I'd like to try an experiment - building a world here, adding a new (hopefully interconnected) piece each week. I don't have a story in mind - that's sort of the point, seeing what emerges just from the creation of the world itself. At some point this is going to need a name, but that feels rather premature for the moment. It is, however, getting to the stage where it's rather silly to link posts individually, so I'm just going to link to the tag lookup result here.

Lay of the land

I don't know about you, but I'm rather sick of maths-y mathsness for the time being. So no more maths for the moment at least. We have an ice-cold world with a super-long year and three moons, and people are going to need to live somewhere. The surface is probably going to be too cold for comfort most of the time. While this world isn't a ball of ice - it's on the outer reaches of the habitable zone - it's certainly cold enough that ice and snow are a common landscape feature, and a problem that any creature or vegetation will have to find a way to deal with. We can mitigate this a little with seasons - tilting the planet's axis by the very-scientific-amount of "a bit", gives us 40-odd year stretches of slightly-warmer, slightly-cooler and slightly-in-between weather. Forty years is long enough that a species - most species, in fact - may well be migratory, moving back and force across the planet as the seasons change. The more delicate plants may lay dormant during winter, leaving the battle of elements to their sturdier cousins, and rendering the winter slopes a wasteland.

The other thing we can do is make our planet highly volcanicly active. Volcanoes and tectonic activity are vital for a habitable planet - they're a little like replacing the fishtank filter - cycling trapped compounds to the bottom and releasing others into the atmosphere. High volcanic activity opens us to hot springs, massive volcanic tubes and tunnels, scultures, spires and constructions, fertile, nutrient rich soil for plant growth (therefore a richer food supply) and more general warmth in particular areas to offset the chill of the planet's distance.

Perhaps we even have small networks of volcanic tubes that the people have fashioned into underground cities. They live beneath the surface, closer to the heat and away from the dangerous gamma rays, venturing out at night (again - away from the gamma rays) to hunt, gather food and other materials. Which means it's a good thing our moon(s) have such long months - most nights will have plenty of reflected light for them to see with. Most creatures - those with complex DNA (more easily damaged by radiation) - will likely be nocturnal, underground, or have developed some special shielding of their own against the damage - perhaps an extremely short lifespan, heavy-metal inclusions in their body, self-repairing DNA, better damaged-cell-detectors, or redundant systems allowing for a higher tolerance for mutation and cell death.

So we have a world that, on the surface, appears quite barren (possibly a further story point there, too - invasion), with entire worlds of life going on at night, and in the layers and levels underneath its surface.

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