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Spelljammer Translating countries into space.

When turning a country into a crystal sphere, which geographic features become what space features? For example: deserts, wetlands, bodies of water, canyons, mountain, hills, Tablelands and any other you can think of.

How do you deside what their sun is like?

Finally, I have been told that there are.3 different configurations of planet systems in our galaxy. What are they?
 

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Mad_Jack

Legend
That's kind of an overly broad question, without a specific example of what you're trying to do...

Most countries (at least on real-life Earth) don't have the size to contain a huge variety of geographical features.

If you're trying to expand a country into an entire planet, the most simplistic thing to do is simply scale up everything - a stream becomes the Amazon River, a pond becomes one of the Great Lakes, a sinkhole becomes the Grand Canyon, a stand of trees is now a primeval forest and hills become mountain ranges...
But that's largely most useful for expanding a country into a continent.

If you want to wrap it around a planet, consider dividing the country up into its different geographical elements (or some representative concept thereof) and then think of it as sort of an exploded view drawing, turning each one of them into a continent - lakes become oceans, maybe part of the plains and the forest is now a continent like Africa (divided between huge areas of grasslands and jungle), maybe the coastal region becomes an island chain, etc.

Probably the first thing you'd want to do is figure out just what about that particular country you're trying to represent, and whether you want to try to replicate those things physically, or just the feel/the idea/the concept of them.

For example, a desert is, at it's essence, just an empty space, or a lack of other things. In many ways, an ocean could represent the same thing - from a certain perspective, the void of outer space is a desert (or an ocean) because there's nothing there...
 


jgsugden

Legend
If we had a bit more on the specifics of what you're trying to achieve, we might be able to offer better guidance. For example, do you literally want there to be a Crystal Sphere called Canada that emulates Canada? It seems like you want everything, including the Sun, to emulate Canada if so.

If I were going to take a country and try to translate it into an entire Crystal Sphere, I would think superficially about the geography, plant life and animals - but would focus more on the cultural elements and the ways the people adapt to their environment. However, when you decide to copy elements of a real world culture in a fictional work you run the risk of being offensive to some people - so tred lightly. I used to try to 'borrow heavily' from real world cultures, but I now borrow light and blend multiple cultural inspirations so as to not offend others with clear anglicized rip offs of another culture.
 

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