Caranus was first meant to be a world setting for D&D when I first thought of it. It was a large map with two continents, there was a fantastically long history thanks to Tolkien. But not like Tolkien, like something else. It was a world where all the boundaries were pushed away. There were three suns and six moons, the world was as large as Saturn and it had a true orbit of 25 years and seasonal variation of one year in length. The world improved as I learned more and more about how the real world and the universe works. Like two of the suns are locked in an orbit around themselves and they in turn orbit a third sun. The orbit takes a year to complete and this variation in the light level creates a mild season effect, but the inhabitants who are not an advanced culture don't know this, they think there are 24 years to a real year because of sidereal motion. Complicated, but just look sidereal days in a year for Earth, it is 366.25 not 365.25. That is fine because it means that the true seasons last about six years each and not 6.25. Happy coincidence I assure you, I did not plan it.
Anyways there are gods, nine of them, three goddesses with two consorts each. Each of the goddesses is represented by one of the suns, there is a red sun, a green sun and a blue sun. Initiates into the religions of the goddesses learns a secret about the goddess. The goddess of Magic is the blue sun. Due to Reighleigh Scattering, all the blue light is scattered, and so, the blue sun is invisible all the time. Imagine, looking up at a clear blue sky and seeing no sun at all! That would be nuts and cool and terrifying. You would think that this would be the goddess of thieves, and you would be wrong, since the light is scattered, the light would come from all directions, so there would be no shadows. There are lots of secrets you might have based on this.
The Green goddess's sun would appear as a yellow sun because of the scattering, so the first secret would be that. The second secret is that she is not a friend of plants, because plants reflect green light, and they don't absorb it. So this might be the goddess for thieves and murderers. The Red sun, is exactly what they appear to be and that light gets absorbed by plants, along with the Blue light. When there is an eclipse of the other suns, the red sun's Light turns vegetation black, so many people call the red sun the goddess of death, which she is, because she is the goddess of life and rebirth, so death as well.
The six consorts, the gods are more universally worshiped, but they are worshipped in pieces, for example the consorts of the red sun are worshiped as the god of corn harvest, and the god of the apple harvest, the gods of hunting, the gods decay, and the seasons and many more. The gods of the Green Sun handle her list of previews and the consorts of the Blue Sun goddess handle her previews. There are only nine true deities, but there are hundreds of faces of each. A high level priest would learn much over his advancement about how the world really works as they gain power. They would look at the world differently than they did as a child.
The yearly weather depends on the proximity of the red and the green stars in relation to the planet, the blue Sun's light is stable throughout. The furthest away it is the cooler the day. Also the suns rotate around each other, a dance in the sky, and there is a subtle variation because of this. The true seasons are brought on by an axial tilt, just like on Earth, but since the transition lasts six years, there is more steady change in the weather. The seasonsa re more pronounced in the extremes of latitude. A winter that lasted six years is a lot more devastating than a winter on Earth. Indeed, unless there were ample stores set aside it would be impossible to live in the extremes full time. But the summers, six years of near constant daylight would allow a lot of crops to be planted and grown, perhaps enough to hold over the long Autumn through Spring weather. More temperate climates might have multiple harvest years in the summer and single harvests in the spring and autumns and maybe one harvest all winter long. The low latitudes have a different problem, extreme heat with 40°C daily averages and high humidity too. And jungles where the daytime highs hit 60° that almost instantly turn into daily downpours that last hours.
Mountain ranges that scrape the sky at airplane heights. With a backbone mountain range that continues without break and without passes for tens of thousands of kilometers— the only breaks are tunnels build through them. The mountain range is shadowed by a great river called the Great River not because of poor imagination, but because it is so… so great. Stretches from lakes in the unbearable south, it courses north picking up tributaries larger than the Nile. Navigable for almost its entire length it widens more and more until seeing across it is impossible. Nations are rubbed clean as its meanders push down its length. Cities die as they are left dry when the river moves. Fish that live in the river found in one place are different from fish found in another. Its great estuary is a vast changing subarctic marsh, where the warm waters meet a cold ocean and blanketing the entire region in a thick fog. Hundreds of thousands of square kilometers, millions, but with a ecosystem that supports many marsh bound nations.
I dream that I might have a story to place in this world so that I can describe it more fully in a novel. One day perhaps.
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