Twilight Deserts

0 kgp / 0 kxp Harmonia (Twilight)

This world is twilight. Its axis of spin is 88 degrees, g 0.7 ms^-2, M 0.2 Y, R 0.1. On the equator, sun rises and sets on the horizon. There is a belt of mountain ranges around the equator, in whose valleys people can survive, protected from the cold storms of the dark side by mountains to the south, and from the hot dust storms of the bright side by mountains to the north.

There are those who believe these mountains were thrown up by the eternal tumultuous conflict between the hot and cold storms. But the gods believe the mountains were raised deliberately by the former celesti. In these valleys live a variety of plants unique to Twilight. According to the gods, these plants were left by the former-celesti as well. Like all such plants, they have no nutritional value for Terran life forms.

The Twilight Acacia, whose leaves face the northern horizon, is so hard it can scratch copper. It prospers in the mountains, and can be found along the equator in the deserts between mountain ranges.

The Twilight Rock Vine is sandstone-brown, and grows on sandstone. It appears to live off sun, water, and minerals. It has thick, hard leaves, all brown. It is hard to see until you get close, but you can use them to climb up south-facing cliffs where they are common. If you cut the base on one of these vines, and wait patiently, water will drip out slowly, but steadily, for hours.

The Twilight Scrub Bush is a knotted bush whose leaves it protects from the wind and snow with a vaguely spherical mesh of flat stems that contract in bad weather, sealing the leaves within. The leavs are fleshy and green. You can squeeze water out of them. It tastes bitter and can give you a headache, but it is worth it if you are thirsty.

There are a few Terran life forms that survive in the Twilight deserts. In deep north-south canyons cut by water in sandstone, you can find grass and cacti. Where there are Terran plants, there are Terran insects as well. In particular, there are large red ants, enough to support a species of sandstone-yellow sparrow in small numbers. The sparrows are sandstone yellow to hide from the highest form of life in the Twilight desert, the desert sparrowhawk, which his a fine-looking bird with a red tail.

In the intensly salty inland seas, you can find plankton and small fish up to three centimeters long

that feed on them.

The Terran life of the desert is not widely known about. Hardly anyone ever travels in the desert. The inhabitants of Twilight consider it suicidal. The nations on Twilight are a series of mountainous islands in the desert. Sometimes people fly from one nation to the next on hypogriffs, but these are usually criminals fleeing from justice. It is risky even to fly across the desert. A storm can come up in a matter of hours, and the mountain ranges are separated by hundreds of kilometers around the twenty-thousand kilometer equator. The nations don’t trade with one another unless they are connected. Harmonia, for example, has had no direct contact with any other Twilight nation for centuries. Its closest neighbour is five hundred kilometers away to the west, across sandtone ranges, and inland sea, and a stretch of the flatest, windiest, and most barren desert on the planet.

The weather in the Twilight desert varies between arctic and saharan. It can swich from one extreme to another overnight. Weather systems extend for hundreds of kilometers, but not thousands. The systems are storms, or clashing storms, which are not global phenomena. Nor does the frequency of hot or cold storms vary during the year, although most of Twilight’s inhabitants believe otherwise.

Roll 1d6 every week. If you roll a 1, you get a cold storm. If you roll a 5 or 6 you get a hot storm.

A cold storm, if it is not followed soon by a hot storm or another cold storm, will take the temperature down to –40 C for two or three dreadful snowy days, and then slowly return to 20 C two weeks after the storm hits. Cold storms are preceeded by a good thick snowfall. This snow protects the Terran plants and animals in the canyons from the subsequent deadly –40 C.

A hot storm will take the temperature up to 50 C for a day of blasting-hot wind-blown sand. After a week, the temperature will return to 20 C.

When a hot storm follows a cold storm, there will be floods as one or two meters of snow melt in a matter of hours. It is these floods that cut the canyons, and explain the big, dry river-beds that the intrepid traveller will find there during warm weather. The floods follow well-established channels through sandstone, but when they hit the flats, they seem to take a different path each time they occur, sweeping away snow, ice, and mud.