Cosmology and Diagrams

Heavenly Bodies and Their Orbits

Asphodel, Hagurna, Orelon and Sol make up the relevant heavenly bodies in the world. The diagram below shows their relations to each other, as well as their orbit paths.

Being a geocentric system, Asphodel's sun orbits around it. One orbit represents one year, which equates exactly 480 days. Asphodel's own revolutions are used to work out the day/night cycle, with each revolution taking 24 hours. Due to the orbit of Sol, the climates in some regions of the world vary greatly due to more or less exposure to the sunlight, and is the prime reason for the existence of different seasons. Each of the four seasons lasts for 120 days.

Hagurna and Orelon have orbits that move in differing directions and are both on an uneven X shaped path relevant to each other. Hagurna's orbiting is largely responsible for the ebb and flow of tides in the world's seas and oceans. Oddly, Orelon provides no gravitational pull on Asphodel's waters, and therefore doesn't influence the tides as Hagurna and (to a lesser extent) Sol do. The positional interactions of the two bodies provide the world with spring tides and neap tides. Meanwhile, Orelon's phases influence the lycanthropes on Asphodel, and its proximity thins the veil towards the adjacent realms - the Ethereal plane, the Feywild, and the Shadowfell.

However, it is believed that the relevant distances between Hagurna and Orelon are the cause of peculiar weather conditions known as Storms of Magic and Null Zones that sometimes appear around the world. Though uncertain, it is also possible that their respective eclipses serve to amplify the two weather events, centering on the zones of the eclipse itself.

Two very rare and very important events in Asphodel's cosmology relate to alignments of the bodies. Their rarity occurs on account of different orbiting speeds, in addition to their differing paths and directions. The first event happens when Hagurna and Orelon perfectly align, crossing their paths at one of the two possible junctures. The other, rarer still, occurs at the same junctures when Hagurna, Orelon and Sol all align. These events always precede a momentous occasion for the world of Asphodel, though those vary in effect throughout history.