The Great Snake (3.5e Campaign Setting)/Geometry and Geography
Geometry and Geography[edit]
The Great Snake, as the name hints, is a humongous snake. More specifically, it is the rotting carcass of a snake, biting its own tail, with a conveniently distorted gravity field.
Geometry[edit]
The snake is arranged in a circular fashion, approximately 12000 miles in diameter, with an average thickness of 1200 miles. A gravitational ring passing through the center of the snake's body holds it in place, and makes it so anywhere on the snake, "down" is towards the snake.
The snake spins along an axis describes from the head of the snake directly to the opposite edge, at a rate of once every 24 hours. This means that "day" on the inner circle of the snake has an eclipse at noon, lasting approximately half an hour.
Concepts like "North", "South", "East", and "West" are mostly meaningless when your planet is a snake, not a sphere. Instead, the typical directions are "Headwards", "Tailwards", "Innerwards - Clockwise/Counterclockwise", and "Outerwards - Clockwise/Counterclockwise". Headwards refers to the direction along the snake one would travel to reach the head before the tail, and Tailwards is the opposite. Clockwise and Counterclockwise are used with the assumption that you're facing Headwards. Some people prefer to call the head/tail North, and the region on the opposite side South, but they are in the definite minority.
Geography[edit]
The gases surrounding the Great Snake are, conveniently, a perfectly breathable mix of nitrogen, carbon dioxide, oxygen, and other trace chemicals. The scales of the Great Snake have been chipped, cracked, and shattered by wind, water, and storms, forming the "rocks" of the world. The outer flesh of the Great Snake has been processed by wind, water, and organisms for long enough that it has become dirt. In effect, the outer layer of the Great Snake is a world of lush forests, pristine lakes, jagged mountains, wild jungles, raging oceans, barren deserts, and scaly plateaus. The reduced sunlight on the head/tail end and the opposite end result in polar ice caps. Since seismic activity has been replaced with the continued process of rot on the inside, instead of volcanic eruptions, we have multiple-mile-wide regions of putrescent gas, which occasionally explode onto the surface, wreaking havoc and poisoning the countryside.
Deep within the Great Snake, however, are gigantic magic-infused organs, tremendous bones, and putrid meat, forming an intricate cave system. Entire civilizations have little difficulty surviving down there, even without magical assistance, as it is possible to simply mine for food and water. Gigantic maggots and bugs, sometimes dozens of feet long, crawl about, feasting on the Great Snake's flesh.
At the head of the snake, there are two eyes. One, the "Eye of the North", is still intact, protected by its invulnerable transparent covering, eternally watching the stars, melting any ice that attempts to form on it due to its natural heat generation. The other was pierced long ago by a gigantic sword. Although much of the sword has been mined for metals, and the pommelstone fell off long ago, the two thousand mile spike is still visible from the other side of the snake.
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