PmWiki | EUADifferentTake / Urlium

Urlium is a relatively small planet (80% Earth mass), with a large iron/nickel core (75% Earth gravity). While it does not have a moon, it is in orbital resonance with a close-by gas giant, which causes tidal forces in it and may have stripped it of part of its crust during accretion; the overall effect from the surface is seeing a blue "moon" make its way through the sky once every other season. Most of the water is underground, there aren't any big seas but there are lakes.

The planet is fairly old and has supported life for a very long time, so there is a thick layer of soil or sand almost everywhere, and what for us is temperate zones are mostly steppes that occasionally have fuckhuge, extremely old trees (tens of thousands of years) that have roots deep enough to get to the underground water, and their perspiration fuels the local water cycle, basically, so there's going to be a smol forest of regular trees around them.

Roads aren't very much a thing because stone is relatively rare so paving is difficult to do. the central desert is sahara-like rather than rub-al-khali like (which makes a bit less sense, admittedly) and is the only place where you get a relative abundance of surface minerals; people go there to dig for minerals and smelt locally (easier to carry charcoal than ore), and then go back to their tree.

The lakes are mostly in the subpolar zones, which, since the planet is overall hot, have what we would call a north-atlantic climate, with hot summers. the polar ice caps are connected with the underground ocean in the sense that they refill it from rain/snow and melt at the bottom as they get close to the mantle, completing the global water cycle.

This would be an excellent land for centauroids, and it is. Fiarra are one of the various species of vertebrats that lost their middle limbs for better metabolic efficiency. Generally speaking, quadrupeds dominate near the central desert and near the poles, and hexaped dominate in the middle temperate bands.

(Magic exists. It's not particularly formalized; it's an art form, requiring first figuring out how to perceive ambient magic, and then figuring out how to affect it.)

The lack of minerals means that everyday things are made out of wood, bone, stone, and if one can afford it, ceramic; metal is only used when there is no other option. Since metal is too useful to be used for coin, currency never developed, except for script that tends to be local to any one community; trade happens exclusively in terms of barter.

The general lack of tall, sharp, recently formed mountains (the tallest mount on the planet is a shield volcano) means that wind cells are large and simple; jet streams come in low and, in the temperate regions, push enough air in the lower atmosphere to make sail wheelbarrows and the like practical. Prevaling wind direction is almost always from west to east.

Tidal forces from the gas giant ensure that there is a storm oculus traveling the planet's desertic equator twice a year; the storm waxes and wanes due to other factors, and its path is not completely predictable, but it effectively prevents access to the desert mining sites during about a third of the year for any one community at any one longitude.

Microbial and subterrene life has had a very long time to evolve and is now extremely efficient at soil fixation; the planet's soil is extremely fertile once watered, be it by localized rain, shallow lakes, or by boreholing. Salt is rare, found in rock formations, and is considered a primary trade good. The combination of receptive soil, predictable wind patterns, and trees large enough to create their own localized water cycle means that the typical thicket visible in the steppe is going to be a mega-tree acting as a bulwark for the wind, and a small forest around it tailing off eastwards, like a comet's tail would away from the sun.