into the background fuzz of all the light coming in from stuff even further away. I suspect your horizon is a few degrees of near the ground luminous fog against which it is harder to make out details at a few miles than it is here on Earth, where it is at least silhouetted against mostly empty sky rather than a jumble of other stuff.
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