Ep 50: Rider's End; A Shemish Epilogue

Whooh! What a great episode. I am glad to have heard about an epilogue episode, but I can not wait to end my first campaign to try it out (wait a second... not exactly). To me, the greatest part of any story is the ending, or the happy ending. It is so great. Amazing episode guys!

An interesting thought occurred to me, as I was thinking about Mitch's next campaign, to determine whether the world is round or flat. Not that I mean to undermine an entire campaign's worth of exploration, but...

From www.howitworksdaily.com/how-high-do-you-have-to-go-to-see-the-curvature-of-the-earth/

"You should be able to detect it from an aeroplane at a cruising height of around 10,600 metres (35,000 feet), but you need a fairly wide field of view (ie 60 degrees) and a virtually cloud-free horizon. The reality is that clouds, hills and mountains mean we rarely get to see the kind of perfectly flat horizon where the curve would be most obvious." Meaning a sufficiently powerful wizard should be able to figure it out with flight magic, and whatever protective magic he'd need to survive at that height.

But humans are pretty ingenious, and ancients found evidence on Earth long before airplanes existed.

"However, you can detect the curve of the Earth from ground level at the coast with a pair of binoculars – just look for distant ships on the horizon and you’ll see that their hulls start to disappear before their masts and other superstructure. Ancient Greek scientists, who spotted this without any optical aids, used this to conclude that the Earth was round."

Noooo, don't do it!

Though a bright character might use this kind of evidence to convince people to back the expedition. Logic and science alone won't convince everyone of "the truth." And of course, both methods only prove curvature, not an actual globe. The world could still be a curved plane! No way of knowing til you circumnavigate - or fall off the edge!