TwilightDeserts

0 kgp /0 kxp Harmonia (Twilight)

This worldis twilight. Its axis of spin is 88 degrees, g 0.7 ms^-2, M 0.2 Y, R0.1. On the equator, sun rises and sets on the horizon. There is a belt ofmountain ranges around the equator, in whose valleys people can survive,protected from the cold storms of the dark side by mountains to the south, andfrom the hot dust storms of the bright side by mountains to the north.

There arethose who believe these mountains were thrown up by the eternal tumultuousconflict between the hot and cold storms. But the gods believe the mountainswere raised deliberately by the former celesti. In these valleys live a varietyof plants unique to Twilight. According to the gods, these plants were left bythe former-celesti as well. Like all such plants, they have no nutritionalvalue for Terran life forms.

TheTwilight Acacia, whose leaves face the northern horizon, is so hard it canscratch copper. It prospers in the mountains, and can be found along theequator in the deserts between mountain ranges.

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

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

There area few Terran life forms that survive in the Twilight deserts. In deepnorth-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-yellowsparrow in small numbers. The sparrows are sandstone yellow to hide from thehighest form of life in the Twilight desert, the desert sparrowhawk, which hisa fine-looking bird with a red tail.

In theintensly salty inland seas, you can find plankton and small fish up to threecentimeters long

that feedon them.

The Terranlife of the desert is not widely known about. Hardly anyone ever travels in thedesert. The inhabitants of Twilight consider it suicidal. The nations onTwilight are a series of mountainous islands in the desert. Sometimes peoplefly from one nation to the next on hypogriffs, but these are usually criminalsfleeing from justice. It is risky even to fly across the desert. A storm can comeup in a matter of hours, and the mountain ranges are separated by hundreds ofkilometers around the twenty-thousand kilometer equator. The nations don’ttrade with one another unless they are connected. Harmonia, for example, hashad no direct contact with any other Twilight nation for centuries. Its closestneighbour is five hundred kilometers away to the west, across sandtone ranges,and inland sea, and a stretch of the flatest, windiest, and most barren deserton the planet.

Theweather in the Twilight desert varies between arctic and saharan. It can swichfrom one extreme to another overnight. Weather systems extend for hundreds ofkilometers, but not thousands. The systems are storms, or clashing storms,which are not global phenomena. Nor does the frequency of hot or cold stormsvary during the year, although most of Twilight’s inhabitants believeotherwise.

Roll 1d6every week. If you roll a 1, you get a cold storm. If you roll a 5 or 6 you geta hot storm.

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

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

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