Beneath a moonless sky... (GLAUGUST 26)

    On the Calculation of Volume I, first of a septology, is a beautiful novel about a woman trapped endlessly repeating the 18th of November. (It’s my next musical.) Much of its beauty is in its exhaustive, unsparing contemplation of life in a time loop and all its ramifications- the weight it puts on her posture to the world, relationships with others, and sense of self. (Incidentally, it’s the next musical I’m working on.) In that spirit, here are some interesting properties and mores of the motescape, a world without sun.

• There are three levels of natural light: pitch black (underground or in shadow), ambient (open sky; the light of the Æther reflects off of the firmament), and bright (proximal to the Æther). Your eyes are adjusted to these fine variations, and are easily overwhelmed by intense light. Your torch going out in a dense forest is just as debilitating as in a tomb.
• Flames are almost painfully bright and visible. Using flame to see is difficult (that is, more than normal), and treated as vulgar in contrast to dimmer, longer-lasting lights, like phosphoric or sodium lamps. Common, impoverished adventurers are derogatorily referred to as ‘torchbearers’.
• When you travel, you can rest whenever you’re tired, shortening or extending your adventuring day by a watch or two without affecting your ease of sleep.
• There is humidity and dryness, and warmth to bitter cold, but no bitter heat. Unheated waters remain cold. The vast majority of people have only ever sweat from exertion.
• Nocturnal animals, like opossums, raccoons, and bats, are common pets.
• No city is without a bell tower that dictates its rhythms. If that bell tower is on a church, they send over a cleric with a highly calibrated nocturnal and a precisely manufactured hourglass to sync your bells to standard. Without this intervention, provincial towns mere miles apart can be on totally opposite sleep schedules, with bell-intervals minutes different in length.
• Interrupting a city’s light infrastructure debilitates it faster than starving it out.
• No moon means no moonlight or tides. Menstrual calendars replace lunar calendars, but sidereal calendars (or zodiac calendars, as they’re called) are what’s most commonly used.
• Seasons are created by the great migration of the birds, who carry the warmth with with them when they leave.

…I’m certain there’d be more to say if I played with the ideas even longer.

I remember playing this same game with a setting on a flat disc. The sun and moon, equally sized, orbited on a flat plane above the earth around the world’s center. That meant the city in the world’s center was in an eternal gloaming, and that on the edges, day and night were defined by the moon and sun growing and shrinking from pinpricks in the sky.

All this is to empower you to spend a moment taking your conceits seriously, and play in delight with the dividends of your imaginative exercise.

GLAUGUST 3: "The many qualities of night air." Thanks for reading, and happy gaming.