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Where do we go from here?

© Dee-Ann Latona

I ran a set of polls in the previous article to help me determine what you, the readers, want to see in this world we're creating. Let's pause for a bit of breath after all of that continent and weather pattern building and take a look at the results, and how they will effect things to come. The poll summaries are as follows:

• Our world will have more extreme weather than Earth. The winters will be colder than ours, somewhat worse than an eternal cold snap. The summers become hotter than our heat waves.
• Our world has humans.
• Our world has more than one kind of sentient being. For now, this means humans and four to five others.
• Our world leans toward fantasy and even milder science fiction elements, but in a low-key sense. What we have here is a fictional world that's just one step to the left and then half a step forward from our home here on Earth.

I am going to leave the polls active in association with the previous article so that those who read it later can register their own feelings on the subject. From time to time I'll then go back and take a look, and adjust the world's course appropriately.

The Weather

There are two things to consider when looking at our world's weather systems: causes and results. Why is the weather so much more extreme than Earth's? Is it a natural form of greenhouse effect, where something in nature caused the ozone layer to lose its solidity? Is there an imbalance in the planet's ecosystem or natural gases? As much as today we like to blame all problems on technology, the fact is that there are many ways that a planet can fall off kilter and then stay there—as I am going to assume that this extremity of weather has always been the case.

The causes require research and educated decisions to determine while not losing credibility with the readers, but we have some additional leeway with the mild SF/F elements. It's somewhat cliché to say the planet's ecosystem was permanently damaged by either a wizards' battle of cosmic proportions or a long lost civilization, so I'd like to stay away from this area. But in a magical world, the planet itself will have some otherworldly processes about it. The byproducts from one of these—however minor it may be—could be the culprit. I'm going to leave the science fiction aspect out of the weather scenario. This weather extremity has been going on for quite some time. Let's keep ancient alien races or long lost space colonies out of it.

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