Re: Regular Day-Night - proposed SJ spell

In <URL:news:local.spelljam> on Thu 24 Aug, Nils Jeppe wrote:
> On Thu, 24 Aug 2006, Dreamer wrote:
> 
> >>> This spell is useless and will not work anywhere where the
> >>> day-night cycle is between forty-eight hours long and twelve
> >>> hours long.
> >>
> >> And why not? That is pretty arbitrary.
> >
> > The reason for that is that this spell produces a 'regular' 24-hr
> > day, and those times are half that day length, and double it, so
> > they are too close to 'regular' be able to be altered.
> 

> But shouldn't it be easier to affect a small change rather than a big 
> change? Say, make the days 10 minutes shorter should be easier than halve 
> them. And if you use the spell over an extended period of time you'd have 
> to maintain the artificial day/night most of 24x7 anyway becuase the local 
> days will quickly be out of sync with your desired 12/12 schedule.

As several poeople have pointed out, day and night also have a
mystical and supernatural nature in the SJ universe, as well as
whether you have light to grow your crops.

Maybe the spell should be able to shift just a little to remain
in sync with whatever is the local regular day-night cycle,
whether it be shorter or longer.  Or, it should be 23hr to 25hr,
to lock best to the natural pattern.

As for small changes - this spell will not disrupt an existing
'natural' day - there would be far too much mystical and
supernatural pressure to overcome.


> >> I still think such a spell serves no purpose in the first place.
> >
> > Plants from Maj will expect to live and grow in a Maj-like day.
> >
> > Try and grow them on Selene and you have 14-days of sunlight,
> > which they might be able to tolerate, followed by 14-days of
> > night, where they will likely have to become nearly completely
> > dormant, or die.
> >
> > Are you claiming that in some way this being a SJ universe will
> > mean that this is not a problem?  I'm afraid that I don't follow
> > your logic...
> >
> > Another application would be somewhere where there is very far
> > from enough sunlight, and you open a continuous portal to the
> > elemental plane of fire, to act as an artificial sun.  You may
> > not want to keep opening and closing this portal, to provide day
> > and night, so you use this spell as well.
> 
> Well I have a couple objections. One is that I don't see why anybody would 
> need to change the day/night cycle. So the plants from your main world 
> won't grow. Big deal - import food. You have a huge agricultural society 
> just in front of your door.

No smart ruler wants to depend on imported food.  SJ mostly runs
on the pseudo-medieval setting of DnD, which means about two
acres under cultivation per member of population (so I'm told),
90% of the population involved in food production, and very
little in the way of fresh food storage.


> If you don't get along with them or do not have enough transport capacity, 
> you could use native plants. And I am not a botanist, but I do not see why 
> plants shouldn't be able to thrive in an altered day/night cycle. Granted, 
> it might take breeding for that trait, but you can still rationalize it. 
> If all else fails, magically altering the wheat might be more convincing 
> than changing the day/night cycle via a spell.

On Selene native plants are lichen, or the somewhat suspect
Mushroom Forest.

Breeding plants to be able to take 14-days of light followed by
14-days of dark would be ... likely difficult.

Yes, priests of a fertility god(dess) might be able to alter
crops.


> The second objection is that you don't really need to come up with a game 
> mechanic. GM's fiat works wonders. But, okay, I can see how working it out 
> might help, especially if the players ever want to set up their own 
> colonies, and of course it'd be nice to have new spells because we don't 
> have enough already.

Yes, GM fiat will do.  But, the GM had better be ready with some
answers when the players have the characters visit from somewhere
like Maj - GM fudge can make pretty poor glue to hold a campaign
together.


> Even then the spell is still out of whack with what's around. The daylight 
> spell lasts for 10min/level and covers a 60 ft area. It's level 3. "Widen 
> Spell" (the feat) increases that area by 100% but increases the spell 
> level by 3. Now compare that with your spell, and it simply doesn't fit. 
> The purely artificial restriction that makes it unusable on the main world 
> is just an obvious hack.

Please compare Control Weather - yes I looked at Daylight, etc. -
and I think a Night spell would also be desirable - one doesn't
exist, that I've seen.


> If it is important enough that your colony has an area covered by a 
> "normal" day/night cycle, you could always enchant a number of 
> things, say, little crystall balls, with the daylight spell and put 
> permanency on them. Mount them on the ceiling. Provides plenty of light 
> for the day. Then, when nightfall is required, you put those little 
> crystal balls into leather bags. Done. No new spells needed. You could 
> even "automate" it or remotely control it by using a mechanism similar to 
> window curtains. To maximize utilization of those light-spheres, the farms 
> would be in roughly hemnispherical caves where you can grow things on the 
> walls too (relatively easy in a lighter gravity), and you'd have many 
> small farms instead of huge fields, but that's okay in my eyes; it shows 
> you're on an alien world and not just outside Adventurersdale (and over 
> time, when enough light-spheres get enchanted, you COULD have huge 
> complexes of those farms too).

You would need to have both Daylight and Night spells say on
poles, then maybe have a 'clock' enchantment to control them.
 
Really, you want this to work outdoors, not just in caverns.

Yes, you probably want circular fields if making maximum use of a
limited area of light/dark is required.

Selene does not have lighter gravity - it has the standard SJ
'binary' gravity - 1G everywhere there is gravity, so you can't
take advantage of that.

Anyway, people want places to be 'like home' - haven't you heard
people say that those who go abroad are shocked by how much their
home changes, and those who stayed home are shocked by how much
the migrants follow the 'old ways'? [grin]


> Or you could just have your moon rotate faster, since you are just 
> building your setting anyway.

I'm not altering the rotation - the tide-locked business has now
had quite a bit tied to it - the two faces have quite different
ecologies.

-- 
Dreamer
dreamer@??????.?????.??.uk
http://www.romsys.demon.co.uk/