>as far as anyone can tell, the world is endless, but there are soft limits on how far you can travel
>travel to the north and the world will gradually become colder and colder, until even the most resilient creatures would freeze to death
>travel to the south and the world becomes hotter for every mile, until everything but the burning sand melts under the heat
>travel to the west and the every plant, animal, and even person becomes smaller as you travel on, until you can't sustain yourself any further on the minuscule food
>travel to the east and the world becomes larger and bigger, until even the smallest of bugs can and will defeat you and eat you and the people are liable to step on you without even noticing
Does this make an interesting premise for a setting?
As far as anyone can tell, the world is endless, but there are soft limits on how far you can travel
Sure.
Yes
>Gulliver's Travels Planet
YES.
No endless oceans? Disappoint
Eventually even a small lake would become a massive ocean, and the river crossings would become uncrossable, since it would be so wide that it would take far too long to get to the other side and you’d probably get eaten by a fish. Sure, you could take the giant bridge, if you want to get found by some peasant girl and kept as her pet.
I imagine the ocean changes depending on the direction. Go north and you run into an endless plane of ice, go south and you run into a dried out sea bed, go west and you get a puddle and east you could get eaten by plankton
What happens if you go up or down?
The earth gets harder until your picks can't break it when you go down.
The air gets thinner and the wind gets harsher as you go up.
This also acts as a soft limit preventing a giant from just rampaging his way too far west. Since your head is literally above the clouds, the air is so thin that you can’t breathe it.
Neat idea, but what's in the middle?
Averageness. 6’0” tall people on average (depending on the race), normal sized plants and animals, and temperate climate.
This is all relative though, the world is literally endless, it just becomes too hostile to explore past certain point.
Exalted's Creation is somewhat like this. If you head from the Center in any of the cardinal directions, the elements take over. Wood for East, Water for West, Fire for South, Air for North. It also brings you out of reality and into the Wyld, though if you manage to keep your bearings, you'll reach the elemental poles - pure expressions of the element. If you don't, you'll wander out of the Wyld and into formless chaos.
That's not a premise. It's just a background detail.
There is no middle if the world is infinite. In the same line of thinking, where you were originally born will always be the "middle", since anything to the west of you will be smaller than normal, anything to the east of you is larger than normal, etc.
The infinite world is filled with infinite people, all of which wholeheartedly believe that their land is the "normal" "middle" one.
It's been a while but I believe this is Exalted's world. Closer to the elemental poles you get extremes in climate and geography.
My setting is like this, only that the furter you go from the centre, the world keeps going more and more featureless. The sky is grey. the earth is just sand. the horizon is indistinguishible in the vast nothingness. Things lose their proprierties, the food stop being nourishing, the water stop beind refreshing. Go on enought and it becomes a literal grey void.
The point is that what in setting are believed to be other planes are just other worlds that resides in this expanse, and you can reach them simply by walking enought. Also there is this crazy archmage that believe that the world is going to end and discovered a way for magic to work into the expanse, so he left for there and started building his own world in there as a copy. The pg discovered it when a teleport spell fizzled and instead of their actual destination they ended up in the replica.
That's one fucked up world.
That's almost exactly how the world is in my setting
Go north and the world becomes colder, the winds fiercer - if you could survive you would eventually reach a giant portal to the Elemental plane of Air
Go south and the world becomes rockier and more mountainous. desolate earth dominates until you eventually reach a portal to the Elemental plane of Earth
To the west, lies the great ocean, soon all sight of land would be lost. Assuming you could survive the giant sea monsters, the lack of potable water, the raging storms, you would reach the porta to the Plane of Water
To the east, across the steppes and deserts the land bakes, volcanic activity is everywhere and if you could survive the broiling temperatures, and make it past the last remaining great dragons that call it home you would reach the elemental plane of Fire
Each cardinal direction is governed by an original element. The North, Original Cold, the South, Original Heat, the West, Original Small, the East, Original Large
Reminds me of how ancient greeks perceived the world.
As one goes away from Greece, the world gets weirder.
North: there are trees taken away by the tides up north, crashing ships like floating islands, its leafs as sail under the winds. Men dressed as wolves eat human flesh.
East: One-eyed nomads steal the gold of gryphons. Elephants are so plentiful that peasants may have one.
West: the winds of the iberia coast impregnates mares. The great river Oceanus may not be a river at all.
South: a kingdom of tall hairless people, except for the head. Their bones are rubbery and their two-tongued mouths can talk with two people at the same time. The garamantian chariot nomads are actually raiders from a kingdom that somehow grows crops in the middle of the desert.
I think the west one is probably the most boring and should be replaced by endless ocean.
From a gameplay perspective having the party starve to death seems a lot less fun than having to fight their way through giant-verse, or the north and south which are both biomes that have tons of monsters you can use and throw at the party.
What can you really do that's interesting about ever shrinking monsters? Not much. The smaller T-Rex loses it's novelty really fast.
>6'0"
>average
user...
Netherlands.
>From a gameplay perspective having the party starve to death
You just turn around and take a few steps east and you have enough to eat again.
Besides, the challenge here would be that you're the monsters and the tiny people are trying to stop you from stepping on their villages. Imagine if you HAVE to keep going west because you're trailing the BBEG or whatever, but where he wantonly tramples on everyone in his path, you need to take extra care not to hurt any of the tiny people.
Exalted?
What if you just fly, and bring provisions
Exalted did it better.
Provisions run out eventually, and you can’t fly too high lest you rub into the problem with Besides, if you don’t have the west be smaller then the world isn’t really infinite anymore, since you are the “end of the line” so to speak, the smallest people in existence.
What does exalted do?
Dutch women don't average 6'
Is that meming?
I mean, I can believe a few of you didn't notice that someone already spoke about Exalted, but that's a lot of people not reading a 30-reply thread