An idea stumbled into my head as I watched this video:

An idea stumbled into my head as I watched this video: youtube.com/watch?v=My4RA5I0FKs

Imagine a world that is mostly a vast desert. An ancient civilization installed a massive network of pipes under the desert and they pump air which fluidizes the sand. Maybe they wanted to make travel across desert easier, maybe they were tired of infantry armies pestering them, perhaps they simply had too much free time on their hands. Nobody reallly knows, because that civilization is long gone, but the pipes remain.

The installation keeps liquidizing the sand, which allows younger, less advanced civilizations to sail through the desert easily. Breaches in the pipe network can cripple important trade routes. The whole installation is now powered by solar plants built by the ancient civilization, and it shuts down at night. When sun disappears beyond the horizon, the sea of sand turns into a still desert for several hours.

Do you think this could be an interesting setting for a campaign? What else would you add here? Let's worldbuild a little Veeky Forums.

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Other urls found in this thread:

saffron-seas.wikidot.com
youtube.com/watch?v=cLnkQAeMbIM
youtube.com/watch?v=bkL94nKSd2M
youtube.com/watch?v=UtjGTrVwRr4
youtube.com/watch?v=emeB83Q6P1I
youtube.com/watch?v=0JRgHol94Xc
youtube.com/watch?v=FJGkFU3leY0
twitter.com/AnonBabble

This is called The Silt Sea and it's a core setting component of Athas/Dark Sun

Is there any way to fix the pipes, or is the whole system just doomed to eventual failure?

Similar to my homebrew setting, except instead of sand, it's ash.

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Self repairing by ancient machines that occasionally rise up and attack travellers, obviously!

Yeah oceans of sand are cool Op.

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Instead of Pipes you could make it a natural phenomenon caused by natural gasses that bubble up from beneath the desert bed

This could allow you to have dangers like large up-swell bubbles

Ahead of this idea by at least a year.

saffron-seas.wikidot.com

I currently use sulfurous gasses, carbon monoxide/dioxide myself. Large, suffocating, swells that can come from nowhere.

>executions at "sea" are often done at dusk, right as the desert hardens
>the sentenced is tied up and left to sit facing the east (or wherever the sun rises from)
>when the engines begin at sunrise he will slowly sink as they warm up for the day

You can drop a guy overboard during the day but they disappear instantly. This makes 'em think about it.

Lighter ships should have axles and wheels that can be attached when the sea solidifies so they can continue moving at night. This would be perfect for pirates looking to evade heavy national warships.

Major battles that continue past sunset would turn spontaneously from naval to land battles, with infantry duking it out while the dedicated sailors attempt to turn their ships using muscle to the optimal starting position before sunrise.

>desert setting
>An idea stumbled into my head as I watched this video
Okay, it's gotta be something like one of these, right?
youtube.com/watch?v=cLnkQAeMbIM
youtube.com/watch?v=bkL94nKSd2M
youtube.com/watch?v=UtjGTrVwRr4

>Liquid Sand Hot Tub
Oh. Your mind works in mysterious ways, OP.

>the sand's are tied to the solar cycle

I like that idea.

It was OP's idea desu

Or perhaps fixing the pipes is what adventurers are needed for, because they tend to break in the most dangerous of places. Maybe there are even sand pirates/terrorists that threaten to damage those pipes or disable solar plants if their demands are not met.

I like the idea that a broken pipe would lead to dead spots and that the new end of the pipe would become massively turbulent due to the excessive amount of gas leaving that area compared to what it should normally have which could to the group trying to run away into these turbulent sands in a desperate escape only to find themselves marooned on the opposite side in a section of dead sea.

There could even be a machine depot of bots that go to repair the pipes underground. These bots could be wildly different from one another, giving rise to legends and tales of great serpents or monsters coming out of the sand seas and preying upon travelers that stray too near their territory.

In reality, the repair bots could be acting to remove what they consider threats to their storage depot or the pressure system in general, or even a probable cause of disrepair or damage. You get too close to a busted section? The beast will drag you under. Beware calmer waters.

This setting could actually go a lot of ways.

>Major battles that continue past sunset would turn spontaneously from naval to land battles

I can imagine having a carrier with a huge deck loaded out with quarters for brigades of soldiers and a belly full of land-based wheeled vehicle-boats that could perform fast-attack operations. Or a literal barge that acts as an artillery platform at night. Pagoda towers used as sentry points and spotting towers for both naval and land engagements.
Merchants circling their ships up at night to make a defensible fort.
Pirate ships being hunted by special boatercycles that can operate effectively on both sand and sea
Huge landing barges with caterpillar treads that can't be effectively disabled

Man this is actually a pretty neat concept.

Okay, so bear with me here. What about...

Boat. Trains.

>desert area full of pipes

So it's a desert world from Super Mario?

youtube.com/watch?v=emeB83Q6P1I

The "it turns off at night" part sold me

Another fun thing to consider is the radical temperature difference in a desert's day/night cycle. Deserts go from scorching heat to freezing cold in a few hours without sunlight.

2edgy4meM80

It gets edgier. So much edgier.

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ohnowatnoway

We're talking shocking levels of edge man.

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this, but add in a longer day/night cycle than we have on earth.

and imagine a ship sinking at sunset, the sands solidifying before the ship can fully sink, and the entire crew is now faced with the long wait until their catastrophe can begin again.With no lifeboats and no way to reach safety before sunrise they await their doom.

ugh daddy twist my nips and razor my earlobes, tell me more

depending on how long a wait we're talking, they might have enough time to lash together some rafts.

Go to bed Oda

This is some crawling through papercuts levels of edge. You sure you're ready?

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That's exactly what I was thinking. Given the right tools and some time, they could just cannibalize the body of their ship and get to making some stuff that'll float short-term.

And interesting though though, you only have to make it until night no matter what kind of ship you're on. Perhaps there would be some kind of self-contained drydocking mechanism for larger ships, like a machine or machines that lift the ship and scoop(s) sand under it to raise it out of the "frozen" dunes for nocturnal repairs.

That could be interesting, like in the instance of the Yorktown at Midway being hit twice because the repair crew was so efficient. A ship is basically sunk at dusk, but in sailing order by morning due to the crew's tireless repairs as night.

I know mechanic foes have been mentioned, but what about organics? perhaps surviving on islands, leaving those to hunt during the long nights?

youtube.com/watch?v=0JRgHol94Xc

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>The "it turns off at night" part sold me
Same.

This thread better be around in the morning!

I'm imagining large stone monsters, Disney's Atlantis style lurking in the sands. Islands that are actually covers tossed together by giant trapdoor spiders that wander the sands at night. Or behemoth ant hills. Huge devil rays that surface just before sunset to beach for the night. And then, the Howlers. Blind simian carnivores that wander into the sand every night in search of animals that got caught and are partly buried in the sands.

In this context, what would be the ecology of the obligatory sandworms? Would they rise near the surface at night, to not be crushed by the weght of the sand? When would they be more vulnerable, at night, on/half trapped/fully trapped by the sand, or at day, while "swimming", like a whale? What about other lifeform? Does some cactus-like plant could float on the daily sand? Birds that only land at night?

Animals that could not be supported by the daily sand, but could burrow just fine in the nightly desert? It would make sense that the maintenance bot would be from the last type, since they would need to keep to the floor during day and dig trough damaged sections.

Consulting my friend who is an expert on these sorts of things (OCD level of setting research)

IF you had a long enough day/night cycle
IF the atmosphere was dry, like Dune/Arakis
IF during the night cycle you had CO2 ice form

The CO2 ice could melt during the day cycle and cause this. Such a world would be at the very edge if habitable, with little water and extreme lethal colds at night (still not as low as it would take to freeze oxygen). If you did it with oxygenated sand, the surface of the planet would literally expload during the daytime. So basically you need the ancient pipes for this, or "magic"

Biologically speaking, any world consisting of primarily sand would have no water because the water would sink. You'd need to survive off humidity, survive extreme cold, be ok in a carbon rich environment...

It's basically a death world

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don't forget "The Laughing Demons", large colorful scorpion-like creatures.

and of course, the dread Spiderlings, eight-legged raccoon-sized creatures that for gives, have a poisonous bite, but rather then spinning web they have these solid deposits somewhere between xenomorph and bees where they foster their young.
A thick viscous liquid transparent purple in color, known as Spidersap, is a very profitable trade-good and a wonderful antitoxin.
"Spiderqueens" are terrifying foes that sailors seldom see.

>any world consisting of primarily sand would have no water because the water would sink
What if it was something like this that was caused because there were large water pipes close to the surface that acted as oases

>sandworms
swim all day and position themselves vertically with their heads protuding from the sand at night. While they take in some air naturally while swimming in the aerated sand, they really subsist on a massive daily inhalation. A worm will, upon sensing the cooling of the sand/the rumbling of the pipes as they begin to shut down, swim upwards and maintain position until the sand sets, then launch a plume of CO2 and sand high into the air before slowly inhaling throughout the night.
Maybe the pluming also creates a Sarlacc-like pit which it will feed with should anything fall down.
They also lay their eggs deep down onto the pipe outlets, so that the larvae are propelled up to the surface when they hatch.

Birds would look like waterbirds and would have extremely long, splayed toes for dealing with surface tension.

that city goes deeper down into the surface.
Construction of such underground complexes is done only during the day, obviously, and the workers are trained to perform a job akin to underwater construction.

a massive deity was born from the terror and hatred of trillions of murdered demons after they were butchered by a dragon the size of a planet. he choked the shit out of that dragon after raping her daughters into submission. tied her, nose to ass, into a ring and built a world on her back. the ring orbits a gas giant that orbits a star. the giant dragon's body heat explosively evaporating water, bleeding sores, and struggling are what cause the oceans of ash to be liquid. its stronger struggles cause earthquakes. the ash are the remains of the trillions of dead demons. eventually the daughters that murder god raped got back and him and cut him into pieces. the three daughters fight over their mothers body, which is why there are three seasons.

what are the three seasons?

I've got some patch-fix ideas here to reconcile with this.
>So basically you need the ancient pipes for this, or "magic"
We keep this theme just for simplicity
>Biologically speaking, any world consisting of primarily sand would have no water because the water would sink.
Every ocean has its bed, right? How about some sizable islands of sheer rock for permanent settlement with deep, DEEP wells to hit the aquifers? That way each island is of incredible value. An oasis could be centered around a stretch of derelict pipeline whose repair mechanisms or bots have been disabled or destroyed somehow, or are just offline.
Or alternatively, an oasis could be above a mechanical compressor (on a biblical scale) with a leak, either by fault or design. Water seeps into the sand above, drillers snatch it with a well.
>You'd need to survive off humidity
Solar-powered compressors or condensers?
>survive extreme cold
Furs, solar-battery-powered heaters, something like that?

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too damn hot, windy with a chance of rain, and fucking cold.

most of the potable water on the world is from frost gathered during the cold season.

so does it go from "fucking cold" to "too damn hot"?

The workers are either very highly paid or slaves/indentured workers, but are a mangled bunch a la oil drillers. They tend to have nerves of steel, and have some horrific superstitions/anecdotes about building stuff in an opaque "liquid".

Ancient Egyptians had worn down teeth from sand getting in their food 24/7. Like, everyone in Egypt, noble to peasant. That applies here as well.

A lot of these questions depend on the tech level of the peoples of the setting, and also whether magic exists. Personally I’d be a proponent of no magic and this being a scifi setting, albeit a post-apocalyptic one. Many technologies are long forgotten, but still used and treasured as relics of the past. The actual tech level of the people is equivalent to the Late Renaissance, but they use stuff like solar moisture condensers and HAM radios that were built long ago, and few people understand how to use them, let alone repair them. Archaeo-tech is the magic of the setting.

pretty much. you could argue that the defrosting period is a fourth season, but it rarely lasts longer than two weeks. it's caused by a combination of the sun getting closer and the bound dragon struggling even harder as she approaches the sun.

the sun, by the way, is her hoard.

below the shifting sand is a bed of solid rock.
below that solid rock are the ruins of the ancient empire that created those tubes, but those ruins are overrun with bots, monsters, and all manner of traps and hazards.

This "underdark" contains many relics and treasures that adventurers find worth the risk.

I can only imagine what night battles would be like if a wheeled sloop full of musketeers swoops in on a stranded ship of the line and blows holes in it with the one or two deck guns, keeping the other crew down with suppressing fire, only to slip away and wait for its prey to sink when the sun rises.

Only if that ship of the line was foolish enough to not deploy a tethered hot air balloon with lookouts aboard to watch for such vessels on the horizon.

or set up a ring around the ship during the night, specifically to watch for and fend off these attacks at the ground level.

a) the musketeers would be operating at night
b) the stationary hot air balloon is a great target

This is why I stuck around. I love when there's an actual discussion.

Agreed. I might steal the whole change in the fluidity of the sand from day to night, with some tweaks.

>You'd need to survive off humidity
This is where the moisture farmers come in.

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After this he went off on a tangent like he often does and spun theories about what kind of life could survive on this works.

Eventually he figured if it was silicon based plant life with ammonia based biochemistry (ammonia is another viable universal solvent like water and freezes at the same temperature as CO2) on a world with a red dwarf star that's nearing tidal lock and a very strong magnetic field.

>if you're sailing on sand, if someone builds a system to make the sand sailable. what does that tell you about the conditions of the planet? there's no water to sail on. we need water. no matter what gatorade tells us. aaand, any water on said world would sink under the bubbling sand, meaning even if it were there it'd be underground all the time and impossible to drill for. so yeah, we can't live on that planet. so you'd have to look at a different kind of life. something that could survive off of the humidity in the air, survive extreme cold temperatures, would be okay in a carbon rich environment

>so let's work with a gas that can take the place of water as a biological solvent. ammonia. which freezes at roughly the same temperatures as CO2. so let's sa you have a lifeform with an ammonia based biochemistry instead of water. on a silicon rich world (because sand is silica). so...a silicon based lifeform with an ammonia based biochemistr

>world would have to be around a red dwarf. not quite tidally locked yet, but getting close 'cause, see, if it were bigger than a red dwarf, if the planet were spinning slow enough to allow the back side to cool to the freezing point of ammonia, then the front side would be cooked. would have to have an insane magnetic field too. so these things would probably navigate naturally by the magnetism of their planet. any plant life, which would also be like them, hell, they might be plants themselves, would probably be a purple color

>so....photosynthetic purple silicon based lifeforms that can use ammonia like water. the planet would have an incredibly strong magnetic field. the star would be wildly unstable and could become 8 times brighter out of nowhere. the auroras at night would be iiiiinsaaaaane because it would be spitting radiation like crazy and the magnetic field would be doing its best to stop it

>this would be towards the end of their world though, because it's becoming tidally locked. which would allow for the bubbling sand oceans, but would mean that in a few million years it becomes wholly tidally locked, which would cause the ammonia in their atmosphere to eventually become locked on the far side of the planet

>hrm. wouldn't need to lock it down too hard though. ammonia's boiling point is -33C. so...actually....if you put it out far enough from a main sequence star...the liquid ammonia could sink through the sand and then boil back up

>meaning they wouldn't have to be purple after all, but probably still silicon based. that much ammonia and sand everywhere. they're not going to be like us. also, by having an ammonia based biochemistry their survival of lower temperatures would be easier. our dependence on water is a big reason why it's so hard for us to survive freezine temperatures

>we define freezing temps by water, so if we were ammonia based, basically the boiling temperature of ammonia would be a hot day

>so yeah, put a planet around a main sequence yellow star out around where Mars is you could get your weird funky planet. we'd die a terrible death. but silicon dude would probably be pretty comfortable

Not really relevant to the kind of fantasy realm we're discussing but a really interesting tangent. It's always fun to imagine really alien spaces

wouldn't the ships be worn down really fast in such a world? due to friction I assume they would need to be repaired very often so salvaging materials for repairs would be crucial. Where do they come from in the first place though? It can't be full sand world I assume, it needs to have oasis or even forests of some sort to provide wood for ships building...

Obbligatory

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*obligatory
Fuck

I imagine there would be rocky islands/oases with resources there. There would be a lot of wearing down, perhaps the ships would have their hulls covered with tanned leather to lessen the impact of sanding.

The sand-resistant hide of sandworms is probably one of the most valuable commodities arouns for this purpose. Wood is valuable too but comparatively easier to come by.

Molesharks.
During the day they swim through the aerated sands, and as the sun goes down they stop and expand themselves like a pufferfish.

When the sand solidifies, they excrete a liquid which basically gums up the sand around them, allowing them to deflate and have a little impromptu cave to themselves.

Despite he name they’re actually not dangerous to people at all, living primarily on sand swimming creatures during the day, and smaller burrowing ones that accidentally dig into their caves at night.

Once the sun comes up, the aerated sand dissolved their little habitat and they swim on.

They make good pets, and are often trained as a combination between watch dogs and hunting dogs by long haul traders.

>Ancient Egyptians had worn down teeth from sand getting in their food 24/7. Like, everyone in Egypt, noble to peasant. That applies here as well.
But ancient Egypt was really lush and green?

The problem was that they used sandstone to grind flour iirc

Maybe the most popular ships are catamarans and "hydro"-foils.

Depending on the Age, they could line the keels with sandworm/other animal hides/copper/iron/or even glass?

So what about the peoples and cultures who inhabit the sand seas? Just humans with different cultures or do we have some alien humanoids running around? I always kind of liked the idea of humanoids with a pineal third eye as desert-dwellers. Makes them hard to sneak up on even when they sleep.

>the worlds creation story is a BDSM skit gone horribly wrong.
Is this your magical realm? It feels like it is.

In the french comic Lanfeust des Etoiles there is a planet covered in sands, people uses boat with sails to travel through the planet as technology only works in the north and south pole of the planet.
It was mostly fluff and only appeared for one volume but it was pretty fun, the character had to fight a not!moby dick along with a not!captain Ahab

Massive desert cities that transform into islands during the day, constructed so the majority of the cities are enclosed until night falls and the cities use pumps and hydraulics to rise back up over the solid sand, and then it opens up and the city comes to life.

Desert caravan train boats.

>when the cities sprawl open.
youtube.com/watch?v=FJGkFU3leY0

I am imagining giant panels unfolding with houses and stores built on swings, so when they lower, the buildings swing down to sit upright on the massive platforms, and big, elaborate statues raising the top of the city up, lifting chunks of the architecture into the air with it, just the whole place unfolding like a popup book

I'm down.

We need a multi-armed robot "deity" at the center of the pipe network that plays a fuck huge organ.

Talking of deities, what would everyone's take on the ancient civilization? Revering them as benefactors that allowed passage through desert? Blaming them for the deserty state of the world? Or maybe just a logical approach that would recognize them as a preceeding civilization that adapted to it's surroundings.

A mix of all of these, I would suppose. A lot of societies might not even be aware of there precursors.

Not really.

Is there anyone that thinks flying ships is a viable alternative to sailing on sand?

Could be done if you had easy access to lighter than air gas, like helium or hydrogen. Hell, you could use sandworm skin as an envelope for a rigid-bodied airship. Harvesting gas is the main obstacle. Fuel is too scarce for hot hair balloons to be done on such a large scale.

>Harvesting gas is the main obstacle
Why not ride the insane thermal updrafts in the midday or fuckheug dustdevils/tornados/sandstorms to catch lift? If it's a desert planet with an atmosphere and a sun shouldn't it be viable?

I’m no aviator, but from what I know if there are updrafts there are equally powerful downdrafts. It could probably be done but it would be really fucking tricky and dangerous. Plus ships and land vehicles can carry more cargo than airships, simple fact.

I really dig this one. I'm thinking that as any given bit of desert is much the same as another you'd get particular nations radiating in rough circles from important resources worth building towns on, with border settlements X days of travel from the main hub cities, since there's very little reason to build anything more than an overnight stopping point and watchtower out in the middle of nowhere.

I'd imagine that any boat that doesn't want to be sneaking around would send up a basic balloon on a long cable to "fly the flag" over the sand dunes and serve as a marker during the long daytime thermals, maybe with a sentry in a basket on bigger ships. Take it down at night, douse lights and hope nothing sneaks up on you during beachtime.

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You could also intentionally submerge or bury your ship at night, leaving only a few chimneys of different heights to help it breath. As the sands begin to shift in the morning, return to the surface.

Okay how about this.

The sand flows naturally. The bedrock of the world, miles down, is a natural magic battery, charging up from the aether. When it's saturated it effuses oxygen.

An ancient power plant can generate enormous amounts of magical power by sapping the bedrock for energy. A side effect of this is that the sand compacts again, causing the sea to solidify. The BBEG wants to turn the plant on, bringing oceanwide infrastructure grinding to a halt, and use the power to...oh I dunno, turn himself into a god? Something that requires a lot of power.

That sounds a bit troublesome to arrange unless you choose to sink it midafternoon as the sun drops steadily, so perhaps it would be the stationary equivalent of a submarine running silent.

"Naval" battles might be fun, given they're limited to a day's length before it's two stationary forts shooting each other and the waves are stationary. I can see the balloon lookouts being important to range your guns, assuming they're Age of Sail style cannon firing over the tops of dunes.

>Islands that are actually covers tossed together by giant trapdoor spiders that wander the sands at night
Dear god no.

Pretty similar in theory to Railsea, which is worth a read if you haven't stumbled on it yet. It's a Mieville book where he does a sorta Moby Dick Meets Shannara thing, but the core of the setting is that the world is a vast desert with little rocky islands of life, and you have to "sail" between them in trains.

Core difference is that instead of quicksand, they are in trains on an infinite sea of rails (which are constantly expanded and repaired by precursor machines), hunting a giant albino mole, and the reason you can't step on the sand is that you would be instantly devoured by giant horrific mutant antlions, earwigs, naked mole rats and centipedes a la that one level from Half Life 2. But otherwise, same exact thing as what you're talking about. There are even trains that use sails for power.

This seems like an awesome idea for a Mediterranean sea analog bisecting two halves of a continent

>Major battles that continue past sunset would turn spontaneously from naval to land battles, with infantry duking it out while the dedicated sailors attempt to turn their ships using muscle to the optimal starting position before sunrise.
Love this one

At the break, you'd have a stormy area, but wouldn't the "dead" areas then just be regular land? Where you could build and live and so on?

>Trains.
Right, that's what this is.

Attached: railsea.jpg (540x359, 67K)

Sure you could walk across the dead areas, but we're talking about areas that could be the size of Atlantic or Pacific currents. Why would you want to build there?

>find a dead spot just next to an important route frequented by traders
>spend life savings to build a tavern there and move in with your family
>the "middle of desert inn" becomes more and more popular
>one night the ancient repair bots finally fixed the pipes underneath the tavern
>haha oops