[crossfire] weather, lattitude, town location, and the world

[Mark Wedel]

  Going back to the original topic:

1) I never envisioned the current scorn continent to be the entire world.  To 
say it is 1/4 of the world, or perhaps even less than that, would be reasonable.

  Until going off the map wraps you around, no reason to ever say exactly 
what/where it is.  For weather purposes, it does make sense.

  For weather purposes, I'd place it in one hemisphere, either north or south.

2) When I originally did the map, I did the basis that 1 space = 1 mile.  So 
2500x2500 is actually a good sized continent (the land mass is actually less - 
that 2500x2500 is entire map size, which includes oceans).

  I do realize that this scale doesn't work really well relative to other 
things, like size of towns, and chains does work good for those.  But then as 
said, the world is effectively ridiculously small (its really just a small island).

  Once could just say this lack of coherent scale is part of the game - we 
already have 2 scales anyways.

  This is better than the old maps, where we had 3 scales (with the towns being 
2x2 or 3x3 icons spaces you entered to get something like you see now).

  One consideration on scale is actual change of terrain.  You could certainly 
say that the planet is very small (few hundred miles diameter).  One problem 
doing that is it becomes much harder to try to compare with any earth like 
environment/features.

  For example, I'd think on such a relatively small worlds, the mountains and 
elevation changes as a whole would be much smaller (a 25000' mountain is now a 
significant variation in the spherical pureness).  I also wonder how weather 
would work on such a world - would you really get storm systems that are just a 
few miles wide?

  Now I suppose you could just make the case that everything behaves like earth, 
but on 1/10th scale.

  So going back to the original conversation:

  Placing the poles at either the very north or very south work fine, and not at 
the corners.  Unless the poles are actually included on the map, there is no 
reason to worry about the effect.

  For that matter, it is a fantasy world - can make the case that the world is 
in fact flat, and Sorig (or whoever) goes across the world as the sun.  Over the 
course of the year, he changes his course back and forth.  Areas far away from 
his traversal path would of course be cold.

  From the current map, it seems like the south area is quite chily, with the 
north area of the continent being a desert.  So putting the continent in the 
southern hemisphere would seem to make sense.