What Causes Endless Night? Anyone know?

[SlimMason]

If have a story idea and a title that only works if the plot is about an Endless Night. The cause of the darkness isn't as important as the darkness itself. So I need help deciding how the dark happens. It is a high fantasy, so there are wizards on the outside of this event, if there is an outside, tring to undue it.

So how do you put a city in the dark in such a way that even wizards would be stumped?

[Moritz]

So how do you put a city in the dark in such a way that even wizards would be stumped?

I guess that depends on the "power level" of the wizards. If it's some D&D style magic, then it has to be more powerful magic (a god?). In other cases it could be a power from a different area that the normal magicians cannot counter (e.g. extradimensional, from a forgotten or forbidden magic school).

If you can spare 15 minutes of time, I'd recommend listening to this:
http://www.writingexcuses.com/
Episodes 14 and 15.

[Shecky]

The whole planet's been shunted into the Plane of Night, and the cause and solution are found in a young child's dream. Perhaps s/he's the child of a trickster god, or maybe the child is the prophesied Alpha/Omega and this is the sign of the End Times, or possibly the child's parents are actually native to the Plane of Night and were exiled/chased out (or left of their own accord, either in protest or fleeing the evil they saw).

[OZ]

Is it the whole planet that is affected or is only one city in eternal night while those some distance away go on with normal cycles?

[Shecky]

That's a choice for the writer, but it's a lot more consistent (if requiring FAR more power) to pop the whole planet over than just to cherry-pick a city - where's the city going to go? What happens to the hole where it was? Who's going to notice and what can/will they do about it? Where's the cutoff - do the 'burbs come or not, and what about underground stuff? What about power, roads and the like? Tuck the whole planet into the Plane of Night, and the sh** hits the fan for everybody, nobody has to do the higher math on just what gets taken (and how/why/where/etc.), just BOOM!

[OZ]

I only asked because the original post asks " How do you put a city in the dark in such a way that even wizards would be stumped?"

For a city to be in eternal night one would need perhaps to suspend something in the sky above it like a never ending eclipse. Another possibility would be if someone found a way to bend light around the city so that the only light in the city was that which was generated internally. This would have the added affect of making the city invisible to those outside it. This deals with the old phenomenon that most tricks which turn you invisible would make you blind as well. With the whole city involved, you would be able to see each other, you just couldn't see outside the city and no one could see in.

[Shecky]

Anyone out there checked out the Eberron campaign setting for D&D 3.5? I'm thinking the Manifest Zones (places where the "veil" between the planes is thin; different planes "leak" through in different places) as a point of departure if you want to do it just for a city. I still think bunging the whole planet to a different plane is a real EEP-inducer, though.

[OZ]

This reminds me a little of Asimov's classic "Nightfall" but in reverse.

[The Corvidian]

It could be an anti-light ward. Another suggestion, someone has made a perfect model of the city, and is using a version of contagion/sympathy to put up a never ending night.

[Shecky]

It could be an anti-light ward. Another suggestion, someone has made a perfect model of the city, and is using a version of contagion/sympathy to put up a never ending night.

Oh, come on - think BIG!

[SunPhoenix]

How about some magical demigod chose to eat the sun to spite of the dwellers of the worldly plane for turning their backs on him.

[AverageGuy]

Oh, come on - think BIG!

Fusion failed.  The sun's still there, but no more fusion, so no more light.  It's just a big ball.

From a physicist's perspective, anyway, that's huge.

[meg_evonne]

Probably need more hints on your story idea.  The whole "punishment fits the crime" idea. 

1. some manipulation of earth's mantal forces in the area under the city to cause a magnetic force that attracks a massive reverse polarity meteor, suspending the sun rays from reaching the land below.  Adds the added dimension that when you shift it, it lands on the next city, or shut the one off in the mantal and see squashed city.  Assumes you can walk out from under it, into the  light.

2.   Transport the entire city to the dark side of the moon it resides on, which like mercury does not rotate.

3.  Give a Jupiter eye a permanent location over the city.

4.  Drop the town down a sink hole of massive proportions after encasing it into an globe of containment.

5.  Cause a rotating planet to freeze without losing it's orbit....permanent dark side.

6.  Transport the city into the future beyond the return of the Big Bang where all matter disappears, again contained in a sphere of some sort.  I think I might have kyped that from an outer limits episode, but I hated them and I've never watched any reruns, nor DVD.

7.  Transport it to the dark side of Mercury, provide means to contain the atmosphere.

8.   Drop it, Atlantis style into the Deep Trench of the ocean, another container devise.

9.  Giant planet eating monster, drops a pile on it.  contain it.

10. Industrial Waste gasses black out the sun, same force disrupts the atmosphere--stopping all wind circulation. 


Poster Darkling casts a spell creating Dark for all time and sends the channel that shall not be named into it to reside for all time as well.  I think that is a layer of Dante's Hell, isn't it.

Enough already..gonna go zap some monsters on guild

give me 20 questions and we'll try again. 

uhm, you said high fantasy....  race that spread a micro thin filament over the city, collect sunlight to power something, stealing energy from the power plants of the city etc..

Your post request is a disease....      So a form of bioengineered insect or space travelling spore that eats sunlight, stealing it away.  Or an airborn virus that mutates creating a sticky soggy mess that lies between the layers of the stratsphere and hardens to steal strength with zero weight so it remains suspended there.

[Yeratel]

In Nightworld, by F. Paul Wilson, the days start getting shorter, and the nights longer, with no cause explainable by science, as the powers of darkness begin their final push to take over the Earth.

[Yarr]

Either a pissed off race of casters, or an irresponsible researcher, or if you're a Shyamalan fan, some angry <i>trees</i>, create a pathogen (magical, probably) that erodes a subject's ability to perceive light. The light is there, but the townfolk cannot perceive it, because they've each lost their optic nerve. This solves an obvious problem with the blotting out of the sun, wherein plant life cannot photosynthesize and the food chain dies from the grass up. It also gives you another layer, by which the protagonist and 5% of the population are immune to the pathogen, or if you like Reavers, have their visual acuity augmented tenfold. If you mean for magic to be a commodity in the world you're building, you can have someone selling an effective talisman for a king's ransom. Or perhaps the college of wizards is in for a powergrab; an environment with so much fear is just begging to be exploited.

Anyway, there are a lot of places you can take that. Just keep in mind all the ramifications of whatever path you take. If this is swords and horses fantasy, how will the peasantry know the hours of the day when the sun is gone? There would have to be a pronounced economic slowdown, when no one shows up for work when they're supposed to, and the lethargy and insomnia that usually occur when people move to the arctic circle.

Good luck with this, though. Let us know what you choose.