Icarus: The major world setting

Facts About Icarus

Technology

It is the steam age, with many new and fantastic devices run on steam engines. With such mechanization, goods can be mass-produced and sent to other islands all over Icarus.

Flight is and always has been of great importance to the Icarians, but with the advancement brought about by the new industrial age, new ways to transport goods and passengers from one place to another are developing all the time, from new renovations to the old models of gliders, to air ships, kept aloft by hot air, or gases lighter than air.

Magic

Every school of magic, though equal in power to every other school, always has a magical means to trumps it and a non-magical means to trump it.

In addition, there are certain ores that, when smelted and purified, will resist certain types of magic, but mining and producing it is rather expensive, and the ores so rare that it is nearly impossible for an average person on the street to get more than a piece the size of a thumbnail. These ores are also often government controlled for the purpose of resisting enemy magics, so that bullets, ships, shackles, and other government owned things might, at very high expense, be made of these ores.

Also, if an ore comes against an ore in opposition to itself (in the same way as noted above about schools of magic), the ores will lose power in proportion to the length of exposure. If they are melted and mixed together, they will automatically lose all power and become nothing but ordinary metal.

Gravity

Gravity pulls pretty much in one direction. Therefore the directions up and down are easily applied. There is also a sort of continental drift in effect where islands shift position in relation to each other very slowly over time. This can lead to a few problems in the form of bridges and ladders needing repair after a few years, or, in the case of islands rubbing together, earthquakes and major damage.

Weather, Climate, and Astronomy

Since it has proven impossible, after countless fruitless journeys, to reach the sun or the moon, scientists have begun to theorize that they are somehow beyond the boundaries of the world. Through every trial that theory has held to be true, but many complained that it was also incomplete. After all, it was well and good to claim that the world had boundaries, but quite another to propose what those boundaries were. After all, every expedition that ever went in any direction never found such boundaries, though they eventually came back to their starting point without turning back.

Recently, using climatic data collected from many different stations in various parts of the world, a scientist by the name of Johan Frederson proposed that the world's boundaries were spherical. He noted that climate zones tended to be in a spherical pattern, with the hottest on the outer regions of the sphere, and the coldest and wettest in the center. Since, according to Johan, the outer regions of such sphere would be closer to sunlight as the sun traveled around the space containing Icarus, they would be hotter.

However, this hypothesis has yet to be accepted by the majority of the scientific community.

The days here are a sequence of 24 hours, with 8 hours of the sun dark thanks to the moon obscuring it, and the rest of the day with sun and moon generally both visible.

Geology

Icarus islands tend to be fairly small, around 18-30 kilometers (or roughly 10-20 miles) from rim to rim on average. Some islands get larger, though no more than 90 kilometers (a little over 50 miles) long. The magical nature of Icarus tends to allow for abnormalities in both island shape and rocks found on different islands.